Fiction by Jordan Watts
You Were Never There
Jordan Watts
My period came late that month, but it still came. When the first clump of dark brown, iron-smelling blood stained my new underwear, I wept. Everyone around me chalked it up to PMS; your daddy thought it was tears of frustration after months of trying and failing. He brought chocolate and a heating pad, held me while I cried, and tried to soothe me—the whole time not realizing that they were tears of relief. While he had been praying for you to come into existence, I was willing you out.
I didn’t know you were really there.
The first time it was a broken condom. Neither of us were ready for you, weren’t even comfortable thinking about you. It was never that we didn’t love you, or wouldn’t—we were just young and scared. That was almost five years ago now. You never came but the idea of you hasn’t left. Ever since that day, I felt you. Afterwards, your daddy and I broke up for a while. We were still babies ourselves and needed some time to figure out who we were on our own. We got back together before graduation. He proposed soon after, and the next thing you knew, we were getting married in the church I went to growing up and moving home to Tennessee.
You don’t know what people are like here, but I’ll tell you. A year in they started asking when we were going to bring you home and when I would be ready, not just to feel you but to carry you inside me. Never mind that I had spent the first eighteen years of my life chasing after kids I was too young to have, never mind that we could barely support ourselves, never mind that the thought of carrying you inside me filled my whole body with dread. I was 24 and although I wanted you, from that first terrifying thought you might come too soon, I knew I was incapable of being your mother.
Time passed, and people stopped asking questions, replacing them with sideways glances reserved for anyone who chose to wait instead of getting right down to the Lord’s work. A woman who didn’t wait for marriage has always been a sinner, but a married woman waiting was just downright strange. And around here people would rather love a sinner than someone who didn’t make sense to them. What was my purpose without you? Even with everyone’s eyes on me, my nerves were finally beginning to settle. Your daddy and I were making payments on our school loans, almost out of debt, and looking to buy a little house of our own.
He was so excited when he asked if we could start trying for you. Your daddy told me he had asked God for forgiveness for all those times where you could’ve come too soon, said that God’s timing was always right—had always been right. Now that we were married and settling into ourselves, he felt like we were ready.
Maybe he was. I thought I could be. God’s timing still prevailed.
For a year we tried and tried, but you never came. Everyone always hears about the girls who get knocked up the first time; they’re the cautionary tales. Wait until marriage, they say, but what about the ones who wait till it’s the “right time,” and still fail? Every time I saw that lonely little line, I wondered if it was a sign from you. I could still feel you with me, but you weren’t ready to meet us.
I thought maybe you could hear my thoughts, feel the hesitation I had about being your mother, the fear that my life would be turned upside down and never righted again. Maybe you had some of the same fears I did; maybe you thought the world was too big and cold for you, and decided it was in everyone’s best interest that you stay put for a little while. I loved you for it. I loved you for staying put, for growing quietly without announcing yourself. I loved you for not coming.
You were part of me. You were just a feeling though, never a real person I had to care for. If you had been more than a thought that I carried with me, I would’ve hated the way you weighed me down and held me back. You were never more than an idea and that made you perfect. That you existed at all was a secret between the two of us.
A year into trying for you, your daddy decided it was time to go see a doctor and start taking some tests. He begged me to come at first, then demanded, then tried to drag me there. When I wouldn’t go, he told me I was disobeying the god that had protected us for so long. God’s timing is always right though, I said, when He wants us to have a child we will, I will. There was no use trying to explain that my heart had changed, not to your daddy, anyway. He wouldn’t be interested in hearing it—his heart was set on you more than it had ever been on me.
Then, my period was late. I counted the days in my head, pleading with you not to come. So when I felt that first cramp in my lower back, buckled with nausea at the feeling, and felt that horrible stickiness between my legs, I wept from gratitude. Your daddy saw the ruined underwear in the sink, me in our bed, and he crawled in beside me. I think he thought this was proof that I wanted you too, but you and I knew it was the opposite.
A month later, several days late again, I drank pineapple juice by the bottle—I read somewhere that it could induce a period or end a beginning. A week later, I stood under the shower head, letting it scald my skin. My body was pink all over, my legs scrubbed with sugar and perfectly shaved. Under the water, I felt new and clean. My hair was soaked and dripping down my body—the body that refused to hold you. The body that could barely hold myself.
And there, running down between my legs, was the blood I had hoped for. You were here with me. Plucked from nothing and then rinsed away, you were just a dark clump on the shower drain. I wouldn’t have kept you, but still, I collapsed. I couldn’t carry you anymore.
