The heartbeat. This was another way I could fail. The baby could have a heartbeat but not the right kind. Perhaps it could have no heartbeat. I had just felt the popping minutes ago but now I didn’t, so maybe in the last thirty seconds it had decided to stop. No no no. “I don’t want to,” I said.
“Come on,” Florin said. “This is the fun part.”
I sat up, my own heart skipping too fast. I wanted out of there.
“That’s okay, Lacey May,” Hazel said, putting her hand on my shoulder. “We should probably put together a birth plan for you. I want you to think about your ideal birth. Just meditate on it.”
“I’ll do what you want me to do.” I got off the bed. Anything to leave.
“Take a walk, listen to your body, to your baby.”
“Listen to the baby?”
“Of course,” she said. “Your baby has all sorts of things she wants you to know.”
“I mean,” I said. “I just didn’t know I was supposed to.” It annoyed me a little bit, to be told to listen to something that was not going to speak outright, just like I was always told to listen to God, to decode divine messaging from dust-filled air.
We walked back to the car. Florin started the engine and scanned the radio. We sat for a minute.
“My mom loves that shit,” she said. “All the oils and body positivity. I don’t know. I’d want a real doctor, but that’s me.”
I thought of Hazel at the yoni magic meeting. How she had looked at all of us. She believed in us fully. I had never met someone like her and it seemed I could find the ends of my pain if she was there to hold my hand.
“I like it,” I said. “You can tell she knows things.”
“I hope so,” Florin said.
“Wait,” I said. I opened the door again. Got out of the car. My body took me back into the farmhouse, back into the room where Hazel was making notes on a chart. She looked up. “Forget something?”
I lay across the bed and pulled up my dress. I closed my eyes and said it. “You should know the father is not my husband but my cousin, mother’s sister’s son. Related.”
She smiled. “Does it feel good to say it to another person?”
It did feel good, to say it so clearly. “Yes.”
“Hon,” she said. “You’d be surprised how many people make it with their cousins, and those babies turn out a-okay. It’s not unheard of is all I’m saying. Some parts of the world it’s pretty normal.” She wanted me to believe nothing could faze her but I saw a red blush flower around her hairline.
She turned the Doppler on. It sounded like radio static. “Now, whether you wanted that to happen to you is another story. I’m here to talk about that too if you want.”
She moved the wand around my small dome smeared with cold jelly. I craned my neck to watch and felt I was out of my body looking at someone else. The faintest brown line spread down from my navel. My skin looked tight and pulled. My thighs were larger, meatier, than ever before. It seemed to me I was turning into a series of lumps. I didn’t understand how I was only going to get much, much larger from here. It seemed impossible. I liked it, though. I looked nothing like the girl that had lain on the shed floor.
“It takes time to find the heart sometimes,” she said. She looked up at the ceiling and let her hands guide her. Her eyebrows twitched and the softness of her tunic rubbed my skin.
She worked a minute longer. The walls were closing in. Here it was, my punishment. I braced. I saw my pink unformed baby floating in the boiling toxic waters of me, too hot to hold.
But then a quick two-step, a sharp gallop.
Hazel smiled like she’d expected this sound. To her, this very routine sound. “Strong.”
It did sound strong. It sounded like rain.
ON THE WAY back Florin and I laughed like friends, and our sweat shone in the sun and the wind mussed our hair and I felt almost normal for a moment, so normal that it seemed right and sure that I should have a mother of my own and not imagine that Daisy was my mother, and so I asked Florin if she and Daisy could drive