The Mirrors Read online

  “You’re carrying an invisible baby. This means we’ll need more frequent prenatal visits, of course. We’ll have to do certain tests that will take a gander at the little tyke indirectly, through studying the movement of the amniotic fluid around the fetus. But it’s nothing to be alarmed about.”

  “Nothing to be alarmed about!”

  “Mrs. Pruitt, let me assure you that hundreds of mothers in the United States alone are raising non evidens kids. There are support groups, there are—”

  But she couldn’t listen to it. Tears welled up; she felt a lump in her throat. She wanted to break down and sob, but she wouldn’t permit herself to do so in public. What would the doctor think of her if she had a breakdown right then and there? What would all the young, radiant women in the waiting room think? Janet thought they’d think something like this: That poor, older lady must have just been told about a birth defect.

  Janet spent a lot of time guessing what other people thought (not just there at the doctor’s office, but at the grocery store, the gas station, and at her cubicle). She suspected lots of people all across town looked down their noses at her, but that didn’t make it any easier to bear the particular criticism of those who had a better knack than she for this pregnancy stuff. So she walked briskly out of the doctor’s office without saying a word, ignoring his calls after her. Her shoes clip-clopped down the shiny linoleum tile of the hallway, into the lobby, and out the door. She kept her glance downward the entire time to avoid eye contact with everyone in the waiting room.

  It wasn’t until she shut the car door that she allowed herself to mourn the loss of visible offspring. “A freak …” she muttered to herself mid-crying-jag. “They’ll stare at us!” She dreaded the oddity of the prospect. She’d be pushing a stroller that would, to all outside appearances, look empty except for a onesie and some blankets and people would still, no doubt, stare (even though there would be literally nothing at which to stare).

  She let herself give in to the emotions for about five minutes, then dried her eyes before driving home. The word freak still echoed through the nooks and crannies of her brain. It took on a life of its own up there.

  She waited until Greg was reading in bed to tell him the bad news. He was perusing the catalog of a company that sold model trains and accessories. He had a small set down in their basement, which he always wanted to expand but could never afford to.

  “I went to the doctor today,” Janet finally blurted out.

  “He says I’m pregnant with a monster.”

  Janet’s husband’s mouth dropped open. Words eventually skittered out. “Honey, you mean we did it? We’re really preg—”

  “What part of ‘with a monster’ did you not understand?”

  He placed his hand on her belly. He grimaced. “No. You mean something’s wrong?”

  “The baby … well … it didn’t show up on the sonogram.”

  He shook his head, pursed his lips. “Hrmm?”

  “I’m carrying a fetus non evidens.”

  “What in blazes does that mean?”

  “An invisible baby, that’s what. A monster, straight from an old horror movie. A zygote-Claude-Rains.”

  “You’re assuming it’s a boy,” Greg said. The corners of his mouth crinkled in a little smile. “It could always be a little girl. I was sort of imagining we’d have a girl, for some reason.

  Anyway … wow. Just. Wow.”

  “I know we’ve been trying so hard, honey. But do you think this is worth, well, continuing?”

  “How far along did the doc say you were?”

  “Eight weeks.”

  “Wow,” Greg said. “Just … wow.”

  “I just want the best, you know. And invisible isn’t the best.”

  “But what if we try again and invisible is our best? I mean, I’m not saying I want an invisible baby, but if that’s what we end up with, well, I could certainly love the child.”

  Janet cringed, as all the implications became more apparent to her. “We wouldn’t have baby pictures. We couldn’t watch over it at night to make sure it was still breathing. And what if it gets the measles some day? There’d be no way to tell.”

  Greg sighed. “I don’t know what to say, hon, except that I love you and I want us to have a family together. But I don’t want you to carry a pregnancy you’re not one hundred percent happy with. Why not take some time to think it over? Maybe go to a therapist and talk over the pros and cons. We can go together, if you want. I’ll even call to make the first appointment.”

  Janet mulled it over for a moment. Yes, she thought, let Greg go about doing that. That’ll keep him busy. She told him she’d mull over her options.

  Then, the next morning, instead of going to work she went to the nearest abortion clinic. She felt bad for misleading her husband, but felt even worse when she saw the protesters outside. Did she recognize one of them? Was that the lady from two doors down? The one who sold her Avon? She decided to drive past. She even honked her car horn, as requested by their signs, pantomiming support for their cause. She tried to make eye contact with the lady, who might have been her neighbor, to be sure the gesture hadn’t been in vain. Perhaps then her neighbor would recognize her. Think well of her. It was about time someone did.

  That night after dinner, Greg presented her with a scrap of paper bearing the name of a marriage counselor and the date and time of their first appointment. “We’ll talk it over. We’ll think this through real good to make the right decision.”

  So they went to marriage counseling. The counselor tried to focus their attention on what having a family really meant to them. All abstractions, never getting down to brass tacks. She went to the sessions every Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. and stayed awake until 11:00 to check the news to see if the clinic was still being protested. Yes, the newscast verified. In fact, the matter had escalated and out-of-state groups from both sides of the argument marshaled forces in what seemed to be a siege to rival that of Leningrad. The rare woman who made it through the ring of protesters had to be accompanied by a gang of counter-protesters. So much for privacy. If she had an abortion, she’d be exposed to her Avon-selling neighbor (if that was her neighbor). She might be exposed in front of the whole city on TV. This wouldn’t do. No, not at all.

  Coincidentally, it wasn’t long at all into therapy (maybe just the third or fourth week) that she “had a breakthrough” in which she agreed to have the child. “Wow,” Greg said. “I never doubted that you’d come around, I just thought it’d take longer. Um, wow.”

  Once they stopped going to counseling, she avoided the subject as much as possible. Eventually, at Greg’s prompting, she did return to see her doctor, and he had her undergo another sonogram at twenty weeks. It just confirmed the diagnosis: fetus non evidens.

  She endeavored to keep the news of the baby’s birth defect quiet for as long as possible. It wasn’t as if she had many friends to confide in, anyway. But the women in the cubicles surrounding hers felt it necessary to hold her a baby shower, and she indulged them.

  One asked her about sonogram pictures. She mumbled something about misplacing them. That certainly caused a stir, and it took some doing to convince them that, really, she was okay waiting until the baby’s birth to see it again. “I’m sure if you call the doctor’s office,” one of her co-workers said, “they’ll print another out for you.”

  Janet nodded. Shrugged. She didn’t want to seem like anything other than a jubilant expectant mother, but she could only stretch the act so far. The other ladies in the office would gossip about her all-too-apparent lack of enthusiasm; of that she was sure. But what of it? Nothing positive could come from talking about sonograms.

  But moments like these were few and far between. For much of her pregnancy, she found it possible to ignore the problem altogether—to pretend that she was just like any other expectant mother. After all, her belly bulged just as with any other expectant mother. In time, she felt the baby kick as any other expectant mother did.
<
br />   All that self-deceit ended, though, when her doctor referred her to a specialist, a teratologist. She asked what in the Sam Hill a teratologist was. The doctor didn’t say. She looked it up in the dictionary and discovered it was a doctor who specialized in birth defects. The word came from the Greek word teras (meaning “monster”).

  So the normal-doctor sent her to the monster-doctor. She’d known all along that she was carrying a monster. This just confirmed it. She had to drive well over an hour to get to this monster-doctor’s office, and she didn’t like the anxious, dread-filled waiting room. But there were some good things that came from it. For example, the specialist was able to tell her the fetus’ sex. (So meticulous was his study of the flow of amniotic fluid around the various nooks and crannies of her baby’s body.)

  She was having a girl.

  They painted the nursery pink. Some women in the office insisted on holding a second shower, just so they could provide gifts designated for the correct sex. Pink, pink, everywhere pink. It all made the whole thing feel more normal.

  As they rounded out the eighth month, she began to worry about the inevitable disclosure. One day, after several months of sullenly and passively accepting whatever care the monster-doc had to offer, she actually decided to confide in him about her worries.

  The doctor tried to comfort her. “Mrs. Pruitt, let me assure you that hundreds of mothers in the United States alone are raising non evidens kids. There are support groups, there are—”

  If she wanted to hear that, she could have stayed with the normal-doc. She interrupted him. “This invisible kid thing.

  It’s just—how can I say this?—it’s not an option.”

  “Well, you know … there are cases. A small number of cases, mind you, where non evidens kids grow out of it. In an even smaller number of cases, the children oscillate between stages of being evidens and being non evidens. I mention that just to inform you that there is a possibility that you’ll see your child some day.”

  “But you’re saying that these things only happen rarely.”

  “Yes, ma’am, that’s what I’m saying. They’re rare— but, I should add, not unheard of. The data we have on the course of this condition suggest that there’s a twenty percent chance of it going either into sustained remission or this sort of oscillating remission I mentioned. Both variations from the usual prognosis typically emerge around puberty. Seems as if there’s some metabolic changes in the body around that time that throw the disorder a curve ball.”

  “You said only a twenty-percent chance?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And I’d have to wait at least ten years, probably more, to see if that twenty percent pans out?”

  “Well, yes, Mrs. Pruitt, that’s one way of putting it.”

  Janet sighed. “Then, like I said, this isn’t an option.”

  “You mean, you want a late-term abortion?”

  Mental images of the Avon lady (if that was the Avon lady) protesting at the endless clinic-siege flickered through her head. “No, what I guess I mean is … there has to be something that can be done. Some sort of intervention. Something?”

  “Well,” the monster-doc said, “most parents of non evidens kids just sprinkle some baby powder on them for the first year or two. Some families jack up the wattage of all the light bulbs in their house so that the kid’s shadows are more noticeable. There are all sorts of tricks to keep track of them. When they get older, you can go with various sorts of makeup, too.”

  “Makeup?”

  “Sure,” the monster-doc said. “I think I even have some literature here from a man in Indianapolis who specializes in this sort of thing.” He handed her a glossy brochure. It had slick color photos of non evidens kids of various ethnicities on their graduation day—all of them sporting an obviously fake, overly made-up look more appropriate for embalmed corpses from particularly nasty car wrecks. A close look at the company logo revealed that, indeed, the business was “a subsidiary of Hecht’s Home for Funerals.”

  Janet had many objections to taking this approach, but focused on the least unpleasant. “But … I mean … surely the makeup would wash off.”

  “Well, of course … that is … obviously. It’s more the kind of thing you’d do just for a special occasion.”

  She began weeping (yes, she tried to hold it in, but the pregnancy had eroded her self-control under a tidal wave of hormones). When the monster-doc tried to console her with Kleenex, she took the entire box out of his hands. She whipped out a handful of tissues and presented them back to him. “Here,” she said through a stuffy nose, “you’ll probably need a couple of these for someone else.” Then she walked out of the office with the box and drove home.

  She spent the night on the Internet, barraging search engines with any one of a hundred variations on “non evidens AND.” At two in the morning, she came across the website of Max Harper, a plastic surgeon in California. “The evidens is in!” the site proclaimed. “Children should be seen, not just heard!”

  The more Janet read, the more she liked. Dr. Harper’s artist would draw a composite sketch of what your child should look like, based on the most attractive outcome of mixing the parents’ features. He’d use computer scans to create a plastic mold matching this sketch, from which an incredibly lifelike skin could be manufactured, to be worn as a tight-fitting suit over top of the actual skin. The child could wear it for days, weeks even, before it would need to be washed. It even had a degree of elasticity to allow for the growth process, and if you purchased a lifetime contract they would periodically adjust the skin to reflect the maturing of features. Once the child got old enough, colored contact lenses could be used to complete the anatomical ensemble.

  She woke Greg up. Fetched his glasses for him, put them onto his face, and pointed at the screen. “Look,” she commanded.

  It took a while for him to clear the cobwebs. “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” he said. He kept repeating “What’s wrong?” right up to the point he seemed to get what she was driving at. “You woke me up for this? I thought you were going into labor!”

  “I’m not due for another two weeks.”

  “You damned sure could go early. It happens.”

  “I won’t let that happen,” Janet said. “This baby isn’t coming out of my womb until I have a way to fix it.”

  “I’m going back to sleep. You’re obsessed!”

  “You’re not even paying attention to the pictures. Take a look at those before and after shots!” The before pictures showed non evidens kids adorned with inferior treatments, like baby powder or makeup. Pathetic, Janet thought. In the afters, the children were practically normal. Hell, better than normal. Downright telegenic.

  Greg took off his glasses, rubbed some sleep from his eyes, replaced the glasses, and studied the screen. “Jesus. This has to cost …”

  “We have a house, Greg. We can always take out a second mortgage. You could always take a second job. This is our child’s appearance we’re talking about! I can’t believe you’re making price an issue.”

  “We’re cubicle-monkeys, honey. We’re not poor, but we’re not rich either. We get by. This—this is just …”

  “Look,” Janet said. “We’re only going to need $5,000 to book a consultation.”

  “Sheesh. Doesn’t insurance cover any of this?”

  “An initial fitting at delivery is only $50,000. We could come up with it. We have credit cards. We could sell the house, probably in a matter of weeks, for that.”

  “Wow,” Greg said. “Just … wow. I can’t believe you’d suggest that. Our home is worth three times that much.”

  “And how much is your baby’s happiness worth, Greg? Have you thought about that? Do you want your baby to have to be seen by a teratologist because it’s a teras? Or do you want her to have a decent appearance?”

  Greg frowned. Hung his head. “Wow,” he said. “We’re really gonna sell this place, eh? Just … man … wow.”

  They named
the baby Harper, after the plastic surgeon. They’d gone to California for the delivery. Special heat-sensing contraptions were arranged so that the doctor could tell how much of the newborn had made it through the birth canal. (Indeed, delivery itself was the most perilous aspect of a non evidens pregnancy.) The baby made it through, though, with flying colors.

  For Janet, this was one of the oddest moments of her life. The agony of pushing through all that concentrated pressure sure felt excruciatingly real, but the end result seemed to imply it had all been in her head. No writhing baby. Just the infant’s shrieks, telltale splatters of newborn-gunk everywhere, and an empty space in the medical staff’s arms where she surmised they held her.

  At least she had the shrieks. She reminded herself of that. When ladies at the office asked what childbirth was like for her, she would have to focus on the auditory—or else make up a story of what it was like to see her child for the first time, extrapolating from having seen such events dramatized on television.

  The obstetrician and the nurses cut the cord and put the baby in an incubator for special monitoring. “But the visible skin! My baby needs her visible skin!”

  “All in due time, ma’am,” one of the nurses said. “Doctor Harper usually doesn’t put the skin on until the second or third day.”

  She scowled. “Then take it out of here. Don’t bring it back until it’s good and ready!”

  “As you wish, ma’am,” another nurse said.

  She tried to keep as stoned as possible on the painkillers until her baby was rendered normal. After the plastic skin was applied, she held her. So this, she thought, is what the big deal is all about. The plastic felt cold on her breast as she tried to get Harper to latch on to feed. She didn’t like how there was nothing but shadowy hollows where the baby’s eyes should have been. She couldn’t wait until she got old enough for cosmetic contacts that would provide the illusion of visible pupils, irises, and scleras. She asked the nurse about it, and she said some moms were able to train their kids to handle them as early as four.

  Janet convinced the plastic surgeon to let her try them when Harper was three and a half. The kiddo needed them, after all. She couldn’t expect her daughter to go off to preschool without them and creep everyone out with those vacant eyesockets.