My Grandmother Was Pregnant for Fourteen Years

My grandmother was pregnant for fourteen years. I was four the first time I saw that belly. I was eighteen the last time. It never once went down.

In that hollow the women went bigbellied one after another, and I never saw a single baby. Not one, my whole childhood.

When I was little, the TV told me that meant a baby was coming. So where were the babies? Chapter 1 I barely lived with my mother.

She handed me to my grandmother the week I was born and stayed gone. For as long as I can remember, she came back to the hollow exactly twice. Once on my fourth birthday.

Grandma's belly was big then. Once on my tenth. Still big. Both times, the two of them fought.

The second time they screamed until their voices cracked, and my mother walked out of that house without saying goodbye. That was the visit she took me with her.

I was too young to understand any of it. All I remember is the train, and how long we sat on it. She brought me to a city. Loud, bright, full of strangers. My mother had no one.

No boyfriend, no friends. Just work. She was young for a biology professor, and her students loved her. That was the one thing I knew about her life. She had almost no time for me.

She lived in her lab. But she cared about my health. I'll give her that. Checkups on a schedule. Pills every day, and she said they were vitamins. From ten to eighteen.

Not one day off. I figured she worried because I'd grown up in the country, that maybe I hadn't eaten right. She was strange in other ways. I was never allowed in her bedroom.

Even when she was home, she kept the door locked from the inside. Sometimes she vanished. Weeks. Months. She left me in the apartment alone. She'd text once in a while.

She always made sure there was money. She never told me where she went. I never asked. That's how we stayed. Close enough to share an address. Never closer.

After my seventeenth birthday she disappeared again. I didn't panic. There was money in my account, and I knew the routine. She came back most of a year later. She wasn't alone.

There was a man with her. His name was Dale Voss. Her partner, she said. They didn't act like it.

She still left before sunrise and came home after dark, still smelling like the lab. They never said sweet things to each other. Some days they barely spoke at all.

But Dale was allowed in her bedroom. So why wasn't I? I liked him anyway. He hardly worked. Books, a laptop, a chair by the window. He was always there. He talked to me.

Nobody talked to me. Not even my mother. Then I turned eighteen. She came home for it, which almost never happened, and she brought a cake. I was so happy I couldn't sit still.

Then my nose started bleeding. It was nothing. Kids get nosebleeds. My mother's face went white.

She ran to her room and came back with a bottle and shook a few little pills into her palm and reached for my mouth. Dale caught her wrist. "It isn't time yet," he said.

I stood there. The blood kept coming, tapping onto the floor. One drop, then another. My mother shook so hard the pills rattled in her hand.

Her hair had come loose over her face and I couldn't see her eyes. I had never seen her like that. Wild. Ready to break something. I didn't know what to do with my hands.

Dale got her into the bedroom. Then he came back out and pinched my nose shut until the bleeding stopped. While he packed the cotton in, one line kept going around in my head.

It isn't time yet. Time for what? Chapter 2 He wouldn't tell me what had happened. He only said not to think about it. That night I couldn't sleep.

Then something split the quiet in half. Glass, breaking. My mother and Dale were fighting. His voice came through the wall. "You're going to get her killed." Get who killed?

I got out of bed and stood outside her door. By the time I got there, the voices had stopped. Had they heard me?

I was still deciding whether to go back to my room when the door opened. My mother looked wrecked. She wasn't surprised to see me at all.

She said she was taking me to the hospital in the morning. Full workup. Because of one nosebleed? I wondered about it. I didn't say no. I had never once been allowed to say no.

The hospital ate the whole day. Nothing was wrong with me. I could have told her that. She didn't look relieved.

She read my lab results over and over, like the paper was going to change. When she finally looked up, there was nothing behind her eyes. "Winnie.

Tomorrow we're going to see your grandmother." She almost never used my name. The way she said it sounded like something being set down for the last time.

Eight years, and I was back in the hollow. It had changed. A few families had put up new twostory houses.

And there were pregnant women out on the road, walking slow, in no hurry at all. No. Something was wrong. They weren't pregnant.

Pregnant women get heavy, but their faces stay full and pink. These women were gray in the face, almost purple. Their arms and legs were skin over bone. Only the belly was big.

Like the belly was eating them. One of them had white hair. She made me think of Grandma. When I was little I never questioned it. Kids don't. Standing there at eighteen, I saw it.

The whole hollow was wrong. I grew up watching women swell, and I never once saw a newborn. So where were their babies? My mother was watching them too.

What I saw in her face was pity. I'd never gotten that from her. Except for the night of my birthday, I'd never seen anything from her. Grandma's house sat at the east end.

I never forgot the way. Eight years, and I hadn't come back once. The house still knew me, though. Everything sat where it had always sat.

The old locust tree in the yard still had all its leaves. A woman was standing under it. Grandma. Her hair had gone white. She turned toward our voices, slow. Her belly was big too.

She's a small woman. That wasn't fat. What was happening in this place? My mother didn't even blink at it. After supper she sent me out for a toothbrush. I knew what that meant.

She wanted me gone so she could talk. The general store was a walk from the house. I passed more of them on the road. More bellies. Maybe it isn't babies, I thought.

Maybe it's tumors. But this many women, in one hollow? Old women sat out front of the store. They looked me up and down.

I paid and turned to go and they called me back and started in with questions. When they heard how old I was, every one of them shook her head. Sorry for me.

I didn't understand it, and I didn't get a thing out of them. Seven at night. The light was going. I came into the yard and heard my mother and my grandmother arguing.

I made my feet quiet. I moved a little closer. Then I heard it, and I couldn't move at all. Chapter 3 My mother said, "Winnie's eighteen.

Two more years and I won't be able to hide it. I have to find something." My grandmother said, "It's her lot. Same as ours." I lay in my childhood bed.

My body remembered the shape of it. To everybody else I was a freak. From the day my mother took me to the city, I never sat in a classroom. Not one day.

She taught me to read and write herself, whenever she had a free hour.

Every fall she mailed a homeschool notice of intent to the school district, signed it herself, and never let me touch the paper.

So on the record, I was a welleducated girl with a very involved parent. Whatever she told me to do, I did. I was good at doing what I was told. Not this time.

This time I had to know. She didn't want to tell me. Then she wouldn't have to. In that house the first thing I learned was not to ask. The second was how to find out on my own.

But where do you even start? Since we'd come back, she left the house constantly, and never said where. I trailed her a few times. Got nothing. She walked along the creek.

She walked around the well. That was all. I couldn't read her. But there was something under it. There had to be. The days went by, quiet and wrong. One night the screaming started.

A woman, somewhere out in the dark, and it carried all through the hollow. Somebody's time had come. Counting the days, that tracked.

And under the screaming, I smelled chicken broth. Thick, close, everywhere. She'd need to build her strength back, I thought. That's all. It didn't sit right. I couldn't say why.

Before dawn my mother was gone, out the door without breakfast. I got two bites down and went after her. Not at the creek. Not at the well. So I tried the market.

It was Saturday, and the street was crowded, and she wasn't in it. I bought a couple of molasses cakes. Women here love them. They say it builds your blood back up.

The men won't touch them, too sweet. I was headed home when I saw the crowd at the mouth of the hollow, everybody talking at once. I don't stop for crowds.

But my mother was in the middle of it. Her back was to me. Her hair had come apart. Standing in front of her were some of the women I'd seen on the road.

Their bellies were down now. Their color was back. My mother was saying something, over and over, and she didn't care who was watching. I was too far to hear.

I pushed in through the shoulders. Somebody called her crazy to her face. Somebody said she'd never agree to it, not ever. And then one word came through the noise clean. Surgery.

Then my mother swayed. She was about to go down. I got to her and caught her, and that was when I felt her hands. They wouldn't stop shaking. The women saw me and stopped talking.

They peeled off, one by one. I walked her home slow. Neither of us said anything. Grandma had lunch on the table. My mother said she wasn't hungry and shut her door.

Grandma sighed and ate without a word. While I was clearing the dishes I heard my mother on the phone with Dale. It sounded like we were going home soon.

That night I turned over and over and gave up and went out for air. I ran into my mother instead. Where does a person go at that hour? I followed her. She was careful.

She kept checking behind her. I hung back. I did not want to be caught. She walked fast, straight to the mouth of the hollow, where those women lived.

I moved in closer, and a hand closed over my mouth and nose, and the ground tipped, and I was gone.

Chapter 4 I woke up the next afternoon with my grandmother and my mother leaning over me. I searched my mother's face and found nothing. I still had no idea what had happened.

Grandma said Miss Ruby from down the road was missing. Her family was frantic. Miss Ruby. One of the women with the bellies. Did my mother have something to do with it?

The deputies were at the door before long. Somebody had told them my mother and Miss Ruby had argued in public. My mother said she hadn't left the house since the night before.

I knew that was a lie. I didn't say a word. She was my mother. It was a routine visit. They were gone fast. After supper she told me to pack. We were leaving in the morning.

We were up before the sun with our bags by the door. Grandma stood under the old locust tree, smiling at us. She said she wouldn't walk us out. She had broth on the stove. Broth.

Wait. I looked down at her belly. It sat low and heavy, like it was ready. I wanted to ask my mother what any of it meant. She stayed quiet the whole way back. Miss Ruby gone.

All those women. Not one baby, not ever. Line it up piece by piece and it puts something cold down your spine. Dale had cooked when we got home.

Everything we liked, the whole table covered. My mother was softer with him than I'd ever seen her.

He reached for her plate to get her a second helping and she stood up fast and stopped him. Then they both looked at me at the same time. Neither of them looked natural doing it.

I laughed and said I'd leave them to it, and I went to my room. The second the door shut, the smile went off my face. His right arm wasn't working right.

He'd been favoring it all through dinner. That's why she'd jumped up. She didn't want me watching him lift anything. Which meant however he'd hurt it, the answer wasn't simple.

Whatever Dale had done, he did it while we were gone. The apartment was spotless. Somebody had gone at it hard, down into the window tracks.

He didn't want me knowing he'd been away. What did the two of them have between them? The next morning she left to teach and he went out for groceries, and the place was mine.

I made myself walk into her bedroom. It was pitch dark. Not a crack of light anywhere. I hit the switch and saw the room for the first time in my life. Ordinary furniture.

One strange thing: a snake figurine on the nightstand. And a painting on the wall. Rats. It made the whole room feel cold. The shelves were packed with books, most of them biology.

Nothing I wanted. But one cubby caught me. There wasn't a single book in it. Just a small potted plant.

I got closer and went over it, and the base of the pot turned out to be a switch. I twisted it, and the panel behind the cubby slid up, and there was a keypad. I tried her birthday.

I tried mine. Neither one. Still guessing, and then my phone went off. It was the woman who runs the corner store by our building. I'm in there constantly and she likes me.

She's my eyes and ears. She said Dale had just come through the front door downstairs. I had to quit. I got out of that room fast.

Before I killed the light I looked at the keypad one more time. Six digits. Not her birthday. Not mine. What other day in this house was worth locking a door over?

Chapter 5 I hadn't gotten anything solid out of that room. But I had a target now. That hidden box behind the shelf. I had to open it. Six digits. What six?

At noon she was still at the university, so it was Dale and me at the table. He kept putting food on my plate, cheerful about it, and asked if I'd had any more nosebleeds.

Odd, that. Both of them stuck on one nosebleed like it was a diagnosis. I wasn't going to pry anything out of Dale. Whatever I got, I'd have to take.

She came home that evening with a bag stuffed full and told me not to touch it. Straight into her room with it. No explanation.

Over dinner Dale asked how her classes had gone, warm as anything. She said she couldn't care less. A room full of twentyyearolds.

He laughed and said they were babies, and she shouldn't hold it against them. So I tried a door. I asked if maybe when I turned twenty I could take a trip somewhere. By myself.

Her head came up. Her eyes went red at the rims and locked on me. I froze. I didn't say another word. Dale was the one who told me to go rest. That gave me my exit.

I lay in bed and went back over it. There were only two things in that sentence that could have done it. That I was almost twenty. Or that I wanted to be somewhere alone.

And I thought about what I'd heard through the wall at Grandma's. Two more years and I won't be able to hide it. My twentieth birthday meant something. Something specific.

Unless— Then it came to me, and I knew I could prove it in the morning. They both left on schedule the next day. That gave me about an hour. Same keypad.

I punched in six digits and the lock let go and the whole bookcase rolled back. I was right. It was the date I turn twenty. Below the shelf was a basement. Black all the way down.

I stood at the top and looked into it, and my chest went tight for no reason I could name. What was down there? I stood at the edge of all that dark and almost walked away.

Then it came back to me in pieces. The women on the road. Grandma's belly. Miss Ruby, gone. I had to know. I made myself take the first step, and then the rest of them.

At the turn of the stairs, there was light. And then a hallway, and the hallway was the worst thing yet. Not the shape of it. The decoration.

Photographs of my mother, the whole length of the wall. In every one her face was blank and her eyes were dull. A doll somebody had propped up. My breathing went shallow.

My legs stopped holding me right. Because in every single photograph, my mother's belly was swollen. There was nothing in her eyes that belonged on a pregnant woman.

What was in them was hate. All those years, and I had never once seen my mother carry the way the women in the hollow carried. Every time she disappeared. That's what she was doing.

So where were her babies? Her face in those photographs had no color left in it. Same as the women back home. Big belly. And never, anywhere, a child.

I went on down the hallway and came to a small room. The door wasn't locked. I put my hand on the knob and heard machines running on the other side.

Chapter 6 One push and it opened, and what I saw stretched my eyes wide. The middle of the room was set up like a small operating theater, and on the table lay— Miss Ruby.

So my mother did have something to do with it. The thought crawled up the back of my neck. Machines packed in all around her. Numbers moving. She was alive.

Why would my mother bring her here? There were files stacked beside the table. I flipped through them. Vitals, logged by the hour. Hers. Was my mother running tests on this woman?

I thought about the night I followed her, and the hand that came over my face from behind. My mother was in front of me the whole time after that. So there was somebody else.

And that somebody was almost certainly Dale. Which explained the scrubbed apartment, and why he needed me to believe he'd never left. What were the two of them doing?

I checked my phone. Nothing from the corner store. But Dale had been gone almost an hour. I didn't want to get caught down there, so I photographed the files and got out.

I was pulling her bedroom door shut when he walked in. In my head I cursed that woman at the store. On my face I gave him a smile with everything in it.

Dale had brought me strawberry cake. He knew I loved it. He picked one up every few days. He wasn't my stepfather on paper. He did the job better than most men who are.

Her health was bad. That's what he always said. So he baked her molasses cake, over and over.

I looked at that kind face and could not make it fit with the woman on the table downstairs. I said something normal and went to my room. Something was off.

I couldn't put my finger on where. Then my phone buzzed twice and lit up. Two missed calls. The corner store. My heart stopped and then came back too hard.

No signal in that basement. That's why I never heard them. I checked the time. She'd called thirty minutes ago. Dale was already downstairs thirty minutes ago.

From the front door of the building to our apartment is eight minutes at the outside. He doesn't talk to neighbors. He doesn't stop to chat. Rule that out.

So where had the other twenty minutes gone? He knocked and came in with the strawberry cake on a plate.

He was smiling at me and I tried to see through the smile to whatever was behind it. I was too green for him. I saw nothing. I ate and watched him.

It looked like there was something he wanted to say. When I was nearly done, he said it. "Winnie. You're too smart." I opened my mouth to ask what that meant.

The room went sideways. The edges of things stopped holding still. I looked at him and couldn't believe it, and he just kept smiling. Wait. The basement was hidden behind a keypad.

But the room holding Miss Ruby wasn't locked at all. Twenty extra minutes. A door left open. He built the whole thing.

I'd walked myself into it, one step at a time, exactly on schedule. Too late to do anything with that now. The dark took me all the way down. I had a long dream