2 Samuel 12:19

by Ashley W. Collins

I’m always thinking of the worst-case scenario like it’s the most likely outcome in any situation. I’m a chronic over-thinker, and never about all of the ways things could turn out great. So when I found out I was pregnant, I immediately began to fear two things. First, that our baby would die, and second, that if our baby didn’t die, then Squirt’s godless heathen of a mother would be ill equipped to prepare him (or her?) for anything more fulfilling than spiritual bankruptcy. I’m a mess like that—have been since eighth grade.

My ear is pressed to the wall; I’m listening to my sister deliver a baby. The plastic chairs in labor and delivery waiting rooms are less comfortable than other hospital chairs, and when you kneel on them, they bruise your knees. My sister, I’ve decided, is a huge wimp—things can’t hurt that much without killing you—she keeps screaming, she’s not dead. From watching The Miracle of Life in health class, I know that soon, she’ll stop howling and the baby will start. I pick at the skin around my left thumbnail, peel up a strip, and bite it off. I’ve been doing this since I was six, and my fingers are swollen, sometimes they’re bloody. There’s the silence I’ve been waiting for, but not the cat-in-heat cry that babies make. Where’s the noise?

I thought intensive care was for old people, smokers, queers with AIDS. I was thirteen in Texas. I was an idiot. In her neonatal intensive care unit, my niece had her own tiny bed with its own handwritten placard, ‘Baby Girl Jordan Bush’ written in bubbly handwriting with a heart where the ‘o’ should have been. I watched when the nurse toted her in there, a fat bundle of wriggling arms, legs, and stomach. Her skin was blue. They Life Flight-ed her to Texas Children’s Hospital, just an hour or two away. It took ten hours to get the helicopter to come pick her up, something about insurance that I didn’t understand. Now when I see Life Flights, I think that poor bastard is going to die.

Jordan was a piece of work. Chubby, pink-lipped, with the crinkly eyes you associate with Down Syndrome. I know this only from the pictures. I never saw her without a thick layer of glass between us. I was too young to visit her in the nick-you, too young to realize that meant NICU. They said she couldn’t breathe because her heart was nearly twice as big as it should have been, that it was crushing her lungs. This is something I had trouble picturing, but trying kept me up every night for nine days. We spent those days in the waiting room watching doctors and nurses emerge from surgery rooms with grim faces to deliver bad news to horrified parents. Every time, I said a silent prayer: Hey God, kill someone else’s kid, would you? Not Jordan. I wasn’t a big pray-er. I didn’t really know how.

Less than two weeks after I listened to my sister give birth, I sat wearing a white flowered dress in another uncomfortable chair, looking at a doll-sized white coffin, like if whoever made Cabbage Patch Kids sold a funeral play set. A single peach rose bloom sat on top; when I watched my mom cut it from the bush in the back yard that morning, I knew I’d always call them Jordan’s Roses.

Everyone we knew was there. Well, not many of my sister’s friends. But they were all young, twenty, and as I heard whispered behind me, “totally freaked out” by the situation. Row upon row of grief-stricken adults sat like wax figures, and I looked at all of them, in my eyes an unspoken challenge. Explain this to me, I thought. Give it your best fucking shot. I’d recently taken up swearing. It felt good. As if on queue, the Reverend stepped to the front of the congregation. There wasn’t a pulpit like you might think, and he didn’t need one. Hell, it would have interfered with his blustering.

My parents knew he’d be a stereotypical Bible thumper. When my sister and her husband wanted to get married, he refused to do the job because they’d been having premarital sex. But he was a friend of a friend, and he was preaching the funeral for free. With all those hospital bills, who passes up free?

He started with David and Bathsheba, which was a rotten thing to do, since it’s one of the Bible’s premier sin-and-pay-the-consequences stories. The gist is that David has sex out of wedlock with Bathsheba, she gets pregnant, delivers the child, God calls David out and, surprise surprise, kills the baby. “Why have you despised the commandment of the Lord, to do evil in his sight?” I looked around to see if anyone else was catching this shit. My sister was so wracked with grief she could barely sit, her husband sat next to her, staring at the ground. My mother was crying buckets watching my sister. My Dad, though—he was a sight to behold. He sat there staring the Reverend in the face with that gleam in his eye, the sure-fire sign that my father is about to rip you to shreds.

“We are all sinners,” the Reverend intoned. “And it is only through Jesus’ boundless love that we can be forgiven and admitted to the Kingdom of Heaven to rest with him for eternity.” He cleared his throat, “and though sometimes the Lord must reach us with difficult lessons, with obstacles that seem insurmountable, we know that with his divine love, he will return us to the path of righteousness.”

I wanted so many things that day: A switchblade with which to dispatch the Reverend. Someone besides my Darwinist parents to tell me he didn’t know what he was taking about. A God who didn’t kill babies just because they were conceived in sin. My niece back.

A few weeks ago, I walked into a church for the first time in more than fifteen years. I’d had premarital sex, done drugs, and a million other things for which I’d theoretically be held accountable in the eyes of God. It took a long time for me to reach the altar, and I gawked in outright wonder at the stained glass, at the ceiling so high I could not quite make it out in the shadows. My heels echoed on the marble floor like the hooves of a plodding old horse, and the silence when I stood at the front of the room was striking by comparison. I gazed around, rubbing my belly absently. What if Squirt turns out like me? Confused, unsure, spiritually vacant? I saw artistry in the glass and paintings, I saw compassion in the collection box, I saw faith in the eyes of each worshiper uttering muted prayers. I did not see God. I worry that I never will.