The bleeding hasn’t stopped. When a nurse comes for me, I’m embarrassed to get up. There is a spot on the chair, and as they are taking me away, I look back and Rebecca is trying to clean it up. It happens quickly. A paper gown and an intake bracelet that is too tight. A Wyeth painting mounted above a box of purple gloves. The sweatpants, inside out and heavy with blood. Cold jelly and the murmur of the sonogram. I can’t help feeling that the painting is inappropriate. It depicts a woman crawling through tall, brown grass. The woman was Wyeth’s neighbor, and she was suffering from a neurodegenerative disease that impacted her ability to walk. This painting is hanging in the room where a doctor tells me that the baby is dead and the tissue will need to be cleared.

* * *

They give me a pill to soften my cervix and then a light sedative. The nurse calls it a twilight sleep. As she walks me through what will happen during the uterine aspiration, I can’t shake the feeling that she once served me at an IHOP in Flatbush, and while it’s possible a lot has changed for her since then, I feel sort of uneasy as she explains the procedure and palms the speculum. When she asks me what I do, I tell her that I don’t do anything. But as they are turning on the machine, it feels important that I be earnest, and I grab her arm and tell her that actually, I am an artist. It is an embarrassing declaration, even as the room is going dark, but when I wake up and they provide me with a diaper, the declaration feels no different from a theoretical child, a thing I’ve cultivated mostly in my mind, cautiously, desperately. A sunlit dream where I do better, where there is no father and my daughter and I move upstate and sometimes I yell at her while helping her with her homework, but ultimately we are pals, and she is someone I can talk to, ill-tempered and serious and leaving bowls of cold cereal around the house, off to kindergarten with noisy, ornate hair, because like black mothers everywhere, I will be required to overdo it with the barrettes. And maybe it is not all great and in my single motherhood my bandwidth is shot with work and child-rearing and trying to get laid. Maybe I bring too many men into her life and she wishes she knew who her dad was, and I tell her that I don’t know, the months in Jersey like a brief, sunlit seizure. Maybe she is too much like me, too much like my mother, teetering silently on some horrific precipice in her teenage years until she comes out the other side as the woman I couldn’t be, a woman with good credit and hope and who is terrifying in her conviction to be whatever it is she wants to be.

“I didn’t even want to be a mother,” I say when Rebecca and I are almost halfway home.

“Neither did I,” she says, and when we pull into the driveway and Eric walks past the kitchen window, I feel it anew. I fiddle with my seat belt and the AC, and Rebecca allows me the pretense. I would like to take a shower and bleed in private, but the hard, ceramic light of the afternoon changes the house, makes it feel opaque, too fixed to accommodate what has happened quickly and with significant carnage. In a year, maybe this will be okay. But today I wear an adult diaper and there is no god, no child, no hypothetical in which there is a farmhouse at the end of all that crunchy, brown grass. There is only the recycling and the white clapboard, dappled in sun.

* * *

Rebecca and I sit in the car for an hour, and once we are inside, she remains close by. I haven’t asked her to do this, and in fact, I feel some resentment at her presumption, but mostly there is this unspoken agreement that in the wake of this bloody and preposterous thing, everything else can be put aside. We orbit each other wordlessly for days, chamomile and ibuprofen appearing on my dresser out of nowhere, like the old days, when we were more tentative, and the house felt like it had a finite amount of air. Rebecca leaves me muesli and Percocet and I go on StreetEasy and look for studios in Bedford Park and Gravesend, and when I do a Google Street View of one of the apartments, it is just an enormous crater in the ground. Newly Renovated! it says, and so I move to Craigslist, and there are a few that look somewhat hospitable to women, but for each one there is a caveat, requirements that potential roommates be “fun” or into the holy spirit, florid descriptions of Orangetheory and how close everyone in the house already is.

* * *

In the week it takes me to heal, I go through a few boxes of thick, hospital-grade sanitary napkins, and in general feel like I am being kept as a new vampire’s main source of food, hard, dark clots of blood in the first days and then a bloodbath so relentless I feel godlike just to be alive. And on the day it stops, I get the internal communications job I interviewed for a few weeks before, a job I actively do not want but that offers paid sick leave, health insurance, and a free mattress, the hiring manager a black woman who halfway through the call tells me plainly to negotiate my package before I say yes, and so I say a number, about five grand more than I feel I deserve, and she simply says, Very good.

* * *

While I am waiting for the paperwork to come through, Rebecca and I take even more incremental steps toward each other until we are basically moving through these last days with our fingers linked, as stiffly as this can possibly be done, our adjacency embarrassing but somehow necessary, even as I am certain she is relieved the child didn’t live. Because in the moments we are closest, there is always a caveat, always a clock running out, and nothing can be purely sweet. I wake up in the morning and think for a moment that I am someone happier and then I remember where I am.

* * *

Then we move through the day side by side, and I feel like the exception, like there is some vestigial organ we share that is essentially a second tongue, our language furtive and crude and articulated only in private, this feeling in both of us, that we are building something out of glass. At times, it feels awful, like it is only this way because there is an expiration date. I go into the city and I watch a broker in a tracksuit flush a newly installed toilet. I get stuck underground while another broker is waiting for me in Forest Hills. On the F, a rat scurries over my feet. And of course, there are babies everywhere. Haggard parents hefting carriages up and down the subway stairs. When I get back to New Jersey, there is an ache between my legs.

* * *

I unpack my paints and I stretch a canvas. I take my time with the gesso, thin it with water to make sure there are no lumps. I lay down a cool background color, and while it dries, I feel myself becoming anxious, too particular about the state of my brushes, which, during the length of my short but generative pregnancy, became stiff with old paint. I sit in the dark and think of the doctors who performed the procedure, and I imagine them at home, spanking their children and smoking cigarettes. I wonder if it is common to ask a patient what she does as the twilight sleep begins, if it functions as a truth serum, or a moment in which patients think of what they would like to be doing with their lives and lie. I want to feel that when I said I was an artist, it wasn’t a lie. But when I try to paint, I am out of sync, still used to the rhythm I kept in my pregnancy-induced insomnia, when I stowed jars of oily artichoke hearts under my bed for delirious painting jags that went on until dawn, which I described, in great detail, to a child who did not yet have ears. Orange, yellow, pink. I do it now almost automatically, and when I catch myself, I feel angry.

* * *