Fig by Sarah Elizabeth Schantz Read Free Book Online Page A

no doubt I’ll either turn when the time comes or she’ll just have to push me into life backward.
    Mama nests. The other women in her group have babies one by one—all at home. One woman gives birth outside at sunrise, and another delivers the baby right into her husband’s hands. They all describe childbirth as empowering.
    Empowering.
    Mama’s contractions come fast and hard. She always says, “It felt like I was being split in half.” The midwife comes but refuses to do the home birth.
    Mama must be taken to the hospital, and this is called transport. Mama agrees to go but she can’t stop crying. She tells them she can do it—deliver me breech—but the nurses and doctors all ignore her, prepping for surgery instead.
    Just as God put Adam to sleep, the anesthesiologist does the same to Mama, and I am born from a dream like I’m not real.
    *  *  *  *
    Uncle Billy wants to take me for a walk before he drives me back to Gran’s. The morning frost has turned the clover into clumps of silver. The sky is not blue, and the sun looks far away. Dolly, the llama, stands guard chewing her cud. She watches as we pass through the paddock of black and white sheep.
    I have a loose tooth. I’ve already lost two of them and the tooth fairy brought me a shiny silver dollar each time. With my tongue, I push this loose tooth forward until I taste the blood, and then I spit just to see the red.
    Uncle Billy answers all the questions I don’t actually ask out loud.
    â€œFig,” he says, “your mother has a disease called schizophrenia.”
    And then he tells me that Mama was nineteen when she first struggled with the disease. The number nineteen feels important, and I say it to myself quietly. “Nineteen,” I whisper, and I can still taste the saltiness of my blood. “It can be hereditary,” he is saying, and I am still whispering the word: “nineteen.”
    But then I stop, because now I’m wondering if I, too, will inherit the disease when I turn nineteen. Gran is always going on and on about how Mama and I are like paper dolls. “Cut from the same paper,” she always says, and when she does she shakes her head and makes a clicking noise of disapproval with her tongue. And now I’m scared. I’m scared to even think about the number nineteen. Let alone say it out loud, even if I only whispered it.
    Uncle Billy tells me Mama’s aunt has the disease as well. “The one who lives in Connecticut,” he says, as if I know all about her, when I know nothing. I’ve only been told that everyone on Mama’s side of the family is dead.
    â€œWith your mother, the disease manifested itself a few weeks after your grandparents died in the fire,” Uncle Billy says. “Annie used to talk about how scary it was. She saw and heard and even felt things that weren’t really there. But she found a special doctor and started taking medicine and all the symptoms went away. She met your dad, fell in love, finished college, and moved out here.”
    He explains how she had no choice but to go off her medication once she was pregnant.
    â€œIt can harm the fetus,” Uncle Billy says. “After Annie had you, she really wanted to breast-feed, which meant not going back on the medicine right away. She’d had no problems during the pregnancy, and she ended up nursing longer than she ever expected. Three years passed and still no meds, and still no symptoms. That was when she began to wonder if she’d been misdiagnosed.”
    Uncle Billy pauses, looking at me the way people do when they need me to understand.
    â€œIt made so much sense when we thought about it,” he says. “We all ended up coming to the same conclusion. We decided the first doctor paid too much attention to her family history and not enough to the fact her nervous breakdown likely resulted from having just lost her parents to a