Chimera

EMILY URQUHART

In Mesopotamia, pregnant women wore amulets in the shape of a feathery, lion-headed demon called Lamashtu. She was known as “she who erases” because she could make a fetus, an infant, and even a new mother disappear. In the past, Romanian women wore tiny books on strings around their necks, each page a handwritten incantation against Samca, the beast who devours the unborn. Devout Catholics pray to St. Catherine of Sweden, patron saint of miscarriage, that she might keep their fetus safe in the womb. And me? I had no prayer, spell, or incantation. Instead, I wrote down a diagnosis I was hoping against, once in English and a second time in Italian, and folded the paper into my wallet.

The first person I told about my pregnancy was a Polish traveller named Masha. We met at the pensione where we were both staying in Alghero, a town on the Italian island of Sardinia. She’d been sailing the Mediterranean and this was her last port of call. I was on a weekend visit, escaping the student dorm where I lived that summer, just outside of London. On our final night, we dined together at a café along the sea wall. That was nine years ago, but the details of the evening remain sharp, like how the setting sun turned the light orange, the sound of the waves beneath the restaurant’s terrace, and how we would become lost in the narrow, winding streets on our way home.

I remember the minutiae of that night because they’re plot points in a story I write every year, usually around the time summer’s hazy edges slip into the sharpness of fall. In some versions, like this one, I begin with meeting Masha and in others she doesn’t appear at all. If pressed, Masha might remember meeting me—it’s somewhat unusual to encounter a solo woman traveller who also happens to be pregnant. If she does think of me, perhaps discovering the photograph we posed for over dinner, our wine glasses lifted high (mine filled with sparkling water) and the light-dappled water behind us, she might briefly wonder and then calculate, as I have on occasion, how old my child would be now. Masha might also question if there was ever any child at all. When I told her my secret, the words hovered in the air between us like an apparition. My unsure tone made my

confession sound like a lie, as if it were something I fabricated to make myself seem more interesting.

I hardly believed it myself. I always said I’d never have children. And yet with the knowledge of impending parenthood, I’d begun to plan, molding my existing life around a shiny date in the future when everything would change. These imagined plans would unfold back in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where I lived with my relatively new partner, Andrew. We’d moved in together that spring and parted for the summer amidst boxes and chaos. He went north to Labrador, where along with his fellow scientists he’d look for signs of climate change in the shrubs of the Mealy Mountains. Meanwhile, I boarded a plane to England. I was taking a field course as part of my graduate work in folklore called “The English Cultural Landscape.” In it, we explored the mythology, history, and material culture of England and its people through a series of field trips that included the absurd collections of long-dead Victorians, the occasional castle, postwar suburbs, wattle and daub cottages, derelict factories, and council flats. There were a few older students like me, but most were twenty-year-olds on their first trip abroad.

A few days after arriving in England, I’d discovered I was pregnant, unceremoniously taking the test in the shared bathroom at my dorm. The second line, the one that tells you if you are pregnant or not, was faint. A few days later an ultrasound showed some kind of growth in my womb, but it wasn’t fetus-shaped.

“It’s still early, love,” a kindly ultrasound technician told me during my appointment at the hospital near the dorm.

The first doctor I visited warned that the pregnancy might be ectopic: a potentially fatal condition where the fetus develops outside the womb, most commonly in the fallopian tube. He based this theory on my hormone levels, which weren’t doubling as expected, and on my medical history. Exploratory surgery the previous fall had unearthed years of extensive scarring from endometriosis. “You’re riddled with it,” is how the surgeon put it. Endometrial buildup increases the risk that the embryo will get stuck in the fallopian tube. So, based on my surgeon’s findings and the British doctor’s hunch, I wrote the words “ectopic pregnancy” on a small piece of paper that I kept in my wallet for an EMS attendant to discover if I fell unconscious from internal bleeding. Before leaving for Alghero, I wrote the Italian translation—“gravidanza ectopica”— on the back of the original note. I’d intended

the information to act in the same way as a MedicAlert bracelet, but over time the note became a sort of talisman, a charm against encroaching threat.

When I woke on my final morning in Alghero, Masha had checked out and I’d started to bleed. On the flight back to London, I tried to distract myself from what I assumed were the first stages of pregnancy loss by watching the Mediterranean landscape reveal itself from the vantage of the plane’s oval window.

A sudden pain, deep inside of me, interrupted. We reached cruising altitude and I crawled over my sleeping seatmate to vomit in the plane’s sole toilet. I spent the rest of the flight in the bathroom, ignoring the airline steward repeatedly rapping on the door. Finally, I sat up in a sweat, staggered back to my seat and buckled myself in for landing. At the airport pharmacy, I looked for painkillers but didn’t know what might harm a growing fetus—if it was still growing. The ache in my side and the nausea were overwhelming. I asked a security guard for help. He showed me to a cot in a triage room at the end of a long hallway and quickly left, closing the door behind him. A woman wearing a fluorescent crossing guard vest came to see me and I explained that I was eight weeks pregnant and was worried it might be ectopic. The woman told me that the only thing she could do was call an ambulance and that would be very expensive for me.

“Is that what you want?” she asked.

I was unsure. I told her I needed more time.

“Stay here for an hour,” she said. “If I come back and you’re gone, then I’ll know your decision.”

Half an hour later, I took a bus back to the dorm, clutching my side.

The next day, I returned to the hospital where I’d had my earlier tests. I met a pregnant teenager named Daisy in the waiting room. I’d seen her there on my first visit. She was wiry and small, and she already had one toddler. Her mother was with her, reading back issues of Hello while Daisy peppered me with questions. She wanted to know when I was due, and if we might exchange email addresses so we could meet up during our pregnancies and after our babies were born. I explained that I’d be returning to Canada in a few weeks.

“Let’s keep in touch anyhow,” she said. “Maybe our babies will grow up to be pen pals.”

I found her optimism touching, but I also found it sad.

Another week of blood taking and ultrasounds followed. I never saw the same physician twice because they worked on a rotating schedule. One day I met with a stunning doctor who had glossy black hair and red lips. She had an upper-crust accent and made disparaging comments about the working class town we were in. She called it a hole and said she couldn’t wait to get back to London.

“You will have a big bleed,” she said. “Then this will be all over.”

At the hospital I got to know a Scottish nurse who was kind and fierce and took a shine to me because of my Scots-Gaelic surname. She had soft brown curled hair and was about fifty years old. I can’t remember her name, but she probably saved my life.

She told me that on a Friday afternoon in late August, she’d handed my file to the doctor on call and said, “This woman is going to be on a flight home to Canada soon and we are going to lose her.” She believed the pretty doctor’s diagnosis was incorrect, and that rather than an impending miscarriage I had an ectopic pregnancy. If not treated immediately, my tube would rupture. So many doctors had hemmed and hawed over the hormone results, the empty womb in repeated ultrasounds, but this nurse hollered.

The doctor phoned me at my dorm a few minutes later.

“Don’t go anywhere this weekend and if you feel anything—I mean any hint of pain—come to the hospital immediately,” he said. Then he instructed me to come in on Monday morning for surgery.

I called Andrew from a payphone on the town’s high street, a flow of Saturday morning shoppers streaming by on either side of the exposed booth. I used the emergency satellite telephone number and hoped he wouldn’t panic when he was called to the phone by the person on duty. He told me that he’d heard wolves howling the night before, a mournful sound that echoed along the mountain pass. I told him that he was a father but also that he wasn’t. He was quiet for a while afterwards, but we didn’t have time for long silences. We couldn’t afford them. I would have surgery. He would arrive in a week. We would keep our plans to see London and the west coast of Ireland.

I checked into the hospital on Monday morning and the Scottish nurse met me with relief.

“I was so worried you’d gone,” she said in her thick, comforting brogue. She showed me into a triage room where I undressed and placed all my belongings in a plastic bag.

She stuck an IV in my arm and handed me a stack of magazines. I sat there for three hours, waiting for a free bed. At one point, I overheard a distressed patient:

“I’m in the middle of having a miscarriage,” she said, then caught her breath and cried a little. “So I’m wondering if I still belong in the prenatal unit?”

She asked again, “Where do I belong?” Her words sounded like an echo. Eventually, I was given a bed in a public ward—yet another dorm—to wait for my surgery. I would need to spend the night but was not allowed to eat. I watched reruns of American sitcoms on the mini television attached to my bed. The next morning and afternoon passed slowly until, very suddenly, I was wheeled into preop. In the fluorescent glare of the overhead lights, the shiny floor and the hollow, bland nothingness of that space, I was filled with panic: for the surgery, and for the dissection of me and the idea of my child. The cleaving of what I had come to know as my whole self over these nine weeks. I began to howl and cling to the arm of the young nurse who’d wheeled me there on the gurney, but she backed away from me.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just I’ve got to go.”

When I woke, a doctor I’d never seen before was at my bedside. She had printed photographs that were taken inside of my body. Looking at the images made me feel queasy and exposed.

“It looks like a grape in a straw,” she said, showing me my fallopian tube and the orb of life growing inside. (Years later, when I am pregnant again and the baby books happily announce that my nine-week-old fetus is the size of a grape, I will recall this image with precision.) She said that they removed the fetus and the section of my fallopian tube where it had been lodged. I wanted to ask the doctor where that fragment of my body and those fused cells went. Had they been tossed in the bin along with the rest of the hospital’s medical waste? I didn’t ask because the answer would be too difficult, but I’ll wonder for the rest of my life.

I’m not alone. In post-war Japan, temples began accepting medical waste associated with fetal products from abortions, miscarriages, and probably ectopic pregnancies to inter on their grounds, and to perform funeral and memorial services. The first of these memorials, in the Oji area of Kita-ku, was called the Hall of Compassionate Sleep. It was the early beginnings of the Japanese mizuko kuyō tradition, a memorial practice now common at religious sites where parents (most

often mothers) can pay homage to their pregnancy loss—to the spirit or the idea of their lost children. Rows of identical stone babies, their heads capped in knitted red bonnets, chubby-cheeked and smiling, stand together at these memorials, each one representing a loss, a significant event on a life’s timeline. Women who visit the site are often well past their childbearing years because memory casts a long shadow. Japanese media has been cruel, and academics call it an invented tradition, but those little stone dolls represent a tangible expression of women’s grief and their choices.

“Come into my womb again in two years,” a woman writes on a small card left among many other messages to the unborn.

North American online marketplaces sell trinkets that memorialize miscarriage: his and her keychains, each with half a tiny foot that join when placed side-byside; custom necklaces with angel wings, the hoped-for child’s name engraved on a pendant; a Christmas ornament with the birth date, which is also the death date, embossed alongside a melancholy quote. At first, I find these souvenirs vulgar, but in time I come to see them as similar to the mizuko kuyō custom. It is just one of many ways to honour a loss like this.

When I woke next, there was a plain-faced woman with grey hair and glasses at my side. Her dark blouse was buttoned up to her neck. She wanted me to pray with her, but I declined and a shadow crossed her face.

“You don’t need biological children,” she said. “I never had any.”

There was an underlying meanness to her soft-spoken manner. I turned my head and hoped she’d go away. I understood this moment to be the possible end of my fertility. I didn’t need to hear it from a stranger.

“You could always adopt,” she said, before wandering off.

The public ward in that grim, mid-sized hospital was like a Greyhound bus terminal. Strangers passed through en route to other destinations; patients came and went, carrying duffel bags of belongings while others read back issues of British tabloids, their bodies sprawled across the uniform grey coverlets of their beds. Ageing blue-haired volunteers pushed trolleys filled with tea and biscuits. Here, I realized, was the true English Cultural Landscape, in all its various guises—the broken, the dying, the healing, and the helpers alongside the judgmental doctor from the upper class, the purse-lipped religious zealot, and the fierce Scottish nurse. It was Daisy,

a teenager alone and pregnant for the second time, and her mother, reading Hello and trying to ignore that it was happening again. It was the distraught woman, mid-miscarriage, who didn’t know where she belonged.

I was discharged the next day, although I was bleeding profusely and it was difficult to walk. My roommate stayed at the dorm with me. We watched Pretty in Pink while pieces of my insides came out in chunks. At one point I bolted to the bathroom when the pain bent me in half, and when I looked into the toilet bowl, I saw a semi-circle the size of a cupped palm. It was grey and pocked and looked like the surface of the moon. At first, I wondered if it was somehow part of the baby, but of course it was my placenta, rendered useless, and now free.

The efforts of life, I thought. All that work for nothing. But this isn’t entirely true, because years later I’ll read about how researchers have found fetal cells in the bodies of women long after they’d been pregnant. Some had been pregnant for only a matter of weeks, but in that time, fetal cells had intertwined with each mother’s cells, and they stayed within her for the rest of her life. They morphed into other cells: they migrated through her body and they became cardiac tissue, beating with her heart, and they were found in her brain, which some theorize might shape the mother’s behaviour. Some cells made pilgrimages to injury sites where they busied themselves repairing damage while others fought disease.

The researchers called these cells microchimerisms, after the mythical Chimera, depicted variously as part human and part beast, or a variety of beasts within one body, or a combination of all these things, but never as a homogenous entity. She was an omen—storms, shipwrecks, and natural disasters followed in her wake. In many tales, she breathed fire and had the head of a lion and the tail of a snake. She was mighty but ultimately doomed. Her undoing was a goody-two-shoes hero and his trusted flying horse. She died of an arrow wound.

Like the Chimera, researchers found that the fetal cells could morph from one kind of cell to another. Therefore, the host, the mother, was both herself and her pregnancies, even when she was an old woman and the pregnancies were in her distant past, lost before they were viable, or children now long grown. Learning about these cells, five years later, was some comfort. Most of the cells from my ectopic pregnancy had been flushed or disposed of as medical waste—the grape in the straw—but some, I’m now certain, remain with me, in my lungs, or my heart, or even my brain. We all leave our mark, whether in the cells we shed, in the

children we bear and the ones we don’t, in rows of little stone dolls or, for me, in the scratches on a page that form a story. One that’s nearing its end.

In two weeks, I was back on a plane, reliving memories of my terrifying journey between Alghero and London. This time, though, I was heading home to St. John’s, and I wasn’t alone. Andrew was by my side. We’d seen the parliament buildings in London, crossed the Irish Sea, and carried on with our journey as planned.

On the last leg of the flight there was a huddle of news journalists and storm chasers in the departure lounge of the Ottawa airport. Something ominous was brewing in the mid-Atlantic. It would touch down in Newfoundland around the same time we were scheduled to arrive. Airline employees warned that our flight path might change mid-route. It wasn’t something they could prepare for, they said. Our pilot would fly eastward and see what happened.

Despite this, we landed smoothly, without incident. As we were ferried home in a taxi, I noticed that windows were shuttered and the streets were empty, but the sidewalks were dry. There wasn’t a breeze.

I woke early the next morning, jetlagged and with the same dull pain in my gut, expecting devastation. But when I stepped outside, the air was warm and the clouds had parted to reveal a brilliant blue sky, the sun burning a hole through its centre. Hurricane Bill had blown past the island. We’d been spared. The destruction and danger, the homes and lives upended, were an unrealized threat.

We will continue to carry our talismans, whisper our prayers, and chant our incantations, but ultimately human beliefs hold no sway over the natural world. Not over the weather, not over the sea, and certainly not over the intricate workings of our own mysterious bodies. As the pilot said over the crackling intercom, we must simply go forward and see what happens. In the ensuing years, other storms would ravage our island, ones whose names we would collectively recall. Bill was not destined to be among them. For most of the world, it was as if nothing had ever happened.