The Kicker

by Lauren McGovern (HONORABLE MENTION - Creative Nonfiction Contest 2024)

9:18 Thursday morning. Faculty lounge. Laptops and dark roast around the table. An open box of apple cider doughnuts. Everyone looks up when Jaye—rockin’ the Mother Bee black dress with her buttery hair—waves her phone with the sonogram photo in one manicured hand and grips her decaf in the other.

“Here it is! The culprit when I’m at the board with angles or diameter!” 

A foot at five months. Jaye lowers herself into a chair, smoothes her moon belly, and passes the phone around for everyone to see.

Oh. 

I remember a different season, a different pregnancy, but the same buoyancy. Y2K had fizzled out, a punchline. This baby was new growth in the scorched landscape after 9/11. I’d invited my parents to the dim exam room to witness their first sonogram—a medical triumph unavailable to them in the 1970s. Appointments had been backed up an hour.

The ultrasound tech (let’s call her Yvonne) surveyed the viewing party squeezed up against the wall. Yvonne, with her sensible bob and khaki scrubs, anticipated my husband, but didn’t know she was supposed to be the activities director, as if monitoring procreation was a goddamn ice cream social. Yvonne asked if anyone else was coming. I met her scowl with a song about inviting my mother-in-law, but she wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t make it but maybe next time and whoa she had some birth stories—three boys and dismissive doctors and—Yvonne ordered me to lower my waistband, smothering goop and trailing the phallic baton up and over the fertile mountain between us.

Here was my adult body and undeniable evidence of sexual intercourse, offering a glimpse of pubic hair, to my mom and dad. Yvonne was right, this wasn’t a theater performance on a cruise ship. I no longer wanted an audience, but Yvonne kept going. She pointed to the face, printed the image, and circled it for us with a blue pen.

Photo by Logan Moreno Gutierrez on Unsplash

Slotting the wand back in place, Yvonne instructed me to pull up my pants. Still in the dark, softer: “Your midwife is Casey, right? Be sure to check in with her before you leave today.” My parents bolted for lunch downtown. 

Casey explained amniotic fluid levels were extremely low. I thought about the development desert inside my body, our dehydrated baby. We needed to see a specialist right away. “There is one thing you can try,” Casey suggested. “An old wives’ tale. Drink lots of water.” 

I hit every water fountain on the way to the ground floor. Why didn’t I have a water bottle with me? Grocery store. I chugged a two-liter bottle of seltzer on the 50-minute ride home. I refilled and lugged the bottle around the house, took it for a walk outside. I stepped off the front porch in my husband’s wool jacket, the three dogs angling to reach the bottom of the stairs then darting off to shove their noses into the field of straw mounds, nests of stiff grass hunched from the pounding winter. On the flat-topped boulder, I’d swig hope, summon magic, then circle back through the dense, mossy patch behind the old well, kicking dead leaves, sidestepping the twisted, ropey grape vines, emerging to take the path up to the house. Call the dogs back. I’d rush inside to pee and start over. I’d heard, read, and seen these moments, the ones where the narrator’s life cleaves into two parts—Before/After, Then/Now. Not/Me. Please/No. This baby was next. This baby was spring. 

But we were lucky. Yvonne detected something we hadn’t seen. Hadn’t known. We called the Maternal Fetal Medicine Unit in Burlington, Vermont and got an appointment right away. The ferry sliced through March on Lake Champlain on our way to the specialist. Stopping at a cafe after disembarking felt like the countless other times we’d sought culture across the lake, but we were hollowed out. We forced ourselves to eat the roasted carrot soup and farm bread, hands entwined, watching families navigate the narrow aisles and barrels of penny candy by the dessert counter. A steady throng of tourists holding the front door open for each other, all smiles and warmth, jammed into the place. My husband secured a pitcher of water for me. We sat with our “maybes” and “if onlys” and “do you think?” at the bistro table by the window.   

When we reached the right floor, I noticed a woman standing in front of the reception desk, clutching herself and crying softly. I stared, immobile. I clung to the belief that I was in the wrong story. That cliche was tethering me to the truth. My husband guided me to a chair and we did what everyone else was doing. We waited. On that first visit, the doctor told us the placenta was not putting in a full work day, but the slacking off pointed to a slightly underfed fetus, not a crisis. “Keep doing whatever you’re doing.” By the second follow-up, Owen weighed a healthy five pounds and didn’t show any signs of distress. A month of worry—check! Order those onesies in EVERY color! Get TEN of EACH! Time to load up that stroller and travel a new road!

My father relayed to me later, next to the hospital bed, cradling Owen’s head in his palm, seeing his dimpled cheeks and dark hair for the first time, that on the sonogram day he and Mom had gone to Arnie’s for lunch. Without taking his eyes off the new person in his arms, he explained that once the breadsticks and marinara arrived, they’d admitted to each other that they couldn’t make out anything Yvonne pointed to in the snowstorm on the small screen. 

Outside the womb, Owen was our hydro-boy: last one out of the hotel pool, long-ass showers, the only family member who consistently used the enormous jet tub—increasing the temp on the water heater in advance—endless summers at the town beach, hikes to our spot along the river to float on an innertube while I read Love that Dog, rafting the local gorge, riding ocean waves. Searching for the next swim. 

Photo by Naja Bertolt Jensen on Unsplash

But something was lurking beneath the surface. A disaster we didn’t know was there. It emerged one September and took Owen away from us. A different hospital. More waiting. Suicide at sixteen. Water, in whatever form, cannot fix this.

I’ve bookmarked and re-read that part of the story, again and again. I’ve drafted new chapters. I have two children. One is alive and one is dead. Love/Loss. Grief/Growth. Sorrow/Strength. My family is floating, our arms around each other in a circle. An “O” if you will.  

Jaye’s phone finally made its way to me at the table in the faculty lounge. I looked at the crisp black and white image. Jaye’s parents in Central New York could zoom in on the grand kicker all day long. I marveled aloud about the big toe, the curve of the unblemished heel, then whispered a private invitation to the little gymnast: join us. Stay. I returned what belonged to Jaye to her outstretched palm. I tamped down the coil of danger. Twisted that lid. Tight. Tighter still. 

Jaye never met Owen, but she’s not afraid. She’s heard about breastfeeding and (almost!) leaking through the job interview dress, the crib escape artist; she listened to the one about the eighth grader who gave sixth-grade Owen a haircut (who needs bangs?); she knows he liked to make ice cream from scratch, and wrote poetry about daffodils. She knows he aced all the math. She knows how it ends. 

The room emptied out. There was one doughnut left. We decided to split it. Jaye walked with me to the printer to collect our worksheets and essay outlines. Variables. New narratives. Lives unfinished, lives unfolding. Teaching and learning. All of us, students.