By the time they met, Sydney and Ross had survived the disasters of family—death, divorce, depression—and assumed adult shape. Their dispositions meshed: he was laid-back and accepting; she was quick and analytical. They fell in love during the horror of the Trump era, got married during the COVID lockdown, moved briefly elsewhere during the California wildfires, and returned to LA chastened but not deranged. So much had gone wrong, but finally they could make an event go entirely right, and that—perversely or predictably—was the event of Sydney’s pregnancy.

She felt it happen in her flesh, the roll onto the shoulder of a new era. Ross cried when she told him, and they announced the news to their remaining parents on New Year’s Day, on FaceTime.

“Over the moon,” her father kept saying.

“No tuna, no turkey,” his stepmother immediately began. Sydney wasn’t even annoyed by her usual bossy tic.

“I know it’s going to be a girl,” Sydney told her own mother afterward when they spoke privately.

“Well, we’ll see,” her mother said.

“Do you still have the red dress with the muff and coat Grandma gave me? And that smock?” She sang the Mary Poppins songs to her belly.

She began to read her fairy tales out loud—one a day.

“Can we name her after Nana?” Russ asked. “At least as a middle name?” She had raised Ross after his mother died.

“Whatever the sex, the other one gets first naming rights,” Sydney said. “So, it’s going to be you.” They sat on their fat couch together, each staring at a phone, when they tried out names.

“Here it is, Rachel Inez. Or Yolanda Ruth. Our Jewish Cuban American princess.”

“Very funny,” she said and kissed his cheek. She could picture her dark hair and brown eyes.

The dog barked and charged the dog on the flat screen on the opposite wall.

“Bel-la,” they both said, without moving.

Sydney didn’t feel skittery, shivery or pukey as the months slid by. She continued to work at home as a human resources director. Russ had to go into the office of his small company, which made all-natural, fresh dog food. Because of the pregnancy, he stayed wary. He took breaks with the vapers just to have a reason to pop outside and pull down his mask. During one of these idle moments, he came up with an idea: their dog should do the gender reveal. She could eat into a cake, of all dog-healthy ingredients, of course, into a blue or pink center. He could ask around for organic bakeries that were still in business after the worst of the shutdown.

“A Bundt cake,” Sydney said. “I love it.”

“I don’t want to know the sex ahead of time,” she told Dr. Kang.

“That’s unusual these days,” she said.

“No, I mean I want to find out with my husband at the gender reveal. Not before.” She described their plan.

“That’s imaginative,” she said. “I’ll chart that you don’t want to know.” Sydney thought she’d be more enthusiastic, but she just turned to the nurse, who told the assistant, who said she’d send Sydney a link to releases, permissions, and notifications.

“The bakery Todd knows folded,” Russ found out. “But he said he’s seen some new places online.”

The bakeries she found didn’t answer her texts. The forms disappeared or wouldn’t open.

When she called to find out why, the office sent her a new set that wouldn’t save her entries properly. No one ever answered a phone, ever, in hospital records.

“You know we don’t have to do it this way,” Ross said when she complained for several days in a row. They were eating a late dinner of delivered Thai. She reached over the corner of the thick glass table to dislodge a bit of peanut from his beard. “It was just a fun idea,” he said. “It’s getting unfun. I don’t want you to have to go through all this. It’s too stressful. Dr. Kang can just tell us.”

“No. No. No.” She stabbed the air with her fork for emphasis. “We are going to do this our way. I wonder if anyone can think straight anymore. This Dogerry place said they could do it, but then they never texted me back. I have to make sure before I finish these forms for the doctor’s office. I just have to keep checking but it’s a new person every time. Maybe I’ll drive over.”

“That will take most of the day,” he said.

“How hard can it be to bake a cake? I mean, I haven’t ever done it, but if that’s your job—at these prices—”

They left the plates on the table and moved over to the couch.

Bella immediately jumped up and writhed in to make a gap between them.

“Ugh,” Sydney said at the silenced face of the former president that came up on the flat screen. “He’s got a wattle, look. Don’t you hate his lips? They’re like a big trout mouth flapping. When are they going to do something about him?” During the election, Sydney and Russ had worked for MoveOn.

“We got a big order from a woman named Grace today.” Russ looked over at Sydney while he stroked the dog’s back. “Isn’t that a nice name, Grace?”

“Very Christian,” she said, swiping a finger over her phone. “I’m trying to find a cartoon of that fish. From when we were kids. I can’t remember the name. God, I wish they would arrest him.”

“Are you nervous at all?”

“Of course I am. I don’t know whether they’re ever going to do anything to him.”

“No, I mean about the reveal.”

“Oh—I’ll be glad to know for sure,” she said. “Even though I already know, right? Just to have it nailed down.”

“Ouch,” he said, smiling.

“Whatever, you know what I mean. Definite.”

She got the person’s name every time from the bakery. They had to postpone because they couldn’t get an ingredient; then they confused the order with another one, then on the pickup day couldn’t find it. The cake was ready once it was located in a new cooler by a new teenager.

“Are you sure this is the right one?” Sydney asked the sleepwalking teenager. He disappeared into the back of the store again and returned. Yes, it was right.

And it was. On gender reveal day, Bella devoured the yellowish cake in a frenzy down to a pink center. She raised her head to chew and swallow faster.

“Don’t let her choke,” Sydney said.

Russ brought the lens in to register the color as crumbs skidded over the marble floor. Pink ones finally flew.

“She knew, she just knew,” Russ said, turning the focus to Sydney’s big smile.

“My body did.” Her eyes watered a little.

This certainty in her flesh helped Sydney when her dark hair began to fall out at its roots, as if too tired to keep clutching the follicles. It helped as her skin became like a striped terry cloth dress. Like the one she’d outgrown in middle school, its button-down front suddenly gappy and awkward around her hips and breasts. The surface of the known was also bloating out of recognition with unknown dangers. In the birthing class they took two nights a week at the open-air mall, new perils constantly emerged. Not the obvious catastrophes of pervasive disease or orange skies or choky air, they’d gotten through these, but the ordinary and everyday threats.

“Did you know most makeup has an incredible amount of carcinogens in it?” They were tromping along the beach one blowsy Sunday. His long, curly hair blew back behind him; the staggered hem of Sydney’s dress flapped around her knees.

“How did you find that out?”

“Bekka told me about a Netflix video. Then I found a list. I’m throwing all my makeup out.”

“All of it?” The wind carried his voice away.

“I don’t want to poison my daughter before she’s even born. Why didn’t someone tell me?”

“They probably didn’t know. I mean, Jesus, talcum powder. They didn’t know about that.” Russ shook his head and shoved his hands into his jean’s pockets.

Sydney reached over to take his elbow. His mother had died young of a mysterious cancer. “I’m sorry, Russ,” she said.

The last sonogram knocked her flat. Not at first. Her obstetrician was out that day; she was being cautious about a potential exposure. The masked and mushroom-capped nurse, all blue and yellow, chatted with Sydney about the new café across from the hospital complex as she ran the wand over Sydney’s belly.

Baby looked fine, she said. But Dr. Kang would be in touch.

After the nurse left, the technician wiped the gel from Sydney’s belly. “So what are you going to name him?” she asked idly.

Sydney scowled at the visor slit of her eyes. “It’s a girl,” she clipped back.

The technician glanced quickly over at the screen. “But—” She turned back to Sydney’s face and said, “Oh.” She finished up quickly.

Sydney wasn’t going to get worked up about it. She’d complain. But of course no one would know who this underling was, and Dr. Kang would say big mistake, sorry, the chaos, the understaffing, the strain, COVID, so sorry.

But that’s not what Dr. Kang said. 

“What the fuck!” She cried after she talked to Dr. Kang. Russ held her heaving chest against his, and Bella licked her leg.

Dr. Kang said she always referred to any fetus six months and older as “baby” so she didn’t slip with mothers who didn’t want to know or foreclose on any nonbinary births. And anyway the chart had noted that Sydney didn’t want to know.

“At first!” she said. But the doctor said she was sorry that Sydney was so upset about it.

And really, everything was fine.

The system had shunted her out; her body had lied to her and taken away her daughter.

“But he’s okay, right?” Russ said. “Nothing else is wrong?”

“I can’t trust ANYONE,” she yelled.

“You can trust me,” he said.

“I mean anyone else, anyone managing this. Not you. Of course not you.”

The next day Sydney drove back to the bakery, which had vanished along with the three other storefronts in that strip mall; online, she tried to trace the route through the hospital to the lab. Of course, one recording led to another, and the guy who finally answered—deep in a chamber of hell where jangly, jaunty music played in between chirpy messages asking her if she knew help would be available immediately online—asked if there was something else he could help her with when he hadn’t helped her with anything. She threw her phone across the room.

Russ was surprised but not unmoored. He tried to soothe her; he rubbed her feet and shoulders and scalp. But Russ’s body hadn’t lied to him; Russ hadn’t been housing this intimate presence for months without really knowing it at all.

A few days later Sydney fumed to Melissa, her private doula, as they sat together on the soft rug next to the couch, both wearing stretchy black tunics and leggings. Melissa didn’t say that Sydney would love her baby boy; she didn’t say at least it was healthy; she didn’t say it is what it is; she didn’t say that Sydney was entitled to her anger but that she shouldn’t let it dominate the wonder of birthing. When others did, Sydney replied in her head, behind tight lips, Why don’t you shut the fuck up?

Melissa thought the bakery was probably responsible. “But as we’ve tried to stress, Sydney, you have to take any medical advice under consideration. As you proceed.”

“Yeah, I know. I got that. Especially from Justine.” The other doula who taught the class was quite adamant about the mother’s power in the face of the medical industrial complex. Even Sydney had to smile at the thought of what she’d say.

“But in this instance, I think it was the bakery,” Melissa said.

A week before Sydney’s due date, Russ’s throat swelled up. He tested positive for COVID and had to move to a hotel. Sydney bleached every surface in the house, clambering up on countertops to get to the kitchen cabinets. She left take-out and his prescription outside the door of his room at the Best Western. “Not hungry.” He spoke through the door. His robust voice sounded hoarse and faint. “But take the medicine,” she yelled through the door. “This is the good stuff.”

At night she clutched Bella to her chest, nestling her over her belly, and refused to cry. She was upset about Russ of course, but she wanted a villain to imagine, a face to blame, a body to imagine sticking with pins, or slicing lightly. She couldn’t share these fantasies with anyone, not even with Russ, because when she imagined them as actual, they made her feel gross.

Someone should pay for the severing of herself from her daughter, and for the slow, too-late labor of transforming him into a son.

Russ had barely staggered home in time to go with her to the appointment. They were left for hours in a hot room without seeing Dr. Kang at all. The nurse said that Sydney’s blood pressure was high. “With geriatric patients, it’s a particular concern. I’d advise you to wait in the building until she can look over your results.”

“How long do you think that will be?” Russ asked.

She shook her head. “It might be a few hours.”

“I don’t want to wait around in a hospital full of COVID,” Sydney said. “I want to go home.” The due date was still two days away.

“I’d feel better if you stayed,” the nurse said.

“Geriatric!” Sydney fumed to Russ in the car.

Dr. Kang called a few hours after they got home. Sydney was lying in her bed on top of a mass of pillows. “You need to check in,” she said. “There’s a bed available, and I want you to take it.” 

“But I’ve been checking my blood pressure every hour, and it isn’t high! It’s right on the border!”

“There are some other issues I want to watch too,” she said. “And I don’t want to lose the bed. I really have to advise you to come in.”

Sydney said she needed a minute to think about it. Panic clamped her brain. She called Melissa. “I think they just want to get me in there to start the oxytocin so I wind up with a cesarean. Just like Justine said.”

“That can happen. If they start too soon, it can deprive the placenta of oxygen. But did the doctor say that?”

“I think I’d be feeling something from him, don’t you? I mean, wouldn’t he have let me know?” Her back had ached for months. There were no new signs of oncoming labor. He wasn’t ready.

Sydney’s phone dinged again. She went on speakerphone to read the text. “She forgot to remind me she’s on call tonight. She’s on call tonight! That’s why! Convenience. It’s all for her now. It’s not even the due date.” The straight pins of her anger, the little blades of punishment, magnetized to circle around Dr. Kang.

Dr. Kang called again while Russ went to get some dinner. Sydney didn’t answer. The panic was rising in her. She didn’t have the connection, and so she couldn’t know for certain. If only he would signal her.

“Well, should you write her back, at least?” Russ asked after they ate and walked Bella. “What exactly are these other concerns?”

“I want one more night in my own bed,” Sydney said. But as the night deepened and Russ dozed, she couldn’t sleep and couldn’t call the doctor either. She took her blood pressure repeatedly.

“My blood pressure is normal. The high end of normal.” She woke Russ after she took it the eighth time.

“I’ll support your decision, you know that,” he repeated. “It’s your decision.”

“But do you think there’s really any danger to the baby?”

“She wants to check, I guess.” He nodded off again.

At 3 a.m. Sydney texted Melissa. She didn’t respond.

At 5 a.m. she texted Justine, who responded in fifteen minutes. “Your BODY will tell u,” she wrote. “U can just go to another hospital. They have to deliver.” 

She woke Russ, standing next to the bed in satisfaction. “The baby doesn’t want to come yet. He’ll let me know.”

She finally settled next to Russ and dozed until the bedroom lightened. The uncertainty clawed her brain; she couldn’t think, only repeat. She began to cry. Russ woke up. “Maybe we should just go to the hospital? Not let them start anything, but just to be there?”

“You’re taking her side now,” Sydney said.

“No, I’m not.”

She made him call Dr. Kang since they got along so well.

Because he was Russ, he didn’t respond but went to get his phone and some coffee.

In the waiting room at the hospital, Sydney ran a finger over the pimples that ridged her hairline. Another one humped up at her left temple. She looked around at the other women in the waiting room. One tipped her head back against the wall. The other, in an orange shawl, paced the area—not in an annoying way. Just steady. Sydney was tempted to join her.

She turned to Russ, glazed over, staring sleepily at the screen on the other wall. What did the baby want? Why wouldn’t he signal? What was their code? Had she already failed him? “Am I—?” she began. But Russ just pointed at the silent screen hanging on the wall opposite. “FBI Raids Mar-a-Lago” the chyron blared.

“It’s the portal of the lion,” the shawled woman declared. She was looking at the screen but had turned before she paced in front of them. Sydney looked up. The woman’s shawl had dropped away; her hands were on her hips, her elbows poking back in bony wings. She wasn’t talking to anyone in particular.

“They’re all going to be okay, all the babies,” she declared. “He’s going down and they’re coming out okay.”

A woman in yellow scrubs emerged from the flapping doors and called, “Sydney Adler?” She had a lilting accent. Sydney tried to rise. Russ took her arm. She smiled at him underneath her mask. And deep within her fear, Sydney assented to the revelation; this was it, a sign, the first of the 114 new fictions that would stun her with the authority of truth.

About the Author:

Jean Kane’s creative work has appeared in numerous US publications, including Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, American Short Fiction online, South Dakota Review, Cimarron Review, Courtship of Winds, Indiana Review, 3:AM, Hotel Amerika, Euphony Journal, Fogged Clarity, Green Hills Literary Lantern, The MacGuffin, Ignatian Literary Magazine, Nonconformist Magazine, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, Pine Hills Review, Posit Journal, Rue Scribe, Slab, Word For/Word, Doubly Mad, Isele, and  the Ginosko Review. Her book of poems, Make Me, was published by Otis Nebula in 2014. She received the Otis Nebula First Book Award, and was nominated for a 2021 Pushcart Prize by Hole in the Head Review.  She is a professor of English and women, feminist, and queer studies at Vassar College.  Find her here: http://jean-kane.squarespace.com/

*Feature Image by Dimmis Vart on Unsplash