Sita Romero received an MFA in fiction from Queens University of Charlotte. Her stories have been published with Third Flatiron, Transmundane Press, and Green Briar Review. She teaches freshman writing and fiction classes in Northern Virginia, where she lives with her husband, kids, two dogs, and over two hundred and fifty board games. Her website is www.sitacromero.com.
Jizo
Sita Romero
Issue 60, Spring 2020
Nia rubbed the anzan omamori between her finger and thumb, sliding smoothly over the brocaded silk, though her hands had begun to sweat. For protection for your pregnancy and baby, her Buddhist mother-in-law had told her when she gifted the small silk amulet to her. Nia hadn’t set it down since the spotting started. The ultrasound wand pressed on her still-flat belly and zeroed in on the shape of their baby. A fuzzy black-and-white monitor revealed a vague profile outline.
“Turn it up,” said Nia. “I need to hear it.” The nurse repositioned the wand to the baby’s chest, looking for the heartbeat.
“It is up,” said Edward, the solemnity in his voice sounded like a warning. Did he do that to his patients, too? That wasn’t fair. But then, none of this was. She squeezed Edward’s hand. Nia knew her question was stupid but let it spill out of her mouth anyway.
“Is everything okay? Tell me it’s okay.” The nurse and Dr. B exchanged looks with Edward. “No,” said Nia, not waiting for the pronouncement. She rubbed the silk harder. Edward’s mother had given her the anzan for protection. It was stupid. A piece of silk couldn’t prevent a miscarriage. But she’d believed it. “No, it can’t be. This baby is okay. I did everything right. I get to keep this baby. No.” She couldn’t stop the rush of words or the flood of desperate emotions. While her worst fear coalesced into existence, she continued to deny it. A tightness gripped her chest. Her breathing came out ragged. “What’s happening? Edward?” Her voice was a harsh whisper.
In his quiet, solemn voice Edward said, “There’s no heartbeat.”
#
Edward drove them home while Nia sat slumped in the passenger seat, crying, railing at the unfairness of it all. There was a harsh reality to the awareness of her dead baby before the miscarriage had actually happened. The light spotting had been nothing compared to what was coming. It was a cruel joke, knowing that it sat inside her, decaying, waiting to be ejected. She crumpled the amulet in her fist.
“You can have the D and C if you want. Rich can take care of the miscarriage right away. You don’t have to wait.” He said it casually, calling Dr. B by his first name, as if he were making an offering to her, like it were a latte or some other commodity. As if the dilation of her cervix and the scraping out of her dead baby in a white clinic room would somehow relieve the problem for her. No. No one was going to take away what she had. There was nothing Edward could offer her. She knew he’d do anything to take away her pain, but she couldn’t lie on that table and let someone empty her womb. She’d done that before.
“No,” she said softly. “I want to let it happen on its own.” Dr. B had said that her body would take care of it. They wouldn’t have to do a D and C unless it didn’t all come out. What did that mean? Unless it doesn’t all come out? She pictured her mother in that moment, standing in the kitchen fifteen years before, banging the bottom of a glass jar of thick spaghetti sauce. She could hear the pounding of her palm on the concave bottom of the glass jar, almost empty. Almost. But somehow, she never managed to get the last bit of sauce from that two-for-one spaghetti sauce jar, the thick red liquid clinging to the bottom and edges, refusing to budge.
They curled into bed together, Nia resting her head on Edward’s chest, listening to his rhythmic heartbeat. The soft beating held her in place like an anchor. There’s no heartbeat. It echoed in her mind over and over. She’d hated him in that moment. But he’d had to say it, confirm it out loud for her. In the quiet, grounded only by the sound of those beats, he said, “We can try again. Once the bloodwork comes back, we may have an indication of hormones or something.”
“Not right now.” She couldn’t think of the next baby with a dead one lying in her womb. The tears started anew. She cried until she fell asleep against Edward’s chest. She woke in a start, hot tears clinging to her face. “She’s dead. She’s dead.” Her heart pulsed rapidly. She inhaled, trying to breathe. Why couldn’t she breathe? A tremor ripped through her. “I found her. I picked her up. I made her stop crying. Why? Why is she dead?”
“Shh, it’s okay. You had a nightmare.” Edward was there, on her, engulfing her. His arms encircled her and he held tight. Safe. She was safe. But not her baby. It hadn’t been a nightmare. Her baby was dead. When she calmed herself enough to slow her breathing, she went to the bathroom. Her face looked pale and ashen. She washed it and used the toilet. On the toilet, she expected blood. Worse than a period. A river of blood to carry her baby out. But it didn’t come yet. She spotted ever so slightly.
Outside of the bathroom she said to Edward, “Maybe he’s wrong. Maybe they just couldn’t find the heartbeat, but it’s there. I’m not bleeding.” She could hear the false hope in her voice and knew it was wishful thinking. Denial. Edward took her hand and looked into her eyes earnestly.
“Your body won’t miscarry until the HCG gets low enough. I don’t think your body knows what’s happened quite yet.” The pain in his eyes and apprehension in his voice made Nia aware that he was afraid to tell her this truth. Afraid he would be the source of more anguish. Nia nodded soberly. “Can I get you anything? Are you hungry?”
“I have to tell my mom. My family.” Mami will be so disappointed.
“You don’t have to tell them right now. There will be time.”
“No. She’ll shop. She’ll call everyone from Caracas to Valencia to tell them. I bet she already has things picked out for the baby. I have to tell her.”
He exhaled slowly. “Okay. Whatever you feel like you need to do.” Nia started calling. She called her mother and interrupted her while making dinner. “Oh, hija, my heart.” She went on in Spanish for several minutes. When they hung up, she called her sister and her best friend in that order. Lotus was last—her newest friend and the one who’d been sharing everything pregnancy with her. After last week’s lunch, shopping and prenatal yoga class, she knew she could call, even with something big like this.
“Oh, Nia,” Lotus said, through tears. “My heart is absolutely broken for you.” Above her mother’s laments in Spanish and her sister’s feeble “you can try again” speech, there was Lotus, crying genuine tears for her and her baby. “Nia, you listen to me. You don’t let anyone tell you not to mourn your baby or to just have another. It’s total bullshit. This was your baby and you get to mourn that loss. You take your time. Understand?”
Nia closed her eyes, shutting out the world and taking in the message. Squeezing everything else out wouldn’t make it go away. In the moment, she didn’t know how important those words were or how they’d come to mean everything to her in the days to come. When the call ended, she yanked the covers back and crawled beneath them. She didn’t feel ill or tired, but it seemed like the right place to be.
Edward came up from the kitchen with a plate of over-easy eggs. “We both know your mom is probably bringing sancocho soon, but I thought you might like some eggs for now.”
Sancocho. It was true, the Venezuelan stew was a cure-all. Nia ate slowly, not tasting the food but doing it anyway because Edward was watching her and she hadn’t eaten a thing all day. She normally loved the salty, smooth insides of an over-easy egg. But in that moment, she tasted nothing. Time passed in a warp. Five minutes was an hour. Three hours were gone when she blinked. Then Okasan was standing there by her bed, clutching a small statue. She looked from her stone-faced mother-in-law to the crumpled anzan on her bedside.
“Okasan?” It came out in a breathless near-whisper. She used the honorific to refer to Edward’s mother the way he did, to her face and even when she wasn’t present. Would their baby have learned Spanish and Japanese both? She handed the small gray statue to Nia. It looked like stone and was heavy in her hands, about a half-foot tall. It had a bald head; the ears stretched in the familiar way of Buddhist iconography. The face was round and serene with closed eyes and a smile, the third eye prominent between the brows. Hanging from the neck of the monk-like figure was a bright red cloth bib.
“It’s a Jizo statue,” she said. She’d seen ones like it before. The bib. The monk smiling like he knew something they did not. She had a memory of a garden in Japan, outside of a monastery they’d visited on her first trip to Edward’s birthplace. There had been dozens of them. Hundreds of them, all dressed in red bonnets or bibs, sewn or knit. She remembered a young woman there, kneeling in front of the Jizo. Nia had stared at her curiously as the woman replaced a weathered bib with a fresh one.
She looked down at the stone monk and knew she was not the first to own him. “He’s the guardian of children. The protector of babies and children gone too soon.” She cut off but her face remained placid. Nia couldn’t read her pain, but she could feel it in her own body. From Okasan, this was a grand gesture. A show of emotion like she’d never seen before. Though Okasan’s face stayed serene, the haunting in her eyes gave her away. Nia suspected Okasan had knelt at this statue and placed the red bib on him. She knew about Edward’s brother, gone too soon, but there was a quiet avoidance in his family, a solemnity that made this gesture unexpected.
“Thank you.” She pulled the statue to her and held him tight.