At my fourth appointment, my ob-gyn took some of my blood, and the fetal platelets told us my baby was genetically sound and definitely a boy. I was officially in my second trimester.
Now, Late Bloomers said, shit got real. Maybe not in those exact words, but the book and common sense agreed that it was time to make the guest room over into a nursery, buy some onesies and a Diaper Genie, and hey, maybe mention I was pregnant to my family and friends. I didn’t. I was carrying a viable, whole, human boy, but he still seemed so intangible. He was like a drawing after I had the idea but before my pencil moved along the paper.
I didn’t even tell my grandmother, my only living relative on my father’s side. She was seven hundred miles away, down in Birchville, Alabama, busy making sure her pansy bed was immaculate and disapproving of young people and her own racist neighbor. She would have been the perfect test case, both because she’d never rat me out to Mom and Keith and Rachel and because she loved me so damn much.
I reminded her of my dad, who had been short and dark-haired and built on the thick side, just like me. And just like me he had been a haunter of used-book stores, an eater of Easy Cheese, a roller of many-sided dice. In my favorite picture, the one I kept in my purse, he was wearing Spock ears. The dork was strong in him. He had picked baby names when I was just a bump inside my mother, but he never got to see if I was a Leia or a Solo. He was killed by a drunk driver three weeks before I was born, Birchie’s crowning sorrow in a hard life full of lesser ones.
She deserved to know she’d soon have a great-grandbaby, but even though I called her at least twice a week, I didn’t bring it up. Childbirth—the kind with a child at the end of it—seemed improbable and distant. Telling Birchie especially felt like promising something I could not deliver. I didn’t believe in it—in Digby—until that first Friday in June, 3:02 a.m., when I was riding out insomnia and failing to come up with even one idea for the prequel to Violence in Violet.
Maybe because I’d written V in V so long ago? I’d begun sketching Violence two decades earlier, when I was a senior in high school—practically a fetus myself. Those drawings got me into Savannah College of Art and Design, and the completed graphic novel had been my senior project for my B.F.A. in sequential art.
I’d taken the finished graphic novel to a small con in Memphis, where I showed it to a guy who hired artists for DC. He liked my shading, and he offered me a contract. I’d put V in V in a box and gone to work, parlaying that first job into a freelance career. I was good, and I got better, and I never missed a deadline. Over the years I’d worked for every major publisher in the business, penciling and inking characters from Ant-Man all the way to General Zod.
About six years ago, while updating my website, I’d scanned and uploaded the opening pages of V in V. It was mostly a whim—an easy way to pad my content. The first month it got a couple hundred downloads. The next a couple thousand. By the summer’s end, I had more than twenty thousand shares and linkbacks, and the traffic was crashing my server. My social media blew up with requests for the whole story.
I self-published it, making a print-on-demand paper edition and an e-book, and I sold more than a hundred thousand copies in the first year alone. V in V was still selling, and now, instead of sitting on panels, I was paid to be a featured speaker at comic-book and fantasy/sci-fi conventions all over the country. When I penciled for other series, my name on the cover boosted sales, and Dark Horse had made a truly motivating offer for this prequel. The only problem was, I had zero ideas.
I thumped my pillow, restless, trying to focus inward on my sharp-toothed antiheroine. How had Violence learned to fly, to bite, to wield her clever, crooked knives? When I started the graphic novel, twenty years ago, I’d concentrated on Violet, the heartbroken girl that Violence comes to protect. Violet was based on me in a lot of ways, so I knew her character down to the bone. Violence had been only a means to an end. To a lot of very bloody ends, actually, and I’d never thought past that. It was an absence in the book, and now I had to fill it. I sank deep into the dark inside my body, waiting to see a story begin, waiting for colors and shapes to come and show me. I was almost dozing, but not quite, and I turned onto my side.
When I came to rest, a smallness deep within me kept on turning. I felt it. It was a silent trill of something like a sound. It was the smallest key, spinning in a lock I’d never known was present at my center.
The movement was in me, but it wasn’t me. It was another little something, a someone, willfully choosing to flex his flippery future arms, or whatever it was he had by then. It was a choice, but I hadn’t made it. It was inside me, and mine, but I did not control it.
Right exactly then, my son started. He became real in ways he hadn’t been five seconds before. Much realer than he had been almost four months back, when I was cleaning up my hotel room in Atlanta, finding only one used condom but remembering two sexes. A second condom had been on the bedside table, speaking to good intentions but still mint-in-package. Now I could feel him making small decisions inside me, and I already knew his name. It was a nerd reference so obscure that nobody but me would ever get it.
“Hello, Digby? Is that you?” I asked him, listening in that same odd, inward way for a sound that was not a sound.
It came again, as if in response. Alien and tiny, unfeelable under any other circumstances.
“Oh, my stars and garters, you’re really there,” I told him, though Late Bloomers said he was a few weeks away from hearing yet.
Quickening, my book had called it, and it was the perfect word, because when he quickened, my whole life sped up, too. I was pregnant, and this baby didn’t even have a crib. Right now he had only me. I had to tell people. My Tuesday gamers ran a meal train every time someone had a baby or got sick. I’d made umpty casseroles and quarts of soup over the years; now I would need a turn.
Most important, I had to tell my family. Fast. My parents needed time to get over their initial shock before the baby came, so Mom could teach me to breast-feed and Keith could show me how to properly install the car seat that I didn’t own yet.
Every Sunday afternoon Rachel hosted a family luncheon after church. I’d sat through more than a dozen since I’d gotten pregnant, eating shrimp scampi or beef medallions for two and keeping my mouth shut. This Sunday, I resolved, I would simply say it.
Something sure smells good, and hey, I’m spawning. Boom and done.
I’d pre-forgive Mom and Keith for any less-than-ideal initial reactions. They were going to be so embarrassed. I’d bright-side it for them, reassure them that I was healthy and happy and remind them that they were finally getting a second grandkid. In the end they weren’t going to love Digby any less for being fatherless or browner than they were. But the end seemed a long way off.
Rachel would back me up, but the minute we were alone, I’d get an earful from her, too. She’d be pissed at me for setting a bad example for her thirteen-year-old daughter. So would her husband, probably, but screw him. Of every jackass currently stomping around on this blue planet, Jake Jacoby was the last one who was allowed to have an opinion about me.
I’d eat whatever crap they needed to shovel at me, and then they’d rally around me. Around us. They had to, especially with Rachel there to make them. Rachel could rally so fast and so hard, and I had to be ready for that, too. Before Sunday I needed to go online and order everything I wanted for a bright blue Superman-themed nursery, before Rachel could swoop in with trendy neutrals and distressed wood and those horrifying Swedish animals from GOOP.