Karlee Kapler

No Streak of Mercy

I tip-toed into the bathroom and made sure not to turn on the light in the hall. I didn’t want my parents to become suspicious. I had visited the bathroom several times that evening, and although I was certain that my parents were asleep or almost at that point, I would prefer that they didn’t ask what it was that I was checking. This had been my routine for several days now. I would go into the washroom and carefully unravel a portion of toilet paper and wad it up in my hands.

And I would wipe.

And wipe.

And wipe.

And pray. Pray for a streak of red. Beg for a streak of red.

Just that little bit of red would help put my fears to rest.

Yet, it didn’t come.

After I had told my mother I was pregnant she had sat up most of the night waiting for my father to come home so she could break the news to him. My mother was less than thrilled I assure you, as this was 1952 and no respectable family of our status could harbor such a scandal as having a teenage daughter pregnant out of wedlock. The early morning light striking through the kitchen lit my mother’s drawn face in blue while shadows cast from the kitchen table broke out around her feet. She had been up on and off most of the night waiting for my father to come home. The night had cut deep and slow, and it was painful to watch her ramble around the house in the darkness. At intervals, she would have slight bouts of rest, sleeping for no longer than half an hour at a time.

My father was, of course, in a drunken stupor somewhere in town.

Years later when we were speaking again, she had admitted the reason she had dealt with his alcohol addiction for so long. It was the only time he was ever intimate with her. I always remember thinking how broken she must have always been to polish the floorboards with her pacing night after night to be loved momentarily by a man who was unstable and cold in his day-to-day interactions. The way the house sighed and relaxed into itself after all of its inhabitants had gone to bed was my mother’s stage. It was in the living room or in the kitchen where she performed her greatest portrayal of a lonely housewife suffering in silence. The darkened walls and quiet furniture watching her tenderly as she went from scene to scene, falling from act one to two, and the final curtain falling when the light began to change. She was no stranger to the light in the kitchen at dawn.

I never did feel bad for her though, the cruel woman that she was. She was a product of her time and old money, and she never expressed an ounce of compassion to anyone who didn’t measure up to her standards socially and economically. In all reality, I hated her so and had felt this way since a small child. While not common amongst our family acquaintances, I had noticed how some mothers would exude such colourful and liberal love towards their children, and it had always made my chest and skin tingle with sharp pinpricks of sadness. I vowed to never treat any children I had in the way my mother treated me. The pulse of such a promise throbbed in the back of my mind like a worrisome headache as the words “I’m pregnant” pushed into the air from my mouth the evening before.

My mother carefully and quickly inquired in the right places and late one night just as each star was carefully blooming into the dark sky, I was shuffled into a car, crowded only by luggage. My mother didn’t say a word to me as she closed the car door behind me, and she refused to look at the vehicle as it pulled out of our vast circular driveway. I stared at the back of her head, hoping she would turn around; my eyes pleaded that she would take a moment to think about what she was doing. I traveled alone. I could never recall exactly where it was that I was going, we seemed to drive so expressively that everything that passed the window was reduced to impressionistic pastel streaks on a dark canvas.

The room in which we slept was above the laundry room and gave off an unbearable amount of heat throughout the day and into the night. The hospital had staff that worked in the laundry room around the clock, and we barely got a break from the hot air that churned into our space. The way our beds were arranged looked much like graves in a cemetery, arranged in rows that hinted that there may not be any living souls here anymore. It looked like this most at nighttime when most shapes were lost in shadows. We were all at various points of swelling, some farther along than others, and many fighting sleep due to a combination of severe acid reflex and the heat penetrating from downstairs. The staff worked hard to keep us out of sight and as uncomfortable as possible. We had, after all, committed the worst sin possible. The absolute worst, and we were meant to suffer as much as possible for it.

Most of the girls that shared the sleeping quarters—and we really were just girls at the time—were there with a sad story in hand. Many had been promised love and everything else that comes with entertaining what would be considered marital affairs and then left to fend for themselves when they had expressed the new circumstances to the young man in question. Rape wasn’t uncommon, and the girls that had experienced such horrors would never admit that they were in fact the victim in this situation and wore their pregnancy as if it was their punishment. Many of these young girls had suffered at the sweaty pudgy hands of uncles and, uncomfortably so, even their own fathers. They never explained in great detail; you just knew from the tears that hovered on the edge of their lower eyelids and the way they pressed their lips together and turned away from you when you asked, “So, why are you here?”

The ones who had gotten into this situation because of an over-eager boyfriend that didn’t keep their word were always more willing to talk about their situation as almost every single one believed that the boy would show up eventually to save the day with an exuberant proclamation of love. We hoped they would realize their mistake and come to rescue us and make us their brides. It was a policy that if you were able to come up with a boy to come forward and claim the child as his and marry you before the baby was born, then you could go home and you could keep your baby. We all believed that we wouldn’t actually have to give our baby up; it didn’t seem like something that would actually happen. It was difficult to imagine someone ripping a newborn baby out of its mother’s arms and forcing her to sign papers with zero explanation of what the paper was for. Each one of us believed that we would be spared this indignity or that the boy would show up in time or maybe we would break free minutes after giving birth and wrestle our baby from the staff and run through the corridor and shimmy out the window, tiny bundle clutched close.

I think we each believed this even during the moments of expelling the tiny babies from our bodies, the air marked with the smell of iron and pain lacing itself through our lower backs and into our groins as a damp dark head was followed by tiny pink shoulders.

There was still time, there was still the entirety of the infant and the placenta that was still ours. It was still ours up until the moment the baby was completely out, and I always wondered if the others had tried to slow the process as much as possible, resisting pushing and holding the baby in a little longer. Maybe it was only me that had done that, but I also didn’t dare ask. It wasn’t as if we had much time after to really delve into what we had gone through after the baby was born.

With soft and deflated middles, we would arrive back in our communal sleeping quarters wearing our now loose maternity dresses and bloodied underwear. Raw and ripped and stitched, we would bleed without effort as we suppressed the tears that needed to roll.We were always sent home within weeks of bringing a tiny life into the world, a tiny life that we only were able to hold for a moment after carrying it for months.

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