Photo Credit: TL Sherwood

Now we call it “the back room.” It occupies the basement corner next to the boilers, a small, unfinished room, blanketed by the stench of my father’s hockey gear. As I remember, it had two desks, ten chairs, the top of a dining room table, an old TV cabinet stuffed with unfilled notebooks, and whatever else was too big for the family to fit in the upstairs junk drawer. The air tasted like the word spare. A stranger might have described the room as “odd,” or “cold,” or even, “defensive.” It was dangerous to sit on the floor. The mangy beige carpet was half-installed and didn’t cover all of the concrete and the extra carpet left a huge roll along the back wall, a bulge like scar tissue, that pushed up under the chair legs as my best friend and I sat those summers ago and tried to write. This was the room I spent most of my time in from ages eight to twelve and, last winter, was the room my parents asked me to spend a few hours in, organizing the Goodwill piles.

For the years that the back room was mine alone, it was a different place. The walls were bare. There were no tables set up but the top of one, oak and polished, laid in the back corner on a bed of creased plastic. The overhead lights—two exposed lightbulbs nestled among the piping—were unreliable. At least once, unable to make them work, I sat there in the soft grey light, which no one was around to tell me would ruin my eyes.

I came down to the back room for more land, especially land of my own. I was an architect. Out of chairs, stools, and stackable white baskets, I built elaborate cities for my Webkinz and Beanie Babies. Feudal villages with disproportionate castles and steampunk garbage-ridden Victorian labyrinths and futuristic totalitarian military academies all littered the carpet. The back room was not large, so buildings were multiple locations at once. On the table top, I built different castles, mansions, Academies of High Magic, hospitals, fortresses, apartment complexes, army barracks, and once, a shopping mall. Sometimes, these changes occurred within the same story. Sometimes, within the same afternoon.

I found, when clearing out an old notebook for salvage, the remnants of construction-paper advertisements I had drawn for the shopping mall. I don’t know what I had intended to do with them. It wasn’t as if the table had actual walls I could hang them on. But I can see in my mind how it happened: I was arranging the mall. Halfway through, I thought of the ads and picked across the room to the art box, so I could make them before I forgot. Halfway through, I thought of the wedding invitations I had stolen with the intention of cutting tiny wings out, and scrambled to find the scissors… Safe to say, there was never a building in the back room I ever completed. This did not bother me. I saw the world halfway between an architectural blueprint and a finished city. And moreover, I had an odd memory, like grey kneadable eraser, that just didn’t stick— In the back room, what I did not remember I could always rebuild, maybe on a different chair with a different stuffed animal, but similar enough to go on.

Then my chairs were swapped for the kitchen chairs, which had grown creaky-jointed. The Webkinz and Beanie Babies were sold at a garage sale when I was eleven. Everything had grown too old. I had grown too old. The back room had changed.

In fact, when I trusted my best friend enough to let them come downstairs, it was no longer the back room. We called it “the haven” or sometimes just, “Haven.” Posters hung on the wall: movies we hadn’t seen, middle school art projects with discarded aliases, and post-it notes with terrible quotes. We added two tables, a lamp, and a blue mini-trampoline, on account that our neighbor’s actual blue trampoline—our previous den of plotting—had broken. We had also been banned.

It was on the mini-trampoline that I sat for three hour shifts while Hazel got the desk. We alternated chapters. When we were done, we would push the laptop at each other and say, triumphantly, “Your turn!” I would inevitably get up mid-chapter and wander around and close the door and bounce on the trampoline while Hazel—steadier Hazel, medicated Hazel—watched and rolled their eyes.

I remember the door being a big deal for me. I remember insisting it always be shut, because the walls of the house were thin, and the hallways were short. Everything said in my bedroom was heard in the master bedroom, even with the door closed and the TV on. On sleepovers, I insisted we hang out in Haven until we went to bed. There we could yell “FUCK!” with a hope of plausible deniability. We could talk about our novels or questions of sexuality, gender, depression, and attention-deficit disorder, which Hazel, who was diagnosed, just called ADHD. Having ADHD meant Hazel needed to take notes when we discussed our novels, because they wouldn’t remember the next day. It meant I walked with them to the kitchen in case they forgot they went for a glass of water. The notes that Hazel sometimes took kept their memory steady. It was a place to come back to where everything was left the right way, understandable even to tomorrow’s new eyes.

Even now, I cannot define the fear that made me seek thicker walls and longer distances. It reminds me of our post-Narnia stories, when Hazel and I were convinced a different world could exist within an object, and we named the giant pear tree in their front yard “Cascadia,” for the world hidden behind a knot in its bark. I can see why the idea appealed to us so much. To disappear somewhere no-one else could know. To build a home within a home and only let in those you can really trust, whose word you can believe.

There is little left of that back room now. The trampoline has moved. The old toys have been divvied up, the tables swapped out, the posters rolled up for the dumpster. The light does not flicker when I pull the string too hard. The concrete is cool and grimy on my bare feet.

I spend several hours separating the blocks of my cities into various trash bags. The work is pleasant drudgery. Sitting there, on the carpet where I built my childhood, I cannot differentiate between the stories I tell about the place and my memories of it. Which are real? Did my kneadable memory stick to facts or just emotions? It is all so vague. I wish I could walk back in time and know for certain what happened or, at least, have another pair of eyes more trustworthy than mine to tell me how time passed in this one room, which I am still not capable of capturing.

Perhaps it never existed. Perhaps the back room I remember is entirely reconstructed, details arranged and mangled, out of time and context and emotion, because my mind decided it was easier to remember that way. Perhaps it was not two weeks before the big trampoline broke when Hazel and I sat on it—that is all I know. It was not yet broken. My face was scrunched up in thought.

Then I said, “Yeah, I’d die for you.”

“Cool,” Hazel said. “Me too.”

Hazel looked, as always, too serious for their age. It had not yet occurred to me that we were ten and we should not have felt the need to make that promise. That perhaps other kids didn’t ask their friends that and didn’t forget about weeks as soon as they had passed and didn’t worry about a nameless, imminent danger that seemed always outside the door, the danger that we would look away and no longer remember what we had built.

Later, I tell Hazel about this. I ask if they remember that time we sat on the trampoline and promised we would die for each other.

“No,” they say. “But I believe it.”

Moe Kirkpatrick is a queer writer from Cincinnati, Ohio. Currently, he is pursuing a BFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. His work has received multiple Scholastic Writing Gold and Silver Key Awards and can be found in Artemis.

Photo Credit: Cady Guyton

There is an application that’s been on my desk for a few weeks now. How to Obtain Certified Copies of Stillbirth and Fetal Death Records. I’m intimately familiar with it at this point, yet, I am taken aback each time I read those words. It tells me to send in $24, and an archive database will be searched all the way back from 1905 to the present. I write out a check and tuck it inside an envelope with the form. The stiff, white paper feels cool and reassuring between my fingertips. I rip the security strip from the back, press the sticky flap shut, then add two small pieces of scotch tape for added protection. In my left-handed scrawl, I spell out “California Department of Public Health Vital Records” with the street address underneath as neatly as I am able.

Walking to the mailbox, my throat tightens. I grasp the envelope as if it could speak the answers I seek, and I almost don’t want to let it go. It’s been thirty years. Back then all I wanted to do was forget, now I burn with the need to know specific details that I’d long ago buried. I wanted that certificate, I wanted something tangible. On one hand, I felt concerned there would be no record, on the other, I was certain that would not be the case. I had been in the hospital, I had given birth, I had named my daughter, surely there had to be documented evidence of that.

I stand at the bank of mailboxes for a minute, breathing in the hot, heavy air. Summers in Las Vegas can be suffocating. I place the envelope in the slot and turn toward home.

~

It is 1988, and I remember clearly various parts of that day, although I cannot for the life of me recall the actual date. By the time I hoisted myself out of bed, Doug, my husband at the time, had already left for work. I stared out the bedroom window taking in the view. Our rented apartment outside of San Diego overlooked the Escondido freeway; it was perched high enough atop the hillside that any traffic below was out of earshot. Coastal sage scrub, tipped brown at the edges from the sun, hugged the landscape, which was punctuated by big gray boulders situated just so between the multitude of sprawling ranch style houses. Southern California’s version of a modern-day Fred Flintstone’s Bedrock. I looked down, rubbed my stomach, “We’ll be living in one of those houses someday. Or better yet, at the beach.”

In the kitchen I made toast, eating it quickly and washing it down with Diet Coke. After showering, I wrestled with my impossible hair. Roseanne Roseannadanna, the similarly coiffed character played by Gilda Radner on Saturday Night Live had nothing on me. The humidity made my hair look twice as big, all ringlets and frizz. No amount of Aqua Net could contain it. I pulled on the maternity jeans I’d bought long before I’d actually needed them, walked to the full-length mirror turning sideways to admire the burgeoning bump, slipped on ballet flats and a light sweater, grabbed my car keys and drove ten minutes to the doctor’s office. There was no reason to think this would be anything other than a routine ultrasound.

“All right, let’s take a look,” the technician said once I’d been ushered back to an exam room. “I should be able to see if this little one is a boy or girl. Would you like to know?” I jumped slightly as she squirted thick, cold conducting gel on my exposed belly, lowered the paddle and began moving it around trying to locate the necessary measurements and appendages. Before I could answer, she removed the paddle, stood up and said, “I’ll be right back.” I lay there, bewildered. Goopy liniment adhered the paper drape to my stomach.

Thirty seconds later Dr. Maresh opened the door, his nurse following behind him. Babies need amniotic fluid to develop he explained. Pinprick leak, extremely uncommon he said. Maybe fluid could replenish he said. Go home and don’t move, UCLA specialist consult, he said.

“Can you tell me the last time you felt any activity?” he asked.

Oddly, I couldn’t. Was it not that very morning as we gazed out the window? All I could think was, no way am I losing this baby.

~

My own mother had a precarious relationship with pregnancy, having several miscarriages both before and after delivering me, my older sister Chelle, and our younger sister Margi.

“Ech, that doctor, what did he know?” She’d tell me. “Had I listened to him Rochelle would be an only child. What’s meant to be is meant to be. Sure, I had you three months early but I looked you over and you had all your fingers, all your toes, you even had eyelashes. That’s when I knew you’d be okay. Well, except for your eyesight, but that was from being in an incubator so long.”

~

That very night, shortly after Doug got home from work, I went into labor. Perched in a sterile birthing bed, I’d felt uncharacteristically small wrapped in a maternity gown large enough to cover the extended abdomens of full-term mothers-to-be, the pregnant equivalent of one-size-fits-most. Splashed with pastel-colored baby animals, perhaps the garment was meant to evoke a gentleness, a last sense of calm before the mayhem of parenthood set in. A fetal monitor stood next to the bed, although I am not sure if it was hooked up to check my progress, or silent of the typical blips and beeps that happened with routine deliveries.

Labor was not the physically painful experience I saw in the movies. Mine didn’t hurt. Instead, deep down my abdomen churned with little pricking sensations, coming closer and closer together until one was almost stepping on the other. I knew from reading What to Expect When You’re Expecting, this meant it was almost time. I dug the heels of my feet deep into the stirrups attached to the bed, thinking this might stop my knees from knocking together with the shivers. “I don’t think I want to do this right now,” I said, as if I were about to cancel an appointment for a pedicure instead of bring a human being into the world.

The nurse, who had her hand between my legs checking my cervix, interrupted my trepidation. “I think we’re ready. What I want you to do is push on my command. Can you do that?”

I nodded my agreement. I do not recall what my husband was doing. Was he holding my hand? Was he worried? Nor do I remember if there was a doctor in the room.

“Okay sweetheart,” I heard. “Here we go. One, two three, PUSH!”

My body expelled my daughter as if she were a splinter. There was no robust cry. Afterward, only the insistent, albeit well-meaning nurse trying to shove a dead baby into my arms, smiling forcefully while attempting to push her agenda. “Go on sweetheart, hold her, look at her. It’s the only chance you’ll have and if you don’t you’ll regret it.”

What the hell did she know of my regret? Was she the one who had just given birth to a lifeless newborn? Had she been forced to name it, the mandate of some California state law that had me cursing the lawmakers, all of whom (I imagined in a rare fit of condemnation) were men?

I caught a glimpse of Madeline’s red, shriveled form but I refused to look at her. Someone offered a Polaroid. She’d been wrapped in a pale yellow and white crocheted blanket from the Women’s League, which was meant to be a celebratory keepsake. They took her away, and left the photo on a table near the birthing bed, as well as the blanket, which now hung limply across my barren stomach. I regarded both with the same welcome I’d reserve for a rabid dog. I picked up the blanket between my thumb and pointer fingers as if it contained a deadly virus, then flung it into the trashcan next to the bed. Turning my head, I whispered to my equally dazed husband, “Let’s get out of here.”

“Sue, you have to sign your release paperwork first.”

There are no words to describe what it is like going into the hospital pregnant, and leaving empty-handed. “I want to go home.” And with that I stood up, wobbled slightly, grabbed my maternity pants and pulled them on as tears streamed down my face.

~

“Hey, Doug. Thank you so much for calling me back. So, this might sound weird after all these years, but I need to find out what happened the night we lost the baby. Like, am I remembering it right? I sent away for a stillborn certificate but they couldn’t find anything for her, and I was wondering if—”

“That’s bullshit!” he said. “She was born in a hospital. How could there be no record of that?”

“Well, there could have been a misspelling on the hospital paperwork we didn’t catch at the time, or the laws of reporting might have been different then. It was a long time ago. It doesn’t make sense to me, either. But they can’t find her.”

I explained the extent of my detective work. How I’d sent three separate applications to the State of California, as well as San Diego County and they all came back with nothing. Then I called the doctor’s office, but Dr. Maresh had retired. I tried the new Palomar Hospital, where he typically sent his patients, because the old one wasn’t there anymore, and I even called several funeral homes in the area.

“Everyone was really nice for the most part but no one keeps records from that long ago. They looked me up anyway, though, just to see if they could find anything, but no such luck. I was hoping you’d be able to fill in some of the blanks. Do you remember any of the details, do you remember anything at all?”

“We were young, Sue, and we were traumatized, you know? I mean, that hurt us. They wanted us to love on this dead baby. They had her all swaddled up, I remember that. I remember we cried together. I didn’t want to hold her. That was tough, man.”

“Do you remember me telling you about what the doctor said when you came home from work that day? Do you remember what car we took to the hospital?”

“I had that black Scirocco. We didn’t get the Jetta until later. Then that damn car got stolen before we even made the first payment!”

“Yep, found it down in Mexico,” I said. “I can’t remember how we spelled her name. Or the date, or how far along I was.”

“We spelled it like Madeline Kahn, the actress. M-a-d-e-l-i-n-e.”

“Oh, right, how could I forget that? I was thinking like Madolyn Smith from Urban Cowboy.”

“And you were twenty-two weeks. But I don’t know the date. It was a long time ago. We were young. We were traumatized. We cried about it together. We did,” he said.

It was hard for me to envision us being close enough to grieve together. I had loved him once, but the divorce and subsequent years afterward had been contentious, and while time had softened that, nowadays we hardly had any interaction. The fact that Doug was willing to contact me back and able to validate my recollections gave me solace, and I felt a stab of grateful softness for a past that, until this very point, had been tainted with hurt feelings. He was the only person on the planet with whom I shared the experience, and there was solidarity in the fact he had almost the same blanks and the same certainties from that night as I did. That was more than enough closure for me.

~

When I am asked how many children I have I always say two. But that is not true. Max was born in 1989, Jake followed in 1990. The boys were ten and eleven when they found out they’d had a sister. We were coming home from seeing the movie, My Dog Skip, when Jake said out of nowhere, “When we were with Dad last weekend he said we had a sister and her name was Madeline. Mom, is that true?” It had never occurred to me to tell them.

Madeline was born sometime in the spring of 1988. I don’t know if she ever showed signs of life outside the womb, although I doubt it. I don’t know for certain what hospital I was in when I had her. I don’t know how there could not be a record documenting her existence, however fleeting it was.

What I do know is she was loved. I held her in my body for over five months and her loss was so enormous it took me thirty years before I could face it.

I am the proud mother of three children. I’ll carry all three in my heart until I take my last breath.

Suellen Meyers is agoraphobic, and not afraid to talk about it. Currently, she is obtaining an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Bay Path University. She writes true stories about family involving themes of loss, addiction, anxiety, agoraphobia, and resilience. Her work has also appeared in The Manifest-Station. She lives in hellishly warm Las Vegas, Nevada, with her husband Gary, Zoey the Elf Dog, and new addition to the family, Abby the Wiggle Butt. Contact her at https://www.suellenmeyers.com/