Free Empty Arms: A Novel by Erika Liodice Page A

my hairline.
    In a fit of insanity, I reached for a pair of scissors. Three even snips was all it took to create bangs, but my hair refused to deviate from the natural part down the center of my head. Rather than forming stylish bangs across my forehead, my hair parted and fell off to either side, hanging there like open curtains, showcasing the nasty family of zits. Horror turned to tears, which turned to hiccups, as I ran my fingers through the tragic mess. With three impatient snips I’d ruined my hair and could never show my face at school again.
    Thankfully, a trip to the hairdresser fixed my bangs, but my problems only got worse. Flipping on the bathroom light each morning was like walking into a surprise party, except it wasn’t my birthday and instead of friends popping up from behind tables and couches and shouting, “Surprise!” it was varicose veins running up my legs, “Surprise!”, dark Amazonian-colored nipples, “Surprise!”, and purple claw marks across my stomach, “Surprise!”
     
November 1, 1972
     
     
Dear James,
     
     
I don’t understand why you haven’t called or written. I’m terrified and there’s no one I can talk to. I understand that things between us are over but I could really use a friend. Is friendship too much to ask for after everything we’ve been through? I’m carrying your baby, for crying out loud. Can’t you give me the decency of a response?
     
     
Cate
     
    Desperate for answers, I stole the pregnancy book from the public library and lay in bed at night, after my parents had gone to sleep, reading about the life growing inside me. It said that at seventeen weeks the baby weighed about 5 ounces, which reminded me of a lab we did in science class with a balance scale and a set of metal weights. Things that weigh five ounces: a checkbook, a small bottle of glue, a deck of cards.
Right now, your baby is big enough to fit snuggly in the palm of your hand
. I stared at the small space from the tips of my fingers to the base of my palm, imagining a tiny baby nestled there, and the first feeling of love tugged at my heart.
    A couple of nights later, while I was trying to get comfortable in bed, something fluttered inside me, as if a little butterfly had gotten loose in my stomach. I sat up with a gasp, startled by the sensation. It lasted only a split second, but it was undeniably there, like an introduction from the great beyond.
    I slid my hands under the elastic waistband of my pajama bottoms and rested them on my bare stomach, hoping to feel it again. “Hello,” I whispered and waited. But it didn’t happen again. Not that day. Or the next. Or even the one after that. The little butterfly didn’t flap its wings again until Honors Chemistry the following Monday afternoon.
    “Are you all right?” Angela asked when I gasped and jerked forward in my chair.
    “Must be the smell of the Bunsen burners,” I lied.
    It became a little game that we played. The little butterfly would wait until the most inopportune moment to flap its wings—like in the middle of my history presentation on early colonial failures or at the dinner table in the middle of Mother’s hell in a handbasket speech—and I would have to cover my jumpiness with a wild array of excuses: hiccups, I thought I saw a spider, I just remembered a scary story. I even faked a ghost sighting one night when I was driving Mom home from work and the little flutter caused me to swerve over the double yellow line. Our little game reminded me that I wasn’t alone. More than that, I felt like I had a built-in best friend, one who surprised me and made me laugh. And I liked to imagine that somewhere, deep within my stomach, the little butterfly was laughing too.
    With every week that passed, the odds of hearing from James diminished while my baby, along with my appetite, grew. Slowly, the defined angle of my jaw rounded out and my butt got bigger. The elastic on my underwear stretched and frayed, gouging my skin and