Free The Lit Report by Sarah N. Harvey Page B

clasped her hands in mine and shrieked, “Sweet Jesus, bless our sister Ruth as she is filled with your Holy Spirit, and forgive our sister Rachel for implying that Jesus was horny.”I’m not above using the Almighty to create a diversion. Rachel started to cry as our classmates snickered, and Mrs. Gregory told her to pray for God’s forgiveness. If God was anything like most fathers, he’d probably be proud that someone thought his boy was a stud. Ruth pressed my palm to her belly. It felt like Sassette was kickboxing; I could feel the pummeling of tiny heels and knobby elbows, and I’m pretty sure there was some head-butting going on in there.
    â€œI know, sweetie,” Ruth whispered. “I’d like to put some hurtin’ on Rachel too, but we can’t go around hitting every idiot we meet.” It took me a minute to realize that she wasn’t talking to me and that we were in far more trouble than I could ever have imagined. If Ruth got attached to her baby, there was no telling what might happen.
    ON VALENTINE’S DAY , I gave Ruth a cupcake covered in pink icing when she came over to my house for her weekly checkup. Before she bit into it she dragged her index finger through the icing and drew a heart with it on her belly. “Happy Valentine’s Day, Sassette,” she said before she scraped up the icing and licked it off her fingers.
    I did all the usual things that day: weighed her; took her blood pressure; checked her ankles for swelling; asked her if she was constipated, in pain, depressed, anxious, stuffed up,light-headed, dizzy or bleeding from any orifice. When I had recorded all my figures and all her responses (minus the foul language) in my journal, I got out the fetoscope and said, “Let’s see if My Little Pony’s awake.” I hadn’t yet been able to hear the baby’s heartbeat, but I figured it had to happen soon, and it would be an even better Valentine’s Day present than a cupcake.
    I bent over and placed the fetoscope on her belly, and suddenly there it was—the thunder of tiny hoofs. I must have gasped, because Ruth yanked the fetoscope out of my ears, jammed the earpieces into place, hunched over, held her breath and listened.
    â€œOmigod, omigod, omigod,” she whispered. Her face turned the color of a McIntosh apple, and she made a strange choking noise. I put my hand on her shoulder and she shrugged it off, her face rosy and rapt. After about five minutes, she handed the fetoscope back to me, straightened up, hugged me and mumbled, “Thank you.”
    â€œFor what?”
    â€œFor looking after us.”
    â€œNo problem,” I said. And I meant it.
    After that, Ruth was a much better patient. She listened to the baby every week with the same goofy expression on her face, and she grumbled a lot about the fact that I was losing weight while she was gaining, but she was surprisingly good-humored about all the changes to her body and mine.She even joked that the best thing about being pregnant was getting out of PE with a forged note from Dr. Mishkin.
    IN THE MONTHS that followed, every time I examined her I’d go over the plan again: “I told my mother I wanted to go on a spiritual retreat in late July, and she said I could go as long as I take you with me. She’s arranged for us to use a cabin belonging to one of the women in her aerobics class. After the baby is born”—I always glossed over the actual birth—”we’ll leave it in your dad’s church right before a service. Someone will call Social Services and the baby will go to a good home. No one will ever know who the mother was. And then we’ll finish school and take off, just the way we always said we would.” Even as I talked about New York and LA and London, about our apartment and our jobs, I kept reminding myself that women give birth in weirder and more dangerous circumstances than these. In airplane