Suspicious River by Laura Kasischke

immaculate miracle, within only a few days after that first time with Rick, I knew I was pregnant. My father would be smoking in the kitchen, and the smell of cigarettes made my heart race, made me taste tar and tires on the roof of my mouth, weak enough to faint. I couldn’t drink coffee, and my breasts felt suddenly bruised and heavy as old fruit. At night I slept like someone underwater. This was only five, maybe six, days later.
    I didn’t tell Rick because I knew what he’d say. His own family was so cozy, I was afraid he’d tell his mother and she’d start knitting booties or miniature pink sweaters. His father might light up a fat cigar and invite all the cousins over for a party.
    My own father drove across town to the bank every third Thursday to deposit his disability check, dragging his dead leg behind him like a lame, stubborn, but loyal bloodhound. Naturally, it was spring. I’d had him call the school that morning and tell the secretary I had a bad case of the flu. Then, when he’d left for the bank, I went out to what there was of a garden in our back yard—a weak rosebush my mother had planted, which bloomed every June despite itself, red and sudden as a car wreck. It was the only thing my mother had ever planted, and I dug a shallow hole behind it with a teaspoon.
    In that hole, I buried a small photo of my mother as a teenage girl. For years I’d kept it pressed like a petal in an old black hymnal with yellow pages, also hers. In the photo, my mother had a strand of pearls dangling in the suggestive V of a black dress, a little cleavage like a stab wound shadowed between her breasts.
    That morning, the soil around the rosebush was muddy, sun warming it up. Old grass mixed in, smelling sweetly wet. And there was the smell of something else, something dead, pushing up out of the dirt—a smell that would last all spring, every spring. The rosebush itself didn’t look like anything more than the arm of a skeleton that day, its bony hand reaching up from the underworld, up for the sun.
    Here and there, a few bald snowdrops glistened against the thawed black. Here and there, the shoot of a crocus reached up, too, struggling from the ground and wheezing as it did, struggling out of bulbs that had been planted by people who’d lived in our house years before we did.
    And even a few fat robins already—wandering around, stunned.
    When I pressed it into the muck with the tips of my fingers, my mother’s photograph curled up wet around the edges in its grave. I used the back of the teaspoon to push the earth back over her, then patted all around it with my palms, letting the darkness seep between my fingers:
    It was a superstitious rite, I knew—though I felt natural, even ancient, enacting it—not silly or stiff at all, small-town, hokey, nakedly hopeful, the way I felt when I prayed. I just felt glad and relieved that she was there, buried, while I was here, a week pregnant and alive, the age she’d been when she’d given birth to me. Spring was getting ready to explode all around us like a homemade bomb.
    This was the last false image of her I had, the only one I hadn’t buried beside the rosebush already.
     
    Later, that afternoon, I called a clinic in Grand Rapids, and they told me I’d have to wait eight weeks for the fetus to grow large enough to scrape. By then, I thought, even the tulips would be blooming, smooth and black, or wagging their red tongues along the sides of houses on our block. By then, April would have come and gone. There would be sparrows darting across the church lawn under the shadow of a cross. Wet wings on Good Friday and a hazy yellow sky. Then another blizzard, though warmer and thick with slush, on Easter Sunday—burying the new color under a rattling cough.
     
    Not surprisingly, nothing ever grew in the spot where I buried the photos of my mother.
    What might I have expected?
    Some kind of flower, or a dangerous weed? A poppy glaring up at the sun, or something