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I forgot to gather the chicken eggs first thing this morning. It's what I'm supposed to do after I do all my other firsts-change diapers, start coffee, put on underwear (clean preferred but not necessary), pour cereal, cut fruit, smell own armpits, and wipe down all three children. If I do all this efficiently, I earn five minutes outside in the morning air by myself in the chicken coop. Today, Sebastian's blowout means I'm not so lucky. You've never managed shit until you've had children shoot it up their own back, crack to head.
I try motioning to my husband, Dillon, asking him to watch Lucia while I go outside. He is at one end of the kitchen table; she is at the other in her high chair. It isn't a big favor, but he shakes his head no and gestures to the little squares of people on his laptop screen. Among the more surprising things about parenthood is how much of a throwback it is to when you were a preteen and had to ask your parents' permission to do just about anything. Or, even harsher but perhaps more apt, it's what I imagine it must be like to serve some light jail time. Permission must be obtained to exit your cell, shower, take a piss, call a friend. It turns out too, that being the breadwinner allows a bit of leniency-guess I shouldn't have stopped earning money.
I extricate Lucia from her high chair, throw a bath towel over my shoulder, and grab a basket for the eggs that I hope to collect, all with Lucia held tightly on my hip.
"Sit right here," I say to Lucia as I lay the towel on the ground next to the gate. This way Lucia can watch me pick up eggs but can't enter the coop, where she might grab a handful of chicken poop, and I can pretend I'm getting a moment to myself. Lucia sits primly on the ground with her head held high, her shoulders back, and her spine straight in a posture no three-month-old should have while I wiggle open the high gate my husband built for us from chicken wire and spare wood.
The coyotes made a bloody mess of things before we made the fence taller. Dillon had to dig it a foot deep to keep them from going under. Coyotes are scruffy out here, hungry from heat. Like rattlesnakes and scorpions, they are not to be messed with. We lost a lot of chickens that first year, and I will admit, each loss broke my heart a little. I'd raised them from chicks and given them my favorite dastardly names-female villains are an obsession of mine.
This morning I'm immediately greeted by the fabulous Alex Forrest-a chicken that boasts Glenn Close's high curly locks from Fatal Attraction. She's a spirited chicken. Certain of what she wants. We had a rooster for a while, named after Michael Douglas's character-I was secretly pleased when coyotes picked Dan Gallagher off.
"Morning, Alex," I say, genuinely glad for her plucky, persistent self. Mystique and Regina George strut over to join us. I sprinkle food, and the rest of the chickens plunder out of their coop so that I can lift the roof and reach in. The eggs are warm and almost soft to the touch. One speckled brown egg fills my palm, and there is something so beautiful about it. You aren't supposed to gather eggs or even go into the chicken coop when you're pregnant, but I did it anyway with Lucia. After carrying and giving birth to two boys, I was done being careful and had stood, twelve weeks pregnant and holding a chicken egg in my hand, thinking, My baby is this big today. It was a sweet moment, a sweet thought, until Lucia was born.
Gathering the eggs always reminds me that things can be simple. I'm feeling that good, whole feeling of being in the world that is rare for me when I hear a mad squawking.
I let the roof of the chicken coop slam shut and spin on my heels.
"Lucia!" I shriek. I drop my egg basket. She's got Alex's head pulled through the tight weave of the mesh. "Stop that! You're hurting her!"
Lucia does not stop. Lucia giggles and twists.
I head straight for the gate, opening and shutting it behind me, but I'm too late. Lucia has Alex Forrest's head in her hand. She sits at the edge of the fence coated in blood, laughing that full-bellied baby laugh that we loved so much when the boys were infants. Lucia's laugh, as with all things Lucia, is tinged with a glee that feels targeted. Is she laughing with us or at us?
She shouldn't have the dexterity to wrap both hands around a chicken neck, let alone to pull apart the mesh and create a large enough hole to coax the stupid creature through in the first place. She smiles at me from atop her towel, a chicken head still clutched in her pudgy little hands.
"Lucia," I say sternly. "Why would you do that?"
Lucia holds the head up proudly for me to see. I watch as she attempts to shove the whole of her free hand into the bloody mess of the poor chicken's severed neck. It's a horrifying spectacle, and almost as if she thinks the severed head is a doll she can manipulate, a ventriloquist's dummy whose beak will soon be spitting out inane jokes if she has her way. I swallow hard, holding back the instinctive urge to vomit. I look away from my daughter to see that the rest of Alex Forrest is still on the other side of the fence. A bloody blond body thrashing on the ground, blood spraying from the neck.
Frozen, my heart races. I look at the chicken wire, at the tiny hexagonal pattern of the fence and the hole she has made to pull the chicken head through.
"How is that even possible?" I ask her. The other chickens have stopped eating. They watch their sister's feet try to gain a headless purchase and fail. The dirt of the coop reddens. "Fuck me," I say.
What do I do first? A normal mother would grab her child. Get the decapitated head away from her and take her inside to bathe off the blood. But a normal mother of a normal child wouldn't stand and watch her daughter play with said head in the first place.
I leave her to her puppeteering and reenter the coop. I pick up the body quickly, bravely I think, and throw it over the other edge of the fence. A talon scratches me from the inside of my elbow to the wrist. Blood pools. I ignore it. My blood is nothing compared to the gush of this one hot chicken.
I let myself back out and swoop up my bloody baby. I snatch the head away from her and hurl it across the top of the coop. I intend it to land near its body on the other side, but of course, it doesn't. It plops at the scaly, yellow feet of the rest of the chickens, and I turn to the house before I can see their reactions-running in tight circles with their wings flapping, beaks pointed upward to their chicken god as they scream in a useless, squawking panic.
"Everything okay?" Dillon asks alarmed, but I can see he has only muted his meeting, not turned off the camera, so he rushes and fumbles to hide the murder scene that is this family.
"Fine," I say, clearly not fine.
"Mama," Jeremy says. "Blood?"
"Blood!" Sebastian yells in joyful mimicry of his brother.
"It's not ours!" I shout. "We lost Alex Forrest."
"Coyote?" Dillon asks as I shut and lock the bathroom door.
"Sure," I say through the door.
"Honey, what's going on?" I can tell that he's stressed, that he's got his mouth pressed to the other side of the door, so the boys don't hear his worry.
"Don't worry. We're fine. Promise." I raise the pitch of my voice to try to convince him just how fine we are.
"Do you need help?" he asks.
Dillon wants to help me. Why won't I let him help me? It's a bad habit of mine, not letting people help. It comes right after my first and worst habit of safely assuming they won't notice that I need help in the first place or, even if they do, that they won't offer it or will offer it but not actually mean it. The problems of other people are, after all, a massive inconvenience. Who would ever disagree with that statement? I've found it's best to function as independently from others as possible, so as not to be disappointed or taken by surprise by someone else's lack of care for you. My life-childhood up until Lucia's birth-was a self-imposed proving ground that I am out here all on my own.
"I got it," I say. "Go back to work."
"Make sure she doesn't ingest any of that . . ."
"Blood," I say for him. "Sure thing."
I put Lucia in the bathtub. I sit on the lid of the toilet and watch her lick her fingers as if they are Popsicles.
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With Lucia clean and me as clean as I’ll ever be, I head out of our bathroom and back into the noise of the living room/kitchen with Lucia heavy in my arms.
Sebastian and Jeremy are playing "frucks"-this is what Sebastian calls any truck or vehicle, which is super cute until we're in public. They like to vroom them around the floor, using swirls in the stained concrete to create highways.
Dillon has shut his laptop, but he's standing up with his cell held to his ear. Seeing Lucia and me emerge from the bathroom, he quickly hangs up.
"Who was that?" I ask. The guilt on his face lets me know it wasn't a work call.
"Are my girls okay?" he asks, avoiding my question. "I was worried."
I need to head out on my daily morning walk before it gets too hot, but Sebastian is still in his sleepy diaper-it's just a nighttime pull-up, but we've accidentally personified it for him, so now he thinks his diaper is just as sleepy at night as he is-and I need more coffee. I always need more coffee.
"Can Lucia play with you two?" I ask.
I've noticed Jeremy, now five, has become wary of Lucia, although I don't know specifically why or when the wariness started. He's careful around her and not in the way he was right after she came home from the hospital-in that big brother way that one hopes to see in their son-but as if he's keeping his distance and sometimes even inserting his body between two-year-old Sebastian and her. I've tried to ask him. Inquire in a way that I hope sounds casual, but Jeremy is tight-lipped on the subject.
Perhaps she already tried a little head-ripping on her big brother before she got to Alex Forrest, I think to myself. My brain is trying to make light of the situation, but even as a private joke that no one will ever know I told, it doesn't land. A shiver goes up and down my spine. I focus on sweet Sebastian, who, right or wrong, still adores his baby'sister.
"Yes, pease! Play with us," Sebastian answers with his usual cheer.
Dillon and I decided on three children from the start, before we knew who any of them would be, and our first two are, by all measures, perfect. And I'm not just saying that because I'm their mother. They are handsome, active, kind, and clever. They hit their benchmarks right on time-not too soon and not too late. Of course, I've spent the last three months protecting them and my husband from our third baby, who, in all likelihood, is some kind of devil. I hope they'll forgive me for not only allowing this chunky piece of dynamite into their lives, but for making it fat with maliciousness before I ever pushed it out of my ravaged lady parts.
I pour myself a coffee, using the mug I hadn't quite drained before the bloodletting. The result is a lukewarm brew, but I sip it anyway. We don't own a microwave-it's some misplaced virtue signaling of Dillon's based either on the idea that such devices will give you cancer or on the simple righteousness that nuked food is not healthy for kids but rather stripped of nutrients during its one-minute spin around a modest glass turntable. Sometimes-no, always-I want to be less Little House on the Prairie and more standard American. I don't tell Dillon this. He is far too proud of what he's built for me to complain.
Lucia, still held to my side with the hand not clutching my coffee, claps at her brothers as they make their honks and beeps and crashing noises louder and louder.
"Lucia!" Dillon exclaims. He claps his hands back at her as he makes his way over to us and eases her out of my grasp. With her weight gone, I feel lighter, if only for a second. "Come play with your brothers."
Dillon sets her in her bouncy chair and straps her in so she can be closer to them. I resist the urge to tell him she doesn't need it: Might as well set the murderous creature right on the damn floor. Dillon plops on the ground to play with them. He revs their little cars around in tight circles with a full-throated commitment. He's good at meeting them at their level both literally and figuratively. He makes eye contact when he speaks with them and listens to their ideas-it's a small thing, listening, that surprisingly few adults do.
I lean back on the edge of the kitchen sink and watch my family play and wonder what it might have been like to have grown up with a father and a good one at that. Mine fled the scene so fast that it's sometimes hard to believe my mother even used a man to make me. A part of me will always believe that she brewed me up out of her own loneliness-no egg or sperm required-a child she dubbed her best friend, because no one else would have her or because she would have no one else. And, while I was often good to her or for her, listened to her ailments and rubbed her back when she was too depressed to get out of bed, I realized early in my adulthood that she only really showed an interest in me when she was between men and sober enough to get off the couch. I may have been her best friend, but she was never mine.
