One Rainy Wish
All week I checked the weather app on my phone, charting the storm looming over California. It was time to take my daughter Melody back to University of California at Santa Cruz for winter quarter. If the weather predictions were correct, the drive from Los Angeles could be treacherous. My anxiety worsened as the days grew nearer. The thought of anything happening to my only child was devastating.
Growing up, I’d wanted a huge family like The Brady Bunch, Eight is Enough, and The Waltons. I never wanted to have just one child. After my daughter was born, she let me know she didn’t want to be a singleton either.
On a rare rainy afternoon back in 2011, I drove a few blocks home from the school where I taught fourth grade and Melody attended first grade. We Southern Californians are not well equipped for weather. My canvas tote bag stuffed with ungraded spelling tests and Melody’s cotton High School Musical backpack would have been soaked if we’d walked.
Driving home, we had just enough time to enjoy a sing-along to Justin Bieber’s “U Smile.” While I screeched along, Melody, who should have been named Harmony, accompanied in an octave of her own choosing that complemented Justin with effortless precision. In the driveway, I waited for the final note to ring before turning off the engine. Rain pelted the roof of our Saturn, pinpricks beating a chaotic rhythm all their own.
Before I opened the door, Melody’s innocent voice piped up from the back seat.
“Momma?”
“What’s up, peanut?”
“When can I have a baby brother or sister?”
My eyes met hers in the rearview mirror. My face flushed. I began to sweat.
I climbed into the backseat, unfastened her seatbelt, and pulled her from the booster seat into my lap.
“I don’t think I was meant to have any more babies.”
“Why not?”
“Remember last month when I was sick?”
Just a few weeks before, I’d called a last-minute sub on a field trip day—which was a risk and waste on so many levels—so I could take my OB-GYN’s soonest appointment. I’d missed two periods, odd for someone who’d had so much trouble conceiving. In the doctor’s office, a blood test proved I was pregnant. Based on the dates I gave, the nurse guessed I was about ten weeks. When the ultrasound technician asked if I was sure about the dates, I knew something was wrong. I’d heard that question before. I knew the look. My entire body pulsing, I forced myself to glance at the screen. Ensconced in gray static, a large black kidney shaped pouch loomed with nothing in it.
“There was a baby in my tummy,” I told my daughter. “But it didn’t live.”
Technically it wasn’t a baby. The OB-GYN explained I had a blighted ovum. A second opinion confirmed the diagnosis. A ten-week-old gestational sac grew, but no baby with it. A bud that never flowered.
On my way out of the doctor’s office, happy pregnant couples sitting in the waiting room blurred into monsters, big bellies jutting out at me, taunting my empty placenta. That night I swallowed a bulky pill and suffered excruciating cramps unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Deep maroon, sticky clumps fell into the toilet and into my panties. I writhed in pain until dawn. At eight a.m., I had to teach. Since I’d been out the day before, I hadn’t had time to prep for another sub. The best I could do was get there in the morning, plan for the afternoon and have a sub cover after lunch. As luck would have it, my co-teacher and I were tasked that day with teaching the district-required puberty lesson to three classes of ten-year-old girls. Emotion got the better of me and I cried while telling them that I’d had a miscarriage and was leaving at lunch to a doctor’s appointment to “finish the job.” They cried too. So many girls admitted their moms had been through the same thing and embraced me as I left.
“At least you have Melody,” one student said. The entire fourth grade knew my daughter from campus and treated her like a little sister.
That afternoon, without anesthesia, yet another doctor scraped my insides with metal instruments straight out of Game of Thrones. Torture devices, every last one. My husband tried to remain stoic but winced with me when I squeezed his hand.
Back in the driveway, the rain picked up. That tapping on the roof, synced up with my hummingbird heart where Melody rested her head.
“Mommy, your heart is beating fast.”
“I know, honey. I’m sad.”
“Was that baby like Frosty?”
When Melody was in preschool, we’d let her know I had to have shots in my belly because we were trying to make “Frosty” (what we called our frozen embryos) into a baby brother or sister for her.
“Kind of.” I rested my head on hers. “But this one was more like a surprise. We didn’t go to the doctor to try and make it like we did for you and Frosty.”
She knew we’d needed science to make her and that there was another embryo involved that didn’t make it. (To this day, Melody considers that a badge of honor, proving that she was and always will be badass. We always share a knowing laugh at Pitch Perfect when Lilly whispers that she ate her twin in the womb.)
“I’m sorry, Momma.”
Despite a deep desire to keep it together, my chest heaved up and down and sobs escaped my throat, one after the other like rolling thunder.
“And anyway, you only need one Nemo,” she said with the crooked smile all Caudills have.
Our IVF doctor harvested 25 eggs; from those we ended up with five viable embryos. From those we were gifted one special baby. The Christmas I was five months into a healthy pregnancy, my husband and I bought each other a Finding Nemo DVD. At the time we didn’t know Melody would be born with Duane’s Syndrome, an eye “defect.” We called her right eye her Nemo fin before corrective surgery straightened it out at age four.
“I don’t need another Nemo. You’re my favorite. My one and only,” I croaked.
“You’re my favorite,” she said as she squeezed my throat just shy of choking me out, like an honest hug from a six-year-old should.
At the time, I felt I’d failed her. I’d failed myself. But what a fucking journey I’d had just to have her. In the car that day I didn’t tell her about the fertility drugs or unsuccessful artificial insemination. She didn’t know about the miscarriage I’d had six years prior, before our first official IVF cycle. Our fertility doctor had said we were lucky. We’d saved thousands of dollars. But the ten-week-old embryo had stopped growing at eight. The doctor that performed the D&C called me “toughie.” Perhaps because as she scraped my insides clean of the life that had once sent us away from the fertility clinic in wonder, I simply stared at her from the paper curtain draped over my knees in silent disbelief. Soon after, “toughie” was back in the doctor’s office again, heartbroken, and humbled to start our first full cycle of IVF. That’s when we conceived Melody.
When I drove our miracle baby, now eighteen years old, back to college, we sang along to the four-hour playlist I’d made including, of course, Justin Bieber. The sky was clear, traffic light, and I didn’t cry nearly as much as when we’d made that same drive in the fall to drop her off for the first time.
The heavy rain didn’t begin until I took her for a quick grocery run. The storm intensified as we drove up the hill to Kresge Apartments. We hugged in the rain. A full body hug only an adult daughter can give.
“I love you the most,” I said, pulling her hood over her already wet head.
“I love you the most,” she answered, squeezing me even harder.
Visibility on the 17 freeway worsened as I navigated the hairpin turns, blasted the defroster, and kept my windshield wipers on the highest speed, the speed only an insane person would use in LA. I stayed the night at my sister-in-law’s house, and by the next day, the 17 freeway had closed. Santa Cruz had flooded. Parts of piers and houses had disappeared into the swelling ocean.
My drive home Monday wasn’t much better. I feared my Prius might wash away along with layers of rural soil that spilled into wide gutters on either side of the two-lane highway. I cursed at semi-trucks when their eighteen wheels created tsunami like waves leaving me blind until I shot through the curl. Wrapped in a large scarf, sipping sparkling water and eating chocolate doughnuts, I listened to podcasts instead of songs. I couldn’t chance watery eyes obscuring my view further.
Seven hours later, I arrived home in LA, into my driveway, where it drizzled.
“Call Mel,” I ordered Bluetooth.
“Hi, Momma. Are you okay?”
“Yes, I made it home! How are you?”
“I’m good. We still have power. Classes will be online most of the week, though. Santa Cruz is so messed up!”
My one and only baby perched warm and dry on the top of a mountain flanked by redwood trees, wild turkeys, herds of deer, and good friends. Happy. Safe. Thriving.
I walked into my empty nest, hugged my dogs and husband, and didn’t shed a single tear.
About the Author
Although born in Ashland, Oregon with family roots in New York, Kerby Kunstler Caudill has spent most of her life in Southern California. She earned a BA in Film Studies from the University of California at Irvine, an MA in education from Cal State Long Beach, and then taught elementary school for 20 years. When she decided to switch gears, she joined a writing workshop with author Francesca Lia Block. “Paper” an excerpt from her memoir was published in the Winter 2020 issue of The Good Life Review. Another excerpt entitled “Boo” appeared in the Spring 2021 issue of Months to Years. The third piece from her memoir, “Stains” will appear January 15, 2023, in the online Literary Magazine Lit Angels.
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