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By Root 1050 0

what she was doing, then rendered her still. She was regularly, violently ill for most of her second month. To call it morning sickness would have left out the rest of the day: she clapped her hands to her mouth getting out of bed, into bed, and walking toward the bed, morning, noon, and night. She vomited on the train or the bus. She upchucked out the car window when David drove her to school, her drool trailing from her mouth like a comet tail. She barfed, it seemed, at the mention of certain people and places, at the smell of coffee and curry. Of course these symptoms caused Alice some alarm too, though it was more about the process, the rumors of pregnancy confirmed, something seen on television that was now happening to you. “You really do puke,” Alice said. “You feel like you’ve got the flu, just like they say.” Mostly, she took it in stride. Mostly, she seemed overjoyed. “Mr. Peanut,” she said, “made me sick today. Mr. Peanut,” she went on, “must not be very happy.” She sometimes wondered aloud, “I wonder what Mr. Peanut will look like.”

Ruminant in bed the night before her sixteen-week ultrasound as Alice was ruminating over the toilet, David found himself newly terrified, the pregnancy itself, this thing inside her as deadly as an asp. A child could bring them great joy, true, but it could also kill her. It had killed Alice’s mother after all—a fact that had somehow got lost. All the medicine and technology, all the focus on the embryo, made you forget about the mother. And so it did matter. It mattered because there was risk.

“Come with me to Hawaii in a few weeks,” he said when she finally lay down beside him. He didn’t want her to come and knew she’d say no. But he wanted her to feel wanted, in which case she’d happily stay put. “You need a break,” he added.

“I can’t,” she said, rubbing her belly. “We wouldn’t make it.”

It mattered because there was risk, he thought again. This occurred to him even more powerfully the next day while Alice was stretched out on the table in the ultrasound technician’s darkened room, quiet and made peaceful by the fossil-colored, fun-house-mirror image on the screen, her guts gone calm for now, as if the translucent gel the tech had rubbed over her belly was an anesthetic. David held her hand and watched the screen over the nurse’s shoulder, aware of the difference between their expressions—Alice’s beatific, like the wand pressed to her abdomen was a joystick varying levels of bliss, his own facial muscles tensed into a squint—while they saw the fetus drip and dart into view, its bones gone liquid and then coalescing to hardness again, as delicate as a bat’s now, its movements as quick and as seemingly predatory, a creature built for speed. Suddenly it curled to a stop, the whole body hunched in his wife’s gut.

“It’s moving a lot,” the tech said, then looked at them and nodded ominously.

This made him want to ask if something was wrong, but he was too scared. The technician toggled along, capturing images, taking measurements, cropping and enlarging as if she were doctoring a photograph, measuring the diameter of the brain and stomach, checking the vertebrae and spinal cord, magnifying the heart from every angle, the ventricles discretely visible and winking as they sucked amniotic fluid—blood, David thought—like the mouth of a giant squid.

Alice turned to him and smiled. “Look at Mr. Peanut!” she said. “Can you believe that’s him?” He smiled back, and when she turned again to watch he squinted once more, aware for a moment that he was holding his breath. Then the tech amplified the volume of the fetus’s heart—background noise he’d barely noticed, ambient but unrecognizable until now, a sound of p’s and e’s mixed with saliva, a lisping that filled the room, like boys make when they imitate the bang of a gun.

Don’t you hurt my wife, David told it.

Her pregnancy was progressing normally, Dr. Redundi assured her after the exam, and true, the OB explained, the morning sickness she was suffering from was acute, but not uncommon. The uterine spasms might be indicating other problems,