Originally titled "A Fourth C," Written April, 2014, the second of three creative non-fiction essays with a focus on research and interviews. Presented at Shippensburg University's Annual Student Research Conference. This should probably not be posted, since the only people to ever read it were my adoring and kind class mates who have no idea who I really am, but fuck it. It's all lies anyway.
Mom had 4 babies all without an epidural; me first, my 2 brothers, and a little sister. Natural pain of childbirth was nothing compared to the hollow hypodermic needle piercing her skin, entering her midline spine and opioids or local anesthetics injected, possibly causing side effects. She took no risks and on pain.
Cassandra, the name chosen for me before I ever existed when my mom was still naturally blonde, graces my family with more irony than all Greek tragedies combined. Conceived out of wedlock to religious grandparents, I brought my parents together in marriage. In Greek mythology, Cassandra is gifted with prophecy, mostly concerning negative outcomes but she is cursed, never to be believed.
Coady, the eldest of the boys, has an extra letter—my dad said because mom was drugged up when the doctors burst in and told her to sign the birth certificate. She’ll say it was because she wanted it to be different. I call him Broady, brother-Coady.
Coady’s two years and two months younger than I, a taller, thinner, more reserved and less open-mined version of myself. He’s equally intelligent and motivated, though he in the form of filming, editing and riding in street BMX edits, in which he and his friends do “sick” tricks.
We’re similarly cleanly and equally hard-working, unlike our spoiled little brother. The babe at 15, a blonde and more baby-faced spitting image of Coady, Curtis is my personality twin. I call him Brutus, brother-Curtis. He calls me Sass, sister-Cass. He’s into drama, not just theater, but in age. Kid has swagger, I’ll give him that, I borrow his new made-to-look-old sweaters when he turns his back, and I stumble upon his cigarettes.
“What the hell is this?” I ask, noticing the crushed Newport 100s in the small—open—zipper pouch on the outside of his backpack, mortified. Do not be like me, do not make these choices, do not disappoint.
He makes an awkward, caught grimace, but my dad stands behind my back, unaware of what’s out of his view and in front of my face.
“Knock that shit off, got it?”
“Okay,” through teeth, rolling his eyes not in attitude toward me, but at himself for letting that slip.
Curtis is a good kid, but he’s confused. My parent’s divorce certainly complicates things. He’s gay, he says, but not directly to me—to social media. He’s growing up unsupervised, living with my dad who works constantly. I pray for him, not that he won’t mess up, but that he’ll make it through the rough few years ahead of him and live the life he deserves.
And unlike all three of us is my sister. I’ve never called her that before; we’ve never met, but I’ve always known. Angel, she does not fit in with the 3 “C”s: Cassandra, Coady, Curtis. Angel hovers above alphabetically, symbolically, holy. Born without life, born without sin, never a complaining breath slipped her lips as so often they do mine.
Coady and I were young, and Curtis had not come along yet. For several months after a blood drenched urine cup test, my mom was home for “bed rest” and under the impression things were fine. Fine—such a loaded word—“of superior or best quality; choice, excellent or admirable; very thin or slender; in an excellent manner; very well.”
She folded the family’s clothes as she sat on the couch when she felt it again, this time 6 months in, the blood blending in with the velvet burgundy sofa. I remember that couch like a nostalgic spoil, for it took so much poison.
I named Dixie, the feline who pissed and shit on those cushions at any opportunity, and who lost control of her bladder due to a thyroid condition, banished to the basement in my college years. A bitter Cass brought Dixie to her lonely townhouse at school sophomore year when her roommate transferred, where Dixie would moan a sorrowful, natural death on Broady’s birthday.
I recall spewing Cocoa Puffs on that same sofa over my dad’s shoulder before I ever went to school, a vomit memory not forgotten, unlike the countless college parties that left my stomach empty and my trashcan full and reeking. But the sofa was before; before the time Angel came and went.
Mom and dad got our brown-haired little heads in hooded coats, arms in sleeves, no shoes though… She and dad forgot. We were dropped off at Grandmom’s, on the way to the Trenton hospital where the doctors asked, “Where’ve you been we’ve been waiting what took so long?” No emergency room wait, ultrasound, sit in chief doctor’s office. What’s going on? What is wrong?
A blood clot, sizable—about 4 by 6 inches—affixed to her placenta, the sack that fed my sister, tore a hole in the organ that connected her to my mother, and out leaked her sustenance, her chance at a normal life dwindled.
The ultimatum; the chief doctor shared with my mother two possible outcomes; my sister would be born “possibly, most probably deformed,” or my mom could die.
She made the decision to, as my devout grandmother so gingerly put it, abort the baby. A 6-month-old baby, barely formed, barely a girl, barely given a chance, forced into the world not alive. But the choice was not a choice. Choose to give Angel 3 more months, and innocent Coady and I might ever wait like birds longing for their momma to return, chirping in the nest for eternity. She flew back to us, leaving one egg for dead, to care for those chicks that already hatched.
My mother and father rarely agree on anything, especially now, post-divorce. Yet talking to them, they have startlingly similar feelings on one topic; jerk.
The doctor plopped down on my mother’s hospital bed as tears leaked out of her ducts, and asked, “are you crying?” How critical, how judgmental, how insensitive? I cry for this moment more than the loss; I cry for my mom for the first time in years.
They photographed Angel in the little hat and name bracelet my mom kept to this day. I’m curious to see the photo, and I know I could take it, braced for the image, but I’ll never ask, the curious image better left unseen. They asked my mom if she wanted a burial, and my mom declined, she only wanted Angel to be for something—medical research, anything. They couldn’t, so she was disposed of the way hospitals deal with those instances, probably the incinerator.
“Normally, when you leave the hospital after having a baby, they wheel you out… you know, in the wheelchair? And they put your baby in the car seat. This time, when they took me out, I was left with nothing.”
November 26th, 1996, Angel’s due date. I was 4-years-old, Coady 2. Coady and I were photographed for Christmas around that time, I see his little face, so round and hair dark, soft, long. He wears a tiny green sweater and little booties. That face stretched into the slim face he has today, spattered with patchy hair he says won’t grow into a full beard, but he says means he won’t bald.
November 24th, 1998, C-u-r-t-i-s was born. I remember going to the hospital, spelling his name in the front seat of my dad’s old pink champagne car, passed down from his sister, with its burgundy interior that smelled of church and that plasticy fiber that in the heat seemed to roast. He’ll never be called “Calvin,” the other name my mom considered, but discarded. He’ll never be called “Curt,” a choice I wish I’d made when “Cassie” became my nickname, the identity I so strongly wish to leave in 1996.
“I don’t think I would have had Curtis,” mom said of Angel, the bird that never flew. Her wings were clipped for C-u-r-t-i-s to soar.
Each Christmas, my dad took us shopping for my mother, and we always picked a gift not on her list; an angel. A snow draped figurine, a beanie baby bear with wings, a crystal rearview mirror charm, a twisted metal hanging garden decoration. My dad said it faded with time, the gifts and the pain. “You know, time heals all wounds… She’s still your sister, maybe someday you’ll meet her in heaven…” He laughed, a “ha” here, nervously, doubting the depth of the words I’m not sure I buy, the words he might not even believe himself.
Until this moment, I’ve never called her my sister. Sister. She’d be 17, a junior in high school. I’d imagine she’d be hardworking like Coady and I, the distance not there like with Curtis. I imagine her the blonde version of me, like Curtis, the blonde version of Coady. I’d imagine her name, a real name, not one based on her death, but based on the future she’d hold. It’d start with a ‘C’, like the 3 Clarhaut children that exist, that got the chance to exist.
