One of the first things I gave my husband was the “rabbit, rabbit” incantation. My dad, dead just six months before we married, taught it to me when I was little. If you said “rabbit, rabbit” on the first day of the month before you uttered any other word, you would have good luck. I set an alarm at midnight so I could shake John awake and we could say it together. If one of us forgot but the other remembered, I figured some of the luck would transfer. John might discover an unopened bottle of chardonnay in his work fridge. A letter from a mysterious stranger might arrive with an inheritance. We might get a break on our mortgage or be given a pack of free herb seeds to start that garden we dreamed of planting.

We needed the luck. The shine had worn off, if there had been a shine to begin with. I began to study the gap in his teeth with new attention, to believe it was a character flaw that showed slovenliness, even though that was an old wives tale. I didn’t like how quickly he washed the plates, leaving crumbs on them. I felt the same way about the forks and spoons that he put in the drawer facing different directions. I had to re-do most everything he did, and his inattention seemed to be showing how he felt about me. it occurred to me that my anger and dissatisfaction could never be fixed because I wasn’t mad at him, I was mad that I didn’t love him. Or didn’t love him enough to overlook dried soap on a glass, the hair in the shower drain, a toilet seat up, a window left open in the rain, the cabinet doors he didn’t shut. He completed every domestic task in a hurry, as if preparing to flee.

“Do you ever wonder where cotton balls come from?” I asked him one night after I peeled a long piece of floss off the flat of my foot.

“From Peter Cottontail, no?”

“Ha-ha,” I said, not laughing. “They just appear, right? That and the milk in the fridge and the cue tips, and your t-shirts that get folded.”

“I thought it was magic,” he said, wiping his face on a towel I had just cleaned.

Yes, magic.

My dad’s biggest hobby was learning magic tricks to perform for me and the neighbor kids. During the day, he worked in the garden section of Ace Hardware, advising customers on various fertilizers or how to get rid of aphids or what time of year to plant violets. My mother earned the real money in the family as a pediatrician, but that also meant she wasn’t around that much and when she was, she kept a sharp eye on me, making sure I didn’t come down with pneumonia or develop a bee allergy or jump from the stair landing and break my leg. For most of my childhood, my mother observed me only in parts—my ears, my nose, my throat. She didn’t have time for shenanigans.

My dad didn’t wear a cape or top hat when he performed, but he did study up on the more complicated tricks—the levitating chair, the locked handcuffs, the disappearing mouse. I loved that he could make ordinary objects appear and disappear with ease. My friends liked him because he often produced Hershey chocolate bars out of thin air.

At that time, I coped with any doubts I had about John by having a massive crush on my married boss, Mark Becker, Esquire. I worked as a communications coordinator for a divorce and bankruptcy law firm and spent much of my time copying files and imaging the two of us having sex in the supply closet next to the discovery files. Mark Becker wore red suspenders, crisp white shirts, and sported a tidy, out-of-date mustache. He seemed not to notice what I considered to be my many physical charms.

The worst/best files were the ones that had been going on for years. Vitullo vs. Vitullo stands out among them; the couple had been in the process of divorcing for more than a decade. The discovery was five accordion files filled with slights and upsets. She did not like that he bought a boat without telling her, and christened it “Sandra Dee” after his high school girlfriend. He did not like her compulsive hoarding of ceramic elephants. There were evidentiary photos, a Polaroid of the spry looking speedboat the yellow cursive name on the side, the living room shelves of elephants, mostly small ones, but then a couple that doubled as side tables.

The wife came in one day, and where I had expected a saucy woman with a slash of bright lipstick, she was frail and small with partial paralysis on her face that made her look like she was frowning and smiling at the same time. I helped her to a chair, and got her a plastic cup of water. She came alive when we were talking about Mr. Vitullo, slapping her hand on the table with startling force. “That bastard does not get my ride-on lawn mower.”

It occurred to me that this is what kept them vibrant, the hate they nurtured for one another.

I told John my observation later, while he was sitting on our sofa, playing a video game involving bombing foreign countries. He said, “That’s aspirational. Thank you for sharing.” His body tilted to the side as he navigated the controls to plow his virtual tank over dozens of dead bodies. “Can you please move?” He said, and I did, centering myself squarely in front of the television and doing a little dance that failed to make either of us happy.

The first time I got pregnant, we were both pretty (very) drunk on good Scotch from John’s boss at the small architecture firm. I didn’t know much about his job, just that he went to work wearing a tie and came home with the tie gone, as if sometime during the day, the boss guy said, Everybody take it easy now. Ties off! Pantyhose optional!

That night, John looked tired. His clothes were rumpled. He’d had a rough day doing urban planning. “What happened? The streets didn’t match up perfectly?”

“We have to figure out how to make it sustainable.” He poured a drink. I asked him to pour me one. We drank for a while.

 I moved to give him a little rub on the shoulders and he said, “That’s okay. I’m going to take a shower.”

We hadn’t had sex in two months. I followed him into the bathroom.  “I’m tired,” he said. It worried me. Did he have leukemia? Was this the beginning of the end?

I said, “What if we do it bareback?” His dad had three horses and John liked it when I weaved in horse language to our foreplay. “Would that entice you?” I began to disrobe, in the most seductive way you can while wearing jogging pants.

“Well, when you put it that way,” he said.

We both forgot the date: March 31. When I woke up with a hangover and noticed I was an hour late for work, I said “Shit.” By then, it was too late to do “rabbit, rabbit” and we were stuck with a month empty of luck.

The first time I saw John was at Tattooed Mom’s in South Philly. He was sitting at the bar with his feet wrapped around the stool, arguing with the bartender about how much On the Road sucked. It was 2 PM on a Sunday. I’d just come from my father’s funeral and wanted to be alone, away from the wailing of his sisters, the sorrowful looks from the guests, and my mother’s thin-lipped silence.

John turned when I walked in. He waved, even though he didn’t know me and knocked over his beer. The glass shattered on the floor. He jumped up, saying, “Don’t move. I don’t want you to cut your foot.”

All I could think about at that moment was how, during the funeral, a part of me thought that maybe my dad was playing one last trick, his best one yet. He would pretend to be dead, then sit up in the casket, and say, “Voile!” Of course, that did not happen. But the glass broke, and John saw me. Maybe that was the sign.

The following Saturday, while we were sharing a sandwich in Rittenhouse Square, I asked John, “Seriously, though, is now a good time for a child?” This was how we were trying to rekindle the spark, by having babies and packing picnics. “You want one right now?”

“Or someday,” he said, staring wistfully out at the young girls strolling by in short shorts with eyelet around the hems.

A shirtless man caught a Frisbee and a dachshund barked furiously at him. That was his Frisbee! All around us: life. Bees flitting about bending yellow flowers, the sound of running water from the man-made fountain, cars and buses hurtling toward some destination. I felt a swooning tiredness in my body, as if I could lay down on the bench and sleep for two days. “We should probably get a pregnancy test though,” I said.

“Are you?” His lips caught on his teeth and the color ran away from his face.

“No,” I said, pulling off the sandwich crust and throwing it to the pigeons.

“I mean, congrats?” he said, trying to recover.

The dachshund ran up and put its nose in my crotch. “He likes you,” he said, laughing in a way that sounded forced. We were trying so hard.  

In old movies, pregnancy is referred to by saying that the rabbit died. I don’t know what that means—maybe that they had to run the blood test through the rabbit to find out if the toxic pregnancy hormones were inside the body. Why this would kill the rabbit has never been explained to me.

I was in the middle of putting together discovery for Vitullo vs. Vitullo when I felt a deep wave of tiredness come over me, like when I got the flu as a kid. I had to sit down. The discovery file I clutched was the latest addition to the litany of wrong doings by both parties. I held it while I leaned my head against a file cabinet, first thinking, But I’m not that hung over, and then realizing, Oh, it happened. All of the bad high school sex, college sex, early twenties and one-night stands, bad decisions, pulling out, not pulling out, guys who said, Please, let me, just for a minute. It finally happened. A part of me was surprised to learn I was a normal person after all.

When I married John, before we moved into the house in Fishtown, I went through each room with sage, waving it to ward off bad luck until the whole house was filled with smoke. I did it because if my dad had been alive, that’s what he would have done. That and nailing an upright horseshoe to the front door. My mother, meanwhile, washed the baseboards and checked that there were fire extinguishers in the kitchen and the second floor. “You never know,” she said. She had just treated a kid with third degree burns, and after I put out the sage in the sink, she took it outside and dropped into a bucket.

I showed John the blue line on the test when he got home from work. He said, “Oh, thank God.” He hugged me, putting his scratchy chin against my face.

I said, “You know that the line means I’m pregnant.”He looked as if he might be sick. “Are you happy?”He nodded in an unconvincing way. His pupils dilated as if I had shined a bright light in them. It was the longest I had ever looked him in the eyes, even during sex, or maybe especially during sex, when I turned my head against the pillow and imagined any number of other men, most of them strangers from the train or casual work acquaintances or Mark Becker, Esquire.

John went to the refrigerator and pulled out two beers. I took this as a signal we weren’t as thrilled as we wanted to be.

We didn’t talk about it at any more that night. He smoked a bowl and stayed up until three AM playing another video game where his convertible kept careening off a cliff into the ocean. I laid in bed on my back, touching my breasts like the gynecologist might, amazed at the sensitivity.

The next morning, he left early for work. You might think you’d find a little handwritten note from him folded in the wooden fruit bowl, something like, I would be so honored to raise a child with you. But you would be wrong. He did his dishes for once instead of leaving them in the sink, but that seemed ominous, as if we’d become roommates overnight.

I called out sick, and then phoned my very best long distant friend, Lisbeth. She was pregnant and complained about it a lot. Her feet no longer fit into her shoes. All she wanted to eat were marshmallows and fistfuls of rich dark soil from her potted plants. “I’ve been possessed,” she said. She didn’t know about my pregnancy until I blurted it out.

“Congrats. Who’s the father?” she joked. I started crying. If I had not known I was pregnant before, this was the evidence. I never cried, but in the last couple of days, I’d had a series of crying jags, enough for a three act Greek tragedy. “Oh, not good? Bad timing?”

I told her that we had done it on purpose, but it now seemed ill-advised. I was only thirty-seven! I wanted to travel to a few more States, I wanted to learn how to paint, to skydive, to ocean dive, to bake a complicated meal with endives.

“Maybe he will vanish, and I can raise this child on my own,” I suggested. I was staring out the back window where a series of small woodland creatures were frolicking—a black squirrel and a chipmunk, as if to show me how Disney-esque life could be.

Lisbeth said, “Should your best-case scenario be a fatal car crash where he is killed instantly?”

“I’m not even sure if I’m on his life insurance.”

“Look, this is important.” I had thought the no-nonsense part of her would have been extinguished by her pregnancy hormones, but no. “Do you want this man in your life forever? Because when you have a baby, you’re not having just the baby, you’re having a baby and the guy who made it, forever.”

She told me she liked her husband, but when she saw the positive stick the first time, she weighed her options.

The next day, I called Planned Parenthood.

At the clinic, there was an old man out front who wore a red hat and carried a sign with a color photo of what looked like a plate of lasagna. He seemed tired; his shoulders were slumped. I accidently smiled at him. He smiled back, but then both of us came to our senses. He shook the poster at me. “God will punish you.”

Everyone inside was super friendly, like we were having an adventure. I felt seasick, sure I was making a mistake and also positive it was the right thing to do.

They made me take out my triple pierced earrings.  I knew then I would let the holes close up; I was no longer going to be a person who had multiple piercings.

I folded my clothes neatly on the chair. I made jokes about the blood pressure cuff. The staff were polite. No one said, Are you sure you want to go through with this? They told me to strip down to my underwear. The nurse mentioned I could leave my socks on. I had shaved my legs for the occasion, so I didn’t offend anyone with my hairy legs during the abortion. I laid down on the hospital bed and a man in dark blue scrubs and curly hair said, “You’ll be just fine. Now, take two deep breaths and count back from 20.”

I started counting: 20, 19—

I woke up in a hospital bed with the curtains drawn. A different nurse, a woman in yellow smock, said, “Look who’s awake.” She held up cookie packets. “Do you want Oreos or cheese crackers?”

“Oreos,” I said.

“You’re going to take it easy now and in about twenty minutes, we’ll get you walking.”

I felt like wailing because they were all being so nice, and there I was, a murderer, lying around in free fuzzy hospital socks, eating cookies. Except I didn’t really feel like a murderer. Except I did feel like one.

After the abortion, we took a trip to Montreal and spoke in French accents to waiters. He replaced the tires on my Honda, saying he worried about me going over the trolley tracks with bald tires. We bought a popcorn popper from the thrift store and watched all of the Hitchcock movies we’d missed in the dark and drank beer to wash down the salt. We were trying. I hung up a curtain. We purchased a new sofa and got rid of the used one with the broken spring. We talked about planting tomatoes and green beans. A tortoiseshell cat showed up in our flower bed on Christmas Eve. I named her Emma Carol.

It seemed to be working, but much of the time I felt like I was watching a show of my life, standing above it like a kidnap victim, not really there, a disappearing girl.

On July 31, I remembered. I woke up before dawn. I said the words. John slept next to me, still in his button up shirt from work after getting home at another ungodly hour. I thought him hilarious at one time—he was tall and goofy and easy to like. He could do a back bend and he loved to read hard cover novels, sometimes even novels by women. He might have been a good father, someday, maybe.

I nudged him. I said, “Say it.” He rolled to the other side of the bed. I grabbed onto him, like we were drowning, “I said it, you say it.”

He said, “Let me sleep, please.”

After we got married, I told John I wanted to stop taking the pill. It made me bloated and moody, and didn’t help much with the cramps, as promised. Doctors, what did they know? I’d been on the pill since my junior year in high school when my mother hauled me to an OBGYN, saying, “Better safe than sorry.”

I made the sign of the cross, and she rolled her eyes. Science was her religion.

John agreed to wear condoms, but the first time we tried, he balked. He couldn’t feel anything.

I said, “Pretend I’m your mistress. Pretend we’re having an illicit affair.”

He didn’t find me funny.

The courtship moved quickly we met, dated, married, all in under a year. I suppose he thought babies were next, but we never, ever talked about it. He agreed to condoms and we bought the biggest box of Trojans ribbed for her pleasure (sure).

The second time the rabbit died in mid-August, I didn’t tell him, because he had been sleeping on the futon in the guest room, except for that one night after we shared Indian food and watched six episodes of Forensic Files back-to-back.

Your honor, we may have had a bit to drink.

He did wear a condom, but the condom slipped off and stayed nestled inside me like a little animal. I noticed in the next morning when I went to pee.

I figured this pregnancy out on the subway home after a long day formatting a PowerPoint for a conference called Advanced Divorce Law. I was nearly asleep on my feet, swaying next to a man who smelled like Irish Spring soap. I spotted a poster that read, “Helping Hands.” At first, I thought it was for a volunteer soup kitchen, but the tagline read: “Adoption: Where Love Multiplies.”

I went to the Walgreens, bought a First Response. Took the test, thinking, No way. No way. I read the directions which were in three different languages on a giant piece of paper that unfolded all of the way could have wallpapered the entire bathroom. When the line appeared, I still had to check the paper, reading it in Spanish first, Embarazo. I remembered that from high school Spanish class, thinking how it sounded so much like “embarrassed.”

When I made the second appointment, I got an acquaintance from work to take me. Sabrina did just bankruptcy, no divorce. She was used to people coming to her when their luck dwindled.

I made an appointment at a different clinic, because it horrified me to think I might be recognized as a return customer. What I hadn’t counted on was that this clinic was having a very vocal, very intense rally with bullhorns and posterboards and praying and singing and hand holding with crucifixes. They were blocking the way into the clinic and the police and a news crew were there. The people outside looked very mad. They were saying things like Save the children and Baby killers and Jesus died for you.

 I said, “I don’t think I can do this today.”

Sabrina said, “Let’s pretend it’s me.”

When we got inside, Sabrina checked in. This clinic was smaller, not dirty exactly, but run down. There were no magazines, no water cooler, just plastic chairs and a dying Ficus my dad would have cried over.

The receptionist behind the glass door didn’t smile or make small talk. She had bright red hair in pin curls and wore spectacles. She slid the forms over to me with the cool disconnection of a bank teller.

What do you want to know about the procedure? It was the same. The same. And worse.

Afterwards, I asked Sabrina if we could go to Whole Foods because it seemed like nothing bad could ever happen in Whole Foods, and she said, “Yes, let’s,” so we went to the one on South Street with the windows that look out into the street. You can sit there with your fifteen-dollar salad and five-dollar seltzer and watch the world pass you by.

We did that, and I was admiring the parade of dogs when I saw John walking across the street with a girl-woman I recognized from his work. She was younger than me; big boned and freckled and healthy looking, someone who surely owned a pony as a child.

He wasn’t touching her, but they were walking close and laughing, and she had this exuberant look on her face that showed how much she liked being around him. You could see that she would always laugh at his jokes and think he was amazing. And he would appreciate it. Maybe in the years to come she would grow bitter and annoyed by his antics, but maybe not.

When John got back from work, late again, I was perched on the living room sofa, watching an old movie starring Bette Davis as a raving lunatic. I said, “I know you’re in love with her.” I was testing the waters.

He jerked his jacket off and threw it toward the coat rack. Missed. “Are you on your period?”

“I’m pregnant,” I told him. This was technically true. Even after the D&C, your body still thinks its pregnant. Your breasts ache and your hormones are in tumult, trying to feed the fetus that is no longer there.

He said, “You are not.” He went to the fridge and got out a leftover piece of meatloaf.

“What if I was? Would you want it now?” I tried to sound casual.

He put the meatloaf in the microwave. As he was pressing the power button, he said, “I think we should consider separating.”

I went upstairs and ripped the pad out of my underwear, balled it up, and stuffed it in the trash. Felt sorry for myself, put my hands over my belly button. Got another pad, took two Tylenol, and crawled in bed.

Later, when he came into the bedroom, he fumbled in the dark for me. I knew that if we had sex, he would be thinking of her. I would be thinking how odd it is that sex can be such a completely different experience depending on your point of view. And I knew there would be blood. Lots and lots of blood.

So, I let him.

He slipped inside me easily. “God, you’re so wet,” he said, his breath on my neck.

It hurt. A lot. And I thought, Good, that’s what you deserve.

When he finished, he turned on the lights, saw the carnage, Rorschach splatters of blood in the shape of what? Little red snow angels. He jumped out of bed, his shrinking penis slick and red. He was panicking, going, “What happened?” thinking that somehow he’d hurt himself, as if I’d hidden a razor inside my vagina. He stood there, taking in the sheets, my face, the blood; like a scene from a murder show. I couldn’t help it, I laughed.

He grabbed his underwear. “Something is wrong with you,” he said.

My father owned many different rabbits when I was growing up, and he named them after spices: Paprika, Cinnamon, Nutmeg. They were docile and sweet, with twitching noses and plushy, hot ears. And when they got old, he took them to a farm. It bothered me when I was little. Why are we leaving them? Won’t they miss us?

“No, Jo Jo, they are okay,” he would say. “They are happier there.”

It didn’t occur to me until the day of his funeral, when he was in the casket looking like a waxen figure and done up with bright red rogue on his cheeks that this too was a ruse. Of course, the rabbits never went to a farm. Of course not.

The third time it happened, when I saw the positive blue line, I thought, Well, no one my age should have three abortions in row. I had moved out by then, into a two-story row house on an edgy street in South Philly with an out-of-control feral cat population and a cavernous basement.

Now that we were splitting up, John seemed surprised that I would take it this far. His reaction reminded me of how I felt after my dad died, like it was his best trick. John seemed to think I rented a house, hired a moving van, moved, only to say, Just kidding. This was a test.

 He said, “Are you sure this is what you want?”

I said, “I’m not sure. Can you hang up the TV?”

He did. I asked him to also help me put together the incredibly complicated bed frame from Ikea. He did that too.

This last pregnancy was the result of good-bye sex. John had brought a bottle of whiskey from work. We drank the whiskey, and then we did it in the living room with a thunderstorm raging outside and unpacked carboard boxes around us. Doggie-style, the way god intended. I thought he had pulled out, but I mean, who cares?

Before he left, he asked me if he could kiss me goodbye. I said, “Let’s not get sentimental.”

Lisbeth gave birth to a baby a girl in mid-October. She called me the day after. “The labor was unbearable,” she said. Eighteen and a half hours, the midwife didn’t show, the doctor wouldn’t give her an epidural until the last two hours.  Her vagina would never be the same, she probably would never have sex again, breastfeeding hurt, she leaked every ten seconds, the baby wouldn’t latch the baby, the baby hated her, the baby’s head was shaped like a silo. But I think she was just saying those things to make me feel less terrible. “I named her after you.”

“You did?”

“Well, her middle name is Joanne, like you.”

Two weeks later, I knew it had happened again. It hurt to put on my bra, and the tiredness returned.  It was in my body, a tiny little speck, the size of an eyelash. I didn’t take a pregnancy test, I just believed it was true.

I threw out the wine bottles from Trader Joes.

I bought prenatal vitamins.

I started to walk around carefully in flat soled shoes.           

On my new front door, I hung the horseshoe right-side up, so the luck wouldn’t drain out. I burned sage, and put the forks and spoons and knives away facing in the same direction.

The rental house had two bedrooms upstairs, one that had been a baby room. Instead of hardwood floors, the floor had green carpeting like grass, and the family had pasted trim at the top of the walls, a row of bright yellow ducks. I took these things as positive signs.

Not long after, I woke up tangled in bed sheets, a hard stitch in my side like I had been sprinting in my sleep. I curled up as tight as I could, like this posture was going to keep everything intact, as if the wet spot in my underwear might be normal. “Spotting was ordinary,” I read on my phone in the dark. It could still be okay. There was no god punishing me, no retribution.

The red numbers of the electric clock blinked at me: 1:31 AM.

I was alone.

I missed my dad. I felt his loss in the tips of my fingers and toes.

“Rabbit, rabbit,” I whispered. “Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit.”