Maybe

from the Probability Spinner by Regan


The employer’s name was Thora Hays. She had been the eldest daughter and second child in her family, and when her mother died during a seventh attempt at childbirth, fourteen-year-old Thora had taken on the role of mother to her many siblings. Her father, a lapsed Mormon, took on the role of alcoholic widower and ran their savings into the ground. Her twin sister was allowed to go to dances and have her sweet sixteen, while Thora baked her cake and put to bed the young children who -- understandably -- called her Mom.
She went from one home to another, marrying a local boy with her father’s consent at age seventeen. Effectively, she had two households. In the mornings and evenings, she played wife, and during the day nanny to her siblings. Charlotte, the one whose life had extinguished their mother’s, was named for that revered lady who never reached forty. On the mantel stood a tall painting made, posthumously, from a snapshot Thora’s father had taken during their courting days. At every meal, the children stared up at an oil canvas rendering of some woman in a blue neck kerchief and bloomers, wondering about her identity. When Thora read fairy tales before bed, they envisioned her as the main character: Cinderella, Snow White, Rose Red, and Rapunzel.
Once Charlotte started school, Thora at age twenty was deemed fit to reproduce. It was the time for such things, just as fall was the season for reaping. She thought maybe when she was 40 and her youngest (she planned to have two: a boy and a girl) had graduated, she and Alvin would travel to other countries. Her younger brother Michael wrapped her birthday present one year in the centerfold of the Rand McNally Atlas. The hand-carved ashtray was nice, but Thora patted down the folds in the map and traced her fingers across oceans and on the bumps she imagined to be mountains. It seemed important, having been born on a planet, to see it properly and up-close. Time spent cloistered in a house made the world seem small and a map delusional.
Instead of two children, Alvin insisted they have six. She was tired by the third and exhausted by the fourth. At the fifth, she told him there must be a way to get rid of it. She did not dislike children nor was she a heathen. He told her they could not deny themselves “this creation, this miracle” and felt injured when she explained her opinion: that creations are things invented on purpose and miracles are things hoped for but unexpected. On the contrary, Thora told him, she had wanted only two, but as their first three children were boys, she continued for the sake of a girl, only for the baby to be still born. She told her husband that, if he was indeed a believer, he would believe that was a sign. They were being punished for their greedy desires.
In those days, there were only so many options, so she had thrown herself down every flight of stairs in town, until the fourth month when she gave up. She would not kill something that wanted so badly to live, but she decided she would not love it. She would treat it as the burden it had become. When the boy – her fourth – was born, she did not cry or smile or kiss his head. Mechanically, she held him to her chest to make an obligatory heart-to-heart connection, then handed him over to his father, saying, “Here, Alvin. You take it.” He named the boy Thor, after her, yet nothing could change her heart.
Every year, on their anniversary, they made love and so conceived another child. She counted the years ahead until her liberation. 42. Not so bad, she thought. Mom didn’t make it that far. A sudden fear struck her. She might not make it to 42. She might continue to push out offspring against her will until, like her mother, she died in the process. Maybe Mom had wanted to travel, too, or write a book, or paint, or build furniture, or speak another language, or see the Chrysler Building. Maybe I will end up just like her. The thought froze her to the core, until she found out she was carrying Number Six.
“If this one’s a girl,” Alvin promised, “I will take you anywhere in the world.”
Dragging her aged, pickled ex-attorney father into the matter, she made her husband sign his oath. Throughout the pregnancy, as she distractedly nursed Thor on a kitchen counter, she imagined the places she would go. She bought National Geographic magazines and pored over their contents, seeing in every woman with headdress, high heels, or habit herself: in the future. Maybe I will go to Morocco. Maybe I will go to Martinique. Maybe I will go to Mongolia. She pricked a wall in the hallway where Michael’s often-glimpsed map hung with baby pins, pulled wide and pointy. Maybe, she thought, I will go to Machu Picchu.
The sixth one’s name was Max.