Terra Ignota

We awake to a skiff of snow still on the ground, the temperature barely above ten. Outside our window, darkness conceals the newly bare branches of the maple in front of our house, and stars linger in the sky. Michael, my husband, is sick with a stomachache. He has been up all night, tossing and turning, flipping his pillow every so often to find the cool side. Nothing seems to help. Around three in the morning, I found him curled into a ball on the bathroom floor, the terra-cotta tiles surrounding him like a field aflame.

Now, I leave him in bed wrapped to his chin in the down comforter and head out for a run. It is Tuesday, two days before Thanksgiving, a day we teach at the university thirty-five miles from our house. We are up early. My running route takes me along the foothills of the Bear Mountains under a sky threaded with falling stars. Because we live in the country, well away from even the small city of Logan, Utah, the darkness is complete. I have no idea where each footfall will land and trust the road is beneath me.

As I run, I think of Michael home in bed in our house which winks across the fields. Growing up, my mother told me I could will away sickness. “Just tell yourself you’re not sick,” she would say, standing over my bed in the morning, her eyes on me but her mind chasing down the day. It was the same tone she used when she would tell me to imagine a field of flowers when I awoke from a nightmare. That a monster inevitably burst from the dancing poppies, jaw open, mouth drooling, and seized my seven-year-old body suggested a lack of control on my part. “You’re not trying hard enough.” The body, my body, was something I could master. Which is why, thirty-some years from childhood, I push my body hard. It is the reason I rise every morning, even now, four months pregnant, and run six miles along country roads long before the sun crowns the mountains and illuminates the broken stalks of corn.

Instead of checking on Michael when I return from my run, I head straight for the bathroom, gloves still on, frost melting at the tips of my hair. The furnace ignites when I flip the light switch, pushing warm air to my feet. At the toilet, I pull down my underwear. They are clean, no blood.

Every baby book I have read indicates you can continue your regular exercise routine while pregnant. However, when listing what those activities might include, the authors name walking, yoga, or swimming, never a six-mile run every morning at an elevation where oxygen is scarce. The absence of pregnant women running across the pages of the baby books suggests I am already a bad mother before I have even become one. On morning runs, I have taken to wearing Michael’s jacket to hide my growing belly from the neighbors. The worry that I could lose the baby through such strenuous exercise does not trump the need to test my strength. Pregnancy has become just one more factor that proves my dedication to endurance, not unlike running in below-zero weather or while lightning strikes nearby.

On the drive south, Michael at home, a bottle of Pepto-Bismol within reach, I imagine running this stretch of highway, cresting this hill, feeling the road curve beneath me. The lack of a shoulder means that few run this four-laned road. Cars speed past at close to sixty. One slip and death, especially in the winter when snowplowed mounds of muddied snow narrow the road.

When I was a child, I ran without fear. I used to head out every night after dinner with my father to run a long, slow loop that circled our military housing area. We met soldiers in white T-shirts and jangling dog tags who nodded to my father as we passed. At the end of...