I hadn’t gotten pregnant yet, but I could still feel the baby in me. Heavy, slimy movement. A soft cramping. We named her Frankie because it made us laugh. The name was hard and sturdy but also playful and full of life.

At night I would ask Drew to touch my stomach. Our little ritual. Did you say goodnight to Frankie? He would play along. Oh, hey Frankie. Did you have a good day? It was a life within a life. I knew one day it would be the reverse. The rest of my life buried in motherhood.

Drew palmed his hand over Frankie like an Afghan. I asked him if he could keep his hand there so that we could go to sleep with the whole family touching. Him, me, and Frankie. I woke up with his hand still there, feeling a shooting, spurting pain. The pain twisted in my abdomen. I felt a baby in the twist. My period was a day late so I knew I could take a test now and it’d be accurate. I peed on a stick as our dog Boris nudged his head through the door crack to watch. His snouty little head looked so cute in the crack. I enjoyed him being there—my slobbering witness.

I laid the stick on the sink counter and willed my pregnancy hormones to do their thing. I visualized the hormones rising joyfully up in the stick, spreading across the length of it, painting their thin red lines. One red line flashed on the screen. My blood swelled hot inside me. The stick suddenly seemed bleary, indistinct. I thought I started to see the second line but it wasn’t there. It appeared again, then flickered out. I ate some breakfast, scuffled with Boris on the carpet, and then checked on the stick again. Still just one line. I lobbed the stick against the mirror, watching it backslide against the glass to its death. I pitched the stick into the trash, cursing at it. 

Every month felt like a loss. It felt like grieving hope, if you could do that. I curled my body fetally against Drew’s as he woke up, told him that there was only one line, always one line. He lassoed his arm around me pulling me into him, his chest rising and sinking against my back.

My nana called the next day to ask if we’d conceived. She asked every day, insisting if we didn’t tell her immediately upon finding out it would be an act of cruelty, a betrayal. I looked down at my distended belly, bulging with period bloat, and thought that the swelling looked like the early buddings of a pregnancy. Maybe I was pregnant, I thought. Maybe the test was wrong. I touched my swollen stomach, and blurted out “Well, funny you should ask…”

My nana squealed, “I knew it. I just did. I just have a grandmother’s sense. ESP.”

My nana’s relief spread into me, becoming my own. I told her we were having a girl and that we would name her Frankie. Frankie Marie. I knew she’d like the name because it had no frills or embellishments. It shot straight to the point. As I said the name aloud, I felt closer to the baby than ever before. She was now with me, inside me. She had a spirit and a body.

Drew sat next to me, head drooped towards the carpet. He never felt the need to dream up other lives because his own was so easy for him. He could absorb it in its raw form. He was able to instantly let go of Frankie. Poof, gone, goodbye. She was over.  She had never begun. I knew he was waiting for me to make a retraction, smile and say this was all some hoax, a dumb joke. Assure him I was just like him—sensible, sane. Well-rested.

But I was becoming someone else. Someone I wasn’t sure about. My love for Frankie gathered heavily in me. Her presence had a volume, a density. It weighed something. I began moving through the world as if she was leading me, a hard bulge jutting out in front of me. I would rest my hand on my bulge as if to say: here she is. She exists. I felt her witnessing life before me, imagining all aspects of life as she did. 

I would walk outside in the morning and imagine Frankie taking in the little bird sounds. She could only hear them, not see them, so the sounds would be imageless, colorless. I would describe to her what they looked like—their soft fans of feathers, their brassy hues. As I described them, Drew would release these long, resigned breaths. Each breath seemed to hurt him, to take something from him.

“The problem is that you actually love her. As if she’s real…”

I pulled Drew’s hand towards my stomach to touch Frankie but he wrenched it back. 

“Don’t you miss her?” I asked him. He seemed like he would at least feel some tenderness towards her. He used to—at least, when she was still just a joke between us. 

“Frankie was just a fun little joke, Edi. You understand that, don’t you? She is not real.”

“Yeah, but I’m just not sure there’s that much of a difference,” I said. I then pulled out a sonogram from my purse and brushed my finger along the slicked paper. I showed the image to Drew. “Look,” I said, “there she is.”

Drew looked at the tiny curl of body—a flash of white amidst the dark. He handed it back, blank-faced. He stepped away from me, slowly, scared of me. He asked if the imaging came from a doctor, or a healer, or what.

“It was created by an artist,” I told him proudly, “One that specializes in reimagining mothers’ visions of their babies.”

Drew yanked the sonogram back from my grip. He cut the paper into long thin strips which fell in a small nest beneath him. He then circled the house, gathering his belongings: his jacket, his cigarettes. He grunted these weird caveman noises to himself that didn’t seem to come from any real emotion. Just came straight from his throat. He continued his grunting sounds as he headed out the door.

Within minutes, Drew became a stranger. It’s odd how quickly that can happen. He now seemed from a different life and time. I saw him in the distance, a fog of memory, a collage of sounds and colors and moments. As he slid from my mind, soft glimmers of Frankie filled in the empty spaces in me. Flashes of her shot through me like little flecks of dopamine. Joy had never been so easy. It had never made so much sense. I could be happy just by seeing her little face in my mind. Was this happiness okay? Could real joy come from delusions? I decided lunacy is at times the only way forward. Lunacy could be a rational decision. A way to be.

I picked up the fallen strips and taped them together so Frankie could look like herself again. She was so tiny but with all the same parts as an adult. A miniature woman. “There you are, all better,” I cooed.

I pecked a light kiss on the glossy paper and curled in bed with it. I touched the image to my cheek, feeling its smoothness. I whispered, “I love you, Frankie,” and then drifted off into a long, deep, maternal sleep.

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Rachel Ament is a writer living in Maryland who has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Paris Review, British Vogue, Teen Vogue, Good Housekeeping, Shape, and NPR. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram.