# Pray
by Anton DiSclafani
Laura Stanley received the news via text mes-
sage. BREEZEWAY BAPTIST WOULD LIKE TO INFORM YOU—
And then a link, which Laura, holding John
on her hip, had tapped with her thumb.
We’re sorry to inform you that your child, John
Furlow Stanley, has not been granted admittance into
Breezeway Baptist’s Ones Class. Please call our direc-
tor, Stacey Heath, with questions.
A cold panic spread over her, starting at her
scalp; the panic no less terrifying given how fa-
miliar it had become as of late. She who had
never been an anxious person anxious all the
time, now. If Carter, her husband, was late com-
ing home from the hospital; if she turned a cor-
ner in their vast, white house and thought she
saw a shadow; if a car honked behind her.
To quell the panic she prayed. She texted
Amanda, her best friend. She called her mom.
Before John’s birth, she had been known among
family and friends for being a calm, even-keeled
person. A tether, Carter had once called her. An-
chor, she’d countered.
She was no longer that person. Before, she
had thought everything would pass, because it al-
ways did. She had trusted in the Lord. Her
church had been a sanctuary. Was still, until this
very moment.
John let out a gurgle, and Laura touched her
lips to his smooth forehead. She had, somehow,
forgotten to pray.
She’d been young, which the various doc-
tors they were sent to after John’s birth kept say-
ing, over and over again until it turned into a ter-
rible sort of manta. So young! So young!
That the mantra was true—Laura had just
turned 26 when John was born—made her feel
more like a failure, though that was not what the
doctors had intended, and Laura knew that. She
knew they were simply, if insensitively, expressing
surprise. Her eggs were young; they were sup-
posed to be perfect. But they had allowed what
the doctors called a de novo mutation, a term
Laura had been blessedly unaware of before her
own child’s entrance into the world. Welcome to
the cold, hard world Amanda had texted her, in
jest, just after John, whom they’d named after
her father, was born. Furlow was a Stanley family
name. Smiley face emojis followed, then hearts.
It was before Laura had known anything was
wrong. She had laughed, peered down at her
sleeping baby, swaddled in a silky blue blanket.
But now—well, now Laura’s world was both
cold and hard. Not John’s. She took some com-
fort in that, more or less depending on the day.
The less intelligent he turned out to be, the
better, for him at least, because he would not
know what it was he was missing. She’d been
reading so much—so many forums on which she
lurked but never contributed, so many articles,
so many pictures—and it was clear there was a
spectrum of intelligence. A spectrum of other
health issues, too, though John seemed mainly
healthy, at least so far. A healthy heart, at least.
At least.
The propensity for obesity, for early-onset de-
mentia—she tried not to think of those.
The despair she’d felt when her obstetrician,
a kind, older man named, funnily, Dr. Mann, en-
tered the room, accompanied by a taller, younger
man, whom she’d never seen before, with a
thatch of honey-colored blond hair—
“I’d like Dr. Nichols, our pediatrician on
call, to take a look at our boy, here,” he said, and
held out his arms for the baby. She had given
birth only hours before. Carter was gone, getting
her sushi and champagne.
The despair. The despair. She still could not
finish the thought. The despair was vast but un-
formed. Of what was she so despairing? She
could not say. Not exactly. Her life upended, her
son not, after all, perfect. The disappointment
threatened to swallow her whole in those early
weeks. But there was something else, too, some-
thing she could not name. Something was wrong
in the world—something rotten in the state of
Denmark, a line she remembered from the one
compulsory English class she’d taken in college—
but she did not know what.
When Dr. Mann held out his arms she
shook her head, pressed John to her chest. A lit-
tle whimper emerged from her mouth.
They’d gone ahead with most of it. The
baby photographer who came to their home and
pretended nothing was wrong, though John’s fea-
tures—the almond-shaped eyes, the flat face, the
tiny ears—were impossible to ignore (how had she
ignored them, for those few hours in the hospi-
tal?). The visits from Carter’s family, who lived
nearby, who were known in the sense that old,
wealthy families in small, Southern towns were
known. Her family, from Southaven. Their
church family, who supplied an endless rotation
of meals. Word had gotten out quickly, but Laura
was grateful for that. It seemed like a mercy, not
to have to explain John to everyone. But the
Sip’n’See, for which John had been supposed to
wear the smocked blue romper Carter and his
brothers had worn, for their own Sip’n’See’s,
which Laura’s mother-in-law, Nancy, had saved
in acid-free tissue paper for all these years (John
was the first male grandchild)—Laura had her
limits. She’d prayed one night for hours, longer
than she’d ever prayed before. Crumpled in the
rocking chair in John’s room, John himself ab-
sent, in the bassinet by her side of the bed. She
prayed and cried and at first it was about the
Sip’n’See, and how she did not want to play host
to the dozens of women who would come to her
house and circle her baby and pity her. And then
the prayer turned to something else, something
darker. She prayed about her own shame, about
how it had colonized her heart, her mind. What
kind of mother was she, to be ashamed of her
own child—
The next day she’d told Carter she was can-
celling the Sip’n’See. It’s not a compulsory event,
she’d said, trying to make light of the matter.
And Carter had tilted his head in his wry way. It
is here, he’d said.
And that much was true. She was from the
South, but Southaven was close enough to Mem-
phis, and anyway, her family had not had money,
not like the Stanleys, who owned real estate and
restaurants and car washes and other vague en-
terprises. Where Laura lived now had its own
rules, its own way of doing things, ways which
Carter understood and she was learning. Bows
the size of Christmas tree toppers on girls’ heads.
Smocked shirts with Peter Pan collars for boys.
Everyone a ma’am or a sir. The men so nice they
seemed effeminate, Carter no exception to this
rule. Everyone aligned with the Tigers or the
Tide, though they lived in between those two
towns. Everyone a member of a church family,
but that was the one way Laura felt at home here,
in this small town in Alabama, a state she’d never
managed to visit though she’d grown up barely
two hours from the northwest corner of it—Laura
had always been a member of a church family.
She’d grown up attending the First Baptist
church. Since adolescence, she’d begun her
mornings reading devotionals, journaling. It was
her therapy, she felt. Her way of feeling at home
in the world. Of finding peace.
She’d gotten her way about the Sip’n’See.
Her mother-in-law had, surprisingly, not been
astonished, the absence of which had slammed
into Laura like a tidal wave. She understood why
Laura would not want to show John to the world.
She texted Amanda, first. John didn’t get in.
Calling now.
Laura would have preferred to email—she
didn’t like confrontation—but she knew a phone
call was best in this situation. Faster, at least. She
felt a buzz against her ear, then another. Amanda,
responding. The buzz was a comfort.
“Hello,” a woman said, “Stacey Heath.” She
had a leisurely voice, which Laura instantly dis-
liked. She was one of those Southern women for
whom her mother had a phrase—butter wouldn’t
melt in her mouth.
“Hi, this is Laura Stanley. John Stanley’s
mother—”
Stacey cut her off, midsentence. Her voice,
when she spoke, was completely different.
“Oh, yes,” she said. It was not a good sign.
John’s denial of admission had not been a mis-
take, even though she and Carter and the entire
Stanley family were members of Breezeway.
Carter had attended preschool there, along with
his two brothers and one sister. They were a leg-
acy family, not like the families that started com-
ing on Sundays when they found out they were
pregnant, since attending Breezeway gave you
preference for admission to its preschool. Its pre-
school that met twice a week, for half a day, and
was staffed by women like Laura, except older,
women whose own children were grown.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Stanley, I truly am, but your
son—”
“John,” Laura supplied.
“Yes, John. Well, we just don’t have the re-
sources to serve him.”
Laura’s chest grew tight. Her breathing
quickened. She had no hands left—the left
cradled John, the right held her hot phone to her
sweaty ear—and so she leaned on the counter
with her elbow.
“I . . . ” she said. She was at a loss for words.
Stacey Heath didn’t sound sorry, did she? She
sounded . . . she sounded firm. She sounded as
if John had been the subject of much discussion
at Breezeway Baptist, and that the conclusion
they—she and the other teachers, Laura as-
sumed—had reached was final and absolute.
A buzz brought her back to reality. Amanda,
returning her text. Another buzz, another text.
“But he doesn’t need any resources,” Laura
said, finding her voice. “He’s like all the other
babies.” That wasn’t really true, even at this early
stage, but Laura did not want to explain to Stacey
Heath that John’s current deficits were mild. He
likely wouldn’t be walking or talking by the time
he entered the Ones Classroom, but what did
that matter?
“Our preschool isn’t equipped to serve spe-
cial needs children.”
Laura’s eyes glazed with tears. “He’s not!” she
cried, though he was. But not in any way that
should matter to a preschool class.
“You wrote on the form that your son has
Down Syndrome?” The fake uncertainty in her
voice made Laura want to hurl the phone across
the room. But that would hurt only herself.
“Yes,” Laura said, surprised by the iciness in
her voice.
“Well . . . ” She let the word trail off.
“But this is for socialization, right? It’s for let-
ting kids be around other kids?”
“Among other things. Other skills.”
“Calculus? Are you teaching calculus?”
A sigh. A deep, disappointed sigh. “Mrs.
Stanley, this is not a decision we take lightly. You
are very much a valued member of our church
family, but we want to make the right decision
for everyone.”
Laura’s cheeks burned. She knew who the
Stanleys were, and it hadn’t helped. Laura
searched her memory, but she couldn’t place Sta-
cey Heath. She sounded older than Laura, but
still young. She sounded thin and hard and
mean.
“It’s illegal,” Laura whispered. The thought
had just occurred to her. A flare of hope. They
couldn’t do this. They thought they could, but
they could not.
“It’s not, unfortunately,” and Laura wanted
to laugh at the unfortunately. “As a religious in-
stitution, we’re free to make our own judgement
about what we can and cannot handle. We’re
guided by God, not the state.”
Laura curled over, as if she’d been punched
in the gut. John squirmed, and when she looked
at him she was met by a wide, toothless grin. He
was so happy, her baby. So delighted by, of all
things, her.
Laura thought of her mother-in-law, of how
this conversation would surely get back to her in
some way or another. She was a mild, sweet
woman with whom Laura found conversation
difficult. She loved John. She would accept the
preschool’s decision. She would not find these
two feelings contradictory.
“Mrs. Stanley, I hope you’ll agree this is the
best decision for all of us.”
She was still looking at John, at his clear blue
eyes, which he’d inherited from Carter. At the
swoop of light brown hair that fell across his fore-
head, that she could not bring herself to cut. She
looked at her baby and thought, He is who he is.
He’s himself.
“But where is he supposed to go?” she asked.
Whaaa?????? Amanda’s text read. Must be a
mistake. Breezeway could not reject world’s cutest baby!
Not a mistake, Laura typed back. Will explain
later.
????
Then, an hour later, when Laura did not
reply: Are you okay?
Laura was not okay, but her not okayness
was larger than a preschool rejection. Her not
okayness related to lying awake at night and won-
dering if John’s future brother or sister, as yet just
an idea, a plan—would be kind, would be willing
to shoulder the burden of John after Laura and
Carter’s deaths. If John did not die first, which
was a possibility, given the host of health prob-
lems that accompanied his diagnosis.
Then she wondered, as she did tonight,
John’s rejection accepted without complaint by
Carter—they don’t know what they’re talking
about, but who cares?—if they should have three
children, as they had talked about before John
was born. Four. The better the chance that one
of them would take care of John; or, that they
could share him. He could live two months in
one house, two in another, etc.
Carter stirred. An unfairness to her future
children, to shoulder them with this responsibil-
ity before they had even been conceived, but
there was no other option. John couldn’t live in
an institution—the thought of her child, being
cared for by strangers, undid something inside
her. They hadn’t found out the sex. There are so
few surprises in life, Carter had said. Laura had
secretly wanted a girl, and now she was so, so
grateful John was a boy. He was less likely to be
abused that way. Sexually and otherwise. There
were so many stories of caretakers raping women.
They found her, when she was online paying a
bill or scrolling through Facebook.
And he would never live by himself. Carter
stirred, and Laura bit the inside of her cheek,
which had become a habit since John’s birth.
The ridge of skin, puckered, and raw, familiar be-
tween her teeth.
She hadn’t yet texted Amanda back. She’d
been disappointed by Carter’s reaction, even
though she’d expected it. His main purpose in
life, now, to soothe her. It wasn’t really about the
preschool, of course, but then again, it was. The
carpeted rooms, lined with perfectly organized,
brightly colored toys; the walls decorated with
foam cutouts of shapes and letters and numbers.
We are all God’s children here, the sign above the
entrance read. There were other preschools in
the area, but Breezeway was where everyone
Laura knew went. Where John would not go.
She probed the line of damaged cheek with
her tongue and prayed, her praying too private
to put into words, even too herself. She read the
Scriptures, did devotionals—What acts of selfless-
ness have you completed today, with an open and
forgiving heart?—or had, before John was born.
But Laura’s praying did not involve language, as
such. It was more a feeling. A connection.
A connection John’s birth had interrupted.
Right now, for instance, in the room that she had
so carefully decorated with the help of a designer
from Birmingham—pleated curtains from an-
tique French fabric; a velvet chaise lounge; a gi-
gantic sterling silver frame that held a picture of
her in her wedding dress, beaming at Carter, who
stood beyond the camera—the room felt like a
strange country, not the place she had loved,
been loved. The man beside her—also unfamiliar.
She put a hand on Carter’s cool back and
tried to summon the feeling of peace. But she
could only think of Amanda, Amanda who’d
had her second child a month after John had
been born, a little girl named Genevieve. John
and Genevieve were supposed to enter the Ones
class together.
Amanda had come to the hospital to meet
John. All of it felt like a fraud, now. The giant
floral arrangement, topped with pearlescent blue
balloons, which their night nurse, a Black
woman with a Carribean accent, had exclaimed
over, right before exclaiming over John. The ivory
baby gown, meant for a different child. His
name. She wanted it all back.
“Hey,” Amanda said, just inside the door. It
was their third full day in the hospital. John was
staying longer, for tests, and Dr. Nichols had told
her she could stay, too, which she knew was sup-
posed to be a kindness, but nothing felt kind,
right now.
Laura tried to smile. John lay beside her in
the clear bassinet. He had cried for so long and
so hard after his circumcision earlier that day
that the day nurse, a white woman with dry lips
and thinning hair, had come into the room. So
far the night nurses were all Black; the day nurses
white. “Oh,” she’d said. “You have to pick him
up, sweetie.” And then, the same thing they all
said, every nurse and doctor and relative who
had entered the room: “He’s perfect.” If he had
been perfect, they would have been discharged a
day ago she thought. But did not say.
Amanda wore yoga pants and a turtleneck,
her pregnant belly asserting itself before Amanda
had even fully entered the room. She was a small
woman, unlike Laura, whom everyone had com-
plimented on carrying her pregnancy so well. It
was a virtue, Laura understood, to look less preg-
nant than one actually was. She should not have
been surprised, but she was.
“Honey,” Amanda said, and came to Laura,
not John. Put her small, warm hand on Laura’s
forehead. She hadn’t even glanced at John for the
longest second.
Laura moaned. She felt like a monster. A
swollen, bleeding monster with thoughts so ter-
rible she knew she could never tell another soul
about them. She had been a nice, good person
because everything in the world had gone her
way. That’s all it was. It wasn’t her. It was circum-
stance.
Amanda leaned over the hospital bed and
pressed her forehead to Laura’s. Laura tried to
say something. “I . . . it’s . . .” but Amanda
shushed her.
Laura felt Amanda’s warmth. Pushing out
her grotesque imaginings. If John had been born
a century ago, for instance, or in another coun-
try—
And then Amanda was beside John, so
quickly Laura thought she felt a rush of air as
Amanda moved from one side of the bed to the
other. She stood over John’s clear bassinet for a
long moment, murmuring.
Laura did not think she could stand it, if the
word perfect left Amanda’s mouth. She watched
her friend, who watched her child, who until a
few days ago had lived inside her, whose subter-
ranean presence Laura found she missed, now.
The weight of him, pressing, ever downward,
against her hips. The movement, which was con-
stant and soothing. How foolish, to be comforted
by the very infant you carried in your womb. And
yet she had been.
“He is who he is,” Amanda said, finally, tears
in her eyes, her voice thick with emotion. She
smoothed one of John’s inky eyebrows with her
finger, then placed her palm on his tiny chest.
She looked up at Laura.
“And you’re his mother.”
She’d fallen in love with John in the weeks
that followed his birth, after the shock of him
gradually departed. Sometimes, when she prayed,
she tried to picture it that way: The shock lifting
from her in plumes of smoke.
The way he opened and closed his fists while
he slept. The sheen of fur that covered his
shoulders. Epaulettes, Carter had said. The way
he rooted around for her breast. The sighs he
made when he slept. She was delighted by all of
it, but more than that, relieved. He was like any
other child in these ways.
She tried to prepare herself for all the things
he would not do. He would crawl, and walk, and
talk, just later than everyone else. Then it became
less clear. He would kick a ball, but he would
never play soccer on a team. He would attend
school, but he would not complete the same
homework as the other children in his grade. He
would have friends, maybe, but as they grew older
they would tolerate John, not come to him for
advice. Would he fall in love? He would have
those impulses, she knew. She understood ad-
olescence to be a particularly thorny time with
special needs children. Laura did not know how
John would express those impulses. How he
would date, or spend his free time, which he
would have more and more of as he grew older.
There were so many things she did not know, so
few she did.
She tried to prepare herself for the daily dif-
ficulties as well. The double-takes people did,
then tried to hide, when she took him to a new
place. The way she’d watched some stupid sitcom
and had been brought to tears by the word “re-
tarded.” The jealousy that had nearly knocked
her from her feet when she’d seen Amanda,
Amanda who already had a perfect child at
home, nursing Genevieve in her hospital bed
only a month after John’s birth. If there had
been any note of apology in Amanda’s eyes when
she looked up Laura would have turned and fled.
But there was not.
She was accosted and then she steeled herself
for future hurt. She learned to gaze steadily at
people in restaurants or stores when they ap-
proached; she’d found this made them less likely
to do a double-take, if they knew they were being
watched. She repeated the word “retarded” to
herself, over and over again in her head, to take
away the sting of it. She told herself it was a
meaningless word, though she cringed to re-
member that she herself had gone through a
phrase of saying it, in middle school, before her
mother told her it was bathroom word, a category
that covered all manner of inappropriate lan-
guage. And Genevieve—well, she learned to love
the child, who was so blonde she looked crea-
turely. She found it was more difficult to be jeal-
ous of those whom you loved.
But the shock of a church preschool denying
admission to her child on grounds that were
utterly ridiculous—this was a surprise for which
she was not prepared. A surprise that seemed to
foretell the rest of Laura’s life.
So she was prepared now, for Amanda’s re-
jection. She would send Genevieve to Breezeway.
Why wouldn’t she? She should. Her child
shouldn’t suffer because her best friend’s child
did. It was a simple equation. You did what was
best for yours.
It was Laura against the world.
In the days following the text from Breeze-
way Baptist, while she ignored Amanda’s text
messages, she found she missed her friend. But
she missed so much, now. She was still comforted
by the routine of church, but gone was the feeling
of solace that had always blanketed her when
she’d entered its vast atrium, slid into a smooth,
blonde wood pew. Let the light of the stained-
glass windows, recently installed, bathe her in
gem tones. That would be gone now, too, for she
would never return to Breezeway Baptist, even
though Carter had told her several times that the
preschool had nothing to do with the church.
She didn’t care.
“Honey,” Carter had said, coming up behind
her at the kitchen counter, where she was stirring
milk into John’s oatmeal to cool it down—“We’ll
go somewhere else.”
Laura stiffened, then released the tension. It
wasn’t Carter’s fault.
She did the things she always did, but with-
out the pleasure of anticipation of talking or see-
ing or texting with Amanda.
Honey, her last message read. What’s going on?
Carter and Amanda the only two people in
Laura’s life who called her that, and she knew
they meant different things by it, but she also
knew that they both loved her.
She missed Amanda, but the longing she felt
for her best friend was tolerable. She missed so
much and yet so much was newly tolerable, her
thermostat for what she could and could not en-
dure having been reset with John’s birth.
She was on the floor with John, playing with
him. Giving him one toy, taking it away, teasing
him, giving it back. John laughed. Clapped his
fat hands together.
Sometimes Laura disappeared. Before John,
but more frequently since his birth. Amanda
must assume she was doing that. Going just be-
neath the surface of her life for a little while.
She’d met Amanda at her spin class.
Amanda, tiny and extremely pregnant with her
first child, leading the class, shouting into her
headset, asking them to imagine they were scaling
a mountain. Asking them to give themselves over
to the feeling of pain.
“Everybody’s gotta mountain,” she’d
shouted. Then laughed. “Everybody wants a glass
of wine and a piece of chocolate at the end of the
day, amirite?” It didn’t even make sense, not
really, but Laura liked Amanda’s latent cynicism,
the way she cut her platitudes with further
clichés. They were fast friends. They both stayed
home with children, or planned to, in Laura’s
case, as soon as she had one. They lived in the
same, brand-new, treeless subdivision. They at-
tended the same church. Amanda’s husband was
a malpractice attorney for the hospital; it seemed
too perfect that Carter was a general surgeon.
Laura had the sense that she was more religious
than Amanda, but that was fine. Laura was pri-
vate in that way. In all ways, but especially that
one.
“I don’t know why God would do this,”
she’d said in that hospital room, Amanda hold-
ing John, now, as Laura herself could not bring
herself to do. She held him, yes, but not like
Amanda did. Not with that kind of love.
Her voice was jagged. It sounded unfamiliar
even, or especially, to herself.
“Honey,” Amanda said. “It’s not God. It’s
just what happened. Random. God had nothing
to do with it.”
And for the first time in her life, Laura was
comforted by the idea of God’s absence.
The doorbell rang. John startled, sought out
Laura’s gaze, relaxed when he found it. Grinned.
She put him on her hip and went to the door,
making sure to stay hidden on the off-chance it
was someone other than the Fedex guy dropping
off a package.
She recognized the white patch of Gene-
vieve’s scalp. Then the reddish sheen of
Amanda’s thick hair, which never seemed to be
depleted by postpartum hair loss.
Laura opened the door a crack. She was so
nervous she might as well have been being chased
by a pack of wild dogs. Her breathing that quick,
her heartbeat that rapid.
“Honey,” Amanda said. Her face was wor-
ried, worried. “Let me in.”