Counting Backwards

5

Jessa

February 2022

As I stepped into the Dreamland Diner, I was greeted by the familiar scent of sizzling bacon. I scanned the restaurant until my eyes landed on my grandmother, who was already nestled into a booth beside a large picture window that looked out onto Lexington Avenue. People outside hurried along the street, but Gram had her eyes trained on the Kindle in her lap. Having spent forty years working as a librarian, she could rarely be found without her e-reader, and its extra-large font, somewhere close by.

“Anything good?”

I asked as I reached the table.

“Meh.”

Gram waved a hand in the air. “A thriller, but I knew where it was going by the end of the second chapter.”

Her blue eyes were bright with triumph beneath her penciled-in eyebrows. People often remarked that my grandmother resembled the dowager countess from Downton Abbey, and I agreed. With her wry sense of humor and a watchful gaze that never seemed to miss a trick, ole Betty Gregory could have given Maggie Smith a run for her money.

Gram barely waited for me to slide into my seat on the worn leather banquette before launching into a barrage of questions.

“So tell me about the immigration case,”

she said as she pushed a large laminated menu across the table. I had to resist the urge to roll my eyes at her question.

Gram had been flush with delight when she heard I would be doing more pro bono work. “Focusing on more altruistic work”

was how she’d put it a few days earlier, right before she told me it was nice to see me “finally following a more righteous path, like you were meant for.”

I knew she was thinking of her father when she said things like that. Though I’d never known my great-grandfather, I was well aware that he’d devoted much of his life to helping others, starting with the subsidized medical clinic he’d opened in a rural Massachusetts town near where Gram grew up. I’d always enjoyed listening to stories about the welcoming place her father created and the crucial medical care they provided for people who couldn’t afford services elsewhere. Grandpa Harry had worked himself to the bone so he and the other doctors at the clinic could improve countless lives. In recent years, it had become increasingly clear that Gram didn’t think I was living up to the same standards. The times she’d suggested I consider a lateral move to a firm more focused on public interest were too numerous to count. Or she’d bring up Jiyana’s job as a social worker and say, “Maybe something more like that.”

It didn’t seem to matter to her that I’d wanted to be a corporate attorney, like my dad, ever since I was a little kid.

Yet now, with partnership off the table, my plans to follow in my dad’s footsteps had been undeniably disrupted. Taking on additional pro bono work wouldn’t change that. And in fact, my father had often talked about wanting to build a pro bono program at his firm, well before boasting about charitable work was used as a recruiting tool. Even so, it irritated me that Gram was gloating from across the table.

“It was just a client meeting,”

I said on a shrug. “The woman was around my age, and nice,”

I added, even though that wasn’t really the point. “I feel sorry that she doesn’t have someone more experienced in immigration law to help her.”

I glanced down at the menu without reading it. We’d eaten at Dreamland so many times that I could practically recite the options from memory.

“Nonsense,”

Gram said. “You’ll do whatever needs to be done.”

She motioned to a waiter so we could place our order.

We rattled off our usual requests: eggs over easy with sausage and toast for Gram, a Cobb salad for me. After the waiter left, Gram continued with her questions. The level of curiosity she displayed went well beyond the mild, polite interest she usually showed in my commercial cases. She wanted to know everything—from the layout of the detention center to the number of guards to my every last interaction on the property.

I replayed the long day in my mind’s eye. Everything I’d encountered at the client meeting had been new to me. “I didn’t get to see that much of the place. From what I could tell, it looked mostly how you’d picture a prison, like what they show in the movies. Lots of barbed wire and restricted areas, guards pacing the halls. Some loud machine blowing air. Maybe the biggest surprise was how dirty it was.”

I thought of the trash that had lined the walls, and that was just in the places where visitors were permitted. I could only imagine that the interior portions of the facility were in worse condition. “I didn’t see sleeping quarters, but the parts I walked through were pretty dismal.”

“So you didn’t see any cages, like they talk about in the news? Children behind chain-link fences like a dog kennel?”

The packet of saltines Gram had taken from the breadbasket earlier lay forgotten on the table as she waited for an answer.

I shook my head, remembering the horrible headlines we’d all seen about the centers closer to the Mexican border.

“No, not today, but this isn’t a facility in Texas. I can’t really speak to what’s going on down there.”

I reached for my glass and took a long sip of ice water, remembering the relief I’d felt when I stepped back into the parking lot after the visit. The biting February wind came as a welcome cleanse after the few hours I’d spent breathing the stagnant air inside the detention center. As I recalled the dispiriting atmosphere, an image of Isobel fanning herself came back to my mind.

“Actually,”

I started casually, as if I hadn’t been perseverating during the entire drive home, “my client was hot even with how cold they keep the place. She’s going through premature menopause because of some procedure they did during her detention.”

“A young woman in menopause? What kind of procedure?”

Gram asked, her gaze becoming more intense.

“I know,”

I said, noticing the way her expression had darkened. “It looks like you’re having the same thought, maybe about some negligence or substandard care. But the client didn’t want to get into it, so I had to let it go.”

“No,”

Gram said.

“No, what?”

“Just wait!”

she snapped. “Why can’t you wait! Give me a moment.”

I was startled by her outburst, but I closed my mouth and went quiet. It wasn’t the first time my grandmother had displayed excitable behavior recently. I figured this was a “senior moment”

taking hold of her, and given her age, I shouldn’t have been surprised to see them happening more frequently these days. Gram turned her eyes up toward the ceiling, as if searching for a thought or maybe just the right words for what she wanted to say, so I waited.

As the silence stretched, my eyes drifted around the room, taking in the other groups of patrons at the kitschy restaurant. I saw a teenaged couple sitting side by side, an elderly man alone, and a table full of middle-aged women in business suits before my gaze settled on a young family at a table across the way. Five of them were crammed into a booth: a mom squirting ketchup onto the plate of a toddler, two slightly older boys playing with action figures, and a ruddy-faced man in a cowl-neck sweater. It looked like the dad was telling them all a story. He was smiling and gesticulating, miming shooting a basketball. None of the others were paying much attention to him, or to each other for that matter.

Watching them, I thought about how I had once taken it all for granted too, the simple weekday dinners, my mom’s constant hovering, my dad’s chattering about the different people in his office or someone he’d bumped into at court. If Vance and I ever managed to have the babies we were aiming for, I would make sure to do better, to relish every moment and appreciate how lucky we were. I tried to mentally superimpose my own face onto the mom across the room, Vance’s onto the dad, imagining what it would be like to trade places. All these years after losing my parents, the desire for a picture-perfect family still followed me wherever I went. Except now, in addition to the constant desperation, I also felt a new sensation of panic—the fear that I wouldn’t be able to have a baby, that the family I’d always dreamed of was simply never going to happen.

“Well, don’t you?”

Gram asked, and I realized I’d missed the first part of whatever she’d been saying.

“Sorry, what?”

I asked, my eyes coming back to hers. “Gram, are you okay?”

Her face seemed to have turned even paler than usual.

“You can’t just let it go,”

she answered. “You have to protect this woman, make sure she hasn’t been harmed.”

Gram had always been a woman of deep passions, but this reaction seemed aggressive, even for her.

“That’s not what I was hired for. It’s not my business.”

She held my gaze silently for a moment, as if trying to make a point. When I didn’t respond, she asked, “Doesn’t it concern you?”

Even though she was putting voice to thoughts I’d been considering myself, I kept reaching the same conclusion: Unless Isobel asked for help or divulged more details, there was nothing I could do about her medical procedure. I shook my head. “She didn’t really want to get into it with me. She’s the client, so she’s in charge.”

Gram slammed her hand against the tabletop, her voice rising as she leaned toward me. “Well, maybe for once in your life, you should take some charge! Stop letting other people make so many decisions for you. Constantly letting other people steer the ship isn’t going to protect you from anything.”

She pointed a finger and leaned even closer. “Enough with sheltering your tender heart. Enough coddling yourself!”

Spittle flew from her mouth as she finished.

“Whoa!”

I reared back. Gram was typically the picture of composure, even in anger. This behavior was so out of character, so much more than the little blips of senility she sometimes displayed, that I was instantly concerned. My thoughts jumped directly to worst-case scenarios, as usual. She might be reaching the beginning of the end, I worried, and faster than I’d realized. I didn’t know if I could confront a life without Gram in it. I wasn’t ready to be the last one from my biological family left on the entire earth.

I knew what I was doing. Catastrophizing. Another term my therapist taught me back in my teens. Unfortunately, no therapist had yet trained me to prevent myself from racing immediately, and unjustifiably, toward imagining the worst possible outcomes.

Gram inhaled deeply and then began again.

“I’m sorry,”

she said, visibly working to calm herself. “It just . . .”

She hesitated. “I hate to think of a young woman deprived of choices like that. Should you not, at least, just ask her about it one more time?”

I was so relieved to see her composure return that I felt willing to agree to anything she suggested. The server reappeared beside our table then, placing a steaming dish in front of Gram and my salad before me.

“She didn’t exactly say the doctor did it without her consent,”

I said as the waiter walked away. “Maybe it was just a complicated medical issue that was difficult for a layperson to understand.”

I felt myself losing confidence in my words even as I spoke them. I actually couldn’t recall exactly how Isobel had phrased it. Had she mentioned agreeing to undergo the procedure? “Or maybe she just didn’t want to get into her personal medical details with me. A stranger. I was only there to help with her immigration status, not her hot flashes.”

Gram pursed her lips, and I got the distinct impression that she was trying to prevent herself from saying something else.

“What?”

I asked. “What is it?”

She inhaled deeply, like she was gearing up to reveal something. But then she hesitated again, and her shoulders slumped. “Let’s just talk a little more about what you think you should do,” she said.

“I should keep trying to get the woman’s removal order canceled because that’s what she has retained me to do. She doesn’t want to get deported to a country that’s really never been her home. Maybe we’re creating another issue where none exists.”

Gram cocked her head to the side, her eyebrows shooting up. “If you really think that, then why did you even mention it to me?”

she asked.

When I didn’t answer, she reached across the table and took my hand. “Do something for me,”

she said. “There’s a Supreme Court case from the 1920s.”

She reached into her purse for a pen, tore off a corner of her paper place mat, and scribbled down the name. “Take a look at it.”

“Oh, come on,”

I started, my tone laced with frustration as I took the paper and glanced down at it. It wasn’t unusual for my grandmother to refer me to an article or book when trying to make a point. All that time spent working in libraries had left its mark. I hated going on research jaunts whenever Gram wanted to teach me one lesson or another, but I’d learned long ago that protesting was futile.

“It’s one that your great-grandfather would have wanted you to read,”

she added as she held my gaze. It was no surprise she was bringing him up. I could hear about my dapper, intrepid, generous grandpa Harry only so many times without developing a bit of hero worship, and she knew it. “It’s easy enough to find,”

Gram told me. “Just read it. Then we’ll talk.”

A waiter reappeared to fill our water glasses again, and when he finished, Gram changed the subject.

* * *

Three days later, I was still anxious about Hydeford. I shouldn’t have been surprised that the 1920s case Gram mentioned had struck at the very heart of what bothered me about Isobel’s situation. The short case opinion from the Supreme Court had hit me like blunt force to the chest. The horrifying opinion had been written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who’d always been described in my law classes as a hero of jurisprudence, a humanitarian, and a visionary. Adding to my shock was the fact that long-venerated justices William Howard Taft and Louis Brandeis also signed the opinion of the Court. After I finished reading the case a third time, when I still simply couldn’t digest what I’d seen, I’d Googled the plaintiff, Carrie Buck.

As I reached for my cell phone to try calling Gram again, Tate came barging into my office.

“Why haven’t you left yet?”

she asked.

Tabitha Clifford, who preferred to be called Tate, was a paralegal at Dillney, Forsythe & Lowe.

Seven years earlier, Tate happened to be the only witness when I wiped out in the hallway on my very first day at the firm.

I could still remember the mortification that coursed through me when my patent leather heel snagged on a piece of carpet and I went tumbling, spilling my iced latte all over myself in the process.

Tate was just passing by with a cart full of Redweld folders.

After helping me back to my feet, she pulled off her own cardigan to cover the stain spreading across my white blouse.

As I joked about literally taking the shirt off her back, I knew I’d found a friend.

“I’m just finishing up,”

I said, looking up from my computer to see that Tate had pulled her pin-straight blond hair into a complicated twist and was wearing fresh, glossy red lipstick. The sky outside had begun to darken, and my empty stomach was getting impatient for dinner.

“Big plans?”

I asked as three emails appeared in my inbox in quick succession, all of them from Dustin Ortiz. Rather than deal with whatever aggravating material was within those messages, I twisted my body so the computer was no longer in my line of sight and returned my full attention to Tate.

“Just that guy from my bridge class.”

She shrugged, and then her eyes fell to the open folder on my desk. “The deportation case?”

she asked. “I thought that one was supposed to be pretty open and shut.”

“Yeah.”

I also glanced down at the folder before looking back at Tate. “It was supposed to be. The woman was arrested for marijuana possession a month before it was legalized in New York. It was her first offense, and only a small amount with no intent to distribute.”

“If it’s legal now, why’s she still in custody?”

“It’s still a federal crime. And anyway, once she was arrested, she became known to ICE. Since she was present in the country without authorization, they kept her. The good news is she’s got no prior record. She has family here, a daughter who’s a citizen. I think I should be able to get the removal canceled.”

“Then why are your shoulders all droopy like you’ve already lost the case?”

Tate asked.

Before I could respond, my cell phone started buzzing on my desk. I saw Vance’s name flashing on the screen, but I didn’t reach for the phone.

“Don’t you want to get that?”

Tate asked, her eyes darting down to the caller ID.

“We’re not . . . No.”

I shook my head.

She lowered her pale eyebrows with a look of sympathy. “Take the call, Jess,”

she said, turning to leave. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

Tate knew all about the explosive argument I’d had with Vance two nights before, right after my period had arrived.

Again, he’d acted like I was blowing everything out of proportion.

He reminded me that we hadn’t been trying all that long, which technically may have been true—but longing so intensely for something that wasn’t materializing made each month feel like an eternity.

There were so many fertility treatments we had yet to try, he’d said, and then he’d reminded me that if fertility care didn’t work out, we could adopt.

At the mention of adoption, I’d gone ballistic.

I wasn’t proud of how I’d behaved, but the cavalier way in which he’d thrown around that word, adoption, made me feel like he didn’t know me at all.

I knew it was all the same to him as long as our kids were raised Jewish, filling new seats in the family’s pew at High Holiday services and belting out songs at the annual Passover Seder.

But passing down his great-grandmother’s hallowed recipe for noodle kugel simply didn’t feel like enough.

To me, the whole point of having children was to bring pieces of our history back to life, to have more biological relatives keeping us company.

I wasn’t willing to consider adoption until we had tried absolutely everything else.

Was it so wrong to be honest about it?

On the fourth ring, I reached for the phone and slid my finger across the screen to answer.

“Hi,”

I said, trying to keep my voice neutral. “I’m just about to leave.”

“I made us a reservation at Sushi Seventy,”

he said, referencing our favorite neighborhood restaurant.

His tone was gentle, laced with something hopeful.

I pictured him sitting in his office two blocks south of the Plaza Hotel across from Central Park, his collar likely loosened by this time of day, showing off his wide neck.

He was probably fidgeting with something as usual, a pen or a coffee mug.

“I did some research today,”

he said, lowering his voice so the colleagues in his open-plan office wouldn’t overhear, “about fertility options and medical interventions.

And I got the name of the doctor Doug and Maria used.

The guy doesn’t usually see people until they’ve been trying for closer to a year, but I sweet-talked the receptionist.”

With those words, my lingering anger began to melt away.

Vance had gone charging ahead, intent as usual on fixing any situation that caused me distress.

That kind of care from him was a hallmark of our relationship.

Really, it was part of what had made me fall in love with him in the first place.

Even the night we met, when Vance had shown up to a New Year’s party full of NYU law students, he’d made it a priority to look out for me.

It had been a crazy night, and somewhere amid all the lemon drop shots and Lady Gaga anthems blaring through my friend Carly’s apartment, I’d managed to lose a shoe.

There was no way I’d have been able to get a cab home on New Year’s, and I couldn’t walk all the way from Gramercy Park to my building downtown with only one shoe.

After making a few jokes about Cinderella, Vance had turned that apartment upside down, insisting that I continue enjoying the party while he searched.

He hadn’t given up until forty-five minutes later when he pulled the shoe out of the freezer, of all places.

I’d already been admiring his soulful eyes and athletic build, but when he closed that freezer door and emitted a triumphant battle cry, I was done for.

Two months later, when things began to feel serious between us, he confessed that he’d had tickets to a late-night Maroon concert on New Year’s but had sent his friends along without him.

He’d smiled sheepishly, telling me the concert hadn’t been nearly as important as helping me find my shoe, or getting my phone number.

I’d been so lost back then, still trying to find where I belonged in a world without my parents.

When Vance appeared with his vitality and confidence, and his constant ability to take charge, I felt like I was being wrapped in a warm blanket, provided a force field of protection that I’d been searching for all along.

And now, all these years later, he was still going out of his way to take care of me.

As I absorbed his words about the new doctor, my imagination took me on a journey of what would follow this conversation.

We would find an expert, the very best one, and we’d figure it all out.

It would all be fine.

Science was amazing, and surely a slew of cutting-edge options were waiting for us out there.

It might be a difficult road, but we would have our own child by the end of it.

“Whoever gets to the restaurant first should order the sashimi combo, right?” I asked.

“That’s what I was thinking,”

he said, and I could hear the smile in his voice. We were going to be fine. Everything would be fine. Totally fine. I just knew it.