Chapter 2 #6
Blindly I push out the door into the hallway, where several of the medical office suites share bathroom facilities. In the ladies’ room I splash water on my face and stare at the mirror, trying to pull myself together. If they don’t run the labs, then nothing bad will happen, I lie to myself.
When the door opens, I hurriedly turn away.
“Afraid of needles?”
It’s Georgia, the new receptionist. Her voice is gentle.
“Not needles,” I confess. “Just uncertainty.”
“It’s entirely safe.”
“What if it comes back positive?”
She tilts her head, but instead of answering my question, she asks one of her own. “Would you still love your child, if she wasn’t perfect?”
“Of course I would.”
“Then you don’t really have anything to worry about, do you?” Georgia says. “Can I let you in on a secret? There is no perfect baby. And there is no perfect parent. You’re going to love that baby despite all her flaws. And if you’re lucky, she’ll love you despite all of yours.”
Something about her calm assurance settles me. I cannot even imagine having this conversation with the dragon lady who’d preceded her in her position. “Thank you,” I breathe.
She shrugs. “Not my first rodeo.”
“Well, it is mine.”
Georgia gestures toward the door. “I know it’s our first date, but could I interest you in a sterile examination room suite and a blood draw?”
As I follow her out of the bathroom, I touch her shoulder. “Thank you for talking me down from the ledge.”
The receptionist nods. “That’s my job.”
That night, when Jesse slides off the worn T--shirt I’m sleeping in, his fingers trail over the Band--Aid in the crook of my arm where the blood was drawn.
He gently peels back the adhesive and wads it up, leaving it on the nightstand, then kisses the tiny purple dot where the needle stuck me. “Did it hurt?”
I shake my head. “I don’t like not knowing what the results will be.”
“It’ll be fine,” he insists.
“But what if it’s not?”
“You’re obsessing. You need to be distracted,” Jesse says.
He skims his hands up my arms, then lightly over my breasts, which have become too sensitive.
Pressing me back on the bed, he hooks his thumbs into my underwear and draws it down my legs, then kisses his way from my ankles to the crease of my thigh.
His tongue sweeps over me, and I shudder.
These days I am like the fuse on a stick of dynamite; it is only moments before I’m arching into him and pulling him back up my body so that he can blanket me, fill me, steady me.
Jesse catches my hands over my head as he moves, and for the first time I feel it—-that hard knot, that pear--size proof, pressed between us. I go utterly still.
“What is it?” Jesse gasps, as he freezes. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” I say, spiraling out of my body and into my head—-can she feel this?
—-and then, so what? Maybe it’s not so bad if the first unconscious stamp on our baby is the kind of love that brought her into being.
“Yeah,” I repeat, with more conviction. I roll so that I am straddling him.
Jesse’s hands bracket my hips. We shift in counterpoint, and when I fly apart, Jesse pulls me down against the fury of his heartbeat.
For a few moments, neither of us has the breath to speak. “If I weren’t pregnant before that,” I manage, “I would be now.”
Jesse laughs and rolls us onto our sides. “I think that’s a compliment?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “You just incinerated my last brain cell.”
I twist so that his chest is pressed to my back. “Worst--case scenario,” he says. “Murder hornets. I mean. Bees aren’t bad enough?”
“Tularemia,” I counter.
“Is that a . . . stew?”
I laugh. “No, it’s when someone mows the lawn, hits a rabbit’s nest with the mower, aerosolizes little pieces of bunny, and breathes them in. It functions a lot like a bioterrorism agent.”
“Your single brain cell was not incinerated,” Jesse muses. “And that is an oddly specific answer. But the point I was trying to make is that the worst--case scenario is not the result of that blood test.”
In the middle of the night, when I wake up to pee, I realize Jesse is no longer beside me. I pad silently to the kitchen to find him limned by moonlight, his hands bracketing the image we got at our first ultrasound, stuck to the fridge.
That tiny white peanut in a black oval, that proof of life.
I embrace him from behind, giving him back some of the conviction he gifted me earlier.
He covers my hands, a silent acknowledgment that—-in spite of his outward bravado—-he is anxious, too, about what could go wrong.
This fear is new for him.
He may understand what it is like to lose someone he’s loved for years.
But me? I am a professional when it comes to losing someone I never got to know.
By the end of October, it’s gotten cold enough for the threat of snow, and my department is gearing up for all the snafus that roar into existence beside winter.
I give a talk at Brown and then wander around College Hill until I find myself at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Once upon a time, this was where my mother spent her college career.
One reason I know so little about my mother is because the bits I do know came from Evie and my dad, and every time I asked for another crumb of information, I saw what it cost them to remember.
Today, though, I’m doing a bit of research on my own.
I head to the admin building, give my business card to the receptionist, and ask for Dean Gelwort, the head of undergraduate study.
Soon a woman with salt--and--pepper curls appears, no doubt alarmed by the fact that the head of emergency prep for the state just dropped by.
“I’m sorry for popping in like this,” I tell her, as I follow her into her office. “I have a personal request. My mother was an undergrad here in the mid--nineties, and she worked with mosaics. I was wondering if there’s any record of senior projects from back then?”
Dean Gelwort starts making notes on a pad at her desk. “What’s your mother’s name?”
“Eloise Ambrose,” I say.
“And who was her thesis adviser?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. She died when I was about two months old.”
“I’m sorry,” the woman says, meeting my gaze. “Most professors from the nineties are long gone, but let me see what I can find.”
I think about my mother walking down the same paths I just walked down. The image I conjure is grainy, fictional.
But it’s a start.
The NICU of Women she points out the preemies in their Isolettes.
They are smaller than dolls, with unfinished features and blue road maps of veins beneath tissue--paper skin.
There are wires and feeding tubes and ventilators.
They suffer from apnea and bradycardia, persistent pulmonary hypertension, heart defects, brain bleeds.
We pass one infant so small she could fit in the palm of my hand. Her skin is pale blue, cyanotic.
The NICU is the safest place for these babies, and I have no idea how to protect it from anything that could go wrong.
“We need this exercise,” Mona says. “Our bioethicists need a chance to practice what it’s like to tell someone it’s very unlikely their child will survive transport—-so would they prefer to disconnect the baby now and hold him until he passes, or would they rather risk putting the baby in an ambulance, knowing he will likely not survive the trip? ”
My gaze falls on a neonate with a pastry bag hanging over its incubator, a tangle of pink tissue bundled inside. “He’s a little fighter,” Mona says softly. “His organs were born outside his body, and as his abdomen grows, they put them back in one at a time.”
There is no situation where that baby would survive an emergency evacuation.
But when it comes to someone’s child, there is no acceptable loss.
The room starts spinning. Dimly I hear Miguel’s voice calling my name, feel his arm braced around my shoulders. “You okay?”
I look at him. “Remember those things you said I might need to delegate?” I say. “I think this is one of them.”
Since we drove here in Miguel’s car, I leave him to talk logistics and I order an Uber. What I need is the advice of someone who made it through nine months of pregnancy without anticipating the worst. I decide to stop by and see my sister--in--law.
The dance studio that Kate runs is in a small strip mall about a half hour away from my office.
The whole front is a glazed window, tinted to screen the sun, but you can peer through to see coltish girls in leotards with their backs arched and their arms raised.
Six teenagers flow in succession, graceful as raindrops chasing each other down a pane of glass.
Kate stands in front of a wall of mirrors, clapping to keep time to music I cannot hear.
It is beautiful, but I prefer the toddlers, for whom the dance class is about putting on a sparkly tutu and crawling onto Kate’s lap.
There’s something that just gets me about watching this woman, who spent her own childhood on the brink of death, surrounded by little ones so full of life they cannot sit still.
I wait until the class ends and then walk inside. “Good time or bad time?” I ask Kate.
“Perfect time,” she says, smiling. “I have a half hour before the next class. What brings you to suburbia?”
I don’t know why it’s so hard to say that I need advice. Maybe because I am the one used to giving it.
“Molly?” Kate says. “I know you’re not here for Beginner Hip--Hop.” Suddenly her eyes widen. “Holy shit. You’re pregnant.”
My jaw falls open. “How did you know?”