What We Have

by Amy Boesky

  Personally, I’m not crazy about imponderables, which is what this breast cancer test sounded like to me. Like the movie I saw years earlier when a team of people got shrunk down and injected into a human body and shot through the arteries, wide-eyed, pointing at corpuscles like awestruck tourists.

  No one had to tell me I came from a cancer family. Wasn’t it obvious? All you had to do was look at the pictures hanging on our upstairs wall. A blood test—what would be the point of that? Suppose it came back negative? Would I really believe it if someone told me I was home free?

  Not likely. Not when I’d known about the sharpshooter since childhood. His X-ray vision, his slow, stealthy prowl.

  Anyway I didn’t want to talk about cancer tests. I wanted to get back to the one subject that mattered: pre-pregnancy. The most fertile times of month. Whether it was true you could really tell you were pregnant even before you missed your period. How could that be? Could the body really be so transparent? When it came to conception, I wanted all the foresight possible.

  Julie was moving to another branch of the would-you-want-to-know tree. Would you want to know the baby’s sex if you could tell from the ultrasound?

  For Julie, that one was easy. Definitely. It would help when it came time to decorate and choose names.

  I wasn’t sure. I thought maybe not. This must be why I get the minus in my version of type A, but I actually liked the idea of not knowing. A stretch when everything was up for grabs.

  Boy or girl? I hadn’t gotten that far. I just wanted a baby.

  “Do you ever worry,” Julie asked me, still fiddling with her spoon, “about passing on the ovarian stuff? If we have daughters?”

  I shook my head, not really thinking before I answered. Maybe living with Jacques was rubbing off on me. “By the time our children have to worry about this . . . ,” I said, shrugging. It all seemed so far off, like a bright frontier. “By then,” I said, half-believing it, “they’ll have figured this whole thing out.”

  Julie nodded. Thirty-five years from now. Who could fathom that vast a stretch of time?

  “Besides, wouldn’t you still rather have your life than not?” I asked her. “Even if worse comes to worst?”

  She nodded. Half a life was better than none, we’d always figured.

  Lives half full, not half empty. Maybe we were optimists, too, in our own way. We circled around other topics, then zoomed back in. Who wanted to focus on doom and gloom when all of life lay before us?

  All I wanted was to be pregnant. It was hard to focus on teaching, on researching time measurement in the seventeenth century.

  I had an old empire-waisted Laura Ashley dress that looked like a maternity dress, and sometimes when I was alone, I’d try it on and sneak glances at myself in the mirror. I thought it looked great. Once I even wore it to Safeway.

  Emily

  WE COULDN’T HAVE PLANNED IT in a million years. Julie’s due date: December 27. Mine: December 31. What are the odds, people would say. Of course there were jokes. “What is it, you’re getting a twofer? A special family deal?” a woman in the doctor’s waiting room asked when she saw Julie and me together. (We had the same doctor. Andrea Weiss, “expert” ob-gyn, top doctor in Best of Washington three years in a row. A friend of Lori’s campaigned for us, and Dr. Weiss squeezed us both in.) We’d laugh politely, but we both knew this was too important for humor. It was a modern-day fable. Two girls from the same (previously unlucky) family get pregnant at the same time, break their family’s terrible spell, and live happily ever after.

  WHY DON’T POETS WRITE ABOUT pregnancy? All that spring, my second in Washington, Julie and I were transformed. Separately, together. I’d never felt anything like this. Expansive. Exquisitely sensitive to everything—smell, taste, touch. Excited, exhausted, exhilarated, nauseated, sleepy, giddy. Craving salt. Craving sleep. Dreaming of light, shadow, membrane. Bewilderingly, absurdly happy. Calling Julie constantly. For once, our timing was defiantly, spectacularly right. My mother was beside herself with excitement and planning. First she’d come to me, then to Julie. Or first to Julie, then to me. Even her maddening comparisons struck us now as funny. Who cared? Life was blessed, the rhododendrons brimming with color—magenta, fuchsia, lavender. Next came the cherry blossoms, garlanded with tourists. We moved through bloom and bracken, delirious, counting forward. How had we managed—without planning—to get pregnant, both of us, at more or less the same minute? What god smiled down on us? This one small miracle apparently lifted the spell, my parents were charming and benign, good humor reigned on our planet, schedules relaxed, warmth encircled us, released from anxiety, from high-risk gynecology, free to eat, nap, dream, grow larger.

  Starting now, we told each other, our luck would be good. We’d have these babies and the old nightmares would evaporate. The babies would grow up together, sturdy and smart. We’d push strollers together in Rock Creek Park. We’d find playgroups. We’d be our own playgroup! For once, everything we didn’t know seemed luminous.

  Our family history was starting over. That’s the thing about babies—they reset the clock.

  WE’VE ALWAYS BEEN CLOSE, JULIE and I. It’s funny, because we’re farther apart than Sara and I in actual years. Maybe in this middle phase of life, our real age gets overwritten by our age as parents—instead of being twenty-eight or thirty-two, we become instead “mothers of toddlers” or “young women trying to have babies.” I’m not sure. I just know that spring and summer Julie and I became inseparable. We talked twice, sometimes three times a day. She’d find a sale at A Pea in the Pod and call me; I’d find an article on mercury counts in dolphin-safe tuna and call her back; we’d have the Morning Weight and See, as Julie called it, with my mother joining in for rounds of the Comparison Game on the phone every afternoon. “Julie,” she’d tell me, “has already interviewed five pediatricians,” or “Julie only gained two pounds this past month,” or “Don’t you think that having a fenced-in yard with actual grass might be nice, once the baby comes? Julie and Jon love northern Virginia. . . .” The minute the conversations with my mother ended, I’d call Julie back to do my meanest imitation of them, except for the days (of course there were days) when my mother actually got to me, and after I hung up I sulked and refused to answer Julie’s calls.

  But most of the time, we derided her together.

  Julie and Jon drove into the city and we took long walks in Rock Creek Park, throwing sticks for Bacchus and scolding him with experimental voices when he loped too far away. After our walks, we’d order takeout and Jon and Jacques would joke about time-sharing a crib. Time-sharing a doctor. Julie was ahead of me, planning-wise. She’d picked a rug for the baby’s room by May, a pediatrician by June, and by month four, just after my mother’s birthday, had already chosen a name. Emily. I figured Julie needed to be ahead, since their baby was due four whole days before ours. Sometimes she’d call me just to say the name out loud, like an incantation. “Em-il-leee.” She’d speed it up, slow it down, the way she used to play the Chopin prelude she labored on all through eighth grade. It was always Emily. Once, I think, it may have been Margot—then Emily again.

  “What if it’s a boy?” I asked. As if I didn’t know. In my family, we just have girls.

  “It’s not a boy,” she’d say, and laugh.

  She kept a calendar; I kept a calendar. We pawed through little outfits at Baby Gap, honing our taste. We both liked primary colors— hated lace and pastels. The babies were due in the same month. December, Capricorn. Patient and practical. Solstice babies, due in the month when the northern hemisphere goes dark and cold, like a closed fist. Two small sparks of light and life.

  Julie usually had her appointments before me—days before, sometimes a week before—and afterward we’d compare notes, doing a postmortem on the nurses. The one with the icy hands. The one with the overbite and the compulsive questions about acid reflux. Julie took her alpha-fetal-protein test, I took mine; she Scheduled her ultrasound, I scheduled mine; like a two
-step, a fox-trot, she stepped forward, I stepped back. It was July, I had goose bumps from the air-conditioning in the study, I was poring over photocopies of calendars from the sixteenth century, trying not to listen to Bacchus scratching the kitchen door, wanting out, and when the phone rang I started laughing when I saw the number on caller ID, having already talked to her twice that morning, once to hear that her boss had reassigned her to yet another dismal case, once to complain that my mother had returned the perfectly nice scarf from Nordstrom we sent for her birthday because it was “too expensive” and she’d never wear it. I was all set to hear another story about the Justice Department or those anticipated syllables—“Em . . . il . . . leee”—but it wasn’t Julie, weirdly enough, it was Jon, and I was still half-laughing as I tried to change gears and make sense of what he was saying, hospital, ultrasound , it was all jumbled, I could barely hear him, and then it wasn’t him. Julie took the phone, her voice clear as a bell. “I had my ultrasound, hon.” Pause. “The baby—” Her voice broke. She was nineteen weeks pregnant, half a week in front of me. Beginning of month five. “The baby died. I have to go to the hospital.”

  I was trying to catch up with her. My heart began to pound, long, slow beats.

  “I have to have it anyway,” she said.

  It was a girl. They could tell from the ultrasound.

  Emily.

  Jon took the phone again. Tried to fill me in. The technician had taken forever. She kept fiddling with the monitor. Finally she left to get the doctor, and then the radiologist herself came in and fiddled some more, and then, after two or three agonizing minutes, she told them: She couldn’t find a heartbeat. “She thinks,” Jon said brokenly, “it may have happened a week ago.”

  Their baby had been dead for a week, and they hadn’t known. None of us had known.

  I tried to work my way back through the past week, remembering what we’d been doing. A few days earlier, Saturday morning, at her kitchen table, Julie and I had been bent over pictures of nurseries in one of those articles we derided, “Making Your Spare Room Ready for Baby.” Scorning the bunnies and the sheep.

  I thought, We will never go back to that again. Uneventful is over.

  We were back to grief and worry. To bodies that betrayed us. I remember how I’d been convinced being pregnant gives you immunity from grief. What had I been thinking?

  She got back on the phone, her voice like a stranger’s.

  “I have to go to the hospital. Dr Weiss says I still have to go through labor.”

  It was like we’d changed genres—sitcom to tragedy. I called Jacques, but I was crying so hard he could barely understand what I was saying. I kept stumbling around, picking things up and putting them down again, like a parody of a woman in labor who doesn’t know what to take to the hospital. Finally I stuffed something to read and a stray roll of Tums in my book bag.

  Jacques met me at Columbia Hospital for Women. Not in one of the peach-and-celadon rooms we visited later with New Age music piped in, not even in Labor and Delivery, but on a surgical floor, a beige, no-nonsense hallway with closed doors where we found Julie propped up in bed wearing a hospital gown, her face white as the sheet behind her, Pitocin dripping into a line in one hand, monitors bleating. My breath felt ragged. Jacques kept rubbing my arm and telling me I had to stay calm. Stay calm—a funny phrase, when you think about it, since I wasn’t calm in the first place. I’m never calm. We were in and out of the room, Dr. Weiss was there, stricken and grave, a sober-faced nurse with her, and they both kept telling us, go home. They said it would be hours before Julie gave birth. “You need to go home and rest,” the nurse kept saying.

  “Go home, hon,” Julie said, her eyes lifeless. “Please.”

  I looked at Jacques, and he nodded. “They need some privacy right now,” he told me in the hallway. Just before we got to the main exit I grabbed on to him.

  It was the most inexplicable feeling, like something inside of me the size of a stitch had just pulled taut and released. A spider unspooling its first strand of web. A match catching and holding.

  “The baby,” I said, my mouth opening. “I think—”

  “What is it?” Jacques was ashen-faced.

  I shook my head. I figured it out as I answered him, as if the words themselves gave this meaning. “I think the baby—moved.”

  Here, of all improbable places. And now.

  We like to think life and death are opposites. Sometimes it’s hard to fathom how close they are. Two sides of the hourglass, sand thickening at the bottom, running down to nothing from above.

  Emily was born at four in the morning, nineteen weeks old. A grief counselor came. They offered Julie and Jon the chance to hold her. They made a print with her heel in cement and told them they’d found it helps to have some tangible memento of the baby to “commemorate the loss.” Most of this I heard later through my mother, who arrived the next day, shell-shocked, tight-lipped, unspeakably sad, shuttling back and forth in taxis between Julie and Jon’s house and ours. I found out some things right away, some things later, after Julie and Jon learned Emily had something terribly wrong—a missing chromosome at number thirteen, a condition so anathema to life she would have died at birth or just after if Julie had lasted to term.

  Jacques lay next to me at night, staring up at the ceiling. “It’s really mysterious, making a baby,” he said. “You think you can map it all out, you can plan all of this, but you can’t, really. You just can’t.”

  I nodded in the dark. I couldn’t answer.

  M Y MOTHER STAYED THREE DAYS. We felt awkward and uncomfortable around each other, both of us trying hard not to say the wrong thing. I called Julie over and over again, but Jon just kept saying she couldn’t talk.

  Julie and Jon had lost Emily. And for a while, I felt like I’d lost Julie.

  In the first days after she got back from the hospital, Julie was surrounded by a sad flurry of activity. Jon was there with her. There were phone calls, flowers, people reaching out. Sara and Geoff called from Olympia. My father called between patients. Friends and colleagues sent flowers. But at the heart of it all, there was an almost unbearable silence: all the plans gone, doctors’ visits canceled, the door to the baby’s room closed. Jacques and I came over and tried to keep them company, but it was clear they wanted to be alone. They bought a tiny Japanese maple and planted it in their garden.

  “I’ll call you when I can,” Julie said, barely looking at me.

  Every day I stared at the phone, willing it to life, willing her to call, but, “You understand,” she’d say when I tried calling her, or, “I can’t, hon, I just can’t.” My mother, back in Michigan, called every afternoon, filling me in. She told me Julie was thinking about taking a leave of absence from work. In August, she and Jon went to Maine together to spend some time alone, away from DC. Time just to be on the beach, to be together.

  They loved Maine, my mother reported, once they were back home in Virginia again. It reminded Julie of Charlevoix, the place in northern Michigan we always went on vacation in the summers. “It was such a relief for her, being away from DC,” my mother added.

  I held the phone away from my ear, staring at the wall.

  Julie and I were going to do this together, I kept thinking. We were going to have the babies at the same time! I missed her constantly. I went to see Dr. Weiss. August, September. I got bigger. Fall came, I started teaching again. In my new course, Writing the Self in Early Modern England, we started by reading The Return of Martin Guerre, the story of a peasant in sixteenth-century France who leaves an unhappy marriage, joins the army, and disappears. When he comes back, his marriage is much better, the community loves him. He’s a kinder, much more likeable man. But events unfold, and it turns out he isn’t who he claims to be after all—he’s an imposter. The real Martin Guerre died at war, and a soldier who knew him came back to the village assuming his identity. How can someone walk away from his life and someone else just take his place? How is such a thing possi
ble?

  “Didn’t they know it wasn’t him?” one student objected. “How could he just pretend to be someone he wasn’t?”

  “We don’t always get to choose,” I told her. “We like to think we always stays the same. That we’re the same person, all our lives. But it doesn’t always work that way. Some things are beyond our control.”

  LIFE GOES ON. WHEN YOU’RE pregnant, that fact is doubly true. I was getting bigger by the week. I could mark the passage of time by my outgrown maternity clothes—that was August, when the blue jumper still fit. That was September, when I wore those black leggings every day. The baby moved now and I could feel it all the time. I could see it moving when I looked in the mirror. We were getting ready. In October, Jacques and I started working on the nursery. We were moving on—we had to. But with each thing we did, each plan we made, I thought about Emily.

  The tree they planted for her was less than two feet tall, with only the slightest furring of leaves. They had to stake it on all sides so the wind wouldn’t blow it over. They made an appointment with a geneticist at Johns Hopkins—an expert. They were “moving forward,” my mother said, and she made that sound like a good thing. Better than moving backward, I guess, but back was what I missed. Every morning, around the time Julie and I always talked, I tried to stay busy so I wouldn’t listen for the phone to ring. My mother took it on herself to keep me up-to-date. She told me I needed to understand that Julie was “wrecked.”

  “It’s life-changing for them,” my mother said. “They’re rethinking everything. Why they live where they live. Why they work where they work.”