Ties That Bind

by Marie Bostwick

  Tim needed to talk about the future he wouldn’t live to see, and I let him, but it was hard. Having a baby was the last thing on my mind. All I cared about then was Tim. I didn’t want to imagine a world that didn’t include him. And I couldn’t imagine raising a child without him by my side.

  One day, I told him so.

  Tim reached out his hand, asked me to help him roll over so he could see me better. I stood up, grasped his bony arm, careful of the IVs, and wedged my other hand gently under his back to give him a boost. He was starting to have problems breathing by then. I remember how raspy his voice sounded.

  “Do you know what’s going to happen in the second after I die?” he asked.

  I shook my head. I could not imagine that. I didn’t want to.

  “The world is going to keep on spinning—just like it has since the beginning of creation. Clocks are going to tick, tides are going to come in and go out, couples are going to fall in and out of love, and you’re going to feel very sad.”

  “Don’t.” I put a finger against his lips. “Please. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  His eyebrows, or rather the place his eyebrows used to be before the chemo robbed him of his hair, drew together. He frowned and pushed my hand away. Weak as he was, he was still strong. Stronger than me.

  “Not talking about it won’t make it go away, Pippa. I’m going to die. After I do, I know you’re going to be sad. But not for always. Life will go on.”

  “No. Not for me.”

  “It will,” he insisted. “One day you’ll wake up and hear the birds outside the window and you’ll stop to listen and then you’ll stop again, realize that, for a while, you forgot to remember to be sad. And when that happens, I don’t want you to feel guilty about it, okay?” He reached across the white sheet and interlaced his fingers in mine. “Okay?” he repeated, in a gentler voice.

  I bobbed my head because I couldn’t speak.

  “Good,” he said, accepting my nod as confirmation. “And someday, I don’t know when, but someday, you’re going to wake up and decide that you’re tired of being alone. You’re going to want a family, a baby. Two babies. Who knows? You might even meet somebody and fall in love and want to have a baby with him—and that’s okay with me ….” He paused for a moment, thinking. “As long as it’s not Scott McNally. Remember him from college? What a jerk. Always hated that guy.”

  I laughed and wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. “Fair enough. I won’t fall in love and make babies with Scott McNally.”

  “Good. But if you fall in love with somebody else, a non-jerk, then fine. You don’t need to feel guilty or disloyal. You have my blessing. I want you to be happy, Pippa. And if you don’t meet someone and fall in love, I want you to have a family anyway, just like we always dreamed we would.

  “After I’m gone, take the insurance money and the junior fund, anything that’s left after you pay for the funeral and the medical bills the insurance won’t cover, and use it for the fertility treatments. I was talking to one of the doctors and he told me …”

  I turned my head away. “Honey, I’m tired. Can’t we talk about this later?”

  His eyes flashed with a hard, dark expression I had seen only rarely in our eight years of marriage but recognized. When Tim looked like that, he had made up his mind and nothing on earth was going to get him to change it.

  “No. We’re almost out of later. We’ve got to talk about it now. There aren’t a lot of advantages to being on your deathbed, but one of them is that you get to set the agenda.”

  “Kind of like how you get to control the remote during football season?”

  “Exactly like that. Pippa, listen to me. We can have a baby, our baby ….” He paused and his eyes glowed with sweet anticipation, as if there really was a baby, not a test tube of frozen sperm and a 5 to 20 percent chance of fertilization, as if he could see beyond the shadow of death into a future that held new life. “This is the chance of a lifetime! Don’t you see?”

  I couldn’t. Not then. It would be a long time before that would happen.

  Tim grabbed my hand, pressed it hard to his lips, trying to kiss me into understanding.

  “It’s hard, I know, and sad, but … oh, baby, it wasn’t all sad! I’ve loved you so much. How many people get to have what we’ve had? For a day or even a year? How many? I don’t want our story to have a tragic ending. And I don’t think it has to, not if we’ve got someone to pass it all on to, the good times, all the memories. Promise me you’ll tell the baby about all of it—how we went camping on our honeymoon and the tent started to leak, about the time I caught the ball in Fenway Park, and how we took that bike trip across the whole state, all the way from Boston to Pittsfield ….”

  “And the red-tail hawk flew right over us for the last five miles ….”

  His smile beamed. “Yes! Wasn’t that something? Tell him that, Pippa. Tell our baby everything we ever did together! Promise me you will.”

  “I will. I promise.”

  After Tim died, I forgot about that conversation. Well, not forgot about it so much as I chose not to remember it. The grief over my beloved’s death was so immense that for a long time I felt dead too. I could not imagine ever feeling any other way.

  But just as Tim had predicted, life went on.

  For the first two months after Tim died, I found it a struggle even to get out of bed, let alone leave the house or go to class. I suppose it might have gone on longer if not for a knock on my door one afternoon in early October. There was a man standing on the stoop wearing blue jeans, a red flannel shirt, and holding a puppy—if a thirty-five-pound dog, no matter how young, can ever really qualify as a puppy.

  The man, a breeder of English mastiffs, was Ben Abbott. The puppy’s name, he informed me, was Clementine. “That’s what I’ve been calling her anyway. You can always change it if you want to.”

  “You must have the wrong address. I didn’t buy a dog.”

  “Maybe not, but your husband did, about six months ago. Well, not a dog exactly, but he paid in advance for a puppy from Esmerelda’s next litter. She’s a champion, my Esmerelda. I don’t normally sell her pups to people who aren’t planning on showing them, but your husband insisted you needed a mastiff and, like I said, he paid in advance.”

  “Oh, Mr. Abbott. I think there’s been a misunderstanding. I don’t know anything about puppies and, anyway, this just isn’t a good time for me.”

  Ben Abbott sucked on his teeth for a moment. “Here,” he said and thrust the dog into my arms.

  Even at eight weeks of age, Clementine was more than an armful, so heavy I nearly dropped her. Unfamiliar with dogs, I held her stomach up, like you would a baby, with her ear flopping backward over my arm. She yawned, stretching her neck, then opened her enormous brown eyes and stared into mine.

  Needless to say, I kept her.

  There were days, particularly the day when I came into the living room and saw that Clementine had chewed up one entire arm of the sofa, ripping the upholstery and pulling out the stuffing with her teeth, that I wondered what in the world had possessed my husband to buy me a dog. But he knew what he was doing. Clementine was a great companion, and a much-needed distraction from my grief. Most importantly, she got me out of the house. First, just out into the yard, then to the end of the block and back, then on longer walks where neighbors came out of their homes to pat Clementine, say it was good to see me again, and sometimes invite me in for coffee. In the spring, when Clemmie’s legs grew longer, I even put her on one of those extendable leashes so she could lope along next to me during bike rides. If not for that, I’m not sure I’d ever have ridden again. Oh, yes. Tim knew exactly what he was doing.

  After a year, I returned to seminary, enrolling in two courses that first semester, three the next, eventually working up to a full load, slowly returning to the land of the living, the place where people exist in anticipation of what is to come.

  And one day, about two years ago, just as Tim predicte
d, I went through most of an entire day before I remembered to be sad. It wasn’t that I had forgotten about Tim, just the opposite. While cleaning out some closets, I found a bunch of old photograph albums and spent an entire morning going through them, remembering all our good times together and feeling so grateful for what we had shared. But I wanted to share it with someone else, to pass on the stories, the lessons, the love that I had known with my precious husband. I wanted a baby, Tim’s and mine.

  I called up the fertility clinic and got more information on artificial insemination. The costs weren’t as high as I had feared, nor was the procedure particularly complicated. The medical bills, the funeral, what I had spent on living expenses during those months of depression and grief had used up a lot of the junior fund and the life insurance, but there was enough left to pay for several attempts at artificial insemination.

  I prayed about it, talked to my parents and the seminary chaplain about it, and decided to go ahead with the procedure. At thirty-eight, I was a little older than most first-time mothers, but I was healthy. But after four attempts, I still wasn’t pregnant. My doctor suggested adding fertility drugs to the regime. They didn’t help.

  Much as I wanted a child, I began to wonder if this was what God wanted for me. Perhaps my calling was to ministry and ministry alone. I spent a great deal of time meditating on the passage in Luke in which the rich young ruler walks sadly away after the Savior tells him to give all he has to the poor and follow him. “There is no one who has left a house or parents or brothers or wife or children for the sake of the kingdom of God who shall not receive many times more in this present time, and in the age to come, eternal life.”

  After more prayer and more conversations with people I trusted, I reached a decision: I would undergo ten procedures, and if they didn’t work, I would accept that God’s plan for my life didn’t include parenthood and move on. Why ten? Because that was all the remainder of my savings would pay for and because the last treatment would occur shortly before my fortieth birthday, which seemed a good time to stop. Unexpectedly, that final treatment coincided with a phone call telling me that I was to fill the position of interim pastor at New Bern Community Church and that I was needed in New Bern almost immediately.

  That’s why this pregnancy had caught me by surprise. After nine unsuccessful attempts at artificial insemination, I didn’t really expect the tenth to work. Emotionally, I had already moved on. On top of that, I was so overwhelmed with packing, moving, and trying to get a handle on my new responsibilities that I barely had time to eat or sleep. I simply forgot all about the fertility treatment. I chalked my fatigue up to overwork and long hours, not the possibility of pregnancy.

  But it was true. Dr. Rhea Mandel, the head of obstetrics at the hospital and, therefore, someone who ought to know what she was talking about, had told me I was going to have a baby. Lying on the exam table, covered by a paper gown and a sheet, I felt two tears slip silently down my cheeks.

  Once again, Tim was right. This was the chance of a lifetime.

  After the exam, Dr. Mandel, Rhea, helped me sit up again. She took a seat on a rolling stool.

  “Everything looks good. But it’s early days yet. And at your age …”

  I finished the thought for her. “It’s possible that I’ll lose the baby. I know.”

  The doctor nodded. “It’s sad when that happens, but when it does, there is usually a good reason. If you get through the first trimester, you should have no problem carrying to term. But until then, you might want to keep this quiet.”

  I nodded. “My parents will be over the moon when I tell them, but I don’t want to before I’m pretty sure everything will be all right. And I don’t want anyone in town to know, not yet. A few people in the church are still adjusting to the idea of a female minister,” I said, thinking of Ted Carney. “The thought of a pregnant female minister might not go over too well. I don’t want anyone to think I’ll fall down on the job just because I’m having a baby. I’m going to go on just like I was before.”

  Rhea laid both hands flat on her thighs and raised her eyebrows. “Oh, no, you’re not. You have got to slow down, Philippa. Get eight hours of sleep a night. A nap in the afternoon. Eat regular meals. Your schedule makes a medical resident look like a slacker. No wonder Bob Tucker had a heart attack.”

  “But … this is my first church. I can’t slack off. There’s just too much to do.”

  “Well, then you’d better find some people to help you do it,” she said in a stern voice before getting to her feet. “I’m not kidding. You cannot continue working fourteen-hour days, not if you want to carry this baby to term. Get some people to help you. Isn’t that what people in churches are supposed to do? I thought that was what the whole ‘love your neighbor’ thing was about.”

  She walked to the door. “At your age, and as hard as it was for you to get pregnant, you won’t get another chance.” She pointed a scolding finger at me. “Do not blow this, Philippa. I mean it.”

  I nodded. “I won’t.”

  “Good.” She opened the door and winked. “Congratulations. I’m very happy for you.”

  25

  Margot

  February

  Evelyn hefted an enormous pile of fabric bolts off the cutting counter and carried them toward the shelves. Working in a quilt shop is a lot more physical than most people realize. That’s why Evelyn is in such good shape.

  It’s been a long winter marked by snowstorm after snowstorm. Three-and four-foot icicles hang from the eaves of every building in town, and stories of soggy ceilings and hundred-year-old barns collapsing under the weight of the snow are common. That probably explained why we’d had a full roster for our “Easy Breezy Beach Tote” workshop and why so many students stayed after class and bought more fabric to make more totes; everyone is hoping for an early spring and dreaming of sunny summer days.

  The bolts—a rainbow of hot pinks, brilliant blues, turquoise, buttercup, and lime green—towered almost to the top of Evelyn’s head, covering her face and mouth, making her response to my question sound like, “Drubgum. Fwoost? Ahbetweepburgenzwip.”

  “What?” I laughed and grabbed five bolts from the top of the stack. “Try again.”

  “I was just asking if there’s something going on between you and Geoff Bench. This is the third time you’ve had lunch with him this month.”

  “Fourth,” I corrected and then blushed, thinking how that sounded. I carried a bolt over to the pink section and reshelved it. “We’re just getting together to talk about Olivia and fill in some paperwork. He has to do that. It’s his job.”

  Evelyn dropped her pile of fabric on the floor, picked up two green bolts, and carried them over to the green section. “Has he had lunch with your parents four times this month?”

  “He’s met with them,” I said defensively.

  Evelyn shot me a meaningful glance.

  “Oh, stop it. They’re not here as often as I am. Buffalo is a seven-hour drive. And Dad has had a lot of work. Plumbers always do in winter; people’s pipes freeze. I’m the one who sees Olivia every day, so it’s only natural that Mr. Bench needs to talk to me more than to my parents.”

  My daily visits to the pediatric ward of the hospital haven’t done much to improve my relationship with my niece. The other children on the ward, the ones who were well enough to respond, like me and call me Auntie Margot. Olivia barely looks at me or speaks to me, or to anyone, including my parents. Which, I’m ashamed to admit, makes me feel a little better.

  Everyone says Olivia is grieving and I just need to give it time, but I wonder. Could she be trying not to grieve? Not to feel? It’s hard to know what is going on in someone’s mind if they won’t talk to you. Either way, I’m worried about her. And Olivia is only one of my worries. Geoff Bench is also on the list.

  What goes on between Geoff and me is more a monologue than exchange. At our last meeting, we spent perhaps five minutes talking about Olivia and the rest of the hour discuss
ing fly fishing and scuba diving in the Caymans—two subjects on which I had almost nothing to add beyond nods, smiles, and an occasional, “Really? How interesting.” I was trying to do what Arnie had told me to do—make Geoff like me. So far, it seems to be working. Maybe too well?

  “It’s only natural that Geoff talks to me more frequently than my parents,” I told Evelyn. “We’ve got a lot of things to discuss.”

  “I’m sure you do,” Evelyn said evenly.

  “Stop!” I laughed and wedged a bolt of bright green polka-dot fabric onto a shelf. “I am not interested in Geoff Bench.”

  “Ah, but is he interested in you?”

  “No,” I insisted. “I’m a good listener and Geoff is a good talker. That’s it. Now, is it all right if I go to lunch or not?”

  Evelyn returned the last bolt to the proper shelf. “Sure. The rush is over. I’ll probably spend the rest of the afternoon sewing samples.”

  I nodded and grabbed my coat off the rack near the door. “I’ll be back by two.”

  “Take all the time you need.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “but an hour will be enough.” More than enough.

  According to news reports, the groundhog did not see his shadow on February second, which means that spring is supposed to come early this year, but I see no sign of it. The snow is piled so high that there’s no place left to put it. The sidewalks are less sidewalks than narrow paths between waist-high snow canyons. Who ever came up with the idea of basing weather prognostications on the whims of a rodent, anyway?

  Though it’s only a short walk from the quilt shop to the café, the cold air felt good. I was glad for the chance to get outside and clear my head before my lunch appointment.

  It’s not that Geoff is a bad guy, but … he makes me uncomfortable. He hardly ever blinks. And he has a habit of talking about his wife, not in a good way. How she doesn’t understand him and how she’s always away in Florida, working on her tan and spending his money, or in New York, visiting her sister and spending more of his money.