The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish for Our Daughters

by Jeffrey Zaslow

  There was silence. Then the man smiled. “Well, you’d be perfect for my friend.”

  “I remind you I’m about to have a baby,” Jennifer said.

  “I see that,” the man responded. “But everything happens for a reason. I think I was meant to meet you today.”

  He left the store and Jennifer was left contemplating his final words to her. Ten minutes later, the man returned with his fiancée, who’d been shopping elsewhere in the mall. “This is Jennifer,” he said to his fiancée. “I think she’d be perfect for Matthew.” The couple gave Matthew’s phone number to Jennifer on a little piece of paper.

  When she got home and told her family what happened, they advised her to be cautious. It all sounded odd. But Jennifer was so uncertain about her life. She felt as if she was wearing a scarlet letter, and that she’d end up alone forever. And so something within her told her to follow through. She called Matthew and left him a message.

  First, she explained how she had met his friend at the store. “He probably told you about my situation,” she said. “I’ll completely understand if you don’t return my call. . . .”

  Matthew was surprised to learn that his friend had handed out his number, and so he asked for an explanation. The friend first talked about how beautiful and engaging Jennifer was. Then he said: “There’s just one small thing.”

  “And what’s that?” Matthew asked.

  “She’s seven months pregnant.”

  “What are you doing?” Matthew responded incredulously. “You’re really trying to fix me up with pregnant women?”

  Matthew didn’t return Jennifer’s call for ten days. But then he decided, what the heck, he’d call this mystery woman. They ended up speaking on the phone for two hours. About everything. The long phone conversations continued for a month, but they both felt it seemed too weird to meet. Jennifer was about to have a baby. Matthew was leaving Michigan soon for a residency at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. How could it work?

  Finally, on Matthew’s twenty-seventh birthday—February 1, 2003—they agreed to meet for lunch at a restaurant in the mall where Jennifer worked. As she remembers it, she was immediately taken with his blue eyes. He thought she was beautiful and charming—and out of his league. Yes, she was pregnant; she looked huge. But that seemed secondary somehow to the chemistry between them.

  Given that she was eating for two, Jennifer was ravenous that day; she had pork chops, mashed potatoes, dessert. Matthew watched her eat with a half-smile on his face.

  It was understandably a strange first date, and yet their attraction to each other was undeniable. “This is crazy,” Matthew said at one point.

  “Completely crazy,” Jennifer answered.

  Matthew later approached his parents. “I’ve met a girl,” he said, “and she’s eight months pregnant.” They listened, and then his mother spoke: “If Jennifer is worthy enough for you to mention her to us, then she means something to you.”

  Matthew had been prepared for his parents to show a degree of angst. He would have understood. But he was touched by how nonjudgmental they were. They had faith in him. He had their blessing to follow his heart.

  On their second date, when Jennifer was just short of nine months pregnant, she and Matthew went to Olive Garden. It was an icy day, and she was moved by how he gently took her hand to help her walk into the restaurant.

  Jennifer knew she was having a girl, and so they discussed names she was considering, including Victoria.

  “I’ve always loved that name,” Matthew said. “You should go with that!” In that instant, Jennifer knew what her baby would be named.

  Victoria was born at 9:46 p.m. on March 5, 2003, and twelve hours later, Matthew came to the hospital, where he met the baby and Jennifer’s family for the first time. Someone took a photo of him holding Victoria, and he was smiling proudly—almost as if he were her father. “I can’t say that heaven parted and the angels descended when I took her in my arms,” he now says. “But it was a precious moment.”

  Matthew moved to Minnesota for his residency in anesthesiology, and Jennifer and the baby traveled from Michigan to visit him. Sometimes they’d meet him halfway, in Chicago. It was all so romantic, and by August, Matthew was ready to propose.

  One day he put Willie Nelson’s version of “I Can See Clearly Now” on his stereo. Victoria was napping, and Matthew asked Jennifer to dance. The dance felt awkward—Matthew was nervous—and so he aborted the dance and decided to just do it. He got on one knee, took Jennifer’s hand, and asked her to marry him.

  Matthew knew he was proposing to two people, of course.

  When Jennifer’s parents got news of the engagement, they told Matthew a secret: From the time their four daughters were born, they had been praying for each of their future husbands. “You’re a man of integrity,” Carol said to Matthew. “And we believe you were meant for Jen from the very beginning. I’ve got to tell you. I feel such respect for you, that you could look past Jennifer’s mistakes and see the woman she is.”

  Days later, when Carol told Jennifer she wanted to take her to Becker’s, Jennifer was suspicious. “If that’s where Mom got her dress, they probably sell grandma dresses there,” she told her sister Heather. But she agreed to go.

  Jennifer felt embarrassed walking in, carrying six-month-old Victoria in a car seat. It was uncomfortable to tell Shelley and her saleswomen that she wasn’t marrying the baby’s father. But they were fascinated by her story. “Wow, your fiancé is a very special man,” Shelley told her. “You’re going to have a happy marriage.”

  Carol and Jennifer didn’t want to buy a white dress. It seemed inappropriate. But they found a beautiful champagne-colored gown with a sprinkling of poinsettias on it.

  The day Jennifer got married, her sister Heather sobbed all the way down the aisle. She was so grateful that Jennifer had finally found a safe haven and a worthy man. She felt renewed faith in her once-wayward childhood hero.

  After they married, Matthew and Jennifer had two more children. Their youngest, Abby, born in 2010, has Down syndrome and a rare blood disorder; doctors say she will likely contract leukemia before age three. She’s a beautiful little girl—they call her “the light in our lives”—but her health issues weigh heavily on the entire family. Abby ends up in hospital emergency rooms almost every other week. Jennifer says she appreciates her past struggles because they’ve helped prepare her for the struggles she’s had with Abby. They gave her the courage to deal with what’s ahead.

  These days, the Ottos also find it helpful to think of all the tests and all the setbacks in their family history—from the day in 1929 when Great-Grandma Peggy ran away to the day in 2002 when Jennifer announced her pregnancy to the day in 2010 when little Abby was diagnosed. They got through all of it together, sometimes hand in hand, sometimes nose to nose. They’ll get through whatever lies ahead, too.

  Victoria, who was formally adopted by Matthew when she was a toddler, is now seven years old. From time to time, she’ll look at that photo of Matthew in the hospital, holding her tightly, twelve hours after her birth.

  “Your daddy picked you,” Jennifer has told her. “That’s a very special thing. And you know what? He picked me, too.”

  When Becker’s Bridal hosts their “Blowout Sample Sale,” Shelley and Alyssa never know who will show up, or what secrets they carry with them. The day can feel wild and exhausting, and all about making quick sales. But Shelley tries to keep in mind that even on these busiest days, in a store filled with frenzied shoppers grabbing at dresses, there are always families who’ve arrived here with a lifetime of bittersweet memories.

  Shelley and Alyssa didn’t know why Carol Otto ducked into that dressing room. They saw her crying, but couldn’t tell if they were tears of joy or sadness. They didn’t know the things on Carol’s mind: thoughts of her late mother touching her face; of her grandmother, so late in life, rejoining the family; of her pregnant daughter’s luck in finding a man of great character; of the health i
ssues now facing her youngest grandchild.

  And so all Shelley could do was to make pleasant small talk, and to joke about the naked mannequin. She thanked Carol for buying her gown at Becker’s all those years ago, and for returning with her three older daughters.

  Rochelle, Carol’s youngest, isn’t yet in a serious relationship.

  “I hope when you’re ready,” Shelley said, “that you’ll come back to see us too.”

  Jennifer and Matthew on their wedding day, with Victoria

  Chapter Eighteen

  Megan

  When a bride and her family find themselves coping with an emergency that might lead to a wedding’s postponement or cancellation, they don’t immediately think to contact Becker’s Bridal. In 1971, after Ashley Brandenburg’s mother went through the windshield of her sister’s car, needing 1,000 stitches, no one called the shop to let them know. Likewise, in 2010, Shelley never got a call about Megan Pardo’s car accident on her way to teach kindergarten. The Pardo family was too overwhelmed to think of it.

  The day of the accident, Megan’s forty-eight-year-old mom, Laura, took five nerve-wracking hours to drive from Michigan to BroMenn Medical Center in Bloomington, Illinois. When she arrived, she was relieved to learn that Megan’s injuries didn’t appear life-threatening, but she was also overwhelmed by the magnitude of what had happened.

  “Your daughter had her window open,” a nurse said, and very quickly, Laura learned the ramifications of that statement.

  Megan’s decision that morning to roll down her window so fresh air might keep her awake had served to compound her injuries. When she had jerked the steering wheel to the left, leading the car to flip, her face and right hand went through the open window, scraping along the pavement as the car rolled over. Her seat belt had saved her life, but any part of her body that went out that open window was battered and bloody.

  Megan was conscious when the car landed in the cornfield across the road, but she was bleeding from both hands, her face, and her head. The largest laceration was above her left eye, but Megan’s vision was OK, and looking at her right hand, she immediately knew that the damage done to it was severe. One finger was severed, and the others looked like raw hamburger. Her hand hardly resembled a hand anymore.

  Though the pain was intense, she was able to press her damaged right hand against the horn while she frantically screamed and waved her left hand out the window. A young man driving a truck saw her, called 911, and remained at the scene to keep her calm. Her fiancé, Shane, then finishing his degree as an agricultural business major at Illinois State, wasn’t contacted right away. It didn’t matter. Megan was in such shock she couldn’t even remember his cell phone number to tell rescue workers.

  At the hospital, she was quickly taken into four hours of surgery in an attempt to repair the damage to her right hand and to take skin from the side of her body so it could be grafted on her face. Her left hand had fared better, but still had a broken finger and various scrapes and cuts.

  For hours, Laura sat in the hospital waiting room with Shane, her twenty-three-year-old future son-in-law, a soft-spoken young man who was reassuringly calm. As the day wore on, Laura’s good opinion of him was reaffirmed. If Megan made it through, Laura knew, Shane would be there for her no matter what.

  Halfway through surgery, the doctor came out and spoke to them. Megan had told the doctor that she is right-handed, and he addressed that first. “The damage to the right hand is far more extensive than we anticipated,” he said. He couldn’t find bone, muscle, tendons or joints in her middle two fingers. Her pinky had just a few fragments, and the doctor said he was able to reattach the index finger up to the first knuckle.

  “She’s unlikely ever to be able to use the fingers on this hand again,” the doctor said. “You should prepare yourselves for the possibility that we’ll need to amputate her hand. She might be better off having a prosthetic hand with fully functional fingers than living with a hand that will basically be unusable.”

  The doctor returned to surgery to work on the skin grafts and to slowly remove the gravel that had permeated all of Megan’s wounds. While Megan was in recovery, he returned again to the waiting room. “The next twenty-four hours are crucial,” he said. “We want to see if the middle fingers on her right hand will stay alive.” He was a straight-shooter: “I’m not optimistic. Only one blood vessel per finger is intact. I’ve been grafting skin around nothing—no bone. It’s like a hot dog—loose skin just hanging there.”

  Megan’s dad, Jack, who had been in Alabama on business, without easy airport access, drove to Illinois as fast as he could, but it would be ten p.m. before he’d arrive. And that tense, ten-hour ride to Illinois offered a terrible sense of déjà vu for him. In 1984, when his older daughter, Melissa, had fallen off a table while having her diaper changed, he had just left town on business; at the moment she fell, he was driving to Windsor, Ontario. Because he couldn’t be reached by phone, state police were sent to find him on the interstate. They never spotted Jack’s car, so he finally got the news when he checked into his hotel in Canada: His nine-month-old had fallen and was in a coma. Now again, twenty-six years later, terrible news about a daughter was reaching him. How many fathers, twice in their lives, get such calls while out of town on a business trip?

  As Jack drove, he tried to stay positive. What good would it do to consider himself cursed? Unlike his wife and daughter, he was not a man of great faith. And so he didn’t find comfort in considering the accident to be “God’s will.” Instead, he thought logically. “I’ve already been through the worst, losing Melissa,” he told himself. “This car accident is awful, but the doctors say Megan’s life is not in jeopardy. We’ve already handled the worst. We’ve lost a child. We can handle this.”

  By late evening, word of the accident had spread through Illinois, Michigan, and other places where people knew Megan. Online prayer chains were started, and Laura was advised to open a page on CaringBridge.org, the online site that helps friends and family remain apprised of a patient’s health updates. In Laura’s first CaringBridge posting, she wrote: “Megan slept fitfully throughout the night, as did her parents. We felt God’s presence and the love of all of you as you prayed throughout the night.”

  On the morning after surgery, Megan’s throbbing right hand was her alarm clock, and once awake, she had trouble breathing because her damaged nose was packed with gauze. “The doctor came in and shared the best news we could hope for,” Laura wrote on CaringBridge. “All the fingers on her right hand are viable and have circulation. They were pink when he poked at them, and she let him know she could feel them. The doctor told her she’s very lucky—a blessed girl.”

  In the days that followed, Laura used the site to chronicle Megan’s progress, both medically and spiritually. It was therapeutic for Laura to write updates, and to read all of the supportive postings people were leaving in the online guestbook.

  Wednesday, March 31, at 9:18 a.m.: “The doctor wants to build a splint for Megan’s right hand. The goal is to get her hand and fingers to lie correctly. They need to elongate her fingers and keep them rigid. He wants the skin he has grafted there to become like an eggshell, so that when it’s time for hand reconstruction, the fingers will be ready.”

  Wednesday, 7:01 p.m.: “The doctor and occupational therapist created a rubber ‘banjo splint’ today around Megan’s arm, wrist, and palm. Each fingernail has been stitched to its corresponding finger and the ends of the stitches are hooked to rubber bands. Each rubber band is hooked to a peg on a loop. The purpose is to elongate her fingers and keep them rigid. It’s awkward and uncomfortable, but she does have all four fingers and they look good. The only potential complication is that the index finger, severed in the accident and reattached Monday, is not looking healthy. Please join us in a powerful prayer for Megan’s index finger.”

  Thursday, April 1 at 8:11 p.m.: “The doctor explained that plastic surgery can’t be done on Megan’s face for at least six months. The
tissue he grafted has to become soft, with good blood flow. So for the wedding Megan will have makeup covering the scars. We hadn’t really understood this, so it came as a shock. Meanwhile, because there are no bones, tendons, muscle, or cartilage in her two middle fingers, it will take a long time for them to be ready for additional surgeries, which will involve bone grafts with bone from her hip. Please don’t stop praying, as the pain in Megan’s hand is fairly constant, especially when the doctor tightens the rubber bands. We also anticipate some anxiety and frustration as she learns to live one-handed.”

  Friday, April 2, at 11:55 a.m.: “God is good! Megan is alive, she has normal brain function, no internal injury, her charming personality is intact, and she has Shane. However, she will no longer have the tip of the index finger on her right hand. The doctor has confirmed that the reattachment is not working. The fingertip is dying. She is scheduled for surgery Monday at 7 a.m. to remove the tip. At that time, he’ll also make a decision about the pinkie finger (which is black) and the middle finger (which is turning purple.) Only the ring finger has a nice pink color. Megan’s attitude remains good, as she realizes life with one hand is still a pretty good life.”

  Before the accident, Megan had believed she was in love with Shane. But it wasn’t until afterward, as she watched him show his love for her, day after day, that she truly realized how deep the bonds between a man and woman can be.

  “This is a test for us,” Shane told people when they asked how he and Megan were doing. “Couples don’t usually face a test like this so early in a relationship. But we’re going to pass. Loving each other through adversity will make us stronger and closer.” And it did. He actually realized that he loved Megan more every day, just seeing the courage with which she faced her predicament. In the days after the accident, Shane kept trying to reassure Megan by holding her less-injured left hand, to let her know he was there.