Giant George

by Dave Nasser

  Christie too, for all her initial exhilaration, was beginning to feel anxious about her work. The trouble was that her job was to go out and sell; if she didn’t do that, she didn’t get paid. Not only that, if she wasn’t there to look after her clients, there were plenty of others, in both her own firm and others, who’d be quick to exploit that and try to get those clients for themselves. We decided the best thing would be not to tell anyone about the pregnancy till she’d reached a point along the line where she had to.

  This is where life can sometimes be cruelly ironic, because that point—the halfway point—was suddenly upon us, and fate, it seemed, had her own ideas about it. It was a Monday morning in mid-July, and a particularly warm day, when Christie arrived at the clinic for her twenty-week scan.

  Her baby bump was just about showing now and her work wardrobe, consequently, was becoming smaller and more difficult to manage. It seemed every weekday started with a wardrobe malfunction and a bed heaped with discarded clothes. We had definitely reached the point where, if she didn’t say something herself, someone else in her office would comment, for sure.

  We’d actually been discussing it that Sunday evening over dinner: how she needed to tell her boss that she was pregnant, along with her due date, of course, and prepare for the impact her taking time off would have. Paid leave to have a baby, in most parts of the United States, is not something a person can rely on. Sure, there’s a basic right to a small amount of unpaid time off, but there was no way Christie could be complacent about the idea of sitting at home bonding with our new baby. She needed to work as late into the pregnancy as possible, and keep hold of her clients while she was away. She’d pretty much decided she’d give up work a week before, and get some sort of day care organized sooner rather than later, to be sure she had everything in place for the two months or so she hoped to stay at home.

  Apart from that, there was no reason in the world for us to worry. We had already passed the major antenatal milestone. The amniocentesis had been done five weeks back, and, yes, we’d sure worried about that one. When you’re pregnant and thirty-five, which was what she now was, you’d have to live on a desert island not to know all the stats about the risks for older mothers, the chief one being the increased likelihood of giving birth to a baby with disabilities. And thirty-five, it seemed, was the number that mattered. It was all “after thirty-five, this…” and “after thirty-five, that…,” so we were naturally pretty anxious on the day of that procedure, and equally happy to get the all clear.

  But that day had been over a month ago. This was just a routine twenty-week scan—except it wasn’t shaping up to be routine at all. And, God, how I wished I’d been there with her. It must have been a pretty scary business for Christie, lying on the exam table that July morning. Having taken a couple of hours off and rearranged all her appointments, she expected the technician to point on the screen at a healthy baby, but then, inexplicably, that didn’t happen.

  The very worst bit of it all, Christie told me, was that period of heart-in-mouth waiting, of sensing something might be up, but not knowing quite what it might be; of noticing the subtle change in the ultrasound technician’s manner, but not daring to interrupt her concentration; of lying there, transfixed, hardly daring to breathe; of the silence—a new and uncomfortable silence, one suddenly throbbing with apprehension, a silence broken only by the hum of the machine; of the feeling of the gel being swept back and forth over her stomach; of the realization, as every second ticked by, that something must be wrong with the baby.

  “I need to get the doctor in,” the technician told her finally.

  CHAPTER 10

  Into Each Life…

  I was at home working on the house, up on the top of a ladder, when my cell phone rang. George was sound asleep on his bed in the next room over. I hadn’t had this phone for long, and it was full of different functions. When I got it, I’d set it up to have a particular song play whenever Christie called. It was “Golden” by Jill Scott, which we’d had played at our wedding. My putting it on my phone was, Christie told me, the most romantic thing ever. I was clearly getting the hang of being a husband.

  I didn’t hear the phone right away though, because of the whine of the drilling, but George did—he knew Christie’s ringtone as well as he knew the doorbell, and was right away in the room with me, tail wagging, all excited. It was noticing George that made me tune in to the call. I put down the drill and climbed down to go answer it.

  My phone was over on the other side of the room—our kitchen adjoined our living room—sitting on the kitchen worktop, lightly covered in plaster dust. I blew on it as I opened it and raised it to my ear. Right away, I knew something wasn’t right. I could tell even before she said a word. It was one of those things I hadn’t consciously thought about, yet had obviously processed on some level. Why would she be calling me otherwise? She’d already told me she was going to pop back after her appointment; she had an out-of-town appointment later in the afternoon and was planning to change into her work suit when she got here, grab some lunch with me and George and then go on to the meeting.

  “Honey?” she said. Her voice was so low I could hardly hear it. It also sounded tight, like she was trying to keep it contained.

  “I’m right here,” I answered. “What’s up?”

  “There’s some sort of problem with the ultrasound scan,” she said levelly. “Can you get down here to the clinic, d’you think?”

  I felt a hole open up in the middle of my stomach—a stomach that now sat on suddenly heavy legs. They felt so weighty that I honestly felt like I couldn’t move. I swallowed, and then asked the obvious question, “What sort of problem?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s just that something’s apparently not right with the baby.”

  Another obvious question. “What d’you mean—something’s not right? What are you talking about?”

  I heard her exhale heavily. “They’re not exactly sure yet. There’s something wrong with the heartbeat, I think.” She said this very slowly, as if trying to take it in. “They have to take me to have another ultrasound,” she continued, “on a different machine, over at the hospital.”

  My legs felt even heavier beneath me. This was sounding more serious by the second. I licked my dry lips. “The hospital?” I asked.

  “Yes, because the equipment there is more advanced. So, if you could get here, you know, as soon as you can…” She trailed off.

  George, ever sensitive to changes in atmosphere, had come up and was standing at attention beside me, his head slightly cocked, looking at me intently. The top of his head, I realized, was covered in a light mist of plaster dust too. I smoothed a hand across it absently as I spoke.

  “Sure, honey,” I said. “Of course. I’ll come down right away.”

  I didn’t know what else to do or say.

  I left George in the cool of the house, filled up his water bowl and told him I wouldn’t be gone too long. I then grabbed the truck keys and headed out the door, anxiety snapping at my heels.

  It was hot as hell that day, with the sky a deep, unbroken cerulean blue, and the surface of the road blurred and shimmered in front of me. The roads were pretty crowded—it was right in the middle of that lunchtime mini rush hour—and it felt like just my luck that everyone else had somewhere important to be today. Except they didn’t, I knew they didn’t, but I did.

  I crossed several busy intersections, all the time moving in frustratingly slow increments, red light by red light by red light, across town. As I drove, I kept thinking about the birth, about the plans we’d both already made for it, about the conversation we’d had on the subject only a few days back, about how we’d agreed, given the way the traffic in Tucson could be sometimes, that we’d need to plan carefully for when the big day came. Maybe we’d do a couple of dry runs of our intended route—check out detours, anticipate problems and so on. We’d make a few maps in our heads of all the other routes we could take if Christie w
ent into labor during the rush hour.

  It had been fun doing that, but now I wondered if we’d been premature, tempting fate in some way. But then I thought: why wouldn’t we have done that? She was halfway down the line now. All was well. All was fine. It wasn’t unreasonable to do that, was it? It wouldn’t have jinxed us in some way? We’d gotten past that big milestone of the amniocentesis, hadn’t we? I simply couldn’t take it in. What could possibly be “not quite right” with our baby?

  It felt horribly ironic that it had been this very week that Christie had finally decided the time had come to make her pregnancy public at work. She’d had to. Her bump had just started to become difficult to hide, and would soon, we knew, since Christie had read a whole fistful of baby books, make the pregnancy not just difficult but impossible to keep secret. It would start growing, and growing fast—a bit like our Georgie had.

  I had a picture of her then, curled up on the sofa, reading intently, occasionally lobbing a new pregnancy or baby fact across the room at me; this thing might happen, that other thing might not. X percent of babies had this, that or the other. Eating kiwi fruit was good for you. We should be sure we had a certain baby gadget because eight out of ten mothers really liked it. I had, on some level, I guess, processed all these bits of wisdom, but for the life of me I couldn’t bring one to mind now—just the picture of Christie, curled up, happily reading, our baby quietly growing inside her.

  I made the last turn around a corner and the clinic soon loomed in my sights. “What could be wrong?” I kept thinking. I drove through the entry gates, trying to get my frame of mind good and positive for Christie, circled around the low buildings and parked the car in the lot out back. There was a young couple getting into a car close by as I got out. She was heavily pregnant, and he was helping her ease into the passenger seat. She had her arm curled protectively around her huge pregnant belly. She looked like she could give birth at any time.

  I thought of Christie, inside, with her tiny swell of tummy, of the baby that was growing inside her. I glanced again at the young woman and it hit me with a jolt. Yes, we’d come a long way, but we still had a long way to go too. I clicked the car remote and jogged back to the buildings, across the parking lot. It couldn’t be serious, surely. It couldn’t. It just mustn’t. I pocketed my car keys, pulled the door handle and hurried inside.

  There are moments in life that always stay with you, aren’t there? Happy moments; sad moments; moments of great wonder. But those moments when you know that a loved one is suffering, and there’s nothing you can do, aren’t they the very worst kind? The kind that punch you in the stomach. I felt like that then—as if I’d been punched in the gut.

  Christie was standing in a corridor, just outside a doorway, waiting for my arrival beside a row of colored fabric chairs that ran in a line against a wall. She had her phone clutched in one hand and her purse in the other, and she turned around at the sound of my approach.

  She’d obviously been looking out for me, because as she saw me approaching, she turned and nodded at someone I couldn’t see inside the room. She looked calm. But then she always looked calm in a crisis, even though—and I could tell only by the tiniest of details—she was feeling anything but.

  I strode up and put my arms around her, giving her a big hug. Even though I knew it might cause a chink in her armor, there was nothing else to do. I had to.

  “You okay?” I asked—just about the stupidest of questions.

  She said yes, even so. “I’m okay,” she said, nodding slightly. “Honestly, I’m fine.”

  I decided that I would leave my truck at the clinic and we’d take Christie’s car, so that we could ride to the hospital together. As we got into it, both of us were unable, it seemed, to find anything to say. As I started the engine, I noticed that she sat in exactly the same way as the woman I’d seen when I’d arrived at the clinic—her arm curled and her left hand held loosely against her belly. Only now I could visualize the tiny being in there, clinging to life. It was difficult to watch, let alone know what to say.

  Christie looked straight ahead, her beautiful profile held as still as a mask. I tried to think of something positive I could say, but nothing came. “It’ll be all right” just wouldn’t work here.

  “We’ll get through this, honey,” I decided upon eventually, as I pulled out once again onto the baking stretch of road. “We really will.” Her answering nod was so small as to be almost imperceptible—as if it needed to be small or she might crack.

  There were only a few miles between the clinic and the hospital, but despite the traffic having eased a little now, everyone seemed to be taking an eternity to cross the intersections, like they were on some heat-induced go-slow.

  We’d been told that the hospital would be expecting us, and thankfully we were shown through without too much delay. This was the first time I’d set foot in the place, and I was struck by how busy it felt. Busy, but also something else: it felt cold. Not cold in terms of people, just oppressive as a building. Like it was a place where lots of bad things happened, and would happen. I tried to dismiss the feeling, but it sat there even so.

  We were shown into a room occupied by a female technician or nurse, who rose, as we entered, from behind a computer station. She beckoned us. “Come on in,” she said. “Mr. Nasser, why don’t you take a seat here, while I get Mrs. Nasser ready.”

  The doctor, a specialist, walked in just behind us, and very quickly, it seemed, we were about to find out exactly what the problem was. I watched silently as Christie’s belly was lubed up once more for the ultrasound, her hand clutched in mine all the time, small and hot.

  The nurse stood to one side as the doctor worked the wand, the fuzzy blur of gray-white images changing constantly, all of them barely comprehensible to me. The silence, bar the hum of the machine, was deafening.

  Finally, she finished. The nurse gently wiped away the lubricant from Christie’s stomach. And then the news was delivered that confirmed our worst fears. This new doctor completely agreed with the diagnosis of Christie’s doctor: our baby had multiple congenital abnormalities, and was very unlikely to survive.

  We sat, holding hands still, as we took this in. How could it have happened? It simply didn’t feel real to us. Five weeks ago, at the time of the amniocentesis, everything had been absolutely fine.

  “How might this have happened?” Christie asked, voicing my own thoughts. “What could have caused it?”

  The doctor spread her palms. “There’s lots we don’t know about this sort of thing, Mrs. Nasser,” she said frankly. “Sometimes it’s genetic; sometimes it’s due to some congenital defect, or an infection, such as meningitis.” Christie nodded, and I remained silent. I couldn’t think what to think about, let alone what to ask, so there seemed little else to say.

  “But might,” Christie asked then, “our baby still be okay? Is there any chance at all that it might survive?”

  The doctor, once again, was gentle but frank with her. “It’s unlikely,” she said softly. “It’s highly unlikely.”

  “So what happens now?” I asked her.

  “What happens,” she said gently, “is that we have to let nature take its course. The absolute best outcome, in terms of Christie’s future chances of having a healthy baby, will be if we let nature do the work at her pace. It’s going to be difficult and very painful for both of you, I know, but all we can do now, in the short term, is watch and wait. So what you need to do, Christie, is go home, carry on as normal, and we’ll get you in here for scans every forty-eight hours.”

  It sounded just horrible, and I could feel Christie stiffen beside me. “But how long might all this—you know—go on?” she asked.

  The doctor shook her head. “I don’t know. Not too long is my best guess.” She laid a hand on Christie’s arm now. “I’m so sorry.”

  Christie was ashen-faced but dry-eyed during the short drive home. She looked brittle. She looked like she’d resolved that she had to keep things together
so she could bear all she was going to have to endure over the coming days. I took my cue from her and didn’t offer up pointless platitudes.

  Then suddenly she spoke to me.

  “I saw the notes,” she said.

  “The notes?” I answered. “You mean your hospital notes?”

  She turned toward me and nodded. “On the desk in the doctor’s office. I took a look while I was waiting for the doctor to arrive. I just suddenly really needed to know, you know?”

  Now I understood what it was that she was talking about. We’d been offered the opportunity to find out our baby’s sex when we’d had the amniocentesis done. And we’d decided we’d rather not know. We’d talked it over, at length, and agreed that we’d like it to be a surprise. We had no preference, anyway. We’d both been clear on that. Like any parents, all we wanted was a healthy child.

  “And?” I said.

  “Our baby’s a little boy,” she answered.

  She moved her hand again, and cradled him inside her all the way home.

  CHAPTER 11

  … Some Rain Must Fall

  We decided to name him Sebastian. We’d talked lots about names, and had already chosen a couple. If the baby was a girl, we might have named her Shane or Annabel, and if a boy, we had narrowed it down to Sebastian. And in the end, at the time we found out his sex, we had pretty much settled on that.

  Suddenly the little bulge in Christie’s belly, previously without any title other than “our baby,” became real in a way that, for me, was profound. I wasn’t the pregnant one. I wasn’t physically connected to him in the way Christie was. He was kicking by now, and Christie had more than once grabbed my hand and quickly placed it on her belly, so I could feel it for myself. It was an incredible sensation: kind of weird and kind of moving, all at the same time. But like many men, I knew that my connection to this baby would only really form properly when I held it in my arms. But now it was the life of my son, Sebastian, that hung in the balance. And in all probability—we’d agreed that hope was now pointless—he would not see many more days.