“They also perform a human leukocyte antigen test,” Jonas went on. “It tells us if the cell markers within the embryos are an identical match to Michelle’s. Every cell has markers that need to match. If they do, we can use the stem cells from the cord blood immediately after birth, and the procedure would not affect the baby at all.”
My head wasn’t grasping something. “Have you thought about what happens to the embryos that are rejected? The ones that aren’t selected?”
Nobody dared respond, not one of them. The blank faces around the table just waited for the question to go away.
“That’s why pro-lifers are adamantly opposed to these kinds of tests,” Mr. Sammler said. “There are legitimate concerns. Maybe you should take a look at the some of the articles I’ve read, see what other families did under similar circumstances. There’s a controversial component to this type of practice. I can fully appreciate your apprehension.”
I couldn’t control what came out of my mouth next. “Similar circumstances? I doubt anyone is on record with this type of circumstance. Do you have any idea what you’re asking of me, Mr. Sammler? I’m a married woman with a family, and you’re suggesting that I create a baby with him, just like that.”
“No,” he interrupted, “I’m not asking that of you. I’m merely offering you the only option that will guarantee my daughter a life…IVF is a non-invasive procedure.”
“Like having another man’s baby inside my body, other than my husband’s, isn’t invasive, or disruptive?” My personal life had fallen under public scrutiny, and Jonas, well, he was just sitting there mute.
“Jessica,” came a voice from the back of the room. It was Jill Sammler. This turned all our heads, because up to now, Mr. Sammler had dominated the conversation. Her voice was steady and strong, her eyes fixed to my own. “You loved her enough to have her,” she said. “Can’t you love her enough to save her?”
CHAPTER 28
“Can we meet for dinner?” Jonas asked. I was at the library on the computer when my cell phone rang.
“I’ll think about it,” I said, abruptly hanging up, wanting to get back to my studies. It was the same empty response I’d given to Jill Sammler when she looked me in the eyes and pretty much begged me to help her child. In both cases, I spoke the truth. I was willing to think about it.
Mr. Sammler encouraged me to research, and I did what was asked of me: I researched. I researched acute lymphocytic leukemia. I researched bone marrow transplants. I read about probability and life expectancy. I even found a few articles on the ethical and moral debates pertaining to having a child in order to save a child.
My research wasn’t limited to leukemia. I found myself in a library researching the Internet for Fanconi anemia after I had stumbled upon a Web site devoted to these children and their parents. Intrigued, I began to read.
Jared Thompson was his name, the one who stood out from among the thirty or so others who were written about on their site. He was diagnosed with Fanconi anemia, and as I read his mother’s personal entries, I became engrossed in his ordeal, as if in her words, there was a message of some kind. Her journals had been kept for years, documentation of the heartache and frustrations that a life-threatening disease has on a family. I had lost a child, a baby boy who had not entered the world, while Jared’s parents had lost life that they intimately knew. They lost baseball practice and holidays, Jared’s body curled around them at nighttime, the smell of his breath, the wisps of his hair, and the sounds of his voice and laughter. They lost years of loving each other. They lost time with their healthy children, and life was reduced to hospital visits riddled with anger and fear. No one who hasn’t experienced it knows what it is like to lose a child, I realized, or even what it’s like to discover your child is afflicted with a life-threatening disease. These people understood, and my heart ached.
As I read through Jared’s mother’s blog, I saw the words bone marrow transplant across the screen. He was almost eight. During the months following, he seemed okay, even if okay meant losing his hair and not being able to leave his house because of the high risk of contracting random illnesses. I learned that children that have transplants are depleted of their regular immunizations, leaving them susceptible to most germs. Even the most common everyday activities can be life-threatening.
But then Jared’s ANC dropped (a subset of the white cell count that fights against infection), and what followed was swollen lymph glands, fever, elevated liver levels, but not all these things at once. No, for these parents, it was far worse. Just as they had seen a tiny spark of light at the end of a lengthy tunnel, darkness would descend. A day of good spirits and positive test results could end with part of his stricken body malfunctioning, or even worse, death. It was a roller coaster. Jared’s story haunted me. And although I could have skipped weeks of past entries and learned the outcome, reading the heartfelt passages delayed the inevitable and gave me an indication of hope.
Blood cultures, pneumonia, hospital stays, antibiotics, chest x-rays, stool cultures, infection, kidney failure, loss of appetite, and other unpleasantries continued. Jared’s mom was not alone in rooting Jared on. I believed maybe he would survive. And with each dated entry, I prayed he would tackle just one more hurdle. But finally he couldn’t fight any longer.
Less than a year from the day he had his transplant, Jared’s little body gave out. The reality was crushing. This was someone’s life and not a story one reads or hears about from the friend of a friend of a friend. I searched the page for the date of Mrs. Thompson’s last entry and saw that it was three months ago. Three months. For me, Jared died today, but a mother had now lived three months without her child.
My cell phone rang again, momentarily tearing me away from the horror on the page.
“It’s about the baby, isn’t it?” my mother asked.
I turned from the computer, cradling the phone between my shoulder and my ear and flat-out answered, “Yes.” How could I deny my mother the opportunity to once again be right? She said something in response, but it was hard to hear with the printer shooting out pages of information I’d bookmarked. I think I started to cry. Either for Jared, or the release of truths, or for mothers everywhere who feel their children’s afflictions as their own.
Seeing what happened to Jared Thompson’s family helped me open up to my mother. When I told her what had happened, she cried with me.
“She’s my granddaughter, Jessica. What can I do?”
I told her what I knew and prepared her, and myself, for the things we didn’t.
“You mean she might die?” my mother asked.
“She could. We just don’t know.” Two teenagers caught my attention, hiding behind one of the bookshelves. They were laughing loudly, without a care in the world. I’d been so stuck in my head the last twenty-four hours, I had forgotten the simple pleasures of life. Look how close we can be to joy; look how close we can be to sadness.
“Mom, do you think it’s a sign?”
“A sign?”
“You know, Jonas being here, and Michelle. Marty, he’s off doing God knows what.”
My mother said to me, “This is life, Jess, and looking for signs isn’t going to give you answers. Have you considered life is testing you? You have to answer the test.”
“It’s too coincidental—all of it.”
“Magical thinking makes it a lot easier for you, doesn’t it?”
I didn’t know. I was staring at the young couple groping each other and then said, “Yes.”
“You figure you don’t have to be responsible for your choices. You can just blame fate.”
“It has to mean something, doesn’t it?” I asked, “that I’m here, and he’s here, and we…” But I didn’t go on, because I hadn’t yet accepted my feelings. I’d been fighting them for hours, years.
“You need to tell Marty about this,” she said. “You can’t just put your marriage on hold and expect to come back to it like nothing’s changed. He’s your husba
nd. He loves you, despite all your imperfections. Didn’t he prove that after the accident? Talk to him, be honest. He’ll support you. He always has.”
“I can’t,” I said. “We’re not strong enough.”
“You have to learn to find your way back to each other, some way to trust again.”
“What if I don’t want to?” I sighed, my eyes following the young couple out the door of the library. “What if I want to walk away?”
“That would be a mistake.”
“I think I can handle what’s happening between Marty and me, but I don’t think I’ll ever understand why God would make a little kid like that so sick. I just can’t wrap my arms around that.”
“It’s horrible,” she agreed. “No one should ever have to go through something like that, nobody. I don’t even know what to say, but I do know you need the support of your family around you, and that includes Marty. Talk to him. Tell him the truth. He’s your husband; he loves you.”
“I don’t mean to sound pessimistic, but I’m not buying into that happily-ever-after crap, not now, not anymore.”
“You never believed in happily-ever-after, Jess.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, getting irritated.
“You’ve always found a way to sabotage things, the good things.”
“How did I sabotage Jonas?”
“He was hardly a good thing.”
“And Marty was?”
“Marty is, and Marty’s willing, and Marty’s capable of giving you everything you’ve ever wanted. Just let him. Let him do it.”
“Whatever,” I said, brushing her off because I simply wanted the conversation to come to a close. My mother didn’t understand.
“Whatever is not going to put your life back together.”
“I love you, Mom,” I said. “I do.”
“I know,” she said. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.” And we said good-bye, and I returned to Jared Thompson and his mother’s pain, so that I wouldn’t have to think about my own.
CHAPTER 29
When you’re dealing with sickness, I learned, life as you once knew it is barely recognizable. Instead of doing the things you had done before like going to work, laughing, and sleeping, you find yourself in a trance, robotic-like. Each day blends into the next, a merging of the mundane: waking up, brushing your teeth, dressing in the dark, and seeing what you’ve become in the mirror. Sadly, a stranger stares back. Your hair isn’t combed. The lines under your eyes grow more defined. The clothes you put on are the same you wore the day before, and still you walk out the door and head toward the hospital. When you’re finished there, you head back home, and you remember that you haven’t eaten all day, and the mail has piled up, and the newspapers, and you get into bed to sleep and are awakened by dreams. You don’t know which are worse, the ones with your loved one sick or the ones that feel even more nightmarish, where they are well, and you awaken to the truth. I walked into New York Memorial after a two-day absence, tired and angry. I couldn’t recall if I’d brushed my teeth. I ran my tongue across them and reached for a Tic Tac.
“Jess, what happened to you?” asked Jonas when we ran into each other in the hallway. “You haven’t answered my calls.”
“I turned my phone off.” He did not need to know that I had cried myself to sleep the past few nights, dreaming of Jared Thompson, stifling the urge to call Mrs. Thompson with my condolences.
“I think I’ll take you up on that dinner invitation,” I finally said, reluctant to deal with the issues at home. “I want to talk to the Sammlers.” I had questions for them. “Can we grab something to eat after that?”
We agreed to meet outside Michelle’s room in an hour, but my visit upstairs was cut short when Jill Sammler grabbed hold of me in the hallway to tell me that her daughter had been having a bad couple of days. I saw through the door that the machines were pumping chemo into her veins.
“You look terrible,” she told me.
I said, “No worse than you,” and a laugh escaped us, drawing comfort from our shared unease.
I could see the black bags under her eyes, the deep worry that burrowed its way into her hollow cheeks. She was tired and going through everything that parents of sick children go through.
“I miss her,” she said. “The chemo’s exhausting her body. She’s either sleeping or throwing up.” I reminded her that there were machines pumping supplements into her, not just the life-saving toxin. I had seen the alternative. This was nothing compared to that.
“She’ll be back,” I said.
“We have to accept that one day she might not. Maybe these little absences are preparing me for that.”
I wanted to tell her that nothing ever prepares you, not for that, but I didn’t, because it was accepting an inevitability I didn’t want to think about.
“Be strong, Jill. Michelle needs that from you.”
“I’m trying, Jessica, I’m really trying.”
“I’m so sorry you have to go through this, really, I am.”
“She’s all I’ve got.”
Mr. Sammler approached with some people that could have been friends or relatives and steered his wife away. I could tell she wanted to stay and talk to me more. I liked her. It was improbable that we’d ever be friends, in the broader definition of the word, but I would have liked to have known my daughter’s mother. If friends were an option, I would have explained the reasons I had to give her up and then maybe she’d tell me why she couldn’t have kids, why they didn’t adopt more children, and what it was like the day they brought Michelle home.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” I told her, and she thanked me in a way that reminded me I held the life of her child in my hands, and that I wasn’t wrong about her wanting to stay.
Jonas came up from behind me and started talking. We were standing there in the stale, sterile hallway while the hospital players in the drama called disease walked by. We were standing so close to one another, I could feel his breath on my cheek. He was saying something. His lips were moving. Did I smell toothpaste on his breath? I had to stop myself from reaching for that hair that fell in his face, hiding one of his eyes.
“Are you listening to me at all, Jessie?”
This time I looked up at him. I wasn’t.
The tone of his voice was what grabbed me, the familiar way he said my name, Jessie, firm, but forgiving, telling me his anger had passed. He heard it too, and the silence was laden with ambiguity.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
“Yes.”
I followed him down the hallway, watching his hunched-over shoulders, knowing better than to ask where we were going. We reached the elevator without uttering a word. When the secluded space filled with other passengers, we didn’t let on that we had once mattered to each other. We were strangers like everyone else on the elevator, which is a phenomenon that has always fascinated me. You think about the millions of people in the world and amid a crowded elevator of people, two souls can be standing side by side with this thing between them, this I know what you look like with your clothes off, and no one else knows. It’s your secret. And it happens every day, in office buildings and darkened movie theaters—there’s someone we were once connected to, and we pass like strangers, and no one could ever guess that we had once meant so much to one another. It was terrifying to me how life could go on without acknowledging what I had invested in, just masking what had once been the true love of my life.
I searched the eyes of the other passengers looking for an indication that one of them was on to us, some recognition, but there was none.
Only when we reached the lobby floor did Jonas address me, and it was to tell me to wait out front, that he would bring the car around and pick me up. I found myself wanting someone to have overheard the dialogue. There, I’d say, see that? We’re not strangers.
The cold air sidled up against me as I walked out the front door of the hospital. It was a refreshing change from the stagnant air of
the building. Staring up at the stars in the sky, I found the biggest and the brightest, and quietly said a prayer.
He honked, on purpose, scaring the life out of me.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I said, settling into the car. He just laughed and pulled away from the hospital. Old habits urged me to look over my shoulder as I had years before, this air of mystery and discretion that followed us; but I resisted it, reminding myself that we were older now, different, changed, married, with children. There was nothing to hide from anymore.
“There’s a great restaurant right outside the city. Do you mind taking a ride?”
“That’s fine.”
He fiddled with the radio station until I grabbed the dials and found what I was looking for. “You still love your music,” he said.
“Uh huh.”
The barrier was there between us, even though neither of us could see it. I crossed my arms closer to my chest, prompting him to turn up the heat. I could have told him that I wasn’t cold, just protecting myself, but I was waiting for him to say something first. I didn’t want things to be like they’d been that summer, with me doing all the talking and Jonas filling in blanks with vague inconsistencies.
“Fill me in about your life,” he finally said.
“Besides this mess?”
“Besides this mess,” he repeated.
Phases of my life flashed in a fleeting montage. Was I supposed to sum that all up?
“We live in LA. Our son, Ari, is three.” I paused and then told him his father knew my husband. I didn’t tell him what Adam had done for me, how he carried me on his shoulders and led me to my husband and career, only to end up back where I started.
“I think I met Marty once, a long time ago,” he said. “Which did you end up in, film or music?”
“I’m a music supervisor. I’m the one that puts the music to the movies.”
“You get to do both. How lucky for you.”
“Lucky,” I said, “Now there’s a word I’ve never been.”
“I don’t get out to the movies very often these days. If I’m not in the hospital, I’m commuting back and forth to the hospital.”
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