The Dream Daughter: A Novel

by Diane Chamberlain

  “Wow,” I whispered. “Does he know?”

  “Of course he knows. I wouldn’t keep something like that from him.”

  We both fell quiet as we heard Hunter’s footsteps heading back to the kitchen. He looked at us from the doorway. “Are you coming or what?” he asked me.

  “Yes, sir,” I said, getting to my feet. I started to carry my glass of water to the sink, but Myra waved me out of the room.

  “I’ll take care of it,” she said. “You go learn what you need to learn.”

  * * *

  The walls of Hunter’s room were plastered with posters of rock bands. I had no idea who any of them were, with the exception of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones … and now, of course, Nirvana.

  “You’re a Beatles fan,” I said, as he took the iBook from me and sat down on the edge of his unmade bed with it. He glanced at the Beatles poster.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Like, I only discovered them a couple of years ago. They were so awesome. George is dying now, did you hear about that?”

  “I … George is dying? He’s only…” I struggled to do the math. “Fifty-something?”

  “Well, he’s pretty old, but still.” Hunter opened the lid of the iBook and began clicking the keys. “At least it’s not like it was with John Lennon.”

  Oh, no, I thought. What did that mean?

  “Sit here and I’ll show you how to do stuff,” he said, nodding next to him on the bed.

  I felt sobered as I took my seat next to him. There were things in 2001 I didn’t want to know. I remembered Hunter—the adult Hunter—warning me against contacting anyone from my past because I might learn things too painful to hear. He’d been right. On a visceral level, I now truly understood the wisdom of that “no tampering” rule.

  Hunter opened the top of the iBook and began showing me how to set up an email account. He was shocked to learn I didn’t already have an email address. Shocked and a bit put out to realize all he was going to have to help me with. “You really don’t know anything, do you?” he said, and I knew it was a rhetorical question.

  “I just haven’t needed email before,” I said.

  “People in the South are kind of behind, I guess,” he said matter-of-factly. “No offense.”

  “No offense taken,” I said. You’re going to be one of us in a couple of decades, Buster, I thought. Watch it.

  He helped me set up the email account and then began showing me how I could search for things on the internet. “What do you want to look for?” he asked.

  “What can I look for? I mean, what sort of information is there?”

  “Anything you want.”

  “John Lennon, then,” I said, steeling myself for what I might learn.

  “Here.” He handed the iBook to me. “You need to learn to do it yourself. This is called Google.” He pointed to a blank space on the screen. “Just type ‘John Lennon’ right there,” he said.

  I did as he told me and a long list appeared.

  “Now just click on one of those sites. Any one of them.”

  I clicked hesitantly on the one that read “John Lennon Death.” Instantly, the machine transported me to a close-up photograph of John and Yoko. Yoko’s crazy hair was pulled back, and for the first time, I thought she looked beautiful. They both did, their faces softened by age. I scanned the paragraph below the picture quickly. He’d been killed. Shot by an assassin at the age of forty. My throat closed up.

  “So that’s how you do it,” Hunter said, unmoved by the news on the page. John had been killed before Hunter was even born. “Now I’ll show you how to use your phone.”

  I peppered him with questions as he helped me learn the intricacies of the phone and its email application. “You’ve got my mom in here already,” he said. “Who else’s number do you want to put in?”

  “Oh, gosh,” I said. “I don’t know them by heart to put in right now.”

  “What about your husband’s?”

  “My husband passed away.”

  He frowned. “Mom said you were, like, married to somebody she works with. One of the scientists.”

  Uh-oh. “I was,” I said, “but he died.”

  “Oh. Well, when you find your friends’ numbers, now you know how to do it.” He handed the phone to me and I had the feeling he was dismissing me. I didn’t want to leave his room. Leave him. He was the only familiar thing in this strange new world I’d entered. I knew he thought I was a little out of it. A bit off. I would have to be more careful. Would I seem out of it to other people I met? Would I seem that way when I spoke to the surgeon? But a pregnancy was a pregnancy in 1970 or 2001, I reminded myself as I got to my feet and left Hunter’s room. I would be fine.

  * * *

  Later that evening, Myra helped me order clothing—maternity pants, tops, underwear, and a lightweight jacket—from Sears on the computer. We sat side by side on the comfortable sofa in her living room, the iBook open on my lap. We were using “my” computer rather than hers so I could get used to “surfing” on it. Myra would point to things and I would order them. All the clothes she picked out were casual, but pretty conservative-looking compared to what I was used to. I had to trust her to dress me appropriately, though.

  “Everything will be FedExed to us here and you’ll have them by Wednesday,” she said. “Thursday at the latest.”

  “Amazing,” I said. Things moved fast in 2001. I hoped I could get an appointment with the fetal surgeon as easily as I could order clothing, but Myra said there might be long waits to see that sort of specialist. I was already twenty-seven weeks pregnant. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could wait.

  “Hunter—the 1970 Hunter—said my hair is wrong for 2001,” I said to Myra as she stood up from the sofa. I spoke quietly, though the 2001 Hunter was in his room. I could hear music blaring all the way down the stairs.

  Myra appraised me. “It’s definitely got that sixties vibe,” she said. “Long and straight and parted in the middle like that. And it’s true that most women don’t wear that style now, but that’s all right. No one’s going to say, ‘Oh, you must be from 1970.’” She laughed at the ludicrous thought and I smiled. “This is enough for tonight,” she said, motioning for me to close the top of the iBook. “In the morning, I’ll make some calls and find out what your next step should be.”

  “I can’t thank you enough, Myra,” I said, getting to my feet.

  “No problem.” She scooted me from the room with a wave of her hand. “We take care of our travelers.”

  14

  I spent the following morning sitting on the sofa in the living room as I explored the internet, tentatively, terrified that I would hit the wrong key on the iBook and destroy it. Myra was at her office, trying to “make arrangements” for me. It was nearly noon when I heard her car pull into the driveway.

  “You have an appointment for Monday,” she said, as she walked in the front door, her briefcase over her shoulder.

  I pressed my hands together, excited and anxious. “With a fetal surgeon?” I asked.

  She nodded, sitting down at the opposite end of the sofa. “His name is Cole Perelle and he’s in Manhattan at Amelia Wade Lincoln Women and Children’s Hospital. Apparently he lives down the shore, and just comes into the city to perform surgery three days a week, so we’re lucky he can take you.”

  “Where’s ‘down the shore’?”

  “He lives in one of the beach towns in New Jersey and commutes to New York, and the reason you could get an appointment with him is that they’re doing a study on cardiac fetal surgery. Hopefully you’ll meet their requirements and can be accepted into the study.”

  “Oh God, I hope so,” I said, shutting the lid on the iBook. I didn’t know what I would do if they turned me down. Did Hunter know for certain that they would take me? Would he have sent me here otherwise?

  “There’s a snag, though,” Myra said. “The woman I spoke with said you should bring your records with you.”

  “I don’t have them,�
�� I said. “Hunter said they’d be useless because of the dates.”

  “He was right.” She shook a cigarette from the package on the end table and lit it, inhaling deeply. “So I had an idea,” she said, the smoke sailing from her mouth. “I called an old friend who’s an OB and she can squeeze you in at noon on Friday. That way you’ll have some current records.”

  “Does she know about … where I’m from?”

  “I told her you’re the daughter of a friend of mine from North Carolina.” Myra sounded businesslike. Cool and detached. “You saw a physician down there but didn’t feel confident about his findings, so you came up here where I could refer you to someone I trusted,” she said. “You didn’t bring your records with you—you wanted an unbiased, fresh look at what’s going on. So when this Dr. Perelle asks why your records are only from this week, you can tell him the same tale.”

  I nodded, thinking that what Myra lacked in warmth, she made up for in resourcefulness. “Okay,” I said.

  “Between now and Friday, you should watch the news and read the Times online—I’ll show you how to do that. You need to turn yourself into a twenty-first-century woman so these professionals don’t look at you askance.”

  “Can I go for a walk?” I asked. I missed my daily walks to the pier and back.

  “Yes, but if anyone asks, remember you’re now the daughter of my North Carolina friend, up here for medical care. That’s the new story.”

  “Okay,” I said again. I wondered how many stories I would have before this trip was over.

  * * *

  I followed her advice and watched CNN and read the Times, but when she was out, I turned the TV to the soaps and the shows where people simply talked to one another, like Oprah Winfrey’s show and The View. Oprah was a smart black woman who shied away from nothing when it came to her interviews, even saying the word “vagina” on television, which blew my mind. I could tell the people in her audience loved her. And I was shocked to see Barbara Walters on The View. She was on the Today show back home—I kept thinking of 1970 as “back home” now—where she was much younger and her hair much darker.

  I learned plenty about the world watching those shows. Homosexual people didn’t have to hide who they were anymore and, in the Netherlands, they could even get married. The last president, Bill Clinton, had been impeached for having oral sex in the Oval Office, and there was some comparison made to Richard Nixon, so I had to look that up. I was no fan of Nixon—I hated that he was escalating the war in Vietnam—and I learned he would eventually have to resign in disgrace. It shook me up sometimes when I discovered things that would happen … that had happened. Occasionally it disoriented me to the point of nausea and I had to stop surfing the internet or watching TV for a while. That’s when I took my long walks down the tree-lined streets in Myra’s neighborhood. I passed a few people here and there, but no one asked me who I was. I saw plenty of bike riders, and they all wore helmets, which I learned from the internet was common. And then there were the people running, their pace slow and loping. Hunter told me they were “jogging.” Even he jogged sometimes, he said.

  I thought about Patti on my walks. I could only imagine how she’d reacted when she learned what I’d done. I wished I had a way to let her know I was all right and that I missed her. I hoped Hunter was able to reassure her that I was safe.

  Sometimes I talked to Joe as I walked. Not out loud, of course, but he was always there in my mind. I told him what I was doing and—in my imagination—he thanked me for giving our daughter a chance at a healthy life. He’d have wanted this baby. This daughter. Of that I was absolutely certain. I thought back to his two weeks’ leave before he left for Vietnam. We could have spent those two weeks anywhere. Done anything. But he wanted to spend them in the house at Nags Head with Patti and Hunter, so that’s what we did. Hunter and I both took off from work and Patti had stopped teaching before John Paul’s birth six months earlier, so all four of us were footloose for those couple of weeks. It was like being kids again, in a way. Although it was October, the weather was unseasonably balmy—warm enough for the guys to surf while Patti and I stayed with John Paul on the beach or cooked. Joe and I crabbed and fished like we did when we were teenagers. All four of us watched the Mets beat the Orioles in the World Series, turning the TV off only when the news broke in with coverage of the “Moratorium Against the Vietnam War” in Washington, which Joe didn’t want to watch. We played Monopoly and Spit and The Game of Life. Joe read The Godfather, and when he finished it he started it again. I read one Daphne du Maurier book after another. We blasted the Stones and Beatles and Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin on the record player. We danced in the living room in the daytime and cuddled up in blankets on the porch in the evenings.

  Every day, Joe ran and ran and ran. He’d smear zinc oxide on his nose and head out to the road. His running was the only clue I had to his fear. He was afraid of losing his conditioning. He didn’t want to arrive soft in Vietnam.

  The last night, we built a bonfire on the beach. Since it was October, we had the beach to ourselves and the fire was a beautiful thing. The four of us wrapped up in blankets and we grilled hot dogs and toasted marshmallows. We talked about nothing of consequence, as if we’d made an unspoken pact to keep things light on our last night together.

  As the fire was dying, Patti suddenly jumped to her feet.

  “Hey, look!” she said, pointing toward the ocean.

  We all turned to see what had caught her attention. Bright, neon-blue waves rolled toward the shore in the moonlight. Bioluminescent plankton. I hadn’t seen that breathtaking phenomenon since I was a teenager. That it was happening on this night, our last night all together, felt significant somehow, and we walked down to the water’s edge, our blankets over our shoulders, and watched, mesmerized, as blue wave after blue wave rushed toward us through the darkness. When we’d been standing there for a while, Joe moved next to me. He wrapped his blanketed arm around my shoulders, pulling me close. “Hey, girl,” he said softly in my ear. “Let’s go make a baby.”

  And we did.

  I wondered now if somehow he knew—or at least he worried—that he would die. Had he wanted a part of him to live on? I was determined that a part of him would.

  * * *

  Joanna kept me going that week as I waited for my appointment with Myra’s obstetrician friend. She reminded me why I had made this crazy trip by wriggling and bouncing around inside me. Would a desperately sick baby be that active? The more I thought about those blotchy images from the experimental ultrasound at NIH, the more certain I felt that Dr. Halloway had been wrong and Joanna was fine. By Friday morning, as I ate breakfast with Myra and Hunter, I felt certain of it. I had a healthy baby. I expected Myra’s obstetrician friend would tell me all was well with my pregnancy when I saw her that afternoon. Maybe then Myra could give me an earlier portal and I could go home to my beloved Nags Head and 1970.

  * * *

  The obstetrician’s office was near Princeton University, not far from where I’d landed a mere four days earlier. My appointment was at noon, and I realized Myra’s friend was most likely squeezing me in on her lunch hour. I thought we should go into the appointment fresh, without revealing to the doctor the diagnosis I’d received in 1970—or as Myra said to her friend, “down in North Carolina,” as though I lived in some dusty little backwater. But Myra had obviously told her the bad news and the woman—her name was Anita Smythe—greeted me with a look of pained sympathy. She held her hand out to me.

  “I’m Anita,” she said with her gentle smile. “Let’s see how you’re doing.”

  We left Myra in the waiting room and I followed Anita through a doorway and down a long hall.

  “You’re the daughter of one of Myra’s good friends?” she asked, although I could tell it was more of a statement than a question. “She told me about your diagnosis.”

  “To be honest with you,” I said, “I’m hoping the diagnosis is wrong.” I wanted to put that out there
up front. I wanted to be sure she’d consider that possibility. “My baby is very, very active,” I added.

  “Of course,” she said. “Let’s get your vitals and then we’ll do an ultrasound and see what we can see.”

  In the hallway, she weighed me, then took my blood pressure and then stuck a probe in my ear, which I realized was some sort of thermometer only after she told me my temperature was ninety-eight point four. She led me into an examining room that was bigger and brighter than the one at NIH, and the clean, modern look of the room gave me irrational hope. The machine had a streamlined space-age look to it, too. The screen was larger and flatter than the one at NIH, and it was attached to an illuminated keyboard. I was going to get good news in this room, I thought. I could feel it.

  I didn’t have to undress, either. I simply lay down on the examining table, lifted my shirt, and lowered my brand-new maternity pants below my belly. She squirted gel on my belly and began running the wand or whatever it was called slowly over my skin.

  “Oh!” I said when the image appeared on the screen. I could see her! I could see Joanna. Yes, the picture was still fuzzy and gray, but I could easily make out the shape of her head. Her adorable, perfect profile. The fingers of one little hand were splayed in a wave. Instinctively, I lifted my own hand to wave back. The connection I’d felt to her from the start instantly became even more solid and real. “The picture is so much clearer,” I said.

  “Really?” Anita sounded surprised. “Myra said the other ultrasound was done in North Carolina?”

  “Yes.” I realized my mistake. I wasn’t going to tell her it had been performed at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland, and I certainly wasn’t going to say anything about 1970. “She looks perfect,” I said.

  Anita didn’t answer as she pushed buttons and turned knobs on the machine, and the image of my baby turned into something I could no longer discern. “Have you had a fetal echocardiogram?” Anita asked.