“We’re pregnant,” she agreed, shaking her head, unable to wipe the smile off her face.
“Will he be like Spencer, or like Britty?”
“She’ll be altogether different,” Tory said. “Not like either one of them. This baby will be one of a kind.”
CHAPTER Seven
Several days later, Barry went with Tory for her first prenatal visit. He had been humming and grinning ever since they’d learned about the baby, but she had convinced him to keep it quiet until the doctor confirmed that the at-home test was accurate. She didn’t want the kids getting all excited if it turned out to be a mistake. Still, he had gone up to the attic and gotten down the maternity clothes and all the baby clothes they had put away, and had begun drawing up plans to build an extra room onto their house. She hid all the clothes from the children, and shushed Barry over and over so he wouldn’t give it away. But the blood test she took confirmed her pregnancy in a matter of minutes, and the ultrasound showed a tiny little fetus with a strong heartbeat. They couldn’t have been more thrilled if it had been their first child.
Dr. Grentwell sat down and began going over the routine for prenatal care. They listened, holding hands, nodding as he spoke, for none of this was new to them. The doctor was a painfully thin man who looked as if he needed medical care himself, and he spoke like a flight attendant who’d made the same speech five thousand times. As he spoke, he jotted prescriptions for prenatal vitamins, which Tory already had, and nausea pills, which she had no intentions of taking.
“You realize, don’t you, that we consider someone of your age to be at a higher risk in pregnancy than a younger woman?” he asked in a matter-of-fact monotone.
Tory bristled. “Someone of my age?”
“Well, you just turned thirty-five. The risk of chromosomal problems in the baby is higher, and we recommend that all of our obstetric patients who will be thirty-five or older at the birth of their babies have a CVS or an amniocentesis. It’s a little early for an amnio, but since you’re ten weeks, we could go ahead and do the CVS.”
“What’s a CVS?” Tory asked.
“Chorionic villi sampling is a relatively new procedure, where we get samples of tissue from the placenta. Those cells are fetal cells, so we can culture them. In a week to ten days, we can determine the chromosomal makeup of those cells.”
Tory thought that over for a moment. “Do I have to have that test? What if I opt out?”
“You certainly have that option.”
“No,” Barry said. “We need to have it done. She’s a worrier, and if we don’t know, she’ll worry about it the whole pregnancy, just based on what you said about women over thirty-five. I’d rather rule out that kind of problem from the start. Besides, if there’s something wrong, I want to know.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Even if something was wrong, I would never terminate a pregnancy.”
“A lot of women say that,” Dr. Grentwell said, tapping his pencil against his pad. “But I recommend the test, because if your baby has Down’s Syndrome or another chromosomal defect, it might take you several months to prepare yourself. Not only that, it’s helpful if we know there could be problems when the baby comes, so we’re prepared to treat them.”
He stood up, and Tory noted that the man needed a wife to tell him that his pants were pulled up too high, and that his limegreen shirt didn’t quite match the army-green pants he wore under his lab coat. His brown socks made her wonder if he was color blind.
“So what do you think?” Barry asked, nudging her. “You know there’s nothing wrong. But you also know that you’ll obsess about it for the next six months if you don’t rule it out.”
She sighed. “Okay, we’ll do it.”
The man sat back down then, his bony elbows on his bony knees, and began his next rote speech on the minor risks involved with the procedure.
CHAPTER Eight
Tory wasn’t sure if it was intuition that something was wrong, or just her melancholy personalty clinging to all of the worst possibilities, but something in the back of her mind still kept her from telling their families or friends that she was pregnant. She asked Barry to wait until the results on the CVS were back. At first, he had argued that she was borrowing trouble, that there was nothing to fear, but when he saw how serious she was, he had agreed.
Perhaps it was the fact that Barry had an autistic brother who had been totally disabled since birth that made her suspect the worst. She’d had the niggling fear of having a baby like Nathan with both of her other pregnancies, even though the doctors had assured her that autism was not genetic. But they had never considered her high risk before. The fact that they did now gave her unprecedented fears that she couldn’t quite assuage.
The two weeks crept by like decades, and Tory tried to assure herself that thirty-five-year-old women had babies all the time. Women in their forties had children without problems.
Still, some distant worry in the back of her mind—as well as the nausea becoming a routine in her life—prevented her from abandoning herself entirely to the joys of pregnancy.
When the results were finally in, the doctor asked them to come in to the office. As the receptionist explained, he never gave these results over the phone. It was a game he played, Barry said. Carry the drama out as far as you can, make the couple sweat, so that when you finally found out everything was fine, you’d appreciate it all the more.
He wanted to throttle the doctor, and so did she. But they made the appointment and went in together, and sat stiffly in his office, waiting for the brittle man to come in and end the drama for them.
But the drama continued as he took his place behind his desk, frowned down at the file in front of him, clasped his skinny fingers, and brought his big, bloodshot eyes up to them. He looked as if he’d been up all night delivering a baby. She thought of offering him some eye drops.
Shoving his glasses up on his nose, he looked at the file again. “I’m afraid there’s bad news.”
Tory’s heart crashed like a glass that had slipped from her hand. She thought for a moment that she hadn’t heard him right, but then she was certain she had. She wanted to cry out that it was impossible, that there was nothing wrong with her baby. But she couldn’t manage to find her voice.
“Bad news?” she heard Barry ask, as if the doctor had just uttered something so absurd that it couldn’t be believed.
“Yes. The fetal cells showed an extra chromosome.”
Both of them stared at him, stunned into silence, as several moments ticked by. Finally, Tory managed to swallow the lump in her throat. “What does that mean, Doctor?”
Dr. Grentwell took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, then focused on Barry and Tory again. “It means that your baby has Down’s Syndrome.”
“No.” The word came out unbidden, and Tory began to shake her head. She turned to Barry, her expression pleading for intervention. But it seemed that the life was slowly bleeding out of him as he focused on some invisible spot in the air.
“Are you sure this isn’t a mistake?” he asked in an incredulous whisper.
The doctor opened his hands. “Unfortunately, yes. This test is conclusive.”
“But…I’ve never had a history in my family,” Tory said. “There’s nobody in my family who’s ever had a child with Down’s Syndrome. And I’m still of child-bearing age.” It was as if the right combination of facts could change the test’s results. If the man just understood her history, her genes…
The doctor shook his head. “I wish I could tell you what causes this, but I can’t. Sometimes it’s genetic, sometimes it’s age, sometimes it’s completely inexplicable. All I know is that there are different degrees of illness, and some children with DS can function very well in life.”
“And some of them can’t.” Barry’s face was dull as he stared accusingly across the desk at the doctor.
“That’s right,” Dr. Grentwell said. “Some of them can’t.”
“Well, what c
an we do about it?” Tory demanded. “There must be something. Some kind of surgery. They do all kinds of things now. They can fix this, can’t they?”
“No,” he said, and she saw the compassion in his eyes, despite the fatigue and the thick glasses he had shoved back on. “There’s no cure for this. No treatment in utero. Or even after birth, for that matter. We can treat any problems the baby may have, such as heart problems, eye problems, respiratory infections, gastrointestinal abnormalities. But we can’t take away that extra chromosome. We can’t change what the baby is.”
Tears began to burn in her eyes, and rage rose to her face. “But that’s not fair!” she said through her teeth. “They can do almost anything. Heart transplants, genetic mapping…Cloning, for heaven’s sake! Why can’t they do something about a little baby with one extra chromosome?”
“They just can’t yet.” She knew Dr. Grentwell, in his yellow shirt and blue seersucker pants, was unequipped to deal with choosing his wardrobe, much less handling an angry mother. They probably didn’t teach emotional shock management in medical school.
“They just can’t yet,” she repeated through thin lips. She turned to Barry again, beginning to sob. “Barry, did you hear that?”
But Barry didn’t move. He didn’t look at her, didn’t look at the doctor, didn’t answer. With a deep crease on his pale brow, he stared straight ahead.
Dr. Grentwell shifted uncomfortably. “I know this is difficult for you.”
She wanted to scream out that “difficult” was what you called your senior year of college. It was getting through thirty minutes of traffic in fifteen. It was waiting for the results of a CVS.
This wasn’t difficult. It was cruel. It was agonizing. It was impossible.
He leaned forward, steepling his bony fingers. “There are some options we should discuss.”
Her hope rose on delicate wings. Tory wiped her face with a trembling hand.
Barry seemed to snap out of his reverie, and looked at the doctor. “Options?” he asked. “Like what?”
“Well, families who find out they have children like this choose to do different things. Some choose to put the baby up for adoption. There are families who take these children.”
“That’s not a viable option,” Tory said, as if he was insane.
“Another option,” the doctor continued, “is putting them in a school after a few years.”
“You mean to live?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“That’s not a school, it’s an institution.”
“There are some very good ones,” he said. “They take excellent care of children with special needs, and they’re a great relief to the families.”
Those burning tears came faster. She grabbed a Kleenex from the doctor’s desk and shoved it against her nose. How many grieving mothers had needed tissues from that box?
“What else?” Barry asked.
“The third option is to have the baby and make the best of it. A lot of families are enriched by a Down’s Syndrome child. These children can be happy, and they bring joy into a lot of hearts. But they can be disruptive and have severe medical problems. It all depends on the family and the degree of retardation.”
Barry bent forward, dropping his face into his hands. Tory knew he was thinking of his brother, sitting in a wheelchair all his life, staring out at something no one else could see.
“And then there’s the fourth option,” the doctor said quietly.
They both looked up at him, this time with dull, hopeless eyes, but Tory prayed that this one would be the miracle that would turn their fortune around, and change the destiny of this baby inside her.
“That fourth option, of course, is abortion.”
“Abortion?” Tory spat the word out as if it had burned her mouth. “How can you even suggest such a thing? A man who delivers babies…I asked that before I came to you. They said you didn’t do abortions—”
“I don’t do them myself,” he said, “but I could refer you to someone. I just thought it was important that I give you all of your options, because that is one of them.”
Tory turned to Barry, horrified. “Did you hear that?”
Barry’s eyes were still vacant. “Yeah, I heard it.”
She got up and jerked her purse off of the floor. “I’m not going to abort my baby, Doctor, no matter what’s wrong with it.”
“That’s certainly your choice.”
Tory grabbed the door and started through it. Barry hesitated a moment, then slowly got up and followed her like a robot whose limbs were almost too heavy to operate.
Dr. Grentwell stopped them. “Wait. There is one more thing we didn’t discuss.”
Tory turned back, but Barry just stopped next to her, his hands in his pockets and his troubled eyes fixed on the wall.
“Do you want to know the sex of the baby?”
Somehow, it seemed vitally important to think of this child as a boy or a girl, and not as one of “these children.” “Yes,” she said, without asking Barry. “Tell me.”
“It’s a girl,” he said.
Somehow, the announcement of that fact made the news seem more tragic. A baby girl, connected to her in the most intimate of ways. A baby girl that would be handicapped. She didn’t know what to think or how to feel, so she surrendered herself to the numbness as she hurried from the building with her silent husband trudging behind her.
CHAPTER Nine
The numbness spread through Tory like an anesthetic going in through a vein, slowly branching out over her heart, reaching her heavy, pressured lungs, oozing into her arms and her hands and her fingers. The tears on her face dried as she walked out to their car, and she would not allow new ones to fall.
Tennessee wind whipped up from the Smokies, blowing her brown hair back from her face, but her eyes could not absorb the sight of the majestic autumn hills in the distance. She couldn’t fathom the thought that there was more than pavement and metal farther down the road.
By habit, Barry opened her car door, and Tory slipped inside, quiet as he came around to the driver’s side and got in beside her. They both sat for a moment, staring vacantly out at those hills, but seeing only the windshield that seemed to block their view.
“There has to be some mistake,” Barry said, shattering the silence.
Tory looked over at him. “You think? Could they have gotten our lab tests mixed up with someone else’s? Misread it or—”
“They must have.”
“But he said it was conclusive.”
He seemed stumped by that, and kept staring at the windshield. “Still, it has to be a mistake,” he said. “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle. But we—you and I—we’re not cut out to have a child like this. You were going to write, and Brittany’s just now in school.”
“An hour ago I was going to put that on hold for the baby, and neither of us minded.”
He swallowed hard. “But it’s not like a normal, healthy baby,” he said through his teeth. “We’re not talking about putting things on hold for a while.” His knuckles turned white on the steering wheel. “We’re talking about giving them up entirely. We’re talking disruptions to our family, neglect of our other children, a lifelong commitment to raise a child who will never grow up.”
The numbness fled. And as the feeling began to seep back into her, tingling in her toes and her fingers, throbbing harder behind her eyes, she fought the tears threatening to drown her. She knew that Barry wasn’t speaking out of ignorance. He was thinking of Nathan, the autistic skeleton in Barry’s closet, who sat like a fixture in his mother’s home, staring into space and ignoring holidays and birthdays, the births of nephews and nieces, the accomplishments of people who loved him.
Tory had been uncomfortable around Barry’s brother since the first day he brought her home to meet his parents. She had always wondered whether to speak to him or pretend he wasn’t there. Was there some part of his brain that heard and understood, even though his face never bet
rayed it? Did he quietly harbor annoyance and irritation at the people who talked to him like a baby, in a loud voice, as if he was hard of hearing? Or perhaps, he was. No one really knew for sure. He spent his days staring at some dimension no one else could see, moaning at discomfort, but sighing aloud at the modest pleasures, like the sun hitting his face as he sat in the prayer garden in his mother’s backyard. And then there was the whistling that never ceased, except when he was asleep. Every day for years he had whistled songs over and over, whatever tune he heard last, whether it was on the radio or the television, or from his mother’s fingers as she played the piano in the living room.
Tory stared at a spot on the windshield, and wondered if it was a chip hewn by a rock, or if it was a smashed bug or some debris that could be scraped off with her fingernail. Then she wondered why such a mundane thought would cross her mind at the worst hour of her life.
“At least we haven’t told the kids,” he said.
Again, the pain sliced through her heart. “I was so looking forward to telling them today.”
He glanced over at her. “What did you think? That the doctor would tell us everything was fine? That there was nothing to worry about? You were the one who wanted to keep it secret.”
“I don’t know why. Part of me thought something could be wrong. The other part thought it would all be just fine. Pretty stupid, huh?”
He shrugged. “Never in a million years did I think…”
His voice cracked, and he let the thought hang. He started the car and pulled out of the parking lot, and they were silent as they drove home. Her mind raced through the conversation with the doctor, replaying every word, every line, reading hope and denial into every nuance of what he had said.
As they reached their own neighborhood and pulled into Cedar Circle, Tory prayed that neither Brenda nor Cathy, nor the Gonzales family who was living in Sylvia’s house while she was gone, would see them coming. She couldn’t talk to them now.
Suddenly, the injustice of it all overwhelmed her. Everyone else had healthy children. Everyone else could expect normalcy. In their pregnancies, they could expect nine months of joy and anticipation. They could go into labor and know that it would end well, hear that baby’s cry, clutch it in their arms. They could have showers and celebrate and take the baby to grocery stores and not be plagued with the fear of someone staring or pointing, or simply not knowing what to say.
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