Happiness--A Memoir

by Heather Harpham

  I sat listening to his rhythms and to the creek’s. I was waiting for some kind of epiphany, which I knew wouldn’t come. In the Greek Orthodox tradition, the Feast of the Epiphany is sometimes celebrated with vasilopita, a bread baked with a lucky coin inside. Whoever receives the slice containing the coin will have a blessed year. But there was no way to slice our loaf for the lucky coin. Unless the present moment was luck enough; Gracie asleep in her crib, Brian puttering, and waiting for me, in the bedroom.

  The next morning, as soon as I woke up, I tried to suppress my consciousness. I’d noticed lately that Gracie seemed to intuit when I woke up, and to wake in response. Even though she slept in her own room in our new apartment, she knew within seconds when I woke. Even if I lay still, made not a sound, I’d hear her stir and coo and call out. She had some kind of special Spidey sense. You could not slip out of sleep, into consciousness, without her knowing.

  When I walked into her room, she was standing up in her crib, holding her arms out over the railing. “Mama,” she said, and broke into her award-winning grin. She began to bounce up and down in excitement, squeaking the mattress, jiggling the whole crib. Mama. Just two syllables, but they kick-started another revolution around the sun. I picked her up; she clung with all four limbs in a tight wrap, her baby head tucked under my chin. Tiny primate clings to bigger primate. Pure joy.

  “Good morning,” I said. “Did you have dreams?”

  I set her down on the deck and went to make coffee. She loved to pick up dried leaves, stray earrings, errant keys, anything she could get her hands on to drop through the wooden slats into the stream below. When I came back out with my coffee, she was disposing of an entire box, one by one, of expensive gluten-free cookies. She seemed decisive, sure of every move. I envied that. “Gracie,” I said, “I’m sorry we can’t give you a sibling. I’m sorry we don’t have a donor for you.” She looked up at me, grinning, scooted on her diapered butt, placed one hand on each of my knees, and began to bob up and down.

  “What are you two up to?” Brian said.

  “Dancing and wasting food.”

  “Sounds like an ideal morning.” He stepped out to join us on the deck and sat down beside me. I inhaled. Being close to him made my entire nervous system downshift into a lower gear. When he sat close, the concept of purring made sense. He rubbed Gracie’s back. “Hello,” he said. “It’s nice to see you both.” And he meant it. With Brian nothing was ever an empty gesture, nothing was phoned in.

  “Will you watch her while I run?” I asked.

  “I will be very happy to watch her while you run—or pay bills or stroll town aimlessly,” he said. “Watching her is a privilege and an honor.” His answer, meant to charm—in fact charming—annoyed me. I wanted him to watch her because he was her dad, not because it was a privilege but because it was his job. Still, I’d asked. He’d answered.

  This was the seesaw quality of my internal state: I love you, you infuriate me. You infuriate me, I love you.

  “Thanks,” I said, and grew angrier still, at him, for making me thank him.

  I loved to run even though I was slow, inconsistent, and prone to injury. Sweating and listening to music and running past the eclectic houses of my hometown made me happy. I’d been running for the last few months, and people had begun to say, “Hey, you are getting your body back,” which, though I was flattered every time, also offended me. It sounded as if my body, while pregnant, had been missing. On hiatus.

  But I was a physical person, a performer, a quasi-dancer (real dancers don’t run), and I wanted to be able to leap around in the same old way I always had. Half appreciating Brian, half resenting him, with equal measures love and anxiety over Gracie, as ever, I laced up my shoes and headed out onto the tree-lined streets of San Anselmo. Normal life. Or close enough.

  When I got home Gracie was napping. Brian was back in bed. I climbed in beside him. Sweaty, smelly, probably muddy. He didn’t seem to mind.

  Later, after a day, after dinner, after putting Gracie back to bed, we sat out on the deck with wine, with the time to talk and to decide.

  We would not have another baby. One sick kid was enough. We would try to find a way to cure her, but we would not, we could not, risk having two sick kids. It felt like a door shutting, but it also felt right.

  15

  Two weeks later, I was pregnant, which was impossible. It was a defy-the-laws-of-physics-common-sense-chemistry-and-the-rules-of-reproduction pregnancy. A throw-your-hands-in-the-air-and-demand-to-know-who’s-responsible-for-this pregnancy.

  “That day you went for a run,” Brian said.

  “I’ve gone for runs before,” I said, “and not gotten pregnant.”

  “After the run. The … you know … remember how it…”

  The fact that we were people who would rather not say condom aloud was maybe why we were always one step behind the best practices in birth control.

  But this had truly been an accident. We’d been using “barrier contraception,” but it had gone AWOL. Way, way AWOL. It had gone on a walkabout. We knew that. We’d been a little worried, but it wasn’t a particularly fertile point in time. Still, I’d called my doctor, and she’d prescribed Plan B. I had picked it up, for Christ’s sake, and—even though I was ridiculously, almost superstitiously, drug-averse—I’d taken the damn thing. Our decision had already been made, out on the deck, over the stream. No second kid. No potentially sick second kid, especially not via accident or subterfuge or the heavy hand of fate or whatever the hell this was. We’d decided no, and we were in charge.

  Plan B was an innocuous white tablet. Two of them, a set of twins, to be taken twelve hours apart. I swished down the first dose. My doctor had assured me that Plan B worked by preventing contraception, not interrupting a process already under way, and (reproductive-rights-supporter though I am) I’d found this reassuring. I did not want to send any souls packing. I just wanted to discourage them from settling in.

  While the first pill did its work Brian and I lay down with Gracie between us. Brian stroked her hair and wrote and stroked her hair. I read and stroked her feet and read. Poor toddler, as she slept her parents treated her like a toy they adored but were rarely allowed to play with.

  “Guess what I’m doing right now?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Not conceiving.” Pause. “Aren’t you proud of me?”

  “Very proud indeed,” though Brian sounded more subtly sad than proud.

  “We are well within the time frame listed on the box. It said seventy-two hours, and we’re only at thirty-two hours.”

  “Phew,” Brian said.

  Only, not phew. Because as we read and wrote and adored our toddler, another soul was settling in.

  And now here I was—a mere two weeks after going for a run and getting sweaty and being outmaneuvered by barrier contraception and taking Plan B—staring at the stick. The all-knowing stick that tells your future. I stared open-mouthed. Brian called this expression “the Garfield.” It usually encompassed indignation and shock, both directed at him, but this time it was pure inability or refusal to believe the facts. Even though I’d been fretting about this enough to go to the drugstore and buy the test, it hadn’t occurred to me that it might read positive.

  I did not say, as I’d said with Gracie, “Oh, my God,” fifty times in a row, out loud. I did not put my shoes on to walk into the fire trails. But I did have the same vertiginous feeling of having been pushed into unincorporated space, of cartwheeling through air.

  I should not have been surprised: there is no better way to get pregnant than to decide against having another child. Probably even as we had sat talking and watching night fall over the creek, settling on an understanding that a second child was out of the question and beyond our limited powers, I got pregnant.

  “Brian,” I said, walking out onto the deck where he’d been peaceably reading, “look!” I was welling up but had no idea whether these were tears of incipient joy, fear, regret, excit
ement, or disbelief.

  He looked at me, looked at the stick, shot to his feet, and embraced me. Exactly the response I’d hoped for when pregnant with Gracie. In reverse proportion to his fear and avoidance then, was his authentic joy now. “This is wonderful,” he said. Here was the reaction I’d once longed for but could no longer reciprocate. I was on the wheel of panic.

  Somehow, in the space of seconds, our magnetized poles inverted, and the alchemy of intimacy reversed. Brian was thrilled, beyond thrilled. Meanwhile, I was an untethered astronaut.

  “Is it wonderful?”

  A second child now would seal my fate to Brian’s. I felt a rising feral terror of being trapped with two small children in a disintegrating relationship. Even a non-disintegrating one. How could I decide if I wanted to stay with Brian when I had to stay with Brian?

  And what about my work? Soon enough Gracie could go to day care, and I’d be able to figure out if my post-baby body could still bend in all the ways necessary in order to perform. Or look for a teaching position within a college theater department, a long-held dream. I’d be able to make a solo performance piece about all this medical insanity instead of just living it.

  But most of all, I wasn’t sure if I could trust Brian to be a stable mate, a good father. I lacked a good-father template to compare him to. True, he was patient and tender with Gracie, holding still while she pulled off his glasses fifty times a day, fetching the toys she threw down into the creek over and over again. And he was devoted to decoding her gibberish, repeating it back to her syllable by syllable, until they understood each other. He was the one who’d figured out that nangi meant “water” and baas stood for “pasta.” But could he love another child as much? Could he and I stay sane together under true pressure? What if Brian had a dark side, a superdark streak, which had yet to show itself?

  I remained silent, clutching the stick, stupefied. Brian stood beside me.

  “It is wonderful,” he said, “and terrifying. It’s both.”

  “I’m no good at both,” I said. “I’m good at one or the other.”

  At our next visit, I shared the news with Dr. Koerper. “This is thrilling,” she said, pushing her gray-blond bob behind her ears. “This is really delightful news.”

  Sure it was thrilling; so was ice-skating across a thawing lake.

  “What about the new baby being born sick,” I asked, “what are the chances of that?”

  Dr. Koerper picked up Gracie’s chart and held it against her chest like a shield. “Well, as we’ve discussed, it’s difficult to say without a diagnosis. Until we know what is causing her symptoms, we can’t calculate genetic heredity.”

  Here, for once, Brian emerged as the optimist. “But we have a one in four chance that the new baby will be a match for her. Right?”

  Dr. Koerper looked visibly relieved to be back in safe waters. “Yes, a twenty-five percent chance,” she said, “that the baby will be a perfect HLA match, and you’ll be able to cure Amelia-Grace.” She looked so happy at this prospect, saying the words cure Amelia-Grace aloud, that I was moved. Dr. Koerper cared. As frustrating as it was to get her on the phone, as much as I resented her many false starts at a diagnosis and her unrelenting optimism, she had this rare trait: at her core, she cared. She was with us, shoulder to shoulder, in our hopes for a healthy daughter.

  We drove home in silence, thinking side by side.

  Our new baby might provide a bone marrow match that could cure Amelia-Grace. Our new baby might be born with the same enragingly undiagnosable blood disease. Or our new baby might be born both sick and a match. In which case, tragically, being sick would render the match useless. We were back to the same unsolvable calculus that had made us decide against this plan.

  A new unspooling ribbon of worry laced through every act; it was no longer just how can we cure Gracie but what if the new baby is born sick?

  We decided to go away for a few days and stop thinking. My dad offered us a house he’d once rented, up the coast in Gualala. “Water is good,” he said. “Take the baby and play on the beach. My treat.” It was a two-hour drive of switchback turns, which might have been awful but instead was heaven. We were on Highway 1, tracing the northern California coastline where the mountains’ ragged edge touches the ocean. High drama for hundreds of miles. If there is a more beautiful landscape, I have yet to see it.

  It was a fabulous house, huge and clean and modern, set a few hundred yards away from a cliff that dropped down to the beach below. We unpacked and settled in. Gracie fit her hands into a pair of decorative wooden clogs and clomped them on the wooden floor, laughing at how much sound she produced. Her hair was growing; she had the beginning of toddler curls on the back of her neck. Her face was rosy (recently transfused) and her smile easy, immediate. Who would not want a second one of these? Brian did. He’d made that clear with every look and touch on our drive here.

  But … everyone said the second kid was exponentially harder. Kid to the power of twenty. It would swamp us—time, money, energy—we’d drown.

  We unpacked, fed Gracie lunch, then stood around on the many decks looking at the expansive views across the ocean toward a dark blue horizon line. Gracie went down for a nap; I soaked in the hot tub in the middle of the day, under a searing blue sky, to the sound of breaking waves. I was bobbing in the tub, and bobbing in me was the beginning of a second someone. Grain of rice with a heartbeat. A cluster of cells, clumping and grabbing on, trying to differentiate themselves from one another, from me. I figured by now my body knew the drill. It could grow a kidney or an earlobe or any other human component, even without my explicit consent. I wanted to embrace this process. And yet.

  I walked into the house dripping hot tub water, padding around on bare feet trying not to wake Gracie. I found Brian in a downstairs bedroom reading and listening to Van Morrison. I love Van Morrison. Brian loves Bob Dylan, but he’d put on Van. We lay down side by side to listen. She’s as sweet as Tupelo honey, she’s an angel of the first degree. I’d been listening to this song since it came out, in 1971, when I was four, and now, thirty-one years later, it made a new sense to me. Gracie sense. That’s what kids do, they remake the world.

  “Are you happy?” Brian asked.

  I laid my head on his forearm. “I might be,” I said.

  I wanted to be happy.

  I was scared and poorly equipped for hardship, that much was certain. Happiness is episodic; it’s hard to know when you’ve caught its coattail. When searching for a parking place on a hot afternoon while cycling through endless contingency plans for Gracie’s health—not so happy. Sitting in my mom’s garden at the end of the day watching Gracie chase Lulu in circles, imagining her with a sibling, romping after—happy.

  When, anyway, did happiness become the one golden ring we reach for? How about being guided by what is right or ethical or meaningful? Or by making—as Brian sometimes called it—the “growth choice.” That sounded good, but I wasn’t that mature. I’d always aimed for what brought me the most joy.

  The safer, smarter, maybe even wiser choice was no new baby. But the joy choice was yes. Or at least that was the choice with the highest probability of joy. True, a pile of potential anguish lay on the opposite side of the scale. But this is the deal in life: the inevitable twofer of joy and misery in their boxer’s clinch.

  This new baby, two or ten or thirty years from now, might make me hear a song in a brand-new way; surely they would dilate someone’s understanding of the world along the way. Likely many someones.

  “OK,” I said.

  “OK?” Brian said.

  “OK. Yes.”

  Brian broke into a smile and took my hand.

  Yes to another child who might be sick, yes to having two children under two years old at the same time, yes to Brian. Yes, yes, yes to drool, late nights, mutual accusation, yes to euphoria, yes to the probable, the impossible, the impractical, yes to boy, yes to girl, yes, if need be, to a cabbage patch kid. Yes to the whole crazy, doomed m
ess. Yes, to whoever had chosen us, yes, we chose you back, yes. Yes to life, yes to the flower of the mountain, yes to yes. I say yes. Come on and come little soul. We accept you.

  16

  I was determined that if this baby were sick, she wouldn’t take us by surprise. Gracie had been most acutely sick at birth. That was when she’d been riding around in ambulances and living in the NICU and people had begun taking snapshots of her, “just in case.” We would not end up in that situation again.

  Dr. Koerper reassured us that if, during my pregnancy, the baby was discovered to be seriously anemic, the fetus could be transfused. This seemed like the kind of well-meaning lie doctors make up on the fly. “But,” I said, “how would you get into the baby?”

  “By threading a needle through the amniotic sac. We run the needle through you, into the sac, to reach the baby in utero.”

  “That sounds complicated and risky,” I said.

  “It is.”

  Stop asking questions, I told myself, when you really don’t want to know the answer.

  Brian gave my knee a squeeze, steady on. I focused on calming my heart rate and sending the baby good vibes, whatever those were. You’d think that having grown up in California in the ’70s I’d have a near-encyclopedic understanding of vibes, but I drew a blank.

  Dr. Koerper was her usual encouraging self. “Remember, this baby has a one-in-four chance of being a perfect match for Amelia-Grace,” she said, “and if so, you can harvest the baby’s stem cells at birth and use them for her transplant.” I liked the way she put things. One in four sounded so much more optimistic than 25 percent.

  I didn’t pause to bog down our conversation with details like the morbidity rate for pediatric transplant patients; to do that would seem ungrateful. I just nodded as though all this sounded great: If the baby is anemic in utero, transfuse right through me! If the baby is a match, transplant Gracie! I nodded and smiled and inwardly wilted. Too much information, too many variables.