17
Brian’s sabbatical lasted through January 20; the baby’s due date was February 10. Even for artsy math illiterates like us, the inherent conflict of these dates was obvious. He beseeched me to look at our situation with cool logic and to move back to New York.
All the hands on the clock of reason pointed toward New York, but I was unmovable. I wasn’t ready. I was scared to leave our doctors. I was scared to leave my mother, my brothers, Suzi and David and Cassie, our apartment, the deck over the creek, the whole of California, including Lulu. I knew it couldn’t last forever, but I insisted that the new baby would be born in Marin, at the same hospital where Gracie had been born. I trusted them. Even though it was more and more obvious that eventually we would head back East, first, I wanted to have one more California-born baby.
And so, we stayed. In my final trimester I went weekly to a local sonogram lab where they measured the baby’s blood levels, in utero, exactly as Dr. Koerper had said they could. Amazingly, each measurement came back normal. The baby appeared to be the picture of health. We were in clover, more or less. And yet our puzzle had a million unplaceable pieces.
When Brian’s sabbatical ended—as crazy and untenable as it sounds—he began commuting to work. As in commuting from California to New York. Weekly. Four days in California, three days in New York. For a man who had once resisted family life so violently, he was incredibly willing to do whatever it took to be with Gracie and me and the new apple seed. It was his writing, in large part, that made this possible, that paid for it. Within the last year he’d gotten both a Guggenheim grant and a book contract, enabling us to run this kooky experiment in bicoastal domesticity.
Brian would leave for work Sunday night and return Wednesday night in a state of utter exhaustion. If, as has been said, the soul travels at the same rate as an unburdened mule, his was perpetually trailing behind him, somewhere over the Midwest. Before his soul could make it as far east as, say, Idaho, he’d be on another plane, flying in the opposite direction. And the poor, exhausted soul-mule would have to turn around and go the other way. I imagined it forever zigzagging the same few interior states.
All the while, I was on my own, seven, eight, then nine months’ pregnant, with a toddler. Lifting Gracie up and down, carting groceries from car to house, riding out the daily emotional ups and downs of a nearly two-year-old human. Responding with calm understanding to the mood swings and serial desires of a toddler is a two-parent job, but there was only one of me, plus the baby in the belly. Millions of people are executing much worse tasks, I reminded myself. But I stink at relativism.
The girl wants peanut butter on the cracker; no, wait, she wants jam. You already spread the peanut butter. Are you insane? A terrorist? Why would you use peanut butter when she wanted jam? No, you can’t get a new cracker and put jam on it; she wanted that cracker. That was the good cracker, and now it has been polluted. No! Don’t try to wipe the peanut butter off. You cracked it. It is a cracked cracker with a corner missing. It can never be made whole again. But look, there’s a bag of gummy bears on top of the fridge. Of course gummy bears are good. Cracker? What cracker? Give her the red gummy bear, not the yellow gummy bear. What are you, crazy?
In the witching hours of late afternoon, I’d call Suzi, now also a new mom. She and Dawa had conceived a little boy, she believed, on the very day Gracie was born (as if Gracie’s birth were not a cautionary tale). According to Suzi, their infant son, Liam, was “a world-class expert on nonproductive nursing.”
“Bummer,” I said.
“Remember that girl who danced in her wet T-shirt on the Indonesian boat?”
“No.”
“She was dancing on deck, and all the boat guys started clapping. I want boobs like her again.”
“Suzi, you never, not for one minute of your life, had boobs like her. And your boobs are not the problem. The babies are the problem. Blame the babies! Why am I having another one? Infant-toddler combo—worst idea ever.”
“Bummer.” Then a long pause. “You might be the luckiest person I know.”
As dreamless, dehydrated, and deprived of our youthful selves as we might be, we were lucky and we knew it. Suzi was madly in love with Liam. The week before, she’d told me that he smelled like her favorite food, pizza.
“All the time,” she’d said, “good pizza. Brick-oven pizza.”
“Is that maybe because you eat a lot of pizza?”
“No!” She’d been indignant. “He just smells like pizza. Naturally.”
On Wednesday nights Brian would arrive home after traveling nearly six thousand miles round-trip and teaching nonstop for three days.
His first day back the best we could do, typically, was to sit side by side on the couch, like a pair of catatonic zombies, while Amelia-Grace frolicked around the living room, drawing bright pictures on the walls, sketching new faces over our faces with her scented markers. We said nothing. Our little Picasso. If she got really bored, she’d begin to reorganize our possessions into like-minded clusters. All the lamps in one place. All houseplants in another. All wooden things together. Days later we would find a clump of toothbrushes behind a chair. It was adorable and heartbreaking, her wish to impose order on her unorderable world.
Sometimes she would sit on my lap, patting my belly, half amused, half mystified by its size. When we tried to explain to her that a brother or a sister was growing inside me and would soon come out, she’d wriggle off to play. We were too ridiculous to take seriously.
As my due date approached, we were painfully aware that if I called Brian at work and told him I’d gone into labor, the chances he’d make it to the hospital in time for the birth were slim to nil. From phone call to walking onto a plane would take two hours at least. The flight itself was five plus another hour at best from airport to hospital. That gave us, tops, an eight- or nine-hour turnaround time. Even though Lewis and Clark would leap out of their buckskin boots to learn that one could cross an entire continent in hours rather than bone-cracking years—it was too long.
Brian could not miss this birth. He had a special role to play. He was the cord blood guy. When Dr. Koerper had first explained how we would “harvest” the new baby’s cord blood for a possible transplant, it had sounded so rinky-dink that I thought she was joking. But this was the very early days of cord blood collection, and it was still a largely do-it-yourself operation. You first had to special-order a collection kit from one of the private cord blood banks. They would then mail you the kit in a big cardboard box, and you would bring this kit with you to the hospital, having carefully read the directions for cord blood collection, and then you would explain to the doctor how to do the actual collecting, which involved a syringe and the baby’s umbilical cord and timing things just right. The responsibility for this entire operation fell on Brian.
All this would be done in the hope that the baby would be “a match” for Gracie.
The only truly terrific aspect to this method of harvesting the cells was that it would be totally painless for the baby. When I’d asked Dr. Koerper if it would hurt, she’d said, “No more than cutting your fingernails.”
The more traditional method of harvesting cells for transplant is to extract marrow from a donor’s biggest bones, typically the hip or pelvis. It’s not hugely dangerous, but it is painful. And we were so happy to have another option. Plus cord blood stem cells are superior in purity and adaptability to cells extracted from the marrow.
And so we ordered our kit and received in the mail a cardboard box full of tubing, bags, and a Xeroxed sheet of instructions to share with our doctor, which Brian memorized word for word.
Though Brian’s presence at the birth was crucial, there was no way to communicate this mandate to the baby. The baby, however, seemed to understand and went about being born in a way that facilitated not only Brian’s speedy return home, but also some calm pre-birth time together.
My contractions began on a Wednesday morning, while Brian was in New York
. They were steady and strong; when I called to tell my OB, he said that labor had begun. I called Brian, he rushed to the airport, caught the first flight. And then, while Brian was over Nebraska, his soul-mule snapped to attention, willing the plane to go faster, my labor stopped. Not tapered off or slowed down. It stopped.
When Brian landed and called from the airport, frantic, I told him to take his time driving home. When he arrived the baby in the belly and I were watching Seinfeld and eating sour cream and onion Kettle chips. We all slept well through the night. The next day we made breakfast for Gracie; Brian wrote for a few hours in the morning. I checked my bag for the hospital, double-checked our checklists and birth plan. Brian triple-checked the cord blood box. My mom came over and took Gracie to the park. Still nothing: no contractions, no labor.
Brian and I decided to run to the local indie book store, Book Passage, where we liked to lurk. On the way there mild contractions started again; I insisted we push on.
“We’ll never go to the bookstore alone together again,” I said. “This is our last hurrah.”
We browsed the new fiction section side by side. Between looking at books, I would freeze with a contraction, gaze into the middle distance, and then straighten up and go back to browsing.
“Heather,” Brian said, after I dismissed his first few suggestions that we go, “great idea! We’re leaving now!”
I thought of my little skirmish, oh so long ago, with the ambulance driver who’d wanted me to ride in front with him, rather than in back with Gracie, and how I’d tried to make my refusal sound like an acceptance of an offer he’d made. I was pretty sure Brian was using my own tactics on me.
We drove to the hospital. After I was admitted we were left alone in a room together. I wasn’t hurting too badly yet. We put our foreheads together, saying nothing. We breathed the same small cup of air, waiting.
People began to arrive. My mom. Suzi and David (with an inflatable tub in which I hoped to labor). Cassie. My dad and his wife. Our spell was broken. Real labor began. Hours went by during which I shouted, every thirty seconds or so, “Where’s the fucking tub?” Dawa—dear friend, ever the man for any job, the world’s best fixer, a guy who once located and rented a live donkey for our college play with only four hours’ notice, a guy who, in essence, could do anything—could not fill the tub. It was unfillable because, as he later put it, “the water pressure was for shit.” It took three hours to achieve ankle depth, and by then the water was stone cold. But David was a paragon of optimism. Every time I asked, he would shout back, “Tub is filling, Harpo!”
I stopped caring about the tub. I wanted drugs. Any drug, up to and including whippets or roofies or polluted street crack, but I was in too much pain to ask. And I’d told my people not to offer me drugs, so no one did. Which was a crying shame.
“I can’t do it,” I told an orderly wandering by with linens. To Brian and my mom and David and Suzi and Cassie, I repeated my new mantra, “I can’t do this!” And they nodded pseudosympathetically. “I’m not kidding,” I said. “I can’t do this!”
On TV babies are born so fast. And Gracie, my sole experience to date, had been born just twenty minutes after we arrived at the hospital. This baby was taking hours; I was out of oomph. I’d never have oomph again. I’d be laboring in the pre-push stage, until this hospital fell down around me.
Brian said, “You can do this.”
And then, presto, a baby boy, seven pounds seven ounces. Huge lips; he looked like Mick Jagger. And he was pink, so pink. He must be healthy, I thought, to be so pink. Inside his body every red cell must be holding together; veins thick with beautiful, fat, blessedly stable red cells.
Moments after his birth, the doctor inserted a long needle straight into the umbilical cord and pulled a stream of crimson stem cells up into the syringe. If our boy matched our girl, these cells would save her life.
Brian squeezed my hand and said, “They got it, they got it all.” The two of us, more than anyone else in the room, knew how much this mattered. It wasn’t only a match that we needed; it was volume. The more cord blood you had, the better your chances at a successful transplant.
Finally, everyone left us alone, the three of us. Me and Brian and our huge-lipped, pink-skinned son.
No one came by at 2 a.m. to say the words blood, brain, barrier, bilirubin, permanent, or damage. No one came by the next day with bad news, either. He was precisely what he looked like, a healthy beautiful boy. We named him Gabriel. Angel of annunciation, who arrived bearing the good news of himself.
18
The next day, in the late afternoon, Brian went to pick Gracie up from day care and brought her to the hospital to meet her brother. Even though we’d told her that there was a person in my stomach and read her every sibling book on the market, she’d remained unconvinced. She was twenty-two months old; her ability to conceptualize a person, in the absence of that person, was foggy at best. She’d parroted back our words, baby, brother, sister, yours, mine, but she had no idea what was in store.
When Brian brought her into the room, she ran to the bed. She seemed happy, surprised, and a little alarmed to find me lying down in the middle of the day. My mom had Gabriel out in the hall. Gracie climbed over the bed railing to snuggle with me. When she was settled, we told her that she had a brother. She said, “Where?” We smiled and called out to my mom who brought Gabriel in and put him in my arms. Gracie looked down at his face, looked back up at Brian and me, looked back down at Gabe. She picked up his hand; he was asleep and stayed asleep. She put her face down into his face and rubbed nose to nose, squishing; curiosity or dominance or a tincture of both.
“What do you think of your brother?” Brian asked.
“Soft boy,” she said, stroking his hand, more statement of fact than appreciation.
My mom cried. Brian cried. I cried. Gabriel slept. Gracie looked at us all with baffled amusement—what were we so worked up about?
Later we loaded both kids into the car to take Gabriel home. We carefully packed him into an infant seat right beside Gracie’s toddler seat. He was rear facing to her front facing. I liked the look of those two seats, touching, two siblings face to face, side by side. Brian pulled out of the hospital parking lot with the greatest of care, I could feel the sense of responsibility coursing through him, and it put me at ease. For today, he could worry, I could enjoy.
We were about halfway home, cruising happily along, when Gabriel let out a piercing cry. I turned to find Gracie pressing her foot, clad in a smooth leather sandal, into Gabriel’s face. She was a premoral creature, happily stomping on his mouth and nose. I shrieked, Brian jumped, Gracie pulled her foot off, and Gabriel fell silent. I was starting to scold Gracie in some new and phenomenally loud way, when Brian pulled over, got out, and separated the carriers so the middle spot opened between them. Problem solved.
Brian smoothed back Gracie’s hair. “Gracie,” he said, “we don’t want to hurt the baby.”
She gave us a winning smile. “Yes,” she said. “I do want to hurt the baby.”
I could relate to her irrational urges, her free-floating aggression. Not toward the baby—I was besotted with this boy of big lips, thick blood, powerful heart—but toward Brian. Almost instantly after Gabriel’s birth, I’d descended into a murky, cold tank of anger.
I knew I should shake it off. I’d already ruined our first night with our son, for myself at least. But my joy over Gabe’s arrival was cut with a resurgence of fury toward Brian, in part because of an inherent conflict of interest.
We’d been told that getting the “full volume” of cord blood was critical, the more stem cells the better for transplant. Each cell, in a sense, increased Gracie’s chances. And so, in the minutes after Gabriel arrived, when I’d experienced a minicrisis of continued bleeding and pain, Brian had needed to focus on collecting the cord blood, rather than on me.
As much as I understood this rationally, I was plagued by a lingering sense that Brian had turned away at th
e crucial moment.
When we’d finally been alone with Gabe tucked into the sling of my arm and Brian peering down at this astonishing development, I’d said, “I was scared.” I said it accusingly, as if he didn’t know, and should have known.
“I’m so sorry you were hurting and scared, my love.”
I could feel his apology reach backward in time, to embrace Gracie and me, without him, on the day she was born.
19
“Let’s pretend we’re in Hawaii,” I said. “Hawaii is lucky and warm.” Brian and I were sitting at the lonely end of Stinson Beach, where it nearly touches Bolinas. It was getting dark, and we were shivering. It had been over three months since we’d sent Gabriel’s cord blood for analysis to determine whether it was a match for Gracie. Brian didn’t look convinced that pretending we were in Hawaii would have a direct effect on Gabe’s matching outcome, but he did offer me a bag of almonds we’d packed as a snack: “Care for a macadamia nut?”
We were staying at my mom’s cottage near the ocean. She’d bought it for a song years ago and now rented it out by the weekend to supplement her income. People drove from San Francisco and paid all kinds of money to fall asleep to the sound of waves. She’d offered us this place for a whole week. To be nice, to take our minds off waiting. We were lucky; but I didn’t feel lucky. I felt sick with the possibility that Gabriel’s cells, being split and analyzed, would reveal not only an incompatibility with Gracie’s but also some scary, hitherto undetected, defect of their own.
“Let’s go make sure the babies are still breathing,” I said. A passable joke in another family. We got up and dusted the sand off our butts and walked the fifty feet back into the cottage, where both babies were, happily, alive and napping.
By our fourth day out at Stinson, Gracie had made peace with the immutable fact that sand is inedible. She dug and threw, threw and dug, with the gusto of a dog allowed off leash. She showered us with fistfuls and laughed, bobbing her head. Gabriel slept in his carrier, on the sand, under a wavering circle of shade, dreaming of what, we had no idea, but his lids pulsed back and forth, ferocious dreamer.
Happiness--A Memoir Page 12