Happiness--A Memoir

by Heather Harpham

  My mom had driven out to bring us lunch. After we ate, Brian walked back up to the house, “I’ll be puttering if you need me.” “We’re good,” I said. Gracie was trying to bury my legs; the dry sand slid off, a thousand silky hands.

  My mom handed me a book of Sharon Olds poems and Star magazine; “to distract and inspire, in any order.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  Her phone rang, and she wandered off to chat. Then my phone rang, one ring too many, and woke Gabriel; his crying sparked Gracie’s crying. I could see from the number that it was Dr. Koerper. I tried to sound composed, not like a crazed lady camped on the beach reading Star magazine to two screaming kids.

  “Hello?”

  “He’s a match,” she said. “Gabriel’s an extended match. A perfect match.”

  I wanted a better, more potent word than thanks. Even thank you felt inadequate. The match might not be her doing, per se, but Gabriel himself felt semi-attributable to her. She’d been the first one to say sibling.

  “Dr. Koerper, you have given us something amazing.” I said. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said. “I am so happy for your family.” And we got off the phone.

  I looked over at my mom, still chatting. I waved my hands in the air. “He’s a match,” I said.

  She started to cry. That is my mom—perpetually ready to share misery or joy with anyone on the beach.

  Brian was just a few hundred yards away, in the house. I wanted to tell him face to face. Mom said, “Leave the kids. Go!”

  When I opened the door to the cottage I could hear the percussive sound of the keyboard. Brian had a particular rhythm. Bursts of sounds, brief silences, and then renewed bursts. I stood and listened: Brian, writing, happy. And I had more happiness to bring him.

  I couldn’t see his face; he might have had his eyes closed. I made a noise, and he turned to me and smiled. Seeing me unexpectedly, Brian had a certain smile. Everyone in the world should be smiled at like this, at least once.

  “Hi,” I said. “Dr. Koerper called.”

  He sat up straighter, every neuron on alert.

  “He’s a match,” I said. “A perfect match. An extended match.”

  “Wow.” A long pause. “Wow. My god. Wow.”

  And then his face fell, an infinitesimal slackening around the eyes, the corners of the mouth. A shadow thought.

  “What?” I said.

  “The risk.”

  We both sat for a while, living with risk, nestled against our hope, the yin/yang of possibility and danger, inextricably linked, coexisting. Cure and threat, clinging and inseparable.

  We could cure her. But only if we were willing to risk her.

  20

  Transplant can cure you. Or it can kill you. There’s not much middle ground. If we chose transplant, we would be, as one doctor put it, taking our “risk upfront.”

  If only she were a hedge fund, or an annuity, it would be easy to take our risk upfront. But she was a girl. A single, unique, irreplaceable girl. A girl who bobbed her head when she laughed, who squealed every single time the Disney logo appeared on the screen, who dreaded water but loved sand. A girl who, when I spoke to her in a severe tone, would sometimes say, “Smooth, Mama, smooth.”

  Without the transplant she would stay a sick kid whose life, however brief or long, would revolve around medical care. Or we could grab for the ring of health. Normalcy. A life not dominated by doctors or blood counts or needles or experimental drugs.

  “Look,” I said to Brian, “when your hair is on fire, you don’t stand around debating whether or not to put out the flames!”

  “You do,” he said, “when the only way to put out the fire is to clobber the flames with a brick.”

  I knew what he meant, but I didn’t want to admit it.

  I was essentially for the transplant, and Brian was essentially against. We squared off in our default positions, optimists to the left, pessimists to the right. But this could turn on a dime. If I suddenly pulled away from the idea, he’d push forward, and vice versa. We couldn’t seem to sit on the same side of the seesaw for more than a second or two. We were suspended in the stasis of indecision. It was our luck to be able to decide, but also our constant burden, and one without a clear deadline. The cord blood was safely banked; it would not expire.

  We weighed the relative pros and cons while making dinner, folding laundry, driving to the beach, flossing teeth, changing diapers, answering emails, brushing Gracie’s hair, while zipping up our coats for a walk, sitting down with a glass of wine after dinner, while making love, while silent in the car riding home from yet another transfusion, while Gracie slept, refreshed, re-pinked, in the backseat. No matter what we were talking about, that’s what we were talking about.

  21

  Meanwhile, the clock was ticking on our time in California. Brian had been commuting cross-country for a whole semester. There was no way we could afford to continue our quixotic two-coast life. For the foreseeable future, my work was caring for a sick toddler and an infant, unpaid. We needed an income, and Brian had great work, in New York. Case closed.

  Come September, we decided, we would move back East. Gracie would be two years and change, Gabriel only seven months. They might not remember California, but I hoped they’d been there long enough for some of its golden light to seep in.

  The worst part of leaving California was leaving my mom. Given how miserable our leaving made her, she was incredibly gracious. In late August she threw a big good-bye party for us in her garden.

  Toward the end of the night, Dawa sat down beside me on a low stone wall. “How’s it going, Harpo?” he asked.

  “I’m sad,” I said. “I don’t want to go.”

  “I don’t want you to go either,” he said. We watched people chatting. Van Morrison drifted out from the house speakers, Well, it’s a marvelous night for a moondance. Suzi was standing in a corner with Liam. “You,” Suzi had said, when she’d told me she was pregnant, “are contagious.” How could I go when we were finally poised to do the thing we’d always said we would do—raise our kids side by side?

  Suzi carried Liam over. “Scoot your butt,” she pushed me.

  “Wanna move to New York?” I said.

  “Not now,” Suzi said. “And how can you?” She seemed to have accepted my reconciliation with Brian, even to be rooting for us, but she saw our move back East as an outright betrayal. She took a chip with guacamole that I’d been holding out of my hand and ate it.

  “Basically,” she said, “you suck.”

  Cassie wiggled in between us. Our good-bye would be easy; she had independent plans to move to New York in a few months.

  “Suzi,” I said, “Cassie’s doing it. I’m doing it. You and Dawa and Liam can do it too.”

  “Look around,” Suzi said, “you’re going to leave this?” My mom’s garden had never been prettier; everything was green, the jasmine trellis she’d planted when Gracie was born was in full bloom. We were insane to leave this place.

  My mom sat down on the stone wall beside us and began to cry.

  “Jessica, no,” Suzi said. “You’ll set off a chain reaction.” But it was too late. I was already crying, Cassie too. If you cry, she cries; that’s how she’s wired. Only when Liam began crying did we pull ourselves together.

  Later I drifted around my mom’s kitchen helping to clean up. “I guess you’re really going,” she said, “and I am happy for you. But I am going to miss you so, so much.”

  This was the kitchen where, as a teenager, I’d accidentally left the water running while sunbathing for an hour on the garage roof. When my mom had come home to find me vacuuming water out of the downstairs carpet, she’d forgiven me almost instantly. When I was pregnant and alone, heartsick and at bay, she’d given me everything she could. Food and money and time and most of all the spirit of camaraderie.

  I thought about the Billy Collins poem “The Lanyard,” in which the protagonist laments the impossible project
of repaying our mothers.

  She set cold facecloths on my forehead

  then led me out into the airy light

  and taught me to walk and swim and I in turn presented her with … a lanyard.

  We would have the phone and email and planes and whatever could be sent through the mail—spoof cards and See’s Candies and eucalyptus leaves and heirloom china and bagels (if not lox)—but it would not be the same. And we both knew it.

  I put my arms around her. “Thank you, Mom. I’m going to miss you too.”

  It was more true than I knew how to say. My mom had a way of looking at the world that moved me; she saw the light, no matter what. And she’d taught me that. We were expert at laughing through the worst. In the Marin County flood of ’83, we’d laughed ourselves sick as water poured under the doors of our green Corolla and pooled around our ankles. We’d laughed as we waded through thigh-high water toward the refuge of a nearby playground.

  “This place will always be here for you,” she said. And with that, I tipped out of tenderness toward irritation. Was she implying I would need to come back? That Brian and I wouldn’t make it?

  I was determined that we would; I was moving cross-country to stay with him. And yet I did not pack. I did not plan. I did not book flights. Because, as much as it made logical sense, moving back East with Brian felt like lunacy. Like leaping from a moving train onto a speeding boat. Like asking history to repeat itself.

  When my own parents moved East together, in 1969, it was the beginning of their end. They relocated to Stony Brook, New York, for my mom to attend graduate school. Right before they left, my dad had passed the California bar; unable to practice out of state, he was miserable in New York. He took odd jobs as an insurance salesman, junior high school history teacher, tree cutter. After a year he told my mom he couldn’t do it anymore, and booked a ticket back to California. Why he didn’t just take the New York bar exam was never explained. My mom was only halfway through her graduate degree but decided to quit and leave with him. The day before they were scheduled to fly, she got her first and only migraine. The pain was so intense she sequestered herself in the bathroom, where she lay down in an empty claw-foot tub for three hours. When she came out, she’d made a decision: she would stay in New York and finish her master’s.

  “I knew that if I left,” she said, “I’d be completely dependent on your dad, and that would be bad.”

  This story had an iconic power in my imagination. It wasn’t just an act of self-assertion for my mom; it was the turning point for a generation of women. So why was I leaving my base of support to return to New York, scene of the crime?

  I waited for my migraine. I waited as I dropped off stuff with Goodwill and gave oodles of baby gear to Suzi, as I bought going-away gifts for my brothers and had a good-bye dinner with my dad and his wife. As I nuzzled Lulu good-bye, “Thanks Wonder Dog. You’re solo pregnant woman’s best friend.” As I scheduled the movers for a Sunday, I waited for my head to split with pain. But it did not come. And, finally, the obvious dawned on me: I was not my mother. Brian was not my father. Together, we were not anyone from the past. And, as potentially unsound as our little family of four was, we were in fact a family of four. Our unit was primary. Trying to make a family is a gamble, and if I was going to bet on something, I would bet on what I wanted, what I hoped for, what I believed in. And that was a life with Brian.

  It was a leap of faith, and I was already midair.

  BROOKLYN (briefly)

  22

  “Why do you dress up to fly?” Brian said.

  I was drinking tomato juice in a plastic cup, red sludge on ice. Brian had a Coke, always a Coke. At forty thousand feet, wedged among rumpled strangers, we toasted each other.

  “My grandmother flew in silk stockings and patent leather heels,” I said. “This is a pale imitation.”

  We were over Oklahoma. Both kids had been asleep for a blissful, overlapping hour. I took his hand. I didn’t tell him that I also dressed up to fly because I still wanted to feel like a contender in the realm of attraction. I didn’t want to be written off, to disappear into the wallpaper of people. Even with two small children. I wasn’t trying to be the prettiest person in the room—my shot at ingenue was long over—but I wanted to register, even a faint blip, on someone’s sexual radar.

  I squeezed Brian’s hand again. I had my legs crossed. Brian slid a hand between my knees. We exchanged a look; we’d been reduced, mostly, to looks. There was very little time, energy, or space for more. But at this, looking, we were world-class. A solar system of desire and insinuation sprang up between us, holding everything we had inside the gravitational pull of our bond: one chubby seven-month-old son; one sickly two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, connected to me by a strand of spittle, thin and delicate as spider silk, strung from the corner of her mouth to a spreading pool of drool on my blouse. We didn’t look away.

  But there was also a virus in our gaze. What we passed back and forth was not only desire, commitment, and respect, but a needling, constant anxiety. We were building our lives on marshland. The primary unknowable was whether or not Gracie would be OK. Neither of us had the first foggy idea how that would go. We didn’t say, “This could go wrong in so many ways.” We didn’t say, “This will all be fine.” We just touched plastic rim to plastic rim and drank.

  Outside the window, a pastel city of lilac clouds and dark gray columns grew upward at asymmetrical angles, like a collection of misty, artfully arranged skyscrapers. I wanted to get out and walk around. If nature was capable of beauty on this scale, why allow for mutation? The rogue nations of autism, faulty heart valves, cancer always, forever, cancer, blood disease—what the hell was their point?

  “Wake up and pay attention,” I said.

  “Are you talking to me?” Brian said.

  “Um, are you God?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Then I’m not talking to you.”

  I leaned back in my seat and pushed Gracie’s damp bangs off her forehead.

  “Before she was born,” I said, “it never occurred to me, not once, that I might have a sick kid.”

  Brian was quiet for a while. “I never once thought about having a kid without worrying that something would go wrong.”

  I was stunned, and a little spooked.

  Unlike me, who disliked articulating the darker possibilities for fear of inviting them to manifest, Brian had to plan for the worst, as a form of preemptive exorcism. That meant that, more or less, every bad thing that transpired in his life was something he’d considered ahead of time. Of course lots of bad things he’d thought of hadn’t come to pass. But this one had.

  I started collecting all our garbage and shoving it into the diaper bag: half-eaten animal crackers, soiled baby wipes, a bottle of coagulated milk. I looked for Gabe’s favorite toy, a plush elephant. He was waking up, cooing in a pleasant way that might or might not turn into high-pitched screams during descent.

  Gracie stirred and looked around her. “Where are we? Are we up or down?”

  “We’re almost in New York,” I said, and kissed the crown of her head.

  “Is New York up or down?”

  Good question. We are about to find out.

  23

  “Imagine ten children crossing the street,” Brian said. “Five boys, five girls, in a line holding hands. They cross. On the other side, only nine arrive.”

  We had been in Brooklyn for about six months, without Gracie getting any better. We were having an argument—the argument—in our Brooklyn bedroom. I wanted to transplant Gracie. Brian did not. At least not now.

  The transplant doctors—we had seen many, on both coasts—had told us that one in ten children didn’t make it through. Transplant carried a mortality risk of least 10 percent, maybe higher—15, 20 percent. What level of risk was unlivable? I didn’t want to think about it, but I knew Brian wasn’t arguing for argument’s sake. He was terrified.

  I tried not to picture the
children, but it was too late; they had sprung to life. A chatty throng of kindergarteners: five boys in Velcro superhero sneakers; five girls with plastic pastel barrettes holding their limp bangs in place.

  “Are you willing to send Gracie across the street?” Brian said.

  For Brian, the possibility that Gracie could die from the transplant was real. In reality, it was real. For me, to say such a thing aloud was a sacrilege.

  “Go away!” I went into the bathroom and locked the door.

  “Answer the question,” said Brian. “Would you send her across the street?”

  If transplant was a huge risk, so was doing nothing. When I thought of Gracie’s future without the transplant, the screen filled with silent, gray snow. I could see her at four, maybe five years old. But that was it. Beyond that, she wavered out of sight. My gut feeling was that she needed this cure to survive. If we left her sick, I felt sure she’d get sicker. “Failure to thrive.” That phrase was never far off. She could dwindle down, sputter out.

  He was afraid she would die if we transplanted her. I was afraid she would die if we didn’t. The fact that we were both very wise to be afraid didn’t help us decide. And we needed to decide soon. Not this week or month. Not even this year necessarily, but before Gracie got a lot bigger. A successful transplant depended on having a high volume of stem cells for every kilo of body weight. Gabe’s cells, stored in the cord blood bank, were finite. Gracie, meanwhile, was only gaining kilos.

  If Brian won’t agree to this, I thought, I’ll go back to doing everything alone.

  “Heather, unlock the door.” Brian tapped rhythmically against the wood, Morse code or maybe the William Tell Overture. I didn’t respond. I wanted to stay mad; I would stay mad. We would wake up in the morning, nothing resolved, in a fugue of resentment, him in bed, me in a nest of towels in the bathtub.