“Thanks, guys,” I said. Not just for dinner, dessert, letting me sleep on you both at the same time as if you were a human La-Z-Boy. Thank you for this year of friendship. Thank you for all the dinners while pregnant and miserable when I spent the night on your huge and comfy couch. Thanks for buying a huge and comfy couch when I was pregnant and alone and you knew I’d sleep on it often. Thanks for walking with me to go get coffee, thanks for driving like crazy to make it to the hospital in time for Gracie’s birth, even though you didn’t quite make it. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
In Nepal people don’t say thank you easily or often. Not because they are ungrateful but because assistance, casual acts of kindness, of community spirit are expected, woven into the fabric of everyday life. To say thank you is quite formal. And Suzi and David and I shared that understanding; thank you was not usually part of the currency of friendship we exchanged.
“You’re welcome, Harpo,” Dawa said, and hugged me.
Suzi stood at the door. “She’s sleeping,” she said. “Don’t wake her up.”
After they left I spent a good hour staring at the baby and absentmindedly petting Lulu with my feet.
The next few weeks, and months, passed much in this same fugue state. Dinner with my mom or brothers or Suz and Dawa or Cassie or even just Lulu. Days doing errands, rocking the baby, feeding the baby. The baby doing her three-step: eat, sleep, poop.
Amelia-Grace would be happy, pink, robust, and full of little squeaks. And then, as her red count dropped, she was a toy whose winding mechanism slowed to a stop. Pale baby. Nonresponsive. The very definition of transfusion dependent.
“At least I can count on her for consistency,” I told my mom. “She’s spunky with blood and droopy without it.” We went through the same drill of paging Dr. Koerper and returning to Marin General for yet another blood transfusion. This was followed by a week or so of bliss when she cooed and flapped her hands at me and latched more vigorously to the breast. I could sleep without watching her breathe. And then exceedingly long naps, a de-energized bunny.
I’d check under her lower eyelid. Pink? Whitish pale? I’d press down on her fingernail beds. If they remained rosy, that was a good sign. Blanched white, bad.
As soon as my anxiety reached an unbearable level, I’d page Dr. Koerper. She would set up a blood check, and we’d find out definitively whether or not Gracie was “holding her numbers,” a phrase that was thrown around like candy, the sweet possibility of something just out of reach.
Dr. Koerper was mystified over the cause of Gracie’s unstable cells, but that didn’t dim her optimism. She seemed willing to more or less make up possible answers if she didn’t know them or at least to err on the side of psychic comfort over statistical probability. She kept making promises and then revising her own deadlines. “This will most likely resolve at three months,” she started out. At four months, she said Gracie would “hold her numbers” by six months. When, at six months, Gracie still needed regular blood transfusions, she told us the disease might “spontaneously resolve” at one year.
I loved the sound of that, spontaneously resolve. I wanted to spontaneously resolve as well; to become more humane, more patient, less combative with medical staff, more intelligent, kind, sound, and if possible, an elegant lounge singer, overnight. But nothing resolved; no numbers held; the promised cure was always a month or two away, a wavering mirage that we marched toward without reaching.
By the time Amelia-Grace was three months old, she had had four blood transfusions. Four times she had been readmitted into the hospital. The staff poked and poked to obtain samples of her blood to compare with the samples of the donor blood. Poked and poked to get an IV into her infant veins. Hung the bag of blood above her head, attached the tubing to the IV, attached the leads for the heart and pulse/oxygen monitors to ensure her miniature organs were not swamped by the flood of new blood. Waited for the slow drip. Unhooked the leads, slid out the IV needle, and discharged her. Four times.
Brian hadn’t been there for any of this. Not one second of one hour of one day. He’d heard about it all in detail. He’d looked at it from every angle on medical websites. But that was nothing, just words, images, information. Not a lived moment with a breathing baby.
And then one night he said, “How would it be if I came there?”
I wanted him to want to see her. I wanted him to demand to see her. I was determined not to poison Gracie’s relationship with her dad with my own lingering anger or expectations. My mother had always, even when she was furious with my dad, fiercely protected my right to love my dad, to know my dad, free from her critique. I would try to do the same for Gracie. But personally, I wasn’t sure I wanted to see him.
We’d been talking about the heat wave in California and how the baby had an angry red rash of minuscule raised bumps.
“What I want to know,” I’d said a moment before, “is whether this rash is nothing or a serious symptom, heralding some exciting new medical problem.”
“Chances are heat rash.” And then, “How would it be if I came there?”
How would it be? Too late, insufficient, enragingly inadequate, confusing, and disorienting. It would be bad, the worst. And also the best. Nothing could be better. As long as we both understood, as Brian seemed to, that he was coming to see his daughter. Not me.
“That sounds like something to talk about,” I said.
“We are talking,” Brian answered. “What do you think?”
I thought I wanted to hate him for the pain he’d caused me. And that I wanted to forgive him for Gracie’s sake. I wanted Gracie to have a dad in her life but not on his terms. I wanted her to have a dad who was there when she needed him. Regardless of whether or not he was “ready.” But Brian was her father; she didn’t have another. Even if he could only be there for her in a limited way, it seemed better than not at all.
“Meeting her is step one,” I said.
“I want step one.”
“You do?”
He repeated himself, not just then, but the next time we spoke, and the next, until I began to see that the balance of love versus fear had shifted in him, had created some psychic wiggle room. We made a plan; he would come in early August, when Gracie was four months old.
She was barely past blob status—when not smiling, she still looked, from certain angles, alarmingly like Alfred Hitchcock—but she was his.
9
Brian hadn’t spotted me yet. He was leaning against a lamppost, reading, eternally Proust, pausing to glance up and down the block. I thought, “Oh, there’s Brian.” I’d expected him to look fundamentally changed, but he appeared much the same: gentle bookworm with a loose posture. Not the monstrous guy who danced through my imagination, saying over and over, “I don’t want what you want.” Even from fifty feet away, the contours of his face filled me with the same diffuse sense of well-being that they had from the beginning. I turned the feeling away; this visit was for Gracie. I was tolerating his presence, at best.
He looked up again and saw me. There was something soft and unguarded in his face. I hoped I looked more reserved.
He stowed Proust and walked over to where I’d parked.
“Spiffy car,” he said.
A faded blue Volvo, which he’d helped pay for.
“Glad you like it; you’re a shareholder.”