We lay still for a long time. Looking at each other, then drifting in and out of sleep.
Brian asleep smelled like Brian awake. This was a man who mysteriously had no body odor, ever. He smelled like warm cotton cloth. I moved my face into the cubbyhole between his shoulder and neck. He put an arm around my waist and pulled me in.
I was aware that whatever it was we were doing, we were doing it backward. Couples usually decide to have a baby together before they have the baby. First we had the baby, and now we were deciding whether or not to have it together.
Every once in a while, if something is troubling me, a phrase will appear in my mind as I wake up, a floating sentence. Like those inexplicable visions of Christ on a piece of toast. This never happens when I ask for it. But it does happen. When I woke up beside Brian the next day a one-word sentence appeared: try.
I turned to face him.
“You again,” Brian said.
We were exhilarated to be together but exhausted. Gracie had woken multiple times in the night, and each time Brian had gotten up in sympathy with me, with her, and been kept awake for the thirty minutes or so of shuffling and snuffling downstairs, until I came back up to the loft and lay down, a bag of lead.
I’d occasionally, over the last month, tried to “Ferberize” Gracie, but I could only tolerate her cries for a minute, three max; upsetting her in any way seemed too cruel given all she’d gone through medically. I’d cave and rush down the ladder. This undermines the Ferber approach, which explicitly calls for no caving.
She was almost six months old, big enough to sleep through the night, to comfort herself, and I was wrung out from climbing up and down a ladder in the wee hours, but I had been unable to change the status quo. Brian, after listening to me sum up this situation, expressed faith in Gracie’s ability to learn. “Let’s try it,” he said. “She’s a tough cookie.”
The next night, when Gracie cried, Brian laid an arm across my chest, “Hang on,” he said. “Give her a minute.” Though I’d asked for his help earlier, I was stunned: where did he get off? Alarm bells were trilling in my head: GET BABY. Brian’s arm was a steady, warm weight on my chest.
“She can do it,” he whispered. Who the hell was he to tell me how to respond? He’d already missed more than half the movie. Did biology alone entitle him to chime in?
Inside this queasy miasma I was the smallest bit grateful. He considered her cries his problem too. Within a few minutes her cries wound down. Maybe she sensed his determination; his faith in her. Whatever she felt, or didn’t, she flopped over and sighed. Snuffled and grunted, but did not cry again.
12
We leapt, in a series of small leaps. Brian came for visit after visit, staying a day or two longer each time. He made plans to bring his mom, Tasha, out to meet Gracie. I told my mom that we were in the process of figuring things out, and told Cassie and Suzi and David and my dad the same. All were a little cautious, or a lot cautious, but also wanted what was best for Gracie and me, and seemed willing to accept that the best might be Brian.
On his third or fourth visit, we started to see Virginia together, to work on our reunion, but also to work through all the fears and ongoing questions we had about Gracie’s health. Our world was dominated by one question: How could we make our girl better? Nestled inside that question, like tiny, nefarious Russian dolls, were sets of other questions we were afraid to ask: Was it our fault? Would she survive?
She continued to be hospitalized, transfused, and monitored. She settled into a schedule of needing blood about once every three to four weeks. The doctors insisted we let her hemoglobin drift down to five or six. At that point, with very little oxygen in circulation, she’d become wan and listless, a dollop of baby who said and did very little. Letting her red count drop so low, said her docs, might “kick-start” her marrow into making red cells on its own. But that was a mirage. No matter how low we let her levels fall, she never made new cells in significant numbers. The older cells disintegrated one after another. She was our darling wind-up toy, who, after each transfusion, was funny, active, and chirpy for two weeks and then grew increasingly inert as her cells diminished and she wound down.
Gracie turned one in March, and Brian was finding it harder and harder to come and go, to worry about her from afar, and to be apart from me. I was finding it harder and harder to parent on my own when he was gone, and to sleep without him. We’d already lost irreplaceable time; it felt urgent that we not lose more. Brian suggested he move to California at the beginning of May when his teaching semester was done, and then take a sabbatical for the next fall. That would give us a solid eight months of living together. I was nervous but ready to try. I found us a new apartment, still in San Anselmo, but bigger, with two real bedrooms, a vaulted ceiling, and a wooden deck over a creek. I would miss Lulu, who would stay at my mom’s. I would miss my mom and the coziness of living next door. But this was a path forward. I hoped.
On the day of our move into the new apartment, Gracie discovered the joys of an empty box. She crawled in, shrieking with excitement. Over the top of the box, she bobbed her head up and down, the happy seal, the classic Gracie. She was fifteen months, not yet walking or talking, but on the cusp of both. She looked, to all the world, like a healthy child.
During our first few months in the new apartment, Gracie was everything you could ask for in a toddler. She learned to toddle, for one thing. Toddled from the bedroom to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the bathroom, shocked and pleased by her new powers. She still loved nothing more than to snatch the glasses off Brian’s head and lift them above her own, a height she perceived as impossible for him to reach. Or she would grab my hats and throw them across the room, then careen after them like a drunken speed walker.