We were still trying to solidify our gains, to feel fully back together, when Brian’s mom, Tasha, arrived. This visit could go either way. Mothers-in-law can be a force of division—but maybe they could also be uniting, the way Democrats and Republicans cozy up under external threats. I was leery that it was too soon; we weren’t ready. But she wanted to come, and she was unaccustomed to accepting no. She’d spent fifty years as an educator, fighting first to racially integrate the schools of Teaneck, New Jersey, and later to introduce progressive education principles into a closed-minded system; she does not suffer fools.
In the days before Gracie, she and I had a mostly nice relationship. Then, when I’d been pregnant on my own, Tasha had reached around Brian to contact me, to let me know that whatever role he decided to take on, she was this child’s grandmother. Which had meant a great deal. But still, any conversation with her had the potential to ignite. She had strong opinions on virtually every subject, from child-care methods to whether or not one should shop at Trader Joe’s (first no, later yes). And she was a fighter by nature; she’d been on her own from the age of sixteen. Now, she was almost eighty. I thought, how complicated can a visit from a little eighty-year-old lady be?
Tasha arrived upbeat and ready for action, bearing, as was her wont, a million gifts that we did not want: clans of Tupperware, rolls of tinfoil, tiny egg cups. They spilled out of her suitcase, which she opened in the middle of our living room. Brian had procrastinated telling her she’d be staying at a hotel. We’d booked a room at a place a few miles away. It was clean and nice, had free breakfasts and a pool.
When Brian finally told her, as she opened her bag, Tasha balked. It was her right, from her point of view, to stay under the same roof as her granddaughter, earned by many hours of hard flying and ordained by Jewish mothers everywhere. But we didn’t feel up to having her. We had a sleeper sofa in the living room, true, but we didn’t want anyone on it.
That first night, in protest, Tasha slept in our car. She would rather cramp up in the Volvo than check into the Marriott. The next day I sat with her on the couch and tried to understand her, and to help her understand us. I started by saying that we didn’t want her to sleep in our car again, and that if she was going to sleep in the car then she should come on inside the house. But that we’d really appreciate it if she’d try the hotel. Please. Just try. And, shockingly, she did.
Later, in bed, Brian said, “You are a magician.”
“I am?”
“You worked magic on Tasha Morton.”
The rest of her visit was mostly sweet. We drove around the Bay Area pointing at landmarks we didn’t have the energy to get out and look at. From the car we oohed and aaahed. And that was fine with Tasha, who, anyway, only had eyes for Gracie.
When Gracie asked for water with a gesture and her secret word, nangi, Tasha said, with genuine grandmotherly pride, “She obviously gets her intelligence from Dick.” Brian’s dad.
Though he would never meet her, Dick had provided at least a quarter of the genetic material that comprised this particular girl. It moved me that Tasha, who’d been living as a widow for over twenty years, still wore her wedding ring. And that she’d claimed a little of Gracie in Dick’s name.
14
“Have you considered having another child?” Dr. Koerper shifted in her seat.
Brian and I stared at her. When you have one sick baby, the absolute last thing in the world you want is another sick baby.
“Listen,” Dr. Koerper continued, undaunted, “Amelia-Grace could be cured.” Full stop. “With a bone marrow transplant. The first step is to find a donor. The better the match, the higher the success rate. A sibling match is best. Kids with a sibling match have the highest rates of survival.”
A sibling match? Survival rates? She seemed to be speaking in tongues.
“We don’t know what is broken, but if we take out the old engine and replace it with a new engine, the car will run.”
“The car will run?” Brian said, making her analogy sound as banal and useless as it was inscrutable. I gave him a murderous look.
“The transplant gives her a new engine, new bone marrow. Gracie is the car,” Dr. Koerper said.
After a year and a half of constant blood transfusions, after a year and a half of false hope and wrong turns, Dr. Koerper had finally stopped promising that this undiagnosable disease would spontaneously resolve. She was admitting defeat: the disease was not going to get any better. Gracie would continue to require blood transfusions for the rest of her life. Unless … we could eradicate the disease. Cure her. We could make her better.
“Amelia-Grace can be cured with a transplant,” she said. “I can refer you to the pediatric transplant team here for a consultation.”
Brian looked stricken. “A bone marrow transplant,” he said. “That sounds like an extreme solution to a problem we haven’t even defined yet.” His tone, as he said the words bone marrow transplant, made it sound like a terrible thing to do to a child, like leaving Gracie by the side of the road with nothing but a cardboard sign that read “Toledo” and a warm can of Dr. Pepper. I, on the other hand, only heard cured.
I squeezed Brian’s knee, momentarily euphoric, until I remembered that this undertaking, outlined by Dr. Koerper, rested on the premise of having another baby.
Out of the question.
Dr. Koerper knew our history; she’d been Amelia-Grace’s doctor before our reconciliation. I’d had the vague impression that she was pulling for us as a couple, but surely this had nothing to do with that. Surely she was in earnest.
“But,” Brian said, “we’ve assumed that having another baby would risk having another sick baby.”
Dr. Koerper was quiet for a beat. Was this little hitch in the plan only now occurring to her? “Since we haven’t been able to diagnose Amelia-Grace, it is true that we can’t give you reliable odds on your chances of having a child with the same disease,” she said. “But think it over. She’d never need another blood transfusion; she’d be cured. And you could go back to being a normal family.”
I suppressed a snort. Back?
My thoughts flew in confused circles, tangling and looping through each other, doubling back. How could we put our daughter into a situation with published survival rates? I didn’t want a transplant for my child, or anyone else’s. But I also didn’t want to have a very sick kid who grew into a very sick adult, if we were lucky.
The one question I’d been afraid to ask, and had put off asking while we searched for a diagnosis, was no longer avoidable.
I made my whole body still and took a breath. “If she doesn’t get better, if she needs lifelong transfusions, what are those survival rates?”
“I don’t like to give those kinds of statistics,” Dr. Koerper said. “People become very attached to the numbers.”
“Please,” I said, “we know they are just numbers.”
Dr. Koerper looked from me to Brian and back again. “Transfusion-dependent patients, in the last available data, have a fifty percent chance of reaching the age of thirty.”
I thought I might slap her; one sharp blow to bring her to her senses.