“OK,” I said. “We’ll be in touch.” I gathered my purse, Brian stood up and took my hand. I knew without looking at his face that he would be tight-lipped, foreboding, knew he shared my view that Dr. Koerper’s statistics were unnecessarily hostile. Never mind that I’d pressed, almost begged for them. How dare she say that out loud.
I wanted to be with Gracie, immediately. I needed to touch her pudgy hands and smell her thin, silky hair, to inhale her sweet toddler breath. When we got to the lobby we found my mom alternately reading People magazine and watching Gracie cruise around the perimeter of chairs. Gracie was wearing a summer dress with giant pink and orange flowers. As she moved, the hem kept riding up; her small legs, plump and strong, propelled her around the lobby at top speed. What kind of creepy statisticians would bet against such a girl?
I chased her and kissed her and smelled her. She squirmed to get down, as if I’d interrupted her at work. I wanted to whisper in her ear, “You will be thirty. And then forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty. You will be ninety and then a hundred. You will be so old and so decrepit, you’ll be baggy with age and decay. Doesn’t that sound nice?”
Walking to the parking garage, hand in hand, Brian and I said nothing. We were suddenly the parents of a girl who might or might not see thirty, and that somehow seemed like a personal failing. We’d made someone with an expiration date.
My mom said good-bye to us in the lot; she was off to do errands, her eternal errands. When I hugged her good-bye, she whispered, “I don’t know what the doctor said to make you two so grim, but doctors don’t know everything. Look at her, she’s perfect.”
I looked at my daughter. She was chubby, currently pink, and humming a wordless, happy opera. She was a baby from central casting.
With a time bomb inside.
I thanked my mom, and we got into the car. I was driving. As I pulled out of the garage, the city spread below us, a rippled, silvery skirt, rising and falling with the hills, hemmed with the blue of the bay. It was an infuriatingly perfect day. Why would the weather never corroborate one’s mood? The bay sputtered with light, transmitting its secret code in a series of blinks and flashes—blue, blue, blue, silver, blue, silver.
Relax, the signals said, everything is OK. The baby might be sick, but she is going to get well. Someday she is going to get an apartment at the top of one of these hills; she’ll count herself among the supremely lucky who get to live in Northern California. She’ll hike the Marin Headlands, get coffee at Caffe Trieste in Sausalito, kayak. She’ll bike through the marina, fly kites at Fort Baker. She’ll do laundry and read trashy magazines and eat cold tofu chili out of the can. Fall in love. Maybe have a baby of her own. She’ll waste time, someday, in a beautiful place because her time on earth won’t be precious. It will be ordinary, disposable time. Just wait.
I was on Lombard Street, approaching the bridge, with both hands on the wheel, when a midnight-blue SUV swerved fully into our lane. The driver seemed to hold a beautifully naive belief that two objects can occupy the exact same time/space. I pulled hard to the right and our car jumped the curb. Thank God, the sidewalk was empty. The SUV driver drove merrily on.
At the next stoplight, she was chatting on the cell phone, head tossed back, laughing. If you are going to nearly kill us, I thought, at least have the courtesy to do it on purpose. I put the car in park, got out, and walked up to her window. She kept chatting. I knocked. Finally, she turned to look. I pointed behind her. “Do you see that car?” She nodded her head. “There is a baby in the back of that car who needs blood transfusions to stay alive. Can you see her?” The woman made the universal palms-down, calm-down gesture. “Do you see the baby or not?” She just stared at me; risk assessment. “That baby has enough trouble surviving without your fucking murderous phone calls.”
Brian got out of the car. “Heather,” he said, “you’ve made some fine points. Now it’s time to go.” I looked at the woman; she didn’t seem like she got my points at all. The moment the traffic light turned green, she was gone. I walked back to the car; Brian was behind the wheel.
“I’ll drive,” he said, sounding casual.
“I can drive,” I said. “I’m a great driver.”
“You are,” Brian said. “You are a legendary driver.”
But he didn’t get out. I walked around to the passenger’s seat.
“She tried to kill us with her Lexus,” I said.
He put one hand on my knee. “I’m always so impressed by the way you know the brands of cars.”
“But did you see that?”
“I did, I saw that,” he said. His that seemed to encompass my actions as much as the woman’s.
Thankfully, Gracie had slept peaceably as I’d wandered around in live traffic, cussing people out. As we crossed over the Golden Gate, I remembered some pop psychology book I’d once read that said anger, searching for an appropriate target where none exists, will aim at whatever is handy. Maybe the Lexus woman was handier than a blood disease. But I said nothing of the kind to Brian. Chances were, he’d be my next target, and I didn’t want to help him disarm me.
After dinner—something veggie for Brian, something meat-ish for me, and minuscule pieces of both for Gracie—we put her to bed with her favorite book, Goodnight Moon. “Goodnight kittens … Goodnight mouse … Goodnight stars. Goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere.”
This book, once beloved, now sounded sinister. Goodnight was uncomfortably close to good-bye.
After Gracie fell asleep, Brian and I sat on our narrow deck overlooking the stream and talked about everything Dr. Koerper had said. Each of us, in our own way, was trying to metabolize the shock of her statistic. If we did not give her a transplant, we had a 50 percent chance of knowing our daughter at age thirty. She had only a 50 percent chance of knowing herself for thirty years.
We calculated her odds of reaching various ages. Did she have a 100 percent chance of reaching the age of twelve, fourteen, eighteen? A 75 percent chance of reaching twenty-five?
“Fifty-fifty chance of reaching age thirty,” Brian said. “I didn’t expect to hear that.”
“Bone marrow transplant,” I said. “I didn’t expect to hear that.”
“Me either.”
“But cure sounds good. I am crazy about cure.”
“Yeah, but to get to cure you have to take your kid through hell. And there is no guarantee she’ll walk out.”
“Also, what would we cure her with? We have no sibling!”
“And even if we wanted to give her a sibling, we can’t be sure that the new baby would be born healthy. Can you imagine having two sick kids at the same time?”
“No,” I said, even though I was picturing two wan, limp babies side by side in a double stroller that Brian and I, side by side, pushed uphill, never down, for all eternity.
“Besides,” Brian added, “we only have a one-in-four chance of having a kid who, if they were healthy, would match her well enough to use the cells for transplant. Twenty-five percent. Those odds stink.”