I looked at him, my glass-half-empty guy, who I suspected was secretly a glass-half-full guy. We were doomed. I did not want to be doomed, I rejected doom, but I couldn’t see a clear path through the numbers to daylight.
And there was this: was it ethical to have a second child to save the first child? Who wants to arrive on earth as a parachute, a backup plan?
“We can’t risk it,” Brian said.
“We can’t,” I said. “And we won’t.”
Brian put his hand out for mine and stood up. “I’m going to putter for a while. And then, do you want to watch 24?”
By putter Brian meant write. Despite his worst fears, he had been, miraculously, inventively, finding time to write inside family life. Sometimes he brought his computer to doctor appointments and wrote as we waited, which made me both thrilled and jealous. Now, from out on the deck, I could hear the beginning taps on his keyboard.
I sat listening to his rhythms and to the creek’s. I was waiting for some kind of epiphany, which I knew wouldn’t come. In the Greek Orthodox tradition, the Feast of the Epiphany is sometimes celebrated with vasilopita, a bread baked with a lucky coin inside. Whoever receives the slice containing the coin will have a blessed year. But there was no way to slice our loaf for the lucky coin. Unless the present moment was luck enough; Gracie asleep in her crib, Brian puttering, and waiting for me, in the bedroom.
The next morning, as soon as I woke up, I tried to suppress my consciousness. I’d noticed lately that Gracie seemed to intuit when I woke up, and to wake in response. Even though she slept in her own room in our new apartment, she knew within seconds when I woke. Even if I lay still, made not a sound, I’d hear her stir and coo and call out. She had some kind of special Spidey sense. You could not slip out of sleep, into consciousness, without her knowing.
When I walked into her room, she was standing up in her crib, holding her arms out over the railing. “Mama,” she said, and broke into her award-winning grin. She began to bounce up and down in excitement, squeaking the mattress, jiggling the whole crib. Mama. Just two syllables, but they kick-started another revolution around the sun. I picked her up; she clung with all four limbs in a tight wrap, her baby head tucked under my chin. Tiny primate clings to bigger primate. Pure joy.
“Good morning,” I said. “Did you have dreams?”
I set her down on the deck and went to make coffee. She loved to pick up dried leaves, stray earrings, errant keys, anything she could get her hands on to drop through the wooden slats into the stream below. When I came back out with my coffee, she was disposing of an entire box, one by one, of expensive gluten-free cookies. She seemed decisive, sure of every move. I envied that. “Gracie,” I said, “I’m sorry we can’t give you a sibling. I’m sorry we don’t have a donor for you.” She looked up at me, grinning, scooted on her diapered butt, placed one hand on each of my knees, and began to bob up and down.
“What are you two up to?” Brian said.
“Dancing and wasting food.”
“Sounds like an ideal morning.” He stepped out to join us on the deck and sat down beside me. I inhaled. Being close to him made my entire nervous system downshift into a lower gear. When he sat close, the concept of purring made sense. He rubbed Gracie’s back. “Hello,” he said. “It’s nice to see you both.” And he meant it. With Brian nothing was ever an empty gesture, nothing was phoned in.
“Will you watch her while I run?” I asked.
“I will be very happy to watch her while you run—or pay bills or stroll town aimlessly,” he said. “Watching her is a privilege and an honor.” His answer, meant to charm—in fact charming—annoyed me. I wanted him to watch her because he was her dad, not because it was a privilege but because it was his job. Still, I’d asked. He’d answered.
This was the seesaw quality of my internal state: I love you, you infuriate me. You infuriate me, I love you.
“Thanks,” I said, and grew angrier still, at him, for making me thank him.
I loved to run even though I was slow, inconsistent, and prone to injury. Sweating and listening to music and running past the eclectic houses of my hometown made me happy. I’d been running for the last few months, and people had begun to say, “Hey, you are getting your body back,” which, though I was flattered every time, also offended me. It sounded as if my body, while pregnant, had been missing. On hiatus.
But I was a physical person, a performer, a quasi-dancer (real dancers don’t run), and I wanted to be able to leap around in the same old way I always had. Half appreciating Brian, half resenting him, with equal measures love and anxiety over Gracie, as ever, I laced up my shoes and headed out onto the tree-lined streets of San Anselmo. Normal life. Or close enough.
When I got home Gracie was napping. Brian was back in bed. I climbed in beside him. Sweaty, smelly, probably muddy. He didn’t seem to mind.
Later, after a day, after dinner, after putting Gracie back to bed, we sat out on the deck with wine, with the time to talk and to decide.
We would not have another baby. One sick kid was enough. We would try to find a way to cure her, but we would not, we could not, risk having two sick kids. It felt like a door shutting, but it also felt right.
15
Two weeks later, I was pregnant, which was impossible. It was a defy-the-laws-of-physics-common-sense-chemistry-and-the-rules-of-reproduction pregnancy. A throw-your-hands-in-the-air-and-demand-to-know-who’s-responsible-for-this pregnancy.
“That day you went for a run,” Brian said.
“I’ve gone for runs before,” I said, “and not gotten pregnant.”
“After the run. The … you know … remember how it…”
The fact that we were people who would rather not say condom aloud was maybe why we were always one step behind the best practices in birth control.
But this had truly been an accident. We’d been using “barrier contraception,” but it had gone AWOL. Way, way AWOL. It had gone on a walkabout. We knew that. We’d been a little worried, but it wasn’t a particularly fertile point in time. Still, I’d called my doctor, and she’d prescribed Plan B. I had picked it up, for Christ’s sake, and—even though I was ridiculously, almost superstitiously, drug-averse—I’d taken the damn thing. Our decision had already been made, out on the deck, over the stream. No second kid. No potentially sick second kid, especially not via accident or subterfuge or the heavy hand of fate or whatever the hell this was. We’d decided no, and we were in charge.