Plan B was an innocuous white tablet. Two of them, a set of twins, to be taken twelve hours apart. I swished down the first dose. My doctor had assured me that Plan B worked by preventing contraception, not interrupting a process already under way, and (reproductive-rights-supporter though I am) I’d found this reassuring. I did not want to send any souls packing. I just wanted to discourage them from settling in.
While the first pill did its work Brian and I lay down with Gracie between us. Brian stroked her hair and wrote and stroked her hair. I read and stroked her feet and read. Poor toddler, as she slept her parents treated her like a toy they adored but were rarely allowed to play with.
“Guess what I’m doing right now?” I said.
“What?”
“Not conceiving.” Pause. “Aren’t you proud of me?”
“Very proud indeed,” though Brian sounded more subtly sad than proud.
“We are well within the time frame listed on the box. It said seventy-two hours, and we’re only at thirty-two hours.”
“Phew,” Brian said.
Only, not phew. Because as we read and wrote and adored our toddler, another soul was settling in.
And now here I was—a mere two weeks after going for a run and getting sweaty and being outmaneuvered by barrier contraception and taking Plan B—staring at the stick. The all-knowing stick that tells your future. I stared open-mouthed. Brian called this expression “the Garfield.” It usually encompassed indignation and shock, both directed at him, but this time it was pure inability or refusal to believe the facts. Even though I’d been fretting about this enough to go to the drugstore and buy the test, it hadn’t occurred to me that it might read positive.
I did not say, as I’d said with Gracie, “Oh, my God,” fifty times in a row, out loud. I did not put my shoes on to walk into the fire trails. But I did have the same vertiginous feeling of having been pushed into unincorporated space, of cartwheeling through air.
I should not have been surprised: there is no better way to get pregnant than to decide against having another child. Probably even as we had sat talking and watching night fall over the creek, settling on an understanding that a second child was out of the question and beyond our limited powers, I got pregnant.
“Brian,” I said, walking out onto the deck where he’d been peaceably reading, “look!” I was welling up but had no idea whether these were tears of incipient joy, fear, regret, excitement, or disbelief.
He looked at me, looked at the stick, shot to his feet, and embraced me. Exactly the response I’d hoped for when pregnant with Gracie. In reverse proportion to his fear and avoidance then, was his authentic joy now. “This is wonderful,” he said. Here was the reaction I’d once longed for but could no longer reciprocate. I was on the wheel of panic.
Somehow, in the space of seconds, our magnetized poles inverted, and the alchemy of intimacy reversed. Brian was thrilled, beyond thrilled. Meanwhile, I was an untethered astronaut.
“Is it wonderful?”
A second child now would seal my fate to Brian’s. I felt a rising feral terror of being trapped with two small children in a disintegrating relationship. Even a non-disintegrating one. How could I decide if I wanted to stay with Brian when I had to stay with Brian?
And what about my work? Soon enough Gracie could go to day care, and I’d be able to figure out if my post-baby body could still bend in all the ways necessary in order to perform. Or look for a teaching position within a college theater department, a long-held dream. I’d be able to make a solo performance piece about all this medical insanity instead of just living it.
But most of all, I wasn’t sure if I could trust Brian to be a stable mate, a good father. I lacked a good-father template to compare him to. True, he was patient and tender with Gracie, holding still while she pulled off his glasses fifty times a day, fetching the toys she threw down into the creek over and over again. And he was devoted to decoding her gibberish, repeating it back to her syllable by syllable, until they understood each other. He was the one who’d figured out that nangi meant “water” and baas stood for “pasta.” But could he love another child as much? Could he and I stay sane together under true pressure? What if Brian had a dark side, a superdark streak, which had yet to show itself?
I remained silent, clutching the stick, stupefied. Brian stood beside me.
“It is wonderful,” he said, “and terrifying. It’s both.”
“I’m no good at both,” I said. “I’m good at one or the other.”
At our next visit, I shared the news with Dr. Koerper. “This is thrilling,” she said, pushing her gray-blond bob behind her ears. “This is really delightful news.”
Sure it was thrilling; so was ice-skating across a thawing lake.
“What about the new baby being born sick,” I asked, “what are the chances of that?”
Dr. Koerper picked up Gracie’s chart and held it against her chest like a shield. “Well, as we’ve discussed, it’s difficult to say without a diagnosis. Until we know what is causing her symptoms, we can’t calculate genetic heredity.”
Here, for once, Brian emerged as the optimist. “But we have a one in four chance that the new baby will be a match for her. Right?”
Dr. Koerper looked visibly relieved to be back in safe waters. “Yes, a twenty-five percent chance,” she said, “that the baby will be a perfect HLA match, and you’ll be able to cure Amelia-Grace.” She looked so happy at this prospect, saying the words cure Amelia-Grace aloud, that I was moved. Dr. Koerper cared. As frustrating as it was to get her on the phone, as much as I resented her many false starts at a diagnosis and her unrelenting optimism, she had this rare trait: at her core, she cared. She was with us, shoulder to shoulder, in our hopes for a healthy daughter.
We drove home in silence, thinking side by side.
Our new baby might provide a bone marrow match that could cure Amelia-Grace. Our new baby might be born with the same enragingly undiagnosable blood disease. Or our new baby might be born both sick and a match. In which case, tragically, being sick would render the match useless. We were back to the same unsolvable calculus that had made us decide against this plan.
A new unspooling ribbon of worry laced through every act; it was no longer just how can we cure Gracie but what if the new baby is born sick?