We decided to go away for a few days and stop thinking. My dad offered us a house he’d once rented, up the coast in Gualala. “Water is good,” he said. “Take the baby and play on the beach. My treat.” It was a two-hour drive of switchback turns, which might have been awful but instead was heaven. We were on Highway 1, tracing the northern California coastline where the mountains’ ragged edge touches the ocean. High drama for hundreds of miles. If there is a more beautiful landscape, I have yet to see it.
It was a fabulous house, huge and clean and modern, set a few hundred yards away from a cliff that dropped down to the beach below. We unpacked and settled in. Gracie fit her hands into a pair of decorative wooden clogs and clomped them on the wooden floor, laughing at how much sound she produced. Her hair was growing; she had the beginning of toddler curls on the back of her neck. Her face was rosy (recently transfused) and her smile easy, immediate. Who would not want a second one of these? Brian did. He’d made that clear with every look and touch on our drive here.
But … everyone said the second kid was exponentially harder. Kid to the power of twenty. It would swamp us—time, money, energy—we’d drown.
We unpacked, fed Gracie lunch, then stood around on the many decks looking at the expansive views across the ocean toward a dark blue horizon line. Gracie went down for a nap; I soaked in the hot tub in the middle of the day, under a searing blue sky, to the sound of breaking waves. I was bobbing in the tub, and bobbing in me was the beginning of a second someone. Grain of rice with a heartbeat. A cluster of cells, clumping and grabbing on, trying to differentiate themselves from one another, from me. I figured by now my body knew the drill. It could grow a kidney or an earlobe or any other human component, even without my explicit consent. I wanted to embrace this process. And yet.
I walked into the house dripping hot tub water, padding around on bare feet trying not to wake Gracie. I found Brian in a downstairs bedroom reading and listening to Van Morrison. I love Van Morrison. Brian loves Bob Dylan, but he’d put on Van. We lay down side by side to listen. She’s as sweet as Tupelo honey, she’s an angel of the first degree. I’d been listening to this song since it came out, in 1971, when I was four, and now, thirty-one years later, it made a new sense to me. Gracie sense. That’s what kids do, they remake the world.
“Are you happy?” Brian asked.
I laid my head on his forearm. “I might be,” I said.
I wanted to be happy.
I was scared and poorly equipped for hardship, that much was certain. Happiness is episodic; it’s hard to know when you’ve caught its coattail. When searching for a parking place on a hot afternoon while cycling through endless contingency plans for Gracie’s health—not so happy. Sitting in my mom’s garden at the end of the day watching Gracie chase Lulu in circles, imagining her with a sibling, romping after—happy.
When, anyway, did happiness become the one golden ring we reach for? How about being guided by what is right or ethical or meaningful? Or by making—as Brian sometimes called it—the “growth choice.” That sounded good, but I wasn’t that mature. I’d always aimed for what brought me the most joy.
The safer, smarter, maybe even wiser choice was no new baby. But the joy choice was yes. Or at least that was the choice with the highest probability of joy. True, a pile of potential anguish lay on the opposite side of the scale. But this is the deal in life: the inevitable twofer of joy and misery in their boxer’s clinch.
This new baby, two or ten or thirty years from now, might make me hear a song in a brand-new way; surely they would dilate someone’s understanding of the world along the way. Likely many someones.
“OK,” I said.
“OK?” Brian said.
“OK. Yes.”
Brian broke into a smile and took my hand.
Yes to another child who might be sick, yes to having two children under two years old at the same time, yes to Brian. Yes, yes, yes to drool, late nights, mutual accusation, yes to euphoria, yes to the probable, the impossible, the impractical, yes to boy, yes to girl, yes, if need be, to a cabbage patch kid. Yes to the whole crazy, doomed mess. Yes, to whoever had chosen us, yes, we chose you back, yes. Yes to life, yes to the flower of the mountain, yes to yes. I say yes. Come on and come little soul. We accept you.
16
I was determined that if this baby were sick, she wouldn’t take us by surprise. Gracie had been most acutely sick at birth. That was when she’d been riding around in ambulances and living in the NICU and people had begun taking snapshots of her, “just in case.” We would not end up in that situation again.
Dr. Koerper reassured us that if, during my pregnancy, the baby was discovered to be seriously anemic, the fetus could be transfused. This seemed like the kind of well-meaning lie doctors make up on the fly. “But,” I said, “how would you get into the baby?”
“By threading a needle through the amniotic sac. We run the needle through you, into the sac, to reach the baby in utero.”
“That sounds complicated and risky,” I said.
“It is.”
Stop asking questions, I told myself, when you really don’t want to know the answer.
Brian gave my knee a squeeze, steady on. I focused on calming my heart rate and sending the baby good vibes, whatever those were. You’d think that having grown up in California in the ’70s I’d have a near-encyclopedic understanding of vibes, but I drew a blank.
Dr. Koerper was her usual encouraging self. “Remember, this baby has a one-in-four chance of being a perfect match for Amelia-Grace,” she said, “and if so, you can harvest the baby’s stem cells at birth and use them for her transplant.” I liked the way she put things. One in four sounded so much more optimistic than 25 percent.
I didn’t pause to bog down our conversation with details like the morbidity rate for pediatric transplant patients; to do that would seem ungrateful. I just nodded as though all this sounded great: If the baby is anemic in utero, transfuse right through me! If the baby is a match, transplant Gracie! I nodded and smiled and inwardly wilted. Too much information, too many variables.
17
Brian’s sabbatical lasted through January 20; the baby’s due date was February 10. Even for artsy math illiterates like us, the inherent conflict of these dates was obvious. He beseeched me to look at our situation with cool logic and to move back to New York.
All the hands on the clock of reason pointed toward New York, but I was unmovable. I wasn’t ready. I was scared to leave our doctors. I was scared to leave my mother, my brothers, Suzi and David and Cassie, our apartment, the deck over the creek, the whole of California, including Lulu. I knew it couldn’t last forever, but I insisted that the new baby would be born in Marin, at the same hospital where Gracie had been born. I trusted them. Even though it was more and more obvious that eventually we would head back East, first, I wanted to have one more California-born baby.