And so, we stayed. In my final trimester I went weekly to a local sonogram lab where they measured the baby’s blood levels, in utero, exactly as Dr. Koerper had said they could. Amazingly, each measurement came back normal. The baby appeared to be the picture of health. We were in clover, more or less. And yet our puzzle had a million unplaceable pieces.
When Brian’s sabbatical ended—as crazy and untenable as it sounds—he began commuting to work. As in commuting from California to New York. Weekly. Four days in California, three days in New York. For a man who had once resisted family life so violently, he was incredibly willing to do whatever it took to be with Gracie and me and the new apple seed. It was his writing, in large part, that made this possible, that paid for it. Within the last year he’d gotten both a Guggenheim grant and a book contract, enabling us to run this kooky experiment in bicoastal domesticity.
Brian would leave for work Sunday night and return Wednesday night in a state of utter exhaustion. If, as has been said, the soul travels at the same rate as an unburdened mule, his was perpetually trailing behind him, somewhere over the Midwest. Before his soul could make it as far east as, say, Idaho, he’d be on another plane, flying in the opposite direction. And the poor, exhausted soul-mule would have to turn around and go the other way. I imagined it forever zigzagging the same few interior states.
All the while, I was on my own, seven, eight, then nine months’ pregnant, with a toddler. Lifting Gracie up and down, carting groceries from car to house, riding out the daily emotional ups and downs of a nearly two-year-old human. Responding with calm understanding to the mood swings and serial desires of a toddler is a two-parent job, but there was only one of me, plus the baby in the belly. Millions of people are executing much worse tasks, I reminded myself. But I stink at relativism.
The girl wants peanut butter on the cracker; no, wait, she wants jam. You already spread the peanut butter. Are you insane? A terrorist? Why would you use peanut butter when she wanted jam? No, you can’t get a new cracker and put jam on it; she wanted that cracker. That was the good cracker, and now it has been polluted. No! Don’t try to wipe the peanut butter off. You cracked it. It is a cracked cracker with a corner missing. It can never be made whole again. But look, there’s a bag of gummy bears on top of the fridge. Of course gummy bears are good. Cracker? What cracker? Give her the red gummy bear, not the yellow gummy bear. What are you, crazy?
In the witching hours of late afternoon, I’d call Suzi, now also a new mom. She and Dawa had conceived a little boy, she believed, on the very day Gracie was born (as if Gracie’s birth were not a cautionary tale). According to Suzi, their infant son, Liam, was “a world-class expert on nonproductive nursing.”
“Bummer,” I said.
“Remember that girl who danced in her wet T-shirt on the Indonesian boat?”
“No.”
“She was dancing on deck, and all the boat guys started clapping. I want boobs like her again.”
“Suzi, you never, not for one minute of your life, had boobs like her. And your boobs are not the problem. The babies are the problem. Blame the babies! Why am I having another one? Infant-toddler combo—worst idea ever.”
“Bummer.” Then a long pause. “You might be the luckiest person I know.”
As dreamless, dehydrated, and deprived of our youthful selves as we might be, we were lucky and we knew it. Suzi was madly in love with Liam. The week before, she’d told me that he smelled like her favorite food, pizza.
“All the time,” she’d said, “good pizza. Brick-oven pizza.”
“Is that maybe because you eat a lot of pizza?”
“No!” She’d been indignant. “He just smells like pizza. Naturally.”
On Wednesday nights Brian would arrive home after traveling nearly six thousand miles round-trip and teaching nonstop for three days.
His first day back the best we could do, typically, was to sit side by side on the couch, like a pair of catatonic zombies, while Amelia-Grace frolicked around the living room, drawing bright pictures on the walls, sketching new faces over our faces with her scented markers. We said nothing. Our little Picasso. If she got really bored, she’d begin to reorganize our possessions into like-minded clusters. All the lamps in one place. All houseplants in another. All wooden things together. Days later we would find a clump of toothbrushes behind a chair. It was adorable and heartbreaking, her wish to impose order on her unorderable world.
Sometimes she would sit on my lap, patting my belly, half amused, half mystified by its size. When we tried to explain to her that a brother or a sister was growing inside me and would soon come out, she’d wriggle off to play. We were too ridiculous to take seriously.
As my due date approached, we were painfully aware that if I called Brian at work and told him I’d gone into labor, the chances he’d make it to the hospital in time for the birth were slim to nil. From phone call to walking onto a plane would take two hours at least. The flight itself was five plus another hour at best from airport to hospital. That gave us, tops, an eight-or nine-hour turnaround time. Even though Lewis and Clark would leap out of their buckskin boots to learn that one could cross an entire continent in hours rather than bone-cracking years—it was too long.
Brian could not miss this birth. He had a special role to play. He was the cord blood guy. When Dr. Koerper had first explained how we would “harvest” the new baby’s cord blood for a possible transplant, it had sounded so rinky-dink that I thought she was joking. But this was the very early days of cord blood collection, and it was still a largely do-it-yourself operation. You first had to special-order a collection kit from one of the private cord blood banks. They would then mail you the kit in a big cardboard box, and you would bring this kit with you to the hospital, having carefully read the directions for cord blood collection, and then you would explain to the doctor how to do the actual collecting, which involved a syringe and the baby’s umbilical cord and timing things just right. The responsibility for this entire operation fell on Brian.
All this would be done in the hope that the baby would be “a match” for Gracie.
The only truly terrific aspect to this method of harvesting the cells was that it would be totally painless for the baby. When I’d asked Dr. Koerper if it would hurt, she’d said, “No more than cutting your fingernails.”
The more traditional method of harvesting cells for transplant is to extract marrow from a donor’s biggest bones, typically the hip or pelvis. It’s not hugely dangerous, but it is painful. And we were so happy to have another option. Plus cord blood stem cells are superior in purity and adaptability to cells extracted from the marrow.
And so we ordered our kit and received in the mail a cardboard box full of tubing, bags, and a Xeroxed sheet of instructions to share with our doctor, which Brian memorized word for word.