Later we loaded both kids into the car to take Gabriel home. We carefully packed him into an infant seat right beside Gracie’s toddler seat. He was rear facing to her front facing. I liked the look of those two seats, touching, two siblings face to face, side by side. Brian pulled out of the hospital parking lot with the greatest of care, I could feel the sense of responsibility coursing through him, and it put me at ease. For today, he could worry, I could enjoy.
We were about halfway home, cruising happily along, when Gabriel let out a piercing cry. I turned to find Gracie pressing her foot, clad in a smooth leather sandal, into Gabriel’s face. She was a premoral creature, happily stomping on his mouth and nose. I shrieked, Brian jumped, Gracie pulled her foot off, and Gabriel fell silent. I was starting to scold Gracie in some new and phenomenally loud way, when Brian pulled over, got out, and separated the carriers so the middle spot opened between them. Problem solved.
Brian smoothed back Gracie’s hair. “Gracie,” he said, “we don’t want to hurt the baby.”
She gave us a winning smile. “Yes,” she said. “I do want to hurt the baby.”
I could relate to her irrational urges, her free-floating aggression. Not toward the baby—I was besotted with this boy of big lips, thick blood, powerful heart—but toward Brian. Almost instantly after Gabriel’s birth, I’d descended into a murky, cold tank of anger.
I knew I should shake it off. I’d already ruined our first night with our son, for myself at least. But my joy over Gabe’s arrival was cut with a resurgence of fury toward Brian, in part because of an inherent conflict of interest.
We’d been told that getting the “full volume” of cord blood was critical, the more stem cells the better for transplant. Each cell, in a sense, increased Gracie’s chances. And so, in the minutes after Gabriel arrived, when I’d experienced a minicrisis of continued bleeding and pain, Brian had needed to focus on collecting the cord blood, rather than on me.
As much as I understood this rationally, I was plagued by a lingering sense that Brian had turned away at the crucial moment.
When we’d finally been alone with Gabe tucked into the sling of my arm and Brian peering down at this astonishing development, I’d said, “I was scared.” I said it accusingly, as if he didn’t know, and should have known.
“I’m so sorry you were hurting and scared, my love.”
I could feel his apology reach backward in time, to embrace Gracie and me, without him, on the day she was born.
19
“Let’s pretend we’re in Hawaii,” I said. “Hawaii is lucky and warm.” Brian and I were sitting at the lonely end of Stinson Beach, where it nearly touches Bolinas. It was getting dark, and we were shivering. It had been over three months since we’d sent Gabriel’s cord blood for analysis to determine whether it was a match for Gracie. Brian didn’t look convinced that pretending we were in Hawaii would have a direct effect on Gabe’s matching outcome, but he did offer me a bag of almonds we’d packed as a snack: “Care for a macadamia nut?”
We were staying at my mom’s cottage near the ocean. She’d bought it for a song years ago and now rented it out by the weekend to supplement her income. People drove from San Francisco and paid all kinds of money to fall asleep to the sound of waves. She’d offered us this place for a whole week. To be nice, to take our minds off waiting. We were lucky; but I didn’t feel lucky. I felt sick with the possibility that Gabriel’s cells, being split and analyzed, would reveal not only an incompatibility with Gracie’s but also some scary, hitherto undetected, defect of their own.
“Let’s go make sure the babies are still breathing,” I said. A passable joke in another family. We got up and dusted the sand off our butts and walked the fifty feet back into the cottage, where both babies were, happily, alive and napping.
By our fourth day out at Stinson, Gracie had made peace with the immutable fact that sand is inedible. She dug and threw, threw and dug, with the gusto of a dog allowed off leash. She showered us with fistfuls and laughed, bobbing her head. Gabriel slept in his carrier, on the sand, under a wavering circle of shade, dreaming of what, we had no idea, but his lids pulsed back and forth, ferocious dreamer.
My mom had driven out to bring us lunch. After we ate, Brian walked back up to the house, “I’ll be puttering if you need me.” “We’re good,” I said. Gracie was trying to bury my legs; the dry sand slid off, a thousand silky hands.
My mom handed me a book of Sharon Olds poems and Star magazine; “to distract and inspire, in any order.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
Her phone rang, and she wandered off to chat. Then my phone rang, one ring too many, and woke Gabriel; his crying sparked Gracie’s crying. I could see from the number that it was Dr. Koerper. I tried to sound composed, not like a crazed lady camped on the beach reading Star magazine to two screaming kids.
“Hello?”
“He’s a match,” she said. “Gabriel’s an extended match. A perfect match.”
I wanted a better, more potent word than thanks. Even thank you felt inadequate. The match might not be her doing, per se, but Gabriel himself felt semi-attributable to her. She’d been the first one to say sibling.
“Dr. Koerper, you have given us something amazing.” I said. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” she said. “I am so happy for your family.” And we got off the phone.
I looked over at my mom, still chatting. I waved my hands in the air. “He’s a match,” I said.
She started to cry. That is my mom—perpetually ready to share misery or joy with anyone on the beach.
Brian was just a few hundred yards away, in the house. I wanted to tell him face to face. Mom said, “Leave the kids. Go!”
When I opened the door to the cottage I could hear the percussive sound of the keyboard. Brian had a particular rhythm. Bursts of sounds, brief silences, and then renewed bursts. I stood and listened: Brian, writing, happy. And I had more happiness to bring him.
I couldn’t see his face; he might have had his eyes closed. I made a noise, and he turned to me and smiled. Seeing me unexpectedly, Brian had a certain smile. Everyone in the world should be smiled at like this, at least once.
“Hi,” I said. “Dr. Koerper called.”
He sat up straighter, every neuron on alert.
“He’s a match,” I said. “A perfect match. An extended match.”
“Wow.” A long pause. “Wow. My god. Wow.”
And then his face fell, an infinitesimal slackening around the eyes, the corners of the mouth. A shadow thought.
“What?” I said.
“The risk.”
We both sat for a while, living with risk, nestled against our hope, the yin/yang of possibility and danger, inextricably linked, coexisting. Cure and threat, clinging and inseparable.
We could cure her. But only if we were willing to risk her.
20
Transplant can cure you. Or it can kill you. There’s not much middle ground. If we chose transplant, we would be, as one doctor put it, taking our “risk upfront.”