If only she were a hedge fund, or an annuity, it would be easy to take our risk upfront. But she was a girl. A single, unique, irreplaceable girl. A girl who bobbed her head when she laughed, who squealed every single time the Disney logo appeared on the screen, who dreaded water but loved sand. A girl who, when I spoke to her in a severe tone, would sometimes say, “Smooth, Mama, smooth.”
Without the transplant she would stay a sick kid whose life, however brief or long, would revolve around medical care. Or we could grab for the ring of health. Normalcy. A life not dominated by doctors or blood counts or needles or experimental drugs.
“Look,” I said to Brian, “when your hair is on fire, you don’t stand around debating whether or not to put out the flames!”
“You do,” he said, “when the only way to put out the fire is to clobber the flames with a brick.”
I knew what he meant, but I didn’t want to admit it.
I was essentially for the transplant, and Brian was essentially against. We squared off in our default positions, optimists to the left, pessimists to the right. But this could turn on a dime. If I suddenly pulled away from the idea, he’d push forward, and vice versa. We couldn’t seem to sit on the same side of the seesaw for more than a second or two. We were suspended in the stasis of indecision. It was our luck to be able to decide, but also our constant burden, and one without a clear deadline. The cord blood was safely banked; it would not expire.
We weighed the relative pros and cons while making dinner, folding laundry, driving to the beach, flossing teeth, changing diapers, answering emails, brushing Gracie’s hair, while zipping up our coats for a walk, sitting down with a glass of wine after dinner, while making love, while silent in the car riding home from yet another transfusion, while Gracie slept, refreshed, re-pinked, in the backseat. No matter what we were talking about, that’s what we were talking about.
21
Meanwhile, the clock was ticking on our time in California. Brian had been commuting cross-country for a whole semester. There was no way we could afford to continue our quixotic two-coast life. For the foreseeable future, my work was caring for a sick toddler and an infant, unpaid. We needed an income, and Brian had great work, in New York. Case closed.
Come September, we decided, we would move back East. Gracie would be two years and change, Gabriel only seven months. They might not remember California, but I hoped they’d been there long enough for some of its golden light to seep in.
The worst part of leaving California was leaving my mom. Given how miserable our leaving made her, she was incredibly gracious. In late August she threw a big good-bye party for us in her garden.
Toward the end of the night, Dawa sat down beside me on a low stone wall. “How’s it going, Harpo?” he asked.
“I’m sad,” I said. “I don’t want to go.”
“I don’t want you to go either,” he said. We watched people chatting. Van Morrison drifted out from the house speakers, Well, it’s a marvelous night for a moondance. Suzi was standing in a corner with Liam. “You,” Suzi had said, when she’d told me she was pregnant, “are contagious.” How could I go when we were finally poised to do the thing we’d always said we would do—raise our kids side by side?
Suzi carried Liam over. “Scoot your butt,” she pushed me.
“Wanna move to New York?” I said.
“Not now,” Suzi said. “And how can you?” She seemed to have accepted my reconciliation with Brian, even to be rooting for us, but she saw our move back East as an outright betrayal. She took a chip with guacamole that I’d been holding out of my hand and ate it.
“Basically,” she said, “you suck.”
Cassie wiggled in between us. Our good-bye would be easy; she had independent plans to move to New York in a few months.
“Suzi,” I said, “Cassie’s doing it. I’m doing it. You and Dawa and Liam can do it too.”
“Look around,” Suzi said, “you’re going to leave this?” My mom’s garden had never been prettier; everything was green, the jasmine trellis she’d planted when Gracie was born was in full bloom. We were insane to leave this place.
My mom sat down on the stone wall beside us and began to cry.
“Jessica, no,” Suzi said. “You’ll set off a chain reaction.” But it was too late. I was already crying, Cassie too. If you cry, she cries; that’s how she’s wired. Only when Liam began crying did we pull ourselves together.
Later I drifted around my mom’s kitchen helping to clean up. “I guess you’re really going,” she said, “and I am happy for you. But I am going to miss you so, so much.”
This was the kitchen where, as a teenager, I’d accidentally left the water running while sunbathing for an hour on the garage roof. When my mom had come home to find me vacuuming water out of the downstairs carpet, she’d forgiven me almost instantly. When I was pregnant and alone, heartsick and at bay, she’d given me everything she could. Food and money and time and most of all the spirit of camaraderie.
I thought about the Billy Collins poem “The Lanyard,” in which the protagonist laments the impossible project of repaying our mothers.
She set cold facecloths on my forehead
then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim and I in turn presented her with … a lanyard.
We would have the phone and email and planes and whatever could be sent through the mail—spoof cards and See’s Candies and eucalyptus leaves and heirloom china and bagels (if not lox)—but it would not be the same. And we both knew it.
I put my arms around her. “Thank you, Mom. I’m going to miss you too.”
It was more true than I knew how to say. My mom had a way of looking at the world that moved me; she saw the light, no matter what. And she’d taught me that. We were expert at laughing through the worst. In the Marin County flood of ’83, we’d laughed ourselves sick as water poured under the doors of our green Corolla and pooled around our ankles. We’d laughed as we waded through thigh-high water toward the refuge of a nearby playground.
“This place will always be here for you,” she said. And with that, I tipped out of tenderness toward irritation. Was she implying I would need to come back? That Brian and I wouldn’t make it?