“Are you willing to send Gracie across the street?” Brian said.
For Brian, the possibility that Gracie could die from the transplant was real. In reality, it was real. For me, to say such a thing aloud was a sacrilege.
“Go away!” I went into the bathroom and locked the door.
“Answer the question,” said Brian. “Would you send her across the street?”
If transplant was a huge risk, so was doing nothing. When I thought of Gracie’s future without the transplant, the screen filled with silent, gray snow. I could see her at four, maybe five years old. But that was it. Beyond that, she wavered out of sight. My gut feeling was that she needed this cure to survive. If we left her sick, I felt sure she’d get sicker. “Failure to thrive.” That phrase was never far off. She could dwindle down, sputter out.
He was afraid she would die if we transplanted her. I was afraid she would die if we didn’t. The fact that we were both very wise to be afraid didn’t help us decide. And we needed to decide soon. Not this week or month. Not even this year necessarily, but before Gracie got a lot bigger. A successful transplant depended on having a high volume of stem cells for every kilo of body weight. Gabe’s cells, stored in the cord blood bank, were finite. Gracie, meanwhile, was only gaining kilos.
If Brian won’t agree to this, I thought, I’ll go back to doing everything alone.
“Heather, unlock the door.” Brian tapped rhythmically against the wood, Morse code or maybe the William Tell Overture. I didn’t respond. I wanted to stay mad; I would stay mad. We would wake up in the morning, nothing resolved, in a fugue of resentment, him in bed, me in a nest of towels in the bathtub.
But we were actually on the same side. We both wanted our girl to live, and to live a good life. I unlocked the door. Brian sat down beside me. He ran his thumb along my inner wrist. I felt my shoulders relax.
“What are we going to do?” I said.
I wanted him to say, We’ll follow your instincts. We’ll use Gabriel’s cord blood. We’ll do the transplant. We’ll hold on like hell and keep her with us. “I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t know.”
We were confused. We were scared. This was a trial by fire, and we were in the middle part, where you burn.
24
Six months earlier, when we’d arrived in Brooklyn, I had seen a Craigslist ad that sounded too good to be true. “Charming 2-bdrm purple Victorian on Webster Pl., quaint block of Painted Ladies,” whatever those were. This rental was at the top of our range, over it. But our range had acquired a terrifying plasticity.
I’d read the ad aloud to my mom over the phone. “Too good to be true, right?”
“Just go check it out,” she’d said. “You have nothing to lose.”
When I think now at how close we came to missing out on Webster Place, I cringe. I shudder. We could have missed Kathy. We could have missed Eden, Chloe, Steve. We could have missed out on Marty Markowitz, borough president of Brooklyn, standing on our front porch to deliver a short speech to the crowd below.
Painted Ladies turned out to be brightly colored Victorian row houses with wide connected porches. Ours had two floors, huge in comparison to everything I’d seen before. Even before I looked upstairs, where two big bedrooms were divided by heavy wood pocket doors, I was leaping around with excitement saying yes. A backyard, a washer and dryer in a laundry room, “parlor floor” windows taller than Brian, double yes.
The owners had to leave town before we could meet to swap lease and keys, so they left the key with a neighbor. Brian arranged to meet her one day after work, but when he arrived at her house, she wasn’t home. She was eight months’ pregnant at the time, and in the fog of making a new human, simply forgot. He phoned her up, and all was arranged anew. That night I asked how our new neighbor seemed. He said, “She used the word mortified about forgetting to meet me. Can you believe someone would be so considerate in 2004 as to be mortified?” That was Kathy, day one.
The next morning, as I dragged the garbage out to the curb, an energetic blond woman walked by, pulled by her pug. Eight months’ pregnant. Had to be her. She glanced down at our pile of broken junk, including a decrepit hobbyhorse and broken toilet brush.
“The glamour of domestic life,” she said, “knows no bounds.”
Later I’d know her as a forgiving daughter to inventively demanding parents, a calm and antic mother to two daughters, a tireless and wide-ranging reader, a scattered and funny partner on urban adventures, a haphazard cook, a lover of a slightly messy house, a secret player of strip poker with her mate, a pretty woman unvain in the extreme, a profoundly unpretentious person who grew up in the thick of one pretentious milieu after another without losing sight of what mattered—kindness. I’d know her as the holder of an MFA in fiction, a prize-winning playwright, and someone madly in love with her pug, Monkey. But all that was icing. The cake I found out within the first three minutes: the sight of her bright silhouette walking down the street toward our house gave me a good feeling.
“You must be Kathy,” I said, and held out my hand. “I’m Heather, Gracie and Gabriel’s mom.”
“Kathy,” she held out hers, “mother of Eden and whoever is in here.”
We were a matched set: two mothers with a toddler and an infant (almost) apiece, aspirational creatives bogged down by small people. When we shook, it felt as if we’d brokered a deal: we’d help each other.
The next day Gracie met Eden, Kathy’s daughter, a serious strawberry blonde with a narrow chin and wide-set blue eyes. She wore glasses, which she pushed back into place frequently and with great care. She arrived via a plastic car with a bright orange roof, like an emergency vehicle. Behind the wheel she was calm and self-possessed. When Edith Wharton drove, I thought, this is how she looked. When Eden got close enough, Gracie rushed the car and tried to climb in. It wasn’t designed for two, but Eden scooted enough to make room. “Hi,” Gracie said, pointing to the nonexistent space between them. “This is Doo Doo.” Her imaginary friend.
“I know Doo Doo,” Eden said.
And with that, they, too, were friends.
Neither girl had ever made a friend before, and the idea that they lived only a few houses apart was intoxicating. Each would rush outside in the mornings, stand at her end of the block, and shout down to the other end, “Eeeeeeeeeden!” or “Graaaaaaaacie!” They’d run to the middle and throw their arms around each other, a pair of lovers reunited after a tragic separation.