A month or so after we arrived on Webster Place, Kathy delivered her baby, another redheaded girl, Chloe. After that, we began to walk, almost daily, in any kind of weather, because it was the only way we could restrain/entertain all four kids enough to talk.
We would push our merry (or not so merry) clan to Prospect Park, past brownstones, rows of mature trees, and the many, many moms in muted-color, million-dollar active wear. In contrast, we were slobs, who shlumped to the park in anything clean. But we had a good time.
I never mentioned Gracie’s illness. I didn’t tell Kathy that the toddler kicking her feet with faux hunger as we passed the ice cream truck had thus far visited UCSF Medical Center, Oakland Children’s, Stanford, NYU Medical Center, Weill Cornell Medical Center, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Columbia University Medical Center, Long Island Jewish Hospital, Hackensack Medical Center, and Boston Children’s. I didn’t tell her that we’d recently sent slides of Gracie’s blood to a specialist at the NIH and several doctors at the Mayo Clinic.
I didn’t share with her the oodles of conflicting advice we’d gotten.
How a famous transplant doctor who’d worked with over nine hundred patients in Italy emailed to say, “Transplant as soon as possible.” While the genius doc at Boston Children’s whom we waited months to see wrote to us after the appointment to caution that younger patients see “overall higher rates of peri-transplant morbidity and mortality.”
Peri-transplant morbidity and mortality. Really? You had my attention at hello.
With Kathy, our medical life was invisible, and I was just another Brooklyn mom. We talked about whatever: the pros and cons of FreshDirect; how not to strangle the brutish biters of the playground; our refusal to care about “the baby weight”; books we remembered from back when we read; our own writing, equally distant; our mates’ foibles and failings (infinite) compared with their charms (finite). Whatever did not include life-threatening illness.
I didn’t even tell her that Brian and I weren’t married because that part of our story invoked the whole: the unsettling fact that we looked like one thing but were another.
One drizzly morning Kathy called. “Do you wanna go to Coney Island?” Least likely plan for a bad-weather day. Perfect. We arrived somewhere that was, if not Coney Island, then close damn enough. Two parking places on one block, what were the chances? It was now pouring, sheets and sails of pelting rain. Another friend might have said, let’s turn back, or insinuated a bit of unspoken blame. We parked and ran toward a neon sign, “Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs.”
Inside, I dried off Gabe with paper napkins. Kathy gently patted Chloe’s ears and nose. Gracie and Eden, infected with the giddy absurdity of running through rain, shrieked, “We’re wet,” flailing their limbs. “We are so wet!” As if wet were rich or beautiful; a small victory they’d achieved by collaborating.
Friendship, with its inexplicable alchemies, is hard to parse. Something had drawn Cassie and me to worship the same horse gods, as ten year olds. Had drawn Suzi and me to the same grungy couch at college parties. Something made Kathy and me click at first shake, and that same unknowable something looked to be alive between these two toddlers.
They said it again, practically singing, “We are so wet!”
“This is great,” Kathy said, “in the worst possible way.” Her laughter transmitted goodwill, a sense of camaraderie in adversity, a little benediction on bad fortune. It was an antidote to Gracie’s illness, which Kathy could not see, but which was omnipresent.
I thought of the Auden quote, “Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can; all of them make me laugh.”
We ate our soggy hot dogs, in our soggy clothes, then drove home. A nothing afternoon that meant everything.
If you are lucky, you meet four or five people in a lifetime who you’re totally comfortable with. Comfortable in a way that causes your best self to surge forward. With them, rowing through life’s quotidian mess is an adventure. I thought of my mom and me, twenty years earlier, cracking up as the Corolla filled with water.
That night after the kids were asleep Brian said, “You look like the California you.”
“I look different in California and New York?”
“In New York, you sometimes look like a person visiting from another planet and this planet’s gravity is too intense for you.”
“In New York, everything is heavier.”
“But tonight it’s lighter?”
“It was a good day. Kathy and I dragged the kids, through rain, to Coney Island, for stale hot dogs.”
“That is a good day. Did you talk to her about Gracie?”
“No. I keep thinking that maybe if Kathy and Eden see Gracie as well, then she will be well.”
“Sweetheart.” Brian put his hand on the small of my back and drew me in.
I put my hand on his cheek and left it there.
“Bedtime,” he said.
Bed, where the trick was to stay awake long enough to enjoy it.
25
Midwinter, Gracie began to sag, running a series of mysterious fevers, 104, 105, with no discernible cause.
I was already overtaxed by this crazy Brooklyn existence. East Coast winter, with young children, sucks. Leaving the house requires a complex layering of clothes onto baby and toddler that would try the patience of the sanest and most organized person (not me). Once I raised my voice at Gabe, not yet one year old, for squirming out of the snowsuit I’d levered him into. Gracie gave me a dark look and said, “He was just born, give him a little time.”
Around four or five each afternoon, I considered placing my head in the oven and turning on the gas. Just to make the place nice and toasty. And then, blissfully, Brian would return home. He’d put down his briefcase. He’d lift Gabriel out of my arms. He’d make Gracie laugh. We would kiss, a nothing kiss. An end-of-day, I’m-home-now kiss, a kiss to make the world go round. A kiss that contained and tried to refute the truth—that our girl was a listing boat in the waters of toddlerhood.
About her fevers, our new New York doctor was cavalier: “Kids do unexplainable things, especially kids with underlying illness, like yours.” Did she even know Gracie’s name? Also, I didn’t like the description, underlying, as though Gracie’s entire personhood was built on the sickness, rather than the sickness being a footnote to the way she touched her fingertips to my eyelids at night and said, “Can you see me when you sleep?” Or the way—when Brian set her shoes on his head and walked around the house saying, “Where are Gracie’s shoes? If only I could find Gracie’s shoes!”—she’d laugh until she doubled over, touching her forehead to the floor. A tiny, davening supplicant to her dad’s idea of funny.
It was also true that two or three times a day she would collapse with fatigue, a puppet whose strings had been cut.