The sonographer knows. She says, “Your doctor will deliver the results as soon as possible.” A stock line, but delivered with tenderness.
Three hours pass before the doctor appears. It’s afternoon. Gracie is still asleep. Brian has arrived back from New York. We stand up when the doctor walks in, shoulder to shoulder.
Dr. K is not on duty. Instead it’s Dr. P, whom we like. He’s calm, he’s responsive. He seems like the kind of doctor who promises himself, daily, to be a human first. But today he stands as far from us as is possible in this tiny space. He’s near the door, as if poised to leave. We wait for him to speak. He opens his mouth, pauses, and then states the following without fanfare: the liver shows no reversal of flow. I feel Brian’s body relax against mine.
“Thank you,” I say. Jubilation. I want to kiss Dr. P.
“Wait,” he says. “We are still concerned by the volume of fluid accumulating in her abdominal cavity.” His speech picks up speed and efficiency. “Though there is no reversal of flow, her other symptoms would indicate that Gracie does have an early iteration of VOD. There is a fifty percent chance it will progress. If it does progress, she has a fifty percent chance of surviving.” As he speaks, his hands hang limp on either side of his body. He moves neither closer to us nor toward the door.
I hate Dr. P.
I stand very still, trying to mirror the stillness of his stance. Maybe if I can stand as calmly as he stands, he’ll blink, flinch, take it back. If not, I will drive him from this room.
A 50 percent chance the VOD will progress.
And if it does, a 50 percent chance she will not survive.
These numbers, applied to Gracie, are malicious. They are personal.
I reject the numbers, en masse, and also one by one. Fuck the percentages given to every patient in this hospital and every other hospital, worldwide. Fuck their arrogant, razored corners, their cleaved sums. Their little stick-fingered hands, rubbing out your odds. Fuck their precise tallies, in neat lines, to the last decimal. Lucky to the left, remainder to the right.
The numbers are rigid, void, inflexible; all they can do is breathe on you with their viciously clean breath and wait for you to make them correct. The numbers don’t love or know or care to listen.
They can’t express the central facts of her person. The numbers might know what time of day she was born, but not what the sky looked like, how it was an incandescent indigo. Numbers can’t stroke her head, whisper songs in her ear, fall asleep with the pulse of her breath breaking warm on one cheek. The numbers don’t know how she hums when she eats, that she favors feta cheese and olives, any savory food, over sweets. How, then, can the numbers predict what might become of her?
Fuck them, one and all.
She belongs to me and to Brian. She belongs to Gabriel and to herself. She belongs to my mom, whose smile flares every time she says Gracie’s name, and to Brian’s mom, who will still get down on the floor to play with her, at eighty-three. To her dead grandfather, who ran a union and never set eyes on her, and her living grandfather, who reads her The Hobbit over the phone. She belongs to Eden and the friends she hasn’t met yet. She belongs to the person who will love her most as an adult. Her true love, and the smaller loves in between, she belongs to them. She is ours. She belongs to us, with us, with me. She is mine. I will not hand her over.
I know other parents in this hospital, on this ward, in this room, have despised the numbers. Have tried to lash their child, psychically, to their own body with the twine of love, righteous anger, magical thinking, with anything, everything, they had. I know my sense of possession, of power, is as frail, as flawed, as theirs. But I use it all. I will mow the fucking numbers down, numeral by numeral, until we boomerang back. To zero. Zero. Where there is no chance that she can be taken. None at all.
I call Cassie, whom I have always called. I tell her I’m terrified. I explain the numbers.
She does not sound calm, and I love her for this.
DAY 15
A day worse than yesterday. She’s in misery. She’s spent the day vomiting blood in increasingly bright and large volumes. While she was napping, a pool of blood collected in her mouth. When she sat up, it dripped down her chin onto her pajama shirt, settling into the shape of a deformed red elephant, hind legs bent, as if in some odd elephant prayer.
“Why am I bleeding in my mouth?” she asks. “What is wrong with me?”
Later she spikes a fever, and her blood pressure refuses to come down.
Brian and I pass worry back and forth, a toxic, contagious vapor we share.
When she falls asleep, Brian says, “Let’s imagine today as her low point. Tomorrow she is going to feel better, and every day after, she’ll gain more ground.”
That’s one possibility. The other breathes under the door, stretches out beneath the bed, a dog with a midnight coat we refuse to recognize.
DAY 16
We have less Gracie than we arrived with. Less hair, less breath, less appetite, fewer heartbeats per minute. Less of her voice making the ponies talk, fewer jokes, fewer demands, less of her hands forming shapes in the air as she speaks. The law of diminishing returns, whatever that means, keeps coming to me.
I’ve begun to do grotesque emotional calculations in the abstract.
By day I wonder—if one (not me!) were to lose one’s child—is there a best-case scenario? Is it better to lose your child in increments, to a protracted illness so that you have time to encapsulate them in your love, to say everything? Or better to lose your child mysteriously, without confirmation of death, so that hope resides, co-occupant, with grief?
By night I picture scenarios in which I might be able to save her. She’s been taken, for reasons not made clear. The kidnapper’s demands are bizarre: I must walk without stopping, in the heat, in the snow, carrying weight in the form of grocery bags, metal bars, sacks of sand. If I stop, even hesitate, the kidnapper will harm her or refuse to return her. I must keep walking. I will keep walking. How long can I walk? Three days, four? I think I could walk indefinitely. Without food or water, or in extreme heat, extreme cold, eventually I would drop. But I don’t see that happening. I see myself lifting foot after foot. I worship a false god, the idol of parental love.
DAY 18
The ultrasound woman returns each morning. She’s gentle, she’s quiet. Gracie sleeps through it. Every morning I am standing on the edge of a very high cliff. Prepared for the sick feeling of dirt sliding, the rocks soft, then loose, then gone. But every morning the ultrasound woman repeats her phrase, “Your doctor will deliver the results as soon as possible.” She’s said this for five days in a row. Each day when the doctor arrives in the afternoon, he confirms that the sonogram shows no reversal of flow. Two days remain in our window of risk. Today he will say the same.