We held on to one another’s legs under the table. I am yours, you are mine.
Between us was the first time we ever sat in a room together and I couldn’t look Brian in the eye, just smiled, hugely, stupidly, into my own lap; between us was the first time he kissed me on Twelfth Street, leaning in, shockingly, thrillingly confident, “I’m going to kiss you now,” the kiss of recognition, Oh, hello; between us was my walk, alone, in the hills behind the house where I grew up, with Brian’s tennis shoe in one hand and, in the other, the pregnancy stick announcing Gracie’s presence; between us was the moment he snatched the twenty-dollar bill out of my hand in the Cuban-Chinese restaurant, but also the moment he said on the phone, while I was in labor, “I love you,” as though five months of alienation could disappear, a tissue devoured by flame; between us was the first time he saw his daughter, at four months old, in her rosebud sack and cried, quietly, so as not to disturb her; between us was every one of Gracie’s screams, at every IV insertion, when he wasn’t there, and the one in her jugular vein when he was; between us was Brian’s forbearance with my lingering rage when we first reconciled and his joy in discovering I was pregnant with Gabe; Gabe in his bee boots, be a pony, tiger; Gabe, on our first day in Durham, standing beside the wide rail fence as cars whizzed past; Gabe’s yell of anarchy and self-invention, oolie ba aa!; between us was our terror that Gracie would never be fully well, and the willed belief that she already was. Between us was the grief for children we’d known who had died, who could never return, nor ever be forgotten. Between us was the future, who we would become as we grew older, as the kids left home, and also the future of the two small people we loved most, our aspirations for who they might become, the revelation of who they already were.
All of this reverberated inside the gaze we held for a long quiet time.
Brian lifted his wine, we clinked and pressed glass against glass, globe against globe. “To the end,” Brian said, “and the beginning.”
HOME
CODA
Not long after our transplant experience was over, totally over, or as over as it ever will be, Brian and I stayed at a lodge with a deck that cantilevers over Mt. Tamalpais, in Marin. Where I grew up. Where each of our children was born. Standing on the deck, alone in the dark and the fog that wraps Mt. Tam on summer nights, we kneeled. Him first, then me. We asked each other if we’d like to be married. The answer was, is, always, yes.
A year later, when the kids were five and three, respectively, we married at that same lodge, overlooking the ocean. Gracie was the ring bearer; Gabriel was the flower boy. At the crucial, aisle-walking moment, Gracie cried under pressure. Gabriel needed to be picked up midceremony. It was not nearly as orchestrated or as elegant as I’d envisioned, but it was beautiful.
We left Durham eleven years ago. And in all this time Gracie has been, and is, well. Cured. Which is the gift of our life: we can dream and wake and eat breakfast because our child lived. She lived.
Unlike many, many other children, she lived.
A truth I live with but don’t like to think about: I can name a child who died in every one of the sixteen rooms on our transplant unit.
I have no idea, still, how to make sense of this, except to pray, in repertory and for perpetuity, Thank you, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Thank you. Thank you.
Gracie is fourteen. She has long, long auburn hair. Rapunzel hair, shiny and glossy. It hangs past her waist. She has a waist! Though you wouldn’t know it; she wears camo cargo pants and baggy plaid shirts. She has a sly sense of humor and an all-consuming crush on Captain Picard. She is a bookworm, who, at school, goes by her given name of Amelia. She is our late sleeper, our deep dreamer, our secret writer. Working, forever, on the best first sentence of a book she hopes to finish. “I want to be a writer,” she says, “if I’m good enough.”
Gabriel is twelve, he wears his hair in the same shag fringe bangs that the Beatles wore as they stepped off the plane in America in 1964. He adores John Lennon and Frank Gehry. His interest in the world knows no bounds. He is the same at twelve as he was at two; our exuberant boy, spinning his million questions. If you could edit one song, change a line or a word or a tune, what would it be? If you could relive one minute of your life over and over again, which minute would you pick? If you could be the maker of something that is already made, what would you be the maker of?
Um, you.
We have accepted our luck. Our daughter and son. We could not earn them, we’ll never know if we deserve them, but we hold on with both hands. And still, we understand that nothing given is permanent. Not wealth or well-being, not sweet dreams or morning coffee. Not a daughter or a son, a husband, lover, friend, mother. Anything, everything, is up for grabs, can fly back from whence it came.
In 2012 Hurricane Sandy felled a tree in our yard. As the tree went down, a branch broke off, the wind lifted the branch and rotated it, midair, so that it struck the largest window in our house jagged end first, like a javelin. Glass shards flew through our bedroom; invisible splinters of glass slid into the drapes, the drawers, the deep recesses of the carpet, the soft soil of our potted plants. We cowered, all four of us, under a thick comforter on our bed. We were OK, but we were also reminded that what is whole can be made unwhole in the space of a breath.
A few months ago Gracie—dreamy girl, consummate reader—looked up from her book at the breakfast table and asked, “Would you really die to save me from dying?”
Gabriel paused his stream-of-consciousness chatter to make sure he was included. “Yeah, would you eat bullets?” Gabe, second-born child and sibling of a transplant survivor, is forever wondering whether his allotment of love measures up. Both of them want to know: Who do you love best? Who will you save first? Will you die for me? A terrible death? Underneath that, the bigger questions: Can you protect me? Will you find a way to keep me safe? Am I alone in this?
“Probably I would die for you,” I said, “especially if you said please.” They rolled their eyes. I should take their questions seriously. I should tell them the truth, that I’d do anything, anywhere, to save them. But then I’d have to admit the corollary truth: there are a host of things I can’t do. No one can.
Brian and I should be in a state of dazed grace, amazed at our luck, seven days a week, every hour of the day. We aren’t. If you sat us down, made us talk, scratched the surface, you would find it—the dumbstruck happiness. But we are also driving the kids to school, arguing over who gets enough time to write. Taking Gracie to acting class on Wednesday nights. Laundry, dinner, if we’re lucky, a kiss in the mud room.