*
He comes home one night, sits on the edge of the bed with his face in his hands. He looks ragged, like he too has been crying. I feel a rush of love for him and then he says, “I’m sorry, I just can’t do it. I’ve thought and thought and thought about it, but I just can’t. I’m sorry, but I’m not cut out for being a parent. I can’t do it. I think you’d be a good mother. But I can’t do it.”
“What are you saying?”
“I just mean maybe it’s important for you to be a mother. Maybe more important than being with me.”
“What?”
“I’m just saying that if you want the baby … you know. More than you want me, I understand. I love you and I want you to be happy.”
I understand then that nothing is more important than him. I will give up this baby for him. I am not strong enough to carry it without him.
*
I make the appointment. It’s on a weekday, so he won’t be with me. The doctor says it’s not a big deal. I’ll be sedated and afterward he’ll pick me up. I’ll sleep a lot, she says, and then I’ll heal. It’ll be like it never happened. We can go on with our lives and forget about it. I’m so glad I live in a time and place where this is easy, where I don’t have to risk my life to do this. But I also know I will be haunted by this day. Haunted by this scraping out of the material that could have been our child. Right now just a curl of life, but also within it the possibility of a whole human existence with its entire weight of experience, memory, connection.
I’m sitting in the waiting room, trying to get myself ready for what happens next. I stare at a magazine, but I can’t make out the features of the happy women in bikinis on sun-bleached beaches. Instead I see a jumble of limbs, flashes of what will happen inside me in a few minutes. My heart is thudding, the pages of the magazine fluttering with my hands. The breath is stuck in my rib cage like a trapped bird.
Daniel walks in. He sits down next to me. He takes my hand and I clutch his fingers as if I am drowning.
I stare at him. “What are you doing here?”
He says, “Do you think we can do this?”
I say, “Yes, if we do it together. If you stay with me.”
The nurse comes to the door, calls my name. I stand, but he pulls me back into the seat. He says, “No, it’s okay. We’ve changed our minds.” She looks at me to be sure. I nod at her. He kisses my cheek in his special spot and whispers, “We’re going to have a baby.”
We walk out together. I leave that room as if I am walking out of a bad dream. I’m too happy to say anything.
*
After that, he’s kind; he’s solicitous. He cooks the foods of his childhood for me, bland white-colored foods that ease my rising nausea. He brings me large-faced flowers, filling the apartment with gardenias, camellias, huge waxy magnolias that glow like full moons. Our space is a swirl of scent. We fall asleep lulled by the perfume of these blossoms. We never talk about what almost happened. We pack our fears into a Pandora’s box and lock it securely away. We have decided that the story was always that we both wanted this accidental child. We have no more use for doubt.
He says, “You’ll be such a great mother. I just know it.” He says, “What shall we call him or her?” and compiles a long scroll of names with beautiful doodles of animals in the margins. He gives me a red pen and asks me to circle the ones I like. He has taken the names that have run in his family, and here are the names of our brethren dead and alive. Generations of names. A way to connect this child to the ones who came before.
He moves the art supplies out of the spare room. He starts painting a mural but says I can’t see it until it is done. He goes around with paint on his face and splattered all over the old gray sweatshirt he loves. Then he leads me to the door of the new nursery, his hands over my eyes. “Look,” he says, and the room is transformed, a secondhand crib, a stack of diapers and baby wipes, and a changing table, and on the wall he’s painted two beavers in perfect detail. One of them is stretching up to draw a perfect, anatomically correct rendition of a majestically large-antlered deer. The other has drawn a child’s stick figure of a deer with red crayon, has trailed off the red crayon into a corner after having gotten some of it on his face, and is grinning at us from the wall. “This is you,” he says, pointing to the artistic beaver. “You’ve got it figured out. This mother thing. You’re going to be great. This is me,” he says about the crayon-besmirched beaver. “I’m a mess, but with you, I can figure it out.”
I think: here are the two souls who will love me without condition, without artifice. I know I will never again wander pathless and unsure of who or what I am. Instead I am this one’s wife and this one’s mother; I will be called by these sacred names: wife, mother. I will be fixed, stable, and held in place securely between them.