What We Have (36 page)

My mother had had a better week—Julie had been out visiting with Maddy, and she’d sounded brighter, almost good. I thought of days like this as Optical Illusion days. If I squinted one way, I saw a lady with a hat instead of two vases. Seeing it like that, I thought, she could rally. Listen to her! Maybe we could get her out here somehow for Sacha’s first birthday. Maybe we could bring her here to see the house, the big squares of sunlight moving in patterns on the old tile floor, the beautiful weedy garden, the bushes with their tawny, un-plucked crop of hydrangeas. Then there was something—a coughing fit, a pause—and the lady with the hat was gone and all I could see was two vases and I couldn’t believe I could have seen it any other way. She was sick, unbelievably sick, she could barely make it down to the
kitchen
anymore let alone navigate an airplane trip to Boston.

The owner accepted our offer in early October, and we signed the purchase and sales agreement. We hired electricians, going back and forth between the House with the Green Shag to what we now called Our House. I still wasn’t feeling well, and finally, squeezed in between everything else, I went to see Dr. Pierce, who prodded my stomach, listened to my lungs with a stethoscope, and drew some blood.

“Periods regular yet?” she asked after I told her I’d stopped nursing in July, and even before the words were out of her mouth, I realized what was wrong. Why I’d been feeling so crummy.

Of course.

I was pregnant again.

It all made sense. Fell into place instantly—how could I not have realized it earlier?

“I think I know what’s going on,” I said shakily, not sure whether to laugh or cry, immediately starting to count backward. August? July? She leaned over to pat me on the shoulder before going out to ask one of the technicians to bring me a pregnancy test. But I was sure of the results even before I took it. I was trembling slightly all over, trying to add and subtract months in my head.

When?—

Two emotions flooded through me as I asked her if I could use her phone to call Jacques. One was utter joy. A second baby. Unasked for, but so deeply wanted—a gift of life in the midst of the deepening sense around us of death and dying.

The second feeling, wrapped around the first, was sorrow. This baby would be born, and my mother would never know her (or him).

I pushed the sorrow down.

Maybe she could make it. Six more months. Half a year. It was possible—

It depended when the baby was coming.

When
. That had always been the first question in our family.

“But,” Jacques said, when he came home early that night to celebrate, “there’s another way to look at it, too.”

I had tears streaming down my face. He was the only one who knew. Tomorrow, I’d call Julie and Sara. Annie. When I worked up my courage, I’d call my parents. Maybe my father, first. And then my mother.

I looked at Jacques, waiting.

“You feel like you’re trading,” he said in a low voice, picking up my hand. “I know you. You think, because you wanted another baby so much and now this is happening, that somehow you’ve made some kind of deal with the fates.” He shook his head. “It isn’t like that, OK?”

I kept crying. Hormones, along with everything else.

“It doesn’t work like that,” he said.

For an ultrarationalist, Jacques had a strangely mystical way of looking at this. He thought the new baby would somehow be connected to my mother. A reminder of renewal, of new life beginning.

To my surprise, Julie said more or less the same thing when I called her the next day. She blew her nose for a while, cleared her throat. Then said, “It’s a good thing, Mellie. Really.”

I still didn’t want to tell my parents. I kept putting it off. One more day. I found an obstetrical practice—a friendly group out in Wellesley, half midwives, half doctors—and one of the doctors gave me an exam, and told me my due date. March 15.

 

AS LONG AS I COULD
remember, my mother was the one I told whenever something good happened. In college, I used to call her to tell her when I did well on a test or paper. “Remember that history final I thought I messed up? Well, it turns out I did really well—” And she’d be there, riveted, glad for me. “You’re kidding! An A? Can you read me his comments?”

Did I call her when things went wrong? I don’t remember. I don’t think so—not usually. But she called me every day anyway, so if no good news was forthcoming, she’d probe. “What is it? You don’t sound right.” Or she’d remember to ask. “Did that guy ever call? What happened with that interview you were supposed to have?”

Now, I had this wonderful news, and I couldn’t bear the idea of telling her.

I went up into the study and closed the door behind me so I could focus. Dialed, heard that familiar ring. Ray answered, saying (sounding aggravated) that she’d have to go upstairs to see if my mother could talk. I thought I could hear the workmen hammering in the background.

Finally, my mother picked up.

She sounded extremely slurry. Either more morphine today, or she’d just taken it.

I got right to the point. “Mellie,” I said. “I have news.”

“Hang—on—” she said. I could hear her breathing. Struggling with the pillows. More breathing. “OK,” she said at last. More a whisper than a voice. “Go on.”

I closed my eyes, tilted back in the office chair, trying to slow myself down. “I have—” My voice broke up, like on a radio station you can’t pinpoint. “There’s something—”

Her voice sharpened. Mother’s intuition. “Are you OK?” she asked, suddenly focused. “Is everything all right? How’s Sacha?”

“I’m fine, she’s fine,” I mumbled, starting to cry. Hormones. I was a mess. “Mom.” I almost never called her that anymore. I went right in—no lead-up. “I’m pregnant. We’re having another baby.”

There was dead silence on the other end. Then—it cut between us like a knife—she said it. The word that has always been our mantra.

“
When?
”

“March 15,” I said. The Ides, they used to call it. Caesar gets warned about it in Shakespeare’s play. For the Romans, it was a festival day. They considered it auspicious—a day of good luck, of fortune.

We hung there on the phone together and neither of us spoke, and for some period of time—a minute, a few minutes, I have no idea—we both cried.

Ashkenazi Jews customarily name their babies after relatives who have recently died. My parents had their own version of this: They kept the first letter. Sara was named for Sylvia. I was named for Alexander, my father’s grandfather. Julie lucked out: Nobody died, and they picked her name just because they liked it.

This new baby would be named for my mother, Elaine. We both knew that. An
E
.

“Are you thinking about names?” she asked slowly.

“A little,” I said. I took a deep breath. “I wonder . . . which names
you
like.” I didn’t want to say anything before she did about the letter
E
. I didn’t want to admit out loud to her what that meant. That by March—

Of course, her planning gene kicked in, trumping everything. “If it’s a boy,” she said, tentatively, thinking out loud, “I like Edward. Do you?”

I took a deep breath. So we were admitting this, then. We were actually admitting—

Like my mother, I tried to stick with the name, tried to put aside what it meant
. Edward. Eddy, Ed, Ted
. I couldn’t picture a boy.

“If it’s a girl . . . ,” I began, coaxingly.

She was silent, pondering.

“If it’s a girl . . . ,” she murmured.

If it’s a girl
, I thought,
I’ll love her with all my heart, whoever she is
. Maybe there was something to what Jacques said, mystical or not, because sad as it was to tell my mother about the baby, I was also glad she knew. Glad that as long as I lived, as long as this new baby lived, I would look at him or her and know: My mother knew about this. Just by talking about the baby together, it felt to me like my mother was giving it her blessing.

“You don’t have any girls’ names?” she asked, mulling this over.

I mentioned two, testing for her reaction:
Eleanor. Eloise
.

But there was no chance to get her feedback. It sounded like someone had come into the room. I heard something scrape; a low sound, either a cough or a muffled groan. “Ame, Ray’s here, she has to help me with something. I need to take some medicine,” my mother said. “I’ll have to call you back. . . .”

Another shift of position, some mumbling.

“Is that OK?”

“Of course,” I said. I set the phone down, looked around the study, and lay my head down on the desk, listening to the faint blood-beat pulsing in my ear.

“Elisabeth,” I whispered. The name I loved most, but hadn’t dared to say.

 

IT WAS LATE OCTOBER, AND
Sacha was almost eleven months old. I was busy with teaching and meetings and we were closing on our house in just a few weeks, and I was at the end of my fourth month now, starting to show, and all of it felt real and affected me in important ways, but through it all, there was only one thing that really mattered, and that was how sick my mother was. People kept asking me how I was doing—the few of my colleagues who had found out. Annabel. I kept smiling and saying fine, I’m fine, but I felt like a sleepwalker. I got up earlier each morning—we’d set the closing for mid-November and the move for the end of the month, so we didn’t have much time left in the House with the Green Shag Carpet. This alone seemed to wake me, this sense of time running out. We were packing again. Rolls of tape, string, stacks of cardboard boxes leaned up against things. Bacchus hunched in the corner, chewed up rolls of tape in his mouth; the afternoons were brimful with golden light, the trees a color I’d forgotten could exist in nature. Eighteen-carat gold, rimmed with lapis.

Awake, Sacha watched everything. She dangled from the swing we hung from the doorway, eyes steady. She pulled herself up in the playpen in the living room, her eyes sober, fixed on ours. As she watched, her mouth opened and closed, mimicking ours. She was trying, I told Jacques, to speak.

It was words that separated her from us, words Jacques and I volleyed back and forth while Sacha, eyes big, fastened on us soberly at dinnertime, mouth shaping a little as her gaze flew back and forth. As October drew to a close, her syllables and sounds began to round into recognizable forms, almost words—
ta-ta-ta-TA!; da-da-da-DA
!—and I’d take out her alphabet book of laminated family photos and we’d pore over them endlessly: all of the aunts first, then Bomma and Boppa, my mother blooming with improbable health from some earlier incarnation, beaming mischievously at us from under a curling red sticky
B
. Some nights we never made it to Cousins or Dogs, so content were we to linger over our
B
s. We lay on the floor of the room that had been Sacha’s since we moved here and I flipped through the pages and practiced saying out loud for her the names of the people I loved most.

“Bomma,” I said. “Look! Here’s Bomma!”

She could learn words early. It could happen, couldn’t it?

Physically Sacha was still small for her age, and in terms of motor skills, a month or two behind most almost-one-year-olds: She had no interest in walking yet on her own, she pulled herself up on things only to sink down again with a sibilant grin, crawled instead of walked, and at the playground in Brookline where we went on weekends, other parents guessed she was eight or nine months. Not almost a year. It was all normal, my pediatrician reassured me. Some babies walk at nine months; some wait till they’re a year and a half old.

Still. I wanted—
needed
—for her to be ahead of herself. She was going to be an older sister in March. She needed to grow quickly! Besides, if she did things ahead of schedule—if she talked early—my mother would know, and it would count. It would be real.

My mother was the historian. She was the one who remembered things, who made sense of things—the keeper of records, maker of plans.

I didn’t particularly care when Sacha walked, but when it came to words . . . I wanted her to learn to say “Bomma.” I desperately wanted my mother to hear her say her name.

We were all flying out to Michigan for Thanksgiving. Maybe Sacha could say her name by then.

I understood at almost every level that what I wanted was impossible. Sacha wasn’t old enough yet to speak. “What Your Baby May Even Be Able to Do This Month” didn’t suggest this would happen until close to a year. If then.

But I could still try.

I tested Sacha, surreptitiously. When Jacques was downstairs, I sneaked out her book of alphabet photos and quizzed her in the bath. “Who’s this?” I asked, all smiles, pointing to my sister. Sacha, solemn as usual, pronounced something unintelligible.
Ba-ba-ba-ba
. When I turned the page, she squinted a bit at my mother’s picture, bubbles forming on her lips.

“
Bom-ma
,” I said, unrelenting, “that’s who this is, darling,” and I guided my finger deliberately to my mother’s face.

She grabbed wetly at the book, not at the page with my mother’s photo, but at the next one, where my father—in happier times, relaxing—was beaming out at us from his position, seated near a desk full of books and papers. His was the image she seemed to reach for, as if a more solid planet had slipped between my mother and herself, rendering my mother’s face shadowy, imprecise.

Finally, I put the alphabet photos away.

Some nights I stripped off my clothes and climbed into the bath with her and the upcoming move and the new house and work and everything else seemed to slip away, like so many shells pulled back by a warm engulfing tide, and she wriggled on top of me like a fish—slippery, perfect, her skin glossy with soap, her hair sticking up in little tufts.

Deep inside of me, the new baby circled and dove.