Giant George (12 page)

Once we’d made the decision, Christie didn’t waste any time.
She went about the business of trying for a baby with the same drive and sense of purpose with which she’d approached getting George. So the new year began with a flurry of activity, and not just in the ways that might immediately spring to mind.

Getting pregnant, it seemed, involved absolute military precision. Not only did Christie want to have a baby, she wanted to have a baby right away.
And Christie, though excited, wasn’t at all naive. Our chats changed, over dinner, from what we might do on the weekend to all the facts about fertility at her “advanced maternal age.” I don’t know who coined the term “advanced maternal age” or, indeed, who thought it would be a good idea to point it out to her so forcefully, but it suddenly became the number one topic of the moment. And, soon after,
a new ritual became established in our house: the daily task of Christie taking her temperature and recording it on a little chart.

She’d been to the store and bought herself an ovulation predictor kit and a thermometer—the better, she explained, for us to maximize our chances. After all, she told me (she was impressively well-informed now), there was only a small window of opportunity in every
cycle, and with us both being such busy people with such extremely tight schedules, it was in our interest to know when that window was coming up so we could make sure our respective work diaries were in tune.

Like any man, I guess, I viewed this sudden change in lifestyle with equal amounts of pleasure and trepidation. While it was good for all the obvious reasons, it also signaled—potentially—a
much greater change; one that was as radical as it would be permanent.

Still, I did as instructed, was willing and obeyed orders. And for all her anxieties about it taking months, if not years, by the end of February, Christie announced that she was pregnant.

Funny, isn’t it, how some things can concentrate the mind? You wouldn’t think there would be much difference between the business of trying
for a baby and actually expecting one, yet as soon as Christie told me her news, there definitely was.

Perhaps I’d been living in cloud-cuckoo-land, but all the while we were trying it didn’t seem real to me. It was just another plan, another project bubbling under the surface, like the various ambitions and ideas I had for real estate. We would have a baby “one day” in the same sort of way as
I would “one day” create the beautiful home of our dreams, in which we could stay put and raise a family.

However, this “one day” had a date, and it suddenly seemed terrifyingly close. I realized right away that I was going to have to speed up our house remodeling schedule. There was no way I could let this baby come into a home that still, in places at least, looked more like a building site.
I wasn’t able to experience Christie’s pregnancy hormones, obviously, but from that point on I worked a double shift almost every day of the week. I gave myself very little in the way of time off; I’d work all day
on my current development property and then all night fixing up our house.

Christie too, for all her initial exhilaration, was beginning to feel anxious about
her
work. The trouble
was that her job was to go out and sell; if she didn’t do that, she didn’t get paid. Not only that, if she wasn’t there to look after her clients, there were plenty of others, in both her own firm and others, who’d be quick to exploit that and try to get those clients for themselves. We decided the best thing would be not to tell anyone about the pregnancy till she’d reached a point along the line
where she had to.

This is where life can sometimes be cruelly ironic, because that point—the halfway point—was suddenly upon us, and fate, it seemed, had her own ideas about it. It was a Monday morning in mid-July, and a particularly warm day, when Christie arrived at the clinic for her twenty-week scan.

Her baby bump was just about showing now and her work wardrobe, consequently, was becoming
smaller and more difficult to manage. It seemed every weekday started with a wardrobe malfunction and a bed heaped with discarded clothes. We had definitely reached the point where, if she didn’t say something herself, someone else in her office would comment, for sure.

We’d actually been discussing it that Sunday evening over dinner: how she needed to tell her boss that she was pregnant, along
with her due date, of course, and prepare for the impact
her taking time off would have. Paid leave to have a baby, in most parts of the United States, is not something a person can rely on. Sure, there’s a basic right to a small amount of unpaid time off, but there was no way Christie could be complacent about the idea of sitting at home bonding with our new baby. She needed to work as late into
the pregnancy as possible, and keep hold of her clients while she was away. She’d pretty much decided she’d give up work a week before, and get some sort of day care organized sooner rather than later, to be sure she had everything in place for the two months or so she hoped to stay at home.

Apart from that, there was no reason in the world for us to worry. We had already passed the major antenatal
milestone. The amniocentesis had been done five weeks back, and, yes, we’d sure worried about that one. When you’re pregnant and thirty-five, which was what she now was, you’d have to live on a desert island not to know all the stats about the risks for older mothers, the chief one being the increased likelihood of giving birth to a baby with disabilities. And thirty-five, it seemed, was the
number that mattered. It was all “after thirty-five, this…” and “after thirty-five, that…,” so we were naturally pretty anxious on the day of that procedure, and equally happy to get the all clear.

But that day had been over a month ago. This was just a routine twenty-week scan—except it wasn’t shaping up to be routine at all. And, God, how I wished I’d been there with her. It must have been
a pretty scary business for Christie, lying on the exam table that July morning. Having taken a couple of
hours off and rearranged all her appointments, she expected the technician to point on the screen at a healthy baby, but then, inexplicably, that didn’t happen.

The very worst bit of it all, Christie told me, was that period of heart-in-mouth waiting, of sensing something might be up, but
not knowing quite what it might be; of noticing the subtle change in the ultrasound technician’s manner, but not daring to interrupt her concentration; of lying there, transfixed, hardly daring to breathe; of the silence—a new and uncomfortable silence, one suddenly throbbing with apprehension, a silence broken only by the hum of the machine; of the feeling of the gel being swept back and forth over
her stomach; of the realization, as every second ticked by, that
something must be wrong with the baby.

“I need to get the doctor in,” the technician told her finally.

I was at home working on the house, up on the top of a ladder, when my cell phone rang. George was sound asleep on his bed in the next room over. I hadn’t had this phone for long, and it was full of different functions. When I got it, I’d set it up to have a particular song play whenever Christie called. It
was “Golden” by Jill Scott, which we’d had played at our wedding. My putting it on my phone was, Christie told me,
the
most romantic thing
ever
. I was clearly getting the hang of being a husband.

I didn’t hear the phone right away though, because of the whine of the drilling, but George did—he knew Christie’s ringtone as well as he knew the doorbell, and was right away in the room with me, tail
wagging, all excited. It was noticing George that made me tune in to the call. I put down the drill and climbed down to go answer it.

My phone was over on the other side of the room—our kitchen adjoined our living room—sitting on the kitchen worktop, lightly covered in plaster dust. I blew on it as I opened it and raised it to my ear. Right away, I knew something wasn’t
right. I could tell even
before she said a word. It was one of those things I hadn’t consciously thought about, yet had obviously processed on some level. Why would she be calling me otherwise? She’d already told me she was going to pop back after her appointment; she had an out-of-town appointment later in the afternoon and was planning to change into her work suit when she got here, grab some lunch with me and George
and then go on to the meeting.

“Honey?” she said. Her voice was so low I could hardly hear it. It also sounded tight, like she was trying to keep it contained.

“I’m right here,” I answered. “What’s up?”

“There’s some sort of problem with the ultrasound scan,” she said levelly. “Can you get down here to the clinic, d’you think?”

I felt a hole open up in the middle of my stomach—a stomach that
now sat on suddenly heavy legs. They felt so weighty that I honestly felt like I couldn’t move. I swallowed, and then asked the obvious question, “What sort of problem?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s just that something’s apparently not right with the baby.”

Another obvious question. “What d’you mean—something’s not right? What are you talking about?”

I heard her exhale heavily. “They’re
not exactly sure yet. There’s something wrong with the heartbeat, I think.” She said this very slowly, as if trying to take it in. “They have to take me to have another ultrasound,” she continued, “on a different machine, over at the hospital.”

My legs felt even heavier beneath me. This was sounding
more serious by the second. I licked my dry lips. “The hospital?” I asked.

“Yes, because the
equipment there is more advanced. So, if you could get here, you know, as soon as you can…” She trailed off.

George, ever sensitive to changes in atmosphere, had come up and was standing at attention beside me, his head slightly cocked, looking at me intently. The top of his head, I realized, was covered in a light mist of plaster dust too. I smoothed a hand across it absently as I spoke.

“Sure,
honey,” I said. “Of course. I’ll come down right away.”

I didn’t know what else to do or say.

I left George in the cool of the house, filled up his water bowl and told him I wouldn’t be gone too long. I then grabbed the truck keys and headed out the door, anxiety snapping at my heels.

It was hot as hell that day, with the sky a deep, unbroken cerulean blue, and the surface of the road blurred
and shimmered in front of me. The roads were pretty crowded—it was right in the middle of that lunchtime mini rush hour—and it felt like just my luck that everyone else had somewhere important to be today. Except they didn’t, I knew they didn’t, but I
did
.

I crossed several busy intersections, all the time moving in frustratingly slow increments, red light by red light by red light, across town.
As I drove, I kept thinking about the birth,
about the plans we’d both already made for it, about the conversation we’d had on the subject only a few days back, about how we’d agreed, given the way the traffic in Tucson could be sometimes, that we’d need to plan carefully for when the big day came. Maybe we’d do a couple of dry runs of our intended route—check out detours, anticipate problems
and so on. We’d make a few maps in our heads of all the other routes we could take if Christie went into labor during the rush hour.

It had been fun doing that, but now I wondered if we’d been premature, tempting fate in some way. But then I thought: why
wouldn’t
we have done that? She was halfway down the line now. All was well. All was
fine
. It wasn’t unreasonable to do that, was it? It wouldn’t
have jinxed us in some way? We’d gotten past that big milestone of the amniocentesis, hadn’t we? I simply couldn’t take it in. What could possibly be “not quite right” with our baby?

It felt horribly ironic that it had been this very week that Christie had finally decided the time had come to make her pregnancy public at work. She’d had to. Her bump had just started to become difficult to hide,
and would soon, we knew, since Christie had read a whole fistful of baby books, make the pregnancy not just difficult but impossible to keep secret. It would start growing, and growing fast—a bit like our Georgie had.

I had a picture of her then, curled up on the sofa, reading intently, occasionally lobbing a new pregnancy or baby fact across the room at me; this thing might happen, that other
thing might not. X percent of babies had this, that or the other.
Eating kiwi fruit was good for you. We should be sure we had a certain baby gadget because eight out of ten mothers really liked it. I had, on some level, I guess, processed all these bits of wisdom, but for the life of me I couldn’t bring one to mind now—just the picture of Christie, curled up, happily reading, our baby quietly
growing inside her.

I made the last turn around a corner and the clinic soon loomed in my sights. “What could be wrong?” I kept thinking. I drove through the entry gates, trying to get my frame of mind good and positive for Christie, circled around the low buildings and parked the car in the lot out back. There was a young couple getting into a car close by as I got out. She was heavily pregnant,
and he was helping her ease into the passenger seat. She had her arm curled protectively around her huge pregnant belly. She looked like she could give birth at any time.