Giant George (13 page)

I thought of Christie, inside, with her tiny swell of tummy, of the baby that was growing inside
her.
I glanced again at the young woman and it hit me with a jolt. Yes, we’d come a long way, but we still had a long way to go
too. I clicked the car remote and jogged back to the buildings, across the parking lot. It couldn’t be serious, surely. It couldn’t. It just
mustn’t.
I pocketed my car keys, pulled the door handle and hurried inside.

There are moments in life that always stay with you, aren’t there? Happy moments; sad moments; moments of great wonder. But those moments when you know that a loved one is suffering,
and there’s nothing you can do, aren’t they the very worst kind? The kind that punch you in the stomach. I felt like that then—as if I’d been punched in the gut.

Christie was standing in a corridor, just outside a doorway, waiting for my arrival beside a row of colored fabric chairs that ran in a line against a wall. She had her phone clutched in one hand and her purse in the other, and she turned
around at the sound of my approach.

She’d obviously been looking out for me, because as she saw me approaching, she turned and nodded at someone I couldn’t see inside the room. She looked calm. But then she always looked calm in a crisis, even though—and I could tell only by the tiniest of details—she was feeling anything but.

I strode up and put my arms around her, giving her a big hug. Even
though I knew it might cause a chink in her armor, there was nothing else to do. I had to.

“You okay?” I asked—just about the stupidest of questions.

She said yes, even so. “I’m okay,” she said, nodding slightly. “Honestly, I’m fine.”

I decided that I would leave my truck at the clinic and we’d take Christie’s car, so that we could ride to the hospital together. As we got into it, both of us
were unable, it seemed, to find anything to say. As I started the engine, I noticed that she sat in exactly the same way as the woman I’d seen when I’d arrived at the clinic—her arm curled and her left hand held loosely against her belly. Only now I could visualize the tiny being in there, clinging to life. It was difficult to watch, let alone know what to say.

Christie looked straight ahead,
her beautiful profile held as still as a mask. I tried to think of something positive I could say, but nothing came. “It’ll be all right” just wouldn’t work here.

“We’ll get through this, honey,” I decided upon eventually, as I pulled out once again onto the baking stretch of road. “We really will.” Her answering nod was so small as to be almost imperceptible—as if it needed to be small or she
might crack.

There were only a few miles between the clinic and the hospital, but despite the traffic having eased a little now, everyone seemed to be taking an eternity to cross the intersections, like they were on some heat-induced go-slow.

We’d been told that the hospital would be expecting us, and thankfully we were shown through without too much delay. This was the first time I’d set foot
in the place, and I was struck by how busy it felt. Busy, but also something else: it felt cold. Not cold in terms of people, just oppressive as a building. Like it was a place where lots of bad things happened, and would happen. I tried to dismiss the feeling, but it sat there even so.

We were shown into a room occupied by a female technician or nurse, who rose, as we entered, from behind a
computer station. She beckoned us. “Come on in,” she said. “Mr. Nasser, why don’t you take a seat here, while I get Mrs. Nasser ready.”

The doctor, a specialist, walked in just behind us, and very quickly, it seemed, we were about to find out exactly what the problem was. I watched silently as Christie’s belly was lubed up once more for the ultrasound, her hand clutched in mine all the time,
small and hot.

The nurse stood to one side as the doctor worked the wand, the fuzzy blur of gray-white images changing constantly, all of
them barely comprehensible to me. The silence, bar the hum of the machine, was deafening.

Finally, she finished. The nurse gently wiped away the lubricant from Christie’s stomach. And then the news was delivered that confirmed our worst fears. This new doctor
completely agreed with the diagnosis of Christie’s doctor: our baby had multiple congenital abnormalities, and was very unlikely to survive.

We sat, holding hands still, as we took this in. How could it have happened? It simply didn’t feel real to us. Five weeks ago, at the time of the amniocentesis, everything had been absolutely fine.

“How might this have happened?” Christie asked, voicing
my own thoughts. “What could have caused it?”

The doctor spread her palms. “There’s lots we don’t know about this sort of thing, Mrs. Nasser,” she said frankly. “Sometimes it’s genetic; sometimes it’s due to some congenital defect, or an infection, such as meningitis.” Christie nodded, and I remained silent. I couldn’t think what to think about, let alone what to ask, so there seemed little else
to say.

“But might,” Christie asked then, “our baby still be okay? Is there any chance at all that it might survive?”

The doctor, once again, was gentle but frank with her. “It’s unlikely,” she said softly. “It’s
highly
unlikely.”

“So what happens now?” I asked her.

“What happens,” she said gently, “is that we have to let nature take its course. The absolute best outcome, in terms of Christie’s
future chances of having a healthy baby, will be if
we let nature do the work at
her
pace. It’s going to be difficult and very painful for both of you, I know, but all we can do now, in the short term, is watch and wait. So what you need to do, Christie, is go home, carry on as normal, and we’ll get you in here for scans every forty-eight hours.”

It sounded just horrible, and I could feel Christie
stiffen beside me. “But how long might all this—you know—go on?” she asked.

The doctor shook her head. “I don’t know. Not too long is my best guess.” She laid a hand on Christie’s arm now. “I’m so sorry.”

Christie was ashen-faced but dry-eyed during the short drive home. She looked brittle. She looked like she’d resolved that she
had
to keep things together so she could bear all she was going
to have to endure over the coming days. I took my cue from her and didn’t offer up pointless platitudes.

Then suddenly she spoke to me.

“I saw the notes,” she said.

“The notes?” I answered. “You mean your hospital notes?”

She turned toward me and nodded. “On the desk in the doctor’s office. I took a look while I was waiting for the doctor to arrive. I just suddenly really needed to know, you
know?”

Now I understood what it was that she was talking about. We’d been offered the opportunity to find out our baby’s sex when we’d had the amniocentesis done. And we’d decided we’d rather not know. We’d talked it over, at length, and agreed that we’d like it to be a surprise. We had no preference, anyway.
We’d both been clear on that. Like any parents, all we wanted was a healthy child.

“And?” I said.

“Our baby’s a little boy,” she answered.

She moved her hand again, and cradled him inside her all the way home.

We decided to name him Sebastian. We’d talked lots about names, and had already chosen a couple. If the baby was a girl, we might have named her Shane or Annabel, and if a boy, we had narrowed it down to Sebastian. And in the end, at the time we found out his sex, we had pretty much settled on that.

Suddenly the little bulge in Christie’s belly, previously without any title other than “our baby,” became real in a way that, for me, was profound. I wasn’t the pregnant one. I wasn’t physically connected to him in the way Christie was. He was kicking by now, and Christie had more than once grabbed my hand and quickly placed it on her belly, so I could feel it for myself. It was an incredible sensation:
kind of weird and kind of moving, all at the same time. But like many men, I knew that my connection to this baby would only really form properly when I held it in my arms. But now it was the life of my son, Sebastian, that hung in the balance. And in all probability—we’d agreed that hope was now pointless—he would not see many more days.

Time is fixed, but how everyone experiences time is always
relative, and those first forty-eight hours seemed endless. Too stressed and anxious to work properly, yet unable to fill the long, long hours, we wandered the rooms of our home mostly in a daze, while George, as ever completely tuned in, would wander with us, his tail down. I really didn’t know what to do, what to say, how to
be
around Christie—this was completely new territory for both of us,
this tragedy; neither of us had suffered the loss of loved ones yet, and I had no idea how best to support her.

We both agreed on one thing: we’d tell no one what was happening. Not because we didn’t want or need support from our families, but because, right now, we didn’t know what was happening ourselves, and, the truth was, we couldn’t face having to have those conversations. We knew we’d
have to have them soon enough anyway.

And at the end of those two days, during which I guess we were both in shock, there would come the first of what might be a whole series of scans, while we waited for nature to take its course. At the end of those two days, Christie had to take herself back to the hospital, lie on that same table, get lubed up, take a deep breath and prepare herself to hear
the worst. How long might this go on? How many times might she have to do this? Could it really continue this way for weeks? How—I couldn’t stop thinking—would she be able to bear it?

And though I never voiced it, another thought wouldn’t stop crossing my mind too: surely,
surely
, it would have been better all around if the news we’d had at that first scan had been final.

We spoke very little
about what was happening to our baby
during those two days. It was as if going there—picking over all those horrible “why him?” and “why us?” thoughts—would make a bad situation even worse. We just carried on, as we’d been told to, trying to act as normal as we could.

Christie, to my astonishment, had remained dry-eyed throughout the trip home from the hospital. She was dry-eyed all that evening,
and dry-eyed the next day. At first I wondered if she was taking herself off to weep alone because she didn’t want to let go in front of me, which kind of hurt, but I soon realized that wasn’t what was happening at all. She was simply staying strong for our baby; she was desperately trying to keep things together. No matter how slim the thread of hope—no matter that, in truth, there was no thread
at all—it was as if she wasn’t prepared to relinquish her role as a mother. There was a part of her that wasn’t going to give up on him—not yet.

Feeling useless and, to a large extent, superfluous, I could do nothing but be on hand and take my cue from George. For those two days, clearly tuned in to his mom’s silent distress, he was a constant presence at Christie’s side. When she sat, he sat
too. When she got into bed, he climbed up there to be with her. When she stood, he stood also, and would pad alongside her to wherever she was going, maintaining a near constant vigil. I was stunned by how sensitive this dog of ours was.

On the second morning I took him to the dog park. It was real early and Christie was finally fast asleep. She’d become gray with fatigue, yet had slept only
fitfully—we both had. Even so, I didn’t doubt that what little sleep I did get was still way more than she did—she looked ashen, her eyes bruised and
dark. But it was hardly surprising: it was pretty hard to sleep in such horrible limbo, when your life has already been shattered so comprehensively, yet you are still waiting for the very worst to happen—for your baby to die.

I decided to take
George to the park on an impulse. He needed to get out every bit as much as I did, and looking at the slender form of my wife curled beneath the sheets, I figured now would be the best time to do it. The sun was still low enough that the heat would be bearable, and I figured Christie would be more likely to sleep deeply if left alone. Now that George was awake, he’d be right there, nosing around her,
anxious to check she was okay. I scrawled her a quick note, left her phone on the bedside table, then silently beckoned George to come with me. Once again showing that same incredible sensitivity to atmosphere, he slipped noiselessly off the bed and followed me out. In the kitchen I grabbed water for us both—George was a water snob and wouldn’t touch the water at the dog park—and we slipped out
of the house as quietly as we could, grabbing his leash as we went.

We had the place to ourselves, as I’d imagined we might at this hour; the only other owner was a woman with an energetic little puppy, who was on the far side of the small dog enclosure. As I waved hello, I wondered briefly why she might be at the park so very early, and wondered if her puppy, like George all that time ago, had
spent the whole night howling and whimpering too. That put me in mind of a conversation I’d had with Christie a week or so back.

She’d been chatting to her mom in Seal Beach about babies,
and had been reminded how early
she
used to get up. Her mom would sit, stupefied with sleep deprivation, while Christie, full of energy, greeted the dawn—5 a.m. was a favorite waking-up time. And when she’d
told me, we’d laughed about how we’d have to draw up a schedule—it was not a favorite time of day for either of us.