What Lies Between Us (21 page)

The message is loud and clear: women's bodies are supposed to swell up, drop babies, and then shrink back down to a manageable size. The baby? Another perfectly designed accessory to match her heels and bag. All around us, this ambient roar of fecundity, and I for one am happy to be outside it.

*   *   *

Yet just a few weeks after the conversation with my mother I think back to it and wonder if it was a trigger. If all those nights Dharshi and I spent in twin beds next to each other had synchronized us so that even though I haven't seen her in years, perhaps her body has somehow reached out and whispered to mine, because now I am late.

My period has never been regular, the ebbs and flows of it impossible to regulate. Also maybe having to pay so much attention to other people's bodies makes it hard for me to pay attention to my own. I realize that it's been some time since I bled, at least a month, if not two. I wait another week hoping and praying, the question gnawing at the back of my mind. What could have happened? I'm on the pill. But is it possible I have missed one here and there? Could his sperm have breached the gates in a moment of hormonal confusion, a morning where I rushed out without popping a tiny pink tablet? It's possible. I've been working mad hours; I haven't always paid perfect attention. I don't tell him because a part of me is convinced I am being stupid. I am not pregnant. Soon my period will come and then I can tell him how scared I was and we will laugh at my silly anxiety and toast to our child-free-ness.

At the end of the week I buy a pregnancy test. Hands shaking, I squat and piss. I lay the test on the counter, wash my hands. I stare into the mirror at my terrified face. Then there are those long, long minutes. I go into the kitchen and eat a cold chicken leg I find in the fridge.

Minutes later, there it is, an unambiguous plus sign.

*   *   *

I sit on the old gold couch we bought together at a garage sale when he was moving in, and my entire life shimmers and vibrates and changes in front of me. How can it be? Even now, in some secret passage of my body, some tiny, unwanted
person
stirs and dreams. When did this presence come? Where did it come from? Can I get it out? It's shockingly like being possessed by some outside force. I think about my skin moving outward and stretching taut, about pushing out a living creature through an orifice that seems far, far too small. I press my hands across my belly, imagining a tiny speck of life floating there. What will I do? What will he think? How will our lives be? Should I abort? Should I carry a child? Give birth to it?

I pace the room and the lost men come to me. My drowned father, Samson. Between them, they had crafted me. How can I pass on such an inheritance to a child? How can I conjure up some miniature soul from the mysterious unknown, feed it upon my blood, and then push it kicking and screaming out of my body into this world? Existence has been heavy enough for me. Would it be a blessing or a curse to bestow it upon some small, unknown stranger?

But then this tiny thought unfolds. It whispers hope. It says that perhaps
here
—far away from the island, far from those malevolent spirits, far from those cruel hands, in the arms of this strong and loving man—it could happen. Perhaps I could be a mother in a different way. Perhaps a child would be born who is a new thing, not an entity ruled by ghosts. A child made by him and me would be born of love, even if accidentally. And this accidental child, born in this safe place, it would love me unconditionally, and for this I yearn.

*   *   *

When I tell him, his eyes widen and his brow rises. He spreads his hands on the table, pushes himself up, and goes to stand in front of our window, his back to me. He looks down onto the street where the late October sun is falling like weak drizzle. I say, “Say something.”

He says, “I don't know … A baby?” His voice trails off and he stands there for minutes. I stay quiet, waiting. He comes back, squats next to me, holds my hands. “I just … I don't think we can. Do you want this?”

I shake my head and then I'm not sure. “I don't know. I never thought I wanted to be a mom, but maybe with you…”

He says, “We've talked about this so much. You've always said you didn't want to.”

I shrug my shoulders, my hands on my stomach pointing out that the decision has been taken from us, has been made by unknown, unseen forces.

He says, “But we're so good. Look how much freedom we have. How easy our lives are. It'll change everything. I don't want it to change. I love our lives. I love how we are together.”

I counter, “I love our lives too. But maybe it'll be like us multiplied. It'll be us times ten. You, me, and a little one. A tiny one just like you or me. It could be good.”

He says, “Have you even thought this through? Do you know how much time and effort and money it'll be? I'm just trying to get off the ground. I mean, if I sold some paintings it could be different.”

“Yes, of course. I'm not proposing we adopt a puppy.” He lets go of my hands, gets up, and paces the room again. He says, “I don't know.”

I say, “I have to go to work,” and stand up. Something in me is far away from him, but he must feel it, because he comes and holds me close to him, strokes my hair with his palms. I rest my face against his chest. He says, “We'll figure it out together. I promise.” His voice sounds like it has traveled miles to me, but I nod against his skin.

*   *   *

I go to my doctor and find out that I am about seven weeks pregnant. At home despite my trepidation I open my old nursing manuals, and there are the lists of attributes:

The embryo is around 13 mm (1/2 inch) in length. The heart is beating with one chamber. A dividing wall is formed in the heart. Arm and leg buds are beginning to grow. The lower jaw and the vocal cords are beginning to form. The mouth opening is forming. The inner ear is being created. The digestive tract is developing. The navel string is being created. The following organs are being formed: the lungs, the liver, the pancreas, and the thyroid gland.

It sounds like a poem, like the lines of the most beautiful poem in the world.

Inside me, these things are happening. The delicate whorl of an inner ear, its complicated mechanisms beyond the grasp of all science to create, is being created. Inside me, organs that pump blood, breathe air, secrete hormones are coming into being, forming the tiny swirl of life that will be this miracle, a new human being. A childhood memory rises, of listening to the Buddhist verses that extoll the sanctity of life, verses that claim that a child is a child from conception and that the months we spend in utero too are marked as a year of life.

*   *   *

I can't eat, I can't sleep. I am as devastated as a bombed-out city. He tries to hold me, but I don't want him. I walk my shifts like a zombie, go through my paces at bedside on automatic. Nadine tries to talk to me, but I push past her. I wonder when one of the others will report me for being careless, for more than once pushing the needle into flesh rather than vein so that patients gasp and swell and complain. There is a time bomb ticking inside me. This is one problem with a deadline set in stone as much as in flesh.

At the grocery store and at the park, I stop to watch women with their children, the way they look at their little ones and the way that longing gaze is returned. No matter how far the child might stray, there is always that look over the shoulder to make sure mommy is there, mommy has not left. The mothers always know where their children are, even as they hold coffee and talk to the others. Always, this invisible umbilicus stretching between a mother and her young.

To be adored like that. To be loved unconditionally, to extend the way we are together, Daniel and me, to this other unknown person, who is also both of us. Could we be like that? Happy? All three of us in love with each other? It seems the last thing missing in the life I have built.

*   *   *

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.

 

Sixteen

It's an easy pregnancy. I have some morning sickness, the skin stretches and hurts, I can't sleep much, but at five months there's a softness emanating from deep inside me. From the ultrasound, the doctor has confirmed what I already knew: we are having a girl. I feel her move in the seas of my body and it makes me breathless. I pull Daniel's hands onto my skin and we stare into each other's eyes in wonder. How is this possible? How have we made a new creature, a person who will have her own life? A new person who is both him and me. The immensity of it makes us grin in delight.

*   *   *

His parents come to visit and we take them out to dinner. When he tells them, I watch their wide, ecstatic faces. His mother says, “Oh, I thought you weren't going to. I mean, I didn't know you were trying!” Then there are the cries of “How lovely. Congratulations. How wonderful.” The clink of champagne flutes for everyone but me. The father looking at the mother, saying, “We are going to be grandparents,” with so much joy.