What We Leave Behind (23 page)

“Okay,” I found myself relenting.

When he walked in the door, I noticed that the man I loved was no longer just my husband. By day’s end, my secret had changed him. He was as handsome as ever with his grayish hair still thick and full, his eyes as warm as the first day we met in his office. Even when he was exhausted after a long day, he always had a smile for me, ready to talk and share his day.

I wanted to make love to him right then and there. I wanted to undress him at the door and feel him inside of me as if everything were the same, and it was always going to be just the two us.

“What’s gotten into you?” he asked, as I started to kiss him urgently on the lips.

Raging hormones
, I almost let slip out of my mouth. “Are you complaining?” I asked, taking off his jacket, wrapping my arms around his neck. “I’ve missed you terribly today.”

“You say that every day, Jess,” he said, laughing at the attention I gave him.

“I know, but today was different.”

I wanted to tell him, I did. I wanted to look into those questioning eyes, the ones I had trusted enough to give this part of myself to, but I stopped myself before the words could dislodge themselves from my mouth. I did not want him to look back at this moment, when he found out he was going to be a father, and remember standing in our foyer. I wanted a tale that he could later tell our children, something that would embarrass them to think of their parents that way.

“Different how?” he asked, as I continued to seduce him, first with my hands, then my mouth.

We did make it up to our bedroom. His question still hung in the air, but it was clear to both of us that the answer didn’t really matter anymore.

I slept with our little secret safely cradled inside of me and thought of nothing else for the next forty-eight hours. It was Sunday by then and it was time. While Marty dozed beside me, I sneaked out of our bed, threw on my robe, and headed for the kitchen. I was a novice in the kitchen, but Marty loved having breakfast in bed, so I threw caution to the wind and began to prepare his favorite coffee and French toast. When I wheeled it into our room, he was startled awake by the wheels on the cart.

“And here I thought you didn’t know where the kitchen was,” he joked, wiping the last remnants of slumber from his eyes. He was at his best in the morning, pure sex appeal. Pulling me next to him on the bed, he planted a tender kiss on my cheek.

“What’s this?” he asked, when he saw the wrapped package on the tray. “I didn’t forget my birthday, did I?” he laughed

“Your birthday’s in January, Marty. It’s June. Open it,” I called out.

I watched as the fingers I loved scratched the surface of the paper, tender, like the way he handled the important people and things in his life. It was fitting for the moment we were about to share.

The silver frame fell from the loose paper and landed on the tray, so he didn’t notice the engraving across the bottom. When he picked it up, I watched how his face changed. The metamorphosis occurred right before my eyes. The engraver had chiseled into the precious metal
Happy Father’s Day
. The photo was the sonogram, a tiny dot on a black and white screen. How something so important could be so infinitely small.

It didn’t take but a millisecond for Marty to realize the extent of my gift. I whispered into his ear. “You’re going to be an amazing daddy.”

His arms flew around me, the tremendous stretch of his grasp, unable to contain his happiness. “Are you serious?” he asked, and not because he didn’t want this, but to the contrary, he wanted to be sure that I was sure.

“Very,” I beamed.

“I love you, honey.” He looked into my eyes, and we both were crying, and I could hardly tear myself away from him, until I realized that I didn’t have to. I could lie there beside him all day. He was mine to keep, and now we were bringing our baby into the world. Nothing warmed me more than that prospect. So much hope, so much joy.

I wanted to make love with him again, but now he was afraid. I had become this delicate doll, and his concern for us endeared him to me even more. It is an interesting phenomenon with men. On the brink of becoming fathers, they revert to childhood, frightened, worried, impossibly thick-headed.

“I’m not being a child,” he responded to my mockery. “I think I’m being rather fatherly—worried about my wife and unborn child, wanting them to be safe and healthy.”

“Well, making love is how they usually get in here. It can’t be that dangerous.”

“Is that how it happened?” he teased, sitting over me on the bed, kissing my neck, my chin, my lips. His hands found my belly, and although there was no bloating that would indicate my secret, his hand touched it lightly, possessively, proudly. He then lowered himself so that his face was aligned with my belly and even though he was whispering, I could make out the words perfectly. “I love you, little one. I love you.”

The pregnancy was not an easy one. Just as I had announced the news to Marty, the nausea began, accompanied by some of the worst vomiting I had ever experienced. It was difficult to cover up such sickness, and before long most of our friends knew, including Jeff and Sharon. “I know someone that vomited the entire ten months,” Sharon told me one afternoon, while visiting.

“What are you talking about?” I asked, “pregnancies only last nine.”

“It’s more like ten if you take into account the two weeks the doctors tack on to calculate the baby’s due date. They’re probably too afraid to tell the mothers that.”

I would never have thought that my body that was at one time so strong would react like this to the growing of a life in my womb. I couldn’t picture another day of vomiting, let alone practically an entire year of it. Marty was as supportive as I would have expected. Every morning before I’d wake up, he’d leave a plate of crackers and a glass of ginger ale by the side of the bed. Sharon said it would calm my queasiness to eat it before getting up, but it was difficult to swallow when I knew it was just going to come right back up. I worried that the baby wasn’t getting enough nutrients. I worried that I wasn’t getting enough nutrients. I worried that I was going to be throwing up when the baby came out of me, that I’d be throwing up on the first day of Mommy and Me.

“I thought it was supposed to be only morning sickness?” I asked her, noticing the time of my last upheaval was well after noon.

“Everyone’s different. It’ll get easier. You’ll just get used to it. And you know what they say? You’re probably having a girl.”

I waved off her remark without further discussion. The thought of getting accustomed to vomiting every day was too frightening.

“You do look beautiful, Jess,” she said.

“Well I feel disgusting and fat.”

The months passed slowly, uneventfully. I was working full-time, as well as consulting for a local radio station on their playlist, and found the work helpful in taking my mind off my burgeoning belly. Each month that passed, Marty would send an arrangement of flowers to the house commemorating the time drawing nearer; but for me, it was a celebration of survival. By the eighth month, despite the daily vomiting, I was huge and uncomfortable. I had gained at least fifty pounds, but everyone would swear up and down that I looked great.

“Radiant,” they’d say. “Positively glowing!” Was I the only one that noticed the veins that colored my legs like a Spiderman comic and the tree trunks that had replaced my otherwise slender calves and ankles? The whole experience bewildered me. I felt trapped in my body, taken over by this life growing inside of me.

“You must be having a girl,” this kind woman in the grocery store told me, joining in the consensus that predicted the sex of babies. But I was certain, Marty and I were having a boy. It would contradict everything we were told, everything my body suggested, but it was going to be a boy. Without question.

It was a crisp, February morning when we welcomed Ari to our world. He weighed in at eight pounds, six ounces, with a head of curly dark hair and a smile that challenged those that claimed the birth canal was a traumatic experience. He was the spitting image of his father.

“I never thought we’d see this day, Jess,” Jeff remarked. “You’ve finally made Marty an honest man,” He kissed me on the top of the head and then baby Ari, who squealed with delight.

My mother flitted around the room in her best flitting style, keeping track of the flowers and presents that filled the hospital room while touching up her hair in case some of our industry friends showed up.

Beth and Paul flew in from New York. The hunger in their eyes was apparent. Beth did her best to hide it, but I knew it was there. They’d been trying to have a baby for a while now. She was happy for us, though, and I sympathized with her sadness.

I held Ari in my arms closely.

“You’re a natural,” Marty would tell me, although I didn’t feel like one. It was awkward and strange, yet at the same time one of the most important things I’d ever done.

“We created him,” he’d whisper to me, after the others had gone, and I’d look down at the tiny figure in my arms, overwhelmed by my purpose in life, the voracious need to protect. My heart was brimming with something that could have been love, but even that wasn’t enough.

“You make beautiful babies, Jess,” Marty said, hurling me away from the enormity of what we had just delivered. When I turned to face him, the only thing that came out of me were tears.

Marty was a wonderful father, and that was partially due to the fact that Ari was such an easy baby. For the first couple of months, he ate, slept, and pooped on cue without so much as a cry or whimper. He smiled, watching us with his big blue eyes, delighting in his new surroundings. We were enamored by him, and we thought, he of us.

The months that followed were filled with getting Ari on the proper schedule, helping him with his crawl, providing a hand when he started to stand on his own, and supervising, basically, his life. He tackled each milestone with grace and deliberation. I watched as he grew before my eyes, no longer a baby, but a remarkably sweet little toddler. I gave up work altogether those first two years, saving my time and energy for the documentation of an endless list of firsts. I delighted in his growth and discovery, relishing in the time we had to share with one another.

It wasn’t long before I became pregnant again. Ari was just two and a pure joy. He had become Marty’s shadow, following him aimlessly around the house, begging his daddy—in only the way a two-year-old knows how—to accompany him to the office, and oftentimes winning the battle. Marty had the forethought to convert an entire area of the building into a children’s play area, and this was helpful to me, because as expected, I re-experienced the wrath of my first pregnancy.

“It could be a girl this time,” Marty told me. “You never know.”

But I knew instinctively that we were having another little boy. It made things easier in a lot of ways, and I was equally as excited about his arrival as I was about Ari. I even knew his name was going to be Josh.

“I hope he looks like you.”

“I hope he looks like
you
,” I repeated.

“We already have a mini me,” he laughed, referring to Ari, who despite having brown hair in contrast to his father’s salt and pepper, was an exact replica of his father.

“I like that he looks just like you,” I said.

“Yeah, why’s that?”

“Because it makes him that much easier to love,” I said.

Accustomed to the strain on my body and the vomiting, I decided to attend a music convention in San Francisco. It was the largest music convention in the business, and I was approached by the head committee to serve on a panel of soundtrack and music supervisors. I was eight months pregnant.

As anxiety provoking as it was for me to leave Ari for the first time, Marty was anticipating spending three days alone with his son. He had taken the week off work to prepare for their adventure.

For me, it was a hectic week in San Francisco. I was so busy meeting with label executives and artists, new and old, that I hardly had a moment to acknowledge my incessant vomiting. “You look fantastic,” they’d say—more lies—thinking the flattering words could somehow translate into their songs being added to radio playlists.

Returning to the game, I enmeshed myself in the music and the latest controversies in the business. I felt a refreshing autonomy—rejuvenated. But at night, the craving for my child would envelop me. I would hear the call of Ari’s voice or feel the flutter within my underside, and assume my role again as mom.

When I would lay in bed in my hotel those nights, I understood what it meant to be blessed. I had a husband who was my best friend and an exceptional father, a healthy child and another one on the way, and a career I loved. Never did I believe it could get any better than this. When you’re feeling that good about something, so content with life, you don’t stop to think it might improve. We are taught not to expect too much, to be so greedy for goodness.

Nothing could have prepared me for what happened next.

The accident occurred just south of Santa Barbara. A young man on a motorcycle saw a car ricochet off the steel barrier along the perimeter of the Pacific Coast Highway and was sensible enough to stop and see if the driver was okay. That would be me, and no, I was not okay.

I was airlifted to Cedars Sinai Hospital, where the doctors prepped me for surgery. In and out of consciousness, the damage was done; a fractured pelvis, broken arm, wrist, concussion, and massive internal bleeding. I only know this because Marty later gave me the details. What he didn’t mention was the baby.

Being alive was something I remembered being grateful for, yes, definitely grateful, but then I thought about the baby, and a life without him seemed deplorable, unacceptable. I couldn’t speak. Grateful turned into something else, something ugly and threatening. If not for Ari, I would not have been able to go on. It was as simple as that. I closed my eyes, not ready for what was to come, thinking that maybe I was better off not knowing. At least not knowing allowed for some minor glimmer of hope. With knowledge came finality. I didn’t think I could stand the alternative.