Daughters for a Time (31 page)

“Moon,” Sam said, uttering another beautiful word to which she had heard me claim that my love was big enough to fly.

“That’s right!” I nodded my head exaggeratedly with a gigantic grin. “We love you to the moon, too.”

While Tim showered, I sat in the corner chair in our bedroom and watched my knee bounce. When Tim turned off the water and exited in a billow of steam, I popped up and stood in front of him.

“I’ve been thinking,” I said, hearing the shakiness in my voice.

“About?” Tim asked, going to his dresser for clothes.

“Stuff,” I said, following him.

“What kind of stuff?”

“I can’t just say it.” I went to the bed, sat down, then stood again. “I need to preface it with some remarks.”

“Some remarks,” Tim repeated. “Will there be a Power-Point presentation?”

“Stop. This is hard to say.”

“Just say it,” Tim said, smiling.

“Okay,” I began. “Here we are, only five months after Claire’s death, and don’t get me wrong, it’s hell. I still wake up every day and feel sick when I remember that she’s gone. But in relative terms, I have to admit, there are some things that I like about our new situation. I like Ross and Martha living across the street. I like that Sam is like Maura’s little sidekick. I like having my wayward father back in our lives.”

“It’s okay to be happy,” Tim said. “Claire wouldn’t want it any other way.”

“Of course,” I agreed. “I just wish that it hadn’t taken her death to set all of this in motion. I wish
she
were living across the street.”

“I know, sweetheart.”

“You would think, with Claire dying, that I would feel less grounded than ever,” I said. “I mean, how can you count on anything when something like that can happen, right?”

“You’ve had more than your share of heartache.”

“Mom and Claire—cut down in the prime of their lives,” I said. “How could any of us—me, especially—not think that this could all end tomorrow? But I don’t feel that way anymore. I see now, having been hit over the head twice with the same pan, how precious life is.”

“I get that.”

“It’s like
I
finally get it. Sickness and accidents steal lives all the time, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t live. Look at Mom and Claire—motherhood wasn’t about an entire lifetime for them, but I know they wouldn’t have traded it for anything.”

I took his hands and looked him straight in the eyes. “I have a plan. There are two parts.” My heart hammered and skipped.

“A plan with two parts?” Tim raised his eyebrows. “What’s Part One?”

“Part One is…” I looked at Tim and then covered my face with my hands as if I were a child. I hadn’t felt this charged up since the first time I held Sam’s referral photo. I opened my hands and said, “I want to use Claire’s frozen eggs and have another baby.”

“You do?” A smile played over Tim’s face.

“I do. I want to add to this family. I want Sam to have a sister. I don’t want to deny her that. I love how she and Maura have been together, and I pray that Maura will always be right here, but we can’t guarantee that. Someday Ross might remarry. He might move away. He and his new wife might have more children. Sam needs a sibling. She needs a sister.”

I sat down on the bed, laid my head back onto the crisp pillow, closed my eyes, imagining a Christmas portrait of three-year-old Sam holding a newborn with Claire’s eyes.

“You do know that these babies,” Tim said, “they come in girls
and
boys.”

“It’ll be a girl.”

“What will Ross say?”

“I’ll—we’ll need to talk to him. I would never do it without his blessing.”

“Do I dare ask what Part Two of this plan is?”

“Part Two is that, after we have the baby…” I looked at him and a tear slid free from my eye. “I want to have a full hysterectomy to reduce my chances of getting the cancer.”

Tim sat down and wrapped his arms around me. He kissed the top of my head and sighed. “That’s the best plan I’ve ever heard. Because, Helen, I couldn’t stand losing you.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said, kissing his stubbled cheek.

“Damn straight you’re not.” He kissed me back. “You’re not leaving me with a houseful of girls to raise alone.”

A month later, Tim and I sat in Dr. Patel’s familiar office at the fertility clinic.

“Prior to your sister’s hysterectomy, fifteen good eggs were aspirated and frozen from her good ovary,” the doctor said. “Enough eggs to try in vitro fertilization twice, if need be.”

Tim squeezed my hand as I nodded.

“The process of freezing eggs,” Dr. Patel went on, “isn’t as dependably successful as freezing embryos, but it does work.”

“It’s worth a try,” I said.

Claire’s eggs had been tested and treated, and now awaited Tim’s contribution, which, too, would be tested and scrubbed. Once fertilization occurred, we would wait three days, as the single cells split, and split again. Then four embryos would be injected via a very thin tube into my uterus. Once again, a Darwinian fight would ensue, and only the winner—or possibly, winners—would survive. After ten days, we would find out if any had implanted.

“The success rate for women your age, Helen, is about twenty-five percent, so that’s something that we need to be realistic about.”

“We understand that there are no guarantees,” I said. But, I thought, the chance of finding Sam was more than one in 1.3 billion people in China, and here we were with her.

“And miscarriage,” Dr. Patel went on.

“We also understand that there is a chance of miscarriage.”

“On the flip side,” Dr. Patel said, “there is also a chance that more than one embryo will be viable.”

“We understand that, too,” we said, laughing nervously at the thought of twins or triplets in addition to Sam.

We thanked the doctor, told him that we’d make an appointment, but that there was one last thing we needed to do.

A few weeks later, Tim and I sat down with Ross, proposed to him the idea of using Claire’s eggs. He cried when he said that he thought it would be a great gift to Claire. He wished us luck and hugged us both.

On what would have been Claire’s forty-third birthday, we returned to the clinic. I was sedated lightly and the embryos were placed in my uterus—life made of my sister and my husband, blessed by Ross, and carried by me. For the first time ever, I was holding up Claire.

“If it works, it works,” Tim said, trying to keep me levelheaded.

“It’s worth a try,” I said. “And if it doesn’t, we’ll head right back to China for another. We might want to do that anyway, someday.”

“Come back in ten days,” Dr. Patel said when he returned to the exam room. “We’ll take a look and go from there.”

There was a chance that this wouldn’t work, but at least for this moment in time, I was pregnant with four embryos.

I spent the next ten days playing quietly with Sam, molding Play-Doh, strolling through the yard, picking flowers and examining leaves, reading stacks of books, and watching videos. Each day at one o’clock, we’d drive down the road to pick up Maura at school. The three of us would nap together on my
bed. Afterward, we’d each drink a glass of milk and snack on cheese and crackers.

Ten days later, Tim and I returned to the clinic. In the waiting room, I picked up an album filled with photos of newborn babies. Sam played in the corner, stacking blocks and lining up cars.

“Sam, look at this,” I said, calling her over. I pointed to the photo album of newborn babies. Sam toddled over and pointed to a squinty-eyed Buddha baby who had a good three chins. “That little boy’s name is Brandon Michael O’Donnell. When he was born, he weighed nine pounds and three ounces.”

Sam smacked the photos with her happy hands.

When we were called into the examining room, we assumed our positions. I lay back on the exam table; Tim sat on the chair next to me with Sam on his lap. Tim looked at me with his cautionary eyes—the ones that reminded me that we only had a 25 percent chance that this would work, the ones that worried that my hopes were too high. I nodded my acknowledgement, conveyed to him that he shouldn’t worry. I was no longer the girl I once was. I was ready to take a risk, fall, and get back up again.

The doctor squirted gel onto my abdomen and pressed the ultrasound wand until he found what he was looking for. That’s when we heard it, the breathy, whooshing aria via Doppler: whirl, whirl, whirl, whirl.

“Ah, the heartbeat,” Dr. Patel said.

When I turned my head to look at Tim, tears sprang loose because, for once, being in the odds meant that I had hit the jackpot. I had spent my life on the tail of every bell curve: a mother who died, a father who left, a struggle with infertility, a sister taken much too early. What were the odds of all of that heartache befalling one person? And what were the chances of that same person hearing this heartbeat?

“Good news,” the doctor said, staring at the black-and-white sonogram. “One embryo has implanted.”

“One,” I repeated, though I secretly had wished that there were maybe two, just in case one lost its grip.

“We’re not out of the woods,” the doctor said. “Take it easy. Let’s look again in a week.”

A week passed, then a month, then the first trimester. With each ultrasound, the little bean grew, and before we knew it, we were at fourteen weeks and back in Dr. Patel’s office. His ultrasound technician, Carly, squirted gel on my belly and roamed around my abdomen with her wand. She called out organs as she found them, identified the chambers of the heart, measured the circumference of the baby’s beautifully round head, counted ten fingers and ten toes.

“Carly, come on,” I said. “You’re killing me.”

“Oh!” Carly said, feigning surprise. “Did you want to know the sex of your baby?”

Carly rolled and pressed the transducer wand to the exact spot between the baby’s legs. “Surprise, surprise, you’ve got a girl.”

“Did you hear that, Sam? You got a sister!” I said.

Sam clapped her hands, recognizing the word
sister
as something good.

At eighteen weeks of pregnancy, we went in for a 3-D ultrasound. It was offered to us mostly for fun: Dr. Patel had just updated his equipment, purchasing the latest technology. Once I was situated in the ultrasound chair, Carly came in and turned on the machine. It caught Sam’s attention, stopping her from what she was doing, pulling on Tim’s bottom lip and belly laughing. She stared alternately at my stomach and the ultrasound machine as Carly squirted gel and rolled the wand.

And then an image like nothing I had ever seen before appeared on the screen. Not black-and-white, like the other
ultrasound, but more golden, glowing. It was like looking into a cat’s-eye marble. There she was, our baby, a perfect bundle curled into the shape of a comma, with her hands at her face and her thumb in her mouth.

“Sam, do you see her?” I looked over at Sam, whose mouth had parted and eyes were transfixed.

And you really
could
see her: the purse of her lips, the cutest profile in all of history, and…Was that a dimple in her chin? And cheekbones that formed her little face into the shape of a perfect heart (thank you, Claire), and the sweetest arms, like two little satin ribbons flowing down from her shoulders and ending in slender, piano-playing fingers.

Carly printed an entire sheet of ultrasound photographs. She printed a few extra to give to Sam, who studied them as if she were charting stars on an astronomical map.

“I don’t suppose Sam’s birth mother ever had an ultrasound like this,” Carly said.

“I think if Sam’s birth mother had had an ultrasound, it would have been because she was forced to, to see the gender of the baby. And in Sam’s case, that probably wouldn’t have ended well.”

“She’s lucky to have you and Tim,” Carly said. Many people had said that over the last year, that Sam was the lucky one. And I suppose, in terms of her survival, the lucky part was that she was abandoned somewhere where she would be found. But it never settled in me that we had done something particularly altruistic. I was the first to admit that my motives were selfish. I wanted a baby, a baby to love, a baby to love me. It had worked out. One side hadn’t received more than the other had. As far as I was concerned, we had struck a good deal.

After lunch, we dropped Tim at Harvest and then drove to St. Mary’s just in time to pick up Maura after school. I spotted my niece on the sidewalk, talking animatedly to a classmate, so
cute in her denim capris and green tunic. Next year she would wear a uniform—a blue-and-green-plaid jumper with patent leather Mary Janes.

“Great day, Mother!” Mrs. Morrissey said as we approached the curb. The director of the school had been in the education field since the seventies and addressed all the moms as “Mother” and all the dads as “Father.” The distinction that I was Maura’s aunt did not discourage her.

“She looks good today,” I said. “Like the old Maura.”

“I heard that she was asked to sing a solo in the Thanksgiving celebration,” Mrs. Morrissey said. “Maybe that had something to do with it.”

“Oh! Great, okay.”

Maura was already talking before her seat belt was buckled. “Aunt Helen, guess what?”