Daughters for a Time (32 page)

“What, honey? Tell me.”

“I get to sing a solo at Thanksgiving! The first verse of ‘America.’”

“Oh, Maura, honey, that is the best news ever,” I said, thinking that Maura singing a solo was just what she needed to counteract the anxiety that seemed to be shrouding her once outgoing personality. “
My country, ‘tis of thee
…” Maura sang.

“
Sweet land of liberty
…” I joined in.

I looked in the rearview mirror, saw Maura’s cheeks perched high atop a smile, the happy girl she used to be. Maybe today, I pondered, she didn’t think about Claire.
Was that the goal?
I wondered. For Maura to forget her mother so that she could be happy? So that the sadness would disappear? As much as I wanted her to remember her mother, because it was only fair to Claire, and because, truly, Claire was unforgettable, I couldn’t help feeling grateful for a day like today when maybe Maura had had a day without her.

“What’s that?” She pointed to the strip of photos in Sam’s hands.

“Those are pictures of the baby girl that’s growing in my tummy,” I said.

“There’s a baby growing in your tummy?” Maura asked, wide-eyed.

“Yep,” I said. “There is. Take a look at the pictures.”

“Wow!” Maura said, her eyebrows almost disappearing into her hairline. Then suddenly serious and concerned, “Aunt Helen? Is she going to be my baby sister?”

I opened my mouth to explain the difference between sisters and cousins, but stopped myself, thinking about how it was Claire’s egg that started it all. “Kind of,” I said. “She’s going to be your cousin, but you know what? She’ll be just like a sister, just like Sam’s like a sister to you. Cousins, sisters—it doesn’t really matter, as long as you’re all together, right?”

“Yeah!” Maura cheered. “We’re having a baby!”

A few minutes later, we pulled into the parking lot of the Gymboree studio.

“Aunt Helen,” Maura asked, “did you bring my blue leotard or my pink one?”

“Blue, I think. That’s the one you like, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Aunt Helen? Is Grandpa Larry going to watch me do gymnastics again?”

“I’m guessing he’ll be here,” I said. “He hasn’t missed a class in months.”

“Is he going to have dinner with us?” Maura wanted to know.

“Probably, unless he’s tired of you choosing IHOP every time,” I said, stifling a smile.

“Last week he drank six cups of coffee,” Maura said. “I counted.”

“That’s a lot.”

“But he never orders pancakes,” Maura added.

“Grandpa Larry never liked pancakes, for some reason.”

“Then why do we go to IHOP every time?” Maura asked.

“Gee, I wonder, knucklehead,” I said, laughing. “Maybe because you love it?”

“Sam likes it, too,” Maura said. “She likes the silver dollars.”

We opened the door to the studio and Maura ran in, hollering, “Daddy! Grandpa!” She ran full speed onto Ross’s lap, kissed him and then Larry, and then darted off for her warm-up.

I handed Sam to Larry and said to Ross, “You came!”

“I heard that we get pancakes for dinner afterward,” he said.

“We do!” I said. “And eggs and bacon.”

“I’d be crazy to miss it,” he said, smiling. He stood up and walked to the window, watched Maura stretch her legs out and reach for her toes.

Larry looked at me, then at Ross. “Good news, huh?”

“He’s coming around.”

“Glad he’s not a slow learner like me.”

I sat down next to him, handed him the strip of sonogram photos, and said, “What do you think, Grandpa?”

The following May, we gathered at Claire’s gravesite to mark the one-year anniversary of her death. Maura danced around the grassy hill, the memory of her mother already blurred, the current events in her life now dominant. It was sad watching Maura forget her mother, to know that she wasn’t capable of remembering that way. But it was also a blessing. No child should have to know that the person who loved her the most had been stolen from her, that she literally had been the victim of a thief. Let her forget, I thought. I would carry the heavy heart for my niece—a heart so full I could feel it in my belly.

I leaned flowers against Claire’s headstone, placed my hand on the cool granite, closed my eyes.
I miss you, Claire. But I’ll see you soon
, I thought, placing my hand on my swollen belly.
And Maura’s doing well. Do you see how we’re all loving her? We always will. I promise, Claire. I promise. I’ll take care of her just like you took care of me. I promise to love all of these girls—none of whom is really mine, but all of whom are still my own. Whatever that means. What I’m trying to say is, I’ll love them like you loved me, okay?

I looked up at the marbled sky and then back at Maura. I would ask her occasionally about a memory, about Claire. She had already forgotten so much—the actual events. Sometimes she would recall a story, a day—”Remember when Mom and I picked apples?”—but then I would find a photo of the
two of them at the orchard on her bulletin board, and I would know that much of Maura’s memories were from pictures. But sometimes I would see her stop, as if she were trying to bring into focus a feeling that was buried a layer too deep. A hug, a touch, a smell—something that would make her pause and remember, a fleeting moment of “Oh, yeah.” I knew because it had happened to me. Occasionally, in the last year, I had seen women on the street who bore a likeness to Claire and I had done a double take. Every time I ordered a vanilla latte, I would hear Claire instruct the barista to “go light on the syrup.” In the days when the grief threatened to swallow me whole, I would hear Claire’s singsong admonition: “Pull yourself together and put on a brighter shade of lipstick!”

I knew what Maura was going through, how she distrusted her memories, because I felt the same uncertainty about what was real and what was imagined.

The first week of July, I felt a twinge.

“Is it a contraction?” Tim asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said, tearing up at the thought of something going wrong, remembering the sadness that swallowed me after my miscarriage years ago.

“Let’s get you to the hospital,” Tim said.

Davis and Delia had come up from North Carolina the day before. The doctor had guessed that labor would start in the next few days. He’d given me the option of inducing, just in case.

Sam was on the deck with her grandparents when Tim and I came down the stairs.

“We need to get Helen checked out,” Tim said to his parents. “She’s feeling something. She’s worried.”

Davis and Delia nodded, assured us that Sam would be fine.

“Mommy and Daddy love you,” I said to Sam, leaning over to kiss her mouth, just as another twinge grabbed at my abdomen. “Be a good girl.”

Sam looked up briefly and then went back to blowing bubbles.

“Good luck, dear,” Delia said, kissing my cheek.

“Delia,” I said nervously. “Will you come with us?”

“Oh!” Delia danced, flustered. “I would be honored to,” she said. “Thank you, dear!”

“I’d really like you there.”

“Lucky you,” Tim said to Sam. “You get Grandpa all to yourself. He’ll probably feed you ice cream and Oreos for dinner.”

“Yeah!” Sam cheered.

At the hospital, Tim checked me in, and once I was situated in a gown in a private room, the nurse came in to examine me. “Nothing’s wrong,” she assured me. “You’re in labor.”

“Oh, okay,” I said. “Those twingy things didn’t feel like what I thought a contraction would feel like.”

“Those are just the baby ones,” she said. “You’ll see.”

Five hours later, the contractions began in earnest. Seven hours later, I cried uncle and called for the epidural. An hour later, the anesthesiologist inserted the catheter into my spinal canal. The next few hours were calm. Delia and I played Scrabble; nervous Tim polished off a pile of candy bars. I even slept for a few hours. At ten o’clock at night, I felt a pressing. It was so low and deep that the burning pressure reached my thighs. The nurse checked. I was at ten centimeters. Ready to push.

Tim was on one side, holding a Styrofoam cup of ice chips ready for me to suck on; Delia was on the other, clearing the hair out of my face.

“Now, Dad, Grandma,” the nurse said, “each of you is going to push her knee toward her face, and Helen, you’re going to push for ten counts.”

Tim put his weight into my one knee and Delia into the other.

“Now!”

I pushed and pushed, though my efforts felt impossibly weak compared to what was needed to see this through. I pushed more, harder, until it felt like I was turning inside out.

“You’re doing really well,” the nurse said. “Again!”

Again and again, I pushed. I lay back against my pillow, crying from exhaustion. Tim slipped me an ice chip; Delia folded a cool cloth on my forehead. I pushed again, and then again. Three hours later, the nurse said she was ready for the doctor. The baby’s head was crowning.

“Oh, dear,” Delia said. “She’s almost here!”

No, she’s not
, I wanted to say, but was unable to speak through my exhaustion and tears. A sense of dread had filled me and an anxiety had wrapped around my neck and pulled tight. She should be here by now. If this was meant to be, it would be over by now. I’d have a baby in my arms. I never should have done this. I never should have tempted fate, messed with science, tried to find a loophole in my infertility life sentence. I wasn’t meant for this. I was in the last mile of the marathon and all I wanted to do was to turn back.

When the nurse came back, she said, “Huh.”

“What?” I asked.

The nurse stared at the strips of paper etching their way out of the machine that monitored the contractions. “Your contractions seem to have stopped. You haven’t had one in over ten minutes.”

My chest grew heavy. I fought for breath. Something was wrong. Of course something was wrong. My baby was dying inside of me.

Delia cupped her hands around my face. “Helen, the baby is fine. She wants to come out.”

I shook my head because, all of a sudden, a fear filled me like cement, and I just knew that she wasn’t going to make it. I wanted to see Mom and Claire. I wanted to tell them that it was no good on Earth without them, that I wasn’t strong enough to carry on alone.

“She’s afraid,” Delia said to the nurse, her little voice ringing clear over the din of machines. “She’s had a miscarriage. She’s lost a lot of loved ones. She’s scared.”

Delia’s words, making sentences out of my sad life, made me want to crawl into a ball and die.

The nurse nodded as if that explained it.

“The doctor will want to start Pitocin,” the nurse said sympathetically. “But meanwhile, see if you can talk to her.”

Delia bent down, her face just a few inches from mine. She pulled the cloth off my forehead, flipped it over so that it felt cool again. “Dear,” she said. “It’s time, Helen. It’s time to meet your daughter. She wants to meet her mommy.”

“Don’t you want to see her?” Tim added. “I’ll bet she looks just like you and Claire.”

I turned my face away, squeezed my eyes shut. “I can’t,” I said.

“I know you’re scared, Helen,” Delia said, wiping my cheeks. “But you’re not going to lose her. This baby is fine and she wants to meet her mommy.”

Meanwhile, the nurse had turned the fetal heart monitor up loud so that I could hear the sound of the baby’s heartbeat: whirl, whirl, whirl, whirl.

“Hear her?” Delia said. “Listen to her heartbeat. She’s strong, dear. Just like you!”

I turned my face in the other direction and fought for breath.

“It’s time, Helen.”

“I’m scared,” I said.

“You’re not,” she said. “Because there’s no reason to be. This baby is blessed. She has angels bringing her in. Your mother, your sister—they’re here, Helen. They’re here to bring in the new baby.”

“But what if—”

Delia cupped my face and forced me to look at her. “No what-ifs, Helen,” she said. “This baby is strong. Now let’s say a Hail Mary for the baby you lost, for your sister, for your mother. And then let’s say one for our new girl who wants to come out.”

My entire body heaved in a sob that was nothing short of a tidal wave. I burst into tears, squeezing my mother-in-law’s hands, and then closed my eyes and said the prayers. The nurse nodded happily when she checked again and saw that the labor was progressing. Twelve minutes later, the doctor arrived, assumed his catcher’s position, and received Grace as she was born into this world.