What We Leave Behind (30 page)

I didn’t clean my face, brush my teeth, or even call home before I got under the covers. I was angry at the world, angry at myself. None of it seemed to matter anymore. Acne and bad breath were the least of it.

The message light was beeping red when I woke the next morning. I hadn’t even heard the phone ring. Jill Sammler’s voice was on the machine, something about a development, and if I could meet them tomorrow at Mr. Sammler’s office in the city. When I arrived, they were all in there—the Sammlers, and Jonas. It was like walking into the principal’s office. Learning that Dr. Levy was the father had to have been a shock to all of them.

“Is Michelle alright?” I asked.

“She’s fine,” Mr. Sammler said. “I suppose an introduction isn’t necessary. You know Dr. Levy.” I murmured something, trying my best to conceal my shame.

“There’s something I’d like to discuss,” he began. In his office surroundings, high above Manhattan, Mr. Sammler located his voice. I might have guessed he was an accountant.

My eyes urged Jonas to look my way, but he made a point to ignore me.

Mr. Sammler continued, “Since Michelle doesn’t have a blood sibling, we’re looking for matches in the national registries. The chances are slim that she’ll hold on long enough for us to find a match.”

“What about my son?” I volunteered again. “There’s no possibility of his being a match?”

Mr. Sammler responded emphatically, “We need that blood match. Presuming Dr. Levy is not the father of that child, your son won’t qualify.”

Nobody spoke as Jonas and I independently wrestled with a fate of which neither of us could speak.

“Which is why I’m glad you’re all here,” he continued. “I’ve been researching an option. It’s a pretty hot topic today, wide debates on both sides of the bioethical spectrum, but it’s been done in similar cases when a child’s life is at stake.”

Something unthinkable was about to come out of Mr. Sammler’s mouth. I knew it before he even breathed his next word. “I read about a family recently that was about to lose their eight-year-old son to a disease called Fanconi anemia. It’s a rare genetic disease that causes bone marrow failure. Without a bone marrow transplant, their son would die. His sister was not a match, and there were none in the national registry. The family had always wanted a third child, so they moved their plans up.”

“Having a child to save a child?” I interrupted.

“Precisely. In this case, the cord blood from the baby’s birth was collected, and it was an exact bone marrow match. The baby boy saved his big brother’s life.”

The hunger in Jill Sammler’s eyes tore through my heart. My initial reaction was that this was a preposterous resolution and ballsy of Mr. Sammler to ask, but he kept right on talking as if this was something Jonas or I would participate in. “Assuming Michelle’s blood work comes back normal this afternoon, and we can continue with the course of chemotherapy, we’ll buy ourselves another year. A match might come up in the registry, but we all know there’s no guarantee. The possibility of a full-blood sibling, again, is our best option.”

 “Parents choosing this option when they’re married is understandable, even commendable, but this is by no means the case,” I said. “Our situation is radically different. How can we create a baby, two unmarried strangers?”

“We’re hardly strangers, Jessica,” Jonas regrettably spoke up, for the first time looking in my direction.

Ignoring him, I continued my rant. “We bring a baby into the world for medical reasons, and then what happens? It’s not like a bottle of medicine that gets thrown in the garbage when we’re done with it. It’s a life, a living, breathing person.”

“That’s right,” Mr. Sammler said, “it’s a life, and a life that has the potential to save your daughter’s. We can all agree this is an insane proposition, but we’re getting desperate here. How far are you willing to go to save Michelle? That’s the question you need to ask yourself.”

She was my daughter, my child; the ties to her were undeniably there. I resented him for implying otherwise and told him so. “I’d do anything to save my child, but
this
,
this
, is crazy.”

“To some people, yes, it’s crazy. To us, it might be her only chance to live.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Does conceiving a child with him guarantee a one hundred percent match?” I stopped talking, because I was entertaining the idea.

“Ms. Parker, that’s a very good question…”

“Mrs. Tauber,” I interrupted, becoming fiercely defensive of my family.

“Mrs. Tauber, in the case that I just referred to, the parents underwent IVF treatment, in-vitro fertilization. A pre-implantation genetic diagnosis was performed on the embryos to find a suitable match.”

“Suitable,” I repeated, “that sounds open to interpretation. What exactly do you mean?”

Jonas spoke up. “One in four embryos will be a match. With the pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, the embryos can be tested to ensure that a match results.”

“They also perform a human leukocyte antigen test,” Jonas went on. “It tells us if the cell markers within the embryos are an identical match to Michelle’s. Every cell has markers that need to match. If they do, we can use the stem cells from the cord blood immediately after birth, and the procedure would not affect the baby at all.”

My head wasn’t grasping something. “Have you thought about what happens to the embryos that are rejected? The ones that aren’t selected?”

Nobody dared respond, not one of them. The blank faces around the table just waited for the question to go away.

“That’s why pro-lifers are adamantly opposed to these kinds of tests,” Mr. Sammler said. “There are legitimate concerns. Maybe you should take a look at the some of the articles I’ve read, see what other families did under similar circumstances. There’s a controversial component to this type of practice. I can fully appreciate your apprehension.”

I couldn’t control what came out of my mouth next. “Similar circumstances? I doubt anyone is on record with this type of circumstance. Do you have any idea what you’re asking of me, Mr. Sammler? I’m a married woman with a family, and you’re suggesting that I create a baby with him, just like that.”

“No,” he interrupted, “I’m not asking that of you. I’m merely offering you the only option that will guarantee my daughter a life…IVF is a non-invasive procedure.”

“Like having another man’s baby inside my body, other than my husband’s, isn’t invasive, or disruptive?” My personal life had fallen under public scrutiny, and Jonas, well, he was just sitting there mute.

“Jessica,” came a voice from the back of the room. It was Jill Sammler. This turned all our heads, because up to now, Mr. Sammler had dominated the conversation. Her voice was steady and strong, her eyes fixed to my own. “You loved her enough to have her,” she said. “Can’t you love her enough to save her?”

“Can we meet for dinner?” Jonas asked. I was at the library on the computer when my cell phone rang.

“I’ll think about it,” I said, abruptly hanging up, wanting to get back to my studies. It was the same empty response I’d given to Jill Sammler when she looked me in the eyes and pretty much begged me to help her child. In both cases, I spoke the truth. I was willing to think about it.

Mr. Sammler encouraged me to research, and I did what was asked of me: I researched. I researched acute lymphocytic leukemia. I researched bone marrow transplants. I read about probability and life expectancy. I even found a few articles on the ethical and moral debates pertaining to
having a child in order to save a child
.

My research wasn’t limited to leukemia. I found myself in a library researching the Internet for Fanconi anemia after I had stumbled upon a Web site devoted to these children and their parents. Intrigued, I began to read.

Jared Thompson was his name, the one who stood out from among the thirty or so others who were written about on their site. He was diagnosed with Fanconi anemia, and as I read his mother’s personal entries, I became engrossed in his ordeal, as if in her words, there was a message of some kind. Her journals had been kept for years, documentation of the heartache and frustrations that a life-threatening disease has on a family. I had lost a child, a baby boy who had not entered the world, while Jared’s parents had lost life that they intimately knew. They lost baseball practice and holidays, Jared’s body curled around them at nighttime, the smell of his breath, the wisps of his hair, and the sounds of his voice and laughter. They lost years of loving each other. They lost time with their healthy children, and life was reduced to hospital visits riddled with anger and fear. No one who hasn’t experienced it knows what it is like to lose a child, I realized, or even what it’s like to discover your child is afflicted with a life-threatening disease. These people understood, and my heart ached.

As I read through Jared’s mother’s blog, I saw the words
bone marrow transplant
across the screen. He was almost eight. During the months following, he seemed okay, even if okay meant losing his hair and not being able to leave his house because of the high risk of contracting random illnesses. I learned that children that have transplants are depleted of their regular immunizations, leaving them susceptible to most germs. Even the most common everyday activities can be life-threatening.

But then Jared’s ANC dropped (a subset of the white cell count that fights against infection), and what followed was swollen lymph glands, fever, elevated liver levels, but not all these things at once. No, for these parents, it was far worse. Just as they had seen a tiny spark of light at the end of a lengthy tunnel, darkness would descend. A day of good spirits and positive test results could end with part of his stricken body malfunctioning, or even worse, death. It was a roller coaster. Jared’s story haunted me. And although I could have skipped weeks of past entries and learned the outcome, reading the heartfelt passages delayed the inevitable and gave me an indication of hope.

Blood cultures, pneumonia, hospital stays, antibiotics, chest x-rays, stool cultures, infection, kidney failure, loss of appetite, and other unpleasantries continued. Jared’s mom was not alone in rooting Jared on. I believed maybe he would survive. And with each dated entry, I prayed he would tackle just one more hurdle. But finally he couldn’t fight any longer.

Less than a year from the day he had his transplant, Jared’s little body gave out. The reality was crushing. This was someone’s life and not a story one reads or hears about from the friend of a friend of a friend. I searched the page for the date of Mrs. Thompson’s last entry and saw that it was three months ago. Three months. For me, Jared died today, but a mother had now lived three months without her child.

My cell phone rang again, momentarily tearing me away from the horror on the page.

“It’s about the baby, isn’t it?” my mother asked.

I turned from the computer, cradling the phone between my shoulder and my ear and flat-out answered, “Yes.” How could I deny my mother the opportunity to once again be right? She said something in response, but it was hard to hear with the printer shooting out pages of information I’d bookmarked. I think I started to cry. Either for Jared, or the release of truths, or for mothers everywhere who feel their children’s afflictions as their own.

Seeing what happened to Jared Thompson’s family helped me open up to my mother. When I told her what had happened, she cried with me.

“She’s my granddaughter, Jessica. What can I do?”

I told her what I knew and prepared her, and myself, for the things we didn’t.

“You mean she might die?” my mother asked.

“She could. We just don’t know.” Two teenagers caught my attention, hiding behind one of the bookshelves. They were laughing loudly, without a care in the world. I’d been so stuck in my head the last twenty-four hours, I had forgotten the simple pleasures of life. Look how close we can be to joy; look how close we can be to sadness.

“Mom, do you think it’s a sign?”

“A sign?”

“You know, Jonas being here, and Michelle. Marty, he’s off doing God knows what.”

My mother said to me, “This is life, Jess, and looking for signs isn’t going to give you answers. Have you considered life is testing you? You have to answer the test.”

“It’s too coincidental—all of it.”

“Magical thinking makes it a lot easier for you, doesn’t it?”

I didn’t know. I was staring at the young couple groping each other and then said, “Yes.”

“You figure you don’t have to be responsible for your choices. You can just blame fate.”

“It has to mean something, doesn’t it?” I asked, “that I’m here, and he’s here, and we…” But I didn’t go on, because I hadn’t yet accepted my feelings. I’d been fighting them for hours, years.

“You need to tell Marty about this,” she said. “You can’t just put your marriage on hold and expect to come back to it like nothing’s changed. He’s your husband. He loves you, despite all your imperfections. Didn’t he prove that after the accident? Talk to him, be honest. He’ll support you. He always has.”

“I can’t,” I said. “We’re not strong enough.”

“You have to learn to find your way back to each other, some way to trust again.”

“What if I don’t want to?” I sighed, my eyes following the young couple out the door of the library. “What if I want to walk away?”

“That would be a mistake.”

“I think I can handle what’s happening between Marty and me, but I don’t think I’ll ever understand why God would make a little kid like that so sick. I just can’t wrap my arms around that.”

“It’s horrible,” she agreed. “No one should ever have to go through something like that, nobody. I don’t even know what to say, but I do know you need the support of your family around you, and that includes Marty. Talk to him. Tell him the truth. He’s your husband; he loves you.”

“I don’t mean to sound pessimistic, but I’m not buying into that happily-ever-after crap, not now, not anymore.”

“You never believed in happily-ever-after, Jess.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, getting irritated.