What Might Have Been

by Glenda Sanders

  “Oh, all the best wine servers decant, don’t you know?” she replied in a heavy, affected British accent.

  “Glad I sprang for a bottle with a cork,” he said drolly. “I’d hate to try to decant a screw-on.”

  Barbara put the water on to boil and then sat down at the table and picked up the glass of wine Richard had poured for her. She took a sip. It was robust and tart. “This was a good idea.”

  “I have some of those occasionally.”

  His hand was on the table, next to his glass, and she covered it with hers and gave it a gentle squeeze. “Probably a lot more often than you realize.”

  He responded with a small smile.

  “I have an idea I want to run past you now,” she said, trying to sound upbeat.

  Richard’s mouth curled sardonically. “If you waited until I had wine to bring it up, it can’t be pleasant.”

  “It’s not unpleasant,” Barbara said. “It’s just something to think about.”

  Richard groaned. “I don’t want to think any more. Let’s go to your bedroom and have mindless sex instead.”

  Barbara grinned drolly. “Later. First I want to feed you so you’ll have enough energy to keep up with me. And while we’re waiting for the water to boil, we might as well toss around some ideas.”

  “You’d be perfect if you weren’t so damned clever,” Richard grumbled.

  “I’m serious, Richard.”

  “I know,” he said resignedly. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Physically, this test Missy’s going to have is not going to be much, but it could have an enormous psychological impact. She’ll actually be able to see an image of her baby moving on a screen, and she’ll probably be given a printout of the baby’s image.”

  “What? Like a computer printout?”

  “Exactly. Only it looks like a black-and-white photo. Richard, some mothers frame these printouts, or post them someplace where they’ll see them often.”

  “The baby’s going to be a lot more real to her.”

  Barbara nodded. “If the baby’s turned the right way, she may find out whether it’s a boy or a girl.”

  Richard buried his face in his hands and swore, then sucked in a ragged breath. “How’s she going to deal with this?”

  “I’d say that depends a lot on how you deal with it.”

  “I’m not ready for this.”

  “It’s here, and it’s happening, whether you’re ready for it or not. You’re thirty-six. Missy’s sixteen. She’s going to need your strength. Whether you think you have the strength or not, she needs to believe that you have it. And if you can’t find it, you’re going to have to do a damn good job of faking it.”

  The water was boiling. She got up and put the noodles in, then stirred them. When she turned abruptly to return to the table, she was startled to find Richard right behind her. An involuntary shriek of surprise rose from her throat.

  He draped his arms over her shoulders and looked into her eyes. “If I find the strength to handle this, it’ll be because you showed me where to look for it.”

  “We’re not going to have to dig very deep to find it,” she said soothingly.

  11

  MISSY GASPED involuntarily as the first gloop of ultrasound transmission gel plopped onto her abdomen, then giggled nervously.

  “Hey, it’s not even cold!” the technician teased. “I have a special heater for it right over here.”

  Missy nodded. “It’s okay. It just felt kinda wet.”

  “Well, you’ve survived the most traumatic part of the entire procedure,” the technician said. “Now all you have to do is relax while we take a look at that baby.”

  All she has to do is relax, Barbara thought, saddened by the irony of it. If only Missy could relax, and have her dilemma miraculously resolved, her youth given back to her, her choices reduced to which dress to wear to the prom and which college to apply to.... If only she could relax, and she would no longer have to face making a decision that would challenge the emotional well-being of even the most stable adult. If only she could relax, and she would be a wonderfully normal teenager, with wonderfully normal teenage concerns, and her father could go to her and say, “Barbara and I are in love and we’re going to be married and the three of us can be a family.”

  The technician, a dark-haired man in his early thirties, competently slid the smooth head of the sonogram transducer into the thickest puddle of transmitting gel and moved it back and forth to spread the gel evenly over her skin. His lively brown eyes reflected kindness as he asked, “Do you want me to point out everything as I go along?”

  Missy looked at Barbara and, for a split second, Barbara knew with clarity and incisive acuity what it was like to be a parent and have a child turn to her expecting answers to impossible questions. What did Missy really want from her? Encouragement? Moral support? Did she secretly hope Barbara would discourage her from looking at the monitor so she wouldn’t have to face the reality of the child inside her?

  Barbara forced a benign smile. “It’s up to you, sweetheart.”

  Was it relief that flitted across that heartrendingly young face as she turned to the technician and nodded? Had she been asking permission? Barbara couldn’t tell. But she could see Missy’s teeth worrying her bottom lip and caught the slight quiver in Missy’s chin as she watched the image of her unborn child come into focus on the monitor.

  “Look at that nice, steady heartbeat,” the technician said. “Uh-oh. He’s getting active now. Look at that leg action. This kid thinks he’s a soccer player. Do you feel him kicking you?”

  “Yeah,” Missy said, her features expressing a blend of surprise, awe and concentration. She had been holding Barbara’s hand loosely, and her fingers tightened around Barbara’s as she concentrated on linking internal sensations to the electronic image.

  “Oh!” Missy chortled as the baby made a strong and sudden kick that was especially pronounced. With a smile still lingering, she looked at Barbara as if to ask, Did you see that?

  “If it’s a girl, she’s a candidate for the Rockettes,” Barbara said.

  “I’m going to try to get a close look at the baby’s face. Let’s see what we can see. There it is.”

  Missy’s fingers tightened around Barbara’s. “It has a nose.”

  Tears stung Barbara’s eyes as she, like Missy, stared transfixed at the monitor. “It’s a beautiful little face,” she said. “A perfect face.”

  “I’m taking a picture now,” the technician said. “Oops! We’ve embarrassed him. The little tyke must be camera shy. Let’s see what else we can find.”

  Arms, legs—he scanned them individually, patiently waiting for the baby to turn in the right direction. “Now, if he’ll just turn a little bit this way, we might be able to tell— Aha! The little fellow is pretty proud of himself. Look at that.”

  “It’s a boy?” Missy asked.

  “In my professional opinion, that’s no shadow. I’m ninety-nine percent sure this little fellow’s a boy.” He grinned. “I have to leave a one-percent possibility for error so you don’t sue me if it turns out to be a girl. I’m going to take another picture now, then we’ll quit all this sight-seeing and get down to business.”

  Missy looked at Barbara. “It’s a boy.”

  “It sure is,” Barbara said.

  The technician took measurements from various angles for another quarter of an hour. When he had to press the transducer until the pressure was uncomfortable, Missy squeezed Barbara’s hand and bore the discomfort stoically. Her eyes never left the monitor. Nor did Barbara’s.

  “Everything looks fine,” the technician said with an air of finality. “Let’s try one more time to get a picture of that face. Good. Good. That’s good. Okay, fellow, just turn a little bit this way and say ‘Cheese.’ Excellent.”

  He turned to Missy with a beaming smile. “He’s very cooperative. We got a good shot that time. Now—” He pulled several tissues from a box on his supply table. “You can clean the
goop off your belly, then go back across the hall and get dressed. The nurse will take you in to talk to Dr. Scofield after I’ve had a chance to show her what we’ve been up to.”

  The doctor was a petite woman with gray-tinged auburn hair pulled into a ponytail at her nape. She was friendly, but reserved. She shook Barbara’s hand firmly when Missy introduced her. “I’m glad Missy was able to bring a friend today.”

  She reiterated essentially the same thing the technician had said. The baby appeared healthy and normal, with a strong heartbeat. The pictures the technician had given her were on her desk and she looked down at them, then smiled at Missy. “It’s a boy.”

  Missy nodded self-consciously.

  The doctor leaned back in her chair, commanding their attention with her authoritative demeanor. She spoke next as a physician, with professional detachment. “Have you read the literature I gave you?”

  Chewing on her bottom lip, Missy nodded.

  “Are you still considering adoption as an option?”

  Missy shifted uncomfortably and averted her eyes. “Maybe.”

  The doctor drew in a deep breath and released it. She looked at Barbara, telling her, silently, that though she could not become emotionally involved, she acknowledged what her young patient was going through. “You’d have no problem at all placing a healthy baby boy.”

  Missy shrugged. She was still gnawing her bottom lip. And she was still not looking at the doctor.

  “You still have some time to think about it,” Scofield said. “But if you should want to meet some prospective parents—just to talk about it—it can be arranged. You wouldn’t have to tell them your name just to talk.”

  Dr. Scofield glanced down at the pictures of the baby pensively. “Do you want these? I can put them in your file if you’d prefer. You could ask for them at any time.”

  “I want them,” Missy murmured. The doctor slid them across the desk and Missy picked them up.

  “Well, unless you have any questions, we’re through for today.”

  Missy had no questions. A few minutes later she and Barbara were in Barbara’s car. “That was sort of exciting,” Barbara said.

  Missy, still subdued, grunted, “Mmm-hmm.”

  “I feel like we should celebrate, don’t you?” Barbara asked.

  “Celebrate?”

  “Seeing your baby’s face.”

  Missy looked down at the pictures on her lap.

  “It’s still early,” Barbara persisted. She wasn’t comfortable taking Missy home without talking to her awhile. “Why don’t we...go to the mall and look around a bit, and then go out for dinner? You can call your dad when we get to the mall and ask if it’s all right.”

  “Okay.”

  They rode on in silence for a few minutes before Missy asked abruptly, “Why do so many people want baby boys?”

  Talk about questions out of left field! Barbara considered the question before attempting to answer it. “People want children for a lot of reasons, Missy. Some of those reasons come from deep inside, from instincts that are as old as the human race. One of those instincts is to perpetuate themselves. Do you know what that means?”

  “Sort of.”

  “It means that after they die, part of them will go on living through their children, and their children’s children, and so on. And most men like to have a son to keep the family name alive, especially if it’s an unusual name.”

  Missy’s voice was expressionless as she said, almost as if thinking aloud, “My dad probably would have liked a boy better.”

  “Why ever would you think that?” Barbara asked.

  Missy shrugged.

  “All men think they want boys,” Barbara said. “That’s because men like to feel they’re in control all the time, and they understand boys. They think all they have to do to raise a boy is buy baseballs. They feel totally helpless with little girls.”

  She chanced a sideways glance at Missy and was delighted to see a grin twitching on the girl’s mouth. Encouraged, she continued. “Want to know a secret?”

  Missy nodded cautiously.

  “The first time a daddy holds a baby girl, he’s scared to death. Because she’s tiny and she’s female—which means she’s a total mystery to him. But something magical happens when a little girl wraps her fingers around her daddy’s finger and squeezes it. There’s a special bond there, a special way that daddies feel about little girls.” She smiled at Missy. “You’re your daddy’s little girl, Missy. He might wonder what it would be like to have a son. Most men do. But he wouldn’t want a son instead of you.”

  She couldn’t tell if Missy was convinced, but the opportunity for heavy-duty talk had passed, at least until dinner. They had reached the mall.

  They went straight to a kiosk of pay phones. Barbara handed Missy a quarter and walked over to a store window to stare idly at a display of kitchen gadgets while Missy called home. The next time she glanced Missy’s way, the girl was waving frantically for her attention. She ran.

  Missy put her hand over the mouthpiece of the receiver. “Daddy says he hasn’t had dinner and he’s hungry and he can meet us here in thirty minutes, but only if that’s okay with you.”

  Barbara was assailed by a dozen emotions at once. What was Richard thinking? She and Richard and Missy having dinner together? “Tell him...of course. It’s a great idea! I don’t know why we didn’t think of it.”

  Later, she wondered why she hadn’t. The evening was a poignant glimpse into what their lives might eventually be. It seemed so natural to be in that informal restaurant with Richard and Missy, having dinner like any ordinary family on an outing to the local mall. It was so right to be there, encouraging Missy to tell Richard about the sonogram, secretly holding Richard’s hand under the table for moral support as Missy showed him the blue booties they’d bought for the baby, exchanging secret smiles and nods the way parents would in a time of shared crisis.

  For the hour and a half they spent in the restaurant, Barbara felt as though reality had meshed with her dream. She’d never felt closer to either of them than when Richard cajoled Missy into ordering apple cobbler with ice cream and then annoyed her by snitching bites of it. Their affection for each other, their closeness, their comfortable familiarity was so apparent in their bantering and teasing that Barbara felt the sting of tears as she watched them together, temporarily oblivious to the crisis that weighed so heavily on both their shoulders.

  It was difficult to say goodbye, hugging Missy and telling her how much it meant to her to have been a part of the sonogram, then shaking Richard’s hand and thanking him formally for the dinner instead of hugging him and telling him how much the evening had meant to her.

  She went home feeling, at the same time, fulfilled and empty. Missy had needed her, and she’d been there for the girl. But she could not go home with Missy and Richard. As much as she loved them both, she was still, officially, only a counselor and confidante to Missy and a mistress to Richard. She was not yet family, neither wife nor mother, nor even stepmother.

  As she climbed into bed—alone except for the latest issue of her favorite magazine—that deficiency in her relationship with Richard and his daughter loomed large in her mind. She was reading the magazine when the doorbell rang. Gizmo was barking wildly by the time she pulled on her terry robe and went to the door to peer through the peephole.

  “I need you,” Richard said, and she was in his arms even before the door clicked shut behind him. He’d never kissed her with such ferocity. He carried her to the bedroom and fell onto the bed with her, still kissing her. Then he took her with a driving urgency that would have been frightening if it hadn’t been so thrilling. Afterward, as they lay together, heated, heaving and drained, he clung to her, covering her, arms encircling her, legs locked with hers.

  “You knew,” he said. “You knew and you prepared me.”

  Barbara wasn’t thinking as clearly as she might have under less intense circumstances. “What’d I know?”

 
; “That I was less prepared to deal with Missy’s baby becoming a reality than Missy was.”

  “Oh, Richard,” she said. “I wish I were as wise as you think I am. The truth is, I just warned you so you’d be prepared to support Missy.”

  Richard exhaled a ragged sigh. “Mother would never allow Missy to post things on the refrigerator the way her friends did, so we have this plastic frame, one of those box-type things, that we always put her latest awards or certificates in. Tonight she asked if we could put the pictures of her baby in that frame.”

  “Oh, Richard.” It seemed so inadequate, but it was all Barbara could think of to say as she hugged him.

  “She showed me a face, and she showed me a miniature baby and pointed out the penis. Jeez, Barbara. She showed me my grandson’s face.”

  Seconds passed before he could speak again. “It was so ludicrous. She’s still—I know she’s not a child, but she’s not an adult, either. Pictures of a baby don’t belong in the plastic frame where you put perfect attendance certificates and spelling tests with smiley faces on them.”

  “What time is it?” Barbara asked abruptly.

  “About eleven.”

  “Get dressed then. If we hurry, we can make it.”

  Richard didn’t question her order. He was up and pulling on his underwear before he thought to ask where they were going.

  “The drugstore down the street is open until midnight. I saw just what we need the last time I took film in to be processed.”

  Half an hour later in the checkout line, Richard looked at the ceramic picture frames he held in his hands. Both were baby blue. One had Baby written across the top in an alphabet block motif, and the second had a boy’s worn sneakers in one bottom corner and a baseball and glove in the other. “There was a time I would have asked if you thought this was a good idea, but I’m not second-guessing your judgment anymore.”

  “She wanted the pictures, Richard. I was there. And she wanted them in the place that had always showcased her achievements.” Her gaze met his. “I’m just glad you responded positively when she showed them to you.”

  “Attila the Hun couldn’t have been unresponsive when she pointed to that tiny face.”