by Nicole Baart
But uncertainties aside, Janice’s job paid relatively well and she was even able to afford a small rent. The day after her first paycheck, Janice had opened a bank account and written Nellie DeSmit a tidy check for two hundred dollars. She laid it on Grandma’s plate before breakfast, and Grandma wasn’t the only one who did a double take when she saw the unanticipated, carefully penned numbers. At first she stared at it indecisively, her mouth opening and closing as she thought of things to say and quickly dismissed them. Finally she looked straight up at Janice and said, “Thank you.” Then she folded the check and slipped it in the front cover of her Bible.
“Are you about ready, honey?” Grandma’s voice floated through the closed bathroom door and the hum of cascading water.
Guiltily, I turned off the slippery tap and called back, “I’ll be just a minute yet.”
“We need to leave in ten.”
I toweled off and wrapped my hair turban-style so I could work some color into my pale cheeks. My blush was called New Bride, which always gave my sensibilities an awkward little twist when I swept my brush across it in the morning. But it was a good color on me, and with a bit of mascara and pearly lip gloss, I didn’t look so haggard, so ashen and depleted.
Grandma smiled at me when I emerged moments later. My hair was still wet and pulled into a loose braid, and I wore a comfy T-shirt with three-quarter-length sleeves over jeans that had to be secured with a hair tie. I felt sloppy and sleepy, but I must have looked much better than I had a mere hour ago.
“He’ll listen for the heartbeat and then send you on your way,” Grandma assured me.
But Dr. Morales wanted to do more.
“There’s the heartbeat,” he said, pressing a Doppler to a spot just above my right hip bone. The room filled with the gallop and swish of blood coursing through my baby’s veins. I had heard her heartbeat before; I knew well the pounding of each throb as if a tiny horse ran furious circles in my belly. But it awed me every time, and I let go of a shuddering breath when I realized that she was well. Her heart beat and beat and beat.
A pulse of static filled the air, and Dr. Morales commented as if to himself, “The baby is kicking.”
I felt it.
“She’s fine,” I exhaled.
“I’d like to do an ultrasound,” Dr. Morales said.
“What?”
My voice must have betrayed my alarm because Dr. Morales looked up sharply. “Don’t worry, Julia; I’m just being overcautious.” He flipped my chart open on his lap and extracted a sheet of paper. “Look at these heartbeats: 150 beats per minute, 155, 160, 150.… Every heartbeat we’ve ever had for your baby has been 150 or over. Today she’s clocking in at 120.”
“Is that bad?” I asked, aware of how desperate I sounded.
“No, it’s perfectly normal. But we’re going to do an ultrasound anyway. I didn’t schedule one earlier because you’re young and healthy. There was no reason to perform an unnecessary procedure. But now, with your headache and the change in the baby’s pulse, I’d like to just take a peek.” Dr. Morales dropped the medical file on a low counter and grabbed a fistful of paper towels to wipe the lotion off my stomach. “Hey—” he smiled, catching my eye—“don’t look so worried. Most women beg me for an ultrasound. You’ll get to see the baby.”
That was a nice thought, but my hands quivered anyway when Dr. Morales’s nurse handed me the sheet for the radiology department at the hospital.
Grandma stood when I walked into the waiting room and gripped my elbow in support and concern. She must have read my apprehension in the downturn of my wavering mouth. “Julia?”
“I need an ultrasound.”
“Is something wrong?” Her fingers tightened on my arm, and I realized, maybe for the first time, how much this baby meant to her, too.
I swallowed. “No, she’s fine. Dr. Morales just wants to check things out.”
Mason Community Hospital, a small, low-lying building with a covered roundabout entrance, shared a parking lot with the medical clinic. It was less than a block from one entrance to the other, and though we could have used the glassed-in walkway, I hated the antiseptic smell that hung in the halls and elected to take the outdoor route. As we passed through the neat rows of cars, a sharp breeze played with our hair and drove leftover gravel from the winter roads against our shins. I hurried, wanting to escape the wind but also driven by a nervous energy that tried to persuade me to keep walking. No news was good news. It would be so easy to hop back in my car and pretend that everything was okay. But as I pulled even with my means of escape, I kept right on walking. I had to know.
We paused beneath a Japanese cherry tree on the boulevard flanking the hospital to let a car pass. The branches hung bare and brown, but hundreds upon hundreds of buds were tiny acorns of promise filling the tree with possibility. I fingered one and tried to calm the pulsing doubts in my mind. My breath was short and anxious, and it stopped in my chest altogether when Grandma curled an arm around me and said, “Pray with me.”
Of course, we prayed together often. In church, before meals, and sometimes when Grandma heard news that needed to be addressed immediately instead of tucked away for mention later, we bowed our heads and brought our petitions before the God who Grandma was convinced heard every word we uttered. But an uncertain discomfort usually niggled at the corners of my mind, and though I tried to understand, tried to believe, I often felt my voice was being raised in an echoless vacuum. I spilled thoughts, dreams, requests, and they melted into some great expanse of nothingness as if they died the moment they left my lips. I was afraid to voice my plea now. What if the answer was not what I hoped for?
But Grandma took my silence as assent and held me close for a moment as she prayed over the baby and me. I let her words graze me, trickling against my skin and dripping off in some ancient rite of blessing. A mild sense of comfort rushed through me when she said, “Amen,” as if I had zipped up a jacket against the dipping temperatures of an autumn night, and my soul stirred beneath the unexpected. I tried to hold the feeling around me, but it was fleeting and gone before I could raise my face to thank my grandmother for her kindness.
The radiology department was more or less abandoned, and we were ushered in almost immediately. Grandma hung back for a moment, and when I felt her slip from my side, I stopped and whipped around, afraid that she did not want to come. Her face told me that she hoped to follow me but didn’t quite dare. She wasn’t sure if she was invited. I closed the space between us and slid my arm through hers, pulling her with me wordlessly.
It was dark and warm in the ultrasound room, and I couldn’t decide if it was too close and somehow ominous or enveloping and cozy. Following the technician’s instructions, I bared my tummy and curled my arm under my head so I could see the black-and-white screen that would afford me the very first glimpses of my child.
Grandma stood beside the low gurney, holding my other hand and alternating between gently rubbing it and thoughtlessly clutching it. It occurred to me that she had not really allowed herself to think there was anything wrong with the baby. Though she seemed collected, together, I knew she was well aware that God didn’t answer every prayer exactly as we hoped He would.
“Twenty-two, almost twenty-three weeks?” the technician asked cheerfully, glancing at my chart. “This will be a fun one—you’ll get to see the baby so clearly!” She was probably forty, with dark, straight hair that swept up and out stylishly above her chin. Her smile was infectious, and when she fixed me with a particularly merry one, I couldn’t help but smile back wanly.
Fine. Everything would be just fine.
“We’ve got a low heartbeat and a migraine?” she queried.
“I guess,” I replied, wondering why she was asking me if my information was laid before her on the paper from Dr. Morales.
But then she wrinkled her nose amicably, and I realized that she was only trying to loosen me up a bit. “You know, migraines can’t really be diagnosed,” she said. “But
with all the extra blood in your system, plus the added stress of baby-growing on your body … even if you’ve never had a migraine it’s not uncommon to start getting them when you’re pregnant.” She patted the low, tight arc of my belly, apparent now even when I was lying flat on my back. “Hey, don’t look so worried.”
She turned the screen away from Grandma and me, explaining that she had a lot of measurements to take and she’d let us see everything when she was done. As she squirted warm lotion just under my belly button, I watched her face settle and focus. She got to work.
I followed her eyes as they studied the screen and tried to read her expression. But she was good at what she did, and her features remained utterly blank as she pressed my stomach over and over, pausing here and there to key in something one-handed amid the clicks and beeps of the machine. I was thankful for her unqualified friendliness and the fact that she didn’t seem at all perturbed that my grandmother stood beside me instead of an apprehensive but doting husband. She made me feel safe somehow, as if she could rewrite whatever was happening inside me with a few strokes of the instrument she held in her steady hand. I relaxed somewhat against the pillows.
Finally, she stopped and spun her chair so she could regard Grandma and me. She took a deep breath, and I could feel tears rise from somewhere far away and hidden to collect at the corners of my eyes. She was going to tell me something was wrong. The baby was ill, somehow malformed, or worse. The room went still with the burden of my fear, and I felt it weighing on us, filling every square inch of space with a quiet dread. I closed my eyes.
“You have a beautiful, healthy baby!” The voice was disembodied, almost meaningless, and it took me a moment to hold it in my mind before it made sense.
My eyes flew open and found Grandma. We sputtered in accord and then laughed as the news sunk in.
“I couldn’t help being a little worried,” Grandma admitted, touching a finger below each eye and sniffling. She bent to give me an impromptu kiss on the forehead.
“Me too,” I said, relief washing over me—the deep, cool, soulful sea that had eluded me as I lay buried in the pain of what I now knew was a migraine.
“Would you like to see?”
Of course! It was an unwarranted question, and Grandma and I cried sweet, happy tears as we counted ten fingers and ten toes and marveled over the upturned slope of a tiny nose in perfect profile.
The technician grinned at us and spent a few moments pointing out the details of my child’s delicate frame. As she moved the wand across my skin, the baby drifted in and out of focus, offering glimpses of herself before retreating almost shyly into the shadows. My breath caught at the sight of her carefully crossed ankles and prettily shaped arms curled beneath the curve of her cheek. I could imagine those limbs, long and tanned, on the little girl that she would someday be.
“Everything looks great,” the technician assured me as she pointed out vital organs and shared important measurements. “And it looks like you’re pretty much right on track with your due date. Does August 7 sound right?”
I nodded absently, happy that she was coming at all and rather indifferent to the specifics of when.
It hadn’t occurred to me to ask or even wonder, and when the technician clapped mischievously, it took me a minute to realize what she was going to offer. “Would you like to know if it’s a boy or a girl?”
A little sound from Grandma told me that she was delighted at the idea of knowing.
But I waffled. I already knew my baby. It would be fun to surprise everyone at the birth, to be right after all this time that my daughter had been so connected to me, so much a part of me, from day one. But certainty meant that I could buy something pink. There was a little sleeper in Wal-Mart, a soft, rosy, impossibly small thing with a row of white, doe-eyed bunnies across the chest. I thought of stopping there on our way home to buy my baby her very first gift.
“How sure are you?” I asked, aware that these things weren’t always so black-and-white.
“Oh, I’d say 100 percent.” The technician winked.
Invitations
KNOWING WHO MY CHILD WAS carried a certain weight that I had not anticipated and was not prepared for. There were photographs of a sort, fuzzy black-and-white things with alien features that swam out of the darkness and aligned themselves into bent legs and lines of curved ribs before fading back into obscurity. Grandma wanted to put them on the refrigerator, but I balked at the idea and instead cut the six pictures apart and stacked them like note cards that I could study and examine at will. It was hard to focus on much else, and when Mrs. Walker caught me off work one morning and invited me over for tea, just the two of us, I jumped at the idea. I wanted someone to talk to.
The day was overcast but warmish, and I was still peeling off my light sweatshirt when Mrs. Walker gestured at the stacks of envelopes and beribboned invitations on her dining room table. She gave me a wry smile. “Thomas is busy writing a big unit for his class on teaching history, and Francesca has her last round of clinicals. Guess who gets to address all 350 of their wedding invitations?”
I nodded in what I hoped looked like sympathy and waited for the familiar falling feeling that I associated with Thomas and Francesca’s impending wedding. It wasn’t that I was still pining for Thomas or that I was jealous of Francesca. Rather, when I thought of the future Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Walker, I had a sense of being cut loose, of finding myself floating and anchorless and not at all sure of how to plant my feet on solid ground again.
Thomas was what I had always planned for myself, and although I thought I had let him go long ago, when he and Francesca announced their engagement in the beginning of April, I didn’t know what else to hope for. But as Mrs. Walker showed me the pearl-colored rectangles of paper with their pink and apple green striped ribbons, they seemed inconsequential to me. I realized I was already flying, pushed forward, upward, by a completely different current. The dream I once had of Thomas was nothing more than a memory. It had been replaced when I wasn’t paying attention.
I settled my sweatshirt over the back of one of the tall chairs and pulled down the edges of my short-sleeved shirt, self-consciously making sure that it wasn’t too short to cover my ill-fitting khakis. Trying to appear interested, I made a little noise of appreciation. “They’re beautiful,” I said, vaguely admiring the exquisitely lettered cards. There was a sheer piece of embossed vellum over the heavy paper of the formal invitation. The grosgrain ribbon holding the two pieces of paper together was tied in a perfect, tiny bow, and I fingered it absently, knowing that Francesca had been painstaking with each and every one. It was just her style.
Strangely, I had thought of doing something similar for birth announcements. But who announces the birth of an illegitimate baby? Who would I send such cards to?
And yet, I would have written her name across the top of the vellum, just her name, with the rest of her information—weight, length, time of arrival—printed on the inside. Ellie Danielle, the announcement would have read. Ellie for Grandma—her name without the N—and Danielle for Dad. Ellie Danielle DeSmit. It was perfect.
But she was a he.
“Just perfect,” I said, startling myself with the sound of my own voice. I hadn’t intended to say anything aloud. I wasn’t even sure what I meant.
Mrs. Walker assumed I was talking about the invitations. “They certainly are pretty,” she agreed, picking one up and then tossing it back on the teetering pile. “But what a pain! Be glad that you didn’t get roped into helping.”
I almost said, “Believe me, I am.” Instead I murmured a meaningless nicety: “They were worth it.”
Mrs. Walker pursed her lips. “I don’t know about that.”
The teakettle on the stove began to whistle its shrill note, and Mrs. Walker disappeared into the kitchen. “Back in a sec,” she called.
I pulled out a chair and was about to sink into it when I noticed a framed photograph across the table. It was a portrait of Thomas and Francesca.
Their engagement picture. I walked around the enormous harvest table and picked it up.
The couple was staring directly at the camera, so no matter which angle I surveyed them from, their eyes seemed locked on mine. Francesca’s head was tilted toward Thomas, and her chin was slanted down a little too far, giving her an almost sinister look. Thomas didn’t fare much better. His smile was wooden, and one eye was open slightly wider than the other. He had never been very photogenic. But I was being critical. They were a lovely pair.
Mostly I was just thankful that I didn’t have to worry about any residual feelings for Thomas Walker. My life had been consumed with the pregnancy, and any longing that I had for Thomas had been placed like billowing robes of consequence on my anticipated Ellie Danielle. A daughter that didn’t exist.
It bothered me that I mourned her so much. In the ultrasound room, after the technician told us the news, Grandma had squealed with delight and buried me in a hug that hid the disappointment— no, shock—on my own face. I had been so sure; I had left room in my heart for nothing else, and it was almost frighteningly disconcerting to know that I had been dead wrong all along. It was so stupid, but I couldn’t help feeling like a stranger occupied my body instead of the tiny soul mate that I had thought I’d known for five months.
In the days after the revelation, I forced myself to confront my desire for a daughter. I had to admit that she was the child who was supposed to complete the broken trinity of generations under Grandma’s roof: mother, daughter, granddaughter. Janice had vacated her place in our family tree so long ago that it was almost as if she had never existed—and yet something was missing; something was not as it should be. So I had risen to take her place. And my little girl would have finished it. She would have made things right, steadied the scale and mended the chain that Janice had broken when she walked out of our lives.
