The Dream Daughter

by Diane Chamberlain

  “And I know you lost your husband, Caroline,” she said, a serious expression on her face, “but I still need to tell you: no sexual activity of any sort.”

  I looked away from her. I was not prudish—that wasn’t it—but my heart broke a little at the mention of Joe. The mention of intimacy. It was a reminder that I was alone in all of this.

  “And you can’t take a taxi home alone,” Liz said. “If you give me the number of your New Jersey friend, I’ll contact her to come take you to the hotel.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s too far for her to come. Too much of an imposition. I’ll be fine.” There was no way I was going to lean on Myra any harder than I already had.

  “I understand, but you’ll have to sign a form saying you’ve been advised against taking a cab alone.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “And since this is only modified bed rest … there’s a delicatessen on the corner by my hotel,” I said. “It’s only half a block. Could I—”

  She was already shaking her head. “Have them deliver,” she said. “When you go out, it’s only to come here for your checkups, okay?”

  “Okay,” I agreed. Except for taking the cab alone to the hotel from the hospital, I was going to be the most compliant patient they’d ever had.

  19

  I fell into a routine over the next few weeks. I got up, showered, had breakfast, and went back to bed to watch TV. I was hooked on the Today show with Katie Couric and Matt Lauer. The soaps were my afternoon entertainment. It was so easy to get sucked into their ridiculously engrossing stories and I wished I had a camera so I could take pictures of Bob and Lisa and Nancy on As The World Turns to show Patti when I got home.

  If the Fielding Hotel’s purported concierge service truly existed, I could have asked someone to buy me a cheap camera, but there was no individual actually assigned to handle that sort of request. Instead, all needs were met either by one of the two people working at the reception desk—businesslike Becky or a sleepy-looking young guy named Dennis—or the doorman, Raoul. Raoul, who was about forty years old and handsome in his gold-trimmed blue uniform and cap, was quickly becoming my lifesaver. He accepted my deliveries from the deli or the little market down the street, and if no one was around to bring them up to the eleventh floor for me, he did it himself.

  “They did what?” he asked, wide-eyed, when I told him about the surgery and why I couldn’t leave the apartment. He seemed to take on my welfare as his personal responsibility then. Besides bringing me the sandwiches and soups and salads I ordered, he was quick to flag down a cab for me when I needed to go back to the hospital for an appointment. He wouldn’t take my tips. I didn’t know if I was offering too much or too little, but either way, he didn’t want my money. He told me about his wife, Corinna, and his five children. He showed me a picture of the whole family, and it was strange to see him out of his uniform. He told me Corinna had to be on bed rest with her last pregnancy and how hard that had been for the whole family. Every few days, he’d bring me something Corinna had sent with him to give to me. Stew or cold fried chicken or a big slab of cake. Sometimes Corinna would include a note: You’re in our prayers or Let us know what you need. I was touched. I’d never even met the woman.

  Most days, Raoul was my only contact with the outside world. He couldn’t believe I’d never been anywhere in New York. “You’ve never been to Times Square or the Empire State or the World Trade Center or any of the museums?” he asked in disbelief. “And now you’re sitting here in the greatest city in the world for months and months and you might as well be back in your podunk little town in North Carolina, for all the good it’s doing you.”

  It was so strange to hear black people like Raoul and Becky speak with New York accents. I was surprised every time they opened their mouths. And while I felt defensive when Raoul made fun of North Carolina, I began to think that my life in my home state had been very small and insulated indeed. I wondered at Hunter’s willingness to trade in the excitement and energy—not to mention the technological advances—of the twenty-first century for the slower, quieter life of the sixties and seventies. It told me how much he adored my sister, in case I didn’t already know.

  Raoul asked me if I’d like to try a meal from a different restaurant for a change, but I had a paper menu from the deli and hadn’t come anywhere near to exhausting their options. After I’d been ordering from them nearly every day for a few weeks, Ira, the deli’s short, gray-haired owner, showed up at my door.

  “I wanted to meet the Southern girl with the miracle baby,” he said, and I knew Raoul must have told the delivery boy from the deli about me. “I threw in a couple extra bagels and a nice slice of New York cheesecake for you, honey,” Ira said. “You let us know if you need anything.”

  Then there was Angela, the housekeeper. I looked forward to the half hour she spent in my apartment each day. She cleaned the bathroom and kitchenette, vacuumed the area rug on my hardwood floor, and made my bed with fresh sheets every Tuesday and Friday, but she spoke no English and I spoke no Spanish, so we just smiled when we caught each other’s eye. Every once in a while she would touch my shoulder to get my attention, and when I looked at her, she’d make a rock-a-by-baby motion with her arms. I’d laugh, unsure if she was trying to tell me something profound or if she was simply sharing her anticipation that soon I would have a baby with me in the apartment. Only for a very short time, I thought, my mind on the date of the first portal Hunter had given me.

  One day when I was feeling particularly low and lonely, Angela arrived carrying a wicker bassinette. It looked old, the wicker a little worn in places, the mattress clean but a bit ragged, and I wondered if the bassinette had been in Angela’s family for generations. I was so touched I couldn’t speak. I took the bassinette from her, set it on the dresser, then hugged her. She didn’t seem to want to let go.

  My appointments at the hospital were long and filled with tests—blood work and urine, ultrasounds and fetal echocardiograms. I only saw Dr. Perelle once, when he stopped by to check one of the echocardiogram results. I could tell he was very pleased.

  “How are you doing all alone in the hotel?” he asked, as I sat in the lab, waiting for yet another blood draw.

  “Fine,” I assured him. “And thanks to you, I’m not really alone.” I patted my belly and he smiled. I wished he could be the one to deliver my baby, but his job was done. I’d been turned over to a perinatologist and an entire team of doctors who would be there at Joanna’s birth, ready to jump into action if she—or I—had any problems. The perinatologist was a woman, which surprised me. She reminded me a little of Myra: not very warm but clearly intelligent. If I had to choose between those two qualities in the person responsible for bringing my baby into the world, there was no contest.

  A month into my stay at the hotel, I discovered a support group on the internet for pregnant women on bed rest. “Stir Crazy Mamas,” it was called. At first I was timid about participating, but I devoured every comment left by the participants and pored over the baby pictures posted by the women who’d successfully delivered their healthy babies. I avoided reading about those women who were having problems and completely skipped the distressing thread started by a woman who’d had a stillborn infant. There was even a woman in California whose baby had had fetal surgery, but for something far less ominous than a heart problem. After a week of reading and rereading every post, I tiptoed into the group, introducing myself, telling them about my baby and the fact that I was on bed rest alone in New York. Within another week, I felt as though I had a dozen or so friends as we compared our experiences. There were black women in the group and a woman who called herself a “Latina” and a French woman who typed in broken English, and at least one lesbian. Everyone treated everyone else with the same caring and respect and acceptance. I was so touched by that. I wasn’t sure that would have been the case in 1970.

  I was the only person in the group living entirely alone, my caretakers a doorman, a housekeeper, and
a sweet old deli owner who tossed a bagel or a fat kosher pickle into my dinner order from time to time. They admired me, my new online friends said. They were praying for me. I checked in with them nearly every hour. Was it possible to love people you had never met, I wondered, or had my loneliness gotten the better of me?

  One of the Stir Crazy Mamas made and sold baby slings and she posted pictures of them online. The slings consisted of a slightly complicated-looking length of fabric you slipped over your head and wore across your chest. The baby would rest snugly inside the sling, close to your body. You could even nurse while carrying your baby, the woman said. I ordered one with the credit card Myra had given me, and when it arrived, I practiced putting it on until I had it mastered. I couldn’t wait to be able to carry Joanna that way, next to my heart.

  Most of the Stir Crazy Mamas were hungry for sex, it seemed, and I quickly realized that I was, too. I must have blocked thoughts of intimacy after losing Joe, but now it seemed to be all I could think about. No sexual activity of any kind, Liz had told me. I was attracted to half the men on the soaps, and I was practically living for Wednesday nights when I could see Rob Lowe on The West Wing. Yes, the Stir Crazy Mamas and I were horny and we couldn’t do a thing about it. Some of them wrote about ways they were “taking care of” their husbands, and they complained about how frustrating it was for them to give and not be able to receive. I stayed quiet during those conversations. I only wished Joe were alive for me to “take care of.”

  Although I was grateful to have found the Stir Crazy Mamas, I discovered that the internet could be a double-edged sword. One evening when I was feeling particularly low and missing Joe, I made the mistake of Googling “Vietnam” and “Pleiku” and “bridge” and “explosion” and “1969.” I found a 1999 article written by a soldier who had been there. In a stroke of luck, he’d been a short distance away from the bridge during the explosion; if he’d been any closer, he wouldn’t have survived to write about it. As a survivor, he was one of the soldiers who had to “clean up” afterward and he said he’d never recovered from the experience. He wrote about men who’d been burned alive. About the severed arms and legs. About a head he accidentally stepped on. His descriptions made me wonder what exactly the army had sent back to us in Joe’s coffin. How did you piece together the puzzle of a man’s body when it had been blown apart? The author said he often wished he was dead and that he was now being treated for PTSD, an acronym I’d never heard before and had to look up. He’d thought of killing himself more than once, he said. He was grateful to his wife for sticking by him through the worst of it.

  I should have stopped reading the article as soon as I realized the story would do me no good, but I kept going. That night, I couldn’t get the images the author described out of my mind. That severed head. Whose was it? I could only hope Joe’s death had come quickly. That he never knew what hit him. I finally turned on the TV and watched an old Alfred Hitchcock movie, trying to get the horrible images out of my mind. I knew, though, that the vivid pictures the soldier had painted were never going to leave me.

  * * *

  On the nineteenth of June, six weeks into my bed rest, Myra showed up at my apartment door. She’d called me about once a week since I left Princeton, but this was her first visit and I was happy and relieved to see her.

  “You’re really getting big,” she said when I let her into the apartment.

  “Hard to believe I still have five weeks left to go,” I said, my hand on my stomach. My enormous belly overjoyed me. I was uncomfortable and bored, yes, but Joanna was growing, her development right on target. All her tests were encouraging, and according to the cardiologist who did her echocardiograms, her heart was “as close to normal as we can hope for at this point.”

  “Can I get you something?” I asked as I motioned for her to sit down on the sofa. “I have water and orange juice and—”

  “Nothing,” she said, sitting down. “I had a meeting in the city this morning so thought I’d stop in to check on you. I’m trying to wrap things up before our big move to Virginia.”

  I sat down on the sofa myself. “When do you go?” I asked.

  “Hunter’s done with school, but he has a job as a counselor at a day camp in Princeton, so I don’t think we’ll be able to leave until the end of July.”

  “I wish you weren’t going,” I said. Right now, Myra and Hunter were only an hour train ride from me—not that I was free to go to them if I wanted to. But once they were in Virginia, they would be five hours away. I’d probably never see them again—at least not in 2001.

  She shrugged off my concern. “I’ll be an email or phone call away,” she said.

  “You’re not planning to go … far away anytime soon?” I said. “As in 2050 or something.” I smiled, but I was genuinely worried she would simply vanish on me.

  “I’ve traveled four times,” she said. “No fifth trips, remember?”

  “Good,” I said, but I remembered that she did indeed take a fifth trip, one she would never return from. Of course I said nothing about it. “I’d like you to stay in 2001, please,” I said instead.

  “I have something for you,” she said, digging in the large tote bag that served as her purse. She pulled out a small yellow cardboard box. “It’s a disposable camera,” she said, handing it to me. “I thought you’d want to take pictures of your baby when she arrives.”

  “Thank you!” I said, staring at the small camera in wonder. I turned it over in my hands. “How do I get the film in and out?”

  “You don’t. The film’s already in it. You mail the camera to the address on the back and they’ll send you the developed photographs. Then you just buy another camera at any drugstore. They’re cheap.”

  “Wow,” I said. Sometimes I really loved 2001.

  “By the way,” Myra said. “I checked out the Gapstow Bridge on my way here. The bridge Hunter wants you to step off from?”

  I nodded. I’d pulled up pictures of the Gapstow Bridge from the internet. The images were not terribly helpful. They’d been taken from a distance, and while they showed the handsome arched stone bridge and the pond below it, I couldn’t gauge how high the bridge’s walls were.

  “You’re going to need a small stepladder to get to the top of the wall,” Myra said, addressing my unspoken concern.

  “Hunter told me that,” I said. “I’m worried about how I’ll do it with a baby, though I bought a sling to carry her in.”

  With some effort, I stood up from the sofa and walked over to the dresser, where I pulled the handmade fabric sling from the top drawer to show her.

  “That’s perfect,” Myra said, taking it from me and looking it over. “Your hands will be free. Excellent.”

  “I landed facedown on my chest in Princeton, though,” I said, lowering myself to the sofa again. “I’m afraid of crushing my baby when I land.”

  “No worries,” she said. “You didn’t land hard, right? There’s actually no impact at all.” She stood up, checking her watch. “I need to catch a train, so I’ll be on my way. You’ll let me know when the baby comes?”

  “Of course,” I said, starting to get to my feet to let her out.

  “Stay,” she said. “No need to get up.”

  “Thank you for the camera,” I said.

  “No problem,” she answered, and I watched her leave, the door clicking into place behind her. I sat there a few minutes feeling terribly alone. I knew Myra wasn’t my friend, exactly. She was more than thirty years older than me, to begin with, and her personality was always cool and professional. But she was the only person in 2001 who truly knew who I was. I wondered where Hunter had gotten his warmth from. That sperm-donor father, I guessed. Bless that guy, whoever he was.

  * * *

  The last few weeks of my bed rest were filled with TV shows and takeout meals, and my Stir Crazy friends. Some of them gave birth to their perfect babies and their good news encouraged me. Bed rest was worth it.

  By the beginning of
July, there was talk of inducing my labor. Joanna’s due date was two weeks away, but the doctors—I had too many of them to count at this point—were nervous and they were making me nervous as well, especially the pediatric cardiologist.

  “There’s a chance she may require a small intervention once she’s born,” he told me. “We need to wait and see.”

  “Intervention?” I asked him. “What does that mean?”

  He shrugged. He was not a very communicative man. “A procedure,” he said. “Possibly surgery or just a dilation. That wouldn’t be unexpected. We need to wait and see,” he said again.

  Oh, no. Dr. Perelle had told me it was possible Joanna would need more treatment after she was born, but I’d hoped he was simply informing me of every possible complication. I planned to hang on to that hope.

  The perinatologist scheduled the induction for the following Friday, which was only a few days before my actual due date. When I told the Stir Crazy Mamas about the upcoming induction, several of them wrote back over the next few hours, sending encouragement. One woman, who had already had her baby but still visited the group, told me she’d been induced as well and she described the whole process, which I nervously skimmed to get to the very end: a healthy baby boy.

  The morning before I was to have the induction, though, I was brushing my teeth when my water broke. It startled me as it puddled around my feet and it explained the backache that had kept me awake for most of the night. I stared at my reflection in the mirror, heart pounding.