“Me too.” We stood there for a while, and then I pulled away and went into our bedroom.
I closed the door and lay down on the bed. Brian followed me in and lay down beside me. He took my hand. I rolled onto my side, away from him. He rolled onto his side, to cradle me. I scooted away, and he did the same, to close the space.
“I can’t,” I said. I wasn’t sure what it was that I couldn’t do. Be a parent whose child had survived when other children had died. Be a parent who would never trust that her child was safe. Let myself feel this much pain. Block this much out.
“I can’t,” I said again.
“My love,” Brian said. “I beg to differ. I think you can. You already have.”
I turned around. He was crying. I was crying. The kids were in the living room watching midnight TV. He put both hands on either side of my face.
I felt there was nowhere I could go that Brian would not follow.
“The world is upside down,” I said. “They are the kindest people I’ve ever met.”
“They are.”
“This is not God’s will. Who would will that?”
“No one, my love.”
“God has leaves and rivers, molecular structures, whatever the fuck, fields of barley. Half Dome and puffy clouds pretty enough to slice you open. But not will. I don’t believe that.”
“You don’t.”
“Humans have will. We can be any kind of way to one another.”
“We can.”
I believed in Deepak’s hand upon Ramya’s back in the PICU. In the sanctity, the sanctuary, of chosen tenderness.
I believed in Brian. Whose love for us was immense, without end or border. My love for him, for the kids, felt the same. All of it was invoked inside our two-person sphere—hand to face, face to thigh, arm to leg, lip to ear, eye to eye—for however long it takes to be reminded of who you are, of who someone is to you. To be recalled to home. Hey, remember me, I’m yours, you’re mine.
*
The day before they left I visited Ramya and Deepak at their apartment. They were packing to return home. Ramya told me about Varun’s services, how meaningful the rituals had been to them. Deepak kept repeating, with wonder and gratitude, how the funeral director had waived their fees. That Ramya and Deepak had noticed this gesture was the astonishing thing. Grieving my child, I could only imagine being bent on hurting the world. But that wasn’t their way. They were making piles of medical supplies and canned foods to leave for other transplant families. They were casting their eyes around the room, asking me what we could use.
Most of all, they continued to ask after the other children, after Gracie. How was she? Ramya wanted to know. If anything, Ramya’s concern for Gracie had sharpened.
“She’s fine,” I said. Ramya smiled. I smiled. And then we cried.
As I was leaving, Deepak told me that his cousin was coming to accompany them on the ride home. “We were three coming down here,” he said. “And we would be only two going home.”
If what you’ve been is a mother or a father and your child is now gone, there is no word for who you are. If you lose a spouse, you’re a widow or a widower. But if you lose a child, you go on being a mother or a father. There is no word because we refuse to cede that much authority to the possibility. It is literally the indescribable pain. If we can’t call its name, it can’t come. Only it can.
50
Near the end of our time in Durham, Brian’s mom, Tasha, came for a visit. On the last night of her stay, we took her and the kids to a local place with a row of picnic tables set into a pretty little garden. Behind a curtain of wisteria, the children found a patch of dandelions.
“Gabe, these flowers are wishes,” Gracie said.
“Let’s eat wishes!”
“No, they are for blowing.”
Gracie gripped a stem and blew its wispy white crown. “I wish to be a pony, never anything but a pony.”
They began to romp around on all fours, pawing at the earth, tossing their heads in the air, touching their lips to the grass, nibbling. Their bowed necks, in the darkening light, formed twin pale bridges.
Tasha looked at them, then at us. “So she’s OK?”
“She’s OK,” Brian said.
“Then what the hell are you still doing here?”
Classic Tasha, straight to the point.
“We’re scared to leave,” Brian said. It was true; as scared as we’d been to come, we were almost as scared to leave. Duke was our security blanket.
“But she’s OK?” Tasha said again.
“Yeah, she’s OK.”
“So then,” Tasha said, “you two did good.”
*
In truth, the moment we knew Gracie was out of danger was invisible. We passed through it many times, without recognition. Transplant is like that. There are few clean borders. Your child is puffy and bald and in lots of pain, but the doctors send you home from the hospital anyway, with an injunction to avoid crowds. Your child regrows her hair, can tolerate a chat with more than two people at once, but a bad cold could still be her undoing.
Parents of perilously sick kids never stop being afraid, not even when their kid swims the English Channel or dances ballet with Baryshnikov or has twenty-three kids of their own. The other shoe is always above our heads, just out of reach, about to drop.
Likewise, returning to an intimate understanding with your partner after a long, fraying time doesn’t happen in a single instant. For Brian and me, it happened slowly, painfully, often imperceptibly over many days. Few of them in a row.
I do remember that Brian came home from a trip to New York with an unexpected gift. A necklace. A beautiful pearl-studded choker, unlike anything he’d ever bought me. Silver that looked and felt like lace, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art gift shop. Very precious, apropos of nothing. Apropos of everything.
Brian, who would beg me to tell him what I wanted on birthdays, at Christmas. Brian—who made notes in a little black book on food preferences the kids expressed or I did—took a risk.
He bought me something that said, I see you this way.
The necklace came with a note: You are my alpha and omega.
I cried as I put the necklace on. Wearing it, I felt elegant, of another time and place. Somewhere Old World and civilized, maybe Prague. Definitely not Durham. We went out to dinner at an intimate French place downtown, Vin Rouge.
“A man who buys a necklace like this for his mate probably believes they are held together by more than geography,” I said.
Brian touched my cheek with two fingertips, ran them lightly down my throat to the pearls. “Probably.”