I Will Never Leave You
S. M. Thayer
PART ONE
Chapter One
TRISH
A newborn generates its own heat. Sleeping, wrapped in a pink candy-stripe receiving blanket and a matching knit hat, the baby’s a hot coal threatening to burst into flames, and yet my husband, beaming, assures me—as nurses have assured him—that she’s not feverish, that she’s perfectly healthy, but the baby’s heat worries me. It’s impossible not to feel as if she’s burning up, not to feel as if, holding her, I’m a twig, a tuft of dried grass, a crumpled sheet of newsprint, tinder that will be consumed by her fire. She’s a forest fire, a conflagration waiting to happen, and there’s nothing my money can do to tamp the destruction this baby’s going to cause in my life.
“Relax, Trish,” James says, easing his hand onto my shoulder. His voice is calm, soothing, and bursting with confidence, a loving voice tailor-made for uttering the “breathe in, breathe out” reassurances expectant fathers must coo to their partners during childbirth. Workmanlike and responsible, he has read the essential baby manuals, streamed the important YouTube videos, subscribed to the necessary magazines, and can mansplain away the natural anxieties of ushering a new life into this world. “Babies can sense tension, and it does them no good, psychologically and emotionally, if their first hours are filled with distress.”
The baby makes the faintest snoozing sounds, and yet the sound seems impossibly loud coming from such a small body. I concentrate on the inhalations and the slight wheeze when she exhales, and though it takes time to feel comfortable holding her, the soothing sounds lull me into a hopeful reverie, and suddenly I’m filled with a generosity of spirit I haven’t felt in ages. It’s like what I’d hoped would come during all the years we tried to conceive.
It’s true what they say: nothing is softer than a newborn baby. Ninety minutes earlier, just after the birth, nurses washed her, but there’s a newborn scent attached to her, something amniotic and yet endearing. I’ve never held anything so soft and delicate, and I can see this baby is no ugly Cabbage Patch doll but already beautiful, with a strong chin and fine eyelashes. Her eyelids are pinched tight in sleep; I can’t wait for her to awaken so I can look into her eyes and determine their color. Her face is still red, her head slightly conical from her passage through the birth canal, but these imperfections will pass with time, and I can see now why women joke of wanting to eat their newborns, envisioning the buttery chins, nougat-like chewiness of their fleshy thighs, the cheeks’ velvety warmth.
Anne Elise weighed seven pounds, nine ounces at birth, already a notch above average.
Because of how she was positioned in the womb, sonogram technicians were unable to get an accurate glimpse as to her sex, and for months James allowed himself the assumption he’d fathered a boy. He’d wanted a boy, spoke often of it. I caught him peeking at sporting-goods catalogues and ducking into toy stores with visions of the Nerf balls, miniature plastic basketball hoops, and glistening yellow Tonka trucks he’d lavish on a son, and yet, looking at his considerate face, how filled with happiness he is, I know he’ll be satisfied with a girl. He’ll nurture her and nourish her self-esteem, tell her she’s beautiful and smart, and give her the courage to fight for herself in whatever arena she chooses to enter in life. He’ll cherish her, invite her to explore and discover lifelong passions. He’ll keep up with her interests, send her links to interesting internet articles relating to them. He’ll commit to being part of her life for the long haul. In short, I know he’ll do with her everything he has failed to do with me.
We’ve been unable to conceive, James and I, during our twelve years of married life, and in recent years we’ve done outlandish things, things that go far beyond the pale of the exorbitantly expensive in vitro fertility treatments that have become standard fare for couples within our social circle. Despite our perseverance and the medical, spiritual, and hormonal specialists we consulted, “unexplained infertility” was the closest we came to an explanation of our difficulties. Like friends and acquaintances in similar circumstances, we wondered why people like us—well educated and drug-free, economically viable with good teeth and stylish wardrobes—had trouble doing what came naturally to everyone else: have children. We clung to each other in our silk pajamas, prey to every foul speculation as to the reason for our barrenness, blaming everything from climate change to the polyethylene in the bottles of our drinking water, the unseemly zeitgeist of our modern times, and the hollowness of our souls. We prodded ourselves on counselors’ couches and on the examination tables of well-meaning doctors who spoke in terms of sperm counts and ovulation cycles. Some nights, we prayed as only a man and woman can pray, playing with positional experimentation that led to foot cramps and bruises but nary a disruption in my monthly cycle.
We started the process with so much hope, imagining our life filled with baby this and baby that, cradles and baby monitors and the beautiful mobile of dancing lambs we’d hang above the crib to lull our child to sleep each night. At our most vulnerable, succumbing to rumors of a Chinese practice with an astronomical success rate, we jetted off to Beijing, where, in a modern siheyuan constructed of concrete blocks and faux bricks, we nodded enthusiastically when a Buddhist monk told us that Western practitioners had only the barest glimmer of the spiritual aura surrounding fertility. We were so hopeful, so naive. Shorn of his hair and cloaked only in a thin saffron robe and a pair of bamboo sandals, our monk spoke in a dry, unaccented English that reminded me of how a Nebraskan might speak. We repeated his incantations in somber tones. So much did we believe him that we swallowed the acrid tea he poured from a terra-cotta pot and became violently ill, both of us falling to our knees and vomiting beneath a flowering jacaranda tree. If I hadn’t been able to arrange for an emergency airlift through my father’s embassy connections, we would’ve died under that same jacaranda, the purple blossoms settling down upon us in the siheyuan courtyard, victims of dehydration, intestinal duress, and our own naive desperation.
We cried. I took refuge in my inheritance, flexing my birthright privilege to buy designer evening gowns from the latest Dolce & Gabbana and Naeem Khan collections. At a certain point, James stopped crying. Unlike me, he had no wealth of his own to fall back on. One night, he groveled for the sleek silver Tesla Model S with ludicrous options that could be his for only $125,000. I congratulated him for his taste. No gaudy vroom-vroom Porsche or Ferrari, a Tesla was a machine of solid engineering with an environmental conscience. “You mean you’d buy me one?” James said.
I laughed. I wasn’t going to do any such thing with my money. “But you’ve got your Volvo,” I said of the midnight-blue station wagon we’d bought two years earlier in a fit of procreative optimism when we still imagined children would one day fill its back seats.