“I never said you were. I’m just saying…we knew it wouldn’t be easy, right?”
Yes, we’d known that. But I guess I also hadn’t realized it would ever be quite this hard. “I have to go,” I said, and when Sean said he loved me, I pretended I had not heard.
I hung up and immediately dialed Piper. “What’s wrong with men?” I asked.
In the background, I could hear the water running, dishes clattering in the sink. “Is that a rhetorical question?” she said.
“Sean doesn’t want Willow to have rodding surgery.”
“Hang on. Aren’t you in Boston for pamidronate?”
“Yes, and Rosenblad brought it up today when we saw him,” I said. “He’s been urging us to do it for a year now, and Sean keeps putting it off, and Willow keeps breaking.”
“Even though she’ll be better off in the long run?”
“Even though.”
“Well,” Piper said, “then I have one word for you: Lysistrata.”
I burst out laughing. “I’ve been sleeping with Willow on the living room couch for the past month. If I told Sean I was going to stop having sex with him, it would be a pretty empty threat.”
“There’s your answer, then,” Piper said. “Bring on the candles, oysters, negligee, the whole nine yards…and when he’s blissed out in a hedonistic coma, ask him again.” I heard a voice in the background. “Rob says that’ll work like a charm.”
“Thank him for the vote of confidence.”
“Hey, by the way, tell Willow that a person’s thumb is as long as his nose.”
“Really?” I wedged my hand up to my face to check. “She’ll love that.”
“Oh, shoot, that’s my call waiting. Why can’t babies get born at nine in the morning?”
“Is that a rhetorical question?” I said.
“And we come full circle. Talk to you tomorrow, Char.”
After I hung up, I stared at the receiver for a long moment. She’ll be better off in the long run, Piper had said.
Did she believe that, unconditionally? Not just about a rodding surgery but about any action that a good mother would undertake?
I didn’t know if I could even muster the courage to sue for wrongful birth. Saying abstractly that there were some children who shouldn’t be born was hard enough, but this went one step further. This meant saying one particular child-my child-shouldn’t have been born. What kind of mother would face a judge and a jury, and announce that she wished her child had never existed?
Either the kind of mother who didn’t love her daughter at all…or the kind of mother who loved her daughter too much. The kind of mother who would say anything and everything if it meant you’d have a better life.
But even if I came to terms with that moral conundrum, the additional wrinkle here was that the person on the other end of the lawsuit was not a stranger-she was my best friend.
I thought of the foam pad we had once used to line your car bed and your crib, how sometimes, when I lifted you out of it, I could still see the impression you’d made, like a memory, or a ghost. And then, like magic, it would disappear. The indelible mark I’d left on Piper, the indelible mark she’d left on me-well, maybe they weren’t permanent. For years, I’d believed Piper when she said tests wouldn’t have told us any earlier that you had OI, but she had been talking about blood tests. She’d never even alluded to the fact that other prenatal testing-like ultrasounds-might have picked up your OI. Had she been making excuses for me, or for herself?
It won’t affect her, a voice in my head murmured. That’s what malpractice insurance is for. But it would affect us. In order to make sure you could rely on me, I would lose the friend I’d relied on since before you were born.
Last year, when Emma and Amelia were in sixth grade, the gym teacher had come up behind Emma and squeezed her shoulders while she waited on the sidelines of a softball game. Innocuous, most likely, but Emma had come home saying that it creeped her out. What do I do? Piper had asked me. Give him the benefit of the doubt, or be a helicopter parent? Before I could even offer her my opinion, she’d made up her mind. It’s my daughter, she said. If I don’t go in and open up my mouth, I may live to regret it.
I loved Piper Reece. But I would always love you more.
With my heart pounding, I took a business card out of my back pocket and dialed the number before I could lose my nerve.
“Marin Gates,” said a voice on the other end.
“Oh,” I stumbled, surprised. I had been anticipating an answering machine this late at night. “I wasn’t expecting you to be there…”
“Who is this?”
“Charlotte O’Keefe. I was in your office a couple of weeks ago with my husband about-”
“Yes, I remember,” Marin said.
I twisted the metal snake of the phone cord around my arm, imagined the words I would funnel into it, send into the world, make real.
“Mrs. O’Keefe?”
“I’m interested in…taking legal action.”
There was a brief silence. “Why don’t we schedule a time for you to come in and meet with me? I can have my secretary call you tomorrow.”
“No,” I said, and then shook my head. “I mean, that’s fine, but I won’t be home tomorrow. I’m in the hospital with Willow.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“No, she’s fine. Well, she’s not fine, but this is routine. We’ll be home Thursday.”
“I’ll make a note.”
“Good,” I said, my breath coming in a rush. “Good.”
“Give my best to your family,” Marin replied.
“I’ve just got one question,” I said, but she had already hung up the phone. I pressed the mouthpiece against my lips, tasted the bitter metal. “Would you do this?” I whispered out loud. “Would you do this, if you were me?”
If you’d like to make a call, said the mechanical voice of an operator, please hang up and try again.
What would Sean say?
Nothing, I realized, because I wouldn’t tell him what I’d done.
I walked back down the hall toward your room. On the bed, you were snoring softly. The video you’d been watching when you fell asleep cast a reflection over your bed in reds and greens and golds, an early rush of autumn. I lay down on the narrow cot that had been converted from one of the guest chairs by a helpful nurse; she’d left me a threadbare blanket and a pillow that crackled like polar ice.
The mural on the far wall was an ancient map, with a pirate ship sailing off its borders. Not long ago, sailors believed that the seas were precipitous, that compasses could point out the spots where, beyond, there’d be dragons. I wondered about the explorers who’d sailed their ships to the end of the world. How terrified they must have been when they risked falling over the edge; how amazed to discover, instead, places they had seen only in their dreams.
Piper
I met Charlotte eight years ago, in one of the coldest rinks in New Hampshire, when we were dressing our four-year-old daughters as shooting stars for a forty-five-second performance in the club’s winter skating show. I was waiting for Emma to finish lacing up her skates while other mothers effortlessly yanked their daughters’ hair into buns and tied the ribbons of the shimmering costumes around their wrists and ankles. They chatted about the Christmas wrapping paper sale the skating club was doing for fund-raising and complained about their husbands, who hadn’t charged the video camera batteries long enough. In contrast to this offhanded competence, Charlotte sat alone, off to one side, trying to coax a very stubborn Amelia into tying back her long hair. “Amelia,” she said, “your teacher won’t let you onto the ice like that. Everyone has to match.”