Marcella clutched her stomach as they made their way to labor and delivery. The contractions were coming hard and fast, and she knew what that meant—she knew her daughter was nearly there.
Marcella was never close with Sylvia. In some ways, she thought, it was impossible to be. Her mother was gone often, preferring her own world over the one she could occupy at home. She wasn’t cold, but she wasn’t exactly warm, either. She was loud and opinionated and excited, but not warm. Marcella had almost no memories of being held before Dave. And she wants to change all that with her daughter. With the birth of this baby, Marcella believes she has the ability to do it over, to have the kind of mother-daughter relationship she had always longed for. She promised herself, as the fire ran across her belly, that she would be there, that she would do it differently. That every milestone, every memory, would be together.
“Push!!”
Marcella held the plastic edge of the hospital bed, sweating and screaming. Dave pressed a cool compress to her head. There hadn’t been time for an epidural, and she felt pulled in two, like her actual insides were about to rip, were ripping, and still they were screaming for more.
“I can’t,” she said.
Dave leaned down close. Usually his presence was a comfort to her, a balm. Just a hug could calm her nervous system. But now she felt like he was sucking what little oxygen she had left.
Still they told her to push. Did they not see her trying? If she’d had a lick of energy she would have told them to care more about her, about the woman right in front of them, but she couldn’t speak.
She screamed out something guttural, a sound she knew for certain she had never made before, knew for certain she had likely never heard before.
And then, there she was. All seven pounds nine ounces of her. She was wet and slippery and red and bruised and there.
Marcella and Lauren reach the ramp that leads up to Parking Structure A.
“What are we doing?” Lauren says. She checks her watch. She appears agitated.
Marcella wants to put her arms around her daughter, to shake her, to look into her eyes and make her see.Don’t you understand?
That was the day she was born. Marcella remembers it all clearly, exactly. Just like it were yesterday.
But Marcella did not bring her daughter here today to tell her about the day she was born.
She brought her here to tell her about the day she died.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
We’re standing at Alden Drive, a few paces over from the emergency entrance to the hospital. Cars pull in and out of the cul-de-sac, dropping off and picking up patients. It’s less chaotic than you’d think, being the emergency entrance to the biggest hospital in Los Angeles. No sirens, no whirling ambulances. Just the slow stream in and out of sick people.
Marcella is clutching and uncurling her hands in repetition. She’s wearing khaki pants and a black sweater and Reebok sneakers, and she looks, all at once, old—older than I remember. My mother has always been youthful and vibrant, if uptight. Rarely a wrinkle, petite and tight body. But I see her now, not as young as before. The realization feels cruel, somehow—and I’m immediately filled with regret. At my attitude in the cafeteria. At being angry with her when really I am angry at myself.
But I want her to know what this summer has been like. I want her to know that itworked.
“I had a second chance,” I tell her. Still angry, still kicking, but the truth.
A Honda drives by with the radio blaring nineties rap. We both turn to look as it whizzes by.
“Yes, well—”
“No, Mom. For real. I did something bad. Something bad to Leo and—”
But then I feel it, the injustice of it. The thing I keep buried down deep inside my heart. The thing I’ve sworn to Leo we will let go of. The thing I’ve “given up.” The absolute garbage, the utter infuriating impossibility, that I cannot get pregnant.
And all at once I want to tell her. I want Marcella to know. Because she doesn’t, she has no idea what we—I—have been going through. The hormones and the drugs and the utter despair that, once again, it did not work. That once again, another month—another year—has gone by and there is no child in our arms.
“I can’t have a baby,” I say. I say it plainly, but it feels like screaming. The declaration feels like the only thing that has ever been spoken aloud in the whole world.
Marcella blinks at me. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I can’t get pregnant. We’ve been trying for three years. We’ve done every fertility treatment under the sun, many times over. And none of it works.”
I’m angry, and I’m angry at her, at her obliviousness, at her insistence that life should be and is orderly. That people meet and fall in love and have a child and that marriage is uncomplicated and that motherhood is given. That she’s never noticed before, the gaping hole in her daughter’s life. That every time I’m over for Shabbat after a failed retrieval or visiting for the weekend after my period comes that she hasn’t seen my eyes, that she’s never asked me what’s wrong and really, truly, wanted to know.
“Oh, honey,” she says. “I had no idea.”
