Pictures of Us Read online

  He was right, though. An Emma with her mind made up, and rational reasons for making it up the way she had, was much scarier than the incoherent bundle of emotion she had been for the past few weeks.

  Even so, I understood how love could carry you away, how you could find yourself somewhere you never expected to be. And I was beginning to understand that all kinds of love could do that, not just the first glimmer of attraction for a crush, as fresh and bright as a firefly, or the hot, steady flames of passion that had burned for longer than you could remember.

  I didn’t think Emma loved Drew yet, not really, but she loved the idea of family, of a brother, and especially the notion of being adult enough to change the world.

  And saving a life did that. If Drew died instead of lived, untold things would never happen. Some people would never laugh, or never love, or never be born. And if Drew lived instead of died, the number of things that could happen because of him was endless.

  Tears burned as I tugged on Walter’s leash and let Michael turn us toward home in the warm dusk, grateful for his arm around my waist, and even more grateful that we were in synch again. Last night, he’d filled the windy hollowness inside me. I could only hope he felt the comfortable, familiar weight of my love the way I did his.

  “Do you remember when she fell?” Michael asked me as we mounted the front steps. He bent to let Walter off the leash, and took my hand to lead me to the porch swing. It creaked as we sat down, and I kicked off my sandals to set it going with my toes against the gritty floor. Through the open window I heard Emma and Jesse at the dining-room table, laughing as they argued over something I couldn’t make out.

  “Of course I do,” I told Michael, settling against him. “I’ve never been so scared in my life.”

  She had just turned four, and we’d moved into the house only a few months earlier—it was still mostly empty, the old floors devoid of carpets and the walls still in need of spackle and paint. For Emma, of course, it was a giant playroom, miles more spacious than the little rented Cape Cod where she had been born.

  She and Michael had been playing hide-and-seek after dinner, which involved more running and giggly shrieks than I thought was strictly necessary, but I didn’t really care. I’d been in the kitchen, finishing up the dishes—those were the bad old predishwasher days—and singing along to Hootie and the Blowfish on the radio, when I heard a horrible thumping sound that went on far too long, and a stunned silence that also seemed to stretch out interminably until I heard Emma gasp.

  Michael’s footsteps hammered down the steps as I dropped the glass I’d been drying and skidded into the front hall, only to find Emma crumpled at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Oh my God. Oh God, is she breathing? Oh God. Oh God…”

  I waved Michael away as I knelt beside her. She was clearly breathing—she was trying to catch her breath, in fact, she’d begun to sob so hard. It was the outraged pain and terror of a child shocked to find herself hurting, and my heart crashed in my chest as I scooped her into my arms. She was sweaty and overheated, a bundle of twiggy little bones, and I rocked her and shushed her as long as I could before I finally set her away from me, just far enough to look at her. She was still crying, shuddering with sobs.

  “Oh God,” Michael said again. The blood had drained from his face, and I was pretty sure that he would begin to tremble any minute. A nasty pink goose egg was already forming on Emma’s forehead—she must have landed right on it, or bumped it hard as she tumbled down the stairs.

  And despite my arms around her, despite my ceaseless murmur against her ear, she was still crying.

  “She might have lost consciousness,” I said to Michael. Everything felt strangely remote, even Michael’s panic—the only thing I could focus on was Emma, shaking and choking on her sobs in my lap. “It took her a long time to cry out.”

  “Lost…?” He sat down heavily on the bottom step, and without thinking, I reached out and smacked his arm.

  “Keep it together,” I said in a fierce whisper. “We have to take her to the emergency room. Go up and get her blanket and her bunny. I’m going to put her in the car. Can you drive so I can sit in the back with her?”

  He blinked once and then nodded and sprinted upstairs. I heaved her into my arms and grabbed a paper towel and a bag of frozen peas for her head before I bundled her into the car.

  Emma had stopped crying only long enough to throw up all over her Elmo T-shirt and the backseat, and by the time we got to the E.R., the world had gone completely surreal for me. If the doctors didn’t examine my daughter right away, I was oddly, calmly sure that I would begin to scream, possibly throw things, and threaten a kind of violence I had never known lurked inside me.

  But they did see her immediately, and three hours later, as Michael and I drove home with Emma asleep in the back seat, he reached forward to lay his hand on my shoulder. “I thought I broke her.” His voice was a husky whisper. “I…I mean, we were just playing, like always, and I didn’t think about her socks on the floor…”

  I’d pulled over, parked beneath an ancient oak just blocks from our house and ran around the car to the back seat, where he had been sitting beside Emma. We held each other beneath a pale, watchful moon while he cried.

  As we sat in the gently rocking swing now, he murmured, “I thought I broke her this time, too, you know? That finding out about Drew would shatter her—her ideas about us, her faith in us, her sense of security.”

  I nodded against his shoulder, but before I could say anything, he went on. “I always knew you would be all right.”

  There it was again, those innocent words that had hurt so much the first time. You would be all right. I hated to break the peace of the moment, but I had to ask. I pushed away. “Why? Do you know how much I love you, really? How could you believe I would be okay?”

  Surprise rippled across his face. “Oh, babe, no. I didn’t mean that you wouldn’t care, that it wouldn’t hurt, but that you would make it okay,” he said. “That you would find a way to help me, to know what to do. Remember what I said about choice? I knew you would choose to believe in us, because I know exactly how much you love me.”

  I was crying again, the tears hot and wet against his shirt. I was ready for the time of tears to be over, but I was grateful for these—even more than last night, they were made of relief, a fabulous lightness that was like the first breath drawn after you’d been under water.

  “She’s not broken,” Michael whispered as he held me. “And neither are we.”

  I nodded up at him, and wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand as he added, “Let’s go tell her we’re heading back to Cambridge.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “I CAN’T DECIDE WHICH I’M MORE nervous about,” Michael’s mom, Maureen Butterfield, said quietly as we walked into Brigham and Women’s Hospital nearly a week later. “Meeting Drew for the first time or Emma’s testing.”

  I didn’t blame her, and I took her hand to give it a warm squeeze as Michael held the door for us. Emma was already up ahead, carefully scanning the bustling lobby, wearing her hastily mustered confidence like armor.

  Agreeing to let Emma undergo testing as a possible bone marrow match didn’t mean anything would happen overnight, though. First there had been a flurry of phone calls back and forth to Sophia and Drew, between Sophia and the doctors and then back to us, appointments to schedule and travel arrangements to make, all with Emma’s last week of school to consider.

  Of course, after I’d seen the stunned amazement on her face when Michael and I told her we were proud of her and we would allow her to be tested, I would have walked all the way to Boston with Emma riding piggyback.

  Still, doctors didn’t tend to schedule testing on Saturdays, which meant more time off from work for Michael, and a desperate call to the high-school principal to re-schedule an exam for Emma. I’d juggled appointments, too, but we couldn’t leave until Sunday morning, since I had another wedding to photograph Saturday afternoon
. I couldn’t break a professional commitment—not at the last minute, at least—although concentrating on thrown bouquets and the right light for shots of the cake wasn’t easy. Maureen had asked if she could come for dinner or, better yet, bring dinner, and neither Michael nor I had the heart to say no.

  Maureen was, as always, the calm eye at the center of any storm. She’d been a practicing psychologist for more than forty years, a fact that had intimidated me when Michael and I first started dating. Would she know what I was thinking? Would she know what I was thinking when Michael had his arm around me? Did she know what we were doing when we were alone?

  Silly teenage fears, of course, but I’d discovered over the years what Maureen had probably learned early on—being a good listener was the first step in being a good therapist. She had her boisterous moments, like anyone else, but for the most part she sat back and listened, and observed. As much as she enjoyed helping a patient work through a problem, she was fascinated by human behavior. She watched people the way some of us watched TV.

  Naturally, she had understood a lot more about our long-ago separation than I had guessed at the time. What was more, she didn’t blame either of us for it or for its consequences.

  “Blame is useless,” she’d told me one day not long after that horrible scene at my mother’s table, when she’d shown up at the door with an armful of lilacs that had bloomed early. “What you need to deal with is facts, consequences. After a certain point it doesn’t matter why someone did something. What matters is what you do about it now.”

  I’d gotten lucky where mothers-in-law were concerned, that was for sure. But I was so distracted by the thought of packing for the trip, of what would happen to Emma during the testing, that the idea of having Maureen over for dinner—even if she was bringing the meal—had made me a little cranky.

  “I’m not sure what she’s thinking,” Michael had admitted that morning as I prepared for the wedding. “But she never does this kind of thing. I don’t want to say no to her.”

  I didn’t, either, not really. Maureen wasn’t intrusive, or nosy, or needy. In fact, sometimes she was so low-key I forgot about her for a day or two, just across town in the house that had been too big even when Michael and Melissa had shared it with her. She’d never married again—she’d never even made a serious attempt at dating after Michael’s dad died, which I thought was a shame. She was a lovely woman, gentle and reserved on first glance, with intelligence and a sly sense of humor that was sharper than you expected underneath.

  And feelings Michael and I hadn’t really considered. As she explained to us Saturday night over Chinese food, she wanted to meet her grandson.

  Michael nearly swallowed part of his egg roll wrong, but I could see that he was appalled we hadn’t considered this possibility, not that she wanted to do it.

  “God, Mom, I’m so sorry, I just hadn’t thought…” he began.

  “Me, neither.” I offered a helpless shrug. “I could make excuses, but there really are none.”

  “There’s no need,” Maureen said firmly. She helped herself to more beef with broccoli, then added a generous spoonful of the dark, pungent sauce before mixing the whole thing into her rice. She took a bite. “The two of you have had plenty on your minds without worrying about me.”

  With that she gave Emma a pointed look, and Emma at least had the decency to blush.

  We were all quiet for a moment, except for Walter, who was whining at Michael’s feet for a taste of our dinner. “Why don’t you come with us, Gram,” Emma said suddenly. She was pleased with herself, the same bright hopefulness in her eyes I had seen the other night. It made her appear both older and younger at the same time—clever, determined, but so idealistic. “You could drive up with us and meet Drew on Monday.”

  Was she aware that there might be only a few chances left for Maureen to meet this boy who was her grandson? I wasn’t about to ask her, but judging by the glance that passed between Michael and his mother at the moment, they certainly understood it.

  So we all climbed into the car Sunday morning, with a bagful of doughnuts from the bakery downtown and headed north again. This time, at least, Emma wasn’t pouting, and Maureen had plenty of fond stories to share about her favorite patient, a man she referred to only as K., who had been in therapy for years and still couldn’t get through a day without either calling her or developing a new phobia.

  Now that we were in the hospital, though, I knew exactly what I was nervous about, and it was Emma. Between my knee surgery and the chaos of Emma’s birth, my own experiences with the medical profession had been pretty unpleasant, and I was usually more than happy to keep my distance from any building with white-coated professionals inside. And here I was offering up my daughter, whose experience with pain so far had been nothing more than a skinned knee or a scraped elbow—aside from the concussion she didn’t remember—for tests that would have turned my legs to jelly.

  Drew and Sophia had planned to meet us upstairs in one of the family waiting rooms, and as we stepped onto the elevator, I felt Maureen fidgeting beside me. She was patting her hair into place, checking that her earrings were securely fastened, and I leaned over to kiss her cheek. “You look fine,” I whispered.

  She flushed with embarrassment, but just as the bell dinged for our floor she murmured, “You usually meet your grandchildren when they’re too little to notice anything but a kind voice and a soft touch. This is a bit intimidating.”

  “He’s cool, Gram,” Emma said as she stepped off the elevator. “Really cool. He’ll love you.”

  Michael slung his arm around Emma’s shoulder. “Cool, Mom. Just keep that in mind.”

  “He thinks he’s so amusing,” Maureen muttered, but once we’d checked in with the nurse, she let me hold her hand. Michael knocked lightly on the door of the room Sophia and Drew were waiting in.

  It was nothing special, even as hospital decor goes—colorless furniture against faintly tan walls, a fake spider plant hung clumsily in the grimy window that overlooked the street and tattered magazines already months old. But there was Drew, a book in his lap as he slouched on one of the sofas. His face lit up when we walked in, and before anyone said a word, he held out his arms and Emma dropped to the sofa beside him, hugging him hard.

  Sophia bit her bottom lip—she was trying not to cry, I knew. Her eyes were glassy, and her cheeks were hot with emotion. I squeezed her hand when she approached us, but I let Michael introduce her to his mother. After dropping my bag on a table strewn with bone marrow literature and pieces of the Boston Globe, I fished out my trusty everyday camera, a digital I’d bought six months earlier.

  I’d packed it at the last minute, and I wasn’t sure why I dropped it into my handbag this morning—a hospital waiting room wasn’t exactly the most scenic setting for photos. But the moment it was in my hand, I understood—this was my way to escape, just a little. When you’re behind the lens, no one pays much attention to you, and the air in the room was nearly electric with awkwardness.

  I was an old-school photographer—I kept the digital for snapshots, studies for future shoots, parties and birth-days. Film was my true medium because I could play with exposures, lighting, cropping and all kinds of effects when I developed it. The digital didn’t offer a lot of choices for light, and there would be no way to disguise the surroundings—at least, not until I could PhotoShop it—but the picture Drew and Emma made together needed to be captured.

  I heard Maureen’s and Sophia’s soft voices as they talked, but I couldn’t see anything except my daughter and her half brother. Emma’s blond head had dropped onto Drew’s shoulder, and his arm was curled protectively around her. Whatever they’d talked about in all those e-mails had clearly made them siblings in ways I never would have expected, and for the first time I could notice a resemblance between them. The angle of Michael’s jaw was there in each face; their father was in the shape of their eyes, a softness in their mouths.

  I took the first shot just as Emma
turned her face up to Drew’s, something he’d said twisting her mouth into a grin. They glanced up when the flash went off, mirror images of surprise, and I took another shot. Then another, as they began to mug for me, heads touching, making faces, laughing.

  Just like a brother and sister.

  I realized that the room had gone quiet behind me, and I spun around without warning to take a shot of Michael, Maureen and Sophia, watching the kids, all their love and fear evident on their faces.

  Maureen rolled her eyes—she hated herself in photos, even if she claimed I did a better job than anyone at making her look “not completely horrific,” as she put it.

  “Stop it, you,” I told her with a smirk. “Or I’ll take even more.”

  She waved a hand and moved out of the way, and I pointed the lens at Michael and Sophia. They stood just inches apart, observing the interplay with interest, similar in height, both of them dark and lean, and I snapped them that way before suggesting, “Get closer, guys. Arms around each other, maybe. Come on. Pretend you like each other.”

  That startled laughter out of Drew and Emma, but Sophia and Michael did as I asked, and they were comfortable together in the shot. Like parents. It took me aback for a moment.

  This was family, I thought, putting my camera aside as a ripple of awareness swept through me. No matter how new it was, how unfamiliar, we were family, disparate, fragile strands woven into one cord. There was no way to judge how strong it was.

  “Drew.” Michael walked across to the sofa as Drew stood, and the two of them hugged, the brief, hard embrace of men. “I want you to meet my mom, Maureen Butterfield.”

  Beside Sophia, in her skinny faded jeans and a loose white blouse, her dark hair a careless pile of curls on top of her head, Maureen was as polished and stiff as a silver teapot. She’d let her dark hair go gray years ago, and it was a gorgeous pewter. She was terribly nervous—her face was set too carefully, her hands stiff at her sides. She’d taken longer than usual to dress at the hotel this morning, and I knew she wasn’t happy with the plain khaki slacks and navy blue shirt she’d chosen. I’d never seen her so unsure of herself.