Pictures of Us Read online

  If Drew felt the same way, he certainly didn’t show it. It was impossible to miss how much thinner he’d gotten in just a few weeks, but there was color in his cheeks, and he opened his arms to Maureen easily.

  “I’m, uh, Drew,” he said after a minute, and everyone laughed.

  “Maureen Butterfield,” Maureen said with a little smile. Just like that, the tension had melted away, and her rigid shoulders relaxed. “I imagine you’re a bit too old to call me Gram, but I’d be happy for you to call me Maureen.”

  “I think I can handle that.” He kissed her cheek lightly, and she gave his hand a squeeze just as the nurse from the reception desk peeked inside.

  “We’re ready for Emma,” she said, checking her clipboard. Brisk efficiency with a friendly layer of warmth—the best kind of nurse, in my opinion. “Emma?”

  I took a deep breath as my daughter got up. The urge to hold her back was nearly irresistible, but when I moved to hug her before she left the room, she stopped me with a shake of her head.

  “I’ll be fine, Mom,” she said, and then glanced at Drew. There were whole worlds of wisdom and faith in her eyes. “We’ll be fine.”

  As she walked away, I found it was impossible not to believe her.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I HAD A LOT OF TIME TO THINK about my daughter in the weeks between that initial cheek swab and the actual process of her donating her bone marrow. She’d taught me something about love and choices with her insistence on getting tested, but sometimes I believed I’d been learning from her since the moment she was born.

  I spent six full days in the hospital after Emma arrived. An emergency C-section and a surprise hysterectomy will do that to you, of course. Emma was fine—almost eight pounds, pink and round and furiously hungry every moment she was awake, despite her impromptu entry into the world—but my OB arranged to keep her in with me until I was ready to be discharged. If they’d sent her home without me, I probably would have followed after Michael in my hospital gown, stitches still screaming and my feet jammed into slippers.

  Those days in the hospital were a blur, a vague impression of pain and exhaustion, coupled with the fiercest love I had ever known. Emma was little more than a strangely demanding mouth at that point, a foreign creature that nevertheless smelled intoxicatingly good. A foreign creature, but mine to care for, and I loathed letting her go even for diaper changes. Whatever apprehension I’d felt when I’d realized I was pregnant had faded into nothingness when I gazed at her face for the first time. I fell asleep nursing her most afternoons, my head bent forward to breathe in that clean, innocent scent from her peach-fuzz skull.

  Recuperating from major surgery is rough even when you don’t have a newborn to care for, and when Michael was finally allowed to take us home, I was so grateful to him I burst into tears more than once the first day. Hormones, my mother said, but I knew it was more. I relied on him for almost everything, and it had never occurred to me that there were women whose husbands would have willingly cleaned a gas station toilet before changing a newborn’s diaper or helping his still-bleeding wife into the bathroom for an emergency sanitary pad.

  And beyond that—in those first days, my gratitude was so huge I could barely see over the top of it—there was the way Michael had fallen in love with Emma. He was every kind of adorable, heartbreaking fool, cooing to her, watching her as she slept, fascinated as her miniature fingers tightened around his thumb.

  What amazed me from time to time, as I stared blearily into the darkened bedroom during a 3:00 a.m. feeding, was how one tiny person changed everything. Before, we were two people, in love with each other, committed to making a life together, but that didn’t really require much more than agreeing on which sofa to buy, or what to watch on TV in the evening, or what to have for dinner. We had separate interests, separate careers; we saw friends on our own as often as we went out together.

  Of course, the key was that we got to come home to the nest we’d made together and find each other there. Every evening was reassuringly familiar—we’d change out of our work clothes, idly discuss ordinary household chores like the laundry and the grocery shopping. Michael would read as I did yoga or sorted through photos, or we’d pass pieces of the paper back and forth as we lay on the bed with the TV on in the background. Some nights Michael tapped away at his first novel while I rustled up dinner and sang along to the radio.

  It was an easy, comfortable existence, exactly what we’d expected when we’d gotten married. Yes, we had to pay the rent and the bills and keep ourselves in food and clothes, but we managed it pretty handily. Our most pressing decisions usually revolved around whether to troop over to Murray’s Bagels on a Sunday morning, or stay home and make pancakes.

  And yet here we were with a baby. Michael and I had made a whole new human being, for heaven’s sake. A person we were entirely responsible for, every moment of her life, at least until she was an adult. I stared into her little pink face all the time, in wonder, as she pursed her mouth or flailed one arm that had escaped from her blanket. I was pretty sure it would be nearly impossible to feel that she wasn’t “ours” even when she was off working at a career, getting married and maybe raising her own children.

  That fierce love was nothing every new parent hasn’t felt, but it was my first maternal revelation, and therefore brand new as well as stunning. As I sat propped in bed one day with Emma in my arms, warm and milky and entirely, incredibly perfect in every way, it dawned on me that what Michael and I were used to was finding our love mirrored in each other’s eyes. We never had to look farther than each other to see the person who meant more to us than anyone else. Now we had an outside focus, this tiny interloper who loomed so huge in our lives, a child we would care for together, a child who would force us to look away from each other once in a while, but who would bring us closer together than ever.

  “Where’s my girl? Let me hold her,” he’d say as soon as he walked into the apartment after work. I was usually happy to let him after a long day of one-on-one time with Emma, who had her cranky moments just like any brand-new person adjusting to a world that must have seemed enormous and cold after all those cozy months in the womb.

  But soon enough Emma would begin the panicky mewl that meant she was hungry, and my breasts would begin to leak, and Michael would moan that he wanted to give her a bottle. We were both a bit like kids fighting over a favorite toy.

  One day was particularly bad. It had rained since noon, squashing the walk Emma and I usually took through the Village, and she had been restless and whimpery for hours. To top it off, she’d been up nearly all night, or so it seemed, and I was so tired I could have whimpered a little bit myself.

  Our one-bedroom apartment was small and arranged railroad style, with a hallway connecting the adjoined living room and kitchen, the bathroom and our bedroom. The living room was crowded with books and camera equipment and Michael’s desk, as well as the swing my parents had given us for Emma, and the bedroom was a nightmare of dirty laundry, Emma’s bassinet and our bed crowded into a room that was barely big enough to fit our shared dresser. None of it even registered as I plodded up and down that hallway, patting the baby’s back, for more than an hour. Her frustrated cranking turned into an official screech about twenty minutes before Michael walked in, and I thrust her at him before bursting into tears.

  “She won’t stop,” I managed to get out between sniffling sobs as I collapsed on the sofa, “and she won’t eat, and she’s not wet, and I’m so tired, Michael, I mean, so tired…”

  To give him credit, he didn’t even crack a smile. He shushed me while he shushed her, until I was at least a little calmer.

  And then he got up, still in his tie and his work shoes, which he normally kicked off the moment he was inside, and started a circuit of our tiny living room with Emma propped against his shoulder. He looped around the coffee table, stopped at the bookcase to show her his favorite novels, paused at the window to give her a view of Sixth Avenue.
>
  She was still muttering, squirming and screwing up her face the way she did when she was working up to a full-fledged scream. That was when Michael started to sing. To the tune of “Old McDonald’s Farm,” he ad-libbed his way around the living room again as he stroked her back. “Your poor mommy is so tired. Yes, she really is. And when she’s tired, she cries, too. Yes, she really does….”

  As if by magic, Emma turned toward the sound of his voice, her huge eyes still that dark, newborn blue, and sighed. After another two choruses, her lids began to droop, until she was finally, miraculously, asleep.

  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was furious that Michael had been able to soothe her when I couldn’t, but I knew that even so, I had just fallen in love with him a bit harder. The image of him walking around that small room, his favorite blue-striped tie crushed between his chest and Emma’s compact little body, was something I would never forget.

  Even now, it seemed, our little girl wanted her daddy for comfort.

  It was late June, and Emma had just been wheeled out of the recovery room after the marrow extraction process. She’d been right—probably through sheer force of will, I thought secretly, with more than a little glow of pride—she was a match for Drew. Despite how desperately Drew needed her marrow, though, he had to undergo pretransplant protocol first, which involved intense chemo and radiation for a few weeks beforehand.

  “Essentially, it will destroy his immune system,” Sophia had explained when we heard the news that Emma was a perfect donor. “But that will keep his body from rejecting the cells. Even if they match, I guess the body knows they’re invaders.”

  Invasion was a distressingly familiar concept even then—when the process of the bone marrow extraction had been explained by the transplant center doctors, I was impressed with the way Emma listened, calm and completely unruffled, at least on the surface. She was to be given general anesthesia, for one, then placed facedown as the doctors inserted large, hollow needles into her pelvic bones to extract the marrow. The thought made me vaguely nauseous.

  But it was her body, as Michael reminded me when I paled and sat down abruptly. Dr. Bonfiglio was alarmed until I assured him I was simply surprised. I accepted a paper cup of water and nodded when Michael whispered, “Her choice.”

  I’d learned enough about choices in the past few weeks to realize how important it was that Emma have the chance to make some of her own.

  Now Michael was seated on the edge of Emma’s bed, telling her silly knock-knock jokes and doing bad imitations of the transplant staff. And, unbelievably, she was smiling. She was so pale it was a little frightening, and she didn’t look quite awake yet. The skin under her eyes was smudged a faint blue-gray, and she kept swallowing, as if her mouth was dry, but there was no mistaking the gentle upward curve of her lips. I was trying my best to ignore the IV that snaked down from the metal pole beside the bed and into the back of her hand.

  “Okay, the really skinny one, with the purple streak in her hair?” Michael said now. “She sounds like a bird on Valium, with that really weird squawk.” He tried to approximate it and succeeded only in making himself sound sort of like a dying cow.

  But Emma laughed, which was the point. “Daddy, you’re a goof.”

  “Yes. Yes, I am.” He pretended to hang his head, then winked at her.

  I turned around when I heard a light rap on the door. It was Sophia, poking her head in tentatively. “Can I come in?”

  “Please.” I got up from the single visitor’s chair, but she waved away my offer.

  “I wanted to see how Emma did.” She handed Emma a lush, hand-picked bouquet of daylilies. “I brought cookies, too,” she said, pulling a container of chocolate chips out of her tote bag, “but I’m not sure if you’re allowed to eat them yet.”

  “Let’s find out,” Emma said with a weak laugh. She pushed herself upright and winced. “I am kind of hungry now, and those look way better than a hospital meal.”

  Michael was up before I could make a move for the door. “I’ll check.”

  I let Sophia and Emma chat for a few minutes and sank back in the torturous plastic chair. If I’d been able to smell the cookies through the plastic container, at least one of them would have been gone already. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and between prep, anesthesia, the actual procedure and Emma’s two hours in the recovery room, I was suddenly weak with hunger myself.

  At least Sophia seemed interested only in Emma. For reasons I didn’t really understand, my brief feeling of kinship with her had faded so completely I sometimes wondered if it had ever happened. Nothing had changed, but every time I glanced at her I found myself inexplicably angry.

  My reaction had nothing to do with Drew or what Emma had undergone for him. The more I knew of Michael’s son, the more I liked him. The same day Emma had been tested, while we all waited in the cafeteria, Drew had pulled a manila folder out of his backpack and handed it to me with a hopeful grin.

  “Michael brought these to me when I was sick, and I wanted to tell you how much I loved them. You highlighted everything cool about architecture.”

  Inside, an old series of my photos was tied carefully with a piece of string. I’d taken them when we still lived in New York, shortly before we got married, as we’d wandered all over the city on weekend afternoons, scouting out interesting buildings and unusual angles from which to shoot them.

  And Michael had shared them with his son, the architecture student. I was touched, both at Michael’s gesture and Drew’s genuine appreciation. He wasn’t angling for a stepmother or even a stand-in aunt, which was fortunate, since I didn’t really have an interest in playing either of those roles. But I was certain that over time we would be friends.

  Sophia, on the other hand, was a different story. Maybe if I tried, if I dragged my feelings out into the light and examined them a little more closely, I could figure out what had changed my reaction to her, but today wasn’t the day to do that. Not when I was too exhausted to think straight.

  The door swung open, and Michael ambled in again, a smile on his face. “The powers that be say solid food is okay if you’re up to it, babe,” he told Emma, sitting on the side of the bed again. “Maybe I should try one first, though.”

  Emma snatched the cookie away with another laugh. “Good try, Dad.”

  “I know someone else who probably needs to eat.” Sophia laid a hand on my shoulder. She was wearing some kind of light perfume, and it reminded me of freshly washed laundry, dried in the sun. “How about some lunch, my treat?”

  Oh, God. What was I supposed to say? Michael and Emma had frozen, two pairs of brown eyes trained on me, waiting for my response. There was no way to refuse—at least, not politely.

  “It’ll have to be hospital food, but the chicken salad actually isn’t half-bad.” Sophia’s tone was light, but I didn’t miss the plea in it.

  Oh, okay, I thought, trying not to grit my teeth. One meal.

  “You don’t mind?” I asked Emma as I stood up and gathered my bag. A last-ditch attempt, but worth a shot.

  She shook her head, another cookie already in her mouth. “I’ll be fine,” she mumbled.

  Michael very pointedly refused to look at me, the weasel, and pretended to be interested in choosing another cookie from the container. I was on my own.

  We rode down to the cafeteria in silence, and it wasn’t until we were in line—with the suggested chicken-salad sandwiches on our trays—that Sophia said, “I guess I just wanted to thank you, Tess. This is awkward, all of it, but what Emma’s done is so huge for Drew. And for me. Waiting for another donor could have taken…Well, a really long time.”

  Too long. She didn’t say it, but it was the truth. I let her pay for lunch when the cashier totaled up our purchases, and made my way to a table in the corner, overlooking the gift shop, before I answered her.

  “You don’t have to thank me,” I said finally, when Sophia was seated across from me. “You don’t really have to thank Emma, either.
She wanted to do this, and in all truth, I don’t think we could have stopped her. She knew exactly how important a possible match could be.”

  Her smile was rueful. “Some people might not offer, even so. And other people wouldn’t let their teenage daughter offer.”

  Offer. There it was, without warning, the reason I found myself tempted to shake her, or shout at her. The infuriating splinter in the back of my mind that I had never been able to get to.

  The words tumbled out before I thought twice.

  “Why didn’t you ask?” I realized my hands had clenched into fists when I felt my nails digging into my palms. “Your son was dying, Sophia. Why didn’t you ask if we would get Emma tested?”

  Shock left her mouth slack, and I felt the wave of anger off her as if an oven door had been opened. But I didn’t care—that was it, that was what had been bothering me. That she hadn’t suggested Emma might be able to help Drew when Michael couldn’t, that she hadn’t, in some remote part of my brain, done every last thing to save her child’s life.

  And in an even more distant, hateful part of my brain, I was worried that Michael would find her unwillingness to intrude on our lives, and our daughter’s health, admirable.

  It didn’t really make sense, even to me. If anything, Michael would stand up and noisily applaud any parent who lay down in traffic for his or her kid, damn the consequences. I could see it, though—Sophia the saint, who would never think of asking for anything for herself, or even her sick child. Sophia the selfless, who would never impinge on another’s happiness or well-being—and therefore deserved help all the more. Apparently, most logic had fallen out of my brain sometime in the past two months.

  I was actually a bit startled when Sophia simply took a deep breath and mustered up another rueful smile, instead of throwing her paper cup of diet ginger ale in my face. The woman had invited me to lunch, for heaven’s sake, and my first gesture had been to attack her. Okay, maybe I did care. My cheeks burned with embarrassment, but I was still curious how she would answer me.