Chapter 2 - The Child We Waited For
Three years before the hospital corridor, Mark and I stood in a tiny apartment kitchen holding a pregnancy test neither of us quite dared to believe.
The sun had not risen yet, and I had wrapped myself in his old college sweatshirt because the floorboards were cold.
He was still half asleep, with a crease across his cheek from the pillow.
"Is that really two lines?" he asked.
"Unless we're both hallucinating."
He took my hands, not the test, and looked into my face as if he needed to see the answer there.
We had endured twenty months of appointments, hopeful calendars, awkward questions from relatives, and the quiet disappointment of another negative result.
Some months I was brave until I reached the car.
Other months I could barely listen when friends described how quickly their babies had arrived.
Mark never blamed me.
He never treated the prospect of children as a measure of whether our marriage had succeeded.
When I told him I was afraid he would regret choosing me if we couldn't have a family, he answered, "I chose you before I knew whether there would ever be a crib."
He said it with the simplicity of a man stating the weather.
That morning, when the test finally showed two lines, he covered his mouth with both hands and sat down on the kitchen floor.
"I might faint," he said.
"You'd better not," I replied.
"You're the only one who knows where we keep the emergency chocolate."
We laughed, then held each other while the refrigerator motor hummed behind us.
For the next six months, our little house became a collection of unfinished plans.
Mark borrowed paint samples from the hardware store and arranged them across the kitchen wall.
He favored yellow because he said every child deserved to wake up in a room that looked like sunlight.
I favored sage green because I wanted a nursery that wouldn't make our daughter squint.
We compromised on pale green walls and yellow curtains.
He drew sketches of a wooden bookshelf he intended to build.
As an architectural designer, Mark believed almost every problem could be improved with a pencil, patience, and properly measured lumber.
He was less skilled at assembling flat-pack furniture.
One Saturday he spent three hours building a changing table backward.
When I pointed out the mistake, he bowed solemnly and said the baby would appreciate modern art.
We learned at the ultrasound that we were having a girl.
Mark stared at the grainy image until the technician gently told him she needed the screen back.
In the parking garage he said, "I hope she has your laugh."
"I hope she has your patience."
"That's a dangerous wish," he said.
"I lose my patience with plumbing."
He talked to my stomach at bedtime, reporting on his workday and apologizing for any noise his attempts at carpentry had caused.
Sometimes our daughter kicked beneath his palm.
He would freeze, then grin like a boy who had just been handed a secret map.
We named her Lily because we had planted lilies along the porch the spring we married.
The plants were not especially graceful.
Some leaned toward the driveway, and others disappeared behind the rain barrel.
Mark loved them anyway.
He said beautiful things were allowed to grow crooked.
We didn't have a perfect marriage.
We argued about his habit of promising too much at work and my habit of worrying in silence until the worry became irritation.
His brother Thomas considered Mark naive because he sometimes designed buildings for community projects at reduced fees.
Thomas managed commercial properties and believed generosity should follow profit rather than precede it.
Their disagreements were polite in public and painful in private.
After one family dinner, Mark sat on the porch steps staring at the street.
"He thinks I'm throwing my life away," he said.
"You aren't," I told him.
"You're building one that looks different from his."
He smiled and put his arm around me.
Our closest neighbor, June Porter, had a spare key and a fierce opinion about our need for curtains.
June was sixty-eight, a retired librarian who insisted she didn't care for children and then began knitting our unborn daughter three different blankets.
She became part of our household without either of us planning it.
When she carried over a yellow cardigan with tiny pearl buttons, Mark held it against his chest.
"This is smaller than my wallet," he said.
"Your wallet is not a standard unit of measurement," June informed him.
We were happy in ways that seemed too ordinary to remember until happiness became something I had to reconstruct.
We ate grilled cheese at midnight.
We argued over whether the dog we planned to adopt should be called Biscuit.
We took pictures of the growing nursery even when nothing had changed except a pile of screws.
We made a list of places to take Lily: the coast at dawn, the botanical gardens in spring, a baseball game even if she hated baseball.
Mark wrote "front porch, whenever she needs it" at the bottom.
I was six months pregnant when I first noticed him stopping to catch his breath halfway up our stairs.
He blamed a lingering infection and too many late nights.
At first, I believed him.
Then he began leaving coffee unfinished and resting a hand on the kitchen counter as though it were moving beneath him.
One afternoon he returned from a routine appointment much later than expected.
I found him sitting in his car with both hands gripping the steering wheel.
His expression was controlled, but there was something stunned in his eyes.
"What happened?" I asked through the open window.
He looked down at the wedding band on his finger.
"They want more tests."
"For what?"
"My heart isn't working the way it should."
I stood in the driveway, the baby shifting inside me, and felt a strange certainty that our life had just crossed an invisible border.
He reached for my hand.
"We'll find out exactly what we're dealing with," he said.
"Then we'll decide what to do."
He was trying to comfort me with the language of careful plans.
We had built so much together by planning.
But there are moments when no amount of care can make the next answer gentle.
That night, while Mark slept, I sat in the half-painted nursery and looked at the empty crib.
For the first time, I imagined our daughter entering a world in which her father might not be waiting.
The thought seemed impossible.
It seemed almost insulting to consider it.
May you like
So I pushed it away and went back to bed, where Mark reached for my hand in his sleep.
I held it until morning.
