The Other Life (3 page)

“And then what?” Lewis asked. “Will the baby be okay?”

Lewis’s voice sounded distant to Quinn, and she became aware that the whole room seemed to shrink, as if she were viewing it through the wrong end of a telescope. She closed her eyes.
This can’t be happening.

“At this point,” the doctor was saying when she opened her eyes, “it’s impossible to make a prognosis.”

“But can it be treated?” Lewis asked.

The doctor licked his lips, his eyes scared and somber. Quinn could tell he was thinking hard about how to phrase his answer, and she knew that if he had the power to disappear at that moment, to slip through his own portal, he would. “Sometimes,” he said. “But I’ll be honest with you. This is a very serious condition. On the other hand, an encephalocele in the frontal region, where it appears with your baby, is more treatable than one in the posterior region.”

“Treatable how?” Lewis asked. “Surgery?”

Dr. Peng nodded. “Sometimes surgery can be performed either shortly after birth or even several years later, depending upon the circumstances. The surgeon repairs the damaged area and closes up the abnormal opening.”

“What about brain damage?” Lewis asked.

“I understand you have a lot of questions,” Dr. Peng said. “Let’s wait until Dr. Bernard arrives and we’ll discuss it further, figure out a game plan.” He turned to Quinn. “Do you want to sit up while we wait for her?”

She nodded, and Jeanette placed a towel over the gel on her stomach while Lewis helped her to sit up.

“This could be a mistake, right?” Quinn said. “I mean, you could be seeing shadows or something. I’ve heard about that happening.” She looked at Jeanette as she said it, hoping for a sympathetic nod. But the woman glanced down, avoiding Quinn’s gaze, and she knew.

ALONE AND AWAKE IN BED THAT NIGHT, QUINN STILL FELT emotionally anesthetized, her numbness now blocking even her cognitive functioning. There was something she’d meant to tell Lewis, but what was it? During their crisis-fueled dance of asking questions, making medical test appointments, and gathering information from whatever sources they could, Quinn and Lewis had successfully avoided talking about the big issues, such as whether they would consider terminating the pregnancy, and what it would be like to raise a disabled child. But there was something more immediate she kept reminding herself to bring up when she and Lewis were alone. Now she couldn’t remember what it was.

She looked at the clock. It was ten after one, and Lewis needed to get up at seven a.m. for work. He was, she knew, in the spare bedroom they used as a home office, researching “encephalocele” on the Internet.
Come back
, she willed him.
Come back to bed
. But nearly an hour later, when the anxiety nipping at the edges of her consciousness could no longer keep her awake, Lewis had still not returned. So she drifted off to sleep, remembering at last the words she had wanted to say to her husband all day:
The doctor said “
her skull.”
Her. It’s a girl, Lewis. Our baby daughter.

 

 

WHEN QUINN AWOKE in the darkness a few hours later, Lewis lay next to her, locked in the heavy breathing of deep sleep. It would be cruel to wake him, since he was only getting a few hours of sleep as it was, but she was burning to talk to him, to tell him what was racing through her mind. She just wanted to share her vision, to let him know that this abstract baby they were talking about was a girl, a tiny bundle who would be swaddled in pink-trimmed receiving blankets. If they aborted the pregnancy, or if the baby died in utero, or was stillborn, or lived a short while before being taken from them, they’d be mourning a daughter. And if she lived—fine or disabled or terribly sick—she’d be their little girl, Isaac’s baby sister, and they would love her fiercely.

She wondered if Lewis knew how much he’d love her. He would. Of that Quinn was sure.

She got out of bed and went into Isaac’s room. He was asleep, curled onto his side, his mouth open to compensate for a stuffy nose. His complexion looked bluish in the dim light seeping in from the window by his bed, and though she could hear the soft, steady burst of each exhale, she put the back of her hand by his mouth to feel his warm breath. She wanted to touch him, to stroke the soft hair over his ear, but she wouldn’t risk waking him. Instead, she leaned in, closed her eyes, and deeply inhaled off the top of his head. Sometime in the last year his infant smell had dissipated completely, replaced by another distinctly Isaac scent, barely discernible beneath the smell of shampoo, laundry detergent, pizza, Play-Doh, or whatever else he had gotten into on any particular day, but there. Always there.

Quinn’s brother, Hayden, had once teased her that women were much more animalistic than men. “I don’t know why you females are always insisting that guys are such beasts,” he had said. “There’s nothing more feral than the human mother. You’re all leaky messes, driven by hormones and scents and blood and breast milk. It’s a little disgusting, to tell you the truth.”

She had laughed and told him the only reason he thought women were so savage was because he wasn’t familiar enough with the heterosexual male. But Hayden had snorted, insisting that macho bravado was mere posturing, and that women were the true evolutionary throwbacks.

He was right, of course. There was something about motherhood that switched on the animal brain. She knew it the moment she took her first whiff off the top of Isaac’s newborn head. She was no different from a lioness or mother bear. When it came to their babies, they were sisters in ferocity.

Quinn padded her way down the hall to the home office, where Lewis had left the computer on. She tapped the space bar and the screen bounced to life, the Internet search page he had been reading reduced to a tab on the bottom. She clicked on it and the page opened on the screen to reveal photographs of horribly deformed children, huge tumors growing out the back of their heads, or worse, the front, contorting their small faces into monstrous parodies of human forms. Faces that weren’t faces at all. She quickly closed the page and collapsed into the chair.

This isn’t my baby
,
she thought. It can’t be. When the doctor had described the condition their baby had, he never mentioned that she’d look like some sort of monster.

My baby, a monster?

Quinn rose from the chair then and began pacing the perimeter of the room, repeating a single phrase in her head over and over, like a mantra: I can mother this child, I can mother this child. But all the while she pictured that escape hatch in the basement. Her heart pounded wildly.

Quinn stopped at the doorway and closed her eyes against the vision of that other life in which none of this was happening. She heard her husband stir.

“Hon?” he called out gently.

Quinn went into the bedroom and stood by the door.

“Are you okay?” he asked, lifting his head. “What’s wrong?”

When she didn’t answer he looked from her face down the center of her body, as if searching for a clue. His eyes reached her crotch and paused.

She knew what he was thinking, what he was hoping. Miscarriage.

“Quinn? What is it, honey?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I’m okay. Go back to sleep.”

“Were you online?”

She nodded.

“I’m sorry. I should have closed that tab.”

Quinn folded her arms. “You don’t need to protect me.”

“C’mere,” he said, putting his arms out as if a hug would make it all better. She didn’t move.

“I can mother this child,” she said out loud.

He adjusted his pillow and sat up. “You know . . . you’re not in this alone.”

“But you want me to have a miscarriage.”

“What?”

“Admit it. You want this to go away.”

“I don’t know
what
I want,” he said.

Didn’t he? Quinn folded her arms. “You’re not being honest,” she said.

“Are you?”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

He shook his head as if he shouldn’t have to explain it. “You don’t have to be strong one hundred percent of the time.”

Easy for him to say. How else could she be expected to get through this?

“All I’m saying is,” he continued, “it’s okay to have doubts.”

Doubts? She knew all about doubts. There wasn’t a day in her life that she didn’t wonder if she could have done something to prevent her mother’s death. Would it be the same with this baby? If she had an abortion, she could spend the rest of her life regretting it. She wouldn’t do it. She couldn’t. Quinn would save this baby as she hadn’t been able to save her mother.

She swallowed hard. “I have to do laundry,” she said.

“Now?”

“Go back to sleep. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

Quinn padded down two flights of stairs to the basement. She wasn’t going to slip through the portal. At least she didn’t think so. She just wanted to face it once and for all. To get a clear vision of what her escape hatch looked like.

Quinn flicked the light switch in the dim laundry room and the fluorescent overhead bulbs washed the room in clinical brightness. The hinged part of the contraption was waist level, and Quinn had to reach up to grasp the top of the ironing board. She pulled it slowly at first, just an inch away from the wall. She stopped, not sure if she wanted to proceed.

You’re just looking,
she told herself.
You’re not going to do anything. Just open the damned thing.

She pulled it another inch and the hinge groaned. Quinn realized then that she’d actually need some muscle if she was going to get it open. Was that a sign that she shouldn’t? That the thing wanted to be left alone?

Excuses,
she told herself.
Don’t be so fearful.

She tightened her grip and pulled hard. It budged less than an inch this time, and Quinn knew it could break if she forced it. She would need to oil the hardware before going any further. She turned, expecting to bolt up the stairs and into the garage, where Lewis kept a can of WD-40, but almost ran smack into Isaac, who stood before her in his rocket-ship pajamas. The sleeves were already two inches too short, and the sight of his narrow wrists exposed made her ache somewhere near her womb.

“My mouth hurts,” he said, his hand on his neck.

“You mean your throat?”

He nodded once and she felt his head. It was cool. “You probably just have a cold.”

Quinn knelt and folded Isaac into her arms. One of the very first things her obstetrician had told her when she tested positively for pregnancy was that she shouldn’t pick up her son.

“You’ll be tempted to,” Dr. Bernard, a mom herself, had said. “But he’s a big boy now and you have to think of the baby.”

It was a revelation to Quinn, who hadn’t considered that the new territory she was entering would require weighing the needs of one child against another. Could mothers really do that? Did they instinctively know which child needed them more at any given moment? Would
she
?

“Anything else hurt?” she whispered, smoothing Isaac’s hair.

“I don’t know.” He laid his head sleepily on her shoulder and she inhaled.

That smell. Quinn hugged him tighter, ready to pick him up. She closed her eyes and imagined climbing two flights of stairs, Isaac’s fifty-pound body pressed against hers. If she reached the top landing and felt a terrible cramping followed by ominous spotting and, ultimately, miscarriage, would anyone blame her? Of course not.
It wasn’t meant to be,
they’d all cluck.

“Let’s go upstairs,” she whispered to Isaac.

He hugged her tighter. “Carry me.”

Quinn didn’t respond.

“Mom?”

She released him and looked at his delicate face. “You’re a big boy,” she said. Then Quinn took his hand and they went upstairs together, side by side.

“YOU SURE YOU’RE OKAY?” LEWIS ASKED.

He was getting ready to leave for work and had offered to take all or part of the day off, but Quinn said she was fine. Besides, she would need him home tomorrow morning to come with her for the follow-up ultrasound, and she knew the business couldn’t spare him that long.

Like most people who owned their own companies, Lewis found it hard to take time off. Sure, he had staff who could run things, but as Quinn understood it, one crisis or another seemed to crop up every day, and his presence was required.

Lewis ran a family business he had inherited from his father, who had inherited it from
his
father. It was, essentially, a fleet of New York City medallion taxicabs, though the way the cars were owned and operated bore little resemblance to the business his grandfather had run. Over the years, skyrocketing insurance and gasoline prices had had such a devastating impact on the business that most owners had been forced to sell out, leaving few fleets in operation. Lewis’s father—who had more perseverance in business than in his own marriage, which he had walked out on when Lewis was five—had hung in through near bankruptcy. Now, with the value of each medallion exceeding the price of most middleclass homes, it had turned lucrative indeed. Lewis’s skills were well suited to the day-to-day operations, which required near-constant innovation, not to mention an uncanny ability to see straight through to a person’s character. The latter was particularly helpful when job applicants came from all corners of the globe, bearing exotic cultural differences.

It was the taxi business that had first brought Lewis and Quinn together almost ten years before. She was living with Eugene then, and he had come home apoplectic about having left his briefcase behind in a taxi. Quinn spent an hour trying to calm him down, jotting down notes as she tried to piece together what was in the briefcase so that she could take steps to make replacements. Her sense of order and attention to details usually had a calming effect on Eugene, who was overwhelmed by life’s chaos. This latest incident, though, was proving tough. Until she could recover or replace everything in that briefcase, he’d be a mess. She sat on the couch, a writing pad on her knee, as he paced.