When It All Falls Apart (Book One) (8 page)

“Sweetie, don’t worry. Daddy is going to be back really quickly. I promise it’s going to be okay,” he said.

She reached out to grab his arm, the wires getting tangled from her movements, sobbing. “Daddy, please, don’t leave me. Please.”

We’d reached the room and the nurse was standing in the doorway expectantly. David turned to face me, shrugging his shoulders. Of course she wanted David. She always wanted him.

“Okay, I guess I’ll go then.” I forced a smile.

I kissed them both quickly on their cheeks and was gone. I fumed as I drove. She’d cried out for David in front of all the nurses and doctors. They’d all heard it and I knew what they were thinking. They were wondering what little girl wouldn’t want her mom to be with her when she was sick. I imagined they were behind their desks at the nurse’s station gossiping about it. I knew none of them would look at me the same again. Something similar had happened a few months ago when Emma and Rori were playing together and I knew Robin still hadn’t forgotten it even though she never brought it up. I was sure they’d look at me the way she had.

It had happened during one of our weekend play dates. Emma and Rori loved to play together. Emma was only two months older than Rori so they’d known each other since they were infants. Robin and I had been thrilled to be pregnant at the same time and excited for them to grow up together. Most people who lived in Los Angeles were transplants and we were no different. My family was scattered across the country and all of Robin’s were in the Midwest. Emma and Rori were as comfortable with each other as siblings and recently they’d even started pretending they were. When we’d go out to dinner or take them for walks, they would giggle and tell people they were sisters even though they looked nothing alike. They couldn’t have been more opposite. Emma was a perfect combination of Trey and Robin’s genes. She had the blond hair of Robin and the green eyes of Trey. Her pale skin and defined bone structure coupled with pale skin made her look like an oversized doll. Unlike Emma’s ivory skin, Rori’s olive complexion mirrored mine just like her deep brown eyes. Whereas Emma was small and dainty, Rori was large boned and gangly—a body that would take years to grow into. No one ever believed their stories about being sisters, but people humored them with smiles and questions.

Our families got together all of the time. A weekend rarely went by that we didn’t see each other at least once. We were as comfortable at each other’s houses as we were our own. Robin and I knew how lucky we were that our husbands got along so well since it was rare to find couples where both sides of the dyad liked each other.

We’d been at Robin’s hanging out and grilling steaks on the barbecue. The men were hovered over the grill drinking beer and discussing which basketball team they thought was going to end up in the final four. They were already waging their bets. Trey was as big of a sports fanatic as David and the two never tired of talking about sports. Robin and I were off to the side, sipping red wine on their new patio furniture while we watched Emma and Rori zoom up and down the concrete slab leading up to Robin’s driveway. Emma was on her new Razor scooter while Rori struggled to ride Emma’s training wheel bike with the long flowing pink streamers coming out of the handlebars. Rori was clumsy like me and having a tough time coordinating the pedals with any productive movement so it was no surprise when she took a tumble. She crashed down onto the concrete and let out a wail when she saw blood coming out of her knee. She was tough when she got hurt except if blood was involved. She completely lost it if there was even so much of a trickle.

I jumped out of my seat and ran to scoop up Rori’s crumpled body. She pushed me away. “Get away from me, Mommy. I want Daddy.” She screamed. She wiggled and pulled away from me in my arms, frantically struggling to get out of my arms and then she screamed it again, louder this time. “Get away from me, Mommy! I want Daddy!”

I turned to look at Robin who had automatically jumped up with me when Rori fell and was standing behind me. She was looking at me curiously with her face wrinkled up. She caught my eye and quickly changed her face to one of sympathy. “Sometimes they just want their dads,” she said, but her voice was forced and awkward.

David came running over and Rori easily collapsed into his arms as he wrapped them around her. “It’s okay, sweetie. You’re alright,” he cooed.

Within minutes she was smiling again and skipping off to the grill to be his helper calling after Emma to follow her. She giggled as he picked her up and threw her over his shoulders as if she weighed nothing. Robin and I took our seats again.

Fucking brat.

I tried not to think of her that way, but sometimes I couldn’t help it. Why did she insist on embarrassing me? Why did she always have to make me look like such an idiot? Robin had immediately started chattering away about the latest sale at the Pottery Barn as if nothing had happened, but I knew something had shifted between us that day. She had wondered the same thing I knew the nurses were asking about me now––what kind of a mother was I?

I didn’t know. I’d asked myself the same question on more than one occasion. I didn’t understand why I seemed to be such a terrible mom because it wasn’t as if I hadn’t wanted kids. The opposite was true. I’d wanted to be a mom from as far back as I could remember, but I had never counted on having a daughter who seemed completely indifferent to me. Nothing had happened how it was supposed to happen.

I wanted to take a long shower before heading back to the hospital. The sterility of the hospital made me feel dirty, but I knew I didn’t have time to wash it off. Rori was going to expect Puppy as soon as she was finished. I pushed my ruminations aside and focused on the task at hand.

By the time I got back to the hospital, Rori’s preparatory surgery was complete and she was sleeping peacefully back in her hospital room. David was by her side holding her hand. I placed Puppy on her chest.

“How’d it go?” I asked.

“Really well, surprisingly. They numbed her up pretty good and it only lasted like five minutes. She was sleeping again by the time we got back to the room.” He handed me a cup of coffee with the familiar Starbucks logo on the side. “The nurses told me there’s a Starbucks on the 2
^nd
floor connecting the two sides of the hospital. I figured you’d need this.”

I smiled. “Thanks, hon.”

Before I had a chance to take a sip, there was a knock at our door. Everyone always knocked before coming in, but it was more of a formality than anything because they were always through the door before we had a chance to invite them in. Dr. Koven came through first followed by two men and one woman. I didn’t know what I’d expected the geneticists to look like but I hadn’t expected them to look so young. They looked like they were barely out of college. The two men looked like the kind of people who had grown up sitting in front of computers all day playing video games. The woman was small and wispy. She looked like she was jumping out of her skin even though she was standing still and her eyes darted around the room taking everything in.

“Let me begin by introducing myself. I’m Dr. Wilcox, the head of pediatric genetics at UCLA.” He stuck out his hand to me and then David. I glanced at his badge and noticed he had an M.D. and a Ph.D. behind his name. I’d never seen so many letters behind one name.

“You have an M.D. and a Ph.D.?” I asked.

He smiled easily. “Yep. Did my Ph.D. in molecular biology first. Well, I was actually finishing up my Ph.D. while I was in med school.”

He was the first genius I’d ever met. He’d probably skipped high school and gone straight to college. His long hair was orange and curly and he tucked it behind his ears constantly. He reminded me of Carrot Top except with a mousey face. Unlike Dr. Koven, he wasn’t wearing a white lab coat. He was dressed in regular business casual clothes. I followed his worn khakis down to his black Converse shoes.

The other man was a tall Black man who towered over him. He wore a collar shirt buttoned up to his neck. He stuck out his hand next. His hands were soft and nails neatly clipped as if he had recently gotten a manicure, but he had a firm hand shake.

“I’m Dr. Martin. I’m one of the fellows on Dr. Wilcox’s team.” He pointed to the antsy woman who had taken up a position behind Dr. Wilcox and was devouring her fingernails. “This is Dr. Hettinger. She’s a second year resident.” The woman barely looked up at us before looking away.

Dr. Koven was busy bringing chairs into the room. It was going to be a long meeting because none of the other doctors or nurses brought anything to sit on when they met with us. The already small room grew smaller. The three of them launched into gathering a detailed family history as if they were writing a novel on our family genealogy rather than trying to figure out what was wrong with Rori. They took out a pencil and paper and began drawing an extensive family tree beginning with both of our great grandparents trickling all the way down to Rori.

It wasn’t as if our family tree was healthy. We’d had our share of disease and illnesses. David’s parents had both died of cancer a few years back. His side was littered with alcoholics and mental illness and he’d had a cousin who’d committed suicide when he was 22. Nearly half of the women in his family had battled breast cancer and those in the far back lineage hadn’t survived it, but most in recent years had.

My family tree wasn’t as full of illness as David’s although I had a long history of heart disease which took lots of the men as victims. I couldn’t give them much information about my father’s side because I didn’t have it. My parents had divorced when I was six years old after my father left my mother for another woman. Even though we had illnesses and disorders, there was nothing in our genes remotely related to kidneys or metabolic disorders.

They drilled us with questions, taking turns being the one to do the asking. Sometimes they asked us the same question twice just in a different way and I felt more like we were being interrogated than undergoing a medical evaluation. It was odd. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would lie about their family history. Would any parent cover up something that could possibly help their child?

Dr. Wilcox flipped through his notes. “I see that you guys did a series of IVF treatments? Did you have any type of genetic testing done?”

We did. We’d gotten genetic testing prior to starting our first round of IVF. I wanted to be one hundred percent certain there wasn’t anything medically wrong with either of us preventing us from getting pregnant before we sank so much money into IVF. I also wanted to make sure neither of has had any genetic disorders we could potentially pass on to our children.

“Dr. Keene was our fertility specialist. He was the one that completed all of the testing.” I answered.

“Did anything unusual come up on your genetic testing?”

“Not really. I mean each of us had things that were recessive, but neither of us had anything we could give to our children.” I said.

“Would you mind if we got those records from Dr. Keene? It would really help us narrow down which tests we want to do with you. I’m not sure if Dr. Koven explained this to you or not, but we’ll be drawing blood from both of you today as well as Rori. We’re going to do a full genetic panel on both of you and her. If we know the tests that you’ve already had then it will narrow the net we have to throw.” Dr. Wilcox explained.

David and I nodded. They could look at anything they needed to in order to help Rori. Dr. Hettinger handed us a release to sign for Dr. Keene and we scribbled our names on the designated lines. After our family tree, they’d shifted to gathering the most extensive and painstakingly long history of Rori’s development beginning with pregnancy. Nearly three hours had passed by the time we were finished with the evaluation. David and I breathed a sigh of relief when they finally left.

“Oh my God, that was exhausting!” he said, slouching down in his chair to lean his head on the back of it.

“Right? Totally crazy. I think we spent half an hour just describing the color and texture of her poop.”

David burst out laughing and it opened up the entire room, lifting the tension. I could breathe without feeling as if I’d choke on the air. He reached over and grabbed my hand, pulling me close to him, and looking into my eyes.

“I love you, Celeste.”

My heart swelled. I never tired of hearing him say it and never would.

“I love you, too, David.”

T
he next few days were excruciating. Time stood still. It felt like it did in the early days when David and I would sit by Rori’s bassinet watching her sleep. She wasn’t responding to dialysis and grew more and more unresponsive each day, slipping further and further away from us. She went through three rounds of dialysis every day and she no longer even opened her eyes when they hooked her up to the machine. She’d gone into a ketoacidotic coma. She still cried without any tears and she’d given up talking. She just moaned. She wasn’t eating and her skin had turned from yellow to a murky green.

It was the most time David and I had spent together alone since Rori had been born. We didn’t have any distractions besides the constant text messages and emails coming in from our family and friends. Our phones buzzed constantly with people asking for updates until we finally turned them off because there was nothing new to report and we got tired of tapping out the same response over and over again.

We were still waiting for the blood tests to come back because they’d been sent out to different specialized labs all over the country. Dr. Koven and Dr. Wilcox warned us she might have an autoimmune disorder that was responsible for her organ failure so Rori wasn’t allowed to have any visitors. Until they had ruled it out, they didn’t want to take the chance of exposing her already fragile system to any possible viruses other people might carry if they came to see her. Dr. Koven had given us strict instructions to monitor our own health and if we started to feel sick then we were supposed leave the hospital immediately until we felt better. She’d assured us that as hard as it would be to leave Rori, it was better for her health if we didn’t expose her. We’d both had a flu shot yesterday to be safe, but also to feel like we were doing something productive.