16
Brooke’s health continued to improve over the next several weeks. She put on weight she’d lost months ago, and her color and stamina grew by the day. Her doctors weren’t quite sure why she was doing so well. Her ICU team suggested the massive doses of antibiotics may have healed hidden infections that were straining her already strained body. Her oncologist wondered if the early doses of the test drug had stimulated her immune system and prescribed tests and bloodwork to document his theory. Brooke declined all additional testing till her return from their trip, lest those tests cause side effects or provide information that might dissuade her from going. Leah, in her frequent phone check-ins, had her own certain if unprovable explanation for Brooke’s amazing reversal—she’d decided to do it, and set the trip as a near-term goal to justify all the effort.
Whatever the reasons, an apparently healthy and beaming Brooke dressed in a canary sundress and wearing the sun bonnet Jodie had sent her from the trip to Richmond as a talisman of bon voyage, and accompanied by the dutiful Dave weighed down with carryon shoulder bags, waved excitedly as the two of them paused before entering the jet way for their flight to San Francisco connecting to Bora Bora on the video taken by Davey and sent as an e-mail attachment to all the family. That video marked the end to direct contact with Brooke for the duration of their twenty-day trip, as she forbade cellphone communication—“Do you know what they want to charge per minute?”—and refused to take a laptop or buy computer minutes—“When I’m at the world’s most beautiful beach, I’m only at the beach!” When one of the boys asked, “How will we know you arrived safely?” Brooke replied, “We’ll send you a postcard.”
So the family in general, and Leah, Jodie, and Penni in particular, were excused from active worry over Brooke’s health and prognosis. With her out of contact half a world away, they returned their attention to lives they’d suspended, or more or less so, since their Easter weekend gathering on Bogue Beach at the cottage at the end of the strand with its widow’s walk view over land and sea.
Normal Lives
Penni lay on her back on the plush grass-green (and all natural fiber) carpet of the nursery staring up at the walls she’d painted herself with the help of stencil kits bought over the Internet. The walls were a unified panorama of an evergreen forest merging into deciduous woods thinning to a broad open meadow rolling down to a pond in the middle distance on the wall where the crib would be. She’d add the animals later. The ceiling above had been pure azure blue with a few fluffy white clouds floating harmlessly past. But on finishing the sky two weeks ago, she’d realized it wasn’t broad enough in scope for her child to come. So she’d searched high and low for a kit that would make it something more, make it a bigger but not threatening sky. She’d not found any such pre-packaged kit. But in her searching she’d discovered a captivating painting of a sky just before sunrise with the morning star glowing bright above a band of gold that merged into the remains of night, stars sprayed across a black background, a crescent moon setting in the west. She’d had the picture electronically enlarged to the size of the ceiling and laid out on a grid of two-foot square tracings. Throughout the process she frequently found herself thinking of Jodie and wishing she had her sister’s artistic talent. There were a few times when she wished Jodie was there to help in the painting and share in the excitement. But in those moments she would end up frowning, remembering how cruelly Jodie had greeted the news of her pregnancy. Though she appreciated Jodie’s numerous attempts to undo that initial reaction, it was still what she first recalled and felt in the pit of her stomach when thinking of Jodie and the niece (or nephew) she would soon have.
But thoughts of Jodie were far from her mind as she lay on her back staring up at the artificial morning sky with the real late afternoon sun sneaking around the building across the alley and pouring through the room’s lone window surrounded by the trees in full leaf of her painted woods. Growing up in an upscale development with its large houses wedged onto tiny lots, she’d had little exposure to anything that hadn’t been shaped many times over by human hand and machine. Even the park where Mom sometimes drove them for “free” play had sculpted walks, manicured lawns, and leaves blown into piles and sucked up by maintenance crews almost as soon as they fell. She’d never questioned this sterilized concrete and asphalt world while growing up, nor throughout college and grad school. She’d always lived in or near cities and took for granted human dominance in and over the world. Her degree in urban planning acknowledged and affirmed that ordering. Though intellectually she knew of broader visions of order—hadn’t they been required to take a full year of Natural Ecology?—she’d never felt the need to engage them.
Until she became pregnant. Now the old urban-suburban order felt artificial and restrictive. She dreaded the idea of bringing her child into an urban environment to be raised by parents locked into that tradition and constraint. She saw examples of this syndrome every day at Morningcare as mothers dressed for their narrow slots in the urban order hurriedly dropped off their similarly prepped pre-schoolers, usually rushing off without a good-bye hug or kiss. And those children would almost surely grow up like her, knowing little else, imagining nothing better.
But not her daughter, not into a life without trees grown from a seed that fell at random, without hedgerows of thorny vines and woodchuck hummocks, without creeks meandering to the will of something other than a site plan and a bulldozer’s blade. Her vision of such a world currently came from books and the Internet (it was amazing the live feeds that were out there) and the occasional field trips or vacation destinations (themselves sculpted and ordered in their own way—by the price and the trip’s planner), and as such was nowhere near instinctive. And perhaps for her it would never be anything more than viewed from outside, separate. But not so for her child. She would find a way to give her a bigger world and a questing heart. It would have to start in the city; Randall’s residency mandated that. But it would not end there. In the meantime, she would find ways to expose her child to the expanse of the world she’d be born into, the vastness of life.
She looked from the painted sky to the gentle rise of her stomach beneath the peasant smock and the yoga pants’ elastic waist. She’d convinced herself about a week ago that the heartbeat she saw on the ultrasound’s monitor and heard with Randall’s stethoscope she could feel if she got quiet enough and blocked out her own heart’s adamant pulse. It was still strange to think of another creature with a heartbeat living inside of her. She saw the condition as both an honor and a fright. What if she were to fail in her life sustenance of this creature? Or what if it was to consume her? She tamped down these irrationalities with thoughts of the little girl to come—forth from God but not yet forth from her body (that really was scary to contemplate). The child in her dreaming didn’t look like anyone she knew—fair skin, blond curls, an infectious giggle. She was happy for the vision to be generic. If she looked like someone she knew, then she would be real; and if she were real, then she would carry needs Penni wasn’t yet prepared to meet. It was fine to deal in abstractions—painted skies and two-dimensional forests. It would be quite another thing to embrace the reality of a dependent with a hungering life.
By then the real day around her had turned to dusk. The nursery was suffused in a fading amber glow. Her hands slid down along her flanks and up under the scalloped edges of the smock. Her fingers met atop the swelling of her uterus that seemed to have grown even since this morning when she’d checked her profile in the mirror. What did that life see? She knew the eyes had not yet formed. What did it perceive in the darkness and the quiet? Could it feel the pulse of her heart, the coursing of blood through her veins? Did it sense the transfer of nutrients, of life itself, through the developing cord? Or was it alone in its oblivion?
She gently massaged her abdomen as they’d told her to do to stretch her skin and ease her cramps. She wondered if the fetus could feel that—the rhythmic strokes of her fingers just millimeters from its beating heart
. Would it make that heart beat faster or slower, excite or ease it? The opportunity and the responsibility were boundless.
To lift that burden, her fingers found their way under her pants’ waist and downward to where the new rise over her uterus leveled off to her former body’s flattened plain. Her fingers eased under the band of her panties to the hardened mound and its thatch of soft thin hair then slid to either side of that mound to the valleys leading to her fork, to the start and the end of that which was growing inside her.
“I figured you’d be in here,” Randall said from above.
“Mmmm,” she cooed, her eyes closed.
“Mind if I join you?”
“Unh-unh.”
And her body was suddenly awash with his touch—the trailing of fingertips, the brush of lips, the coursing of tongue, the gentle nuzzling of smooth cheek across the rise of her uterus, the taut skin of her stomach, her sensitive breasts, her panting mouth. He greeted her moans with cooing assurances of his own as he enveloped her body, took her unto himself.