Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, Sweet Prince. And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
(Shakespeare’s Hamlet)
We almost skipped the eighteen-week ultrasound.
The amniocentesis results had come back two weeks earlier giving the all clear. Despite the thickened nuchal fold in the first trimester scan, no problems in the chromosomes. Looked like a healthy baby boy.
They’ll just give us something else to worry about while we’re at your mom’s, your father had said. I think we should skip it. Plus, there was the wedding on Saturday—maybe we could head west a day early, leave your sister with Grandma, and spend a relaxing afternoon browsing bookstores.
What could an ultrasound tell us that the amnio had not?
I was a woman brought low by three months of nausea and we were both worn ragged from worry. But then I decided we should go. Tempting every god who ever swirled around this green, green earth, I claimed this one would be fun, a chance to get a good look at you—we’d bring a video tape! For posterity! Maybe Baby #2 wouldn’t get a baby book like his sister, but Ella didn’t have a womb video.
I convinced your father to keep the appointment and we brought Ella along. She was in the room with us when it all came down. We’d promised her a late breakfast at Biscuits, the Mexican breakfast place across the street—hashbrowns and guacamole. Her favorites.
The waiting room was empty, although now I imagine Conrad’s two women, sitting in the corner, knitting black wool. Why didn’t I see them there? Why hadn’t I heard their needles clicking? We didn’t have to wait long. Five minutes tops. Now I wish I could go back and buy half an hour more.
The ultrasound room was dim, high tech, level two. Ella got the chair by the door, some paper and markers. I climbed onto the tilted table facing the monitor, folded down my pants, and poked you up and out. Your father took a seat by my head.
The ultrasound technician was Julie, the same one we’d had all along. Two kids. Emma, so close to Ella, and a little boy. . . Sam? Maybe. Something classic. We were springing into the future, talking about boy names. I remember that she said I go for the classic names. I liked Julie, a few years younger than me, sweet-faced with wavy brown hair and quick hands that could slide the ultrasound wand through the warm goo on my tight belly to find you, line up cursors, click keys, and take measurements, while still managing to track the screen, my face, and the keyboard with her eyes and seem attentive to us all.
She’d been there for the amnio, too, making sure the needle stayed clear of your little body (I couldn’t look). I remember when a missing digit seemed like a big deal, but oh, the parts of you, of me, I bargain away now in my darkest moments when trading a leg or an arm for a whole heart seems possible. After the amnio, after the stone-faced doctor had pulled off his gloves and left the room, Julie had been comforting. Her son had made a poor showing on the nuchal measurement, too—3.0 to our 3.4 and he was just fine. Perfectly normal.
We had talked some about the ways in which technology had outstripped our medical capacity to understand the information we gathered. When your father and I entered the world of prenatal testing—isn’t that what we do these days? test and test and test?—we didn’t know what we’d do. Our pro-life-leaning obstetricians said more than once, Well, if you know you wouldn’t terminate the pregnancy, then what’s the point of testing? But I disagreed, still do, with this logic. There are many reasons—to know, to be prepared, to be ready to intervene. And there’s the biggest reason of all: because we never know what we’ll do in a situation until we’re standing with our noses pressed up against it. We think we know, but we don’t. Until you’re the one who has to make the decision—and you’re making a decision no matter what you do, even if you do nothing at all—you do not know. We did not know. And when you think you’ve imagined every scenario, mind-painted all possibilities, consider the unimaginable. I’d never even heard of such a thing, I whispered, head shaking, hands shaking. I didn’t even know it was possible, I said to the doctor who performed the procedure four days after we learned what impossible means. (Procedure. Forgive me, Baby, I have no language here. Language is slipping away from me, like a yolk from its shell. No, no, too gentle a metaphor. Language has been sucked away. A vacuum. A war.) I didn’t even know it was possible, I said, and in response, this final doctor—a mother, like me, with sad eyes and steady hands—said two things (in what order I cannot recall because that time in Chicago has been encased in a kind of glass, a snow globe of shock):
That’s a good thing. You don’t want to know everything there is to worry about.
This baby’s fate was already written. She said this quietly as she unwrapped laminaria rods and handed them to the medical intern who was doing the insertion, giving my body the signal to open up and let you out. Too soon. I was looking at her over my draped right knee. The pain, rod after rod, intensified. The pain felt like labor. The two doctors marveled at my capacity to bear it. Can you give me a count? I asked. How many more? If I know what I’m in for, I can take it. And the doctor told me it would just be two more, but that turned out not to be the answer to my question. I had no idea what I was in for.
Wait. No. I have written this all wrong. This is not the story. I am lying. I am a terrible liar. I made it up. Let me try again. I’ve gone too far, way too far.
I could try bringing it back to Indiana, arching back in time, but after Julie, to the next office, later that same afternoon with the pediatric cardiologist. Your dad—I know you know this—is a gentle man, but he got mad at that cardiologist leaning into the ultrasound screen and then sketching your heart on scratch paper (scratch paper!), crossing out, drawing again, citing percentages for survival along the way. . . When you say “success,” your father said through a tight jaw, you’re not talking about his life, you’re just saying he wakes up from the surgery, right? The cardiologist nodded. So if everything works perfectly in every surgery, he still has half a heart, right? The doctor nodded again. This is a Catholic hospital, he reminded us. Your dad and I shook our heads. We shook and shook and we’re still shaking. With you, my Sweet Prince, the miracle had already happened and there was no hope for another. Nobody could give us hope for another. I lay on my back and stared at the white ceiling, the warm ultrasound gel thick and cooling on my exposed belly. You still inside. You kicked. I choked. My god. Oh my god. I pulled up onto my elbows to be closer to your dad. The cardiologist handed me a towel: You can clean yourself up.
Too far. Still too far. The cardiologist character is behaving badly. Instead, he should say, There has been a mistake. . . Yes! A mistake! Look! See? Here. Here is the other side of your baby’s heart. It was hiding in the shadow of your liver.
But he didn’t.
I need to stop it now, bring it back to the darkened room with Julie. Your sister has just drawn a car wash with green marker on a white sheet of paper. There are lots of soapy bubbles on her sheet, she tells us, and we watch you on the screen. Julie narrates, the tape rolls. Together we count and measure: brain, fingers, toes. You’re still measuring big. A week ahead, but your sister was big, too. I don’t move your due date in my head. I keep you on your proper date in the future: October 12th, the day our one body will become two.
Stop.
We never watch the change in Julie’s face when she gets to your heart. I never say. What? What is it? She never even has to tell us things don’t look quite right on the left side, but it’s not for her to say. We never meet that doctor, the one we’ve never even seen before, who walks into this story wearing a jean jacket under her stethoscope and has the nerve to tell us you have only half a heart. Just the right, not the left.
No. The story ends way before this, at least five minutes before, when Julie—her angel face beaming—pops out the tape and we pack it in our suitcase to show to your grandmother: our new baby boy. You with your beautiful, whole, blood-pumping heart.
Jill Christman's memoir, Darkroom: A Family Exposure, won the AWP Award Series in Creative Nonfiction, was first published by the University of Georgia Press in 2002, and will be reissued in paperback in Fall 2011. Recent essays appearing in River Teeth and Harpur Palate have been honored by Pushcart nominations and her writing has been published in Barrelhouse, Brevity, Descant, Literary Mama, Mississippi Review, Wondertime, and many other journals, magazines, and anthologies. She teaches creative nonfiction in Ashland University’ s low-residency MFA program and at Ball State University in Muncie where she lives with her husband, writer Mark Neely, and their two living children. She is hard at work finishing her second book, a memoir entitled Blue Baby Blue. “Nineteen Weeks and One Day” first appeared in Under the Sun. 21.1 (Summer 2007): pp. 81-84.
