A Hope for Emily

Thinking about that doesn’t hurt as much as it used to, and I wonder if that’s because I came to Italy. No matter the treatment’s result, or lack of it, this trip hasn’t been a waste. It’s brought me acceptance and a form of peace that I can see on the horizon even if I can’t quite feel it yet. It’s brought me closer to James, as well as closer to Eva. It’s brought me a strange, new sort of hope.

And it’s brought me to this moment, where I can brush Emily’s hair from her eyes and kiss her cheek. “Baby girl,” I say, with all the love in my voice. “It’s time to go home.”

*

Dear Bean,

* * *

Today is your third birthday! Three years old and full of spit and fire! I love your spirit, Bean. I love the person you are becoming.

* * *

So let me see, what are some things you like at just turned three? Well you love princess pink, of course. That practically goes without saying. You love graham crackers and play dough and dancing to Rod Stewart—still a favorite!

* * *

You’re just starting to talk in complete sentences, and you screw your forehead up when you do it, as if it takes an immense amount of concentration, and then this look of incredulous delight passes over your face when you manage it, like you’ve just discovered quantum physics or rocket science. You’re brilliant, Bean. You have a little lisp that I love. I don’t ever want it to go away.

* * *

Yet I know it will, and you’ll start speaking properly, and putting more and more words together, and even though I’m so excited for all that, I almost can’t bear it. I want you to stay exactly as you are, Bean, because you’re perfect.

* * *

Love,

Mama

26

Eva

It is raining when we land in Boston, a misty drizzle that reminds me of walking through a sprinkler. It has been the strangest and saddest forty-eight hours, and I don’t know how to feel about anything.

James and I haven’t talked, not properly. I knew it wasn’t the time or place, and so I kept myself in the background while he spent time with Emily and Rachel.

When he came back to the guesthouse the day after he arrived, looking so weary and forlorn, he told me that Dr. Rossi had said the treatment wasn’t working and Rachel had agreed it was time to go home.

“Oh, James.” I couldn’t say anything else and I didn’t need to. James reached out and hugged me, and I realized I couldn’t remember the last time we’d actually touched. It felt so good, being back in his arms.

“I’m sorry,” I said, hoping he knew I meant for more than the news he’d just given, and James just nodded,

his arms still around me. There would be time to talk later. Too much time, perhaps.

Rachel has been quiet and distant since we started the journey back to Boston, lost in her own world, and I’ve let her be, sensing she needs her space. This time she barely seems aware of the stares in the airport, the whispers in the plane as Emily, buckled onto a stretcher, is boarded into the cleared section in the back.

We were lucky to get a passage so quickly; sometimes the wait for commercial travel with a stretcher can be as long as two weeks. It makes me wonder who else needed these cleared seats, the space for a stretcher. Who else was gambling everything on hope, desperate to get somewhere?

Back in Boston, Rachel travels in the ambulance with Emily, to see her settled back at the palliative care unit. James takes a cab to help on the other end, and I take our car home. Everything feels as if it is ending, and yet this life is in me, demanding to be acknowledged and known.

I’ve started to show just the tiniest bit, the smallest, slightest of bumps, bigger than I was at this stage last time. Last time. I know I need to tell James about that. I need to tell him so much, and I hope, I pray, we’ll be stronger for it. But even if we aren’t, I know I need to speak the truth.

I need to speak the truth to myself, the truth I’ve been hiding from for so long. Since finding out I am pregnant, since telling Rachel about everything, I’ve realized what I’ve been doing all these years. How I’ve been tricking myself into believing that if I get pregnant, if I carry a baby to term, I’ll somehow make up for my lost daughter. I’ll have balanced some invisible set of scales that I didn’t even realize existed in my own mind.

But of course that’s not going to happen, just as Rachel having another child would never make up for losing Emily. It’s so obvious, such basic psychology 101—if someone had told me that’s what I was doing, I would have laughed at them. Sneered, even.

Of course I know you can’t replace a child. Everybody knows that.