21. Wolf in the Blood
After the amnio, the pregnancy went smoothly. Anita’s belly steadily swelled. She loved feeling the baby stretch and roll inside her, like a dog sleeping in the sun. She lolled and watched crap TV, Love Connection, the most mindless insipid things she could find. She didn’t read a book or even a magazine. She didn’t water the plants; she let them all die.
She lay in the sun like a plant herself.
She had worked through the first half the pregnancy but they decided she would take a leave of absence for the spring semester, to rest and prepare for the baby. They did the math; they could afford it if they lived cheaply. She needed to avoid the stress. They cut back on everything nonessential, created a cocoon of calm.
Then they got a call from their landlady, an old woman named Loretta who had built their house back in the sixties. Instinctively Anita was afraid Loretta would want to raise the rent, or sell the house, and they would have to move. She realized she had come to love the place; she leaned on it like a crutch, she breathed it like oxygen. Eva was there, in the air, in the earth. But in an extraordinary turn of fortune, Loretta did want to sell the house –– to them. She liked David and Anita. She liked to think of them living up there, collecting rocks and learning the names of plants. She liked to think of a child living there. She didn't want to deal with brokers. She didn't want somebody to come in and tear the house down and build a “monstrosity,” as she put it. She would give them terms herself that would keep their monthly payment the about the same as their rent. She didn't want to deal with bankers.
It was hard to believe. But Loretta was dead serious.
As the papers were drawn up, they began to imagine, tentatively, a future. They went for long walks in the mountains, talked about everything, memories, forests, rivers, all the things they loved as children. They talked about putting in a swingset, a vegetable garden, an orange tree.
Happiness slipped in like streaks of morning sunlight on the grass.
Then the nurse from the rheumatologist’s office called.
Her voice was bright, chirpy. She would put the doctor on the phone.
The blood tests had come back. Lupus anti-coagulant, anti-nuclear antibody, anti-cardiolipin antibody, the doctor said.
Wolf in the blood had awakened.
We sit across from the rheumatologist, small in our chairs, his desk huge and dark. Maybe a 50% chance of having a healthy baby, he says.
Two people don’t deserve––
In grief, the wolves lie down with you and rest.
In grief you let go of the desire for happiness: you step across the line into the other world: the world beyond fear, the world of crushed dreams.
The world of crushed dreams is oddly beautiful; full of light that fades, but then comes again; full of flowers that wilt, clouds that gather, let fall their rain, and dissolve. In this world everything changes, everything is moving, everything is beautiful, and nothing is what you had wanted it to be. Your child is taken away. Your house burns down. Your mother is lost in pieces. Your dreams are crushed, and love flows in to take their place.
When you cross back into the ordinary world, the world where you desire to get the things you want, love scatters: fears and anxieties sprout like dandelions, everywhere, everywhere. Aggression flares up, frustration, irritation. Dreams swell and multiply, and as dreams swell, the world withdraws. Light doesn’t quite reach your eyes, the coolness of water can’t reach your tongue. Love becomes unsimple, crazed with little cracks in all directions.
You chase your dreams, and they slip away, feinting, dodging, dissolving in your grasp.
And you turn and the wolf is upon you.
Dr. Hussein sends us out to repeat the tests. He is not buying it, this 50% thing. So far the baby looks fine. I can tell he is angry at the rheumatologist. I love him for that. Obediently we enter the hospital –- not the Death Star this time, but the university hospital where Dr. Hussein teaches. Obediently we descend to the basement, follow the maze of halls to the lab. Obediently I wait for the nurse to draw my tainted blood.
We sit in the small windowless waiting room, filling out forms, our minds a maze of fears.
The waiting room is small, claustrophobic. The floor is gray, the chairs vinyl, worn. There is a small window over the receptionist’s desk with a sliding panel of rippled glass, clouded, gray.
Then the door to the hallway opens, and a woman walks in, carrying a toddler and holding a little girl by the hand.
The toddler has two angry red scars that cross his skull, big stitch marks visible through his pale shaven hair. The little girl sits down so quietly. She has two neat pigtails, a pink t-shirt with a butterfly embroidered on the front, pink and green flowered shorts. Her little knees are pale and thin. The woman speaks to the person behind the desk, tells her this is Timothy here for his blood tests. They speak quietly; the words “oncologist” and “second surgery” are audible. Then she turns and love fills the room.
I have to this day never seen anything like it.
An ordinary brown-haired woman, someone you would never look twice at. She turns and love fills the sky (although there is no sky to be seen in this basement room.) There’s my good girl, she says to her daughter. David and I look at her.
God bless her, we both think, in unison, although neither of us believes in God.
It is only later that I realize what it is: this unassuming woman lives in the other world. She is going about her business, driving her car, buying groceries, keeping appointments, raising her children, in the world of crushed dreams, of love beyond fear.
We are now back in the ordinary world, grasping at ordinary happiness again. For her that’s not an option. For her the worst has happened, and is still happening. Her child is alive, suffering, possibly dying, slowly, over a period of years; and as he suffers her healthy child must suffer too. Their life is in ruins. They stand on the rubble of it, unsheltered. Her crushed dreams remain crushed. So she moves in love.
Timothy is called back for his blood draw and the woman disappears through the door with him. We’ll be back in a minute, she says to her daughter as she leaves her.
There’s my good girl.
The little girl sits, knees together, holding on to the edge of her chair, listening to the sound of her brother crying behind the gray doors. She flinches when the needle sticks him; she feels it. She knows.
That night as the sun goes down we go for a long walk in the mountains. We'll get our test results in three days. Till then we have to wait. The thought of losing another child, of maybe losing child after child, replays in my brain, like wave after wave, carrying me back to the shore of the other world.
The only way to survive this is to go back there.
To to lie down with the wolves, to offer myself to them, gently.
I look at the ridgelines, one layered over the other, ridge after ridge, falling randomly to the sea, each line familiar as a face. The light touches each of them so gently before leaving, lining them with gold. And then shadow, and then gone.
The world is made of fallen children.
The world is Pietá: mother, with all her fallen children in her arms.
And motherlove is everywhere, it is all around me, it fills the sky.
Remember this, I think.
And then, that night, I sleep.