A Perfect Life (32 page)

I grabbed her shawl—but I was too late, that's all I was left with. She spun away from me and hurried across the ice. She couldn't be serious, I thought. The Charles never froze completely, not even during a prolonged cold spell. The ice supported the desk, but that was near the far shore and who knew what lay between. I wanted to run and drag her back, but she was halfway across the ice. Besides, she was stronger than I was. What if we both fell in? What would happen to my baby? Better if I ran for help.

I glanced back toward the brownstones, not one of which was lit. Oh, what did that matter, disturbing someone's sleep! Still, it might be quicker if I flagged down a
cab. The driver could radio in for help. Storrow Drive was deserted, but there was traffic on the bridge. At the very least, I could keep an eye on Laurel.

I started running up the steps to the pedestrian overpass. I took the stairs two at a time. It occurred to me that my sister was mentally ill. A scene flashed through my mind—it was from that musical,
The King and I
. The king's unhappy concubine, Tuptim, choreographs her version of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
. The slave girl, Eliza, escapes across the ice. When Simon Legree tries to cross the same river, the Buddha calls out the sun so the wicked slavedriver falls through the ice and drowns. Was Laurel thinking about Eliza's dance across the ice? Did she think she had to make good on her promise to die young? None of this made sense, and the thought that my sister truly had suffered a breakdown frightened me as much as the probability of her plunging through the Charles.

I reached the bridge and stood there panting. I looked down. Laurel was three-quarters of the way between the Boston side of the river and the desk. The moon had disappeared, but the ice glowed pure white, as if it were lit from underneath, and the mere fact that it seemed possible to walk across something you usually couldn't walk across made me understand why my sister wanted to try. “Laurel!” I called down, but she was too far away to hear.

I don't have any memory of what happened next. I only know that I saw my sister vanish. I remember waving the shawl—I must have flagged down a cab. But by the time the driver had managed to call the police, by the time the divers got there, by the time they fished my sister's body from the Charles, it was far too late for any of us to save her.

I slept to avoid grieving for my sister. I slept to keep from thinking I was responsible for her death. If I had never developed a test for Valentine's, she wouldn't have learned she didn't have it. She might have kept living her reckless life forever, assuming she would come down with Valentine's but never developing the disease or dying. I allowed Willie to rouse me from my bed and nearly carry me to her funeral, then I crawled back in that same bed to avoid the memory of watching Willie and Ted and Karl Prince and Cruz lower Laurel's casket into its yawning grave, then watching my own hands as they helped the rabbi shovel some dirt on top.

I slept to avoid answering my father's calls and listening to him cry and rant and take the blame on himself when it should have remained mine alone. I slept as a reward for all the sleep I had given up working in the lab, and to forestall the overwhelming task of zeroing in on the gene, figuring out which protein it coded for, and trying to undo whatever damage that protein wreaked. Most of all, I slept to keep from fretting about the child inside my womb and
what I would do if I found out it was carrying the gene for Valentine's. The blessings of ordinary life seemed as fragile as the bones of that fetus inside me. Maybe, like Laurel, I had found the stamina and courage to work so hard for so long because I assumed I would die young and rest forever in the grave.

I went into the lab only when I could no longer force myself to sleep. I used the sun's glare as an excuse to shut the shade and block my view of the Charles. The river terrified me now. I kept imagining Laurel plunging through the ice, myself leaping in, some unnameable force dragging both of us down. I crossed the river only when Willie persuaded me to keep my appointment with the obstetrician Honey had picked out in Boston. As the Jeep neared the bridge—not the Longfellow, which I no longer could bear to cross, but the bridge near BU—I shut my eyes and counted. My throat tightened. I shook. Of all the rotten luck, traffic slowed to a stop and we sat on that bridge for so long I finally felt compelled to open my eyes and look down.

The water was no longer frozen, but I could somehow tell how very cold it still must be. A long-necked black bird I took to be a cormorant dove underwater. I tried to predict when and where it might surface, but the bird seemed to stay submerged too long for any creature to survive. I imagined Laurel's body among the weeds. I saw my mother's skeleton in a rotted dress from Weiss's. Why had they died and I hadn't? And my mother's brothers. And my grandfather. And those sufferers up in Maine. Why was I healthy
and they were not? And what about the children who had tested positive for the gene, and for whom, as Vic said, nothing could be done?

“I don't want to be here,” I said. “I don't want to be here!”

Willie thought I didn't want to stay on the bridge, so he honked his horn and swerved among all the stalled cars. I made it through the checkup. Then we returned to Cambridge by way of a third bridge, near Newton. He gunned the Jeep; I closed my eyes and hummed until we reached the other side. For the next several months, whenever I was scheduled for a checkup, this was the bridge we crossed and the method we used to cross it.

Willie worried about me, of course. But he had the sense not to say much. The night Laurel went through the ice, I called him from the police station and he hurried down to drive me back to my apartment, where I registered that he had stayed up for us, waiting, with a pan of cinnamon buns he had baked from scratch. When he understood what had happened, he wrapped the comforter around my shoulders and led me to bed. Then he moved in and took care of me. When I berated myself for not calling Laurel more often, not truly understanding what she was going through, he reminded me that my sister had been responsible for her own life. It wasn't my test that killed her. It was the way she had chosen to respond to the same genetic hand that fate had dealt me. He kept our refrigerator stocked with nutritious foods, cooked me breakfast and dinner, and used the blender to mix me frappés. When I cried, he rubbed my
back. He made sure I took my iron pills. Only once did he lose his patience, when the doctor put his stethoscope to my belly and I didn't seem to care.

“That's our child,” he said. “That's its heart, Jane. You've got to snap out of this.”

I promised him I would.

“When? When the kid's twenty? When you've missed the whole thing?”

My father seemed to suffer the same loss of zeal that I did. He surprised me by relinquishing the presidency of the foundation. He wanted, he said, to spend more time with Honey. But I suspected that, like me, he was giving in to grief and self-reproach. “My job's over now,” he said, a victory that entailed pretending that his son-in-law and Ted and his own unborn grandchild weren't still at risk.

Only Vic didn't stop work. One afternoon—I was in my fifth month—he called to tell me that he would be spending the next several weeks in Washington, setting up a committee to formulate guidelines for genetic testing, not only for Valentine's, but for all the diseases for which tests might be developed. This much I had predicted. But he shocked me by accepting Honey's request that he take over the Valentine's foundation until my father found the heart to resume his old post. Instead of switching to a line of research whose morality was unassailable, Vic was doubling down on his efforts to find the gene for Valentine's. There was no going back now, he said. The only solution lay in getting past this hopeless limbo we were in.

Vic's energy, his unwillingness to be crippled by the same doubt that had crippled me, made me all the more
tired. I couldn't bear his solicitude. He seemed to think I had gotten pregnant on purpose, in response to finding out that I didn't have the gene. Every time he saw me, he described another reward of giving birth. “It's a miracle,” he said portentously. “A child is the very definition of grace.”

I went in to the lab as infrequently as I could. Not that anyone I knew was there. Yosef had accepted a position as a salesman for a biological supply house. Susan was staying home, cramming for her LSATs. Lew was at McLean, recovering from another bout of manic depression. And Maureen was flying around the country giving seminars in the hope of landing a job. When I did go in, I spent my time complying with requests from other biologists that I send them copies of the probe. Everyone was racing to clone the gene. While the test for the marker required DNA from the patient's entire family, a test for the gene itself could be accomplished with blood from the patient alone. Even if I hadn't felt so sluggish, I would have needed years to achieve this.

My due date came and went. I began to think of my pregnancy as an experiment that had failed. I napped on the couch while Willie sat in the kitchen studying the annual reports of companies he might invest in. But my languor unnerved him. “We could drive to New Hampshire,” he said, an offer I declined, not wanting to give birth in a cabin in the woods with no running water.

“Babies have their own clocks,” Honey assured me. I could guess what it was costing her not to point out that she had begged me not to have a child with her son. “Willie came two months ahead of schedule. He was the teensiest
thing. The doctors told me he might not pull through. And now, well, just look at him—six feet four inches, and so healthy I can't think of the last time he had a sniffle.”

Healthy,
I thought. In the heartbeat of silence that followed, Honey, I was sure, was thinking the same thing.

My father was less optimistic. “Something's wrong,” he kept mumbling. “The kid's getting too big,” although I had put on less than twenty pounds. “Tell that doctor of yours to make the kid come out now.”

As it happened, my contractions started the day my regular obstetrician left town for Nantucket. The OB on call was a stern older woman with a face like a pie plate and a watch hanging around her neck upside down, so only she could read it. She was semiretired, and my regular obstetrician had warned us that Dr. Krook had “antiquated ideas.”

“You going to do the right thing by this gal?” she asked Willie, and even though we were planning on getting married, I was glad he didn't volunteer this information. A wave of cramps wrung my womb. I reached for his hand, panting, not to any rhythm—I hadn't had the heart to take the class—but in response to the ebb and flow of pain. The contraction subsided. Through blurry eyes I saw the obstetrician studying my chart. “Both of you have a history of Valentine's chorea in your families?”

I struggled to sit up, but Willie was already answering. “What do you propose we do about it now?”

The next contraction clenched my uterus. I gasped and leaned back. The obstetrician clocked the time. The fact that her watch was hanging upside down upset me terribly.

“All I meant was that two educated people such as yourselves ought to know better.”

And I thought as I lay there that it isn't always possible to know what “better” might mean. Maybe I had had a child because I had grown so tired of weighing the pros and cons of each option. Maybe I had had a child because, by the time my head was clear enough to reach a decision, the pregnancy seemed too complex an experiment to destroy. Or maybe I had had a child because I was sick to death of death and wanted to give my father something to live for. Or maybe I had had a child because tossing a coin had revealed what I wanted to do all along.

“Now push,” the doctor ordered. I didn't need to be told. I had no other desire but to push. Still, I held back. I would never have a child in my body again, never share this sensation so many women before me had known. “They wanted to put me under,” my mother said. “That's what they did back then. They put the mother to sleep so she wouldn't make any trouble. But I raised a fuss and told them, ‘Don't you dare. This is one moment I am not about to sleep through.'” My mother, Glori Weiss, had felt this same pain, this same suspense and exaltation, and perhaps this same worry that the child she already loved, the child she would undergo any torture to spare, might someday fall ill.

Then I couldn't keep from pushing and out my baby rushed on a wave of warmth.

“A girl,” the obstetrician announced. “Small. But she seems to be fine.”

One of the residents held her up. Her face was round and red, with a tuft of wet hair peaking from the crown. She looked like a beet from my mother's garden.

“And what's the baby's name?” the resident asked.

“Lila,” I said. “Lila Weiss Land.” I had intended to name her for my mother, but I was afraid of cursing her with my mother's bad luck. Besides, “Glori Land” sounded like some dopey doublespeak for heaven. No other member of our family had been blessed with both good health and a euphonious name. My father's father had run off when he was a boy, and his mother had been a shrew. That left only my mother's mother, Lillian, but “Lillie Land” sounded ridiculous. Then Willie took me for a walk through the Arnold Arboretum. The lilacs were in bloom. Lilac? I thought. No.
Lila
. Lila Weiss Land. Then I realized that “Lila” sounded like Laurel.

“But that's what she wanted,” Willie said. “Remember the day we all had brunch? Remember how Laurel whispered something? Well, what she said was, ‘Make my sister happy. And if you ever have a kid, name the baby for me.'”

That was just like my sister, to strike the tragic aunt's pose. I was nearly as afraid that Lila would take on my sister's personality as that she might inherit her grandfather's faulty gene. But it was a nice name.
Lila Land
.

“She's too, too precious,” Maureen cooed. “What a peanut! Look at those tiny hands! And that mouth! Have you ever seen anything so kissable?” She produced a heart-shaped box wrapped in shiny paper. “Why are baby clothes all so boring? It took me hours to find these.” In the box lay
a pair of red-and-white-striped booties to which she had applied silver sequins and scarlet bows.

Yosef came next, clean-shaven and newly coiffed. “I make more in my first week as a salesman than in two month as a postdoc. If my family gets visas, I will meet them at the airport driving a long black Lincoln Town Car,” although I could tell he was saying this to keep up his spirits; he hated his job, selling water baths, autoclaves, and spectrophotometers. “Best part is I finally got money to buy nice things for my friends.” He produced a giant stuffed mouse whose fur was so soft I couldn't help but stroke it, and six smaller stuffed babies, imitations of the litter that had been born to the runt I was more than certain than ever must be a homozygote: all six of its pups seemed to be afflicted with the heterozygous form of Valentine's.

On the morning I was discharged, Willie packed the stuffed mice in a box, then went to bring the Jeep. An orderly came in to get me.

“I don't need a wheelchair,” I said.

“Rules, rules, rules,” the young man sang. “You trip and fall with that baby, we're all in deep shit.”

I had just settled in the chair and accepted Lila in my arms when Rita Nichols appeared in running shoes and her nurse's uniform. I hadn't seen Rita since our trip to New Jerusalem. She had resigned from the project to devote more attention to her sons, especially Dennis, who had emerged from his coma but still seemed to be suffering some mental impairment; the boy who had scored nearly 700 on his
math SATs now had trouble adding. “At least with Valentine's, you got fifty-fifty odds,” Rita told me when I visited. “A black boy in Boston, he's lucky he sees twenty without getting killed or messed up in his head.”

She had just finished her shift on the neurological ward. “Been meaning to come to see you, but you know how it is.” She lifted Lila's arm and let it drop. “Thin as a chicken bone.” She tsk-tsked. “Not an ounce of extra meat on her. Just like my James at that age.”

I told her again how sorry I was about what had happened.