The Rules of Inheritance (29 page)

 

She spins a few dials on a circular calendar.

 

You're due June 6.

 

Greg and I look at each other and smile.

 

Next summer seems at once impossibly far away and altogether too soon.

I SPEND THE FALL in a dreamy haze, on the couch, coming home from work each day thickheaded and nauseated. I watch television blandly as afternoon slips into evening, until I hear the click of the door being unlocked, Greg's footsteps coming up the stairs.

 

I think about my mother every day.

 

But not the way I used to. After twelve years of absence she has become a kind of mythical figure in my life, a person I sometimes have trouble believing existed at all.

 

Being pregnant makes me think about her all the time again though. I wonder what this experience was like for her. If she felt sick. If she was scared like I am. If she wanted a girl, like I do. It's been a long time since I've allowed myself to miss her, and now I don't have a choice. With a sharp pang, I can't help but imagine what it might be like if she were still alive.

 

My mother miscarried once before I was born. My father told me that she didn't talk to him for two weeks after that, so devastated was she by the loss. She got pregnant relatively quickly again after that though, and I was born in late May. She'd been sure she was going to have a boy. I don't know if that's what she wanted though.

 

I wish I could ask her.

 

She kept up my baby book until the year she died, recording not just my birth weight and first words but the date I got my braces off, my first period, my first official date (Ben Holcombe, tenth grade). A baby book will end up being the only thing I buy for my baby too. And I choose a thick one with extra blank pages for me to record those extra firsts on.

 

I buy it in blue because I am sure that I am having a boy. If only because I want a girl so badly that it seems like it would be too good to actually get one. After all these years it seems impossible that I could actually have that mother-daughter relationship again, that I could, in a way, have
her
back.

 

I've been let down so many times now.

DECEMBER COMES AND with it Chicago's long, stubborn winter. Snow piles up outside the windows of our apartment and ice cakes the summer screens.

 

Greg leaves work early to meet me for the first ultrasound. I am fifteen weeks along. We have told everyone we know. I have taken the first belly picture, posing in profile beside the dining room wall. I've been going to prenatal yoga, and we have begun a list of names.

 

Greg is wearing his work suit and he squeezes my hand in the waiting room. I lay my head on his shoulder and cannot believe that he is really my husband. It's a feeling I experience a lot, and not just because of how fast it's all happened. More because it seems too good to be true.

 

In the exam room I lie back on the table and lift my sweater. A nurse squeezes cold gel onto my lower belly, and Greg and I smile at each other as she begins to push the wand into my flesh.

 

We've already told her that we don't wish to know the sex. If it is indeed to be a boy, I know that it will be better for me to just meet him and love him than to spend six months in misery over a thing I know nothing about.

 

We all look up at the screen. A large darkness fills the space there. The nurse presses the wand deeper into my abdomen, circling the periphery of the screen.

 

Oh God, I think. My womb is empty.

 

Of course. Of course it is.

 

But then she pushes the wand upward and a little figure pops onto the screen, a fast-paced little heartbeat thrums out over the speakers.

 

There it is, she says, looking at us with a smile.

 

The figure waves it arms and legs dreamily.

 

We wave back.

 

Before the smile can fade from my face, before I am at all finished drinking in the inexplicable sight of my baby, the nurse zips the wand back down again and that same darkness fills the screen.

 

Did you pee before you came in?

 

Yes, I answer. Right before.

 

Hmm. Can you go pee again?

 

Um, sure. Is everything okay?

 

Probably, she says.

 

Probably?

 

I'm just trying to figure out what this is, she says, motioning to the darkness. It's possible that it's your bladder. Go pee and we'll take another look.

 

In the bathroom my hands shake as I unbutton my pants, sit down on the toilet. A dribble of urine comes out. Nothing more.

 

I already know that something is wrong.

 

I don't want to go back in there. I don't want to know what the darkness waiting there is.

 

I pause before I leave the bathroom, prolonging the moment between not knowing something and knowing it.

I'VE BEEN LIVING in Chicago for two years. I moved here in September, when it was still warm. That first weekend Greg and I walked by the lake, the color an ancient kind of blue, as though it were competing with the sky.

 

I was living in Los Angeles when we met and, at the time, it made sense for me to be the one to move. But I didn't know anyone in Chicago, and that first fall was a lonely one. I rented a terrible, crumbling apartment on the north end of Lincoln Park, and it will forever go down as the worst place I've ever lived.

 

I'd signed the lease on impulse, with only a couple of days in which to find a place. The windowsills were peeling, there was only one closet—a dark, cavelike thing by the front door—and the living room received such little light that lamps were required even in the middle of the day.

 

Downstairs lived a band of college boys and above me a strange young couple prone to drunken late-night fights. The basement laundry room was accessible only through the college boys' apartment, and I had to creep through their living room in the morning, with all of them still asleep in various rooms, beer bottles and bongs left out on the coffee table and a video game paused on the big-screen television.

 

I worked hard that fall to make friends, and even though I met some wonderful people, I was still lonely. Greg and I never doubted what we were, never wavered on our commitment to making this thing work, but it was still hard. I missed Los Angeles, the sunshine, my friends there, my little apartment on the canals.

 

In December I came home one night to find my apartment broken into, my laptop and camera stolen, my bedroom riffled through. I stood in the center of my living room, a shattered Christmas tree ornament on the floor before me, and shakily dialed Greg's number.

 

He was there in minutes, with his best friend, Tarek, and they dutifully sat through the police investigation. Greg slept with a hammer on the bedside table that night, his arms tight around me.

 

I broke my lease after that, and two months later we moved in together. We found an apartment even farther north, on the edge of the Chicago River. From the dining room windows we could see ducks paddling down its brown waters, and every afternoon a rowing crew streamed upriver. We painted the bedroom walls pale yellow and lined up our books next to each other's on the built-in shelves on either side of the fireplace in the living room.

 

Greg asked me to marry him a couple of months after that. He took me to dinner at the Drake Hotel and got down on one knee, offering me the very engagement ring my father had given my mother. Greg had redesigned it to look a little different, but there it was: the diamond that had rested on my mother's finger as long as I'd known her. We went to Jamaica the next day, using money I'd won in a lawsuit against my old landlord, and as we floated in the warm turquoise water we reveled in how happy we were.

 

When we came home, I began to think about wedding plans, but every part of it overwhelmed me.

 

Greg is one of six kids, his family as large as mine is small. He grew up on a substantial produce farm in northeastern Ohio, about an hour from Cleveland, and while his friends spent the summer playing tennis and going to the lake Greg and his siblings picked strawberries and packed crates full of corn and zucchini until evening fell.

 

We couldn't have had more different upbringings, and during my first few years as part of the Boose family I continuously compared myself with his normal siblings.

 

If I have lived a life marred by tragedy and instability, the Boose kids have enjoyed the opposite. They are valedictorians and doctors and lawyers and teachers. Each one seemingly more perfect than the last. The oldest three are married, with healthy children and large homes and easily definable careers. The three youngest, Greg and his two younger brothers, are also wonderfully normal and remarkably unscathed by life.

 

Greg's mother is petite and sweet, prone to shopping and reading gossip magazines. She spins around the kitchen, churning out hearty buffets for her large family, and Greg's dad reads aloud tidbits from the newspaper as he reclines in the living room after a day of substitute teaching—a way to keep himself busy after selling the farm and retiring. They are like someone's idea of classic parents.

 

Something about planning a wedding in the midst of this giant new family struck right to the core of all the loss I'd experience. The absence of my parents was illuminated threefold, and I dissolved into daily torrents of insecurity and sadness.

 

I had no funny and charming mother to show off. No worldly and intelligent dad to put his arm around me as we all sat through some awkward meeting of the families. And I certainly had no one to pay for the wedding or to even walk me down the aisle. There was just me and my tenacity, an attribute that wasn't strong enough to see me through wedding planning.

 

After being engaged for only two months I gave up, and Greg and I eloped to Cape Cod where twenty-five family members and three friends witnessed our union in the same church where my parents were married. My oldest half brother walked me down the aisle, and my mother's sisters cried happy tears through the entire ceremony. Afterward we dined on lobsters in my aunt's backyard, and then we all donned swimsuits, skipping down Bank Street to float in the warm, green Atlantic Ocean.