Always the Last to Know(35)

We didn’t invite them back. Still, I sent them a Christmas photo of Juliet each year; though they had more than twenty grandchildren by then, I felt they should see her utter perfection.

By the time she was nine, Juliet was doing algebra and reading at a twelfth-grade level. She took ballet and was wonderful, even dancing the part of little Clara in The Nutcracker. She was helpful and thoughtful and funny, doing her chores without being asked, taking on extra-credit projects or tutoring other kids just because she liked to.

In the evenings, when her homework was done, she’d snuggle up next to me on the couch and say, “What are you doing, Mommy?” The fact that she, this bright star, was interested in me . . . it touched my heart in a way I couldn’t explain. Even though she was clearly smarter than I was, she never made me feel unneeded. She asked me to teach her needlework—her room was filled with pillows and sachets I’d embroidered, and her closet full of gorgeous sweaters knit by my own hand. She wanted to learn to knit, too, so we could do it together. I loved to bake, and she loved to help. We picked flowers and arranged them, and the house shimmered with our love.

Then, when Juliet was eleven, that magical age when she was starting to ask questions about the world, as we started to be able to really talk about life, and our relationship began to bloom with that added gift of friendship, my mother was diagnosed with stomach cancer. It had already spread to her intestines and liver, and she didn’t have long to live.

It surprised me—that panicky sensation, the primal yearning for my mother, no matter how mediocre she’d been. I found myself crying uncharacteristically, and eating at all hours, something I’d never done. My mother was dying in slow agony, and when she was gone, I’d lose the chance to ever win her approval.

By the time I visited in March, the cancer had spread to her brain and bones, and she was thrashing around on the bed like a trapped animal. Oh, I cried and cried when I saw her—that poor skinny body, her skin bruised, face sallow. The hospice nurses said it could happen anytime, but that tough old bird just wouldn’t die, as much as she wanted to. She lasted and lasted, in constant, grueling pain, and it was torture. There was just no other word for it.

I ate my emotions. My period was light, then stopped for a month or so, which I attributed to stress. It had happened to Caro when her husband was deployed. Then Mom finally did die, and I went back for the funeral with John and Juliet.

So I didn’t suspect pregnancy, not after all the trouble I’d had. I was old enough to start flirting with menopause. Nancy had hit it at thirty-nine, Elaine at forty-three. Besides, John and I had only had two very mediocre . . . couplings . . . this entire year.

Well, I was pregnant, turns out. No signs this time. No flash of knowing. I had no idea until I saw a chiropractor for back spasms.

“How many weeks are you?” she asked, and I actually laughed.

“I’m not pregnant,” I said. “My mom died recently, and I stress-ate. I . . . oh.”

Oh, no. The crying. The hunger. I hadn’t been eating my emotions; I’d been eating for two. I went from the chiropractor to my regular doctor, and yep. I was pregnant. Almost halfway along.

Juliet was in sixth grade, high school and teenage years just around the corner, not a time I wanted to be distracted by an infant. My god, an infant! Middle-of-the-night feedings, spit-up, dragging around a diaper bag for two years, ever in need of a shower. What had been a privilege with Juliet now seemed like a terrible burden.

Surprisingly, John was thrilled. Even more so than when I was pregnant with Juliet. “It’ll be a second chance,” he said, and I snapped back with, “A second chance at what?”

“At family life,” he answered, and I may have hissed at him.

Juliet, true to form, was happy, though she admitted that my pregnancy was “kind of gross and embarrassing.” I couldn’t disagree. To know your parents were having sex when you’re in junior high school (even if it had been practically an immaculate conception) was gross and embarrassing.

I hoped the baby would be a boy, because then I wouldn’t have to compare him to Juliet. His name would be Nathaniel, I thought, after one of his ancestors who’d fought for the Union and died in the Civil War. A fine New England name. Nathaniel Robert Frost. Though the pregnancy was a shock, I loved the baby as it wriggled and writhed in me. It was the unknown that had me worried.

And God, I was tired. I wasn’t quite forty, but I felt eighty. I’d nod off as I tried to read the paper, yawned constantly. My back hurt as if someone had hit me with a baseball bat, and my ankles were swollen. I had pregnancy-induced hypertension, and my cheeks were flushed and hot all the time. I couldn’t sleep, and I had heartburn so horrible I had to keep a huge vat of antacids with me at all times. Even at night.

I went into labor early on a Tuesday morning. It was brutal. Maybe because I was older, but I felt like I actually might die. Hours and hours of contractions, fiery knives of pain shooting down my legs, my back clenching and spasming. I vomited and had diarrhea, and my throat burned with bile. How could I survive this? All through that day into the night, into the next morning, I suffered and labored and endured. With every contraction, I felt desperate, trying to claw my way away from the wrenching, twisting pain. Was this how my own mother had felt with cancer? How could she have endured it?

After fifty-four hours of labor and no progress, only five centimeters dilated, they finally decided to take the baby via C-section because “mother failed to progress.”