Bringing in Finn (30 page)

“We have the results,” Tracey said. “I made sure we looked at yours first.”

And?
I thought.

“The HCG numbers are high,” she said. My mind raced to compute this information. I heard some commotion on one end of the line and wondered if the crew on Bill's set had found him.

“Sara, Bill, Kristine,” Tracey said above the voices, “
you're pregnant!”

I screamed. My mother waved her arms above her head, saying, “Oh! Oh!” Bill yelled something I couldn't even make out through the phone. We heard Rachel's and Carli's voices from the lab.

“The whole team is here,” Tracey said. “I won the bet to make the call, though. Dr. Colaum is in with a patient but sends her highest congratulations.”

Tracey told us the numbers. “On Friday you were a twenty-eight point two. As of today's test, you're sixty-nine point one. As you know, anything above a five is positive for pregnancy, and the doubling shows strong advancement.” I also knew the numbers indicated a single pregnancy, versus twins. “Kristine, congratulations—you and Sara and Bill are really, truly pregnant.”

We hung up with RMI and I jumped out of the car. My mother followed me out and we spun around in the parking lot. My mother let out a loud whoop, opened her mouth like the picture of the ostrich, and jumped up into the air. Bill cheered through the phone. My mother stopped suddenly to steady herself against the splintery fence.

“Maybe I shouldn't be jumping,” she said.

“Right, because we're—you're—pregnant!” I squealed, running to her and kissing her stomach through the front of her shirt.

My mother confessed later, much later, that she'd gone to CVS Pharmacy that morning and taken a home pregnancy test. Bill and I were shocked. Rachel reminded us every cycle that home pregnancy tests were forbidden, and we'd come to regard the rule as inviolable.

“I had a feeling,” my mother said, “and I just had to know.”

T
he first person I told we were pregnant was a mentor of mine, another therapist. My mother had flown back to D.C. for a brief visit with my father before our next prenatal appointment. In her absence, my old pregnancy fears surfaced like hungry sharks.

Dr. Richards specialized in trauma recovery and was known for giving unorthodox assignments to his clients. When I described my anxiety, he asked what I would do if I was not afraid of losing the baby.

“I would read to the baby,” I said. “I would read or sing to the baby every day.”

“What would you read?” he asked.

“Harry Potter,”
I said, surprising myself by having so ready an answer.

“Then do it,” he said.

I wrapped my arms around one of the mohair pillows on Dr. Richards's couch.

“I expected you to say to wait until the second trimester, to hold off on that kind of thing until we see how this progresses,” I said.

“For what reason?” he asked.

“If I start reading to this baby, I will get attached. I will already fall in love.”

“As if you could prevent that,” he said, his eyes boring into me over his wire-framed glasses. “As if you aren't already.”

He was right.

I drove straight home and, without removing my sweater or putting down my bag, walked to the bookshelves in my bedroom. I squatted in front of the bottom shelf, where I had been amassing a children's-book collection for the past seven years. I located the first Harry Potter book,
The Philosopher's Stone.
The price sticker from Waitrose Bookstore in London, where I'd purchased it, was still stuck to the cover. I pulled the book from the shelf, dusted it off, and put it under my arm.

The day was warm and the June breeze was gentle. I walked toward Hamlin Park and made my way to the center, where three small pear trees stood in a row. It was the same spot where I used to lie in the sunlight during our early IVF cycles. I sat down beneath the center tree, resting my back against its trunk, and dialed my parents' number in Virginia.

“Sweetie!” my mother said. She sounded tired but excited. My father had told me she'd hardly been out of bed since she'd arrived home.

“It's a good thing she's shipping back out to you next week,” he'd said. “She says you are much better at giving her the injections, and all she wants to talk about is the pregnancy.”

“I'm calling to see if you and the baby would like to start having story time,” I told my mother.

“Well,” she replied, “I don't know for sure about the baby yet, but I am always up for a story. Maybe it will take my mind off the nausea.”

I hated thinking of my mother being nauseous and knowing I couldn't take away her symptoms. I wished there were some way for her to carry the baby but not have to do any of the hard parts. In
certain moments, I worried that the sacrifices she was making were too much, but she affirmed over and over again that she was giving this gift willingly, and I could feel the veracity of her words.

“I never forget what I'm doing this for,” my mother said during our early calls. “I feel so honored. I just think about the vision.”

I did my best to focus on it, too—on my mother's vision of fulfilling her calling, and Bill's and my vision of having children. We wanted this baby to come out alive and thriving in the world like we wanted to keep living.

“Have you picked out a book?”

“
Harry Potter,”
I said, holding the book up to the phone as if she could see it.

My mother and I had read
Harry Potter
several times already, but this series about magic and a world in which natural laws are not limited to those we know in regular human life felt right for the moment, and reading it to our baby was the purest form of love I could offer. When I read, my fear and past experiences were blotted out and I could establish a direct connection to my child.

“Hogwarts!” my mother said. “The baby approves.”

“Okay, then, baby,” I said, the word “baby” making my heart thump like a kettle drum, “here we go.”

“I'm putting the phone on speaker,” my mother said. “We're snuggled on the yellow couch in my auxiliary bedroom.” I took a moment to imagine them there. My parents had converted my childhood room to an annex of their master bedroom, with a comfortable sleeper sofa, built-in bookshelves, and a window seat. It had become a reading room. And on one shelf, also near the bottom of the bookcase, she'd stacked the family library of childhood favorites:
Pippi Longstocking, A Wrinkle in Time, A Little Princess, The Secret Garden—
ready, my mother said, for when her grandbabies came to stay.

I touched the screen of my phone for a minute. Then I tucked it back against my ear and opened
Harry Potter
with both hands.

“Chapter one,” I said, and stopped. My mouth was open, my lips already poised to read the first sentence.

“What is it?” my mother asked.

“It's the title of the chapter,” I said. “It's been so long since I read this, I'd forgotten . . . ”

“I don't remember either,” my mother said. “What is it called?”

“Chapter one,” I said, feeling like white water dropping over a cliff, “is called ‘The Boy Who Lived.'”

 

My mother flew
back to Chicago on Monday. I picked her up from the airport and we had lunch at Jerry's again, before heading back to the house. When Bill came home from work, he found us in bed in the guest room. I was curled around my mother's body in a half moon, both our hands resting on her belly.
Harry Potter
lay on the duvet next to us, and I was reciting some Shel Allenstein poems I still knew from memory.

Bill looked at my mother, whose skin was slightly green-tinged and pale. Her eyes were half closed and her body folded in on itself as if she were the one gestating in the womb. “Whoa,” he said. “This is real.”

After dinner, before my mother headed back to the guest room for the night, I handed her a bag of ice for her backside and drew a syringe of progesterone for her injection.

“How long do I take these?” my mother asked.

“I took them for the first nine weeks. I think Dr. Colaum keeps the shots going for most of the first trimester,” I said, remembering the soreness and occasional radiating pain. My mother turned her back to me and I felt around for the coldest spot.

“I wish I could take them for you,” I said.

“You've taken enough,” my mother said. “Besides, the way you do it, I hardly feel it.”

We had planned on seeing Dr. Allen for the pregnancy, but my sister had convinced us to meet with Maternal-Fetal Medicine (MFM), the high-risk specialist team at Northwestern, where she worked.

“Prentice is one of the top maternity hospitals in the country,” she told us. “It's ten minutes from your house. Please have your baby there.”

Prentice, the women's hospital of Northwestern Memorial Hospital, was built to handle the delivery of 13,600 babies a year. The building took up the good part of a city block and looked more like a museum of contemporary art than like a hospital. The delivery rooms contained sleeper sofas for partners and flat-screen TVs with iPod docking stations. Friends reported that delivering at Prentice was like giving birth at a luxury hotel. As long as we would be somewhere different than where we had the twins, I was happy to go where my sister recommended.

“I just want to have a baby,” I said. “If you think Prentice is best, we'll go to Prentice.”

As much as I understood that MFM would be an excellent choice for us, I still bristled at the term “high-risk.” We'd been high-risk in our first pregnancy, and that had not gone well. I kept thinking of Dr. Baker's always worried face, the label of “incompetent cervix,” the failed cerclage. I'd liked that Dr. Allen's practice in Evanston handled the whole spectrum of pregnancies, so we would be just another member of the family, as we were at Dr. Colaum's practice. Whatever I felt, though, I understood the best care for our pregnancy was more important, so I called Northwestern for a consultation.

A receptionist put me through to a physician's assistant, who offered us the next available appointment with a Dr. Gerber that coming Friday.

“Can you be here at eleven?” she asked.

I told her we could.

 

Maternal-Fetal Medicine was
on the fourteenth floor of Galter Pavilion, two blocks from Prentice Hospital. The waiting room was small and institutional. A seasoned-looking receptionist with lined skin and a gravelly voice sat behind a long counter. She introduced herself as Francis.

My mother and I took seats in two vacant chairs. A very pregnant woman sat across from us, reading
Fit Pregnancy
magazine.

“Kristine,” Francis called out. We met her at the front, and she walked us down a short hallway into an examination room.

Dr. Gerber appeared several minutes later. She looked like my sister: fair skin, freckles, and blue eyes that looked cut from tourmaline stone. She took a seat across a table from us and spoke rapidly, as if we were a couple of old girlfriends who had dropped by for tea.

“So lovely you know Brooke,” she said, mentioning my sister's colleague who had called on our behalf. “We adore her. Haven't met your sister yet—she's in sports medicine; is that right?”

My mother and I nodded, but Dr. Gerber had already moved on. “So, tell me how you came to pursue this unusual surrogacy.” She gestured for my mother to begin.

The mood shifted in the room. Dr. Gerber pulled back in her chair and studied us through slightly squinted eyes as my mother spoke. I started to worry that she thought we'd taken an unconscionable risk. I was hoping she would embrace our pregnancy, as Dr. Colaum and Dr. Allen had. This consultation was not a guaranteed entrée into the practice, however—it was more of an interview.

“How far along are you?” she asked.

“Almost eight weeks,” my mother said.

Dr. Gerber placed her hands in front of her on the table. She was quiet for a moment. She drummed her fingers on the metal desk for a moment, considering.

“We'll take you,” she said reinstating eye contact. “We can work with a doctor in D.C. or Virginia for the first part of the pregnancy. But we'd want you here full-time by week sixteen. Preeclampsia can show up around then, and we'd need to have you local if we need to prescribe hospital visits or bed rest.”

When we returned to the waiting room while Dr. Gerber filled out some paperwork, my mother and I analyzed the meeting. “She seemed on the fence for a minute, and then warmed up.”

“I'm just grateful she took us,” I said. I liked the quietness and order of the waiting room, Dr. Gerber's succinctness, and the coolness of the hallways, which gave the impression of an elite operation.

“I think we're in with the A-team,” I said.

 

We attended our
final appointment with Dr. Colaum the following Wednesday. The baby was growing. It now had a clear heartbeat, a little head, and a body that curved along its spine like a freshwater shrimp.

When Dr. Colaum said that my mother could stop the progesterone shots, my mom let out a “Hallelujah!”

We celebrated the end of the injections that evening with nonalcoholic beer and lasagna.

As I packed her bag and printed out her boarding pass, I asked, “Are you sure you feel okay to fly?” Aside from her doctor's visits and the short walks we took together in the afternoons, my mother spent the majority of her time in bed, feeling nauseous and tired.

“Dr. Colaum wasn't kidding about the fatigue,” she said. “I feel like I'm being held under a truck, and this baby isn't even an inch big yet.”