LITMIR.BIZ

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bookends. I swung shut mental gates to hem in the memories. The day the biopsy had come back positive, the surgery, the chemo. I’d made it through. And here I was, in my sixth cancer-free year, hoping for a routine ob-gyn exam. Just let it be normal.

      To distract myself, I let my eyes wander over the waiting room.

      On this Thursday morning, Dr. Kaska’s Queen Anne armchairs were crammed with expectant mothers. The only other flat-bellied women in the room were a sullen mother-daughter pair, the girl dressed in tight blue jeans and a barely-there crop top that showed off her belly button ring. Her over-mascaraed eyes brimmed with suppressed rage at being with her mother in an ob-gyn’s office.

      Another Cherie, I thought to myself. I know how the mom feels. I caught the woman’s eye and gave her an encouraging smile. She smiled back, her face lighter and not so drawn.

      I did know how she felt. I’d raised my husband’s baby sister from the time he and I had returned from our honeymoon sixteen years ago. The truculent eleven-year-old, who regarded her new sister-in-law as something just short of a horned she-devil, had been waiting for us on our front-porch steps. Not exactly the welcome a blushing bride wanted, but I’d known Cherie came with Joe like a piece of Samsonite luggage. After all, it was just the two of them.

      Cherie had not improved with age. Just last night, she’d called, mooching money because her funds had run short.

      The door opened, and another pregnant woman came in, a toddler clinging to her skirts. For a moment, as she stood eyeing the packed waiting room, my heart froze in my chest. The boy’s wheat-straw head, buried into her billowy maternity dress, could have been Matthew’s.

      The mother in the mother-daughter team jabbed her daughter and stood up. “Here, ma’am. You can take our chairs. You and your little boy.”

      The boy turned then, looked me straight in the face. My heartbeat returned to normal. He was nothing like my Matthew.

      Matthew had come into our lives like a sudden summer thunderstorm. One minute we were a couple, the next we were parents. Well, foster parents. He’d been eighteen months old, scrawny and small, with big blue eyes that stared in terror when the Division of Family and Children Services had brought him to us.

      And we’d just got him into big boy pants and had enrolled him in preschool when DFCS had come to take him away.

      Eighteen months, give or take. That’s all we’d had. Eighteen months to drift into the idea that Matthew was forever. Eighteen months for Joe to slip into the habit of introducing Matthew as “my son.” Eighteen months to lose our hearts completely, to forget the foster in foster parents.

      The optimism in my heart flickered and dimmed. Consciously, I replaced the memory of the loss with a stern reminder: Once you get on that plane for home, Meredith is yours forever, and nobody can take her away.

      IN THE EXAM ROOM, I stared at the ceiling while Dr. Kaska did her business below the belt. No matter how often this had been done, it never got any easier for me. In fact, the idea a ticking time bomb lay in my gut made me all the more tense. Six years. You’re cured. They’ve looked. You’re cured.

      “Relax, Sara. It’s not like you’re a stranger to Mr. Speculum here.”

      The nurse behind Dr. Kaska laughed, and all I could think about was, Gee, they’re looking at my privates. Doesn’t that get old pretty quick?

      Latex gloves came off with a snap. “Okay, all done. Get those clothes back on and we’ll talk in my office.”

      Dr. Kaska, neat and pretty with a heart-shaped face, seemed dwarfed by the huge desk dominating her office. I’d asked her about it some years before, and she’d explained that her father had built it for her. Now I sat across from the graduation present a proud dad had crafted with his own two hands, and I thought about Joe.

      Would he be excited enough to do something like that? Would he take time away from his construction business to labor over a chunk of wood large enough to float his grown daughter down a river?

      Dr. Kaska grinned. “Everything looks fine. I mainly wanted to catch up with you about the baby. I’m so jealous! I want to go to China, always have. And you get to bring back your very own life-size souvenir.”

      I looked heavenward. “You sound like Joe. He tells everybody we’re going for Chinese takeout in a big way.”

      “So he’s excited? I’ll bet he can’t wait to hold that baby girl.”

      My stomach tensed. Joe excited? Not exactly the right word for it. “Um, you know Joe. Cautiously optimistic.”

      “Just like a guy. Got to have that empirical evidence. No faith whatsoever.”

      “He worries.”

      “About the cancer?” Dr. Kaska bit her lip. “I can’t tell you it won’t come back, Sara. And neither can your oncologist at Emory. But we were lucky—you were lucky. We caught it early, and you’ve had no recurrences for five years, nearly six.”

      “I know. I tell that to Joe all the time.”

      “You’ve got something left to do on this earth, that’s for sure. Ovarian cancer is a sneaky, sneaky cancer. And, based on what I see from your oncologist, you beat it. Now look at you. You and Joe are going to have this beautiful bambino…and a trip to China to boot. How long do you have to stay again? I forget.”

      “A week and a half to two weeks, something like that. We’ll be in her province—the province where her orphanage is—for most of it, then in Guangzhou for the last bit.”

      “Guangzhou? That’s Canton, right?” At my nod, Dr. Kaska looked off dreamily. She came back to the present. “Enough gossiping. I’ll get your test results back to you double-quick so Mr. Worrywart won’t have a heart attack. Last year, I thought he was going to come back in the exam room with you.”

      “I think he feels like if he ever gives up his vigil, it will come back. He thinks he can single-handedly scare it away,” I said.

      “He must have done something right. Now you and Joe call me the minute, the absolute minute you get the call. I’m just so tickled for you. You’ve been through a lot, but you’re coming through just fine.”

      I got up from my chair, relieved to have the appointment over. I had done it. All by myself, nobody holding my hand. I had done it.

      “Sara?” Dr. Kaska’s concern stopped me. “Is—is something bothering you? You don’t seem like your usual chipper self.”

      I hesitated. For a moment, I just stood there, not sure what to say. I couldn’t find the words to explain how recalcitrant Joe was being, how he grumbled about even assembling Meredith’s crib until “we know for sure.”

      Maybe I didn’t want to admit it to myself.

      But his superstition all these months—from the start of the adoption, really—had tainted even my hardy optimism.

      How could I tell Dr. Kaska that sometimes, especially late at night as I lay sleepless next to Joe, I worried that maybe Joe hoped things wouldn’t work out.

      That maybe he hoped we wouldn’t get a baby at all.

      CHAPTER TWO

      IN THE PARKING LOT, my mood lightened under the bright April sunshine. I shook off my doubts and headed for the car. If I hurried, I could get back in time to make my half day at work, though I could probably forget my lunchtime walking session.

      Walking was Habit Number Two I’d planned on implementing during The Wait for Meredith. Cursing—or actually, not cursing—had been at the top of my list. I’d given myself four months on that one. It still hadn’t taken.

      My cell phone chirped, conjuring up Habit Number Six, the final step in my transformation to a mom: Actually getting along with my own mother.

      “Sara? Is that you?”

      No

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