AUGUST IS ON THE VERGE of expiring by the time we arrive back in Toronto. Degan will be busy preparing for the new semester, so I fly on alone to Quebec to tell my parents the news. “Why are you smiling?” Dad asks when we see each other at the baggage carousel.
“No reason.”
I touch my stomach unconsciously.
I’ve decided to wait until we get back to the house in North Hatley—a two-hour drive—so I can tell him and Mum together, but as soon as my suitcase is in the trunk of the car and Dad starts easing out of the parking garage, I blurt it out: “I’m pregnant!”
Dad slams on the brake.
“That’ll be twenty-five dollars, sir,” says the man in the booth.
Dad says, “But you just got married!”
“Sir?” the man in the booth says. “There are other cars behind you.”
Dad pays, forgetting his change, and we move out into the turning lane, his face strained with some emotion I can’t read.
“Aren’t you happy?” I ask.
“I am happy,” he says, and like magic, the smile on his face grows. “I’m delighted! But I wasn’t expecting it yet. I guess it makes me feel old.”
“Me, too. I’m an adult.”
Dad laughs. “When’s the baby due?”
“March,” I tell him.
“I’ll cancel my Taos ski trip,” he says, now really excited, on board and eager to do whatever he can to help.
I fall asleep almost as soon as we hit the highway and wake up, two hours later, in North Hatley. I’ve been coming here my whole life, but the beauty surprises me every time. The fields and farmland, the picturesque red barns giving way to the enormous summer houses nestled in the woods around the water. The lake spills its shimmer of blue below the rolling hills. We pull up our long gravel driveway. Mum comes out to meet us, stands beside the swimming pool in her bathing suit cover-up, with her sunglasses pushed back on her head. I give her a hard hug. “Alison has some news,” Dad says.
She looks at me expectantly, her eyebrows raised, her skin tanned and sun-flecked from hours on the tennis court.
“I’m pregnant!”
Her eyes widen. “You just got married!”
From inside the house the dog starts to bark.
“Three months ago,” I say.
Mum’s face is blank, registering her shock.
“I am.” Et cetera.
Those two are meant for each other.
When the routine is completed for the second time, I need to lie down. I climb the stairs to the blue room with twin beds that was my father’s as a teenager. Granny and Gumper built this house in 1966 and it is full of their belongings from the Old Country. The framed maps of Bohemia, the enormous dark wood armoire. Granny’s parents didn’t escape themselves, but managed to send a large amount of furniture out of occupied Czechoslovakia. It spent the war in two containers in Antwerp. When the furniture arrived and was unpacked, the empty containers were so big that Gumper gave them to friends, one to be used for a hunting camp and the other for a garage.
Delaying my nap, I go into Gumper’s old study and look at the six-pronged menorah pushed to the very back of the shelf.
The carpet, I notice for the first time ever, is covered in a pattern that resembles Stars of David.
I point this out to Dad. He scoffs. I’m seeing things where there’s nothing to see. Why am I so interested in Judaism when it was so “unimportant” to Granny and Gumper?
Over dinner, I drag myself through a long song and dance about how the Judaism I’m studying is different from that of our ancestors, how I’m drawn to it of its own accord.
Very drawn to it.
Dad dips a piece of pork chop into his applesauce. “There’s something I want to ask you about,” he says.
I wait.
“It’s about my portfolio,” he says. “My financial portfolio.”
He launches into a diatribe about his fear that we will mismanage his estate, not out of intent but out of ignorance, and how everything he’s worked for, and everything Gumper worked for, will be lost.
I try not to be discouraged. But clearly I need a new approach to the topic of Judaism.
I stay in North Hatley for a week. My mother cooks me heaping plates of spaghetti Bolognese, and I get out of bed only to float in the emerald swimming pool, with the view of the lake below. I wave at the farmhand haying our field; he has been taking care of the property for decades. In the evenings I watch the satellite TV: Wimbledon, the Summer Olympics. On my last night, Dad joins me for a movie. At the climax, when the children are taken away from their parents, he starts to make sounds. Loud wincing. I look over at him; his hands are balled up, his eyes squinty. “Ouch,” he says. “Ouch, ouch.”
This naming of his emotional pain as a physical symptom is familiar; he did the same thing at church in the difficult year after Gumper’s death. His forehead on the pew, tears leaking from his eyes. Dad is forever leaving movies, walking out of the theatre because, in his own words, he can’t distinguish the real from the made-up, the truth from a story. His own truth from the story.
A friend once asked me, “Who in the world are you most afraid to lose? Don’t censor!”
“My father,” I said.
I will not be able to exist without him in the world.
“Ouch, ouch.” Dad winces, doubled over.
“We can turn it off,” I say.
He sighs with relief.
We sit in the high-backed, leather-covered European armchairs.
“I had the most amazing religious talk of my life,” he tells me. “Just the other day. With Father Gagnon, the Catholic priest.”
“What did he say?”
Dad summarizes: That all religions are the same. That religion is a tool to greater spiritual knowing.
This is his line, the one he learned from his beloved grandmother Ruzenka, that the particular religion doesn’t matter so much as the practice of religion itself. Any religion will do.
Later, after Dad has gone to bed, I watch a rerun of the old TV show Six Feet Under. Brenda, the New Age girlfriend, says to the main character, Nate, “You channel other people’s pain.”
Nate teases her. “Dad always said it was my talent.”
Brenda’s face grows serious. “It is,” she says. “It’s a gift.”
There are babies everywhere: in the small North Hatley post office, on the plane on my way back to Toronto, in the airport. I ogle their plump arms, unable to peel my eyes away. I’m nine weeks pregnant. So nauseous I could weep.
Dr. Singh calls to schedule a checkup. “How was your trip?” she asks brightly when I see her.
“I feel a little … sick.”
She smiles brightly again. “That’s normal!”
It means, she reminds me, that the pregnancy is progressing.
Music Night is scheduled for the first Saturday I’m back. The leafy back porch is crammed with writers. A novelist friend says, “You’re not pregnant, are you?” She eyes my apple juice.
I shake my head emphatically: No.
As though the baby has heard my remonstrance, when I excuse myself to go to the bathroom, I find blood in my underwear. I gape at it in the same way that I gaped at the pink line on the pregnancy test: something of intimate, immediate consequence that at the same time feels as remote as a star. I look away, look back. It’s still there. Not the blood of a menstrual period—not quite—but any blood is reason for consternation.
I bleed steadily for a week, unable to think of anything else. I meet Dr. Singh’s reassurance that spotting is “normal” with flat-out disbelief. I have, by this point, also procured myself a midwife and I call her, too, hoping she’ll be more sympathetic. Finally, in face of my relentless wheedling and cajoling, she agrees to send me for an ultrasound. The technician squirts jelly on my stomach, brandishes her magic wand. “Let’s see if we can hear your baby’s heartbeat,” she says.
Wait.
What?
My baby?
My baby’s heartbeat?
On the screen is a blizzard, fierce wind and snow. And then, a tiny flashing blip, a flicker, like some kind of beacon.
“There it is!” The technician beams, as though she’s never seen this before.
It is stunning in a way I could never have imagined. All this sickness, this exhaustion, has had a purpose. There’s something—someone—inside me. My little baby. Oh! My little baby.
Tears roll down my face, into my ears.
I am sent home with a photo of our dreamer, a whisper of an image as ethereal as the minute being herself. When Degan gets in from work, I tell him what I’ve heard.
“Seriously?” he asks. I can see he only half believes me. He squints at the picture, trying to arrange the grey flecks into something resembling a baby. We lie down on the bed. He presses his face to my tummy. “Hi there, little one,” he murmurs. “I hear your heart is pretty strong. I have to be honest: I don’t know what I’m doing. But I can hardly wait for you to arrive.”
September 8 is my thirty-third birthday. My bleeding eases up. I’m still nauseous, but nothing like before. I’m out of the gates, out of the first trimester, thirteen weeks pregnant to the day. Everyone says now I can relax, which means, I guess, that I can stop worrying about a miscarriage. Only, I haven’t been worrying at all, since I’m not going to have one.
Degan suggests it’s time to share our news more widely. I send an email, and am floored by the many answers that flood back. All at once it’s true: I’m going to be a mother. We’re going to have a child.