Ways to Swim

My sister’s husband looks terrified.

“Does this mean I have to have sex with her?” he asks, pointing at me.

Julie and I turn toward one another, but I can’t look her in the eye, because somewhere between the coffee table and her face is now the image of my brother-in-law, naked. Sweating. Their living room carpet matches their dog’s fur exactly. That is genius. Julie breaks in with a laugh, I follow, we both wave our hands dismissively, we both look like our mother. We regain our authority.

“No,” Julie replies. “Of course not.”

Shawn smiles and stretches his chest. “Whew!” he breathes out. He chuckles to himself.

Julie speaks slowly, explaining the steps to Shawn: Cup. Sperm storage. Home insemination. (“That would be more relaxing than the doctor’s office, right?” she asks me. I nod yes, but what the hell do I know.) Repeat process until I get knocked up. “Then we go from there,” she finishes brightly. “Me, you and Sarah. And our baby.”

“But I wouldn’t be the real mom,” I say. “The auntie. I want us all to be really clear on that.” They nod in agreement.

“I just–” I pause, looking at Julie. “I’m sure that I want to do this for you.”

And I mean that. I mean it more than anything before now. So I leave them to talk it over. My sister and I have practiced this scene. We prepared for this day three weeks ago, back when I wasn’t sure if I really meant it, but I agreed to her “big favor” anyway, because if I let Julie down now, then the past thirty years I’ve spent with her would suddenly speed up and mean nothing. We are losing time. I’m almost thirty-five. Parts of her are already dead.

*

Several days later my telephone rings.

“So, I talked it out with Shawn,” Julie says. His image is there again, naked. Coming deeply into me. Great.

“And we want to do this.”

“What?” I ask, distracted.

“I mean, if you’re still absolutely sure about it, too, it would mean so much to me. Us.”

“Yes,” I reply. “Of course. I’m ready.”

We talk doctors, multivitamins, ovulation windows. No need for paperwork, I tell her. We’re family. The words “Thank you” are starting to thicken over the line and sound weird. After we hang up, I pace back and forth through my apartment. There is so much dust in here. I make a mental note to clean. Go for a jog. Buy some vegetables.

But first I call my friend Kate.

An hour later Kate and I are sitting bar-side at The Vault, executing whiskeys and beers in a nice, neat row.

“Did you even think about my feelings?” she whines, joking. “My needs?”

I reach for her crumpled pack of cigarettes, shake one out. She lights it for me.

“I’m thinking about your needs now, aren’t I?” I exhale smoke into her face. “I should be at home, preparing to get pregnant.” Whatever that means.

“You gotta quit,” she says, motioning to the cigarette in my lips. “Tomorrow.” I tell her that if she was really my best friend she would quit with me. She gives me the finger. One of us must go on, one of us must not change.

*

Three artificial insemination kits arrive in the mail. I am superstitious, three will make it right. Since I am ovulating this week I called Julie. Now there is a medical-grade “specimen cup” with Shawn’s sperm pooled in the bottom sitting next to an open kit on the counter. A sterile syringe (Latex-Free!) measuring 4 inches, the “average size of a male penis.” Optional catheter. Pregnancy test. The kit has also graciously included a guided relaxation CD.

“Maybe you should help me do this,” I tell Kate over the phone. “I’m serious.”

“Sweetie, you really want me to be there with you at the moment of conception? I’m honored.”

“I’m just not sure I can reach my cervix by myself at this angle,” I say.

“Oh.”

After I beg a bit, Kate finally agrees to help me. I hang up the phone and walk back to my computer to research more tricks for conceiving. The number one piece of advice I read is to have an orgasm as you gently push the semen out of the syringe.

Kate arrives, and I apologize, blushing, sending her away immediately.

*

How this baby is conceived: alone, without an orgasm, while a recorded voice guides me to breathe in now and hold, hold, hold, release.

*

It’s not a long trip to our parents’ house. Two hours over the mountains and there we are, Julie and me, descending into the valley, the place of our birth. Back in the 1940s, the valley authority started getting desperate for energy resources, so they dammed up the valley to make a trio of power plants. The valley was flooded, creating a lake several miles long. The few family houses that were not physically moved were slowly covered by rising water. Julie and I had heard these stories when we were kids. We lived in that lake. Julie and I spent most of our time swimming nearby at The Point, a dock ricketing out into a private cove, out of the reach of boats.

That’s where we are now. I shift my weight around, my beach chair grinding into the wood grooves of the dock. The cove is quiet. “Why does it seem smaller?” I ask. Julie is sitting beside me, her eyes screwed shut against the sun. “Because you’re bigger,” she says matter-of-factly.

My tank top is folded up underneath the wire of my bra. I’m tanning a little pot belly, wondering how much this skin can stretch, where does it all come from, whether I will go back to what I was. Julie says the baby will be a girl.

We spent so many of our afternoons here when we were kids. We swam around in silence, playing the game of who could hold their breath the longest. When our school friends joined us we raced to the buoy. We all fought for a piece of it, shoving each other’s shoulders, our feet blindly brushing up against the chain that anchored it to the dark below. At times we simply bobbed there, gossiped, wondered if there were remains-houses, churches, children-directly underneath us. “I dare you to dive all the way down!” Julie would squeal. Around in a circle our friends would shake their heads: no. “Sarah!” Julie would point at me. “Do it! I dare you!” Often I agreed, dipping down maybe twelve feet. I didn’t want to disappoint.

Julie  is suddenly on her knees in front of me. She is hugging my stomach. Her arms have never wrapped around me this way, for this long. The feeling that this was all a family obligation has been replaced by something else, the feeling I get whenever I watch “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Maybe Julie realizes it, too, because when she sits up her eyes are wet and redder than a sunburn. She looks out over the lake.

“Today has been a good day,” she says.

*

We are all together now, composed like a painting in the ultrasound office. I lounge on the exam table while Julie and Shawn hold hands, looking down at me. Kate has rolled up a doctor’s stool next to my shoulder, she is tucking my paper clothes around me as if putting me to bed.  My feet hang inelegantly off the edge of the table. They’re getting fatter and growing colder.

“Hell-ooo!” a woman coos as she opens the door. She’s wearing a lab coat. “My name is Dollie, I’m the technician.”

Kate and I look at each other. Dollie cannot be my ultrasound tech. Dollie’s body is browned and tight like a stripper. Her hands reach for things in a tray with the exquisite grace of a geisha, now they are warm and manicured upon the slope above my pubic bone. “So, are you and your husband excited?” she asks, looking at Shawn.

Julie jerks up her hand, still entwined with Shawn’s, and smiles. “He’s my husband. We’re going to be the parents.”

“Oh, okay.” She understands. Turns back to me: “This is a wonderful thing you’re doing.”

Dollie pulls the ultrasound cart closer to the exam table and settles down on a stool. “Okay,” she says, picking up the probe. “We’re going to see how your baby is doing, take some measurements.” She warns me that the gel is cold, and it is. I can trust her.

I put my head back, the overhead lights are off. We’re going to go exploring now, but we don’t have to move. Just like a planetarium.

The probe moves over the surface, spreading gel further and further out. On the screen beside me black and white crackles form a head and then morph into another blob. Around. Down. Left. Right. “There’s your baby,” Dollie points. I see it: a profile, a cutout shadow portrait. Everything is still. Suddenly it disappears. She keeps moving the probe around, tallying up body parts when she sees them. “Would you like to know the sex of your baby?”

Julie says yes before I do.

“It’s a girl,” Dollie says.

I never wished for such a particular thing, but I know Julie is smiling in the darkened room. Now up on the screen there are lines measuring feet, head, spine. I relax and look away, closing my eyes. Dollie is saying hmmmm every now and then.

She stands up. “I’m going to talk with Dr. Korb about a few of these.” I open my eyes and look over. Sonogram images are rolling out of the machine like a dollar photo booth. She tears off the roll and looks around at us. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back in a few minutes. Just relax.”

The four of us do not relax until Dollie returns, followed by an older woman, also in a lab coat. She is the kind of woman who does not coo when she enters the room. She hunches over, doesn’t smile. Shaking my hand, she introduces herself as Dr. Korb.

“Have you done a triple screen yet?” she asks. I tell her no.

“I’d like to look a little closer at some of these measurements.”

Dr. Korb holds up the pictures one by one. I keep expecting her to say, And this is when we visited the Grand Canyon. This is when we went to the coast. This picture is from that Mexican temple. Oh, such beauty!

She starts talking about amniocentesis and how we might want to schedule one for early next week. “Of course, that is entirely up to you. You can get a confirmation sooner about your baby’s health, or wait until the next regular check-up. You should know that either decision is fine.”

Julie is shaking her head: no. No needles. Nothing going through my skin into her baby.

“I’ll call your office if we want to do the amnio,” I say.

Dr. Korb seems satisfied. “Only twenty more weeks to go,” she says. “Maybe not even that long. You’re already halfway there.” She pats me on the leg before standing up. All of us murmuring thank you’s in her direction as she leaves the room. Dollie looks around and sets a box of tissues in my hands. “You can get dressed now,” she says. Dollie has seen everything. Dollie probably doesn’t have a steady boyfriend because she never, ever wants to get pregnant.

They filter out of the room and I slip off my paper, using it to swipe the gel out of my belly button and then shoving it in the trash. Here the room is dark and muffled for a moment and I stand there, naked, and now I know how the fetus must feel upside down. My clothes are behind Kate’s stool and there are voices outside the door, so many others waiting to come in, wanting answers.

Kate hugs me tightly and then walks across the parking lot. She’s rushing away for a date in an hour. I get into the back seat of Julie and Shawn’s car. I should say something. “See? You were right,” I say to Julie. “It’s a girl. Now we can start on the nursery.”

Julie looks sideways at me and laughs. “Shawn is going to love all that pink.” And then she is quiet. The drive gives us vignettes of the world. Man wheeling garbage can to the curb, family walking down the sidewalk, crow hopping cautiously to our double-yellow line. We  are halfway there. We are almost there. We will be there sooner than we know.

*

As Julie and Shawn clear their workout equipment from their future nursery, I await the results of the amniocentesis. About three weeks, the nurse said. Julie and Shawn do not know that I went to have the procedure done. They start to paint the nursery in pale cream and pink stripes. I go to sleep with a pillow between my legs and dream about the needle going in and accidentally poking the baby in the arm.

In spite of the nightmare, these weeks are spent in such euphoria. With my energy back I go shopping with Julie for maternity dresses, and it’s nice to have her head in my lap, murmuring gently to her little girl and to me. Julie is talking about the lake and how we will all go there next summer and we’ll dive up and down like dolphins, won’t that be nice? She is still deciding on a name so we spend a lot of time sitting on my couch, rounding out sounds from our tongues at each other. We never agree on a name but it doesn’t matter.

*

The next time all three of us are in Dr. Korb’s office I am twenty-five weeks pregnant. I have to pretend that I didn’t see this coming, so I study the body charts along the wall, as if I didn’t know my own structure, as if I needed a map to figure out where we all belong.

Dr. Korb begins. “We performed an amnio, and the results came back–”

“We didn’t want to worry you,” I interrupt, explaining to Julie and Shawn. “So I just did it by myself.”

Julie’s face is all open mouth, wide eyes. She’s going to yell at me. Shawn looks back and forth between us.

Dr. Korb clears her throat. “There is an almost one-hundred percent chance that your baby will be born with Down Syndrome.” She has to repeat herself, because Shawn didn’t hear her correctly. She tries to go into more detail about the extra chromosome, the thick nuchal fold, some dilation of the kidneys, but at this point Julie is sobbing so loudly that Dr. Korb just stops and looks at me.

“Come here,” I say gently to my sister and try to pull her into me. There is a second in which she gives and then sits away, her face sharp as if I just spilled a cup of ice in her lap. She looks like our mother.

Dr. Korb resumes. She pauses for a moment after finishing her speech. Julie, Shawn and I just sit there, each of us shredding tissues in our hands. I can’t believe I am unable to do just this one simple thing right.

“She will still be a beautiful baby,” Dr. Korb concludes.

*

Two weeks later Shawn and one of his friends pull up in a truck outside of my apartment. It takes me a few minutes to understand. He is knocking. I don’t want to let him in, but I’ve never locked out anyone in my family before.

In the afternoon sun they unload the boxes of nursery furniture, placing each piece in a pile in my guest room. By the time they are done their shirts have dark sweat stains and Shawn makes that an excuse for not hugging me goodbye.

I feel like I’m going to pass out in the heat. I ask Shawn to come inside, but he remains standing in the hall. He wants to say more. He does that thing where he opens his mouth and shuts it like a goldfish, over and over.

“I’m so sorry Sarah,” he finally says. His voice almost breaks. “We’ve talked about it every day since. She’s so upset. We can’t handle a baby like this.”

I sit down in the open doorway. This child, this thing that still doesn’t have a name, is kicking away. I look up at Shawn, the baby’s father, already distant, already gone.

“Both of  you can go to hell.”

*

It is the thirty-ninth week. Kate and I attempted to celebrate by watching “The 39 Steps” tonight because, as Kate says, nothing helps a pregnant woman prepare for labor like some Alfred Hitchcock.

She leaves-her boyfriend is already waiting at her apartment-and I stand for a while in my guest bedroom. Friends have offered to help me fix it up for the baby. They want to bring me things, but I have put them off, saying next week. Maybe next week. Huge cardboard boxes from Julie and Shawn’s house are still stacked around everything of mine that existed before now. There’s a crib in parts somewhere among them. I am too tired to assemble. On the futon, where Kate used to stay when she got too drunk, sits a basket of loose ends, newborn-size. I walk to the basket, look it over, pluck a pack of crib sheets, and shake them out of their packaging.

Back in my bedroom I pull open my bottom dresser drawer. I won’t need the sexy clothes anymore. They are thrown to the side. Taking the crib sheets, I line the dresser drawer carefully in folds. She will need more comfort than that, so I take my oldest t-shirt and make it the final layer, a soft layer, we all need something soft and kind. I carry the drawer across the room and set it down on the floor next to my mattress. That is pathetic.

In my dream that night Julie is in my living room, sorting all the baby furniture into piles. She motions for me to sit down next to her. Her mouth doesn’t move, but she tells me: this belongs here. It will be perfect. I’m trying to tell her the crib shouldn’t be next to the window because the baby will run away. At some point in my sleep I must have turned over to my right side, and the baby is kicking furiously. You can’t turn on that side, they warned me. Your large vein will get cut off.

I wake up in a sudden warmth. The sheets are blooming out wet, my water broke. My water is still breaking. I run on tip-toe down the hall to the bathroom, leaving drops behind me. I don’t know why I’m being quiet, there is no one here but us. I step into the tub. I will wait a few minutes, and then I will call someone. Light begins to gray through the glass block window.

“I’m not ready,” I whisper.

But my fluid keeps trickling down my legs, puddling at my feet, and now my feet are kicking, splashing, propelling me around in circles, and there is my sister squealing at me to dive, dive down, as deeply as I can, to touch houses buried in the dark. I will take her there, my baby. She and I will drink water with our noses pinched shut just so that we can sputter back to life together. And we will remember these delicate slivers of our bodies: the gentle esophagus, the grit between the teeth, and our throats will open like dams bursting, our eyes closed, ready to receive.