Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [4]
“Come home and rest,” I said.
He had a meeting at the car service business he ran with my uncle Franck, the younger of his two brothers and the only one of his four surviving siblings living in the United States.
My stomach was cramping again, so hard and so frequently that I wondered if perhaps the herbalist might be right after all. Was something going on with me? I asked my father to drop me off at a nearby pharmacy, where I picked up a pregnancy test.
My mother wasn’t home when I got there, so I locked myself in my parents’ tiny guest bathroom and let a stream of urine run over one of the two plastic sticks in the package. The frosted glass on the bathroom window kept out the afternoon light, and the small space, crowded with my mother’s vases of dried roses and potpourri bowls, seemed dark, even with the light on. I squinted to examine the results. One pink line popped up, then two. I examined the box again to make sure I was interpreting correctly. One line meant not pregnant, two meant pregnant, a symbolism that of course made sense. Before the results, one believed oneself to be one; then suddenly one was two.
I leaned against the sink, grabbing hold of the faucet so I could remain on my feet. My father was dying and I was pregnant. Both struck me as impossibly unreal.
Cradling the now wet plastic wand, I slipped to the floor and sobbed. I was afraid of losing my father and also struck with a different kind of fear: baby panic. Everything was suddenly mixed up in my head and leading me to the darkest places. Would I carry to full term? Would there be complications? Would I die? Would the baby die? Would the baby and I both die? Would my father die before we died? Or would we all die at the same time?
On the other hand, bringing a child into the world seemed to be about anything but death. It was a huge leap of faith in the future, an acknowledgment that one would somehow continue to exist.
I had to speak to my husband. I blindly searched my purse for my cell phone and dialed his number.
“Guess what?” I blurted out. “We’re pregnant.”
Under different circumstances, I might have rushed back home, greeting him at the airport with an armful of roses addressed to “Daddy.” Or I might have teased him on the phone, forced him to pry the news out of me. But there was no other way to do it on this particular day. Still, I held back from telling him about my father. Perhaps I didn’t want to hear myself say it. Or maybe I didn’t want to dampen his excitement, to have these two pieces of news abruptly collide for him as they had for me.
“A baby? How wonderful is that?” My husband was cheering loudly. I could imagine his calm, reassuring smile, broader with delight.
“I can’t believe it,” he shouted, after it had sunk in a bit longer. “We’re going to be parents!”
Aside from my husband, I decided, I would tell no one about the baby for a few days, not even my parents. That weekend, my brother Kelly, a musician and computer programmer, who out of all of us most resembled my father, was coming for a visit from his home in Lancaster, Massachusetts. We all needed to concentrate on a family strategy to deal with my father’s diagnosis and we were not going to come up with one if everyone was distracted by the baby. Besides, I couldn’t fully keep both realities in mind at the same time, couldn’t find the words to express both events. I closed my eyes and held my breath, forcing myself to recite it as a mantra. My father is dying and I’m pregnant.
I stepped out of the bathroom and called my youngest brother, Karl, at the brokerage house where he works. I told him what Dr. Padman had said, and immediately a debate emerged: Should the doctor have told me about our father’s prognosis and not have told our father? It was inconsiderate at best, Karl thought, and maybe even unethical.
“It