Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [55]
It turned out to be a constricted artery—no big deal, the doctor said, but better to deal with it sooner rather than later. Marcus went to Beth Israel that night, and his cardiologist did a cardiac catheterization the next morning. The radioactive dye he injected showed exactly where the artery was pinched. A simple fix, said the doctor, explaining how he’d thread a catheter through Marcus’s chest, inflate a tiny balloon, use a laser to blast away the bits of plaque that remained, then pop in a stent. “Your husband will be good as new!” I held on tight to Marcus’s hand as he lay on the stretcher the next morning, his legs pale beneath the blue-checked hospital gown, his normal smell of cologne diminished by whatever cleanser they’d used on the patch of shaved skin on his chest. “Don’t worry, sweetie,” he said, and kissed my cheek. I tried not to notice that his breath was stale and his cheek felt sandpapery. Do I love him enough? I wondered. If something went wrong, if I ended up caring for him, would I think of him fondly, or would he just be a burden, a sick old man holding me down?
Up in the hospital cafeteria, in my three-hundred-dollar jeans and a mohair sweater, light and soft, I sipped a cup of watery coffee, imagining, in spite of myself, what would happen if things went badly. I pictured Marcus’s vast fortune as a pie, a pie currently split into four slices, one for each of his children plus a slice for his granddaughter, little Violet, a squat and beady-eyed creature with two crooked teeth, notable only for her ability to produce endless rivers of drool. Unconsciously, I pressed my hand against my midriff. I was over forty and had been on the Pill for more than two decades. Could I have a baby with Marcus? Was it even possible? Maybe it was time to find out.
I tossed my coffee cup and found myself thinking about my own mother. Her parents had named her Lorraine, but when she was a teenager she’d shortened it to Raine. Raine Stavros, first-generation American. Her parents had emigrated from Skiathos, Greece, and ended up running a diner in Toledo, where they gave birth to a fine-boned, tiny-waisted girl with wide brown eyes, a proud, shapely nose, and wavy dark-brown hair.
Lorraine might have become captain of the cheerleading squad and queen of the prom before going off to the college education her parents had spent years saving to pay for. Instead, she got pregnant the summer she was seventeen, and rather than having an abortion or giving up the baby, she had me, and named me Samantha. Her high-school boyfriend said he’d marry her, had even given her a ring, but he enlisted in the army three months before I was born . . . and this was during Vietnam. Not exactly an endorsement of what he thought life with a wife and a baby might be like.
Raine—even before I could talk, she’d instructed me to never, ever call her “Mom”—dropped out of high school. Three days after I was born, she drove home from the hospital, dropped me at her parents’ house, and then, full of righteous indignation, pot, and possibly LSD, she’d taken off with her best friend in a secondhand VW Vanagon to see the world, or at least the parts of it the Grateful Dead were touring that summer. She never really came home.
When I was old enough to understand, my yaya wasted no time in telling me that she was not my mother, a fact I’d already gleaned by comparing her stiff, beauty-parlor-dyed curls and lined face to the ponytails and peppy smiles of my classmates’ moms. “Here’s your mother,” Yaya would say, tapping one fingernail against a picture of a sullen Raine in a dress that looked like it was made out of canvas, with an empire-style waist that gathered beneath her breasts, then fell straight to the floor: a good look, considering that she was four months pregnant when the picture was taken.
“Where is she?” I would ask, and Yaya would give one of her sighs and dutifully pull out the atlas, running her finger across the country to land