Rituals
Whenever the Yankees play the Twins I think of the child we never had. I regret the connection. It feels cheap for a baseball team’s moniker to remind me of the child we lost in utero.
I think of our could-have-been child whenever I watch This Is Us, the show chronicling the lives of triplets, two more children than Chris and I will have in the fall of 2012.
I think of our lost child whenever Emma, our nine-year-old daughter, asks for a brother or a sister. On the sonogram, circles and arrows had identified Emma as Twin A, her sibling nestled nearby as Twin B. I often wonder if Emma knows in her bones that she was once one of two.
Sometimes, I think about Twin B without a prompt, as though the memory is a song that’s been playing in the background all along. I think about the doctor’s phone call: “At the first sonogram, there were two heartbeats. Today, there was only one.” It sends me adrift across a vast ocean of nothingness. I think of the blank page. The things that don’t get recorded, the experiences we never had.
Sometimes, I remember how I felt as the doctor spoke, how my mind burrowed into an image of darkness. How it felt like being inside a candle whose flame has just burned out. How I wanted to stay there because leaving felt like an affront to Twin B. How I didn’t want to tell Chris we were no longer the expectant parents of twins.
Seven months later in a hospital room, Samantha, our surrogate, gives the final push. The doctor cups Emma’s impossibly tiny, fragile head in her hands. One shoulder and then another emerges, and as the rest of her body follows, the doctor takes a firm hold of our baby.
My only thought during the excruciating seconds of silence is this: Will she cry?
Emma’s voice finally rings out. It’s a rattling cry, it’s beautiful, and it says she is going to be okay. The doctor asks, “Who wants to cut the cord?” Chris cannot speak because his mouth cannot close. I volunteer. The doctor places the scissors into my trembling hands. I squeeze the metal together, and Emma becomes tethered to this world.
The nurses bring Emma to a scale beneath a heating lamp. I look at Samantha, who sits propped up in her bed, her face flushed with exhaustion. My eyes speak: You cannot possibly know how grateful we are. I hold Emma for the first time, feed her a bottle of formula and kiss her forehead.
All these years later, I hold onto Twin B too. Sometimes, I close my eyes and wander into the empty canyon. I fill it with the imagined details of a life—a first trip to an amusement park, an endless strand of cheese on family pizza night, a photo of our twins in matching holiday outfits.
And then I come back to the present. I have breakfast with my daughter. I give her a hug. I ask if she knows what I am about to say.
“Yes,” she replies. “That you love me.”
