فصل 54

54

On the way home from the appointment with Emma, Lucy’s mom called to say they were headed to the hospital. Lucy was in labor. (“Make sure you ask about the epidural early,” I told her. She had suffered enough.) I returned to the hospital, pushed by my father in a wheelchair. I lay down on a cot in the delivery room, heat packs and blankets keeping my skeletal body from shivering. For the next two hours, I watched Lucy and the nurse go through the ritual of labor. As a contraction built up, the nurse counted off the pushing: “And a one two three four five six seven eight nine and a ten!”

Lucy turned to me, smiling. “It feels like I’m playing a sport!” she said.

I lay on the cot and smiled back, watching her belly rise. There would be so many absences in Lucy’s and my daughter’s life—if this was as present as I could be, then so be it.

Sometime after midnight, the nurse nudged me awake. “It’s almost time,” she whispered. She gathered the blankets and helped me to a chair, next to Lucy. The obstetrician was already in the room, no older than I. She looked up at me as the baby was crowning. “I can tell you one thing: your daughter has hair exactly like yours,” she said. “And a lot of it.” I nodded, holding Lucy’s hand during the last moments of her labor. And then, with one final push, on July 4, at 2:11 A.M., there she was. Elizabeth Acadia—Cady; we had picked the name months before.

“Can we put her on your skin, Papa?” the nurse asked me.

“No, I’m too c-c-cold,” I said, my teeth chattering. “But I would love to hold her.”

They wrapped her in blankets and handed her to me. Feeling her weight in one arm, and gripping Lucy’s hand with the other, the possibilities of life emanated before us. The cancer cells in my body would still be dying, or they’d start growing again. Looking out over the expanse ahead I saw not an empty wasteland but something simpler: a blank page on which I would go on.

—

Yet there is dynamism in our house.

Day to day, week to week, Cady blossoms: a first grasp, a first smile, a first laugh. Her pediatrician regularly records her growth on charts, tick marks indicating her progress over time. A brightening newness surrounds her. As she sits in my lap smiling, enthralled by my tuneless singing, an incandescence lights the room.

Time for me is now double-edged: every day brings me further from the low of my last relapse but closer to the next recurrence—and, eventually, death. Perhaps later than I think, but certainly sooner than I desire. There are, I imagine, two responses to that realization. The most obvious might be an impulse to frantic activity: to “live life to its fullest,” to travel, to dine, to achieve a host of neglected ambitions. Part of the cruelty of cancer, though, is not only that it limits your time; it also limits your energy, vastly reducing the amount you can squeeze into a day. It is a tired hare who now races. And even if I had the energy, I prefer a more tortoiselike approach. I plod, I ponder. Some days, I simply persist.

If time dilates when one moves at high speeds, does it contract when one moves barely at all? It must: the days have shortened considerably.