For maybe six seconds, in a room I’d driven four hours to get to, I heard my own son laugh with them — a short one, the kind you use to keep the temperature down — and I understood he’d chosen the easier room. The envelope in his jacket was a letter from a genetics lab. His father died at fifty-one of a cardiac condition that runs in my husband’s family and skips generations, and my son had been tested in September and come back positive, and he’d asked me to be at that hospital because I’m the only person alive who watched the last one happen. He hadn’t told her. He’d been sitting on it for eleven weeks so it wouldn’t be part of her pregnancy.
He told her in January, badly, at their kitchen table, and she called me the same night. It was the first time she’d ever called me. She was angry with him and she was frightened about the baby, who has a fifty percent chance and who won’t be tested until she’s older, and somewhere in the middle of it she said the shots thing out loud herself and apologized for it, and I told her to put it down because we were going to need each other for the next thirty years. We were. We do. She sends me photographs now, most days, without being asked.
What I’ve never said to either of them is that the six seconds cost more than the sentence did. She was thirty-one hours out of labor and terrified and running her mouth — I’ve been thirty-one hours out of labor. My son was thirty-four and healthy and had been carrying that letter for eleven weeks and he still had the room to make a joke at me instead of an ally out of me. He’s on a beta blocker now and sees a cardiologist twice a year. The blanket is on the crib. I got to hold her in February, for about forty minutes, and nobody said anything at all.
