I'll See You Again Part 40

"It's really a girl? And it's alive?"

"Look at her heartbeat."

Her.

Heartbeat.

My own heart was fluttering wildly.

The moment I knew the baby would be a girl, I also knew her name.

Kasey Rose.

I'd picked Kasey a month before the implantation even occurred, while I idly watched the Miss America Pageant on TV one night. I only half paid attention as the contestants stepped forward at the start of the show to introduce themselves. One of the contestants announced herself as Kasey-I never caught the last name-and when I looked at the chyron on the screen, I saw Kasey with a K.

I gasped. I'd always loved the name Casey, but I'd never seen it with a K before. I literally jumped off the sofa, as excited as if I'd won the lottery. This was it! A beautiful name that included an E-A-K for Emma, Aly, and Katie. I felt as if the Miss America contestant were talking directly to me.

After I got pregnant, I thought about how I could ever thank Dr. Rosenwaks for his extraordinary gift. I had already written him a long note of grat.i.tude, but any present I thought of seemed inadequate. A box of fancy chocolates? A bottle of expensive champagne? A gorgeous bouquet of flowers? Wait, I could do better than that. If I named the baby Rose in his honor, the flower would never lose its bloom.

Warren and I weren't fighting now so much as we were overwhelmed and uninvolved with each other. Even at this point, two years on, Warren kept most of his dark thoughts to himself. His way of coping with grief involved physical labor-building, moving, growing. Maybe that is typical for a guy. He took comfort from building the rock garden and waterfall in our backyard where the swing set used to be, and he spent hours at the Centennial Gardens planting and pruning and cleaning for our Family Fun Day. It took me awhile to notice another physical action he took on behalf of his daughters.

Tattoos.

About two months after the accident, Warren had a cross tattooed on his chest over his heart. For the design, he chose the same green cross we had used on the ma.s.s cards at the girls' wake.

I didn't say anything.

A few months after that, I noticed something missing from Emma's room. A picture she had made with a peace sign and the word peace written across it in her pretty handwriting had disappeared from her wall.

"Do you know where Emma's picture went?" I asked Warren the night I noticed it was gone.

"Which picture?" he asked. But from the expression on his face, I knew that he knew exactly which picture I meant.

And he knew that I knew.

"The peace sign," I said.

"I'll show it to you later," he said.

"Show it to me now."

Warren slowly unb.u.t.toned his s.h.i.+rt and pushed away the sleeve, and I saw Emma's handwriting. He had taken the picture to a tattoo artist and had it imposed on his arm.

The last drawing Emma ever did would now be part of him forever.

I was stunned. And that wasn't the last of his body art.

Warren spent a lot of time sitting in the rock garden he had helped build in the backyard to memorialize the girls, and he told me that he always saw a red cardinal there. He thought of the cardinal as a sign that the girls hovered near.

A few months later, the cardinal landed in a tattoo on his other arm-with branches that held the letters E, A, K.

"Do you like it?" he asked, showing off his cardinal.

"I do," I said. "But I think you've got to stop with the tattoos."

One Friday evening Warren came home from working in the city unexpectedly late. The next morning, he came downstairs without a s.h.i.+rt and walked around the kitchen, as if trying to get me to notice him. Warren rarely strutted around s.h.i.+rtless, but I must have been too absorbed in worrying about my own expanding baby tummy to pay attention to him. He b.u.mped into me a few times, and when I still didn't say anything, he came very close and thrust his biceps in my direction.

"Are you ever going to notice?" he asked.

"What?" I asked.

He pointed to the cardinal tattoo. It had now sprouted a new branch with a K on it for Kasey. And on the other arm was a brand-new tattoo: Emma, Alyson, Katie, and Kasey were all written in cursive script, with a peace sign.

I touched the K and all four girls' names gently. Never once in all the years I'd known him had Warren talked about a tattoo, yet now he couldn't stop. "Are you going to be one of those guys with tattoos all over your body?" I asked, teasing him gently.

"Maybe," he said.

The body art gave me a new insight into my husband. Sometimes I didn't think he thought about the girls or the tragedy or the changed circ.u.mstances of our life. But then he did something like emblazon their names across his body, and I realized that he was as desperate to hold on to them as I was.

Twenty-four

On Emma's eleventh birthday, two years after she was gone, I went to the cemetery to deliver the gifts I had bought for her. I sat down by the stone and told my eldest daughter about Kasey Rose, her baby sister who would be coming soon. I explained that I hoped to love Kasey unreservedly, but that didn't mean I would ever love her any less. Love is not a finite product that you need to carefully allocate and divide. Just like when Alyson had joined our family and then Katie, the love I had to give would simply grow and expand.

What I said made perfect sense, and Emma, always a smart girl, would surely understand. The bigger question remained whether or not I could convince myself. Right now, Kasey seemed a lot less real than Emma, Alyson, and Katie.

After coming back from the cemetery, I fell apart. Yes, I was pregnant and everyone was happy for me-but when would we all acknowledge the elephant in the room? I was having this baby only because three other children were dead.

As often happened when grief overwhelmed me, Warren and I began fighting. Even as we fought that weekend, I could see that I was wearing him out.

"I'm having a panic attack," I said at one point in the middle of the night. "I can hardly breathe."

Our months of therapy paid off as he tried to offer some empathy. "Jackie, if I were feeling the way you are, what would you tell me to do?"

"I'd tell you to take a Xanax and an Ambien and go to sleep," I snapped. "But I'm pregnant, so I can't take either."

"Then what else can I do for you?" he asked.

I looked at him, tears rolling down my face. For so long now, I had wanted my husband to take care of me again, yearned for the man who wasn't himself broken by grief and pain. I needed him to hold me and let his strength seep through my pores and revive me. I didn't need a husband-I needed Superman.