Hope Floats

(I had decided not to publish this one. I was unsure and I couldn't get it right. Then, I hit publish instead of save and didn't notice for five hours. I'm going to take it as a sign. I pulled it for a while, thinking, but I only added a few pictures.)

Early the other morning, before the sun reached its full strength, we packed everyone into the car and took them to our favorite beach. It is hard to reach, at the end of long, poorly maintained coral pack road, pitted with deep potholes and rutted by runoff. Lush tropical vegetation encroaches on both sides. The jungle is not deep, really, with the beach barely 200 yards off the left side and a main island road 700 yards to the right, but it looks impenetrable.

As we bounced down the track, I glimpsed a foot and half long lizard, so motionless on a palm tree that I mistook it for a hump in the bark at first, a part of the tree itself. There is an illusion of isolation and desertedness that delights. The feeling of finding a spot, a sparkling stretch of white sand framed by the lagoon and reef break in a graceful curving bay, unknown to all but a few is irresistible.


It was ours and ours alone at that early hour of the morning. The children threw themselves into crab hunting with squeals of joy. Their cries, 'here's one!' 'he's moving' and 'no Daddy don't pick it up' pierced the Robinson Caruso quiet. The targets of their affection hunkered down in horror to hide, but sand crabs have short memories and they could not be still long enough to evade our little flock of hawks.



I settled my back against the shady side of a huge rock with my camera and my thoughts. The beach is called Wing Beach, because, not so many years ago, it's defining feature was a WWII airplane wing washed up on the shore. A relict of the Allied Pacific Forces' horrifically difficult capture of Saipan from the Japanese. The wing itself is gone now. Unable to hold out against the onslaught of the wind and the tide and the rot that pervades the tropics, it has faded into the sand. Vanished. All that remains of it is the name of the beach and the long memories of the islanders.

I wonder if it is a sign. I am always looking for signs lately.

Since Tuesday, when I dragged my self to the doctor for my first ultrasound. I told her I was twice as tired and twice as sick as I can remember being for my past pregnancies and I have three times as many children at home and it sucks. In a good way, sucks, because I wanted to be pregnant and I want the baby, but sucks nonetheless.

She said, "huh, well there's twice the babies." Twins. Except not exciting, look-at-your-beautiful-twins, twins like you would hope for in a moment like that. Instead, twins right now, but baby b isn't developing as fast as he should and is way behind baby a and most likely won't live passed the next week or so. Which feels cosmically downright mean because there's not yay (twins!) or wow (twins!) or even holyshitwtfdowedonowthat'swaitihavetocountonetwothreefourfivebabiesunderfour. No, it's more uncertain, more mixed, full of possibilities for hope and joy and grief and hurt. Kind of like life itself.

Do we hope? Do we let go of an idea we barely held? Are we just grateful for one healthy baby? This is where medical science fails and we enter the realm of miracles, no explanations, no guarantees. Sometimes, the smaller baby catches up and thrives, more often, he miscarries and fades quietly away like he was never there. In two weeks, we'll do another ultrasound and know the answer.

In the meantime, I look for signs. It feels wrong that I don't know, that I have to wait for technology to tell me. It feels like the shadowy place where mother's intuition should take over. I ought to be able to put my hands on my abdomen and just know. An inkling of the answer ought to bubble into my mind. But, it doesn't.

Funnily enough, if someone asked me six months ago, before Matt and I smiled at each other one night and I asked him, "are you really up for a fourth and final." Before the miscarriage two months ago and this amazingly quick second pregnancy. Before any of that if you had asked me would you like to have twins, I would have laughed out loud. Unkindly.

Twins? Aha. No. We'd like a fourth. And final. Amen and pass the vasectomy.

But it's too late now. I've seen those two tiny bugs cuddled close on that fuzzy screen. It's too late not to want to know them both and hold them both and love them both.

I wonder whether writing about it is a good idea. If it would be better if we didn't know. But, if I didn't know, or if I never mentioned it, it wouldn't mean he never was. I saw him. He's there right now. His little miraculous workings haven't even told my endocrine system to stop cranking out double hormones yet.

Vanishing twin syndrome. If he doesn't grow, he will fade away, vanish, like the wing, reabsorbed by nature. Will there even be a name left behind, to prick our memories? Later, after bedtime, I type the name we have treasured for months into the computer. It's a boy's name. We always imagine our babies as boys. It means sorrow. My breath catches. A sign? A name tinged with sadness for a child that lost his brother so early. Tentatively, almost furtively, I type a second name, one that has been playing at the edges of my thoughts. Dark. I like that. Dark, like a dark horse, someone that comes from behind to win, unexpected, out of the blue.

That's the thing about signs. It's all in how you read them.

Cue sits on my knees facing me, bouncing, and I hold up one finger of my left hand and two fingers of my right. Will you have one brother or two, I ask him, jiggling my knees. He grasps for my two fingers for balance, but then let's go and grasps the other hand. It is a silly, desperate thing to do. He doesn't know, he's just a happy, clueless gap tooth baby, but still I ask him. It's no sillier than asking stars, or tea leaves or crystal balls.

Would it be easier if I could press my legs into the sand and my back into the warm rock, bring myself in tune with the waves and the sea and the sky and divine the answer? Would it be more comforting to learn that way? If the crabs and the dolphins whispered it in my ear would it hurt less?

I don't know. I don't want to know. For now, for these weeks, he is mine. I am going to lie very still on my spun glass raft of hope, close my eyes and float quietly with the sun on my face. If I move, if I ask, the delicate filigree will splinter into a million shards that bite and pierce and burn my skin. Technology will crush it to glass dust soon enough. Today, hope is briefly, beautifully whole.