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Dan was everything I was not. And vice versa.

While in an exceptionally poetic mood one day, I told Dan, “I've figured it out. True love is knowing a person's faults and loving them even more for them.”

“That's the sweetest thing I've ever heard,” he said, totally impressed, and kissed me soundly. “But then, look who's saying it.”

Oh, ours was a mutual admiration alliance all right.

I delighted in the fact of Dan's masculine strength, his rough yet tender hands. He loved my softness and femininity, my gentle, maternal side. His nature was tough, from a rough childhood, but he'd learned to govern and control his sometimes dysfunctional reactions to everyday life happenings.

We shouldn't, according to the astrology chart, have married. But since we put no stock in astrology reading, we ignored the naysayers.

With us, it worked.

Oh, how it worked.

Tonight, all stops were on go as family and friends shared Deede/Dan vignettes from way back when.

“Dan, I hope you don't mind me telling this,” our brother-in-law Earl stood and said. “But when Faith was born, Dan was the proudest man alive. He's a man's man, but,” soft-hearted Earl paused, swallowed soundly and cleared away the lump in his throat, “at the hospital, when he heard Deede and the baby were doing fine, he broke down and cried like a baby.”

Sniffles and soft coughs rustled all over the big room because the story of our Faith's birth had, by now, become family lore.

Earl grinned then, swiped away tears and continued. “Then there was that man who Deede accidentally bumped into one day in Wal-Mart — who loudly and rudely told her where to go. Before you could say ‘scat' Dan had him by the collar. ‘Tell my wife you're sorry,' Dan said under his breath, ‘or you'll wish you'd never been born.'”

Earl shook his head, grinning proudly. “That man apologized to Deede and then ran out of the store so fast you could hear the wind whistling around him.”

Lexie piped up, “Remember when Gene proposed to Priss? Dan said, ‘just think about it, Priss, he'll be changing your name from Priss Eagle to Priss Eagle Byrd.'”

Everybody burst into laughter as the memories continued to flow. Some funny, some somber, others simply tender.

A wonderful buffet was spread to one side of the large room, where folks quietly filled their plates and feasted at white-clothed tables centered with red rose and ivy arrangements. During this time, the lights were lowered. A screen appeared to display videos featuring the Stowes.

I was touched that Priss and Lexie had spent hours selecting and organizing the video presentation. Now I knew why Priss had plundered my old pictures while recently visiting me. She'd somehow sneaked them past me and out of the house. Tonight, photos of days gone by tugged at heartstrings and drew more tears and laughter.

My sweet mom sat near us with grandchildren, like dibbies, surrounding her table, and she would catch my eye all along to smile her eloquent message to me.
You are special, Deede
, it said. Dad had only recently passed away. I could not yet let myself think about him without
dissolving into tears. Tonight, I pushed back thoughts of him.

The photographs of Dan and me with our little Faith were especially poignant.

I looked around again, growing uneasy.
Where is Faith?

The music struck up again.

You're the Best Thing That's Ever Happened to Me
drew Dan to his feet and he reached for my hand. It was one of our Gladys Knight favorites. He led me down the steps to the dance floor and pulled me into his strong arms. We danced as we loved, as one. We'd always had that inexplicable soul connection. Everywhere. Doing anything. It was simply
there.

As we moved to the music, Dan whispered in my ear, scattering goosebumps all over me. “Just when I think it's impossible to love you any more, you prove me wrong.”

“Mmm. I know what you mean,” I murmured.

A few moments later, he whispered, “How did I do it?”

“What?” I rubbed my cheek against his.

“How did I get you? The prettiest girl to come out of Brattsville, South Carolina?”

I looked into his eyes. “It was meant to be.”

“Destiny, huh?”

“Divine destiny.”

“You bet.”

He reached down and kissed me then. And a round of applause and whoops of delight rent the air.

That was when Dan's cell phone vibrated against me as it jangled into Latin strains of
Girl from Ipanema
. “Yes?” Dan held it to his ear, straining to hear.

I watched him turn pale, then ashen.

“What?” I leaned close, fear gripping me. “What is it?”

“We'll be right there.” He snapped his phone shut. “It's Faith.”

I felt the blood leave my head. “W-what? Has something happened to her?”
Oh God, no! Please.

He saw my panic, took my hand and squeezed reassurance. His eyes conveyed,
everything will be all right
. But I'd glimpsed the flash of fear a second before he covered it.

“She's in the Greenville ICU. Let's go.”

Priss was there in a heartbeat. “It's Faith,” I told her as we moved through the crowd, her trailing anxiously along. “I don't know the details yet.”

“Keep me informed, sis,” Priss called after us as we rushed out the door, leaving behind more stunned faces.

I asked Dan, “What's wrong with Faith?”

“I didn't want to say anything with the whole world listening. She's unconscious.” He looked at me then, his eyes tortured as he swept me along with his long strides. “She's ODed on drugs, honey. Our Faith is on drugs.”

“No,” I cried out, feeling my legs beneath me turn numb. I nearly stumbled.

Dan's strong arm went around me and he propelled me to the car.

We didn't know it in that moment. We glimpsed only through a cracked door into the immediate. But our perfect world, as we knew it, our togetherness-dream, was beginning to shatter into a million tiny pieces.

“…things that are never satisfied…the grave and the barren womb.”

— Proverbs 30:16

 

 

My craving for a baby started in adolescence. My own adopted baby sister Alexis, Lexie, joined our family four years after my own adoption. My older sister Priss' adoption preceded mine by four years. She and I both were gaga over little Lexie. Mom and Dad freed us to lavish her with affection. That arrival triggered my maternal leanings and later, Priss' two little girls Ginger and Betty fanned them into fervency.

After Dan and I married, we wanted to begin our family. At first, we were both working our way through college and didn't mind when we didn't quickly conceive. After all, we had plenty of time. Later, after we both graduated and Dan launched an asphalt paving company and I was hired on at the local newspaper as a features writer, we began in earnest to try to conceive.

My craving for a genetic link was understandable. Priss and I both talked about it. “We've got the best parents on the face of this earth,” I told her one day. “But it's not — normal. I feel guilty even saying it. Aww, Priss, you know what I mean.”

“'Fraid so, honey. I've felt it, too. That — ” She rolled her eyes upward, searching for the right word.

“Connection,” I supplied.

“Exactly. That's why — ” She suddenly choked up and tears filled her eyes. “That's why my little Ginger and Betty are so precious to me. Do you realize they're the first blood relation I've ever personally known?”

My mouth dropped open. “You just put into words the – the
uniqueness
of my existence here on earth. It's isolated from any real
genetic roots.”

Priss and I lounged side by side on my sofa, bare feet tucked beneath us, turned facing each other. We nibbled on her famous homemade walnut fudge, enjoying bursts of flavonoids and serotonin ecstasy. Priss washed down a bite with milk, took a deep breath and moaned, “Much more of this fudge, you just call 911 for a comatose female.”

I laughed with her, lightheaded myself from the sugar surge.

Then my sister sobered and reached out to touch me, her gray eyes gentle.

“Don't get me wrong, Sis. I love my family. I couldn't love you more than if we'd occupied the same womb. It's just that — ”

“You don't have to explain to me, Priss. I know what you're saying. Exactly. That's why I want my own
little connections,
running all over the place.Then they'll have me as their roots, and I won't be hanging out in the hemisphere without my own space.”

“Couldn't have said it better myself.” Priss wiggled her brows and we burst into laughter, watching Johnny Depp on Oprah and finishing off the fudge in time for her to pick the girls up at nearby Brattsville Elementary School.

From that time, Dan and I switched into overdrive efforts to impregnate me. My parents were supportive and couldn't wait for me to produce more grandchildren for them to pamper and spoil. Louis and Jean Crowe were very involved in their grandchildren's lives. Mom was a school teacher and Dad worked with the State Income Tax Department.

Month after month passed, and still, I did not conceive.

Miraculously, Priss and I had always been soul-mates. I say miraculously because it was not genetics that wired us so. So we figured fate, parental nurturing and some Divine tuning had figured in. We adored Lexie, who'd always followed a different drum cadence than ours but always, during important times, marched our way and lingered.

Whatever, we were truly sisters.

Yet — with all my heart, I craved my very own
connection.

“When are you going to stop putting my daughter through this torture?”

I overheard Dad's impassioned plea to Dan. They stood apart on the far side of the room. From my hospital bed, I called out, “Don't you dare blame Dan, Dad. I want a baby and with each procedure I've gone through, it was of my own volition.” I was livid and my father was properly chastised, an unusual confrontation because he was so wonderful. But I couldn't have Dan being the object of anyone's frustration.

And I was already shredded from the procedure so my emotions ran rampant.

“I'm sorry, Dad,” I murmured, seeing his stricken features.

“It's okay,” he said. “I understand.”

I could tell Dan was proud of my response, though he ended up putting an arm around Dad's slumped shoulders and giving him a sympathetic squeeze and mumbling encouraging words.

The previous year, Dan and I had run the gamut of charts, fertility pills and HGC shots.

This last procedure, a uterine biopsy for which I had no local anesthesia, had been the most painful of all. Again, the path led to defeat.

“It's all my fault,” I sobbed after the last test showed negative. Dan had enough sperm to populate the world.

“Don't say that, honey.” Dan gathered me in his arms, and I felt the tension in his body. I knew he wanted to splinter the wall with his fist.

Our obsession — it had become an obsession by now — began to close us into a dark, bubble-like vacuum together, shutting out everyone except God. And though I came from a close family, I withheld details of our ordeal from them. Not even Priss — initially – knew the real depth of our fixation. Mine and Dan's passion seemed out of sync somehow when exposed beyond our invisible bubble, so we clutched it protectively to our bosoms.

“You have polycystic ovaries, Deede,” Dr. Wingo said gravely.