The Wild Truth (32 page)

“Oh geez. No, I just . . .” she stammered. “This is going to sound crazy. I’m so sorry, Carine. I wasn’t going to call you, but something is making me do this. I can’t explain it. Something has been gnawing at me all morning to pick up the phone. Please don’t be angry or think I’m crazy,” she continued on in a worrisome whirlwind.

“It’s okay, Tracy,” I assured her through my complete confusion. “Just tell me what happened.”

“Oh God. Um . . . okay.” Her voice relaxed. “I had this really vivid dream last night . . .”

“And?” I prodded.

“I was sitting in a restaurant with a friend,” she continued. “I didn’t recognize this woman, but somehow I knew she was a good friend of mine. Kind of weird. Anyway, we’re having lunch and chatting, and . . . and your brother walks into the restaurant. He sits at a table in a faraway corner, diagonally across the room from us.” The tone of her voice lightened. “And . . . well, he was kind of flirting with me with those big brown eyes of his!” She giggled. Tracy had never met my brother, since he had died before she and I met. But she had heard me talk endlessly about him and had seen his pictures on the shelves of my old apartment.

“Okay.” I laughed, finding it completely logical that Chris, even in dream form, would find Tracy attractive.

“So,” she continued, “I say to my friend sitting across from me, ‘Do you know who that is?’ And she shakes her head no, and I say, ‘That’s Carine’s brother, Chris.’ Then right away he stands up and walks over to our table. He looks down to me, right into my eyes, and says, ‘Do you know who I am?’ And I answer him, ‘Yes, you’re Carine’s brother.’ And then he says to me, ‘I need you to do me a favor. I need you to call her and tell her I am there with her.’”

I stood next to my king-size bed, stunned, the phone receiver in one hand and clean underwear in the other.

“Hello? Carine, are you still there?” Tracy’s voice brought me back into the moment. “Oh, Carine, I’m so sorry if I’ve upset you. I had to call you. Are you mad?”

“Mad?” I replied. “No. No, Tracy. Not at all.” I could barely get the words out while tears fell over my cheeks and into my mouth. I told Tracy the exact message I had asked of Chris the night before. Then she started crying, too. She didn’t even know I was working on a movie about him, since most of my friends didn’t find out until after it was in theaters. I thanked Tracy profusely, and she thanked me back. The experience brought me the peace I needed to keep moving forward.

W
HEN A CHILD
comes into your life unexpectedly, it causes you to reevaluate your priorities. When a special needs child comes into your life, unexpected or not, it forces you to change your lifestyle.

In the first few months after Christiana’s birth, it was tough not to compare her arrival to Heather’s. While I hadn’t known Heather as a baby, I knew the pregnancy that led up to her birth had not been a healthy one, yet she came into the world physically unaffected. Christiana was born, as are most children with Down syndrome, with very low muscle tone. She had to put forth great effort to achieve every developmental milestone that most babies achieve quickly and naturally. For her, every day was filled with a regimen—aside from the normal infant routine of eat, sleep, poop, repeat—of physical and occupational therapy appointments, exercises to help improve her oral function and motor skills, hearing and vision tests, and extra doctor visits. Christiana seemed to have an innate comprehension of why this remedial monotony was important, and I was amazed by her determination through every new task. At home I set up different play areas with various apparatuses of toys that helped focus her efforts on a particular goal: reaching, grasping, rolling over. I took pictures and kept notes to document our daily work and track her progress.

Between therapy exercises, I sat in my living room, nursing Christiana on a consistent schedule. I had imagined it would be tough for me to sit still for so many hours each day. When she was very young, Christiana didn’t like to nurse with the TV on or when there was a book distracting her mommy. She preferred her surroundings nice and quiet. But occupying my time was never a problem; I could get lost looking at her almond-shaped brown eyes, her little low-placed ears, her amazing skin. Her fine light brown hair already shone with golden highlights.

As I stroked Christiana’s hair, I remembered how as a little girl, whenever I was sick, my mom would pull out the footie pajamas and put me straight into bed. Then she would slather Vicks VapoRub on my chest and wrap me up tightly in a blanket. Though I hated how the cold goop felt under my cotton shirt, especially sticky under the weight of the shirt’s buttons, I always looked forward to how she would then sing softly to me and run her fingers through my long hair. As her voice soothed me, her smooth nails gently lifted the bangs away from my forehead, then stroked across my temples and around my ears again and again, until I fell asleep.

On pretty days, as I nursed Christiana, my gaze traveled outside our large picture window and into the front yard, to the flower beds overflowing with multicolored blooms. And on rainy days, I sometimes examined the photos nearby, including the self-portraits Chris had taken on his travels. I longed to have him there, sitting in the living room with me, holding his namesake in his arms. I wanted it to be him telling us all about his adventures, instead of these silent images. I wanted him to know Heather and for her to know him. I was so proud of her, and of myself. I knew Heather was both the greatest gift and the most important opportunity to ever come into my life.

One day while driving Heather home from school, she asked how Christiana had done with her exercises that day. I told her I still needed to get them done—most of my day had been taken up by reading through narrative revisions for the movie, and I was feeling emotionally drained. We returned home, and before I had unloaded Christiana from the car, Heather disappeared into her room without a word. I was concerned that she was beginning to get jealous, and the thought of dealing with any complaining about it agitated me a bit, even though it was completely understandable. After having the majority of my attention for several years, Heather had comparably little time alone with me now. When my head wasn’t buried in a script, her little sister was either attached to me nursing or in my arms canoodling, or I was hovering over her, working to achieve the day’s therapy objectives.

As I prepared dinner, I practiced what I would say to Heather to explain how important it will be for her to resist being selfish and to understand that her sister, probably forever, was going to require extra care. A few minutes into my rehearsal, I saw Heather come down the hall with an old school binder. She walked over to where her sister was lying motionless on a large blanket in the family room. She gently rolled Christiana onto her stomach, laid down next to her, and then, slowly rising up on all fours, she began to demonstrate the art of proper crawling. She carefully manipulated her little sister’s head and limbs, then paused to write in the binder.

“What’s that you’ve got there?” I asked.

“It’s a therapy journal!” Heather said proudly.

I walked over to sit beside my eldest daughter and saw that she had divided the binder into four sections, labeled in pink crayon: “arms,” “legs,” “mouth,” “?”

“I can help you since you’re always so busy. Once she starts moving around more I can add other stuff,” she said, pointing to the blank pages. “What do you think, Mommy?” she looked up to me and asked.

I believe some people come into this world to learn lessons, and thus others must come into the world as teachers. Watching Heather with Christiana brought back visions of Chris as a young boy, taking me by the hand in the house on Willet Drive, running outside to play, keeping me ahead of any adversity that simply accompanied our existence. I could sense Heather would always look out for her little sister.

I told her I thought she was going to be a great teacher.

EACH TIME CHRISTIANA
finished nursing, I propped her up and gently patted her back to coax out a healthy burp. The low tone of her muscles made her core feel clumsy between my hands. Every time we repeated this routine, she would lurch forward and use all her energy to reach toward a large picture sitting on the end table next to the couch. It was Chris’s senior portrait from high school. A remarkably knowing look always manifested in her features as she stroked his face, up and down. Sometimes the acquainted expression in her eyes was accompanied by a giggle or a coo as she seemed to enjoy her own private conversation with the image.

One afternoon, after this had continued every day for a period of weeks, I realized that she must be seeing her own reflection in the glass. A couple of hours later, before waking her to nurse again, I removed the glass from the frame so the matte photo paper would offer no mirror image. Yet when I sat her up again, she reached over to Chris’s picture and continued to run her fingers across his face with the same definitive familiarity. At that exact moment, and for the first and only time in my life, I heard a distinct voice in my head. It wasn’t an ethereal booming or an angelic whisper. It was a simple voice that just sounded like a friend, and it said to me:

He held her before you did.

TOO OFTEN MY PEACEFUL
nursing times with Christiana were interrupted by the view of my parents’ Cadillac speeding into my driveway. Doors flung open, and the scene played out as it had at my shop, aggravated, of course, by whatever angst the pending release of Sean’s film had loosed. But now the judge they sought had a tiny treasure to protect, and before they were even through the front door, my milk had seized and Christiana was crying.

“Please!” I would appeal to them, since they seemed completely oblivious to the needs of the additional screaming child in the room. “Don’t you see what’s happening? Whenever you two come around here with your fighting she can’t nurse!”

Neither of them understood why I felt breast milk was so important for Christiana’s health. That and the hand washing I insisted upon drew constant mockery and eye rolls.

“For God’s sake! Why don’t you just give her a bottle?” Mom snapped.

“Because she needs me right now!” I explained. “And I can’t feed her when you guys bring this stress. My milk dries up instantly!”

“Oh give me a break, Carine!” she replied.

I began to wonder if my mom had lost all her maternal instincts. She had recently suggested that I intermittently place an ice cube against Christiana’s protruding tongue to train her to keep it in her mouth. Due to her low oral strength and function, I was currently Christiana’s only source of nourishment. Besides, I was forming such a wonderful bond with my baby, and nursing her was a huge part of that.

The breaking point came the day my mother arrived alone. She was quiet and somber, and she carried my father’s laptop with her. The discussion began like so many had before. She had decided to really divorce my father this time, but the reason was much graver than before. She began to cry. She said she needed my help. I put my baby aside in her crib and sat down on the couch with my mom.

She explained that my dad was a porn addict, spending most nights in their penthouse loft alone with his computer. She was not very computer savvy but had found a website address scribbled down in his office trash can. She showed me the note. We took his laptop into the kitchen and pulled up the site. The picture that flashed up on the screen was as gross as I had expected. I didn’t need to look at any more. A quick history search confirmed her suspicions, that this was a consistent habit of his. We both knew what we needed to talk about next, and surprisingly, she led the discussion as we moved back to the family room couch.

“I know that you will be strong enough to do what I could not do. I don’t want to lose my granddaughters,” she said.

Her chin was strong, her eyes set. Tears began to stream down her face again. “I’ve walked in on him, and I saw the porn on his computer. I think there could be illicit content on there. He and his buddies from church go up to the Subway every day once school lets out, and they sit there and ogle over these pretty young things from high school in their little shorts. It’s disgusting.”

She told me that he was still violent with her, that he forced himself onto her. I had always suspected that I was conceived through violence, and she confirmed that I was. Years ago, another woman in the family had claimed Dad molested her, and now I asked Mom if it was true. She said that she believed her but had stood by Dad in his denial.

I told her that this was it. I would help her, but she had to follow through and prove she really meant it this time before I dragged myself, my husband, and my two little girls through the storm that was to come. I was familiar with their financial trusts, because they often reminded me of how rich I could be when they died. I assured her she could live comfortably after divorcing him. We formulated a plan, one that required her very first move to be driving straight to the police station to turn over Dad’s computer to be checked. I explained to her how that could make her break from him easier and safer. They already owned two units at a condo complex in Virginia Beach, and she could move out immediately. I told her I would help get her away from him. I held her. I cried with her. I said I was proud of her.