Daybreak Read Free

Arthur’s face toMargaret’s, passing quickly over Margaret’s by-now-enormous abdomen; his expression seemed to say that this was a sad place for a woman in her condition to be. “As I told you, before I become certain, this will be a hard road to travel. I always believe in being frank.”
    “He may be expert, and he certainly was nice, but I don’t believe him,” said Margaret, going down the steps from the office.
    Arthur said only, “Shall we try elsewhere?”
    “Of course we shall. Anyone with a brain in his head looks for a second opinion.”
    So they looked and so they received it: the same. The baby might live for a year or two or maybe into young manhood, or die anytime in between. He could be subject to pneumonia, diabetes, heat prostration, intestinal distress, or heart failure; he will need extensive, prudent, careful rearing and watching … After the fourth or fifth try they knew it all by heart.
    Patiently, Arthur, knowing better, acceded to Margaret’s pleas; by car, plane, and local train they went with their bundled baby from doctor to doctor, and came at last full circle to where they had begun.
    “Enough,” Arthur said. “We’ve come to the end. Now accept.”
    It was, in a way, a relief.
    The family, parents and grandparents, gathered on that final evening in Arthur’s den. The grandparents were shell-shocked.
    “I looked it up the minute you got off the phone,” said Albert, the grandfather. “Cystic fibrosis runs in families! No one, as far back as I can go, not any of us on Margaret’s side, ever had it. What about you, Arthur?”
    “Nobody,” Arthur said miserably. “Of course therecan be some ancestor so far back that no one even knows his name. Anyway, it doesn’t always have to be inherited. It can just happen.”
    “Supposedly everything we are is in the genes,” responded Albert, in equal misery.
    “What’s the difference?” cried Margaret. “What is, is, and there’s no changing it. I’m worried now …” Her voice trailed off. Her hands rested on the rounded heap where the next baby lay waiting soon to be born.…
    But Holly was strong and well from the moment she made her appearance. With her there were no crises, no worries or daily cares about pneumonia or diet or diabetes—or anything, certainly none of the symptoms or effects of anything as dire as cystic fibrosis. She was a joy, although not an easy joy like Peter! Headstrong, affectionate, argumentative, warmhearted and stubborn, she was certainly not like him.
    “Holly is you, as Peter is Arthur.” That was the informed opinion of relatives and friends.
    “Informed opinion,” said Margaret, lying now on Peter’s bed in the waning afternoon. Like Arthur. Arthur’s boy.
    And it was not true! He was … whose boy? Her hands, lying at her sides, made fists. Her wedding ring cut her flesh. Not true! So there was another grief! How many kinds of grief was a person supposed to bear? How to resolve the conflict?
    “My heart breaks over Peter,” she whispered. “Breaks, do you hear? But that other, that other who is also mine, was mine … oh God, how much, how many sorrows?”
    * * *
    She was still lying there when Arthur came home. She heard his keys jingle as he laid them on the hall table and heard his call.
    “Margy? I’m home. Where are you?”
    “Upstairs. I’ll be right down,” she said, not wanting him, on his first day back at work, to come up and see her weeping in that room; she must be strong for him, must help him.
    But he was already at the top of the stairs. When he saw where she was, he came in and put his arms about her, holding her without speaking.
    “All those years,” she murmured. “Our Peter. Nineteen, this summer.”
    “Yes, yes. A short life. My God! And all the time he knew, I’m sure he knew, it would be short.”
    “Can you absorb in your head or your heart that he was not born to us? He was so much ours! How can it have happened, Arthur?”
    “Who can say?