Redeemed 9 comments

By Bradford Winters

I hadn’t even told friends yet we were expecting a third. Which makes telling you in this form all the more strange, and yet, given the venue, strangely fitting. If there’s anywhere in cyberspace that one can safely walk in blind faith, it is here.

With the first two pregnancies, we had ignored the conventional wisdom of waiting out the first trimester to spread the news. And with my wife in her late thirties at the time, there was all the more reason to wait. But no. In fact, with the first pregnancy we were only several weeks in when not only did I fail to contain it, but at a friend’s rehearsal dinner. Arguably, there was more than one good reason not to share the news that night.

With the second one, though, I learned my lesson: a near miscarriage at seven weeks was followed by a triple screen test at fifteen weeks which indicated an elevated risk of Down Syndrome. Granted it was a risk factor of 1/125, not something to sweat over necessarily.

But sweat I did until the day she was born, because where there is even a wisp of smoke, I am prone to stoke the fire.

Three years and two extraordinary daughters later, my wife tells me the news at dinner. We had been open to the possibility despite some pretty good reasons to stick with two — the change of game from man-on-man to zone defense, the inevitably greater genetic risks this time around, a global economic meltdown, etc.—and had often recalled the story of a friend’s parents who, come their own decision to stick with two or have a third, drew up a list of pros and cons. The cons outnumbered the pros by a long shot, but they went ahead and had a third anyway, and said it was the best decision they had ever made.

Nevertheless, without even a wisp of smoke in the air yet, I set about adding wood to a bonfire of my own making. I’ll get run ragged in zone defense, my ass kicked in the recession, but Lord, let us have a healthy child.

Thus began the sleepless nights, which tapered off around the time I had a dream that the baby was a boy. A big healthy boy whom, upon waking, I thought we might name Luke. A favorite name of mine all along, and all the more perfect for a boy born in the Year of the Ox, the symbol of his namesake.

Of course, the Chinese birth chart at our first visit to the OB indicated a girl. So be it, Lord, just let it be a healthy one. (The upfront risk of Down’s, even before the triple screen, was 1/34 now that my wife was in her early forties—again, not exactly a cause for alarm yet, and besides, was I that quick to disregard my dream anyway?)

Healthy it looked indeed when the first sonogram appeared with such startling clarity, more so than I could recall from either of the first two pregnancies. There was the heart, bouncing like a tiny white ball on the black screen. That day, (s)he had the clarity of an ice sculpture in the moonlight.

Then came a bout of bleeding the same day our car went missing. Having called the OB and tow pound alike, we were to report to the doctor’s office on the one hand, and the police station on the other. Good times.

The car, it turns out, was indeed at the pound; the baby, however, was no longer with us. Where there had been a bouncing heart and crystal-clear repose, now there was nothing but the tiny form of it suspended in inertia.

The next day there would be a time to mourn, to grieve an entire life lost in those eight millimeters of budding hands and feet, to learn that each of us, in fact, had had the sense it was a boy. But first...my wife to the hospital and I to the tow pound, then home to put the girls to bed and return to the hospital when the sitter showed up.

And there I sat, waiting for a car I didn’t even want, like a character in a short story who, fresh from the impact of what had just happened, finds himself in one of the more unsympathetic environments imaginable. With its wood-paneled walls and woman at the window whose insane fake nails looked like fish hooks for Leviathan; with the guy next to me bitching that Howie Mandel’s son breezed through the line in five minutes while he had been there two hours, and another guy announcing for all to hear that he owned a Porsche, Flannery O’Connor could have hardly done it better.

But then, as if scripted by O’Connor herself, when I finally did get the car, our crappy old Honda I would have been just as happy to have stolen so as to collect the insurance, when I proceeded to the exit gate where the guard handed me a receipt, I looked down at the word stamped in bold red caps: REDEEMED.

Call it what you want, a sign or coincidence, and I will do the same.