“Um, I used to say . . .” I lick my lips. “I tell her to dwell in possibility.”
“What’s possible, Grip?” Bristol asks. “I mean, we know what won’t happen.”
The fierce light that has entered Bristol’s eyes dims for a moment.
“She won’t live a long life,” she says softly. “She may not even live at all outside of my body. We know what isn’t possible, but what is?”
“I don’t know, Bris,” I confess. Our options seem narrow. Our choices are crap. I’m the guy who defied every odd to achieve the things I have, to build the life I have, but I’ve finally met a mountain I can’t conquer. “What’s possible?”
“Life,” she whispers. “Maybe not for our little girl, but for someone else’s. For someone else, she could save a life. She could do a lot of good whether she’s here for a moment or for . . .”
Bristol looks down at the phone in her hand and shows me the screen.
It’s a website dedicated to neonatal organ donation. I read through the information, shocked to see the organization was founded by parents who lost their baby to anencephaly.
“This is a possibility.” Bristol cups my jaw and lays her head against my face. Her damp lashes blink on my cheek. “I can’t terminate this pregnancy. I can’t make myself do it, and I need to feel that it’s not in vain.”
I get it. I feel the same way, and this route feels like the only thing close to possibility in this scenario, but it will carry a heavy price, one we can’t even begin to calculate.
I hope we don’t regret it.
Chapter 37
Bristol
I’VE LIVED A PRETTY privileged life.
I know that. I get it.
Beyond the top-percenter privilege my family’s wealth afforded, there’s that layer of privilege that’s almost become a buzzword: white privilege.
Confession.
Honestly, I used to get defensive about this somewhere inside. I didn’t ask to be born white, or for the intrinsic advantages that come with it living in this country. Hell, at first I didn’t want to believe it was real. It’s much easier to believe you don’t have these immense advantages through accident of birth than to figure out how you can balance the scales.
Grip and I managed to get beyond labels like “privilege” or “minority” or even black and white. Beneath the labels, we found who the other person really is and how they’ll love you in good times and bad. Unconditional love, by definition, doesn’t give a damn about those labels.
Life is the grand equalizer. It has a way of stripping those privileges, rendering them inconsequential. Black, white, rich, poor—when it rains, we all get wet. When it rains, it pours, and sometimes, there is no shelter. I’m in the storm of my life, or rather a storm is in me, brewing in me, growing in me . . . a storm of heartache and tragedy for which there is no privilege, no escape. Not my family’s money. Not my husband’s fame. Not my expensive education or my ambition. The hardest things in life have no escape, no workaround. There is no around, only through. We trudge through those storms. They toss us to and fro. They drench us and change us and strip us of the protection we thought privilege allowed, only to find in the end that we all bleed. We all suffer. We all die.
God, I’m morbid. And philosophical. In short, I’m a bore.
But so is this guy droning on for the last forty-five minutes. It makes me appreciate how gifted an orator Dr. Hammond is to make prisons and criminal justice reform sound fascinating, because this guy doesn’t.
Dr. Hammond leans over to whisper in my ear, “Glad I’m not the only one struggling.”
I snap my head around to meet the amusement in his eyes with a chagrined smile.
“Was I that obvious?” I whisper back. “I thought I looked engaged.”
“If that’s engaged,” he says with a grin, “I’d hate to see checked out.”
I pretend to wince.
“I need to work on my fakery. I’m not very good at phony, never have been.”
Grip leans over to see me and Dr. Hammond, who sits to my right. “What the hell are you two talking about?” he asks. “You do realize this banquet is to honor us, right, Iz?”
“Do you feel honored?” His dark brows crest over the rims of his glasses. “If you honor me by holding me hostage to a bad speech for an hour and serving me rubber chicken, I’ll pass.”