The Wait

by Stephen L. Burns

Illustration by Janet Aulisio

The copy of People magazine on Alicia’s lap was standard waiting room fare, dog-eared and four months out of date. It had been open to the same place for several minutes, far longer than it would take anyone to read the single simply-worded paragraph captioning the two-page photo spread.

“Is this your first time, dear?”

Alicia blinked, then looked uncertainly at the woman sitting next to her. “Excuse me?”

The woman was what some of her friends would call a foxy granny. A trim and well-maintained late fifties, maybe even older, with long moonlight gray hair cascading over her shoulders. She was casually dressed in jeans, sandals, and a loose forest green silk blouse. Her long fingers worked a crochet hook with almost mechanical precision, pulling fine blue cotton thread from a bag at her feet and turning it into tighdy woven fabric.

She smiled, revealing a lifetime’s worth of laugh lines around her eyes. “I asked if this was your first time.”

Alicia tried to make herself get with the program, and managed to produce an unconvincing smile. “Uh huh. First time.”

“I thought so. You’ve already been in for the amnio?”

Her smile thinned. “Yeah, and boy wasn’t it fun?”

“And now you’re waiting.”

“That’s right,” Alicia agreed in a leaden tone. “I’m waiting.”

She didn’t really want to be there. Wouldn’t have been, either, except that she didn’t have much choice in the matter. Jacob Isaac Goldman, the owner of, creative force behind, and absolute authority over Goldman Architectural Design Associates had come down to her workroom bearing two fresh hot Kona coffees—her favorite kind. He’d made himself at home by sitting on one of her workbenches, and given her coffee and hearty congratulations on what he referred to as the “blessed event.”

J.I. was what she and everyone at GADA called him, and he was a terrific boss. Alicia was the firm’s Chief Nerd. That was even what he’d had painted on her door in real gold leaf after she’d called herself that one time. Her job was to keep GADA’s multitude of computers running at peak efficiency, printers and plotters grinding out the paper, net connections stable, and to manage software installation and upgrades. A penny-pinching, elbow-jogging, computer-hating neoluddite like her previous boss could make a task like that an absolute misery.

J.I. made it the best job she’d ever had. GADA was a great place to work. Nice people, the hottest new equipment, one hell of a dental plan. The bennies were grade A all the way.

Except that one had strings attached.

“It used to take several weeks,” the woman said. “The waiting, I mean. Before that, this stuff wasn’t even possible.”

“Progress marches on, I guess,” Alicia replied glumly. Sometimes it marched right over top of you.

“So you’re what, almost into your second trimester?”

Alicia frowned down at her squarish, fireplug body. “I didn’t think it showed.”

The woman laughed. “I had three, and I’m here with my daughter Penny, who’s on her third. That’s helped make me pretty good at reading the signs that say ‘baby on board.’ ” She lowered her voice as if confiding a secret. “Besides, you’re being here gives me a pretty fair idea of how far along you are.”

“Yeah, I guess it would.” Alicia glanced at her watch once again. Fifteen or so minutes to go. The waiting was getting to her, but she wasn’t ready to deal with what would happen when it ended.

“You seem kind of nervous. You shouldn’t be. There’s really nothing to worry about.”

That was just how J.I. had put it. GADA’s health plan would pick up the tab for everything. After the baby was born she could take extended maternity leave. Or, he hoped since she was so dam indispensable, come back part or full time for a substantial pay premium. Come back with the baby in tow, of course. Bassinets were nothing new in the GADA offices, and she would also have free use of the first class daycare center right there in the building. Any help she needed managing both a job and a baby, all she had to do was ask.

GADA was a small enough firm for everyone to have a pretty clear understanding of her situation, the boss included. This was his gentle way of acknowledging her single parent status, and letting her know he would do everything he could to accommodate it.

There was, he repeated, nothing to worry about. She hadn’t been worried.

Then.

“I’m not worried,” Alicia said, trying to sound more confident than she felt. “Just nervous.”

“There’s nothing to it. Even if a problem is found in the genescan, the therapy isn’t that much different than another amniocentesis.”

“I know.”

“Is there a…” The woman hesitated a moment, even her crochet hook halting mid-stitch. “Is there a special problem you think they might find?”

Before Alicia could answer that, the woman continued on in a rush. “I’m not trying to be nosy, it’s just that I’ve seen what they can do. In my daughter Penny’s case they’re checking for Tourette’s and Down’s. Penny is fine, and so is her older brother Jimmy, but her younger brother Ricky has to live in a group home. The Tourette’s is on Hal’s side. Hal’s her husband, and has a very mild case that’s being treated with medication. Penny’s first, Olivia, was normal. Her second, Donny, tested positive for Down’s, had in-utero gene therapy, and came out just fine.”

“I’m glad.” Alicia shook her head. “No, nothing like that—at least that I know of. The only reason I’m here is because it’s a rule where I work.”

They had just about finished up the Konas when J.I. had sighed, his smile fading. He looked Alicia in the eye, his expression turning somber. “You’ve maybe heard that I have a son who is institutionalized,” he said in a soft, toneless voice.

“I guess I might have,” she admitted evasively.

“Well, it’s true. He was Mandy and my second child, and his name is Leonard. We call him Lenny, but his name should really be Lesch-Nyhan Syndrome. That’s the name of the disease he has, and pretty much what he is. First, he’s severely mentally retarded.”

Alicia waited while J.I. paused for a sip of coffee, knowing from his face and posture that there was more to come. Worse.

J.I. shrugged. “That wouldn’t be so bad; he could have a life with that. But with LNS that’s the least of his troubles. He’s in such constant physical pain that five times a day they have to give him injections of enough painkiller to knock down an elephant. Even still, he hurts.”

“I’m sorry,” Alicia said, feeling the raw but tightly controlled pain radiating from him while he told this.

“God should be sorry.” His shoulders slumped and he regarded her with haunted eyes. “Ah, I don’t mean that. But there’s worse yet. Because of the LNS he suffers from an extreme form of something called autophagia. What that means is he bites and chews on himself. Unless he’s restrained he gnaws on his own arms and fingers like a dog with a bone, would take them right down to the bone if we let him. He has to wear a plastic thing in his mouth, not only to keep him from doing that, but also to stop him from biting his own lips off.”

Alicia could only stare back at him, unable to imagine living with such a terrible thing, and being able to tell about it so calmly.

“He probably won’t live much longer, and God willing, he won’t. Eight years of pure unadulterated hell his life has been. Eight years of dumb drugged whimpering misery.”

She opened her mouth to say something, anything, then closed it. What could she say?

J.I. flashed her a weary smile. “I didn’t come down here to visit and tell you all this to make you feel bad, or to scare you. I tell it so you’ll understand a rule I have, one that applies to you now. See, what caused Lenny’s condition was a mutation in a single X chromosome. The one bad rivet which made the temple of his body an uninhabitable ruin. Mandy and I had no idea that such a terrible thing could happen to a child of ours, that our love could create such tragedy. Our first child, our daughter Hannah, was just fine.”

He drained his coffee cup. “It’s the shouldadones that keep you awake at night, Alicia. We could have had a genescan done on Lenny before he was born, and they probably would have spotted that bad gene. The gene replacement therapy available back then was maybe good enough to have fixed the problem, and if not, preventing his birth would have been a mercy. It was an inconvenient, expensive option, and we never took it. Like now I wouldn’t spend every cent I have to make Lenny right. Anyway, for our third, Benjamin, you can believe we had it done.”

He put his cup aside, a sad but determined look on his face. “So this is why I ask that you go for the tests we never had done for Lenny. If there is a problem with the child you carry, it can be found and fixed before another life is ruined. Not doing everything I can to prevent another Lenny would kill me. Such work is still expensive, but GADA will pick up the tab. You can make the appointment for during work hours, even go in the company limo if you want.”

Alicia swallowed hard. “You said ask, but I don’t think you’re really asking.”

J.I. nodded soberly. “I’m not. All this was covered by a clause in the contract you signed when I hired you. I do not like forcing anyone to do anything against their will, but because of my Lenny I can give no leeway in this. I’m sorry, but this is a matter of conscience for me. Do you understand?”

She nodded slowly. “I guess I do.”

“Will you make me happy and do this for me? For your baby?”

Right then it didn’t seem like such a big deal. “Sure. Why not?”

J.I. hugged her, so relieved he cried. Even apart from needing the job and the money, not to mention the bennies, how could she have said no to a man and an argument like that?

“So what do you do for a living?” the woman asked, her crochet hook going back into high gear once more.

“I take care of the computer equipment at Goldman Architectural.”

Her green eyes widened. “Hey, they’re really famous! I’ve been to that museum they designed over Thirteenth. Modern art doesn’t do much for me, but I keep going back because that building is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. Do you like working there?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“That’s nice. What about the father?”

Alicia frowned. “What about him?”

“What’s he do for a living?”

“He—” She hesitated, not wanting to get into all of that with a perfect stranger. “He’s a mailman.”

The woman must have picked up something from her tone of voice. She stopped crocheting, cocked her head and said, “You make it sound like he’s out of the picture. Are you all by yourself in this?”

Alicia grimaced. “I guess you could say that.”

Dave was going to be out of the picture for some time. He was a hospitalized mailman with a fractured skull, three broken ribs, ruptured spleen, bruised kidneys, and both arms and one leg in a cast. The Davey Express wouldn’t be making any rounds for quite some time to come. Maybe never, considering how badly his leg— not to mention the rest of him—was messed up.

They had never caught the guys who had done it. His was just one out of a couple of dozen cases handled by one overworked detective. If it had happened while he had been on duty that might have been another story. But no, he had just been out walking his dog the evening he had been jumped.

They had killed Zippy, literally stomping the poor dachshund to death, and had damn near done the same thing to Dave. About all the information the detective had was that there had been four of them. That had been learned by simply counting the sets of bloody bootprints leading away.

“But the father wasn’t really your partner, was he?”

Alicia frowned. “What makes you say that?”

The woman smiled. “I can tell zese zings,” she intoned in a hokey accent, then winked, her eyes sparkling with merriment. “An old feminist like me was marching for the rights of gay women before you were even bom. I have a gay younger sister, and two gay nephews. Like the old saying goes, some of my best friends are straight. It’s not that hard to tell.”

Alicia wasn’t really that surprised or particularly put off. Being gay wasn’t something she tried to hide. And although she didn’t flaunt it—or at least she didn’t think she did—she knew that a combination of something about the way she looked and some sort of vibe she gave off made it obvious to a lot of people. Not ten minutes into her first interview with J.I. he’d asked if she was in a steady relationship or been, as he had so nicely put it, “between lady friends.”

“No,” she said in answer to the woman’s question. “Dave is just a real good friend who acted as sperm donor.” She let out a sad chuckle. “Becka and I used to tease him about being bisexual.”

“Becka was your partner?”

“Yeah. Was. We’d been together in a monoger for almost two years. We’d bought a house together. We decided to have kids together. So we did what a lot of gay women do. We got a male friend—Dave—to donate sperm. It was all supposed to be so romantic. We’d be pregnant together, have our babies together, grow old together raising them.”

“But something changed all that.”

Alicia nodded grimly. “Sure as hell did. I caught, she didn’t. Come to find out, she couldn’t. Becka went completely off the deep end. She even demanded that I have an abortion, saying that since she couldn’t have a baby I was betraying her by having one.”

Hardly aware of what she was doing, she cradled her belly protectively. “I refused. She trashed the place and left—and left me holding the mortgage and everything else.” She shrugged. “Don’t you just hate it when your life turns into something from a trashy soap opera?”

“You’ll meet someone else,” the woman offered gently.

Alicia snorted. “I always do. My problem is keeping them.”

Before Becka had been Donna, and before her Mariel. Each and every one of them had seemed like The One, Becka most of all.

Their almost two years together had turned out to be just one more thrilling episode of Alicia’s Post-Millennial Lesbian Love Follies. There were times finding someone to love and be loved by was like being in some sort of cruel lottery where you got the prize first, only to have it later taken away when your ticket proved to be yet another loser.

Alone again, her hopes and plans in ruins, and now pregnant to boot, she had briefly considered the abortion Becka had demanded.

But she was in her downhill thirties, and that old biological clock was ticking so loudly she almost had to wear earplugs when she looked in the mirror and counted those sags and wrinkles and gray hairs, which made her look more like her own mother than a potential mother with every passing day.

Especially when she frowned.

“What about your family?”

“My dad’s been dead over ten years now. When he died my mom took Jesus into her heart as her personal savior, and her version of him doesn’t leave any room for my kind.”

“She doesn’t accept your being gay.”

A bitter laugh. “She prays for me when she isn’t telling me I’m going to be microwaved in hell for all eternity because I’m an abomination in the eyes of God.”

“That must be pretty hard to take.”

Alicia shrugged. “We avoid each other. I was closer to my dad. I know he would’ve gotten off on being a grandfather, that was something he always wanted. I think part of Mom’s problem is her trying to deny a bit of latent DC voltage of her own.”

“So you’re facing this all by yourself.”

She shrugged again. “I’m doing OK.”

“Having and raising a child all by yourself doesn’t frighten you?”

She stared at her hands. Her nails were bitten to the quick. “Maybe a little. But I want this baby. I think I’ll make a good mother—I sure as hell intend to try. I have a good job, and my boss is totally supportive. It’s just—” She shook her head and spread her hands in a broad, all-inclusive gesture.

“You mean this place? This procedure?”

Alicia sighed. “You got it.”

“You really shouldn’t be. This is like, well…” A puckish grin appeared. “This is like the bum-in period they put computers through before shipping them. If there is any problem they find it and fix it now, before it leaves the old baby factory.”

Alicia chuckled, tickled by that way of looking at it. “Bum-in. I like that.”

The other woman laughed. “See? Nothing to get upset about.”

Alicia’s pleasure faded, her smile with it. “I wish it were that simple. I knew this was coming, but I kept myself from thinking about it. Things a couple friends said only made me avoid it all the more. But going through the amnio kind of made it impossible to do that any longer.”

She checked her watch. “In just a few minutes the doctor is going to call me in, give me the results of the genescan, and I’m going to have to— to—” She shook her head, her tongue locking up as she tried to say it.

“To what?”

She forced it out in a harsh, hopeless voice. “To decide what to tell the doctor if she tells me the tests turned up the gay gene.”

Understanding flashed in the other woman’s eyes. She started to say something, stopped herself. Instead she put down her needlework, reached out and covered Alicia’s clenched hands with her own.

At fourteen she’d thought she would rather die than live with the urges and impulses blossoming inside her rapidly changing body. At fifteen she’d begun trying to forcibly change by dating boys and even letting them have sex with her. It was awful, and repetition only made it worse. Drinking had helped for a while, numbing the disgust with herself, what she was doing, and what she wanted to do instead. But in the end it had led her to spending the night of her seventeenth birthday in the hospital having a quart of cheap tequila pumped out of her stomach.

Then the following summer she had met Carrie, sweetly Men in love, and been loved back. It was then that she began to repair her heart, and come to terms with her own sexuality.

By the time she was in college she knew exactly what she was, and had grown comfortable with it. Her dad knew, and accepted it and her without reservation. Her mom was another story. She refused to accept it, and after her dad died she veered off into uncompromising righteous rejection.

Even so, the nineties weren’t that bad a time to be a gay woman. For a while there it had been almost chic, what with k.d. and Melissa and Martina and other such popular icons. The Millennium came and went with a brief fuss and little change. Most people knew you weren’t some sort of perverse monster who preyed on little girls. Most people had gotten past the point where lesbian conjured up an image of some man-hating, combat-booted, cigar-chomping, swaggering bull dyke with a flattop and a physique like a pro wrestler, and gay didn’t automatically kick off a knee-jerk revulsion.

Most.

Alicia gazed off toward the reception area where soon a nurse would appear and call her name. Once again she protectively cradled her belly.

“There’s nothing wrong with being gay,” she said with a quiet certainty it had taken years to gain.

“Nothing at all,” the woman agreed.

“If I hadn’t come to terms with myself I probably would have killed myself drinking.”

“One of my friends went through something like that himself.”

“But what about my baby?” She hung her head, feeling like there was a million pound weight on her back.

“I think about how my mom acts, and what it’s like to be on the receiving end of her attitude. I think about how great my love life has been.”

“You don’t have to be gay to have your partner bail out when a baby enters the picture. Women always have gotten left holding the bag, and I guess they always will.”

“I know that. Then I think about Dave, the man who helped make this possible. Hell, I don’t even mind calling him the father.”

“Is he causing problems?”

“Not like that. It’s just…”

She sighed, hunching her shoulders. “He’s in the hospital right now because he was the victim of a gay bashing. Four real men’ damn near killed him. They did kill his dog, just stomped poor Zippy and kicked him and—” Her voice broke, and the tears she had been holding back finally began to seep through her tightly squeezed lids. He’d looked like a truck had run over him. Maybe it had. A truck named prejudice, a monster ten-wheeler loaded to capacity with fear and hate and cruelty, an uncaring unswerving behemoth that would relentlessly flatten anything unfortunate enough to be in its way.

How could she in good conscience leave her child in the path of such a terrible thing as that?

The hands of the woman beside her closed tightly around her own, gentle and reassuring.

“Let me tell you a little story,” she said in a kindly tone. “My husband and I started our family in another time. Back in the late sixties, which might as well have been another age. One where a meat-grinder named Vietnam was chewing up young men and spitting them back out either physically and spiritually damaged, or in body bags. We came very close to not having children. How could we, when the draft and the war were what they stood to inherit? But someone passed on to me a bit of wisdom that changed our minds, and I’m glad it did.”

Alicia lifted her head to look at the other woman, was given an encouraging smile.

“Vietnam ended. The draft ended. My children grew up and started their families wondering if they could in good conscience bring children into a world where AIDS seemed to be the medical equivalent of Vietnam. But now even that’s finally been licked.” Her grip tightened, and although her voice was filled with conviction, her gaze was tranquil. “What I was told and what I have learned to be true is that you can’t know what sort of world your children will inherit. Or what kind of world they will make, or what sort of place they will find in it. You just can’t.”

She patted Alicia’s hands. “If the doctor says your child carries the gene for cystic fibrosis or Down’s or something like that, have it fixed and be thankful that you live in a world where such a wonderful thing is possible. But unless you think being gay is some sort of disease, leave that be. Tell the doctor you don’t need or want to know. If you believe in God, leave that up to him.” She grinned. “Or if you’re an old pagan like me, leave it up to Her. Just because a choice exists, that doesn’t mean you have to make it. The basis for your decision could change, and completely invalidate it. For all we know, maybe next week they’ll discover that there’s a hate gene, a prejudice and intolerance gene, which would mean that your mother and those gay bashers and every one else with the bitter cinder of bigotry in their hearts are the ones who need the gene therapy. Not you. Not your child, if she or he even has it.”

Alicia stared at the other woman, almost afraid to breathe for fear it would shatter the feeling of finally seeing a clear path through the barbed wire snarl of doubt and contradiction J.I.’s rule had subjected her to. Before she could unloosen her tongue a smiling black nurse appeared at reception and called, “Alicia Montondo?”

The moment of truth had arrived. The wait was over.

“Uh, here,” she answered.

The other woman gave her hands a final encouraging squeeze, then let them go. Alicia started to rise, realized that the magazine was still open on her lap.

She gazed down at the photo which had stared back at her before. It showed what many would consider the ideal—and only proper—family: the beaming dad, the adoring mom snugged under his arm, a chubby baby smiling from her lap; the sort of life and future she would never be able to provide for her child. She still hadn’t read the caption and learned who they were and why they were pictured, unable to get past what they represented.

She closed the magazine and tossed it onto the table as she stood up. As she began to turn away her eye was caught by the picture on the front cover.

Delores Sanderson, the first gay female Vice-President.

A shiver went through her as she realized that instead could be a possible future for her child. She turned back toward the woman who had sat beside her. “I never did ask you your name.”

“Minerva,” she answered with a benevolent smile.

Alicia stared. “Like the goddess of wisdom?”

The woman chuckled and shrugged modestly. “Well, my friends call me Minnie and my charge cards are nearly always maxxed out.”

Alicia licked her lips, trying to find words for how she felt. “Thanks, Minnie. I—I can’t tell you how glad I am I met you.”

“Go,” she said with a laugh, picking up her needlework. “Go and blessed be both you and your child.”

Alicia nodded, then headed toward the waiting nurse, on the way crossing paths with a striking blonde in jeans and a sweatshirt. Already she was thinking of passing on the simple wisdom she’d been given to a pregnant friend who had been avoiding coming to a place such as this, almost certainly for the same reason it had been such an agonizing dilemma for her.

Just as the nurse began leading her toward the doctor’s office she stopped and turned for one last look at Minnie.

Her chair was empty. Nor was she anywhere to be seen in the waiting room.

Alicia frowned, then shook her head. She probably had been waiting for that blonde, and now they’ve gone home, that’s all.

Probably.

Alicia laughed and ran to catch up with the nurse, glad she no longer had to wait to begin the process of making the critical decisions about the future of the son or daughter she carried.

Not that she was going to ask that either, but if turned out to be a girl, she already knew what her name would be.

A name for wisdom.

“Artificial life is the most powerful tool in modern computer modeling,” proclaimed Jeremiah Braun-Higgins with a grandiose sweep of both arms. “These small autonomous programs are coded so they can change slightly as they replicate, and that lets them evolve new capabilities in response to their environment.” He was about to describe how A-Life could simulate the whole evolution of organic life when he felt a sharp kick under the table.

Content

The Wait
by Stephen L. Burns