The Careful Ones — The Waiting Room
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The women in the waiting room didn't look like each other, but they were starting to.
Nadia noticed it the second time she came in. She was there for the twelve-week scan, the standard one, nothing unusual. The clinic was on the third floor of a building that also housed a private GP and a dermatologist, and the waiting room had the particular carpet of places that wanted to feel calm.
The other women — three of them, two with partners — were her age, roughly. Professional. The kind of tired that came from working while pregnant, not from poverty. The kind of calm that came from having access to information.
One of them was reading something on her phone. Nadia caught a glimpse: a page dense with numbers, a coloured chart. She looked away, and then looked back, and the woman tilted her phone slightly, a gesture so small it might have been unconscious — or might have been the privacy reflex of someone who knew what she was looking at and knew that other people had opinions about it.
She had a friend, Renata, who'd done the profiling eighteen months ago. Renata had a boy now, thirteen months, who had already been to a music class, a swimming class, a sensory development workshop. The workshops were held in a converted warehouse in Hackney that smelled like cork mats and good intentions. Nadia had gone once, to be supportive. She'd watched Renata's son — Lucas — stack foam blocks with the focus of a small engineer, and she'd watched Renata watch him, and the watching had a quality to it that Nadia couldn't place at the time.
Later she identified it: it was verification. Renata was watching Lucas for signs of the profile. Not anxiously. Not even consciously, maybe. But the way you watch a plant you've put in a specific window — checking that the conditions are producing the expected result.
Renata had shown Nadia his profile once, just briefly, from her phone, scrolling past it as if by accident. Predicted vocabulary development: above average. Fine motor: upper quartile. She'd said it's not a guarantee, she'd said it's just information, and she'd said it in the tone people use when they've already decided and want you to understand they also thought about it first.
Nadia had said that's great and changed the subject. She hadn't thought much about it then. She was thirty-one and not pregnant and the question was abstract.
Now she was thirty-two and fourteen weeks and the question was not abstract.
• • •
She and Dev had conceived the old-fashioned way, if that was still a phrase you were allowed to use. It had taken four months, which the GP said was normal, and which had felt like a long time because Nadia was the kind of person for whom waiting was a form of failure. Dev was calmer. Dev was always calmer. He'd said it'll happen when it happens and meant it, and she'd wanted to shake him and also to be him, which was often how she felt about Dev.
They hadn't discussed profiling. It hadn't come up, exactly — it had been present without being mentioned, the way the cost of the flat was present without being mentioned, the way the question of where her career was going was present without being mentioned. Things that occupied space by not being said.
Her mother had asked, once, over the phone. Are you doing anything special? She'd meant the profiling. Nadia had said no, and her mother had said okay, good, and Nadia hadn't been able to tell if the good was relief or disappointment.
• • •
Her name was called.
She lay on the table while the sonographer moved the probe around. The baby appeared on the screen: a shape that looked like a question mark, or a comma, or something not yet decided.
"Looks good," the sonographer said. "Heartbeat strong. Dating matches."
"Good," Nadia said.
She watched the screen. The baby moved — a twitch, a flutter of something that might have been a hand. It was too early for the movement to mean anything. It was too early for the baby to mean anything, in the sense of intention, of choice. And yet she was here, lying on her back with cold gel on her stomach, watching a screen, and the thing on the screen was a person she was making without a spreadsheet, without a profile, without information — and the absence of information felt like something. Not freedom, exactly. More like a dare.
The sonographer printed the image. Nadia held it — the thin paper, the grey smudge — and felt the usual thing, the thing everyone says they feel, which is wonder, but also something else underneath, which was the specific wonder of not knowing. Of having no data. Of carrying a child whose cognitive range and emotional regulation and cardiovascular health at sixty were unknown, and would remain unknown, and would unfold in real time over years, and she would watch, and the watching would be different from Renata's watching because she would have nothing to verify against.
She didn't know if that was better. She knew it was different.
• • •
On the way out she passed a noticeboard. A flyer: Expanded Pre-Implantation Genetic Profiling — Understanding Your Options. A QR code. A tagline at the bottom, in the kind of font that wanted to seem friendly: Because every family deserves the best start.
She stood there for a moment.
She thought: we already started. She thought: three weeks ago I didn't know this was an option. She thought: the women in the waiting room knew.
She thought about what best start meant, and how the word best did most of the work in that sentence, and how it was a word that sounded simple and wasn't. Best for whom. Best by what measure. Best compared to what. The flyer didn't say. The flyer didn't need to. The word best was sufficient, because everyone wanted it, and nobody could argue against wanting it, and the impossibility of arguing against it was what made it so effective.
She didn't scan the code.
She folded the flyer and put it in her bag and walked to the lift, and the thought she didn't let herself finish followed her down to the ground floor and out into the street, where it became the vague feeling she'd have for the rest of the pregnancy that she hadn't asked enough questions, without being able to name what the questions were.
• • •
Dev was home when she got back. He was making pasta, the simple one, the one he'd been making since university. The flat smelled like garlic and olive oil and felt like home, which was a relief.
"How was the scan?"
She showed him the picture. He held it and smiled in the way that he smiled — slowly, with his whole face — and she loved him for the slowness of it.
"All good?"
"All good."
She put the kettle on. She took the flyer out of her bag and looked at it again, on the kitchen counter, next to the bread and the post. It looked smaller here. Less like a question and more like a piece of paper.
"Dev."
"Yeah?"
"If we'd done the profiling thing. Would you have wanted to know the scores?"
He looked at her. He put down the wooden spoon. "Do you want to talk about this?"
"I don't know. Maybe."
He leaned against the counter. "I think I'd have looked. I think anyone would look. And then I think I'd have wished I hadn't, because you can't unlook. But I also think—" He stopped. "Why are you asking?"
"There was a flyer at the clinic."
"Okay."
"And women in the waiting room. With charts on their phones."
He nodded. He picked up the wooden spoon again, stirred the sauce. "I think we're fine," he said. "I think we're doing it the way we want to do it."
"I know."
"But?"
She looked at the flyer. The QR code. The friendly font. "What if we're wrong? What if not knowing is just — choosing to not know? And the choosing is the thing, not the knowing?"
Dev thought about this. He was good at thinking about things without rushing to answer, which was one of the reasons she'd married him and one of the reasons she sometimes wanted to scream.
"I think," he said carefully, "that every generation of parents worried they were doing it wrong. And every generation was right. And the kids turned out okay anyway. Mostly."
"Mostly."
"Mostly is all you get."
She put the flyer in the recycling. Then she took it out and put it in the kitchen drawer, under the takeaway menus, where she could find it if she wanted to and wouldn't see it if she didn't.
The pasta was good. They ate on the sofa and watched something and didn't talk about it again, and the drawer stayed closed, and the baby inside her continued to become whatever it was going to become, without reference to a spreadsheet, without a score, without a profile, in the dark.
Next chapter: The Appendix