Spoken from the Heart (19 page)

Dr. Franklin was also worried that I might miscarry, just as Mother had. The recommended treatment was cervical sutures. George and I headed to Houston for the procedure, our fingers interlaced, our hands clasped together, communicating in that one gesture every hope that we held for all the months to come. While we were in Houston, Dr. Franklin scheduled us for a sonogram, which was a relatively new technology and not at all routine. Our radiologist was a doctor named Srini Malini, and we watched her as she studied the incomprehensible flecks of white scoring the dark gray screen. At last she turned to look at us and said, "There are two babies." George's eyes and mine overflowed.

But Dr. Malini kept staring at the screen.

Her next words were "They are not cojoined." Both of us gasped; we had never envisioned such a thing. My mind began to race with questions, and I asked her to look to see if there were any heart defects, anything associated with Down syndrome. I had already decided against amniocentesis, because we didn't want to tempt the risk of miscarriage. And these were my babies. I would love them however they came. Dr. Malini looked very closely, and then she said, "They're beautiful babies," the words I had longed to hear.

We asked if she could tell whether they were boys or girls. She turned back to the machine and said, "I can tell that the top one is a girl, but I can't see the one underneath as well. I'm pretty sure she's a girl, but I'm not positive."

The next day I had the sutures, and I sat in my hospital bed that night watching the highlights of Prince Charles and Lady Diana's storybook wedding, dreaming of a happy ending of my own. George had a dozen roses delivered to my room and signed the card, "With love, from the father of twins."

When I first learned that I was pregnant, I had pictured two babies in my mind. My next thought was that it's greedy to want two babies, and I berated myself for even thinking such a thing. Now there were going to be two babies, if all went well. One of my friends in Midland was a midwife, and she told me that anyone pregnant with twins should lie down in the morning and again in the afternoon, and I did that. I took Lamaze lessons from my close friend Penny Slade-Sawyer, who was the mother of three boys. I went to the neighboring city of Odessa to see my obstetrician, Dr. Charles Stephens, every three weeks, and my father insisted upon driving me there each time. Then in early November, when I was barely seven months along, Dr. Stephens found the early signs of preeclampsia. My blood pressure was dangerously high. He looked at me with a worried face and said, "I'll never forgive myself if you don't get at least one baby." He wanted me to go to Houston or Dallas, where there were neonatal intensive care units, because he was sure the babies would be born prematurely and might need special care. I chose Baylor Hospital in Dallas because my uncle Mark was a doctor there and the neonatologist, Dr. Delores Carruth, was the mother of twins. George and I booked our flight.

In Dallas, I was admitted to the hospital and put on bed rest. I was determined to give the babies every possible day to develop and grow; I wanted them to have whatever chance I could give them. George was traveling between Dallas and Midland, tending to me, tending to his business, finishing his job as chairman of Midland's United Way charity campaign. But I was not lonely in my hospital room. Barbara Bush scheduled an event in Texas and came to see me, and so did my Dallas friends Pam Nelson and her husband, Bill, and Anne Johnson, the wife of Clay Johnson, one of George's longtime friends from Andover and Yale. Clay and Anne had seven-year-old twin boys of their own. Weldon and Robert visited me one day in my hospital room and soberly counseled, "We were premature and it wasn't that bad."

On November 24, George was back in Midland hosting the final United Way luncheon when my Baylor doctor, James Boyd, called him and said, "You are going to have your babies tomorrow." George asked him, "Are you sure?" And Dr. Boyd said, "Yes, unless you want your wife's kidneys to fail." My blood pressure was too high, and it was dangerous to continue the pregnancy. George rushed back to Dallas, and at dawn the next morning, I was wheeled into the operating theater for a cesarean section. George was standing next to me as they delivered the babies. Barbara came first at five pounds, four ounces, and Jenna second at four pounds, twelve ounces. They were five weeks early.

We had chosen to name the girls after our mothers, and we did it alphabetically and democratically. The baby who arrived first would be Barbara, the second would be Jenna.

Word was out that the vice president's daughter-in-law would be giving birth at Baylor, and all the television stations from Dallas were waiting at the hospital. One cameraman brazenly walked up to the maternity ward. As I was being wheeled from the operating room, he stepped from behind a wall with his camera. I was swollen with edema from the toxemia and my failing kidneys, and now my postcesarean face was flashed on the local news. It was humiliating. And what was even worse was that I smiled, trying to be accommodating, rather than simply telling him to go away and leave me alone. News photographers snapped pictures of George and the babies so that papers across the country could run the photo with the caption "The vice president's latest grandchildren."

Our girls were here and healthy, and we were thrilled. The country music group the Oak Ridge Boys sent tiny pink sequined jackets. And the jazz great Lionel Hampton sent three vases of red roses to my room, one for me, one for Barbara, and one for Jenna, with a note saying, "Welcome to the world. Lionel Hampton."

And we welcomed them. They were, quite simply, the answer to all our prayers.

I never saw Dr. Malini after that one visit in Houston, when she showed us the first images of our girls. Then on July 18, 2005, George and I hosted an official dinner at the White House for the Indian prime minister, Mahmohan Singh, and his wife, Gursharan Kaur. The State Dining Room was transformed into an Indian garden, with overflowing vases of orange and red flowers, saffron-hued silk tablecloths, and miniature trumpeting elephants fashioned from hot pink and green mums and roses. For that dinner, one invitation was particularly precious to me. I invited Dr. Malini. When she came through the long receiving line wearing a stunning orange sari, George announced to the prime minister of India that she was the doctor who'd told us we were having twins, that she was the first doctor to see our babies. Dr. Malini laughed and said, "Yes, and I've honored patient confidentiality for all these years. I've never told anyone that I was the one who saw for the first time that you were going to have twins." I sat her at my table, and nothing made me happier than to see her beautiful smile all through dinner. It was such a small thing to give back to someone who had given us so much on that hot and anxious July afternoon.

A few days after the girls were born, Mother and Daddy flew into Dallas to see the babies. Uncle Mark stopped by, and Daddy told him that he was having shoulder pain. Mark immediately went on alert. "I just had a patient who died of lung cancer," he told him, "and his first symptom was shoulder pain. When was your last X-ray?" Daddy hadn't had a chest X-ray in a while. Uncle Mark hustled him off to Radiology. When the films came back, the radiologist didn't see anything, but Uncle Mark did. It was a tiny spot, the kind of shadow that perhaps only a brother would have seen. He pointed to it and asked the radiologist, "What about this?" I had just given birth to twins, and my father was being diagnosed with lung cancer. He and Mother headed back to Midland to pack for a long hospital stay. Daddy's only hope of beating the disease was if surgeons removed part of his lung.

Joey O'Neill's dad offered to send his private plane to pick George and me and the girls up when we were finally released from the hospital, in mid-December. It saved us a six-hour drive or a commercial flight with two premature babies. When the plane left Midland for Dallas, my mother and daddy were onboard. Daddy was coming to Baylor for his surgery; I was leaving to return home to Midland. I don't remember what we said to each other; I was too overwhelmed. Life and death were balanced on the span of those two aluminum wings.

George and I arrived home, and we were on our own. While I had been at Baylor, my friends had hosted a baby shower for me and had set up the nursery. I hadn't even decorated a room or shopped for baby clothes because I was afraid to prepare for a future that might not come to pass. Now I had armfuls of diapers and tiny clothes and bottles, and I was completely overwhelmed. George and I had no experience with babies, and suddenly we had two, who seemed to cry all the time. I longed for my own mother, but she was with Daddy, first in the hospital and then for his long convalescence at home. Friends came over to help set up our Christmas tree.

For months, I had secretly daydreamed of sitting under the Christmas tree with George and our two wonderful babies, like some storybook tableau. Instead, we were bleary-eyed and nervous, trying to soothe howling twins. Some nights, we put them in their cribs and literally ran to the other side of the house, hoping for an hour of quiet. Eventually, driven by exhaustion and inexperience, we hired a baby nurse to help us get up with the girls in the middle of the night and to give us a chance to ever so briefly leave the house. After the girls were in their cribs, we would take long walks around Midland in the chilly wintry darkness, arm in arm.

Christmas came and went, and we adjusted. We got the girls on a strict routine. We fed them both at the same time, even in the middle of the night. We put them down early, and they woke up early, and I had them nap in the mornings and afternoons. I believe very strongly in the importance of sleep for all children, but especially for premature babies, whose brains are still growing and developing. After the initial crying and the trauma of us trying to adjust to them and them simply trying to adjust to the world, both girls became happy babies. And George and I discovered a wonderful symmetry in having twins; there was always a baby for one of us to hold. Every morning before dawn, George would get up to make the coffee, as he had done from the start of our marriage; then he would go get the girls and carry them into our bed. We'd each hold a baby and drink our coffee while they drank their bottles, with the morning news droning quietly in the background. The start of the day was reserved for just the four of us. Those early mornings were some of the sweetest times of our lives.

In the afternoons, even in the frigid winters or broiling summers, I would push the girls in their stroller around the sidewalks of Midland. I adored those walks through the daytime quiet in the same neighborhood where my family's "Big House" had been, where each yard or square of sidewalk held a childhood memory of my own. At the end of our walks, we passed a large, frosted globe light planted atop a post on a neighbor's front lawn. One afternoon Barbara lifted up her little hand, pointed, and said, "Moon." We had been reading
Goodnight Moon
at bedtime, and she thought this white orb was the moon rising on her street.

I still worried, though. The doctors had told me that many premature babies have eye problems, so when they were around six months old, I took both girls to an eye specialist, who waved a penlight around the room and had them follow it with their eyes. He told me they were very alert girls, and I breathed a relieved sigh. They crawled early and walked by age one. But I still remember the couple of days when Barbara acted listless. I bundled her off to Dr. Dorothy Wyvell, who had been my pediatrician and who had treated the Bush children. Every child in Midland seemed to have been poked, prodded, and tongue-depressed by Dr. Wyvell. She had gray hair now, and she remained strikingly blunt. She did an exam, ordered some tests, and looked at me. "I know why you're worried," she said. "It's to be expected." With that, she pronounced Barbara fine. Dr. Wyvell was the one who had diagnosed George's little sister Robin's leukemia when she was three and had told Barbara and George Bush that there was nothing they could do but make her comfortable. Leukemia was fatal, Dr. Wyvell explained, and she would slip away in a matter of weeks. Robin spent most of the next six months in Sloan-Kettering in New York, pumped full of transfusions on the slim hope of a cure before she died.

At home, I bought a baby food grinder and made all the girls' meals from scratch. Later, when we went out to eat Mexican food on Friday nights, we would bring the girls, and they would sit in their high chairs eating beans and rice. After those years of living just the two of us, I was happy to have a home with baby toys strewn across the floor and crawling and toddling twins, exploring every nook and cranny of their world.

Daddy recovered from his surgery, and he and Mother began to drop by all the time to see the babies. Daddy's favorite time to arrive was right after lunch, just when I'd put the girls down for a nap. He would knock on the door, open it wide, and loudly call, "Laura, are the babies awake?" They invariably heard him, and once they could pull themselves up, they would be standing in their cribs beaming when their grandfather opened the door. He loved to hold them on his lap, their two little bald heads and his big one bent over together. We spent our Christmases with Mother and Daddy, and the girls clamored to go to Mother and Daddy's house on Halloween, to trick-or-treat there first. Mother brought pink-frosted cupcakes on Valentine's Day, and we set up Easter egg hunts. Barbara scoured the grass and bushes and found the most eggs. She was a young collector, with mounds of colored eggs clutched in her hands and pressed tightly against her chest. Jenna was our homebody. When we were selling the town house on Golf Course to move to a larger ranch-style house on Harvard Avenue, she got on her tricycle and pinned one prospective buyer inside our little concrete backyard. As fast as her feet could push, Jenna rode in tight circles around the woman's legs until she could hardly take a step. Jenna was determined to defend her home against intruders at all costs.