into a big, scary tube. Showing tenderness and compassion, the tech
stopped the table before it slid Colton fully into the machine, allowing him
to keep his head out so that he could see me. The machine whirred to life,
and Colton stared at me through eyes pinched with pain.
Just like that, the test was over. The technician scanned the pictures,
then escorted us out of the lab. He did not take us back to the main waiting
room, but to an isolated hallway where a few chairs lined the wall.
The technician looked at me somberly. “You need to wait here,” he said.
At the time, I didn’t even notice that he had not asked Colton to get
dressed.
The three of us sat in the cold, narrow hallway, Sonja cradling Colton, his
head against her shoulder. She was crying pretty steadily now. Looking in
her eyes, I could see that her hope had drained away. This wasn’t the
normal place where you would wait. The tech had separated us out. He
had seen the picture and knew it was something bad.
Sonja looked down at Colton, lying in her arms, and I could see the
wheels turning in her head. She and Colton did everything together. This
was her little boy, her pal. More than that, this little blond-haired, blue-eyed
fireball was a heavenly blessing, a healing gift after the baby we had lost.
Five years earlier, Sonja had been pregnant with our second child. We
were over the moon about it, seeing this new life as the rounding out of our
family. When it was just the two of us, we were a couple. When Cassie was
born, we became a family. With a second child on the way, we could begin
to see the outlines of the future—family portraits, a house filled with the
joyful noise of childhood, two kids checking their stockings on Christmas
morning. Then two months into the pregnancy, Sonja lost the baby, and our
misty-edged dreams popped like soap bubbles. Grief consumed Sonja.
The reality of a child lost, one we would never know. An empty space
where there wasn’t one before.
We were eager to try again, but we worried about whether we would be
able to have another child, multiplying our misery. A few months later,
Sonja became pregnant again. Her early prenatal checkups revealed a
healthy, growing baby. Still, we hung on a bit loosely, a little afraid to fall in
love with this new child as we had the one we had lost. But forty weeks
later, on May 19, 1999, Colton Todd Burpo arrived and we fell head over