Chapter Fourteen
No one knows where Sylvia’s money comes from. Not my mother, who grew up here. Not my father, who has always been at least partially in charge of the finances of Broad Beach. Certainly not me.
“There’s money,” Sylvia says. “It’s not yours, so don’t worry about it.”
My grandmother was always a riddle. Beginning with: Who was my grandfather? My mother tried to find him, I think, online—she didn’t get very far.
“He left,” Sylvia said. “That’s all we need to know.”
Sylvia wasn’t cold about it, not exactly, although it couldn’t have been easy for my mom anyway—to have such little information, to have a mother with such little interest in giving her any.
But Sylvia was never very interested in the past, hers maybe especially.
“Keep it moving, baby” was her favorite things to say.
I asked my mother about it once, and her response was vague. Something like “You can’t miss what you don’t know.” But I knew she did, miss something—if not him than the idea of a nuclear family.
Marcella had met her own grandparents just three times in her life. Once when she was too little to remember.
“A practical woman,” my mom once told me when I asked.
“My mother was not sentimental,” Sylvia has said. “But she was from the Old World. No one had that luxury back then.”
When I was growing up Sylvia would sometimes disappear for long stretches at a time, telling no one she was leaving or where she was going.
When she’d return I’d ask her, “G-money, where did you go?”
Her answers were always a skirt. “To a luxurious villa.” Or: “Somewhere fabulous.” Or: “My favorite city.” Or: “To a really good time.” No real explanation.
It bothered my mom. She wanted to know where Sylvia was, if she was safe, and, mostly, when she was coming home.
“It’s not good for Lauren,” my mom would say. “You act like there is no one relying on you here. You have a family.”
Sylvia would always scoff. “She’s not my daughter; she’s yours. But if you’re asking for my parenting advice, I think she could do with a little less stability.”
In my early years I was in awe of Sylvia—she seemed to me less like a grandmother and more like a fairy godmother.
Popping in and out, always in a cloud of mystique and expensive perfume, always with a treat or dress or doll.
I looked forward to her leaving because I knew when she returned there would be something to celebrate.
She was an apparition, an energy, the embodiment of everything Marcella wasn’t.
As Sylvia got older we spiraled off in different directions—I moved out just as she started to stay closer to home. Over time Sylvia stopped traveling entirely.
“I’ve seen it all,” she told me. “There’s nothing more for me out there that isn’t here.”
I expected my mother to love this—it’s what she always wanted: Sylvia home, in her orbit day in and day out, finally. But instead of becoming closer over the years, they’ve grown more distant. They have dinners together but don’t do much of anything else. At least, I don’t hear about it.
After I leave Bonnie’s I come home to an uncharacteristically busy house. Sylvia is doing tai chi with an instructor over Zoom, who blasts through the computer at a screech.
My dad is having breakfast in the kitchen, watching television at a volume that is clearly trying to compete with the living room sound, and my mom is banging around pots and pans, cleaning up the sink.
“Hello!” I holler, over the noise.
Sylvia gives me exaggerated, overhead waves. “Want to join?”
She’s dressed in black leggings that buckle at the knees and an old T-shirt that has “Coors Cowboy” on it.
“Just ate,” I say, “but keep crushing it.” I flex my bicep at her, she flexes back.
“Honey!” Dave says. He immediately grabs the remote and turns down the TV volume. “How was the water?”
I flop my bag onto the counter and move to fill up a glass with water. “How did you know?”
Dad’s cheeks go wide into a smile. “Just the look,” he says. He takes a big bite of toast. “And also your board was gone.”
Marcella turns around, a spatula in her hand. She’s dressed in white linen pants and a blue-striped button-down. She looks like she just stepped out of a J.Crew catalog.
“Did you see Stone?” she says.
“Yeah.” I gulp down some water. “We ended up going to the Cove for breakfast.” I decide to leave out the part about Bonnie. I don’t want them to ask me how she is. I don’t want to have to tell them.
“I see him out there sometimes when he’s back. Boy can shred. A lot like the old man,” Dave says.
He grabs my mom’s elbow and pulls her toward him. He kisses her, and I look, briefly, away.
“You don’t need to be shredding,” my mom says.
The tension between them about the water hasn’t waned, but it’s also the one area where my dad drew a line that Marcella doesn’t totally cross.
He’s yielded to her on most areas of life and family and parenting, but on this one, Dave was the law: His daughter would surf; she would love the water. And he’d be in there with her.
“How is Stone?” Dad asks. “Still in Denver?”
“Boulder. He never got married,” my mom says. “Jeff used to talk to me about it.”
“How could you after this one?” Dad extends his arm toward me.
“Well,” Marcella says. “Of course.”
She looks at me and smiles slightly.
I don’t want to talk about Stone, or Bonnie. And I realize how long it has been since I’ve spoken to my husband.
“I’m gonna head up; I need to do some work and call Leo.”
“Send my love!” Dad says.
I hear Marcella cover a stainless steel pot with a clank.
I go into my bedroom, and before I unplug my phone from in the charger I go to the bathroom.
I still have my period, and I’m bleeding this morning in spurts of crimson—a reinvigorated day four.
I feel the grief settle around me—both at another failed attempt and at the unknown of the future—our fight, Leo’s absence.
But I notice, too, a thread of newfound freedom.
Just a whisper, a small taste of it. If we do nothing, there will be nothing, but also: There’s nothing I need to do.
In the beginning, fertility treatment felt like a necessary step, a means to an end.
Productive, even. After a year of not getting pregnant, we were doing something to change that.
OK, so we have to take Clomid; OK, so we have to do IUI; OK, so we have to do IVF.
They were just the steps we had to take to become parents.
I never considered the possibility that they wouldn’t work.
That nothing we did was going to bring us any closer.
That, in fact, every month that went by made the possibility of our success bleaker and bleaker.
I’ve never been pregnant, but I have once seen double lines on a pregnancy test. About a year ago we did an IUI cycle that started as a potential IVF but not enough follicles grew—only one—and we pivoted to IUI.
Less invasive but, more importantly, less expensive.
I had done a myriad of shots, but we weren’t going to go through the out-of-pocket surgical procedure.
And the month wouldn’t be a total waste.
I knew it wasn’t going to work, but also—fertility treatment leads to magical thinking.
But, maybe, perhaps—everyone had an exception story.
We weren’t supposed to test until day fourteen.
Two weeks past procedure. Sometimes the trigger shot took a while to work its way out of your system—a week, ten days, tops.
Two weeks was enough time for real pregnancy HCG to grow detectable in the body.
Enough time to get a BFP (big fat positive).
In the early days, before intervention, I became obsessed with testing.
I’d test at day seven, day nine, holding the pink test strips up into the light and squinting.
Did I see something? Maybe? No, just “line eyes.” All the terminology poured out of other hopeful women on Reddit.
I found myself part of the TTC community, when before I would have cringed at the acronym. That was me, trying to conceive.
Leo quickly told me we had to exhibit some self-restraint. “This is too much of a roller coaster,” he’d say. “We’ll test on day fourteen, until then, we live our lives.”
The day came. I had been feeling unwell the past three days—unwelcome, normally, but in a pretest window, drenched in hope. Every wave of nausea or stuffed-up nose or abdominal twitch made me think maybe—just maybe—our luck was about to change.
I took the tests. Three of them, just to be sure. They were all positive.
I ran into the living room holding them up, screaming for Leo. “Look!” I said. “Do you see that?”
He did.
We cried; we held each other. We made plans to drive out to the beach that night. “We’ll hand them one,” I told Leo. “We’ll wrap it up and hand it to them.”
I saw my parents, tears in their eyes, a hand clamped over my mother’s mouth.
They didn’t know what we were going through—we hadn’t shared. To them, it would all be upside, all joy.
“You’re making me feel old!” Sylvia would say, throwing her arms around us. “A great-grandchild.”
We held each other at the door. Leo was going to work—he was helping a director friend with some postproduction at a studio in Hollywood—and I was heading to the clinic to confirm the pregnancy with a blood test.
“Call me as soon as you hear,” he said. He kissed me hard. “I love you so fucking much.”
I had never walked in the doors to the clinic and had this reception before. All the nurses—Becky and Jaime and Tenacity and Shayanna—were beaming.
“We knew it!” they said. The relentless positivity of Reproductive had annoyed me in the past, it felt like a mosquito buzzing, but now I welcomed it. We had known, hadn’t we?
I held up my crossed fingers to indicate Not yet, to say, I am being cautious, but it was just a front. I was already drunk on joy, already calculating a due date, letting the past two years fall away in a dissolve of it was all worth it.