Chapter Fourteen #2
And then the call came. In the middle of Party City. I was there buying tissue paper. In my hand was a full sheet of white and something yellow with pink flowers on it.
“This isn’t a good call,” Becky said. She didn’t drag it out. “You’re not pregnant.”
Any line, however faint, meant positive. Any line. There had been two of them, three times over. “What do you mean?” I said.
I wanted it to be true so badly. I wanted to be pregnant even if it was a chemical pregnancy. I’d find myself jealous of women who had miscarriages. I longed to just know I could. To experience the beginning, even if it wouldn’t last.
“The trigger shot must have lingered in your system a lot longer than it usually does. We don’t see this often, but your HCG level is only 2.7. It would have to be over five to be a pregnancy. I am so sorry.”
I wasn’t pregnant. I’d never been pregnant. I just had some medication in my system, and probably indigestion.
I put the yellow paper back. I called Leo.
“Honey” was all I got out before I started crying.
“I’m on my way.”
I beat him home, got in bed, and when I heard the door open, I remember feeling an overwhelming sense of guilt. That he didn’t deserve this. That he thought he was having a baby and now he wasn’t because of my body. Because of what it could not or refused to do.
That was the first time Leo expressed it, that maybe we were going too far.
“Are we sure?” he said, as we held each other. “I don’t want you to go through this anymore.”
“We have to,” I said.
He didn’t fight me on it, not yet—and that was over a year ago, now.
And every month since we have carried on.
The thing about infertility is the absolute idiocy of hope.
The bottomless well of it. The way it refreshes and refreshes and refreshes.
After every retrieval, after every failed phone call, after the comedown off the hormones and drugs there it is again. Waiting.
I blink back the memory as Leo answers the phone.
“Hey,” he says. I can hear the flood of city sounds behind him. “We’re reversing. I can’t really talk.”
“Oh, OK,” I say. “How is it going?”
I hear his voice get distant. “I don’t think we need it. Does lighting want it?” Then he’s back. “Hey, babe, I’ll call you later, OK?”
He doesn’t wait for my answer before hanging up.
I take out my computer and go through my emails methodically. In fifteen minutes flat I’ve answered them all, plus attached two documents to our bookkeeper, Peter, and sent the requisite 1099s a client requested for two ill-advised part-time employees she definitely cannot afford.
The truth is, being a CPA is a little like being a teacher.
Not in practice—we are not impacting the world, at least, not with any great significance—but they are alike in the schedule.
There are crunch periods—finals, tax season, but the summer is mostly off.
Even Wagner doesn’t really go into the office all that much from June to Labor Day. I like the cyclical nature of my job.
I can hear the house has quieted. I take my laptop back down with me, hoping the kitchen has cleared.
Only Marcella is in the living room. She’s reading, which is unusual.
She’s never been a big reader. Dad puts away a book a week, easy.
He loves thrillers and spy novels, has mainlined the entire Grisham catalog.
My mom always says she prefers life to books.
But here she is, curled up with a cup of coffee.
I tilt my head down to read the cover, and she closes it.
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. Yikes.
“Any good?” I ask.
She looks at me, trying to decide. “It might be if I stick with it.” She pauses. “I’ve read the same chapter four times.”
My mother usually does not poke fun at herself. I find myself taking a seat down next to her.
“I don’t blame you,” I say. “I don’t think I ever got through it, either. It doesn’t seem very enjoyable.”
She laughs lightly. “It’s really not.”
She sets the book on the coffee table and shifts her body toward me.
“Dad didn’t surf this morning,” I say. I’m surprised I’m still thinking about it. Or maybe her vulnerability has given me an opening to something else.
“He’s fine,” she says, because she knows where I’m going with this. “He comes and goes—he’s not as militant as he used to be.”
“Are you sure?” That’s three days in a row, by my calculations, that he hasn’t been near the water.
“Ask him to go out with you tomorrow,” she says. “I’m sure he’d love that.”
“I thought you hate when he surfs.”
She looks up at me and exhales. “I’m learning.”
My mother is not a particularly beautiful woman.
Whatever that means. She’s cute, yes, and puts herself together well, absolutely.
But her features do not exactly hang together.
Her hair is straw-colored and chin-length, her nose is small and wide, and her eyes are big and almost rectangular.
Something about her always seems disjointed or effortful.
I’ve always thought I took after her physically.
A little awkward. But when she looks up at me now, I see something softer than I’ve ever seen before.
“You look nice,” I tell her.
I want to say something else, something about parenthood, maybe. The impossibility of my own—to actually tell her now. The weight that I’m carrying. Or about marriage, Leo being gone, the hard truths of commitment. Or I want to ask: “Will I be happy without a child?”
She looks up at me curiously. “You hate the way I dress,” she says.
I blink at her. “Who said that?”
She shrugs in a way that feels practiced. “I don’t know. You make it clear.”
“Mom,” I say. “You’re reaching. I just told you you look nice.”
“Well,” she says. “Thank you.” She flips her book back open.
“I called over to Bonnie’s,” she says. “Stone answered. I invited him to dinner tonight, if that’s OK.”
“Did you speak to her?” I ask.
“No. Stone said she isn’t really up for visitors right now.”
She looks at me a beat longer. I can’t tell if she’s waiting for me to tell her something—about my life, about Stone, about visiting Bonnie earlier—Does she know?
But also—why does she never ask? Why is it always on me to cough up information for her to get to peruse at her liking?
Aren’t mothers supposed to pry you open?
“Is he coming?” I ask.
“Yes.”
And then, as if the conversation is complete, she resettles herself and turns the page.