Chapter Eighteen #2
He doesn’t say anything, just shakes his head.
We both look at the surfboard, abandoned on the deck.
“I’ll get it,” I say. I pick it up and lean it against the far side wall.
“My strong, incredible daughter,” he says. He pulls me toward him, and I feel his shallow sides, the way his body has thinned out. He used to be solid, more than a little round in the middle, but most of it is gone now.
I feel my chest constrict, and the water rise in my throat.
“Honey,” he says. “Come on. Don’t go there. Your old man is fine.” He exhales out a long breath. “But you know no one lives forever.”
“We’re not at forever yet,” I tell him. I lean my head on his shoulder.
“No, we’re not!”
We watch the ocean like that for a moment.
“Surf sucked anyway,” I say, and I feel his body relax against me—this tacit admission that I’m letting this one go.
He squeezes my shoulder.
“What do you say we make pancakes?” he says.
Dad heads inside to the kitchen, and I go upstairs. My hands shake as I unplug my phone and hit Leo’s name. It rings once, twice, three times, and then I’m met with the familiar click of his voicemail. I throw it across the bed, and it lands, gingerly, on a pillow.
My fear transforms, morphs back into anger. Where is my husband?
The memory comes immediately, automatically. In one moment I’m in my childhood bedroom, and in the next I’m back in the worst moment of our marriage. Our final egg retrieval. The last time we did IVF.
Six months ago Leo and I showed up at the surgery center beaten down from the meds but excited.
Relentless hope. It was still there. We had done our trigger shot thirty-six hours before, but the timing at the clinic was off and they rushed me into the surgery, afraid I’d ovulate before they could collect the eggs.
All I saw was the OR fading to black and then coming to in the recovery room with Leo sitting beside me.
“How did it go?” I asked. “Did we get them?”
We had seen four eggs on our ultrasounds. We were hoping to capture all four. A dismal number for someone my age, but what amounted to a lot for us. We’d never had more than three.
“Dr. Park will be in soon,” Leo said. He stood over me. He put a hand on my head, smoothed some hair down. I had lumbered into the waiting area with an ice pack pressed to my neck. I hadn’t been able to drink anything for eight hours and had a headache from the lack of water. Now, I felt fine.
“What happened?” I asked him.
I saw it on his face—the way he was struggling to pull it together, to keep composed, to keep composed for me.
“Let’s just wait,” he told me.
As it turned out, we didn’t get any.
“There was nothing of quality to retrieve,” Dr. Park said. He was sympathetic, so were the nurses. Two of them came in to tell us better luck next time.
“Let’s not lose hope,” Dr. Park said. “There’s a lot more we can do.”
Leo stood up then. He walked to the corner of the room, where the curtain met the partition, and turned his back to us.
“Sorry,” I whispered.
Dr. Park just nodded. “I’ll let you get some rest.”
He put a hand over mine, gently, and then took it away and was gone. I didn’t blame him. I knew he had another patient going in, another set of eggs to retrieve. It wasn’t his fault we hadn’t gotten any. It wasn’t anyone’s. And if it were someone’s, it was mine.
My eyes followed Leo. “Hello?”
I knew what was happening. I knew he was emotional. That he hadn’t wanted Dr. Park to see his tears. But all I felt was rage.
Here I was, lying in a hospital bed, my insides having just been invaded, and there he was, sulking in a corner.
“Leo.”
When he didn’t move, I lost it.
“Could you please turn the fuck around?”
He did. I saw his eyes were red. “I can’t do this anymore,” he said.
I felt my insides boil. He couldn’t do this anymore? He wasn’t doing anything. I said as much.
“That is so not fair and you know it, Lauren. I don’t want to spend our marriage this way. It’s too painful. I think we maybe need to say enough is enough.”
I felt breathless with his words.
“You just want to give up?” I felt enraged, tormented, even, that he didn’t understand what that meant, that he wasn’t looking at everything I had already given up, everything I had already sacrificed. That for him it was as easy as: next.
“I don’t consider it giving up,” he said. He was calm, rational. I wanted to kill him. “I consider it not prioritizing this fictional baby over ourselves.”
“She’s not fictional.”
“Lauren,” he said. I saw something soften in him. “How much pain do we have to go through?”
“There’s no we here,” I said. “You’ve done nothing. I’m the one in the hospital bed. I’m the one on all the hormones. I’m the one who can’t exercise or drink for half the goddamn month. And you think this is your choice?”
It was nasty, mean-spirited. I was angry. I felt betrayed by him, abandoned. I felt what women throughout history have always felt—in service of someone else. That he could just decide not to have a baby, and I was powerless to get now what I so desperately wanted.
I thought about my ticket then. I thought about this opportunity I have. But I also knew it wouldn’t work. Even this ticket couldn’t fix it. What would I do? Go back to twenty-five? But I didn’t want a baby. I wanted a baby with Leo.
We’d still do three more wishful-thinking IUIs after that, but when I think about our story, when things turned over, I think about that last retrieval.
The truth is nothing was ever the same afterward—and every month since, Leo has given up a little bit further. And I’ve resented him a little bit more.
I head downstairs to find the kitchen already a mess. Pans, bowls, blueberries popping on the stovetop, and butter melting on the griddle.
“How’s Leo?” Dad asks. He looks at me sideways.
“No idea,” I say.
Dad nods. “It’s not easy being apart like this.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say.
I feel a bitterness spring up in me. Something that’s been hidden now made front and center.
“Copy that.” Dad goes to the freezer and pulls it open. “How do you feel about chocolate chips in the morning?”
“Decidedly pro.”
We don’t talk much more after that. We move around each other easily. Dad finishes up the batter; I make the blueberry syrup.
I add the chocolate chips in when the belly begins to bubble, and we eat at the breakfast table, just like we have so many times before.
I realize today is my third wedding anniversary.