Chapter 6
GRAHAM
My mother came to the house on Thursday with a plan for keeping my diagnosis private.
She sat in Claire's chair at the kitchen table and declined coffee as if this were a short business call.
The blank refrigerator door was behind her.
I had started putting papers there—clinic hours, appointment confirmations, a list of questions—but none of them covered the pale square where Claire's calendar had hung.
“Lydia has already repeated what she heard on the phone,” my mother said. “If Claire stays away much longer, people will invent reasons.”
“They already have a reason. You gave it to them.”
“I said she was under strain. That was an attempt at kindness.”
I set my coffee down. “Stop discussing her.”
“Of course. I can make that clear to everyone without exposing something so personal about you. There is no need for medical details. I will simply say the subject is closed, and Audrey and I can help Claire return without any more questions.”
It was an offer I would have accepted two weeks earlier. My mother would stop the comments. Claire would come home. No one would have to know why.
“Audrey isn't helping with this.”
“Then you bring your wife home before Theo's baptism becomes a story people tell about her marriage.”
“Claire decides whether she comes home.”
My mother looked toward the hall, where Claire's key still rested in the shallow brass bowl. “You sound as though this was done to her.”
I could have answered. Instead, I told her I had a medical appointment and walked her to the door.
The second specialist had a plastic model of the male reproductive system on his desk and no interest in making the result easier to hear.
He reviewed both analyses, ordered another blood test, and described medication that might improve certain numbers without promising it would improve them enough.
“What gives us the best chance?” I asked.
“That depends on what you and your wife want.” He turned the monitor toward himself. “And what she's willing to undergo.”
My pen stopped.
He had already explained what might be required from me. Pills. Another analysis. A procedure if the next images showed something useful. When I asked what the medical options required from Claire, he drew a line down the center of his pad.
The second column ran longer.
Monitoring. Injections. Retrieval. Days away from work. Risks he would need to explain to her himself.
I had heard most of the words before. Claire had lived them while I drove, remembered medication times, and congratulated myself for never missing an appointment.
Once, after a retrieval, she had been sick into a paper bag while I argued with the parking machine.
I had brought the car around, heated her seat, and believed that was the part worth remembering.
The specialist was waiting for my next question.
I could not think of one.
He printed the treatment pages anyway. At the elevator, the packet slipped against my coat, and half of it struck the floor. A woman pushing an empty stroller helped me gather the pages. I thanked her without meeting her eyes.
I bought a black accordion folder on the way home because the loose packet would not stay in my hands.
At the kitchen table, I labeled one section Results and another Options. I wrote What Claire wants on a third tab, then stared at it until the ink dried.
I did not know what Claire wanted. I knew where she kept the adoption agency card she had once brought home from a charity event, so I went into her office to find it.
Her desk drawers were mostly empty. The laptop was gone, along with the leather tool roll that usually lay beside it. I opened the wrong drawer twice. On the third try, I found an old business planner beneath a stack of catalogs.
It opened to the previous spring. Nearly every week held a clinic entry in blue ink: bloodwork before a hotel installation, ultrasound at seven-fifteen, medication pickup between client calls.
On one Friday, Claire had written Marlowe Museum proposal, 10:00 and drawn a line through it.
Beneath that, in smaller letters: Clinic changed retrieval monitoring. Send regrets.
A cream envelope was tucked into the back cover. The Marlowe committee had invited her to pitch the floral design for its annual gala. Claire had declined and recommended another studio.
I sat at her desk and searched the date on my phone. That morning, I had texted her from the airport to remind her to take the injection packed in her cooler. She had replied with a thumbs-up and wished me luck with my presentation.
The family group thread from the same week had twenty-three messages. My aunt had posted a photograph of Theo holding a Whitmore silver frame. My mother wrote that I had shown extraordinary patience through a difficult season. Audrey answered with a white heart.
I had liked my mother's message.
The phone went dark in my hand.
I carried the planner to the kitchen. The empty chair across from me made the table look wider than it was.
The Marlowe invitation would not fit inside the folder without being folded. I tried once, stopped when the cream paper creased, and laid it on top instead.
On a yellow sheet, I wrote work Claire gave up.
Marlowe was the only thing I could name.
I had been in airports for the rest. Or at dinner with my family. Or beside Claire, watching her apologize to a client without asking what the apology cost. The blank beneath Marlowe accused me more accurately than a completed list could have.
I moved to another page and wrote no children. Under it, I put Montreal, Maine, Italy—the places we had once discussed for the mythical year when treatment stopped owning the calendar.
They looked like destinations in a brochure. None of them told Claire I would still know how to wake beside her if the room meant something different than we had planned.
I closed the folder.
Ten minutes later, I opened it again and practiced an apology to the empty chair. I reached the word options before I said her name. On the second attempt, I did the same thing.
The third time, I stopped talking.
Audrey called while I was dividing the clinic packet into sections.
“Eleanor says you're going to tell people,” she said.
“I haven't told her what I'm going to do.”
“She thinks you're angry enough to make this public. Graham, that won't help Claire. Everyone will know exactly what the two of you have been doing, and they'll watch her even more closely.”
“They're already watching her.”
“Then let Eleanor shut it down quietly. You don't owe the entire family your medical records.”
I looked at the folder. “Claire asked me to tell them.”
Audrey was silent for a moment. Upstairs in her house, something struck the floor and Theo shouted that he was fine.
“You were terrified,” she said. “She doesn't know what you were like that first night. I could explain it to her without making excuses.”
“Don't contact Claire.”
“I'm trying to keep this from getting worse.”
“I will talk to my wife.”
The word still came automatically, with all the certainty missing from the rooms around me.
“All right,” Audrey said. “Theo keeps asking when he'll see you. Are you still coming Sunday?”
“I'll be there for lunch.”
I told her I would call Theo on Saturday, then returned to the folder. I did not ask Audrey what my mother had told her or why they were planning my next conversation between them. I had kept her away from Claire. For the moment, I let that stand in for fixing the rest.
At four that afternoon, I sent Claire the message I had rewritten six times.
I've prepared every future I can think of. Treatment, adoption, or no children. I will choose you in all of them. Please let me come after the studio closes. Once.
Her reply arrived twenty minutes later.
Tomorrow at six. Downstairs only.
Theo answered Audrey's phone on Saturday morning and spent ten minutes explaining the cardboard bridge he was building for school.
He wanted to know whether I still had the small clamps in the garage and whether I could bring them to lunch.
I found them on the shelf beside Claire's missing van space, wiped the dust from the handles, and put them in my car.
The ordinary promise steadied me more than it should have. Theo needed clamps; I had clamps. Nothing in that exchange could ask why I had lied to my wife.
Claire's last two words waited above it on my screen: Downstairs only.
The studio was permitted. The apartment above it was not.
I put the folder in my briefcase. Before I left, I took it out again and removed the page headed What Claire wants. The blank tab was worse than carrying nothing, and more honest than pretending I could fill it before I saw her.
At six, the studio's front windows were dark except for one lamp over the long worktable. Claire opened the door before I could knock twice.
She wore jeans and the old gray sweater I had noticed missing from our closet. Her hair was tied at the back of her neck. I had spent thirteen days thinking about what I would say when I saw her, and the first thing I noticed was that she looked tired.
“Thank you for seeing me.”
She stepped aside. “You have an hour.”
The stairs rose behind the office door. Claire led me past them into the public workroom, where buckets stood clean and empty beneath the counter. No photographs, no open mail, nothing of her life upstairs had been left where I could see it.
I set the accordion folder on the worktable between us.
“I talked to another specialist,” I began. “I brought every option, including the ones where we stop. I need you to know that if we never have a child, I still—”
Claire did not look at the folder.
“Who knew?” she asked.
Every answer I had brought belonged to a different question.