Epilogue
Izzy
Five Months Later
The exam room is the same one.
Same soft lighting, same receptionist who whispers for no reason, same paper on the table that I’m already tearing into tiny pieces under my legs.
The only thing different is the chair by the door, because it’s empty. Wilson is sitting on the rolling stool right next to the table, holding my hand, and his phone is in the glove box of the car three blocks away.
He put it there before we came in. I didn’t have to ask him to.
“You’re doing the paper thing,” he says.
“I’m aware I’m doing the paper thing.”
“Do you want me to do it too? Solidarity?”
“I want you to shut up.” I squeeze his fingers hard enough to hurt a little. “Nicely.”
Five months of trying and nothing.
The doctor told us not to count, so we didn’t count. We just noticed, the way you can’t help noticing.
The first two months I told myself it was early.
The third month I bought a test and cried in the bathroom with the door locked, and Wilson sat down on the floor in the hallway and didn’t take a single call.
I could hear his phone going off on the tile out there, buzzing and buzzing, until finally he just turned the damn thing off.
The fourth month I stopped buying tests. The fifth month I called the clinic.
The tech knocks and comes in, cheerful, clipboard, and this time she doesn’t glance at any empty chair.
“Both here. Good. Ready to take a look?”
The gel is cold. The wand moves. She walks us through the gray shapes on the screen, and Wilson watches like there’s going to be a test on it afterward, and when she goes quiet a second too long, I feel it in his hand before I feel it anywhere else.
“The scarring has progressed some since your last images.” She says it gently, and she says it to both of us. “I’ll let the doctor go through everything properly, but I want you to have the shape of it before she comes in. Conceiving on your own is going to be very hard. Not impossible. But hard.”
I hear the word hard, and I keep hearing after it, because he’s holding my hand.
The doctor comes in and tells us the rest. IVF. The odds. A year, if we’re lucky. And Wilson hears all of it the first time, sitting right there with me, and I don’t have to explain any of it to him later.
He asks the smart questions. He asks the dumb ones too. He asks if it’s going to hurt, and the doctor says the shots aren’t fun, and he says he’ll do them. She tells him they’re for me. He says he knows that, he means he’ll be the one holding the needle.
I have to look at the ceiling for a while after that one.
In the car, he doesn’t turn on the radio.
He puts both hands on the wheel and doesn’t start the engine, and we just sit there in the parking garage under the fluorescent lights with his phone still in the glove box and the folder from the doctor in my lap.
“Say it,” he says finally. “Whatever it is. Don’t make me guess it later.”
“I don’t have anything.” It comes out shredded. “I don’t have a sentence, Wilson. I’ve got hard, and a year, and a needle.”
“Okay.” He doesn’t reach for me. He learned that one the hard way. “Then we sit here until you do. Or until they tow us. I’m good either way.”
We sit there for forty minutes. Somewhere around minute thirty-five I put my head on his shoulder, and he still doesn’t start the car.
That’s the sentence.
***
Fifteen Months Later
The first transfer didn’t take.
I can say that now without my throat closing up. It took about two months to get there.
There was a phone call in the studio, a nurse with a kind voice and bad news, and then a week I honestly don’t remember very well. A lot of it was on the bathroom floor with Wilson on the other side of the door, not saying anything, just there. I could feel him leaning against it through the wood.
He didn’t try to fix it. That’s the part I keep coming back to.
He could have flown a specialist in from Zurich by dinnertime, and he knew it, and I knew it.
Instead he sat in the hallway for three days and brought me tea I didn’t drink and let me be exactly as sad as I needed to be, for as long as I needed to be.
When I finally opened the door, he was asleep sitting up, with his phone dark on the floor next to him and my paint-stained cardigan spread over his knees like a blanket.
We tried again in the spring.
Today is the second call.
I’m at the easel because the only other option is staring at the phone, and I’ve been painting the same patch of blue for about an hour now. Wilson is sitting on the studio floor with his back against the wall, pretending to read a book, with his phone face up on his leg where we can both see it.
It rings.
Neither of us moves. Then both of us do at the same time.
He answers on speaker and holds it out between us like it might go off, and the nurse says our names, and Wilson says, “We’re both here,” and then she says a number.
I don’t know what the number means. I know it’s a number and not a no. Wilson knows exactly what it means, because he read the book twice, and his whole face changes.
“Can you say it plainly?” His voice cracks on plainly. “Please. For my wife.”
“It’s positive, Mrs. Carter.” I can hear her smiling through the phone. “You’re pregnant. It’s early, and we’re going to be watching you closely, but you’re pregnant.”
The brush is on the floor. I don’t remember dropping it.
There’s blue on my hands and blue on his shirt where I grabbed him and blue, somehow, on the phone.
He’s not crying. He’s laughing, this stunned, wrecked laugh into my hair, and I’m the one crying, sitting on my studio floor in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon with the nurse still on the line saying something about folic acid.
“Stubborn,” Wilson says into my neck.
“The doctor said lucky.”
“The doctor doesn’t know you.” His arms lock around me. “Stubborn.”
***
Twenty Months Later
Morning light leaks through the bedroom curtains, and I’m losing an epic battle with the button on my jeans.
“These fit two weeks ago.” I give up and flop back on the bed with a dramatic groan. “I absolutely refuse to buy a third size. I refuse.”
“Or you could just wear the maternity pants I bought you last month.” Wilson materializes in the doorway holding a cup of decaf and sets it on the nightstand with the exaggerated caution of a man handling a live grenade.
“Wilson. The maternity pants have an elastic waistband.”
“Yes. That’s… that’s the point of them.”
“I’m not ready to surrender to elastic yet. Elastic is defeat.”
“Plenty of women wear them, Izzy.”
“Those women have given up, Wilson.”
“Those women are comfortable.”
“Same thing.” I haul myself back up to sitting with considerable effort. “I’ll improvise. Maybe a hair tie through the buttonhole.”
He sits beside me on the edge of the bed and rests his hand on my belly, barely touching, the way he’s touched me for weeks now, braced for me to shatter.
“How are we feeling this morning?”
“Like I swallowed a basketball, and the basketball has very strong opinions about my bladder.” I cover his hand with mine and press it down flat. “But happy. Terrified and happy.”
“That sounds about right.” He bends down and presses a kiss to my belly through my shirt. “Hey in there. Your mom is having a pants crisis. You’ll inherit the stubbornness from her, fair warning.”
“The baby can’t hear you yet.”
“The baby hears everything. It’s in chapter nine of the book I’ve been reading.”
“You’ve read nine chapters of a pregnancy book?”
“I’ve read the whole book. Twice. I have follow-up questions for the doctor.”
“Of course you do.” I run my fingers through his hair. “Can I ask you a favor?”
“Anything. Name it.”
“Can you please stop treating me like I’m going to break?” I tug his hair gently to make sure he’s paying attention. “I know why. I know what it cost to get here. But I’m not made of glass.”
“I’m not treating you like glass.” He sits up and takes both my hands in his. “I’m treating you like a miracle. Because that’s what you are. You and the baby both. I refuse to apologize for being careful with miracles.”
“That’s very sweet, and also I’m losing my mind, because you’ve had kid gloves on for a solid month now.” I pull him closer by the collar. “Wilson. Pregnant women can still have sex. Enthusiastic sex. Ask chapter ten of your book.”
“The doctor said we should be careful about…”
“The doctor said nothing is off the table without complications. We have zero complications. Zero.” I start working on his buttons, because his shirts never survive anyway. “There’s just a wife who really, really wants her husband, and a husband who’s been acting like she’s made of spun sugar.”
“You won’t break.” He catches my hands, but he doesn’t pull them away. Just holds them against his heart where I can feel it pounding. “I know that.”
“Then prove it.”
He does, eventually. The careful thing loses the fight, and the way he looks at me, fuller everywhere, belly and all, makes me feel good instead of awkward.
His hands aren’t shaking anymore. Mine are, but for a much better reason.
Afterward, tangled together in the warm morning light, his palm spread across my belly, both of us still catching our breath, a thump lands against his hand from inside.
“I felt that.” His eyes go wide. “Was that…”
“That was your kid telling you to stop worrying so much.” I lace our fingers together over the spot where the kick landed. “Their mother is strong. Pass it on.”
“I know you’re strong. I just forget sometimes that strong people don’t need protecting from everything.”
“I don’t need protecting, Wilson. I just need you here. Present. Paying attention. That’s the whole list.”
“I’m here.” He presses his forehead against mine. “You’re stuck with me.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.” He kisses me slowly. “On this baby. And every day we have left.”
“That’s a lot of promises, Wilson Carter.” I give him the skeptical eyebrow.
“I know.” The crooked grin arrives, the same one from the coffee shop where all of this started, older now and finally honest. “I’ve gotten really good at keeping them.”
***