Chapter 26
It was a game at first. To see how many times we could have sex in one twenty-four-hour period. We fucked in the bathroom at the hot shop, and in the backseat of Micah’s green Volvo, and in the prickly bushes of a weekend hike.
I listened to my mother’s Mile High Woman album on loop, remembering Clayton’s words: She said it was the sound of you coming into the world.
The music was grand and bursting with life, the album cover featuring a giant Belle in a flowing white dress reclining in a green valley like a sexy Paul Bunyan.
I imagined growing my baby, and hearing my own choir as the tiny life entered the world. My own little act of creation.
When after a few months I still wasn’t pregnant, we did a bit of research. We started tracking my cycle and making it count.
Months passed, still nothing. So we went to the doctor. I remember there was this oil painting hanging behind his desk, of a cream-colored coyote howling at the moon while a Native American man looked on from a distance surrounded by saguaros. I’d never seen so many desert art clichés in one piece.
The doctor’s face was grim as he delivered the results of the tests. “We found scarring in your fallopian tubes, Rhea.” He paused. “Have you ever been diagnosed with chlamydia?”
What? Micah let go of my hand. “No.”
The doctor nodded knowingly. “There’s a chance you might have contracted it in the past without knowing it. When left untreated, it can cause scarring and infertility in women.”
I could feel Micah looking at me, but I didn’t return his gaze. “Does that mean I can’t have children at all?” I asked.
“No. There’s an operation we can perform that might help. I also recommend changing your diet and ceasing any alcohol, smoking, or drug use. You want to create a clean environment for the embryo.”
I shifted in my seat, my vagina itching like I hadn’t washed in days.
We scheduled the procedure, and then we drove home without speaking.
At home, I immediately jumped in the shower and turned it to scalding. I wanted to bend over and let it stream into me, sanitizing my insides.
In college, I had taken an evolutionary biology class that explained to me that the creature inside me wasn’t necessarily a creature at all, but a series of survival instincts left over from my primitive ancestors that I couldn’t always control, especially before my brain had fully developed.
I had seen the double bind we were all in—the gap between our instincts and what society demanded of us.
For a while now, I had stopped thinking of myself as the little tortured thing. I felt more in control and less shame.
But I had made the decisions that led me here. I had thought there was liberation in being so reckless with my body, as if it was worth nothing. No matter where the impulse came from, creature or no, it had happened, and now I was paying the price. Regret curdled in my stomach.
At dinner, Micah was the first to break the silence. “I want you to know that I don’t blame you.”
“… Okay.”
“Whatever you did before we were together is your business.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “What if you’re the one who gave me chlamydia?”
“That’s unlikely.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t have that many partners before you.”
“Neither did I,” I said, and it was true. But I couldn’t stop picturing the boys I’d slept with in high school, their doughy faces pathetic with surprise beneath me.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know how that sounded. I was trying too hard to say the right thing.”
Of course I knew I was to blame. I had let myself become infected, and now I had a scarred body. “No, this is my punishment,” I said in a small voice. “This is what I deserve.”
“Hey,” he said harshly. “Don’t say things like that. Get those thoughts out of your head. You’re never going to get pregnant thinking that way.”
“But I can’t just stop—”
“Don’t. Don’t say it. You’ll have the operation, and then you’ll get pregnant. I know it will happen for us. It’s just a matter of when.”
I nodded, attempting to clear the thoughts, but the regret and shame continued to accumulate as we ate, and I imagined it polluting my body even more.
I felt the overwhelming desire to purge, to flush all of the poison out. I wanted to be clean.
Over the next few months, I changed to a vegan diet and stopped drinking. I swore off all sugar, fat, and preservatives. I only bought produce at farmer’s markets, and made elaborate, colorful meals lurid with vitamins.
I surrounded our bed with white chunks of purifying selenite. I got acupuncture once a week. I drove to the outskirts of the city where a friend placed her hands on my womb and removed an energy blockage that I imagined as a thick, gray clot at the center of my belly.
I tried to move through the world in a way that would atone for my sins. I was kinder and more empathetic to everyone I met.
I took in deep cleansing breaths.
When it was time for the procedure, I felt clean and pure, the space inside me as sterile as the operating room where they put me under.
The surgery was successful.
But three months later, there was still no baby.
We tried everything my mother’s money could buy—new fertility treatments with sharp-angled acronyms like ART, IVF, FSH. Trips to Spain and Thailand to sample their local fertility offerings. But they simply didn’t work.
I remember grieving in a strange void where only I floated, mourning something that had never existed.
It was like the grief I had for my parents—amorphous and unjustified, missing someone I did not know nor could picture in my mind with any emotional specificity.
It was grief without an object—only a terrible wrongness reaching to every corner of my body.
Micah and I discussed adoption, and while I objectively loved the concept, I could feel myself resisting the notion. It wasn’t that I didn’t think I could love such a child. There was a surplus of love stored up in my body, ready to be directed at any sweet, vulnerable thing.
But some nights, when Micah was asleep and my thoughts were allowed to ferment undisturbed, I wondered if my infertility was something even more elemental, more fated than anything I’d done in this life.
Perhaps I was not meant to have children.
A girl with a creature inside of her who had no memory of her mother’s love and could not control the terrible thoughts that entered her mind.
Who sometimes sensed a nameless, shapeless doom on the horizon, waiting for her.
Perhaps such a person was not meant to be a mother.
So I did what people have been doing for centuries to cope with pain—I buried myself in work.
If I was unable to create life, at least I could create something else.
With my mother’s money, I co-financed a documentary investigating a popular company’s corrupt business practices, and for the next few months, I lost myself in the greed of strangers.
I drifted to another part of the world I’d built with Micah, far enough away that he couldn’t touch me, but close enough that he knew I was still there.
I was working on something important, so he couldn’t directly fault it.
Instead, he matched my commitment, devoting himself even more obsessively to his own work, spending early mornings and late nights in the hot shop, coming home streaked with ash.
We were two dedicated people, working side by side on things we loved, and wasn’t there something inherently romantic about that?
Even if we’d stopped being romantic with one another?
I didn’t care if it was delusional; I wanted delusion. It was comfortable. I clung to it.
In February, Hess flew to Arizona to escape the winter, and I put on a happy face.
She wanted to go hiking, so we drove two hours north to a trailhead in a valley of red rock formations jutting up from the earth.
I had heard of this place from friends who talked of it being an “energy vortex,” but Micah and I had never taken the trip.
This was life sucked of moisture, reduced to its vibrant, chalky essence.
And yet for all of its dryness, there was something soft about the air, like an element other than water moved through it, caressing my skin as Hess and I scrambled up the rocky incline.
At the top of the hike, we sat on a large flat rock and looked out over the valley between the two pillars of the cathedral formation. We were the only ones there, and the silence had the same softness as the air, like silk against my eardrums.
I tried to feel for the energy that supposedly buzzed straight from the earth’s core up into this rock. Maybe that was the strange softness—the energy releasing and becoming like tiny, smooth particles in the air.
“What’s going on, Rhea?”
I tensed, suddenly feeling cornered. It was just me and her up here, with miles of scorching, bone-dry desert spreading out in every direction.
“What do you mean? Everything’s good,” I said casually, careful not to sound too defensive. Hess knew I’d had an operation to boost my fertility, but I’d downplayed the situation, and she didn’t know how long we’d been trying.
She put her hand on mine. “I know you, honey. You can tell me.”
I felt a crack form, and something warm and salty leaked into my chest. I was so careful about what I said to Micah for fear that I’d express a toxic thought.
Even around friends, when they could stand listening to me talk about fertility, I didn’t dare tell them how I was really feeling.
Giving air to the thoughts and feelings, I believed, would make them even more poisonous.
But it had been so long since I’d let it all out, and I felt safe with Hess, like maybe it wouldn’t count if I told just her. It’d be like talking to myself.
I told her I had tried to make my body into a pure, beautiful place. Somewhere untainted where someone else might want to live.
But it hadn’t worked.
And I didn’t think it was just bad luck.