What Came First (26 page)

“Third,” I mumble.

He flips through some pages. “But only one live birth.”

“My son. Yes.” I keep my eyes on the nearest lake painting.

He stands up. “If you don’t have any more questions, I’ll send the nurse in. She’ll arrange for the collection.”

After Dr. Goodman leaves, Eric and I are silent. Finally, he says, “So you’re getting IUI? I thought you might go for IVF.” IUI is intrauterine insemination; IVF is in vitro.

“You’ve been reading up on it?”

“I did go to medical school for a year.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Plus I’m good with Google.”

“My ovulation is regular and predictable, so I thought I’d try this first.”

“No hormone shots, even?”

“I don’t want to risk multiples. I’m not exactly young . . .”

“You’re not that old,” he says.

I laugh. “Thanks.”

I am feeling slightly less uncomfortable when the nurse reappears. “Ready to make your deposit?” she asks Eric.

“Uh, yeah,” Eric says.

I am feeling uncomfortable again. “You want me to wait for you?”

“No, that’s okay. But good luck later. With the—you know.”

“Right. Thanks. And good luck with the . . . I guess that doesn’t require much luck.”

He grins. “Nah. It’s all about skill.”

I walk out of the office, take the elevator downstairs, cross the parking lot, unlock my car—and then it hits me. I can’t leave, not when the first stage in the creation of my future child’s life might be happening five floors above me. If I can’t be part of the moment (and to be clear, I don’t want to be), at least I should be nearby.

By the time I get back to the waiting room, the chubby white couple has been replaced by a thin Asian couple, along with two women who may or may not be together. Hope and anxiety mingle with the Muzak.

I sit near one of the women, a trim brunette in tailored slacks, heels, and a white blouse.

She catches my eye. “How long have you been trying?”

Since I don’t know how to explain my situation, I say, “Since last year,” which is as long as it took to track down Eric.

“Three years for me,” she said.

“Good luck.”

“You too.”

I close my eyes and think:
twelve percent
.

All my life, I have been self-disciplined and goal-oriented. Things don’t happen to me; I
make
things happen. And then, when I was thirty years old, three years out of law school and two years married, I got pregnant by mistake.

It was ten o’clock at night when I took the test. I had just gotten home from work; my panty hose lay crumpled on the bathroom floor. Rob, my husband, was still at his (different) law office: par for the course. I placed the test stick on a piece of toilet paper to show him when he got home, washed the pee off my hands, and called his office number.

“Robert Purdy’s office.” He always answered that way after his secretary left. He said it was so he could screen his calls, but I secretly believed he couldn’t bear the idea that people might think he answered his own phone, even late at night.

“It’s me. Can you come home?” I wanted to show him the stick.

“Is something wrong?”

“No. It’s just—I have something to tell you.” Blood pounded in my ears. I had no idea how Rob would take the news. At this point, I wasn’t even sure how I felt about it, but it seemed like something we should process together.

He said, “So tell me.” Computer keys clicked in the background.

“I’d rather do it in person.”

He sighed. “I should be out of here by, I don’t know. One, maybe? I’m working on an acquisition, they need everything done by next week.”

“This is important.”

“More important than a three-hundred-million-dollar leveraged buyout?”

“Actually, yes.”

He stopped typing. “What’s going on?”

I took a deep breath. “I’ve been feeling sort of odd lately. Achy in my abdomen. Just kind of—off.”

“You should see a doctor.” He started typing again.

“I will. Because . . . I’m pregnant.”

Silence.

“Rob?”

Silence.

“Rob?”

“I’m processing . . . Are you sure?”

“I just took a home test. It was positive.”

“Shit.”

“I know this wasn’t exactly in the plans yet, and I’ve got to admit, I was pretty shocked at first too, but now that I’ve had a little time to digest it—”

“Shit!”

“Right now, that response isn’t exactly helpful.”

“There goes the Newport house.”

“What Newport house?”

“The one we were going to buy once we’d paid off our student loans.”

“Rob? For God’s sake!” My throat tightened. “There will be plenty of time to buy a house and cars and go on vacation and all that crap. And we’ll still have two incomes. I’m not going to stop working. But we’re having a baby! Aren’t you at least a little bit happy about it?”

“You shouldn’t tell them at work.”

“They’re going to notice.”

“Eventually, yeah. But you have your review coming up. If they hear about this they might think
mommy track
and—”

“Can you come home? It would really help if we could talk about this.”

“We are talking about this. Talking more isn’t going to help. I’ve got to do those acquisition briefs, and . . . shit! I cannot fucking believe this.”

He stayed late at the office to finish his brief. When he got home, I was asleep.

A month later, my abdomen stopped feeling achy. My breasts, which had gotten bigger, returned to their normal size. To his credit, Rob accompanied me to the ultrasound and held my hand as the doctor pointed out the peanut-shaped mass that had stopped growing and had no heartbeat.

“More common than most people realize,” I remember the doctor saying. And: “Won’t affect your future odds of conception.”

Also to Rob’s credit, he held me as I cried that night and drove me to the D & C the next day. But three months later, when I asked him if I thought we should start “trying,” he looked at me as if I were insane.

“We got lucky last time,” he said.

“You call a miscarriage lucky?”

“This is not a good time for a baby.”

“When is a good time for a baby?”

“Maybe never.”

We spent the next year discussing and debating (never arguing) whether or not to have children. And then he left me.

“It’s become increasingly clear that we want different things out of life,” he said. “That’s never going to change.”

A year later, he married a secretary from his office. Not his own: that would have been tacky, and Rob was not a tacky man. She became pregnant almost immediately.

And so did I.

Eric is surprised to see me in the waiting room.

“I just wanted to make sure everything went okay,” I tell him.

He sinks into the chair next to me and buries his face in his hands. “I couldn’t do it.”

In an instant, my anxiety turns to despair. “But when we talked on the phone, you said you had no reservations. You talked about altruism . . .”

He slumps back in the chair and stares into space. “I don’t mean I couldn’t do it from a moral perspective. I mean, I just . . . I guess I was more uninhibited when I was I was twenty-three.”

Now I get it. “Oh! So you mean—oh.”

This is awkward. But at least hope is not lost. He just needs to get in the mood, that’s all.

I lower my voice. “You want me to run to the store? Get you some, um, magazines?”

“They had magazines,” he tells me.

“I’ve got a portable DVD player at home,” I say. (Do I have time to drive up and back?) “I could buy you a movie . . .”

“They had movies,” he says. “A whole shelf of them. One for every . . . predilection. And if I’d been anywhere else—really, it would have been fine. Easy. But the room, it smelled like, you know—”

“Oh God.”

“No! Not that. It smelled like a doctor’s office. Antiseptic. And kind of desperate. If desperation had a smell. And I could hear people walking by and the nurses on the phone.” He shakes his head.

“You want to go for a walk?” I ask. “Then try again?”

The lab would need an hour, an hour and a half, maybe, to wash his sperm. My appointment isn’t until three o’clock. There is still time.

He shakes his head. “I’m really sorry, Laura. I don’t think it will make any difference.”

I swallow hard. Attempt a joke. “So when you say, ‘It’s not you, it’s me . . .’”

He snorts. “Oh, yeah. It’s definitely me.”

“Let me buy you lunch, at least. And then you can decide.”

Looking back, so many things are funny—but not really.

Like: From the first time Darren and I slept together, two months after we started dating, until the day we got married, two years after college graduation, I had at least four pregnancy scares and was just so, so,
so
relieved when they turned out to be false alarms.

Like: For years I blamed our lack of sexual chemistry on my fear of pregnancy. Then, once fertility became an issue, I blamed our lack of sexual chemistry on the pressures of pregnancy.

Like: Now that we’ve got two kids and there’s neither the fear nor the pressure of pregnancy, we don’t have sex at all.

Ha ha. Funny, right?

 

 

The summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college, Darren came to visit me at my parents’ lake house in northern Michigan. We were sleeping in separate rooms, me with my sister and him with my brother. We hadn’t seen each other for over a month, and while our relationship, even at the beginning, was based on more of an emotional than a physical connection, we were nineteen and in love, and a month is a month.

Three days into the visit, we went for a walk after dinner. Down the street, a path led away from the lake, into the woods. We were about ten minutes down the path, talking and hugging and kissing and laughing, when it hit us: at last, we were alone. It was unlikely that anyone would be showing up, given that the mosquito-tohuman ratio was somewhere in the neighborhood of ninety-to-one.

We rolled around on the mossy ground, the possibility of discovery only adding to our excitement. This was passion. This was love.
This
was what everyone was always making such a fuss about.

It wasn’t until the very last moment that we realized that Darren hadn’t brought a condom.

“Do it,” I urged.

And he did.

I had just finished my period. Surely I couldn’t be ovulating. Right?
Right?

By the time we got back to the cabin, our arms and legs and Darren’s butt covered with mosquito bites, I was convinced that I was pregnant and my life was over.

“What will we do?” I asked him over the phone a week later.

“There’s nothing to do,” he told me. “You’re probably fine.”

“What will we do?” I asked him two weeks after that, when my period was officially late. Granted, my period was late as often as not, but this time it felt different.

“What do you want to do?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

Keep the baby. Give up the baby. Have an abortion. Each option terrified me in its own way.

“I’ll stand by you no matter what,” he said.

And just like that, I could breathe again. Everything was going to be okay. Darren loved me. I loved him.

The next day, I got my period.

“Thank God,” Darren said.

“I know. We’ll never do that again, huh?”

“Well . . .”

I laughed. “You know what I mean. As soon as we get back to school, I’m going on the pill.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.” I’d told Darren my concerns about the pill—including that it might affect my fertility down the line—but I couldn’t go through this again. I’d barely slept in a month. As it turned out, even being on the pill didn’t stop me from worrying about pregnancy, but at least the later scares were less intense.