What Came First (30 page)

In the kitchen, Carmen is dredging fish fillets in cornflake crumbs.

I force myself to smile. “Halibut?”

“Tilapia.”

“Fresh?”

“Frozen. Sorry.”

“No, no—it’s okay. Make sure you take some home for your dinner, Carmen.”

Ever since Ian’s unfortunate discovery that the food chicken and the animal chicken are the same thing in different forms (one being a live form, one dead), Carmen has been cooking a lot of mild fish—which Ian will only eat if it’s been dredged in crumbs and pan-fried. He won’t touch salmon or ahi or shellfish. Beef is out, too, because “Cows are cute and they have feelings.”

Last week Carmen grilled turkey burgers. Several bites in, Ian asked, “Is turkey the food the same as turkey the animal?”

I pretended not to hear him, and he ate the entire burger, but I know it’s only a matter of time before we’re living on bread and cheese—especially since next week Carmen is flying to El Salvador to visit her children.

Tonight, still reeling from Eric’s girlfriend’s phone call, I don’t really care what I eat. It was a huge disappointment, of course, having the test turn out negative yesterday. However, one thought saved me from total despair:
I can ask Eric for more.

A couple of days ago, I even sent him a casual e-mail:
Just came across some pictures of Ian (attached) when he was little & thought you might get a kick out of them . . .

I thought he’d write back and ask whether I was pregnant, which would give me the perfect opening to make my next request. But I haven’t heard from him. After my conversation with the fiancée, I doubt I ever will.

If only I had gone with in vitro from the beginning, instead of waiting until the third try. It was foolish of me to do the first insemination, when the sperm was fresh and my odds were greatest, without so much as a hormone injection. I had such an easy time getting pregnant with Ian, and lately my cycles had been so regular, my ovulation so predictable. Getting Eric Fergus to agree to a donation seemed like the biggest hurdle—no, the only hurdle. I thought my body would take care of the rest.

The sounds of an inane children’s program drift into the kitchen. I follow the noise down the hallway and into the office. The blinds are drawn, the lights off. Ian lies on his belly, chin on hands, glazed eyes fixed on the flickering screen.

“Hey, buddy.”

He turns his head to say, “Hi, Mom,” before returning his attention to the show.

“Can I have a hug?”

He pushes himself up from the floor, gives me a quick squeeze, and then resumes his position on the carpet.

I put my handbag on the desk and step over Ian to the window, where I pull a cord to open the venetian blinds. Ian flinches at the light but keeps watching his moronic show.

“Are you still in your pajamas?” I ask.

He checks his oversize T-shirt and baggy boxers as if seeing them for the first time. “I guess.”

“It’s after five o’clock.” I raise my voice to be heard over the laugh track.

“Lazy day.” He shoots me his most irresistible smile.

“You’ve had several lazy days.”

“It’s summer.”

“Did you rake the chicken coop like I asked you to?”

The smile wavers, just a bit. “I forgot.”

“You need to check your list. First thing every morning.” Ian has a whiteboard in his room; his daily responsibilities are in the top left corner, in red ink. For a while, the system worked.

“The coop is starting to smell,” I say. Actually, there’s no “starting” about it; the coop stinks, especially in the summer heat.

He rolls onto his back. “Can’t Carmen rake the coop?”

“No! Carmen cannot rake the coop!” Suddenly, surprisingly, I am angry. I scan the desk and the floor before spotting the remote control on a chair.

When I click off the set, Ian abandons his irresistible-child routine. “Mom! I was watching that!”

“Did you make your bed this morning?”

“Carmen did it.”

“What about the piano—did you practice?”

“I’ll do it later.”

“No, you’ll do it now.” My voice warbles.

Ian stares at me like I’m a stranger before getting off the floor and stalking out of the room.

“Get dressed first,” I call after him. He doesn’t answer.

My hands shake; my face burns. I almost feel the way I did after my hormone shots. A nurse had me practice jabbing an orange, and then she showed me how to stab myself in the thigh. I didn’t mind the sharp burn so much, but the flushing and jitters that followed worsened my insomnia and left me feeling anxious.

In the kitchen, Carmen heats olive oil in a large frying pan and avoids my eyes. She heard me yell at Ian.

“Please don’t make Ian’s bed tomorrow,” I say.

She throws three tilapia fillets into the pan. When they hit the oil, they sizzle. “I tell him. Two time. But he no do it, and it look messy.”

“I know. But we have to stop doing so much for him. He needs to learn.”

My voice must sound funny because Carmen turns and touches me on the arm. “You okay?”

The gesture makes my eyes fill. I blink back the tears.

“Just tired,” I say.

“Tomorrow I make you pasta,” she says. “No fish.”

I laugh, and a tear bubbles from my eye. “Pasta sounds wonderful. Thank you, Carmen.” After a pause, I add, “You’re good to us.”

Ian, dressed at last, in gym shorts and an old T-shirt, settles himself at the piano, shuffles his sheet music, and begins to play. Badly. At first, I think he’s hitting the wrong keys on purpose, but his stiff posture and the concentration on his face makes me think otherwise.

His piano teacher said that he showed an unusual natural musical ability. Presumably, he received that from Eric Fergus, along with his easygoing charm and slacker tendencies. Natural ability is of no use without practice and perseverance.

Eric Fergus. Who goes from medical school to Costco?

Ian continues to pound the piano. I cross the room, place my hands on his shoulders, and kiss the top of his head, breathing in his little-boy smells. He tilts his face back. I kiss his nose. He smiles, as incapable of staying mad at me as I am at him.

Out of nowhere, I wish I had a partner—not just so I could avoid all of the donor sperm issues, but so I could talk about how wrenching this baby quest has become. How I want another child like Ian more than I’ve ever wanted anything.

Eric Fergus doesn’t have a child to call his own—by choice, presumably—but he does have Vanessa. I can’t get her voice out of my head, the tension when she asked, “Are you pregnant?”

She wanted me to say no; that much was obvious. Her happiness is directly correlated with my disappointment. So, yes, I could ask Eric Fergus to make another donation, and I think he’d agree. But whether or not the pregnancy succeeded, his donation would compromise his relationship. Just because I’ve shied away from marriage doesn’t mean everyone else should.

“Dinner is ready.” Carmen places a platter of fish, a spinach salad, and some roasted potatoes on the counter.

As she packs up her things and prepares to leave, Ian and I fill our plates with food and take them to the outside table. It’s a bit warmer than ideal, but after a day in a temperature-controlled, fluorescent-lit office, I like to spend a half hour with grass, trees, and, yes, chickens. They rush to the front of the coop and squawk.

“You can’t come out,” Ian tells them. “There are owls and coyotes.”

I don’t ask whether he let them free-range today. If he says no, I’ll have to scold him, and we’ve clashed enough for one day.

We eat without talking for a while, Ian taking the tiniest bites of his fish. He is getting as bored of it as I am.

Finally, I say it. “You know how I was trying to have a baby?”

“Yeah.”

“It didn’t work.”

He nibbles at his fish and says nothing.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” I continue. “I’m glad I tried. And that we met your donor. But I think it’s time to give up on this baby thing. We’re a family, you and me. I love you so much. So, I’m sorry if you’re disappointed, but you’re not going to have a brother or sister.” It is an effort to hold back tears, but I need to stay strong for Ian. He’s wanted a sibling for so long.

He drinks some milk and places the glass just so on the table. “Okay,” he says finally. He jabs his spinach salad—which he likes even less than regular salad—before poking some more at the fish. When he speaks again, his voice is light.

“Can we get a puppy?”

I blink at him. “You want a dog?”

He grins. “Yeah. Wouldn’t that be cool? When Carmen and I went to the mall yesterday, we went into the pet store, and they had this awesome dog. It was white with blue eyes. It was like a husky or something. But mixed with something else.”

Later, when he’s in bed, I dial Eric’s home number one last time. When a female voice answers, I say, “This is Laura Cahill. I just thought you’d like to know the test results. They were negative.”

She is quiet for a while. Finally, she says, “Thank you.”

The line goes dead.

“You’re welcome,” I whisper.

At ten o’clock in the morning, the thermometer outside the kitchen window reads one hundred and two degrees. For two months, it has been over a hundred every day, and we can expect the streak to last into October. It’s like this every year, though sometimes the crippling heat starts in April. For the millionth time, I ask myself why we—no, why
anyone
—lives in Arizona. However, as Darren so kindly pointed out the last time I bitched about the heat, I used to say the same thing about Chicago whenever the temperature dropped below zero.

Since seven A.M., the children have been in the television room, glued to a succession of shows featuring unnaturally perky preteens who are pretty much guaranteed to be in treatment for either drug addiction or anorexia or both before their eighteenth birthdays. Sydney sits on the couch, surrounded by silver Pop-Tart wrappers, while Harrison lies on the crumb-encrusted carpet, an open box of crackers near his feet. In the summer, I let the children make their own breakfasts.

Of course, I’m tempted to let them watch television and eat junk food all day. I often do. Approximately seven hours into any television marathon, though, they snap. All of the misbehavior they’ve stored up comes pouring out in a tsunami of tears and tantrums. Taking the twins out in public is about as relaxing as walking around with a grenade in my pocketbook, but sometimes staying home is worse.

The phone rings: it’s my mother.

“Twenty-seven days till they go back to school,” I tell her. “Not that I’m counting. It’s just that the kids are so sick of being cooped up inside.”

“Who starts school in the middle of August? I don’t understand why they have to go back two weeks before the rest of the country.”

“Arizona is not like the rest of the country.”

“Amen to that.” My mother is not what you’d call a desert person. “What’s your weather like today?”

“It’s five bazillion degrees out right now,” I say. “But we’re supposed to get a monsoon later. That should drop us to about four bazillion degrees for a couple of hours, so maybe the kids can play outside.”

“You ever use that Barnes & Noble gift certificate I gave you for your birthday?” she asks.

“No,” I say. “Good idea.”

When I hang up the phone, I feel the familiar pang of missing my mother. We didn’t take our usual trip to Michigan this summer. Darren couldn’t get the time off, and the flights were expensive. Plus, after the four horrific hours we spent in the Detroit airport last year when our plane was delayed by storms, the TSA has probably added Harrison’s name to the terrorist watch list.

“Want to go to the bookstore?” I ask the kids.

This deep into their hypnotic state, it takes them a moment to register the question. At last, Harrison says no and Sydney says yes.

And then they reach a kind of consensus when Harrison says yes and Sydney says no.

“I’ll buy you cookies at the café,” I tell them. Once again, bribery works its magic. I hurry them into clothes before they have a chance to reconsider. I grab a frozen bottle of water, and we’re on our way.

At the strip mall, every shady spot is taken, so I park my minivan in the full-on glare, knowing that when we return the interior will be somewhere in the neighborhood of what it takes to cook a turkey. By then, the frozen bottle of water will be mostly thawed. I will use it to douse the children before they climb into their car seats. The droplets will evaporate, saunalike, as I race back to our air-conditioned house.

Like I said, Arizona is not like other places.

In the children’s section, Sydney falls to her knees in front of a shelf of chapter books while Harrison makes for a rounder. He tugs a stuffed
Where the Wild Things Are
creature off the display. Some things should really be left at two dimensions.

“I’ll buy you each a book,” I tell him. “But no toys.”

He ignores me. Since he isn’t actively destroying the thing, I sidle over to Sydney, who has pulled a book off the shelf and is frowning at the page.

“The picture books are against the wall over there. Or maybe you want to try an easy reader?”

At the end of kindergarten, both of the twins were at the soundout-the-words stage of reading, which Mrs. Stick-up-her-Rath said was “within the acceptable range,” but that “many of the students are up to level-three readers.” She encouraged me to spend at least forty minutes a night reading with each child. After some discussion, Darren and I agreed that he would read with Sydney after dinner every night, and I would read with Harrison. And then we both pretended we’d never had the conversation.

Still, in my (semi) defense, at eight o’clock every night, I send the children to bed and tell them they can “read” for a half hour. They flip pages and pretend to understand the words. They are calm. They are quiet. So what if they don’t know what they are reading? They haven’t even started first grade, for God’s sake.