One Good Egg: An Illustrated Memoir (14 page)

That night, Lorene and I didn’t get to decorate the tree. We had a quiet dinner and toasted “to Daddy’s sperm.”

“Just think,” Lorene said, “this time next year, you could be pregnant.”

“But we still have one more try while Steve’s here . . . ”
This is the kind of thinking that sets someone up for disappointment.

I
picked Steve’s head out, bobbing toward me, almost a block away. Funny how you can go years without seeing someone, then miss him when you’re apart for a night. “Porn mission accomplished?” I asked, pointing to the backpack. He nodded.

This time a woman from the lab greeted us at the elevators. There wasn’t a proper reception area or a receptionist. She instructed us to wait while she disappeared back into the lab.

Steve whispered, “Strange characters, this place.” I nodded. She reappeared and led Steve down the hall.

Steve’s second deposit went much faster. In fact, it took him longer to pick a pound of handmade chocolates on the way home.

“You know,” Steve said after we were back in the car, “I think I’m going to take your friend Mako up on her offer, do the apartment-cat-sitting while she’s gone.”

“I thought you were allergic to cats.”

“Actually, I’ve done pretty well with Mark’s cat.” He paused. “I feel like I have so much more energy—I think it’s just that I’m more of a city person.” I had noticed a difference in his walk. “I’ll give you gals a break for a few days.”

“Sure, makes sense. Of course.”

P
ROBABLE
C
AUSES FOR
S
PRING IN
S
TEVE
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S
TEP

Three weeks is a long time to be a houseguest, or to have a houseguest, for that matter, and we still had three to go.

Steve went into the living room to call Bruce once we were home. He came back into the kitchen to make his pre-dinner tea and hang out while I was cooking. “Bruce invited me to the Cape after Christmas.”
The Cape’s not the city.
I didn’t say anything.

“You okay, honey?”

“Yeah, I guess I just thought . . . ”
Thought what? Thought you’d like living here? You’d want to help get ready for Christmas? You wouldn’t become best friends with my best friend?

“Look, it’s a bit tricky . . . I’m trying to sort things out. I like working on my novel, but it’s not like I have a deadline or anything. This is my vacation. And, you know, if everything works out, I’ve got to figure out how I’m going to do this once a year. I want to feel like something more than a visitor . . . ” He swallowed a sip of tea and the mug amplified his sigh.

“You’re right,” I said. I stopped chopping. “Sorry.”

“What can I do to help?” He had his Enya CD poised above the CD drawer.

“Not that!” I said. He put on Emmylou Harris’s
Wrecking Ball
and started doing the dishes.

W
e were late for our third deposit. Steve was packing up for Mako’s. It was the Friday before a Christmas Eve Monday, the height of the holiday ramp-up. “Another strange thing about this place,” I said in a low voice as we were getting off the elevator. “No holiday decorations.”

Steve shrugged. “Maybe it’s out of respect—you know, the chemo, or the noncelebrants in the ‘family.’”

A new woman in a terry cloth turban and lab coat handled our intake.
“Mrs. Baker?”
I’m sure you reserve your precision handling for the specimens.
“Mr. Dillon, right this way.”

I kissed Steve good-bye. “Call me!”

There was a message from Steve on the home machine. The deposit had gone fine, but they had stuck him with more blood tests on his way out.

Truth was, there was hardly time to notice Steve was gone before it was time to pick him up at the train on Christmas Eve afternoon. I set him up with wrapping supplies in his room.

“Merry Christmas?” Lorene yelled up. I half expected to find her collapsed on the couch. She stood at the bottom of the stairs, draped in pine roping. “They gave me a really good price.” Lorene had the roping wrapped in lights and hanging above the kitchen windows over the table by the time my mother and her dog arrived, followed by my older sister Robin and her dog, and my younger sister Meredith and her husband, Jonathan. Seven of us sat around the table and raised our glasses to a chorus of “Merry Christmas!” Lorene raised hers a second time: “To my new family!”
To Steve? Our baby plan?
It took several seconds to compute. She meant
my
family. It felt as if she’d been a part of it forever.

S
teve’s third deposit brought our total to thirty vials. I caught Mecke “in” on December 26th. A fourth deposit would kick us up to a higher storage fee. “You may want to consider it,” Mecke suggested. “The values for your IUI specimens are above our minimums, but not by much. Perhaps we should have waited longer between collections, but Stephen is a mature donor and we all knew going into this . . . ”

I was ovulating again. Maybe, by some miracle, we’d never need an intrauterine insemination; maybe we wouldn’t need any of it. “I think we’re done.”

“All set, then. Let’s see, his last deposit was December 21st, 2001. We can release this, provided we have Stephen’s results, after June 21st, 2002.” Steve would need to be retested for hep B, hep C, and HIV, which have a six-month incubation period.

My cycle was off. My period had been late after our first try. I wasted three ovulation predictor kits—I’d either missed my surge or never surged at all. We tried a couple more times before Steve went to the Cape, but I pinned less hope on the whole thing. Maybe that was good . . .

We took Steve to Vermont for his last weekend. We showed him the place where we were going to have our wedding reception. It could have been that the end of the visit was near, or maybe we really had figured out how to live together. We read and wrote in front of the fireplace where Lorene and I would be married. Drank wine, played cards, and talked late into the night. The snow started falling our very last night, and we sent Steve outside.

We watched him from the kitchen windows; he was looking up, big flakes landing on his eyelashes, like a kid who had never seen snow.

I drove Steve to the airport the next day. The ride was quiet, just the two of us. We held hands. I didn’t know how to thank him. I didn’t know when I’d see him again. We entered the mouth of the tunnel that would dump us out at the airport, and Steve said, “This feels really strange. I’m kind of afraid to go home. Afraid I won’t fit back in—not with Mark, I mean—with the life . . . ”

I searched for something to say. “You’ve got the Australian Open coming up.” We both love tennis. “That’ll pull you in . . . You can come back. Anytime.” We were pulling up to the curb. We barely had time to hug before Homeland Security shooed me away; Steve was still adjusting his backpack when I looked back in the rearview mirror.

He called the next day to say he was home. I didn’t bother interrupting his life a week later to tell him I got my period. It was March when we heard from him next; he’d weathered a few severe withdrawal episodes, but he was comfortably reimmersed in his Australian life.