Sing You Home (30 page)

I sing the alphabet for her, backward.

And in return, Vanessa tells me about her first year of school counseling, about a sixth grader who confessed that her father was raping her, who ultimately was moved out of the school and the state by the same father, and who—periodically—Vanessa still tries to Google to see if she survived. She tells me about how, when she buried her mother, there was still a bitter, hard nut in her heart that hated this woman for never accepting Vanessa the way she was.

She tells me about the one and only time she tried pot in college, and wound up eating an entire large pepperoni pizza and a loaf of bread.

She tells me that she used to have nightmares about dying alone on the floor of her living room, and it being weeks before some neighbor noticed she hadn’t left the house.

She tells me that her first pet was a hamster, which escaped in the middle of the night and ran into the radiator vent and was never seen again.

Sometimes, when we’re talking, my head is on her shoulder. Sometimes her arms are around me. Sometimes we are at opposite ends of a couch, our legs tangled. When Vanessa had first given me the brochure for this place, I had balked—did we have to hide out with the other quarantined lesbian couples during our honeymoon? Why couldn’t we just go to New York City, or the Poconos, or Paris, like any other newlyweds?

“Well,” Vanessa had said, “we could. But there we
wouldn’t
be like any other newlyweds.”

Here, we
are.
Here, no one bats an eye if we’re holding hands or checking into a room with a queen-size bed. We take a few excursions—to the Mount Washington Hotel for dinner, and to a movie theater—and each time we leave the grounds of this inn, I find us automatically putting a foot of space between us. And yet, the minute we come back home, we are glued at the hip.

“It’s like tracking,” Vanessa says, when we are sitting in the inn’s dining room at a breakfast table one morning, watching a squirrel dance across a lip of ice on a stone wall. “I nearly got kicked out of graduate school for writing a paper that advocated separating students by ability. But you know what? Ask a kid who’s struggling in math if he likes being in a mixed-level class, and he’ll tell you he feels like a moron. Ask the math genius if he likes being in a mixed-level class, and he’ll tell you he’s sick of doing all the work during group projects. Sometimes, it’s better to sort like with like.”

I glance at her. “Careful, Ness. If GLAAD could hear you now, they’d strip you of your rainbow status.”

She laughs. “I’m not advocating gay internment camps. It’s just—well, you know, you grow up Catholic, and it’s kind of nice when you make a joke about the Pope or talk about the Stations of the Cross and you don’t get a blank stare back in return. There’s something really nice about being with your
people.
”

“Full disclosure,” I say. “I didn’t know the cross had stations.”

“I want my ring back,” she jokes.

We are interrupted by the shriek of a toddler who has run into the breakfast room, nearly crashing into a waitress. His mothers are in hot pursuit. “Travis!” The boy giggles and looks over his shoulder before he ducks under our tablecloth, a human puppy.

“I’m sorry,” one of the women says. She fishes him out, nuzzles his belly, and then swings him onto her back.

Her partner looks at us and grins. “We’re still looking for his off switch.”

As the family walks off toward the reception area, I watch that little boy, Travis, and I imagine what my own son would have looked like at his age. Would he have smelled of cocoa and peppermint; would his laugh sound like a cascade of bubbles? I wonder if he would be afraid of the monsters that live beneath his mattress, if I could sing him the courage to sleep through the night.

“Maybe,” Vanessa says, “that will be us someday.”

Immediately I feel it—that flush of utter failure. “You told me it didn’t matter to you. That you have your students.” Somehow I choke out the words. “You know I can’t have kids.”

“It didn’t matter to me before because I never wanted to be a single mom. I saw enough of that when I was a kid. And of course I know you can’t have babies.” Vanessa threads her fingers through mine. “But Zoe,” she says. “
I
can.”

An embryo is frozen at the blastocyst stage, when it is approximately five days old. In a sealed straw filled with cryoprotectant fluid—a human antifreeze—it is gradually cooled to –196 degrees Celsius. The straw is then attached to an aluminum cane and stored in a canister of liquid nitrogen. It costs eight hundred dollars a year to keep the embryo frozen. When thawed at room temperature, the cryoprotectant fluid is diluted so that the embryo can be restored to its culture medium. It’s assessed for damage to see if it’s suitable for transfer. If the embryo survives mostly intact, it has a good chance of leading to a successful pregnancy. Cellular damage, if not extensive, is not a deal breaker. Some embryos have been frozen for a decade and still gone on to produce healthy children.

When I was undergoing in vitro, I always thought of the extra embryos we froze as snowflakes. Tiny, potential babies—each one a little different from the next.

According to a 2008 study in the journal
Fertility and Sterility,
when patients who didn’t want more children were asked about their frozen embryos, fifty-three percent didn’t want to donate them to others because they didn’t want their children finding an unknown brother or sister one day; and they didn’t want other parents raising their child. Sixty-six percent said they’d donate the embryos for research, but that option wasn’t always available at clinics. Twenty percent said they’d keep the embryos frozen forever. Often, the husband and wife are not in agreement.

I have three frozen embryos, swimming in liquid nitrogen in a clinic in Wilmington, Rhode Island. And now that Vanessa has mentioned it, I cannot eat or drink or sleep or concentrate. All I can do is think of these babies, who are waiting for me.

Heads-up for all those activists out there trying so hard to prevent a constitutional amendment allowing gay marriage: nothing changes. Yes, Vanessa and I have a piece of paper that is now in a small fireproof safe in an envelope with our passports and social security cards, but that’s about all that is different. We are still best friends. We still read each other the editorials in the morning paper, and we kiss good night before we turn out the lights. Or in other words, you can stop law, but you can’t stop love.

The wedding was anticlimactic, a speed bump in the road of real life. But now that we are back home, it’s life as usual. We get up, we get dressed, we go to work. Which for me proves a necessary distraction, because when I am alone I find myself staring at the paperwork from the fertility clinic that was a second home to me for five years, trying to gather the courage to make the call.

I know there is no logical reason to believe that all the medical complications I faced will affect Vanessa as well. She’s younger than me; she’s healthy. But the thought of putting her through what I went through—not the physical worries but the mental ones—is almost too much for me to handle. In this, I have a newfound respect for Max. The only thing harder than losing a baby, I think, is watching the person you love most in the world lose one.

So I am actually looking forward to occupying my thoughts with something else today—my next session with Lucy. After all, at our last meeting, when I belted out a string of curses, I got her smiling.

When she walks into our classroom, however, she isn’t happy at all. Her burgeoning dreadlocks have been brushed out, and her hair is lank and unwashed. She has dark circles under her eyes, which are bloodshot. She is wearing black leggings and a ripped T-shirt and two different-colored Converse sneakers.

On her right wrist is a gauze pad, wrapped with what looks like duct tape.

Lucy doesn’t make eye contact. She slings herself into a chair, pivots it so that it is facing away from me, and puts her head down on the desk.

I get up and close the door to the room. “You want to talk about it?” I ask.

She shakes her head, but doesn’t lift it up.

“How did you get hurt?”

Lucy brings her knees up, curling into herself, the smallest ball.

“You know,” I say, mentally ditching my lesson plan, “maybe we should just listen to some music together. And if you feel like it, you can talk.” I walk toward my iPod, which is hooked up to a portable speaker, and scan through my playlists.

The first song I play is “Hate on Me,” by Jill Scott. I want to find something that matches Lucy’s mood, that brings her back to me.

She doesn’t even twitch a response.

I move on to frenetic songs—the Bangles, Karen O. Spirituals. Even Metallica. When we reach our sixth song—“Love Is a Battlefield” by Pat Benatar—I finally admit defeat. “All right, Lucy. Let’s call it a day.” I hit the Pause button on the iPod.

“Don’t.”

Her voice is thin, thready. Her head is still tucked against her knees, her face hidden.

“What did you say?”

“Don’t,” Lucy repeats.

I kneel beside her and wait until she turns and looks at me. “Why not?”

Her tongue darts out, wets her lips. “That song. It’s how my blood sounds.”

With its driving bass and insistent percussion, I can see why she’d feel this way. “When I’m pissed off,” I tell her, “this is what I play. Really loud. And I drum along to the beat.”

“I hate coming here.”

Her words cut through me. “I’m really sorry to hear—”

“The special ed room? Seriously? I’m already the school’s biggest freak, and now everyone thinks I’m retarded, too.”

“Mentally challenged,” I correct automatically, and Lucy gives me the look of death.

“I think you need to play some percussion,” I announce.

“And I think you need to go f_____.”

“That’s enough.” I grab her wrist—the one that isn’t injured—and tug her to a standing position. “We’re going on a field trip.”

At first I am dragging her, but by the time we are headed down the hallway, she is tagging along willingly. We pass couples plastered to lockers, making out; we skirt four giggling girls who are bent over a phone, staring at the screen; we weave between the overstuffed lacrosse players in their team jerseys.

The only reason I even know where the cafeteria is, is because Vanessa’s taken me there for coffee other times when I’ve been at the school. It looks like every other school cafeteria I’ve ever seen—a life-size petri dish breeding social discontent, students sorting themselves into individual genuses: the Popular Kids, the Geeks, the Jocks, the Emos. At Wilmington High the hot lunch line and kitchen are tucked behind the tables, so we march right down the center of the caf and up to the woman who is slinging mashed potatoes onto plates. “I’m going to need you to clear this area,” I announce.

“Oh, you are,” she says, and she raises a brow. “Who died and left you queen?”

“I’m one of the school therapists.” This is not exactly true. I have no affiliation with the school. Which is why, when I get into trouble for doing this, it won’t really be devastating. “Just a little ten-minute break.”

“I didn’t get a memo about this—”

“Look.” I pull her aside and, in my best educator voice, say, “I have a suicidal girl here, and I’m doing some esteem building. Now, last time I checked, this school and every other school in the country had a suicide prevention initiative on the docket. Do you really want the superintendent to find out that you were impeding progress?”

I am completely bluffing. I don’t even know the name of the superintendent. And Vanessa will either kill me when she hears I did this or congratulate me—I’m just not sure which.

“I’m going to get the principal,” the woman huffs. Ignoring her, I move behind the counter and begin to grab hanging pots and pans and turn them over on the work surfaces. I gather ladles, spoons, spatulas.

“You’re going to get reamed,” Lucy says.

“I don’t work for the school,” I reply, shrugging. “I’m an outsider, too.” I set up two drumming stations—one makeshift high hat (an overturned skillet), a snare (an overturned pot), and leave the metal server door at our feet to be the bass drum. “We’re going to play the drums,” I announce.

Lucy looks at the kids in the cafeteria—some of whom are watching us, most of whom are simply ignoring us. “Or not.”

“Lucy, did you or did you not want to get out of that awful special ed room? Get over here and stop arguing with me.”

To my surprise, she actually does. “On the floor is our kick drum. Four beats, even. Kick it with your left foot, because you’re a lefty.” As I count off, I hit my boot against the metal doors of the serving table. “You try it.”

“This is really stupid,” Lucy says, but she tentatively kicks the metal, too.

“Great. That’s four-four time,” I tell her. “Now your snare is at your right hand.” I hand her a metal spoon and point to the overturned pot. “Hit on beats two and four.”

“For real?” Lucy asks.

As an answer, I play the next beat—eighth notes on the high hat: one-and-two-and-three-and-four. Lucy keeps up her rhythm, and with her left hand copies what I’m doing. “Don’t stop,” I tell her. “That’s a basic backbeat.” Over the cacophony I pick up two wooden spatulas and do a drum solo.

By now, the entire cafeteria is watching. A group of kids groove to a makeshift rap.

Lucy doesn’t notice. She’s pouring herself into the rhythm as it shimmies through her arms and her spine. I start singing “Love Is a Battlefield,” the words raw, like flags ripping in a wind. Lucy can’t take her eyes off me. I sing through one chorus, and then on the second, she joins in.

No promises. No demands.

She’s grinning like mad, and I think that surely this breakthrough will be written up in the annals of music therapy—and then the principal walks into the cafeteria, flanked by the lunch lady on one side and Vanessa on the other.

My spouse doesn’t look particularly happy, I might add.

I stop singing, stop banging the pots and pans.

“Zoe,” Vanessa says, “what on earth are you
doing?”