Sing You Home (7 page)

I take a deep breath. “Which verse do you like the most?”

“The second, I guess.”

I fall back into the familiar: teacher to student, therapist to patient, the person I used to be. “Tell me why,” I say.

I don’t know where Max has found the boat, but the rental is waiting for us when we get to Narragansett Bay. The weather report was wrong; it is cold and damp. I am quite sure we are the only people booking a motorboat this morning. Mist sprays against my face, and I zip my jacket all the way up to my chin.

“You go first,” Max says, and he holds the boat so that I can step into it. Then he hands me the cardboard box that has been on the seat between us for the drive down to the beach.

Max guns the engine, and we go spitting out to sea, puttering through the no-wake zone around buoys and the sleeping hulks of sailboats. Whitecaps reach their bony fingers over the hull of the little boat and soak my sneakers.

“Where are we going?” I yell over the motor.

Max doesn’t hear me, or he pretends not to. He has been doing a lot of that lately. He comes home hours after the sun has set and I know he couldn’t possibly be pruning or planting or mowing or even surfing. He uses this excuse to sleep on the couch.
I didn’t want to wake you up,
he says, as if it is my fault.

It’s not even really morning yet. It was Max’s idea to come out here when the ocean was quiet—no fishing trawlers, no weekend sailors. I sit on the center of the bench of the boat with the box on my lap. When I close my eyes, the churn of the engine and the slap of the waves rearrange themselves into a rap beat. I drum my fingers against the metal seat, playing in time.

After about ten minutes Max cuts the engine. We bob along, tossed by our own wake.

He sits across from me, his hands tucked between his knees. “What do you think we should do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to . . .”

“No,” I say, thrusting the box at him. “You do it.”

He nods and takes the small blue ceramic shoe out of the box. A few packing peanuts flutter away on the wind. It makes me panic—what if a big gust of wind comes along at just the wrong moment? What if the ashes wind up in my hair, on my jacket?

“I feel like we ought to say something,” Max murmurs.

My eyes fill with tears. “I’m sorry,” I whisper.

For not knowing anything better to say.

For having to do this in the first place.

For not being able to keep you safe inside me a few more weeks.

Max reaches across the space between us and squeezes my hand. “I am, too.”

The reality of my baby, it turns out, is no more than a breath in the cold, a puff of smoke. The ashes are gone almost the very moment they hit the air. If I’d blinked, I could easily have pretended that it never happened.

But I imagine them settling on the frantic surface of the ocean. I imagine the Sirens on the sea floor, singing him home.

Max is late to the appointment with Dr. Gelman. He comes skidding into her paneled office, smelling of mulch. “Sorry,” he apologizes. “Job ran late.”

There was a time when he was ten minutes early for our appointments. When, once, his truck broke down and he jogged with a semen sample to the clinic so that it would arrive in the window of time necessary to fertilize the harvested eggs. But in the two weeks since I’ve been discharged from the hospital, our conversation has been limited to the weather, the grocery list, and what I’d like to watch on TV at night. He slides into the chair beside me and looks at the obstetrician expectantly. “Is she okay?”

“There’s no reason to think that Zoe’s not going to be fine,” Dr. Gelman says. “Now that we know about the thrombophilia, it’s manageable with medication. And the fibroids that we saw beneath the placenta—we’ll hope that, without the hormonal fluctuations of pregnancy, they shrink again.”

“But what about next time?” I ask.

“I honestly don’t anticipate another clot, as long as we keep you on Coumadin—”

“No,” I interrupt. “I mean, the next time I get pregnant. You said I could try again.”

“What?” Max says. “What the
hell?”

I face him. “We have three embryos left. Three frozen embryos, Max. We didn’t give up before when I miscarried. We can’t just give up now—”

Max turns to Dr. Gelman. “Tell her. Tell her this is a bad idea.”

The obstetrician runs her thumb along the edge of her blotter. “The chance of you having a placental abruption again is between twenty and fifty percent. In addition, there are other risks, Zoe. Pre-eclampsia, for example: high blood pressure and swelling that would require you to take magnesium to prevent seizures. You could have a stroke—”

“Jesus Christ,” Max mutters.

“But I can try,” I say again, looking her directly in the eye.

“Yes,” she says. “Knowing the risks, you can.”

“No.” The word is barely audible, as Max stands up. “No,” he repeats, and he walks out of the office.

I follow him, hurrying down the hall to grab his arm. He shakes me off. “Max!” I yell after him, but he is headed toward the elevator. He steps inside, and I reach the doors just as they are closing. I slip in and stand beside him.

There’s a mother in the elevator, too, pushing a stroller. Max stares straight ahead.

The elevator bell dings, and the doors open; the woman pushes her child out. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted,” I say, as soon as we are alone again. “To have a baby.”

“What if it’s not what
I
want?”

“It’s what you used to want.”

“Well,
you
used to want a relationship with me,” Max says, “so I guess we’ve both changed a little.”

“What are you talking about? I still want a relationship with you.”

“You want a relationship with my sperm. This . . . this baby thing . . . it’s gotten so much bigger than the two of us. It’s not even us, in it together anymore. It’s you, and it’s the baby we can’t seem to have, and the harder it gets the more air it sucks out of the room, Zoe. There’s no space left for me.”

“You’re jealous? You’re jealous of a baby that doesn’t even exist?”

“I’m not jealous. I’m lonely. I want my wife back. I want the girl who used to want to spend time with me, reading the obituaries out loud and driving for forty miles just to see what town we’d wind up in. I want you to call my cell to talk to me, instead of to remind me that I have to be at the clinic at four. And now—now you want to get pregnant again, even if it kills you? When do you stop, Zoe?”

“It’s not going to kill me,” I insist.

“Then it just might kill
me
.” He looks up. “It’s been nine years. I can’t do this anymore.”

There is something in his gaze, some bitter pill of truth, that sends a shiver down my spine. “Then we’ll find a surrogate. Or we’ll adopt—”

“Zoe,” Max says, “I mean, I can’t do
this.
I can’t do
us.”

The elevator doors open. We are on the ground floor, and the afternoon sun streams through the glass doors at the front of the clinic. Max walks out of the elevator, but I don’t.

I tell myself the light is playing tricks on me. That this is an optical illusion. One minute I can see him, and the next, it’s like he was never here at all.

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The House on Hope Street (3:56)

MAX

I
always figured I’d have kids. I mean, it’s a story most guys can identify with: you’re born, you grow up, you start a family, you die. I just wish that, if there had to be a delay somewhere in the process, it would have been the last bit.

I’m not the villain, here. I wanted a baby, too. Not because I’ve spent my whole life dreaming of fatherhood, but for a reason much more simple than that.

Because it’s what Zoe wanted.

I did everything she asked me to. I stopped drinking caffeine, I wore boxers instead of briefs, I started jogging instead of biking. I followed a diet she’d found online that increased fertility. I no longer put the laptop on my lap. I even went to some crazy acupuncturist, who set needles dangerously close to my testicles and lit them on fire.

When none of that worked, I went to a urologist, and filled out a ten-page form that asked me questions like
Do you have erections?
and
How many sexual partners have you had?
and
Does your wife reach orgasm during intercourse?

I grew up in a household where we didn’t really talk about our feelings, and where the only reason you went to a doctor was because you’d accidentally cut off a limb with a chain saw. So I don’t mean to be defensive, but you have to understand, the touchy-feely part of IVF and the poking and the prodding isn’t something that comes naturally to me.

I had a hunch that it wasn’t just Zoe who had infertility problems. My brother, Reid, and his wife had been married for over a decade and hadn’t been able to conceive yet, either. The difference was that, instead of forking over ten thousand dollars to a clinic, he and Liddy prayed a lot.

Zoe said that Dr. Gelman had a better success rate than God.

As it turns out, I have a total sperm count of 60 million—which sounds like a lot, right? But when you start figuring in their shape and speed, all of a sudden I’m down to 400,000. Which—again—seems like a pretty big number to me. But imagine that you’re running the Boston Marathon along with more than 59 million drunks—suddenly it gets a little more challenging to cross that finish line. Add Zoe’s infertility issues to mine, and we were suddenly looking at IVF and ICSI.

And then there’s the money. I don’t know how people pay for IVF. It costs fifteen thousand dollars a pop, including the medications. We are lucky enough to live in Rhode Island, a state that forces insurance companies to cover women between twenty-five and forty who are married and can’t conceive naturally—but that still means our out-of-pocket expenses have been three thousand dollars for each fresh cycle of embryos, and six hundred dollars for each frozen cycle. Not covered: the ICSI—where sperm are directly injected into the eggs (fifteen hundred dollars), embryo freezing (a thousand dollars), and embryo storage (eight hundred dollars per year). What I’m saying here is that, even with insurance, and even before the financial nightmare of this last cycle, we’d run out of money.

I can’t really tell you the moment it went wrong. Maybe it was the first time, or the fifth, or the fiftieth that Zoe counted out the days of her menstrual cycle and crawled into bed and said, “Now!” Our sex life had become like Thanksgiving dinner with a dysfunctional family—something you have to show up for, even though you’re not really having a good time. Maybe it was when we started IVF, when I realized there was nothing Zoe wouldn’t do in her quest to get pregnant; that
want
had become
need
and then
obsession.
Or maybe it was when I began feeling like Zoe and this baby to be were on the same page—and that I had somehow become the outsider. There was no room in my marriage for me anymore, except as genetic material.

A lot of people talk about what women go through, when they can’t have a baby. But no one ever asks about the guys. Well, let me tell you—we feel like losers. We can’t somehow do what other men manage to do without even trying . . . what other men take precautions to
not
do, most of the time. Whether or not it’s true, and whether or not it’s my fault—society looks at a guy differently, if he doesn’t have kids. There’s a whole book of the Old Testament devoted to who begat whom. Even the sex symbol celebrities who make women swoon, like David Beckham and Brad Pitt and Hugh Jackman, are always in
People
magazine swinging one of their children onto their shoulders. (I should know; I’ve read nearly every issue in the waiting room of the IVF clinic.) This may be the twenty-first century, but being a real man is still tied to being able to procreate.

I know I didn’t ask for this. I know I shouldn’t feel inadequate. I know it is a medical condition, and that if I suffered a cardiac arrest or a broken ankle I wouldn’t think of myself as a wimp if I needed surgery or a cast—so why should I be embarrassed about this?

Because it’s just one more piece of evidence, in a long, long list, that I’m a failure.

In the fall, landscaping is a hard sell. I do my fair share of leaf blowing and buzz cutting lawns, so that they’re prepped for the winter. I prune deciduous trees and shrubs that flower in the autumn. I’ve managed to talk a couple of clients into planting before the ground freezes—it’s always something you’ll be glad you did come spring—and I’m pretty sold on some red maple varieties that have spectacular color in autumn. But mostly this fall, for me, will be about laying off the guys I hired during the summer. Usually I can keep on one or two, but not this winter—I’m just too far in debt, and there isn’t enough work. My five-man landscaping business is going to morph into a one-man snowplowing service.

I’m pruning a client’s roses when one of my summer help comes loping down the driveway. Todd—a junior in high school—stopped working last week, when classes started up again. “Max?” he says, holding his baseball cap in his hands. “You got a minute?”

“Sure,” I say. I sit back on my heels and squint up at him. The sun is already low, and it’s only three-thirty in the afternoon. “How is school going?”

“It’s going.” Todd hesitates. “I, um, wanted to ask you about getting my job back.”

My knees creak as I stand up. “It’s a little early for me to start hiring for next spring.”

“I meant for the fall and winter. I’ve got my license. I could plow for you—”

“Todd,” I interrupt, “you’re a good kid, but business slows down a lot. I just can’t afford to take you on right now.” I clap him on the shoulder. “Call me in March, okay?”

I start to walk back to my truck. “Max!” he calls out, and I turn. “I really need this.” His Adam’s apple bobs like a cork. “My girlfriend—she’s pregnant.”