My breath catches in my throat, and tears prick my eyes.
I don’t know what to say, so I go with the old standby: “Mommy loves you, Ellie-Belle.”
“All right, sugar cube.” Micah pulls her back into his lap. “Let’s eat this ice cream and get you in the tub.”
I suppose we’ll set those ground rules about Nini another time.
Chapter 3
November 11
“If I were you, I’d nip it in the bud,” Claudette says.
Claudette and I shared the same whim, which I’m beginning to regret, and spontaneously met at Centennial Park after preschool today.
“I don’t tolerate imaginary friends.”
Of course she doesn’t. She doesn’t allow her kids to eat when they’re hungry, either. They eat at seven, noon, and five, with snacks at ten and two, whether they’re hungry or not.
I check my watch now. It’s almost two.
Like clockwork, she’s unzipping an insulated cooler and calling over her shoulder to Crew and Fendi—her children, who know better than to delay responding—before she turns back to me. “Listen. If you put on like this Nini is real, it’s going to encourage her.”
I’m sorry I mentioned Nini at all. “The professionals say it will encourage her imagination.”
“Professionals don’t always know what they’re talking about. A professional plumber fixed my garbage disposal last month, but it’s on the fritz again. I told him what was wrong, and he insisted otherwise, so . . .” She shudders, as if a colony of ants just wandered out of her hair. “Sometimes you have to take charge of what’s going on in your own household, if you know what I mean.”
The kids, Bella included, are running toward us.
Claudette spreads a red-and-white gingham tablecloth over a picnic table and is pulling snacks from her cooler—homemade and prepackaged in tiny, resealable containers with matching forest-green lids—and placing them into three neat piles. “I always bring extra,” she says. “Just in case. Don’t want to leave anyone out. I assume you didn’t plan to have snacks at the park today?”
I feel my brow knit. I want to tell her that my kid is perfectly all right to gnaw on whatever stale crackers or fuzzy, high-fructose fruit snack I happen to find at the bottom of my purse, but the fact of the matter is that I don’t even have a crumbling saltine to offer Elizabella.
It’s not like this outing was a planned picnic. If it were, I’d surely have sliced grapes into quarters and mixed an organic peanut butter spread for celery sticks and . . . whatever else Claudette does when she isn’t listing and selling houses. We were simply driving by, and Bella said Nini wanted to stop for a swing. So here we are. I can’t deny my daughter an offered snack when her playmates are bellying up to a table set more for a ladies’ luncheon than a quick snack at a park.
Claudette’s son reaches for a container labeled with his name, but Claudette pulls it just out of reach. “Set the table first, Crew.”
He begins to set out biodegradable paper plates and even proceeds to fold the napkins in half.
“Say thank you,” I remind Bella.
She glances up at me, then down at the foods in the containers, which must look foreign to her. “Where’s Nini’s?”
“You’ll have to share your plate with Nini,” I say.
Claudette lets out an exasperated sigh, and if I took the time to look at her, I’m sure she’d be treating me to her best mom stare.
“Not fair,” Bella says. “Fendi has her own, Crew has his—”
“Bella—”
“Nini wants her own.”
My phone rings—“Rock-a-bye Baby”—and my heart flutters. It’s the lab, calling with today’s news. “Share for a second, okay?” I dig in my purse while Bella protests. “We’ll talk about it—”
“Not fair.” Bella crosses her arms over her chest.
I find my phone, press the “Answer” button, and hook an arm around my daughter’s waist to pull her off the picnic bench. I’m not supposed to lift her, but I can’t very well leave her having a tantrum at Claudette’s table. Neither can I deal with her and the lab at the same time. I lead her away from the playground and picnic area toward a line of pines, where it’s quieter.
Bella’s squealing and kicking. “Not fair, not fair, not fair.”
“Is now a good time?” the woman from the fertility clinic asks.
No. But I can’t not take the call. Waiting for news is nearly as stressful as the shots and procedures. “It’s fine. Just a moment.” I lower Bella to the ground and pull the phone from my ear for a second. “Bella, this is the baby doctor, and Mommy has to talk to her for a minute. Please.”
She’s in tears now, wailing at the top of her lungs.
But what can I do? I turn a few degrees to the left, walk a few steps so I can hear, and put my phone to my ear. “Sorry about that. What’s the news?”
“Mrs. Cavanaugh, of the oocytes we managed to fertilize, only one is developing. By the second day, we like to see a cell count of four to six, and the one that is developing, I’m sorry to say, is at only two.”
Numbness spreads from my heart to my fingertips. Deep breath. “So that means . . . wait. How . . . I’m not sure I under—” I press a hand to my other ear to deaden Bella’s screams. “We had six eggs. Twenty-five percent develop. That’s what you said. So how is it that we don’t have a single healthy embryo this cycle?”
“Twenty-five percent is the likely outcome, but as you know, assisted reproduction is an inexact science, and—”
I’m pacing now, wearing a trench in the grass around a tree. “It has only two cells?” Anger rises like bile in my throat. We’ve been cheated. It isn’t fair. I did everything right. Not once did I miss a dose of medication, not once did I neglect the needles, not once did I miss a pill.
And if I did everything right, how is it possible things have gone wrong?
“We’ll watch it,” the tech is saying. “There’s a chance it will still develop, but—”
A chance? I—we—deserve more than a fleeting chance! I hear about people all the time, “cursed” with unwanted pregnancies, women begrudging that it happened now instead of six months from now, couples pondering abortions because their kids are older, and they were almost out of the woods when they were surprised with an oops, despite their methods of birth control. But me . . . I’m a good mother, and yet it’s always a struggle for me to conceive.
“And no measured correlation between cell number and gestation.” The technician’s voice is flat, dry. I know she isn’t supposed to give me a sense of false hope or even prepare me for the worst. Just the facts.
“But even if it does develop”—I take another deep breath—“doesn’t that mean there’s something wrong with the embryo?”
“Not necessarily.”
It worked once, I remind myself. We have Bella. We have two embryos frozen at the lab. I spin to look at the proof that everything is going to be okay.
But Bella isn’t where I left her. A quick scan of the area turns up no sign of my daughter. “Bella!”
Another spin. She’s nowhere to be seen. “Bella!”
I realize I’ve hung up on the lab, but at the moment, I don’t care about anything as much as I care about glimpsing my kid.
My heart is beating like mad. My pulse throbs in my ears, and I feel my legs trembling as they carry me toward the playground.
Please, let her be there!
But the swings sway in the light autumn breeze, and only a pair of boys occupies the merry-go-round. Claudette is pouring juice for her kids, right where we left them, but my daughter is not seated at their table.
I scream at the top of my lungs: “Elizabella!”
Chapter 4