But I didn’t acknowledge this.
“I know what you’re feeling,” he said quietly, compassionately, his voice losing control as he wiped at his eyes with the back of a shirtsleeve.
“Trust me,” he said. “I get it.”
A better person would have realized that Aaron had lost something too. A better person would have consoled him, would have let him console and be consoled. But not me.
This was my loss, not his.
“Go away,” I barked then, and I heard it in my own voice, heard it and hated it but said it nonetheless. “You have no idea what I’m feeling. Don’t stand there and pretend you know what it’s like to lose a child.”
I returned to my cave, throwing the blankets back over my head where I could scarcely breathe.
“This baby. This pregnancy. This need to get pregnant,” Aaron lamented as he stood in the doorway, urging me to eat, to get out of bed, to go for a walk, to get some fresh air. “They’ve gotten the best of you, Eden. They’ve turned you into someone I don’t recognize anymore. Someone I don’t know.”
And then he reminded me of who I was before that day we decided to start a family.
Fun loving. Benevolent and genuine. Carefree.
“I’d give anything to go back to being Aaron and Eden. Just us. Just you and me,” he said, and for a bat of an eye I remembered us on our wedding day, riding in on horseback on Aaron’s family farm in a regal ball gown, exchanging nuptials beneath the nighttime sky. A celebration worthy of a fairy tale. I had found my everything. I had married my prince.
But suddenly my everything wasn’t good enough.
I needed more.
“I want to try right away. As soon as we can,” I told Dr. Landry today as we sat in his office, and it was then that Aaron stood up from his tufted armchair and left the room.
September 8, 1997 Egg Harbor
Aaron didn’t show up at the fertility clinic for today’s appointment.
For weeks I’ve gone through the whole rigmarole, the process of developing follicles, of returning to Dr. Landry’s office every few days to have my blood drawn and an ultrasound performed to see if there were any viable candidates for the procedure. I’ve been injected with a legion of hormones, each which leave blood blisters along my skin and a gamut of side effects, from headaches to hot flashes to moodiness and pain.
Already, Dr. Landry has forewarned me that, should implantation occur, Aaron and I will need to administer shots of progesterone into my backside to not only make a baby this time, but to help maintain the pregnancy. We’ll do it daily, for ten weeks or more. “It’s not for the faint of heart,” he assured me, but I told him I’m ready. “I’ll do anything, anything,” I swore to Dr. Landry as he listed the side effects of the progesterone shots—the weight gain, the facial hair, the unbearable pain—to have a baby.
And then, when a mature follicle was ready, spotted on Dr. Landry’s ultrasound monitor where not so long ago sat the image of a baby with a heartbeat and webbed hands and feet, we scheduled an appointment for the egg retrieval, where Dr. Landry planned to insert a needle deep inside me to remove the eggs from my womb.
Today was that day.
Except it wasn’t.
I sat for hours waiting for Aaron to come and deliver his sperm.
Three hours and fourteen minutes to be precise, watching as other couples—six, eight, ten of them—came and went through the glass doors.
I read each of the magazines in the waiting room two times.
I made an attempt to phone Aaron, but he didn’t answer my call.
I told the receptionist, who stared at me with shame and regret, that Aaron was only running late, that he would be here soon.
That he was caught up in traffic.
And then, after another hour of waiting, I asked to speak to a nurse and one was fetched for me, and, standing closer to her than appropriate so that she had to take a half step back to regain her personal space, I wondered whether they had any of Aaron’s sperm remaining from the analysis or our first round of IVF. Certainly they had some remaining in storage, a few drops even, a single sperm, half-dead, clinging to the edges of a petri dish.
But she shook her head remorsefully, apologized and said no.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “There is no sperm.”
The nurse took a step away, but before she could go I laid a hand on her arm and asked whether my eggs could be removed now, if they could simply be stored somewhere, held on to until Aaron came to make his deposit. It seemed completely possible, like layaway, but I was reminded then of the little life span an egg has after ovulation. “There isn’t time,” she said, and it was then and only then that I inquired about donor sperm, an idea that settled in my mind slowly, one morsel at a time, while I spent hours in the fertility reception room, reading pregnancy magazine after pregnancy magazine, waiting for Aaron to come.
Donor sperm.
Two words I thought I’d never have to use in my entire life.
The desperation in my voice was tangible to every single person in the room, but none more than me. “Can we use donor sperm?” I begged, latching on to her arm now, fingernails leaving crescent-shape indentations in her skin.
“Where is your husband, Eden?” the nurse asked, stepping away, pretending altogether that I had never uttered those words, donor sperm. She was speaking down to me, that I knew. That I could clearly hear, as she riffled through a patient file in her hands, another patient’s file, obviously distracted and needing to be somewhere other than in the reception area with me.
“Where’s Aaron?”
It was then that I told her how he must have gotten caught up at work, except that was a lie because it was Monday, the one day in which Aaron never worked.
I inquired again about donor sperm—certainly they had vials and vials of male sperm stored somewhere in this facility that I could use—but the nurse assured me that they would need consent from me and Aaron—from the both of us—to use someone else’s sperm.
In other words, Aaron would need to be present to give his consent, he would need to be here, and Aaron wasn’t here.
Aaron wasn’t running late and he wouldn’t be there soon.
He had no intention of coming at all.
He just didn’t tell me.
Not until I came home from the fertility clinic to find him at the kitchen table, drinking a beer. A beer! Suffice to say I lost it completely, feeling enraged. I screamed at him then like I’d never done before, uttering words I could never take back. Coming at him with fists raised, thinking for a minute that I could hit him. That I would hit him. I’d never done a thing like that before, and my fists stopped just shy of him as I turned on myself instead, pulling my own hair, screaming like a maniac. Aaron didn’t flinch. I’d scarcely ever raised my voice to Aaron before, and it left me feeling rattled long after he left the room, walking out on me midsentence. It was the medication doing it, I convinced myself as I stood there in the empty kitchen in silence, strands of my own hair in my hands, watching as outside the sun went down—an arc of pinks and blues setting over our share of the bay, heaven on earth as we once so foolishly believed—the myriad fertility drugs affecting my judgment. They were the reason why I screamed and yelled, and yet I had every reason in the world to be angry.
Aaron never showed for the appointment.
He never came to deliver his sperm.
My eggs were ready and waiting, but where was he?