But after the four IUIs failed, just as the fertility doctor said they would, and after the first failed IVF, the lead doctor at the clinic wrote letters to Jess’s insurance carrier to explain why intrauterine insemination would never work for Jess’s particular problem, that they had to go straight to in vitro fertilization next time. She had diminished ovarian reserve, only a fraction of the number of eggs left in her ovaries that she should have at her age. And on top of that, the quality of her eggs was not good. Poor egg quality, her doctor told her, was closely associated with chromosomal abnormalities in embryos, which usually resulted in miscarriage. He recommended genetic testing before any future transfer of an embryo to her uterus.
Dr. Mann’s mustache was so long that sometimes he chomped on it when he spoke. It was hard to decide whether a person like that was totally trustworthy. Could he say why she’d miscarried her first pregnancy? No, definitely not, to even guess would be pointless. On the wall behind his desk were photos of him holding various babies, all success stories. “But I got pregnant without even trying,” she said.
“You were twenty-five,” he said.
Jess took the news as if from a distance, like maybe they’d gotten her labs mixed up with someone else’s. She’d been getting annual pelvic exams for a decade. She was a normal weight. She ran four or five miles a day. She bought organic tomatoes and ketchup because she read an article once. She was never sick. And then, slowly, it sank in. Her body might not be what she thought it was.
The best the insurance company would do was reduce the required number of IUIs to three. The only other option was to pay out of pocket, but the expense was absurd, so she went through the three cycles of IUI again, this time more impatient to get to IVF. Once they got there everything looked precarious but more or less normal until the transfer, which was canceled because of the four decent eggs they’d retrieved and fertilized, none turned into blastocysts. That was year one.
Every morning for the six and a half years they spent trying, Jess woke up and her first thought was of her ovaries—what they were up to in there. Time seemed bent in all the wrong directions. A week felt like a month, a month felt like a year. The meditation instructor at the acupuncturist’s office—an elderly woman who wore sexy deep-cut blouses and tight jeans—said to always begin the day with positive affirmations, but Jess couldn’t stop herself from scrolling through regrets. She should have started earlier. That was always number one. Right after they lost that first pregnancy they should have tried again. She should never have smoked, not even at weddings, not even on big nights out. She shouldn’t have had so many Diet Cokes. She once wrote out a rough estimate of how many she’d had in her life, starting around eighth grade, right up until the present day, and the number made her weak. She should never have so much as tasted that no-frills powdered iced tea her mother used to buy in drums so big that their cat could climb inside when it was empty. She should have been the kind of woman who nursed a club soda and didn’t in fact spend so many nights of her late twenties doing flaming shots at the Half Moon while she waited her turn at darts. Or maybe it was just the opposite. Maybe she could have used more fun and less studying, less worrying over that incomprehensible law school loan, which became real to her only after the first entire year of payments didn’t change the balance whatsoever. Why had she stayed up so late working on papers, keeping herself awake with gallons of coffee when she could have been sleeping, making her body a safe haven? She never should have gotten into a hot tub, especially in rental houses down the shore.
After two years, they switched to a clinic that struck better deals for people paying out of pocket. She had to wait six weeks to even get an appointment, and then figuring it all out—the financials first, and then getting new baselines with new tests—took another two months. And did it work? It did not, despite all their talk of new protocols, success rates. They switched to a third clinic in year five.
* * *
Seeing the picture of Malcolm in his jacket and tie, getting ready for the day he’d been looking forward to since he started working at the Half Moon, it hit her that despite recent tension between them, she should have planned a party. He was forty-three and she was nearly thirty-nine. After so many years of disappointment, they could have used a celebration. She’d pressed snooze twice that morning, had struggled to get up and into the shower. Had she even wished him luck? She regretted not pausing for a moment to tell him that she was proud of him.
But after it went through and she discovered the details, the swell of love she felt while sitting at her desk that morning of the closing drained away and was replaced with a rage so all-encompassing that sometimes it was only as she was falling asleep and felt her body relax that she noticed how tightly clenched her muscles were from jaw to shoulders, down the long plane of her back.
Jess found herself at Bloom because she needed to get away from her own failure to thrive. Every day at the law firm after not making partner left her feeling more deeply embarrassed than the day before, like everyone in the entire building was talking about her. She lost weight because instead of gobbling a sandwich at her desk each day she started walking over to the park to sit on a bench and study the people who passed by. Of all things she kept remembering a moment in law school, a mock debate in front of the class, how easily and deftly she’d won, how her professor had given her a nod to acknowledge she’d done well, how she and her classmates had gotten drinks after and how smart and strong and beautiful she felt that afternoon. But there was something crucial about her life that she didn’t know then, and the present-day Jess wanted to reach back and shake her. If it were possible to send that girl a message, what exactly would she say?
She started doing strange things. One day she bought an ice cream cone from a truck parked on Eighth Avenue, but it was too sweet and after a few licks she didn’t want it. Instead of walking it to the garbage bin on the corner, she simply dropped her arm and let it go. No pedestrian stopped or glared. No passerby expressed condolences—what was worse than dropping a fresh ice cream cone? The taxis and buses and trucks and cars and bicycles and mopeds all continued along the avenue at the exact same frenzied rate. Only the machine-sharp edges of the swirls sagged until they disappeared. Another afternoon she walked all the way to the High Line and noticed a group of young people lying on a sliver of grass, their pant legs and sleeves hiked up to soak in the sun. It was spring, the first sunny day after a week of gloom, and she decided that she would also like some sun, so she took off her blouse, unbuttoned it top to bottom as if she were sitting on the edge of her bed, and stretched out in a pencil skirt and a navy bra that she told herself looked like a bikini top. She set a thirty-two-minute timer on her phone, and when the timer went off, she was surprised that she’d fallen asleep, her purse tucked under her head as a pillow, her stomach itchy for the rest of the day because the skin there hadn’t gotten sunlight in probably ten years.