One afternoon a woman pushing a stroller sat on the other end of the bench where Jess was sitting, scooped up the baby inside, and placed the child on her chest. The baby stretched out an arm, a tiny fist, and then settled. From four feet away, Jess could feel the baby’s warm weight, the sweet smell of her scalp, and felt the breath go from her body as if she’d jumped into a lake of icy water. The mother turned to her for a moment—not so young, Jess could see—and smiled.
When they told her she was not making partner, she knew she was supposed to be a good sport. It’s better, actually, they all implied. Less face time with difficult clients, plus partners had to buy in, and this way she could keep her salary and not bother with that. They wanted her to stay, they made that clear. Not all firms were so generous. But to be passed over at almost the exact same time she and Malcolm reached the end of their fertility effort—for Malcolm to have reached his end, more accurately—seemed too coincidental to be unrelated. The powers that be would never say it, of course, but Jess knew the main reason she hadn’t made partner was because she’d taken herself off cases that required travel. She didn’t want to deal with explaining her bag of medications to a TSA agent, and she didn’t want to worry that they’d keep her cooler bag open for so long that the meds would be ruined. She didn’t want to go hunting for a monitoring facility in Savannah or Austin or Denver to have her follicles checked. Who knew if those clinics were even good? How many hours had she spent lying on an examining table with her knees pulled to her chin while back at the office her admin kept her calls at bay? After, she’d close her eyes at her desk, will her mind empty, and then picture some wheel deep inside her body turning at exactly the correct rate. Maybe someone had looked in and seen her, assumed she was asleep. She knew what they were thinking: she doesn’t even have kids.
When she brought the news of not having made partner to Malcolm, he pointed out that it was just a title, and it meant something that they wanted her to stay. He said working at the firm was still better than the years she’d spent working for the union when she was fresh out of law school, but what he meant, Jess knew, was that the money was better, and though he never said it, she also knew that Malcolm believed all lawyers did more or less the same thing.
“Are you friendly at work?” Malcolm asked when she was trying to figure it out. “People like you?”
Jess felt her face get very hot.
“I’m just asking,” he added. “That’s the main thing, right? No matter what kind of job you’re in.”
“And here I thought the main thing was competence.”
“You did?” Malcolm said, her tone completely lost on him. He was distracted, searching for a missing scratch-off in the basket where they threw the mail. “I really don’t think so.”
In nearly seven years of trying, she had two chemical pregnancies, eight months apart, that disappeared around week four. Where did they go? Vanished. Like the ribbon of a balloon that slipped out of her hand. She had one ectopic pregnancy in their third year. She went for a long run while it was still inside her, and she couldn’t stop herself from hoping that if she ran hard enough she might shake it loose, send it to a place where it could live.
She had one miscarriage of a baby that was in the right place, a robust seven weeks along, floating in there exactly as it should have been, but then its heart simply slowed to a stop, like it had shown up at the wrong house, the wrong party, and then turned around and left.
After that one, they had to wait four months before even getting baselines for a new cycle because she was still showing positive for HCG. The next cycle was canceled at retrieval. The one after at the transfer.
Eighteen months after losing that pregnancy, she was pregnant again. She didn’t celebrate until she reached week ten, even in her own mind. Mostly she felt dread, like she’d better move through her days with great tenderness. She stopped exercising. She stopped carrying the laundry basket up the stairs and asked Malcolm to do it. She left flats of water in the trunk of her car until he got home. She bought milk by the quart instead of by the gallon so it was lighter to carry. At eleven weeks she felt more confident and told her mother and Siobhán. The baby forums she was on, the private Facebook groups, the Reddit threads—all reiterated what her mother told her when she was twenty-five, that twelve weeks was the moment she could feel sure that the “baby dust” they were always wishing upon one another, strangers in dark rooms, typing their dearest hopes into a box, had actually worked.
And then, eleven weeks and five days, a dull ache across her abdomen. Livid spots on the toilet paper when she wiped. “No,” she decided, closing her eyes and pulling up her underwear like she’d seen nothing, knew nothing. Malcolm was sound asleep—his wallet, keys, phone, and a small pile of coins on the bed table next to him, as always. But then she stood at the kitchen counter a few minutes later and felt a wet heat bloom between her legs.
“Malcolm!” she shouted, dropping to a crouch. He came clambering down the stairs, fear on his face.
He took one look and knew. “You’re okay,” he said, getting down on his knees to hold her, fumbling with her phone to get past the password and find the clinic’s number. “You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay.”
That time, Malcolm had gone so far as to say that he liked the name Nora for a girl. Dennis for a boy. Without telling her he was going to do it, he moved his childhood dresser from his mother’s house to their house one morning while she was at work. The dresser was still covered with old Mets decals, baseball cards he’d pasted so carefully when he was ten or eleven.
Eleven weeks and five days, almost the moment it went from being an embryo to a fetus. The doctor shared a few theories and then repeated what they’d heard before: it was a sign that a healthy pregnancy was possible. “How do you figure that?” Malcolm asked, incredulous. This clinic was an hour-and-a-half drive from their house. The doctor said that with every setback they learned more, made an adjustment.
“Oh sure,” Malcolm said after, when they were on their way home. “Of course he wants us to keep going.”
“You think he’s lying to us?”
“Not lying, exactly. But—” They crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge, and Malcolm took the first exit. He pulled into a park that overlooked the Hudson. “Want some air?” he asked, and then he got out of the car and walked toward the water.
“You know when we were growing up, there were those couples who didn’t have kids?” he asked when she caught up to him. “My mom’s friend Annie used to give us two-dollar bills when she visited. Mary and I used to always argue about whether a two-dollar bill was real money or not.”
“My aunt Linda, too,” Jess said.
“Exactly. So for them—” Malcolm seemed to be turning over what it was he wanted to say. “I assume they wanted kids. Maybe that’s wrong but I assume they did. So they did whatever you could do forty years ago, but then your options ran out pretty fast and you accepted it. It just wasn’t possible.
“But nowadays there’s always going to be someone who’ll say maybe you can, as long as you do x, y, and z and take this cocktail of drugs and do this and that. If you want a baby, even if you have less than a half-percent chance, there’s a doctor who will come up with a protocol.”
“And thank God, right?” Jess asked, even though she knew that was not the answer he’d come to.
“I guess,” Malcolm said. “In some ways, okay, thank God. But when does it end? There’s you, and there’s me. That’s enough for me. I just want you to know that. I think we’re going through a hard thing, but once we’re past it, we can have a great life. We’ve been doing this for a long time. I think you and I alone make a family. Don’t you think so?”
Part of her was glad he was as shaken as he was. Sometimes she wondered if she was grieving alone.
“Of course you’re enough for me, Malcolm,” she said. “Of course we’re a family. I’ve loved you since the first second I saw you. This is just something I always expected for us. It’s hard.”