She put the mass, wrapped in toilet paper, into a specimen bag from the supplies room, and slipped it into the pocket of her white coat. She walked back to the nursing station to ask where she was needed next. Room 11. She pulled back the curtain but couldn’t smile.
“So, tell me,” she had said, putting one side of the stethoscope into her ear. “When did the fever first begin?”
On the way home in the morning, she had stopped at the fertility clinic and waited in the parking lot for them to open. They would test the fetus. The results showed no genetic abnormality. The life had a chance, just not a chance inside her. At home, she went straight to the backyard and stared at the spot where she’d buried the first one.
Ben watched her come through the back door and asked why she was out there. She hadn’t answered. She’d gone to the fridge and taken out a loaf of bread and grabbed the first utensil she saw. While she tried to spread the almond butter with a fork, she calculated the dates in her head to figure out when she could get pregnant next. She could ovulate again in fifteen days, it is technically possible, she would test herself every day with the ovulation kit. The days between the losses and when she can try again are long and empty. They are meaningless to her.
Ben had asked her a second time what she had been doing outside. She’d only shaken her head. And then she’d shaken it again. She wanted rid of the milestones she’d let herself plot on the calendar, again, like a fool: late September, when baby would arrive, and the air would be perfectly cool for strolling. December, when they’d spend the holidays at the farm, walking the snowy fields with the cousins, the baby bundled in a carrier on her chest. February, when she’d begin a slow return to work, three days a week, maybe four. July, when they’d have their first family vacation to the coast with her mother. Long naps under the sun umbrella with Grandma. Chubby feet in the tide.
Ben pulled her away from the counter and took the fork from her hand.
“Is it the baby?”
She never could bring herself to answer, but he knew. He cried quietly into her neck, but she couldn’t cry with him. She couldn’t find any emotion at all.
The fourth time she was pregnant, Ben had only nodded when she showed him the stick. Nothing felt like a joyous miracle anymore. Every day felt perilous, living on the edge of a knife. She begged time to move faster.
They had twelve days to go until the eighteen-week mark, when she saw the smear on the toilet paper. She was scheduled for a dilation and curettage nearly a week from then, the soonest they could take her, and for those five days, her breasts were sore and the fatigue of pregnancy consumed her. Her body was confused, or maybe couldn’t bring itself to let go.
She wanted it out of her. It was all she could think of as she went through her days. She looked forward to the IV needle in her hand, to the blissfully unconscious state of the operating room. The slit of indistinguishable eyes between cap and mask, cold steel tools, blinding lights, the biting smell of iodine. The scraping clean of every last unviable cell. The relief of not having to see, this time, what she had been growing inside her.
“You seem so calm,” Ben had said to her quietly, shifting in his seat in the pre-op waiting room. What he’d meant was that she wasn’t crying, like she was supposed to. Like the woman two rows in front of them. “I guess you’re a doctor, you’re used to this stuff.”
But no. It was because she had tried on the disappointment over and over and over so that she was prepared. She had already lived the very moment they were in.
She had only nodded. Yes. My cold, clinical heart is used to this.
When she didn’t want to talk about it, she only wanted to scream about it. But there was nowhere to go, no empty void to hold this kind of anger.
Ben had been so quiet in the days following each of the losses. He never asked her about what happened to the babies who left her. And so he didn’t have to keep count in his head like she did in hers: one in their own backyard, two in medical waste bins, and one in her bottom dresser drawer in a small plastic bag from the crematory.
The fetuses were lost. But so was the way she had come to understand herself as they grew inside her. As a mother. As someone new. She loved that woman—that woman was who she wanted to be.
26
September
The Loverlys’ Backyard
Aiden’s eyes dart from Whitney’s breasts as she dances, to the ice bucket that Jacob puts on the table. Blair is punctured. She moves slowly as the air seeps from her body. She slinks backward to the patio sofa and clears her throat. She hates this about him, that he’s always looking at attractive women the way he used to at her, probably imagining them naked. It’s piggish. She cranes her neck to look for Chloe and Xavier, to buy time for the humiliation to leave her face. The tears rise to her lids.
Aiden seems to sense her turn of mood. He motions for her—come here, come sit on my lap. Like they’re teenagers. Like they’re in love. Like it’s Blair he wants to fuck. Well, fuck you. She wants to say it out loud. But Jacob and Whitney are both watching her now, too, so she goes to him like she should. She puts a stiff arm around his neck and thinks of how much she hates him. She hopes the tears don’t spill.
And then a woman Blair had noticed before, tall and lithe, with comically massive sunglasses and shorts like underwear, comes over to ask Whitney and Jacob about the caterer. Aiden seemed to have registered the woman’s presence when she came into the backyard earlier, like a dog smelling something in the air—chin lifted, head slightly to the left, attention pulled away. Does anyone else see the thirst on his face that she always does?
But this was how Blair lived when it came to her marriage. On alert. She had trained herself to spot danger everywhere she looked. You’re overreacting, he would tell her. You’re being insane.
I’m not your father.
Whitney is oozy and overcompensating with the woman, who is the girlfriend of Jacob’s college friend. They don’t live in the area, and this bothers Blair, this infiltration of a neighborhood barbecue, that they’ve stayed so late. She suspects the couple invited themselves. The girlfriend is young and tight and speaks loudly, and there is too much shimmer in her makeup, there is maybe even glitter. Like the kind of makeup Chloe would want. Blair feels a sense of superiority over her. She seems to make Jacob uncomfortable, too—he’s turned away from her—and Blair likes this kinship with Jacob, this bristling toward the same tawdry vibe she can’t stand.
Blair listens in but it’s not enough to distract her from her rage toward the man she’s sitting on top of. Her throat burns. Her eyes burn. She wants to punch Aiden in the side of the face, his freshly shaved cheeks patted with aftershave; she wants to shove her foot into his scrotum over and over and over.
His hand moves to her back, and she arches away from his touch.
“Don’t.”
He doesn’t ask her what’s wrong.
She looks around again for Chloe. She’s at the fence with Xavier now, he’s finally come out of his room. They’re talking to Mara, who is slipping violets through the wooden slats for Chloe to put in her hair. Blair would normally interrupt, stamp herself on the conversation, make her all-knowingness concerning the children obvious. But she stops herself.
She thinks of what Rebecca told her and Whitney two hours earlier, just before leaving the party. She had gestured to Mara’s yard, stepped closer, and lowered her voice.
“Is she not coming?” Rebecca had asked.
“It’s too much for her on our side of the fence, with the kids and the noise. And the fun,” Whitney had said. Blair had chuckled. “How long until she sells, do you think?”
But Rebecca only twisted her lips and looked away from them, and then finished her glass of water. Blair had watched her eyeing the clusters of mothers earlier, as the servers kept topping them all up with wine, more wine.
“I’m not sure how much you know about Mara. But she and Albert had a son. They raised him there in that house. He died quite young, from what I understand.” Rebecca pauses, and then says: “He was just a teenager.”
Blair had looked at Whitney. They hadn’t known. Whitney was quiet, but Blair watched the change in her eyes as she stared into Mara’s backyard. “Do you know how it happened?”
Rebecca shook her head. “She’s never said.”
“Jesus,” Blair whispered. “And they never wanted to move back to Portugal?”
“I asked her if she’d ever leave. They were the only ones in their family who immigrated here,” Rebecca said. “They could live comfortably back home for the price they’d get for that property. My guess is there’s too much of her son’s memory tied to the house. Might be hard to leave that behind.”