Sing You Home

“No,” I interrupt. “I mean, the next time I get pregnant. You said I could try again.”

“What?” Max says. “What the hell?”

I face him. “We have three embryos left. Three frozen embryos, Max. We didn’t give up before when I miscarried. We can’t just give up now-”

Max turns to Dr. Gelman. “Tell her. Tell her this is a bad idea.”

The obstetrician runs her thumb along the edge of her blotter. “The chance of you having a placental abruption again is between twenty and fifty percent. In addition, there are other risks, Zoe. Pre-eclampsia, for example: high blood pressure and swelling that would require you to take magnesium to prevent seizures. You could have a stroke-”

“Jesus Christ,” Max mutters.

“But I can try,” I say again, looking her directly in the eye.

“Yes,” she says. “Knowing the risks, you can.”

“No.” The word is barely audible, as Max stands up. “No,” he repeats, and he walks out of the office.

I follow him, hurrying down the hall to grab his arm. He shakes me off. “Max!” I yell after him, but he is headed toward the elevator. He steps inside, and I reach the doors just as they are closing. I slip in and stand beside him.

There’s a mother in the elevator, too, pushing a stroller. Max stares straight ahead.

The elevator bell dings, and the doors open; the woman pushes her child out. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted,” I say, as soon as we are alone again. “To have a baby.”

“What if it’s not what I want?”

“It’s what you used to want.”

“Well, you used to want a relationship with me,” Max says, “so I guess we’ve both changed a little.”

“What are you talking about? I still want a relationship with you.”

“You want a relationship with my sperm. This… this baby thing… it’s gotten so much bigger than the two of us. It’s not even us, in it together anymore. It’s you, and it’s the baby we can’t seem to have, and the harder it gets the more air it sucks out of the room, Zoe. There’s no space left for me.”

“You’re jealous? You’re jealous of a baby that doesn’t even exist?”

“I’m not jealous. I’m lonely. I want my wife back. I want the girl who used to want to spend time with me, reading the obituaries out loud and driving for forty miles just to see what town we’d wind up in. I want you to call my cell to talk to me, instead of to remind me that I have to be at the clinic at four. And now-now you want to get pregnant again, even if it kills you? When do you stop, Zoe?”

“It’s not going to kill me,” I insist.

“Then it just might kill me.” He looks up. “It’s been nine years. I can’t do this anymore.”

There is something in his gaze, some bitter pill of truth, that sends a shiver down my spine. “Then we’ll find a surrogate. Or we’ll adopt-”

“Zoe,” Max says, “I mean, I can’t do this. I can’t do us.”

The elevator doors open. We are on the ground floor, and the afternoon sun streams through the glass doors at the front of the clinic. Max walks out of the elevator, but I don’t.

I tell myself the light is playing tricks on me. That this is an optical illusion. One minute I can see him, and the next, it’s like he was never here at all.

2

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The House on Hope Street (3:56)

MAX

I always figured I’d have kids. I mean, it’s a story most guys can identify with: you’re born, you grow up, you start a family, you die. I just wish that, if there had to be a delay somewhere in the process, it would have been the last bit.

I’m not the villain, here. I wanted a baby, too. Not because I’ve spent my whole life dreaming of fatherhood, but for a reason much more simple than that.

Because it’s what Zoe wanted.

I did everything she asked me to. I stopped drinking caffeine, I wore boxers instead of briefs, I started jogging instead of biking. I followed a diet she’d found online that increased fertility. I no longer put the laptop on my lap. I even went to some crazy acupuncturist, who set needles dangerously close to my testicles and lit them on fire.

When none of that worked, I went to a urologist, and filled out a ten-page form that asked me questions like Do you have erections? and How many sexual partners have you had? and Does your wife reach orgasm during intercourse?

I grew up in a household where we didn’t really talk about our feelings, and where the only reason you went to a doctor was because you’d accidentally cut off a limb with a chain saw. So I don’t mean to be defensive, but you have to understand, the touchy-feely part of IVF and the poking and the prodding isn’t something that comes naturally to me.

I had a hunch that it wasn’t just Zoe who had infertility problems. My brother, Reid, and his wife had been married for over a decade and hadn’t been able to conceive yet, either. The difference was that, instead of forking over ten thousand dollars to a clinic, he and Liddy prayed a lot.

Zoe said that Dr. Gelman had a better success rate than God.

As it turns out, I have a total sperm count of 60 million-which sounds like a lot, right? But when you start figuring in their shape and speed, all of a sudden I’m down to 400,000. Which-again-seems like a pretty big number to me. But imagine that you’re running the Boston Marathon along with more than 59 million drunks-suddenly it gets a little more challenging to cross that finish line. Add Zoe’s infertility issues to mine, and we were suddenly looking at IVF and ICSI.

And then there’s the money. I don’t know how people pay for IVF. It costs fifteen thousand dollars a pop, including the medications. We are lucky enough to live in Rhode Island, a state that forces insurance companies to cover women between twenty-five and forty who are married and can’t conceive naturally-but that still means our out-of-pocket expenses have been three thousand dollars for each fresh cycle of embryos, and six hundred dollars for each frozen cycle. Not covered: the ICSI-where sperm are directly injected into the eggs (fifteen hundred dollars), embryo freezing (a thousand dollars), and embryo storage (eight hundred dollars per year). What I’m saying here is that, even with insurance, and even before the financial nightmare of this last cycle, we’d run out of money.

I can’t really tell you the moment it went wrong. Maybe it was the first time, or the fifth, or the fiftieth that Zoe counted out the days of her menstrual cycle and crawled into bed and said, “Now!” Our sex life had become like Thanksgiving dinner with a dysfunctional family-something you have to show up for, even though you’re not really having a good time. Maybe it was when we started IVF, when I realized there was nothing Zoe wouldn’t do in her quest to get pregnant; that want had become need and then obsession. Or maybe it was when I began feeling like Zoe and this baby to be were on the same page-and that I had somehow become the outsider. There was no room in my marriage for me anymore, except as genetic material.