stories, but each one unfolds into another. I tell Vanessa things I have never even told my mother: about what my father looked like the morning he died; how I’d stolen his deodorant from the bathroom and kept it hidden in my underwear drawer for the next few years so that, when I needed his smell for comfort, I’d have it. I tell her how, five years ago, I found a bottle of gin in the toilet tank and I threw it out but never told Max I’d stumbled across it, as if not speaking of it would mean it hadn’t really happened.
I sing the alphabet for her, backward.
And in return, Vanessa tells me about her first year of school counseling, about a sixth grader who confessed that her father was raping her, who ultimately was moved out of the school and the state by the same father, and who-periodically-Vanessa still tries to Google to see if she survived. She tells me about how, when she buried her mother, there was still a bitter, hard nut in her heart that hated this woman for never accepting Vanessa the way she was.
She tells me about the one and only time she tried pot in college, and wound up eating an entire large pepperoni pizza and a loaf of bread.
She tells me that she used to have nightmares about dying alone on the floor of her living room, and it being weeks before some neighbor noticed she hadn’t left the house.
She tells me that her first pet was a hamster, which escaped in the middle of the night and ran into the radiator vent and was never seen again.
Sometimes, when we’re talking, my head is on her shoulder. Sometimes her arms are around me. Sometimes we are at opposite ends of a couch, our legs tangled. When Vanessa had first given me the brochure for this place, I had balked-did we have to hide out with the other quarantined lesbian couples during our honeymoon? Why couldn’t we just go to New York City, or the Poconos, or Paris, like any other newlyweds?
“Well,” Vanessa had said, “we could. But there we
Here, we
“It’s like tracking,” Vanessa says, when we are sitting in the inn’s dining room at a breakfast table one morning, watching a squirrel dance across a lip of ice on a stone wall. “I nearly got kicked out of graduate school for writing a paper that advocated separating students by ability. But you know what? Ask a kid who’s struggling in math if he likes being in a mixed-level class, and he’ll tell you he feels like a moron. Ask the math genius if he likes being in a mixed-level class, and he’ll tell you he’s sick of doing all the work during group projects. Sometimes, it’s better to sort like with like.”
I glance at her. “Careful, Ness. If GLAAD could hear you now, they’d strip you of your rainbow status.”
She laughs. “I’m not advocating gay internment camps. It’s just-well, you know, you grow up Catholic, and it’s kind of nice when you make a joke about the Pope or talk about the Stations of the Cross and you don’t get a blank stare back in return. There’s something really nice about being with your
“Full disclosure,” I say. “I didn’t know the cross had stations.”
“I want my ring back,” she jokes.
We are interrupted by the shriek of a toddler who has run into the breakfast room, nearly crashing into a waitress. His mothers are in hot pursuit. “Travis!” The boy giggles and looks over his shoulder before he ducks under our tablecloth, a human puppy.
“I’m sorry,” one of the women says. She fishes him out, nuzzles his belly, and then swings him onto her back.
Her partner looks at us and grins. “We’re still looking for his off switch.”
As the family walks off toward the reception area, I watch that little boy, Travis, and I imagine what my own son would have looked like at his age. Would he have smelled of cocoa and peppermint; would his laugh sound like a cascade of bubbles? I wonder if he would be afraid of the monsters that live beneath his mattress, if I could sing him the courage to sleep through the night.
“Maybe,” Vanessa says, “that will be us someday.”
Immediately I feel it-that flush of utter failure. “You told me it didn’t matter to you. That you have your students.” Somehow I choke out the words. “You know I can’t have kids.”
“It didn’t matter to me before because I never wanted to be a single mom. I saw enough of that when I was a kid. And of course I know you can’t have babies.” Vanessa threads her fingers through mine. “But Zoe,” she says. “
An embryo is frozen at the blastocyst stage, when it is approximately five days old. In a sealed straw filled with cryoprotectant fluid-a human antifreeze-it is gradually cooled to -196 degrees Celsius. The straw is then attached to an aluminum cane and stored in a canister of liquid nitrogen. It costs eight hundred dollars a year to keep the embryo frozen. When thawed at room temperature, the cryoprotectant fluid is diluted so that the embryo can be restored to its culture medium. It’s assessed for damage to see if it’s suitable for transfer. If the embryo survives mostly intact, it has a good chance of leading to a successful pregnancy. Cellular damage, if not extensive, is not a deal breaker. Some embryos have been frozen for a decade and still gone on to produce healthy children.
When I was undergoing in vitro, I always thought of the extra embryos we froze as snowflakes. Tiny, potential babies-each one a little different from the next.
According to a 2008 study in the journal
I have three frozen embryos, swimming in liquid nitrogen in a clinic in Wilmington, Rhode Island. And now that Vanessa has mentioned it, I cannot eat or drink or sleep or concentrate. All I can do is think of these babies, who are waiting for me.
Heads-up for all those activists out there trying so hard to prevent a constitutional amendment allowing gay marriage: nothing changes. Yes, Vanessa and I have a piece of paper that is now in a small fireproof safe in an envelope with our passports and social security cards, but that’s about all that is different. We are still best friends. We still read each other the editorials in the morning paper, and we kiss good night before we turn out the lights. Or in other words, you can stop law, but you can’t stop love.
The wedding was anticlimactic, a speed bump in the road of real life. But now that we are back home, it’s life as usual. We get up, we get dressed, we go to work. Which for me proves a necessary distraction, because when I am alone I find myself staring at the paperwork from the fertility clinic that was a second home to me for five years, trying to gather the courage to make the call.
I know there is no logical reason to believe that all the medical complications I faced will affect Vanessa as well. She’s younger than me; she’s healthy. But the thought of putting her through what I went through-not the physical worries but the mental ones-is almost too much for me to handle. In this, I have a newfound respect for Max. The only thing harder than losing a baby, I think, is watching the person you love most in the world lose one.
So I am actually looking forward to occupying my thoughts with something else today-my next session with Lucy. After all, at our last meeting, when I belted out a string of curses, I got her smiling.
When she walks into our classroom, however, she isn’t happy at all. Her burgeoning dreadlocks have been brushed out, and her hair is lank and unwashed. She has dark circles under her eyes, which are bloodshot. She is wearing black leggings and a ripped T-shirt and two different-colored Converse sneakers.
On her right wrist is a gauze pad, wrapped with what looks like duct tape.
Lucy doesn’t make eye contact. She slings herself into a chair, pivots it so that it is facing away from me, and puts her head down on the desk.
I get up and close the door to the room. “You want to talk about it?” I ask.
She shakes her head, but doesn’t lift it up.
“How did you get hurt?”
Lucy brings her knees up, curling into herself, the smallest ball.
