“I do.” But my voice was querulous.
“Where is all this coming from?” Mom asked. “You haven’t put yourself through all these medical procedures if you’re gun-shy about having a baby. Are you having second thoughts about Freddie?”
I buried my face in my hands. “I don’t know,” I whispered. “Maybe.”
That night on the train, I had sat by myself in the lounge car after Nick and Freddie retreated to their cabins. But at a certain point, I’d let him percolate long enough. I’d found Nick sprawled on his narrow bed, his head on one of two riotous plaid pillows, palms over his eyelids. I closed the door and clicked the lock, then turned toward the bed, right as the train hit a curve and all but tossed me at him.
“I’m flattered,” Nick had teased, but there was strain in his voice.
“Talk to me,” I said, arranging myself at the foot of the bed.
“About what?”
“Cute.”
He lifted his palm to look at me. “We could do what you said and get a random donor and not tell anyone.”
“Too late.”
He made an indecipherable sound. “Then I suppose a fake pregnancy and secret adoption are out of the question?”
“I assume you’re joking,” I said.
Nick made a face. “Like 90 percent.”
I kicked off my shoes and crawled over, snuggling up against his long body. “When Dr. Akhtar brought up sperm donation, I shut her down. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that, but I knew the idea of using Freddie would pick open old scabs,” I said. “And I was right.”
He wound a strand of my hair around his finger. “I’ve been thinking about it nonstop since I came back in here. Would I always look at that baby and see every horrid scenario that played out in my head when I found out he’d kissed you?” He closed his eyes. “It’s starting already. It’s a bad movie I can’t pause.”
Hearing that had been enough for me. We’d gone back to Dr. Akhtar and tried another round of IVF, with Nick’s sample. No dice. Of course.
Now, my hands poked at my stomach, which had stretched and deflated from hormones more times than I cared to count.
“I always imagined our kids having a blast with Uncle Freddie,” I told Mom. “Like having two dads for the price of one. But now…”
“That idea is a bit closer to home than you thought,” she finished for me.
“I’m definitely afraid we’re wrong not to use Freddie,” I admitted. “But what scares me more is pushing Nick to do it, and then finding out his instinct not to do it was right.”
“And how does Nick feel?”
“We haven’t talked about it again,” I said. “The last IVF is too raw. Also, I don’t know how to…” My voice cracked. “What if they look like him? What if we lose Freddie forever because he can’t ever look at our child, or children, without seeing a person that he and I made?”
Mom frowned. “I agree that’s an awful lot to process,” she said. “But it seems like you’re hanging on to Freddie more than you ought to be. Is there something else we need to talk about here?”
“I can’t believe you’re asking me that!” I said. “I love Nick. I fought to be with Nick. But I don’t want to live without Freddie, either. And I’m scared this might make that inevitable. We’ve always had a connection.” I let out a harsh laugh. “The idea of it becoming umbilical, too, is…a lot.”
Mom looked at me in silence for a moment. “Bex, I think the time has come for you to do a little work on your own behalf here,” she said. “You have to let go. You have to let him go.”
“This would not be letting him go,” I pointed out. “It would be either bringing him too close, or shoving him away.”
“Unless he offered to be your donor as a way of forcing the kind of space he knows he needs,” she suggested.
“No way,” I said. “He wasn’t thinking clearly. He cannot really want to do this.”
“He’s an adult,” Mom said. “At a certain point, you have to take him at his word.”
I curled up on the floor and rested my head on her lap. “I can’t believe it’s come to this,” I moaned. “Freddie thought he was my only way out once before, and now what if he really is?”
“I can’t tell you what to do, honey, but I don’t think you should say no to his offer out of fear. That’s all.” Mom pulled the ponytail holder from my hair and started combing it out with her fingers, just like she did when I was younger and came to her for advice about stuff that seemed every bit this important. “I think we all need to stop looking backward at what we’ve always loved, and milk whatever joy we can from the time we have left.”
“Holy shit, Mom,” I said, sitting up to stare at her. “Are you dying?”
She smacked my knee. “No! I was trying to be profound,” she said, laughing. “You’re ruining it.”
“I always wondered where Bex got her propensity for whacking me in my limbs,” Nick said, then he rapped twice on the doorjamb. “Knock, knock. Sorry to interrupt. Nancy, do you, ah, know anything about knitting?”
“A little,” she said. “What’s the problem?”
He held out a gnarled mess of yarn. “I’m wondering about my next step here.”
Her brow furrowed. “Is it…an intestine?”
Nick looked at it. “Perhaps it is now,” he said. “It meant to be a sweater.”
Mom snickered. “Maybe we all have something we need to let go,” she murmured to me. Louder, she said, “Come downstairs and let me dig up some of my mother’s old books. Join us, Bex?”
I
