You okay? my husband whispers.
Yeah, I say. I touch my glass’s rim like she did.
We have a proposition, the guy says once I’ve sat and sliced into the steak but not yet chewed it. I look down at my food. I drop my fork, reach for my drink.
Okay, my husband says. Go on.
When we get home I’ve been crying and my husband’s angry and my phone’s dead in my pocket and both girls are deep asleep in bed. The babysitter is watching TV on her computer and my husband goes to pay her. I sit on the edge of one of the cribs we converted to beds and watch them sleep and cry a little more.
I grab hold of their feet; I kiss them; I find my husband in bed. They want, it turns out, not his skills or smarts or any of the kind of long-term employment that we had hoped for. They’ve offered us twenty thousand dollars for my husband’s sperm.
It’s raining the next morning, and I put on a long-sleeved shirt and shorts and wrap my phone inside a plastic bag so I can bring it with me. The rain’s torrential and I don’t see a single other person; it’s still dark out. Water sloshes in my shoes and I have to wipe it from my eyes so I can see. Sometimes, as my feet fall into puddles, I wonder if I’ve misjudged their depth and my calves and thighs clench, just before my feet meet ground again and they take off.
I take my clothes off in the hall of our apartment when I get home. I leave a wet pile outside our front door, socks and shoes and shirt and shorts, and I peel off my sports bra and my underwear inside the bathroom as it fills with steam from the shower and I get in.
My husband grabs hold of my bare arm as I’m walking toward our room to get dressed with a towel wrapped around me.
You went running, he says.
I nod and shrug and smile.
His hand is big and warm but my arm stays tight and I start to lean away from him. He’s not angry, but his grip also isn’t soft.
This shutting down and pushing through, he says. It’s not as convincing as you think.
There is a woman in Josslyn’s apartment. The door is cracked open and I see her in the kitchen, opening the drawers.
Hello? I say.
It’s been a month. The place still sits empty. Pieces of the floor tiles are still missing and the molding at the base of the hall walls close to her door is still charred.
Hi, says the woman in Josslyn’s apartment.
She’s my age, a little younger. She wears a pleated skirt, a tucked-in tank top, her hair held back in a bun. Last I heard from Luis, the cops think it was a random man who’d fixated on her from across the street for months.
I’m Iffy, she says.
I tell her my name.
Ifeoma, she says. My name’s Ifeoma, but my mom’s the only one who calls me that.
I nod.
There’s a small box a quarter full in the corner, an old TV on a wooden box in front of a dark-red couch with a wool blanket spread over the back in the room past where she stands.
Josslyn was my mom, she says.
I’m so sorry, I say.
I think I want to hug her but stay still.
She nods, her hands still by her sides. She was a little nuts, she tells me.
She shakes her head and I step closer to her but stop at Josslyn’s doorway.
She says, again: She was my mom.
I’m at work when I get an email from the rich woman. There are paragraphs below her signature about copyright and confidentiality. The disclaimer covers ten times the space of the few sentences she writes.
I worry that we shocked you, she writes, and I’m sorry. I hope you don’t mind I found your email online. I wanted to say that we don’t mean to presume anything in our asking for this thing that feels so monumental. It’s just we liked your husband so much. We’re so desperate to find something that works.
Everybody likes my husband, is attracted to him; everybody falls in love with him.
She tells me about their failed attempts at IVF and her husband’s low sperm count. She tells me she’s imagined inserting the sperm of someone she doesn’t know into her womb. They clean it, she writes. In a machine. It’s all so strange and clinical and I couldn’t quite imagine how a baby might come out in the end. It’s all so abstract, so unreal, so exactly nothing like I thought. I just, she says. I thought it would be worth it to ask and I am sorry if it freaked you out.
I sit at the high school in an office with five other people. Fake wood panels separate our desks. Everyone seems always to be busy. I used to feel busy, but now I come here and stare at my computer, not sure how I used to fill all of my time. I keep looking around to see if anyone is watching. I wonder if someone somewhere in human resources has gotten an alert because the word sperm passed through the network on its way to me.
I close my computer and go back to reading: So Big, Edna Ferber. About mistakes it’s funny. You’ve got to make your own; and not only that, if you try to keep other people from making theirs they get mad.
I pretend the woman hasn’t emailed. I want to be able to say no to her without thinking. I want to give her what she wants, to get what we want, and not care. I no longer believe that there’s such a thing as everybody getting what they want and no one paying for it later. I’m embarrassed, maybe, by how much I still hope that we can get
