Olivia and Felix had decided to go through with in-vitro fertilization after failing to achieve a pregnancy with the aid of other kinds of treatments and methods, including seeing a shaman from Tucumcari, New Mexico, who claimed to have operated on Olivia’s Fallopian tubes without having to cut her open and proved it by showing Felix a cotton ball with a drop of blood after the so-called surgery.
“Don’t lift anything heavy in the next couple of days,” he’d advised.
Of the thirty-six eggs that were harvested from Olivia’s womb at the Manhattan Beach Fertility Institute, twenty-two, the strongest ones, were fertilized with Felix’s sperm. Of those, ten did not make it past day three. Twelve had been frozen and of those, six were thawed and transferred into her uterus in sets of two over three years, but all of them ended in early miscarriages. Of the last remaining six embryos, two had become Sarah and Elias, two were Diana and Andrea, and the last two were indefinitely cryopreserved at the fertility lab.
After the three consecutive miscarriages, Felix had pleaded to Olivia, in exhaustion, “Can’t we forget about all this and go back to enjoying life?”
“You mean sex?” she’d asked.
“Yes, sex, I want our sex-for-fun back, but I want everything else, too. Life. This obsession is killing me.”
“It’s killing me, too, but we have six more embryos waiting in the lab. Let’s go again, once more, please.”
She thought about those days, five years ago, when six months out the cramps and the bleeding announced the beginning of Sarah and Elias’s end. That pregnancy had been the one that had given her the most hope, the one that had lasted the longest. She had even allowed herself to feel enough optimism to buy cribs and baby paraphernalia, against Felix’s cautious optimism. But during a long weekend in Acapulco her cervix had begun to dilate ahead of time and the fetuses had caught an infection from the ocean water that had made its way into Olivia’s uterus. Felix had taken her to the local hospital, where the nightshift ER doctor gave her sedatives and painkillers and whispered to her that everything would be all right in a trembling voice that lacked conviction.
There weren’t any available beds or delivery rooms, and Olivia lay panting on a gurney parked in the hallway next to a drunken woman who had wrapped her car around a palm tree and destroyed her face. Ignoring the other patients, the doctor filled up a latex glove with saline, like a water balloon, and inserted it into Olivia’s vagina.
“Hopefully this plug will delay labor,” he said.
He then tilted her gurney down so her head was lower than her feet, in hopes that gravity would do its part to keep the babies from coming out. This angle allowed Olivia to see the underside of the neighboring gurneys, one of which had a blob of chewing gum stuck to its rusty frame. It was that kind of hospital.
It took her several hours of intense effort and pain. No Lamaze training, no epidural, no IV, no hope. As the years went by and the freshness of the agony subsided, she had come to accept the fact that she wasn’t the only mother in history to deliver stillborn babies, but on that night, at the crowded Acapulco hospital, she believed that some otherworldly being had chosen her and only her to bear this eternal suffering.
The commotion around her gurney hadn’t subsided yet, the doctor was still stitching Olivia up, and the nurses were hurriedly clearing the area when she realized that another nurse had whisked the tiny bodies away.
“Follow that nurse and get my babies back!” she wailed to Felix.
He hesitated for a moment but then ran off after the nurse. When he disappeared among the crowd that milled about in the hallway, Olivia closed her eyes, nauseous from the painkillers, and cupped her breasts with her hands, gently, as if she were holding chicks that had fallen from their nest. She could feel the milk inside wanting to infuse life. Her nipples ached and swelled with the wish to feed. But no one would latch on to her with tiny lips; there would be no children to nourish.
In the morning, when Olivia woke up, alone, she had been transferred to a more private area, a corner behind a curtain. She noticed a clean gown and robe at the bottom of the bed. With a great deal of exertion, she took off the bloody hospital clothes and changed. She lay down again, still tired from the toil of labor, and stared at the ceiling. A gecko crawled into a crack as if it owned the place.
“Are you Mrs. Almeida?” a voice called out as the curtain was brushed aside to reveal a short and heavy man, ready to burst out of his guayabera shirt, each button a potential projectile. “I’m here from the funeral home.”
He opened a shoebox and pulled out two small, red satin pouches no larger than a pair of socks with a golden sash tied around each one, and gave them to Olivia. Each weighed only a few ounces.
“I don’t know which is the boy and which is the girl. I’m so sorry.”
Olivia took the pouches, soft and supple to the touch, like stress balls, and put them in the pockets of her robe.
“Could you finish filling out the death certificates? Nobody could tell me what the babies’ names were. Your husband wasn’t sure.”
Olivia took the pen and wrote Elias on one certificate and Sarah on the other.
“Is this paid for?”
“Yes. Your husband already took care of it.”
When she returned the pen she hugged the man from the mortuary as if he had been a dear relative and wept on his shoulder.
“There, there,” he comforted her in a professional manner before he excused himself. He had to leave, on to his next grieving person.
When Felix got there, he leaned against the bed and dried the sweat off his forehead.
“Any news from the mortuary?”
“They came out to get the paperwork signed,” she said, but failed to mention the pouches in her robe pockets. She wanted to be the only one to touch them, to feel their warmth fading against her body.
“What about the babies?”
“I asked them to discard the ashes.”
“I suppose it’s for the best. We’ll have to move on. Let’s go home, I’m exhausted,” said Felix, stroking Olivia’s shoulder. “We can plan a memorial, something small, intimate. Just for us.”
Now, standing at the top of the dune in Death Valley, on the very same spot where five years ago she had come in secret to scatter her children’s ashes and tiny bone fragments, she wondered if she could reconfigure the facts into a different shape, another reality, like the sandy desert, changing its story at the slightest breath of wind. But she couldn’t. Her story seemed to have been written on another part of the desert, chiseled on the solid boulders of the mountains that surrounded the valley. Those, she thought, haven’t moved and never will.
Thursday, February 11th
Dr. Feldman must have had eyebrow reshaping and microblading, an eyelid lift, and definitely a good dose of Botox. That was Keila’s impression as she sat on the couch in front of him. Having developed a radar to detect these cosmetic procedures as her friends went through them over their menopausal years and then denied it, she was able to draw her conclusions from his supple cheeks, glossy forehead, and expressionless face. He’d also had a less than successful hair-transplant procedure along his receding hairline.
She wondered if it had been a good idea to choose this therapist on Claudia’s recommendation. “No other Beverly Hills therapist could have gotten my friend Giorgio out of his depression when his restaurant lost the Michelin star,” she’d said. “Chefs commit suicide for this sort of thing.” But now, sitting across from Dr. Feldman, she regretted having rushed into making an appointment. Celebrity therapists dealt with narcissists, mostly, not people like Oscar, with depleted self-esteem. She could have gone with Olivia’s choice: “He’s a pothead with Buddhist inclinations, Mom, you’ll love him. He treats his clients outdoors, in Echo Park right by the lake, and after the session he teaches them tai chi. Wear something comfortable.”
Oscar sat at the other end of the couch, quietly listening to Dr. Feldman’s questions, the first one asked poin
t-blank.
“So, tell me, why are you here?”
An unavoidable feeling of importance flooded Keila. This was her opportunity to tell her story. She could go back, way back, to her single-cell-organism ancestors, but because she knew they had limited time, she decided to start when she was born.
“First of all, thank you for seeing us on such short notice,” said Keila. “To answer your question, I had a happy childhood, if you ask me.”
Dr. Feldman did not raise an eyebrow when he heard Keila’s statement, but she sensed he wished he could.
“I see you want to tell me your life story, but when you’re done I need to hear why you’re here. You’re in the hot seat now, and I’m not letting you off the hook,” he said with half a smile, as if trying to break the ice.
Oscar crossed his arms and his legs, clearly expressing his reluctance to be there.
“My grandparents were killed in a concentration camp in Poland, but my parents avoided the Holocaust when they were shipped to Mexico as young children,” she continued, now in possession of the podium. “They were cousins. A couple from the synagogue who couldn’t have babies raised them. There aren’t many Mexican Jews, so it’s a very tight-knit community. I was particularly fond of Bubbe Myriam. Because I was my parents’ only child and my grandparents’ only granddaughter, I had all their attention and love, just for myself. You can imagine what that does to a girl. The search for relatives in Mexico, Europe, the U.S., and even Argentina, following dead-end leads, was a constant in their lives until they passed away a few years ago, within two months of each other. They never found anyone except for an aunt they recognized in a photograph at the Museum of Tolerance.
“I could have married someone in the Mexican Jewish community. I had good prospects, great ones, in fact. But I married Oscar instead. Why did I marry a Catholic? Well, he wasn’t much of a Catholic and I wasn’t much of a Jew. Don’t ever tell that to my parents. Religion wasn’t an issue for me. It was the fact that Oscar is an American. He will say otherwise, that he is Mexican even if he was born in Los Angeles. But I’m not here to tell you his story. I moved to L.A. with him, very reluctantly at first, knowing it would kill my parents, but the decision wasn’t so hard. We had a good marriage. We have three daughters, very lovely girls. Actually, everything was lovely—with a few bumps, why not say it—until something happened to Oscar last year. I don’t know what. But now he just sits there, like right now. Look at him! It’s as if someone had stuck a vacuum cleaner in his mouth and sucked out his soul. That’s why we’re here. I want to find out if this marriage has any hope of surviving.”
“Would you like to say why you’re here, Oscar? It’s Oscar, right?” asked Dr. Feldman.
Oscar sat up straight and ran his finger along the inside of his shirt collar as if stretching the fabric.
“Keila is upset with me,” Oscar said in a barely audible voice. “She wants to get divorced, but we don’t get divorced in our family.”
“Can you elaborate?”
“It’s not an option.”
Those were the last words that Oscar uttered in the entire session, which was mostly taken over by Keila, who expressed in various ways her own thoughts on the matter.
“Why perpetuate something that isn’t working? People change. Our time on earth is limited: we should choose who we want to spend it with. Divorce is an option when no other options are available.”
Dr. Feldman glanced at the little clock on the side table and handed Keila a tissue. She wasn’t aware she had a tear on her cheek.
“I’d like to hear more about Oscar’s reasons to be in therapy, but our time is up for today. Would you like to come again next week?” he asked, pulling out his calendar.
“Yes,” said Keila.
“No,” said Oscar.
Captive in the car, Oscar endured Keila’s rage as she maneuvered through the Sunset Boulevard traffic.
“Don’t waste my time or the therapist’s. If you’re not doing this, say it now.”
“I don’t see how this is going to help.”
“Got a better idea?”
“I’m fine, Keila. I’ve been worried about the drought, like every other sensible person living in Southern California, that’s all.”
“Why? We already replaced our toilets with the water-saving ones. And look how long we had our pool half filled! And the trouble it brought us! We almost lost our grandchildren! And now Olivia had to take matters into her own hands because you wouldn’t do anything about it. It’s so embarrassing.”
Oscar closed his eyes and thought about their latest visit with Diana and Andrea. Olivia had allowed him to hold them, five minutes each. He’d felt an almost imperceptible vibration coming from Diana’s chest, perhaps the activity of her immune system fighting infections, her frail little body recovering slowly, a good sign of health for someone else, but for him it was not. He couldn’t stop imagining the girls in tiny caskets, no matter how much they wriggled and fussed in his arms, proving that they were very much alive and well.
“They’re fine and that’s all that matters,” he said, contradicting his thoughts.
“Are you coming to therapy next week or not?”
“Don’t you have to be in Mexico City to meet with your gallery people?”
For someone so oblivious, Keila realized, Oscar was quite aware of her work commitments and travel schedule. He also kept a mental chart of the daily temperature and humidity in the city and could recite it effortlessly as if he had a built-in barometer. She hadn’t found his underwear in the freezer or had to run out on the street to look for him half dressed and disoriented. A fear that she had subconsciously been battling against suddenly leapt into view, but with these observations about Oscar’s behavior, she felt she could rule it out: Alzheimer’s. It couldn’t be.
“You’re right. I’ll schedule a session for later in the month.”
The sun had long set over Sunset Boulevard, honoring its name as it did every day. Dusk had draped its indigo light over the endless lines of cars filled with people trying to get home on a Thursday evening, and the rows of low buildings, many of which had the blinking neon signs of fast-food restaurants and stand-up comedy places, or larger-than-life billboards advertising clothing brands, upcoming movies and television series, or celebrities with no apparent talent endorsing their own perfume brands. Latinos from across the diaspora—Mexicans, Hondurans, and Guatemalans—waited for the bus in loosely arranged lines, most of them heading to their second or third job. Oscar looked up and recognized Venus, the only naked-eye planet that could upstage the permanent glow of the city in the February sky, and wondered if there would ever be a cloud over Los Angeles again.
Friday, February 12th
Early that morning, Patricia found Oscar in the toolshed by the pool heater, reading the newspaper, uncomfortably sitting on the bench.
“Here you are! I was looking for you,” she said, putting a cup of coffee she’d brought for him on the worktable. “You should have worn your robe. It’s sixty degrees. Want to come back in the house and have breakfast with me?”
Oscar took off his reading glasses, put them in his pajamas’ shirt pocket, and gave a long look at his daughter before answering.
“I’d rather read the paper here, mi chamaquita. It’s quiet.”
“Are you avoiding Mom?”
“What? No. Of course not. I just like to be by myself to collect my thoughts,” he lied.
Patricia, disappointed, gave him a kiss on his forehead and turned around to leave.
“Just know that I’m here for you, Papi. You don’t have to endure this alone, whatever it is.”
On the way back into the house she felt an ache in her chest that she explained as a longing for Oscar’s warmth. She needed the loving father she’d always had, but at the same time, it was clear to her that right now he needed her more, even if he wasn’t ready to acknowledge it.
Sunday, February 14th
Claudia’s Valentine’s
Day gift to herself was to run in the L.A. Marathon that morning. Every year, she’d choose three of the most challenging races and train for them religiously. No matter the blisters, to hell with the cramped quads, damn the bloody armpits. She’d run the San Francisco Marathon with its intimidating hills, the Big Sur Marathon where she sprained her ankle at Hurricane Point, and the ever-ascending Grandfather Mountain Marathon in North Carolina. The L.A. Marathon was easy in comparison, but on that morning, around twenty minutes into the race, she quit and went home to sleep. Anyone who knew her would have been shocked. “Why? She’s not a quitter,” they’d say. But she just drifted back to her bed without giving it even the tiniest thought.
Tuesday, February 16th
If Keila hadn’t inherited artistic genes (who knows from whom, as neither one of her parents could draw a line on a piece of paper) she’d never have met Simon Brik, owner of the well-established art gallery Brik & Spiegel in the posh neighborhood of Polanco in Mexico City. She’d never have had to decide whether to betray Oscar or not, in response to Simon’s insistence. But there she was, sitting across the desk in his gallery, avoiding his profoundly blue eyes while he laid out the details of her upcoming show.
“We could go with the couples fucking inside the glass bubbles. It’s really your strongest series right now,” he proposed, looking at several photographs spread over the desk. Hyperrealist, high-fired, polychrome ceramic sculptures, no larger than twelve inches tall, depicted several naked couples embracing in assorted sexual positions—men with women, men with men, women with women—each couple suspended inside a glass-blown balloon.
“I also have the anti-spooning series, it’s the latest one. Don’t you like it? Go to my website,” she said, hoping to steer her show toward a less romantic theme.
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