by Megan Walker
She doesn’t say anything for a moment, just stirs her spoon slowly around the edge of the bowl. Neither of us has had a single bite of our food yet. Maybe a fancy dinner wasn’t the best idea for this—though I guess it’s not making it actively worse.
“I don’t know that you totally do,” she finally says. “I haven’t been talking about it as much as I should have.”
That makes two of us. “Is it the injections?” As annoying as sperm extraction is to me, egg retrieval involves weeks’ worth of shots, and then minor surgery. Another reason I felt like an idiot for my freak-out moment. And another reason I feel like a bastard for not sparing her the pain of carrying a child by agreeing to surrogacy.
Though she’ll have to go through the egg retrieval either way.
Anna-Marie shakes her head. “No. I mean, I’m not looking forward to that, but I can deal with it.” She’s quiet for a minute. “It’s just that I’ve never been that girl who hates her body before, you know?” She tucks her chin and closes her eyes. “I’ve always been thin, and my body’s basically done whatever I want it to, within reason. But now—I feel like it’s betrayed me, and I can’t help but be angry at it all the time. I just think it would be nice to get the process out of my body, so that if it fails, at least it’s not my body failing. Over and over.”
I squeeze her hand tight, wishing so desperately that I could fix this. That I could fix all of this.
“I think it’s affecting our sex life,” she continues. “And I’m sorry about that, too.”
I sigh. I know what she means, but . . . “I don’t think it’s just that. It’s all the planning and the timing and the inevitable disappointment.”
“I know, right?” she says, waving a hand in the air. “All that pressure . . . It’s the worst.”
It is. I stroke her knuckle with my thumb. “I miss the way we used to be. I miss you.”
Tears creep into Anna-Marie’s eyes. “I miss you too.”
“I can do the surrogacy thing,” I say. “I don’t like it, but I’ll do it.”
The corners of her lips turn down. “Yeah, but if you’re stressed about it, that’ll just make me more stressed.”
“Okay. But if you’re more stressed about IVF, that’ll make me more stressed.” I try to say this lightly, like it’s a joke, this stress Catch-22 we’re finding ourselves in. But it’s not a joke, and we both know it.
She looks down at our hands. “Do you think not feeling like you can be involved in the pregnancy will affect how you feel about the baby?”
“No,” I say. And it’s the truth. It’s hard for me to imagine what it’ll feel like having a little person who’s completely dependent on us, but I’m sure I couldn’t blame a little helpless being for the way it came into the world. “I think it’ll affect how I feel for those nine months, but I think I would get over it. Which is why I can do it, you know? I can be uncomfortable for a while if it’s what you need.”
“I feel the same way,” Anna-Marie says. “And I think ultimately I hate the idea of IVF less than you hate the idea of surrogacy, so that’s what we should do.”
I want to be the one making sacrifices for her, not the other way around. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.” She sounds pretty convinced. “We’ll have a consultation, and see what happens next.”
This sucks. But the truth is, the option that wouldn’t have sucked was for us to have had a baby a year ago and be about to celebrate his or her first birthday, having named him or her after something terrible like a brand of kitchen sink. What we’re dealing with is not what we want, but what’s left to us to try.
“You don’t look happy about this,” she says.
“I’m not,” I tell her honestly. “I’m tired. But it’ll be worth it.”
“Okay,” Anna-Marie says. “And maybe . . . maybe if we’re going to try IVF next, we don’t have to keep doing the Clomid and the timed intercourse and the IUIs. Maybe we could take back our sex life, you know?”
I like this idea, but it also scares me, and it takes me a beat to figure out why. “Do you think you’d want to do that?”
“Yeah,” she says. “I’m as tired of all this as you are.”
That’s not exactly what I meant, and I hesitate. I know this is irrational, but I need to ask. “You would still want to be with me like that, right? If you didn’t have to. If it wasn’t a chore.”
Anna-Marie looks heartbroken, and I want to take it back. It’s not like sex isn’t still good. It’s just not as . . . carefree as it used to be. Not as purely about us.
“Of course I still want to. That hasn’t changed at all,” she says, and I’m embarrassed at how much relief I feel hearing that. God knows it hasn’t changed for me, how very much I want to be with her.
She bites her lip. “But I might need a little bit of a break. Not because I don’t want to be with you, but just . . . to reset. To get back what we used to have, you know?”
She’s clearly nervous about how I’m going to take this, but I see that she’s right. If we stop doing all the fertility stuff and suddenly expect to have our old sex life back, we’ll just be giving it a different kind of pressure.
“That makes sense. I’m good with that.” I give her a reassuring smile.
“I think our food is getting cold,” Anna-Marie says, and I squeeze her hand, and then let go.
I love my wife, and our marriage, and our lives together, but I hate what the last year has done to us. As we begin to actually eat, I find myself wanting to talk about something else. Anything else.
“I got a phone call from Felix Mays today,” I say.
Anna-Marie looks surprised. “Really? Felix? Why?”
“He’s the consulting cellist on that project where Axel Dane is playing a cello prodigy.”
Anna-Marie raises her eyebrows. “I bet he’ll have fun with that.”
“And apparently Axel’s agent just got arrested for child pornography—”
“Ugh,” Anna-Marie says, setting down her spoon.
“You can’t be surprised.”
“No. But I can be appalled.”
“And Felix wants me to represent Axel so he can do his job.”
Anna-Marie looks confused. “You don’t rep kids.”
“I know,” I say. “But I said I’d talk to them tomorrow. Because I’m a sucker.”
Anna-Marie looks skeptical. “You’re going to rep a monster kid because Felix Mays wants you to?”
“Or because I feel bad leaving the kid at the mercy of the lions I know are circling to represent him.”
“Yeah, I can see that. But how miserable are you going to be doing this job?”
“Probably very,” I say. “But if they’ll pay twice my hourly rate for the duration of the project, I think the pain will be worth it.”
“You were just saying that we don’t need the money.”
I was. And that’s true. “Doesn’t mean I’m not going to charge them through the nose for being pains in the ass. They also don’t need the money.”
Anna-Marie picks up her spoon again and takes a bite of her soup. “You do have a point.”
I nod. “Plus, it helps out a friend.”
“Are you considering Felix Mays a friend?”
Her skepticism is warranted. I’ve barely talked to Felix before today. But still.
“You don’t like him,” I say. “You haven’t since you thought he might have stolen your shoes.”
Anna-Marie looks insulted. “I didn’t like him when he was on heroin. But I don’t have a problem with Felix now.” She points her spoon at me. “After all, because of him, we got AJ to play at our wedding.”
“Because of him, AJ no longer exists,” I tease back.
She laughs. “That’s true. But I’m over it.”
“Well, that’s good,” I say. “Becau
se he and I may be working together.”
“Because you usually work with the music consultants on your clients’ projects?”
“No,” I say, “But if I’m going to suffer through this project with Axel Dane, Felix is definitely going to suffer with me.”
Anna-Marie laughs. “Good. I support this.”
“You support Felix suffering.”
“I support whatever gets you through this job without driving you nuts.” She pours me another glass of wine. “I think you may be needing this.”
She’s not wrong. We toast to Axel Dane, may he not drive away what last bits of sanity I have.
Though I’m pretty sure it’s this next part of our infertility adventure that is going to have that honor.
Three
Felix
I leave the set later than I want to, not because I got to teach Axel anything about the cello, but because the assistant director insisted I sit around on the off-chance that the director had questions for me at the end of the screen tests.
Shocker: He didn’t. I vaguely remember Gabby telling me that working on a film set involves a lot of sitting around and getting paid for doing basically nothing. I thought this was because she was an extra, but no. It appears to be the case for many of us, though not, from what I could observe, the directorial staff.
I pull into the driveway, glad to be home, dying to tell Jenna about the craziness of the day. The first one to greet me when I walk in isn’t my wife, though, or even Ty. A twelve-pound flurry of fur dashes toward me, failing to stop soon enough and skidding the last foot or so on the hardwood floor until he crashes into my legs. He bounces back to his feet, tail wagging frantically.
“Hi, Rocket,” I say, bending to scratch his head. The little terrier mutt dances around under my hand. We got him from a rescue the day we found out we were having a baby girl, thinking Ty might take the news of not getting his long-awaited baby brother better if it came with the other thing he’d been wanting forever—a dog.
The dog did seem to appease him, and so Rocket Superpope Mays became the first four-legged member of our growing family.
“You been keeping everybody safe here? Scaring away any threatening mailmen or joggers with that fearsome yip?”
Rocket wags his tail, then takes off running toward the kitchen, where, from the apple-cinnamon smell in the air, I’m guessing Jenna has something baking, and I think I know what.
Trust my wife to be making a pie, even though she just had a baby a few weeks ago. I’ve mentioned several times that she shouldn’t push herself so hard, but she says baking relaxes her. And after a day like today, I’m definitely not going to complain about pie.
I round the corner just as she’s walking down the hallway, baby monitor in hand. Her face breaks into a wide smile to see me, and damn if that smile isn’t the best thing in the world to see, even after nearly two years of marriage—maybe especially after two years of marriage.
“Hey, gorgeous,” I say, wrapping my arms around her when she gets close enough. I pull her in for a lingering kiss, which she returns with enough heat that I know she’s missed me today, too.
“I appreciate that you can still say that with a straight face,” she says when we pull apart, gesturing at herself. She’s got her hair up in a ponytail that has gone lopsided, and has on a loose-fitting Red Hot Chili Peppers t-shirt over yoga pants, because I know she’s self-conscious about the slight belly she hasn’t lost yet, even though our daughter was just barely born.
I wish she knew how beautiful she still is, how sexy. That being the mother to another of our children only makes her more so to me, not less. But she always dismisses it when I tell her.
I shake my head, determined to try again. “You’re always gorgeous. I told you that the first time I saw you in those yoga pants and glasses, and I still mean it.”
Her lips curl up just enough that I know even if she doesn’t totally believe me, she likes hearing it. “Even given the amount of hours-old spit-up I’m currently covered in.”
“Well, I didn’t say you smell amazing.”
She laughs and pinches my side. “Yeah, well, joke’s on you, because I’ve taken to wearing your shirts.” She walks to the kitchen, giving me a coy look back over her shoulder.
“Don’t think I haven’t noticed.” And I have. Baby spit-up or no, there’s something hot about seeing my wife wearing my shirt. Though I’m even more inclined to appreciate it when she’s got nothing else on.
That thought—combined with the kiss—has gotten some reactions going, so I try to turn my thoughts elsewhere. The need for which, as usual, is both frustrating and embarrassing. Since I’ve been coming down off the Suboxone, hoping to one day be totally free of the meds for controlling my heroin addiction, the drug-aided stamina that both Jenna and I have enjoyed over the last two years has been entirely flipped on its head, so to speak.
I was warned that would happen, and I’m even taking anti-depressants off-label specifically to counteract that side effect. They help, in that I can endure the sight of my wife walking out of the shower in the morning without an instant explosion.
But it doesn’t take a whole lot more than that before I turn into a teenage virgin on prom night, which hasn’t exactly done wonders for our sex life.
Jenna says she doesn’t mind, that it doesn’t bother her the way it bothers me. But I can’t imagine how that could be completely true, given how incredible our sex life was before. And how . . . fast it is now, and how infrequent—or at least was before Rachel was born and we stopped completely so Jenna could recover.
I follow her to the kitchen where Ty is sitting at the kitchen table playing on his iPad.
“Hey, kid,” I say, ruffling his blond hair.
He barely turns around. “Hey, Dad.”
“Isn’t there a house rule about no video games during dinner?”
Ty still doesn’t look at me. “I already ate. Mom and I both did.”
Jenna gives me a little grimace, from where she’s putting pie ingredients back in the cabinets. “Yeah, sorry. We were starving. I’ve got a plate for you to heat up, though.”
“Sounds great.” I look back at Ty, who’s frowning at the iPad. Is he upset I missed dinner? We try to eat as a family, but that’s not always feasible, like when we’re busy working on a new album, and it’s never bothered him before. “Sorry I was late,” I say, squeezing his shoulder.
“It’s okay.” He sounds fine about it, but he’s still frowning as he pokes at the iPad, and I look over at Jenna, my eyebrow raised.
“He’s worried about this science project idea he needs to have for tomorrow,” Jenna explains. “And he has found my suggestions unsuitable—”
“Because everyone on TV always does a volcano,” Ty says miserably. “Or a potato conductor. I have to do something different.”
“So I told him to look up some science project ideas online,” she finishes.
“But I don’t like any of these ideas.”
“Ah,” I say. “Well, let me get something to eat, and I’ll help you look.”
I go to the fridge and take out a plate of what looks like chicken parmesan. We’ve long since eaten up all the casseroles and lasagnas Jenna had prepared and frozen before Rachel was born, as well as the ones her mom brought over. We didn’t even have to dig into all that for the first week or two, thanks to meals provided by the women at the church we’ve been going to for the last year and a half.
We’re leaving that phase, though, where everyone wants to help. Rachel isn’t any easier to take care of now than she was those first few weeks, but I think we’re expected to be getting our feet under us by now.
Jenna seems to think so, anyway, and so she’s been cooking a lot lately. Possibly more than she used to before we had a newborn. “This looks great,” I say. “Did you make this today? You know you don�
�t have to—hey, are you doing the dishes? Jenna, save those for me.”
She waves a hand dismissively. “I’m almost done.”
There is a pile of dishes still teetering precariously in the sink. She is nowhere near done. She is also, baking aside, not usually this determinedly domestic.
“We also have a ten-year-old who is fully capable of loading the dishwasher,” I say.
“I’ve got it.” There’s a tension in her voice that makes me decide not to push it.
I put the plate in the microwave. “How was everything today?” I ask. I still want to tell her all about Axel, but it can wait.
She blows some wisps of hair out of her face so she doesn’t have to use her soapy hands. “Good,” she says, but her smile—unlike the one that greeted me when I came home—looks forced. “Rachel was fussy, but I walked her around the neighborhood a few times and then she slept. A little.”
I groan. Rachel, while being the world’s most adorable baby—no bias here, I’m sure—also seems to have decided after the first couple weeks of life that sleep for more than thirty minutes in a row is for the weak.
Neither Jenna or I agree.
“It’s fine,” she says. “It got me some sunshine and exercise. How was your day? How’s it going teaching Axel Dane, child superstar?”
“Axel Dane, spoiled monster, is a little more like it,” I say. “So get this, I—”
Rocket starts barking his high-pitched yip at something outside the window.
“Rocket!” Jenna hisses, but it’s too late. The monitor perched on the counter starts to wail. Jenna goes from slightly tense to looking like she’s about to collapse into tears.
“I’ll get her,” I say quickly, and this time Jenna doesn’t seem inclined to stop me. She just wearily hands me the half-filled baby bottle on the counter, probably from twenty minutes ago when she finally got Rachel to sleep again.
I give Jenna a kiss on the forehead and take the bottle. Jenna was disappointed that Rachel didn’t take to breast-feeding very easily—or pretty much at all. But I was relieved that we could bottle-feed her, despite all the extremist warnings from the Anti-Formula Guilt Coalition. My sister Dana isn’t part of that particular mom-brigade, but she did send me many emails on every scientific study relating to formula ever, which I have stringently ignored and definitely not passed on to Jenna.
