by Jodi Picoult
From my spot on the podium, I turned to the band. According to the playlist, our final song was supposed to be Donna Summer’s “Last Dance.” But this didn’t seem like a disco crowd, so I turned to the guys behind me. “You know Etta James?” I asked, and the keyboard player launched into the beginning strains of “At Last.”
Sometimes when I sing, I close my eyes. There’s harmony in every breath I take; the drums become my pulse, the melody is the flow of my blood. This is what it means to lose yourself in music, to become a symphony of notes and rests and measures.
When I finished singing, there was a thunder of applause. I could hear Reid clapping loudly: Brava! And Liddy’s twittering girlfriends: . . . best wedding band I’ve ever heard . . . must get their card from you.
“Thank you very much,” I murmured, and when I finally opened my eyes, Max was staring into them.
Suddenly, a man came crashing toward the stage, smacking his hand against the drum set as he stumbled forward. He was completely trashed and, from the sound of his Southern accent, one of Liddy’s relatives or family friends. “Hey, girlie,” he crowed, grabbing at the hem of my black dress. “You know what you are?”
The bass player took a step forward, shielding me, but Max was already coming to my rescue. “Sir,” he said politely, “I think you should leave . . .”
The drunk man shoved him and grabbed my hand. “You,” he slurred, “are a fucking nightingale!”
“You don’t swear in front of a lady,” Max said, and he punched the guy. The drunk collapsed against a shrieking cotillion of bridesmaids, their long gowns breaking his fall to the floor.
In an instant, a tuxedoed behemoth grabbed Max and spun him around. “This here’s for beatin’ on my daddy,” he said, and he knocked Max unconscious.
It was pandemonium—Hatfields versus McCoys, tables being overturned, old ladies tearing ribbons off each other’s hats. The band grabbed up their instruments, trying to keep the fray from destroying their equipment. I leaped off the stage and crouched over Max. He was bleeding from his mouth and nose, and also from a cut on his forehead where he’d struck the stage as he fell. I pulled his head onto my lap and huddled over him, shielding him from the rest of the commotion. “That,” I said, as soon as his eyes fluttered open, “was idiotic.”
He grinned. “I don’t know about that,” Max said. “It got your arms around me.”
He was bleeding so much that I insisted he go to the emergency room. He gave me the keys to his truck and let me drive while he pressed a napkin to his forehead. “Guess no one’s ever going to forget Reid’s wedding,” he mused.
I didn’t answer.
“You’re mad at me,” Max said.
“It was a compliment,” I said finally. “You punched a guy for giving me a compliment.”
He hesitated. “You’re right. I should have let him tear your dress off.”
“He wouldn’t have torn my dress off. The guys in the band would have stopped him before—”
“I wanted to be the one to save you,” Max said simply, and I stared at him in the green glow of the dashboard.
At the hospital, I waited with Max in a cubicle. “You’re going to need stitches,” I told him.
“I’m going to need a lot more than that,” he said. “For starters, I’m pretty sure my brother will never speak to me again.”
Before I could respond, a doctor pulled aside the curtain and entered, introducing himself. He snapped on a pair of rubber gloves and asked what had happened. “I ran into something,” Max said.
He winced as the doctor probed the scalp wound. “Into what?”
“A fist?”
The doctor took a penlight from his pocket and instructed Max to follow the tiny beam. I watched his eyes roll up, then from side to side. He caught my glance and winked at me.
“You’re going to need stitches,” the doctor echoed. “You don’t seem to have a concussion, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea to make sure someone stays with you tonight.” He pulled aside the curtains of the cubicle. “I’ll be back with the suture tray.”
Max looked up at me, a question in his eyes.
“Of course I’ll stay,” I said. “Doctor’s orders.”
One week later, I go back to work at the burn unit of the hospital. The first patient I see is Serena, a fourteen-year-old girl from the Dominican Republic who is one of my regulars. Burned severely in a house fire, she was treated locally and wound up disfigured and scarred. She hid in the dark in her family home for two years before coming to Rhode Island to have reconstructive skin grafts. I’ve met with her for an hour each time I am scheduled to be at the hospital, although at first, no one really understood what good music therapy could do for Serena. She was blind because of cataracts that developed when her scarred eyelids wouldn’t shut, and has limited movement in her hands. At first I just sang to her until she began to sing along with me. Eventually, I modified a guitar for her, tuning it to an open chord and then fitting it with a slide so that she could play. I put Velcro patches on the back of the neck of the guitar so that she could literally feel her way into the chords she was learning to play.
“Hi, Serena,” I say, as I knock on the door to her room.
“Hey, stranger,” she answers. I can hear the smile in her voice.
I am grateful, selfishly, for her blindness. For the fact that, unlike minutes ago, when I was talking to the nurses at their desk, I will not have to be responsible for putting her at ease when she doesn’t know how to offer condolences. Serena never knew I was pregnant; therefore, she has no reason to know the baby died.
“Where’ve you been?” she asks.
“Sick,” I say, pulling up a chair beside her and settling my guitar across my lap. I begin to tune it, and she reaches for her own instrument. “What have you been doing?”
“The usual,” Serena says. Her face is swathed in bandages, still healing from her most recent operation. Her words are slurred, but, after all this time, I know the patterns of her speech. “I have something for you.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. Listen. It’s called ‘The Third Life.’” I sit up, interested. This term grew out of therapy sessions we’d had over the past two months, where we’d talked about the difference between her first life—pre-fire—and her second, after the fire. What about your third life? I had asked Serena. Where do you think of yourself, when all the surgeries are finished?
I listen to Serena’s reedy soprano, punctuated by the beeps and whirs of monitors attached to her body:
No hiding in the darkness
No anger and no pain
The outside may be different
But inside I’m the same
On the second verse, when I have her melody tangled in my mind, I begin to pick out harmony on my own guitar. I finish when she finishes singing, and as she slides her hand up the neck of the guitar, I clap.
“That,” I tell Serena, “was the best present ever.”
“Worth getting sick for?”
Once, during a session, Serena was playing with a rainstick, turning it over and over and getting progressively more agitated. When I asked her what it reminded her of, she told me about the last day she had been outside in the Dominican Republic. She was walking home from school and it started to pour. She knew, because she stepped in the puddles that were forming, and her hair was wet. But she couldn’t feel drops on her skin, because of the scar tissue. What she’d never understood was why she could not feel rain, but something as insubstantial as a classmate’s sneer about her Bride of Frankenstein face felt like a hot sword running through her.
That was the moment she decided not to leave her house again.
Music therapy is not supposed to be about the therapist, it’s supposed to be about the patient. And yet, a small splash on the belly of my guitar suggests I must be crying. Like Serena, I haven’t felt the tears on my cheeks at all.
I take a deep breath. “Which verse do you like the most?”
&nbs
p; “The second, I guess.”
I fall back into the familiar: teacher to student, therapist to patient, the person I used to be. “Tell me why,” I say.
I don’t know where Max has found the boat, but the rental is waiting for us when we get to Narragansett Bay. The weather report was wrong; it is cold and damp. I am quite sure we are the only people booking a motorboat this morning. Mist sprays against my face, and I zip my jacket all the way up to my chin.
“You go first,” Max says, and he holds the boat so that I can step into it. Then he hands me the cardboard box that has been on the seat between us for the drive down to the beach.
Max guns the engine, and we go spitting out to sea, puttering through the no-wake zone around buoys and the sleeping hulks of sailboats. Whitecaps reach their bony fingers over the hull of the little boat and soak my sneakers.
“Where are we going?” I yell over the motor.
Max doesn’t hear me, or he pretends not to. He has been doing a lot of that lately. He comes home hours after the sun has set and I know he couldn’t possibly be pruning or planting or mowing or even surfing. He uses this excuse to sleep on the couch. I didn’t want to wake you up, he says, as if it is my fault.
It’s not even really morning yet. It was Max’s idea to come out here when the ocean was quiet—no fishing trawlers, no weekend sailors. I sit on the center of the bench of the boat with the box on my lap. When I close my eyes, the churn of the engine and the slap of the waves rearrange themselves into a rap beat. I drum my fingers against the metal seat, playing in time.
After about ten minutes Max cuts the engine. We bob along, tossed by our own wake.
He sits across from me, his hands tucked between his knees. “What do you think we should do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to . . .”
“No,” I say, thrusting the box at him. “You do it.”
He nods and takes the small blue ceramic shoe out of the box. A few packing peanuts flutter away on the wind. It makes me panic—what if a big gust of wind comes along at just the wrong moment? What if the ashes wind up in my hair, on my jacket?
“I feel like we ought to say something,” Max murmurs.
My eyes fill with tears. “I’m sorry,” I whisper.
For not knowing anything better to say.
For having to do this in the first place.
For not being able to keep you safe inside me a few more weeks.
Max reaches across the space between us and squeezes my hand. “I am, too.”
The reality of my baby, it turns out, is no more than a breath in the cold, a puff of smoke. The ashes are gone almost the very moment they hit the air. If I’d blinked, I could easily have pretended that it never happened.
But I imagine them settling on the frantic surface of the ocean. I imagine the Sirens on the sea floor, singing him home.
Max is late to the appointment with Dr. Gelman. He comes skidding into her paneled office, smelling of mulch. “Sorry,” he apologizes. “Job ran late.”
There was a time when he was ten minutes early for our appointments. When, once, his truck broke down and he jogged with a semen sample to the clinic so that it would arrive in the window of time necessary to fertilize the harvested eggs. But in the two weeks since I’ve been discharged from the hospital, our conversation has been limited to the weather, the grocery list, and what I’d like to watch on TV at night. He slides into the chair beside me and looks at the obstetrician expectantly. “Is she okay?”
“There’s no reason to think that Zoe’s not going to be fine,” Dr. Gelman says. “Now that we know about the thrombophilia, it’s manageable with medication. And the fibroids that we saw beneath the placenta—we’ll hope that, without the hormonal fluctuations of pregnancy, they shrink again.”
“But what about next time?” I ask.
“I honestly don’t anticipate another clot, as long as we keep you on Coumadin—”
“No,” I interrupt. “I mean, the next time I get pregnant. You said I could try again.”
“What?” Max says. “What the hell?”
I face him. “We have three embryos left. Three frozen embryos, Max. We didn’t give up before when I miscarried. We can’t just give up now—”
Max turns to Dr. Gelman. “Tell her. Tell her this is a bad idea.”
The obstetrician runs her thumb along the edge of her blotter. “The chance of you having a placental abruption again is between twenty and fifty percent. In addition, there are other risks, Zoe. Pre-eclampsia, for example: high blood pressure and swelling that would require you to take magnesium to prevent seizures. You could have a stroke—”
“Jesus Christ,” Max mutters.
“But I can try,” I say again, looking her directly in the eye.
“Yes,” she says. “Knowing the risks, you can.”
“No.” The word is barely audible, as Max stands up. “No,” he repeats, and he walks out of the office.
I follow him, hurrying down the hall to grab his arm. He shakes me off. “Max!” I yell after him, but he is headed toward the elevator. He steps inside, and I reach the doors just as they are closing. I slip in and stand beside him.
There’s a mother in the elevator, too, pushing a stroller. Max stares straight ahead.
The elevator bell dings, and the doors open; the woman pushes her child out. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted,” I say, as soon as we are alone again. “To have a baby.”
“What if it’s not what I want?”
“It’s what you used to want.”
“Well, you used to want a relationship with me,” Max says, “so I guess we’ve both changed a little.”
“What are you talking about? I still want a relationship with you.”
“You want a relationship with my sperm. This . . . this baby thing . . . it’s gotten so much bigger than the two of us. It’s not even us, in it together anymore. It’s you, and it’s the baby we can’t seem to have, and the harder it gets the more air it sucks out of the room, Zoe. There’s no space left for me.”
“You’re jealous? You’re jealous of a baby that doesn’t even exist?”
“I’m not jealous. I’m lonely. I want my wife back. I want the girl who used to want to spend time with me, reading the obituaries out loud and driving for forty miles just to see what town we’d wind up in. I want you to call my cell to talk to me, instead of to remind me that I have to be at the clinic at four. And now—now you want to get pregnant again, even if it kills you? When do you stop, Zoe?”
“It’s not going to kill me,” I insist.
“Then it just might kill me.” He looks up. “It’s been nine years. I can’t do this anymore.”
There is something in his gaze, some bitter pill of truth, that sends a shiver down my spine. “Then we’ll find a surrogate. Or we’ll adopt—”
“Zoe,” Max says, “I mean, I can’t do this. I can’t do us.”
The elevator doors open. We are on the ground floor, and the afternoon sun streams through the glass doors at the front of the clinic. Max walks out of the elevator, but I don’t.
I tell myself the light is playing tricks on me. That this is an optical illusion. One minute I can see him, and the next, it’s like he was never here at all.
“There is audio content at this location that is not currently supported for your device. The caption for this content is displayed below.”
The House on Hope Street (3:56)
MAX
I always figured I’d have kids. I mean, it’s a story most guys can identify with: you’re born, you grow up, you start a family, you die. I just wish that, if there had to be a delay somewhere in the process, it would have been the last bit.
I’m not the villain, here. I wanted a baby, too. Not because I’ve spent my whole life dreaming of fatherhood, but for a reason much more simple than that.
Because it’s what Zoe wanted.
I did everything she asked me to. I stopped drinking caffeine
, I wore boxers instead of briefs, I started jogging instead of biking. I followed a diet she’d found online that increased fertility. I no longer put the laptop on my lap. I even went to some crazy acupuncturist, who set needles dangerously close to my testicles and lit them on fire.
When none of that worked, I went to a urologist, and filled out a ten-page form that asked me questions like Do you have erections? and How many sexual partners have you had? and Does your wife reach orgasm during intercourse?
I grew up in a household where we didn’t really talk about our feelings, and where the only reason you went to a doctor was because you’d accidentally cut off a limb with a chain saw. So I don’t mean to be defensive, but you have to understand, the touchy-feely part of IVF and the poking and the prodding isn’t something that comes naturally to me.
I had a hunch that it wasn’t just Zoe who had infertility problems. My brother, Reid, and his wife had been married for over a decade and hadn’t been able to conceive yet, either. The difference was that, instead of forking over ten thousand dollars to a clinic, he and Liddy prayed a lot.
Zoe said that Dr. Gelman had a better success rate than God.
As it turns out, I have a total sperm count of 60 million—which sounds like a lot, right? But when you start figuring in their shape and speed, all of a sudden I’m down to 400,000. Which—again—seems like a pretty big number to me. But imagine that you’re running the Boston Marathon along with more than 59 million drunks—suddenly it gets a little more challenging to cross that finish line. Add Zoe’s infertility issues to mine, and we were suddenly looking at IVF and ICSI.
And then there’s the money. I don’t know how people pay for IVF. It costs fifteen thousand dollars a pop, including the medications. We are lucky enough to live in Rhode Island, a state that forces insurance companies to cover women between twenty-five and forty who are married and can’t conceive naturally—but that still means our out-of-pocket expenses have been three thousand dollars for each fresh cycle of embryos, and six hundred dollars for each frozen cycle. Not covered: the ICSI—where sperm are directly injected into the eggs (fifteen hundred dollars), embryo freezing (a thousand dollars), and embryo storage (eight hundred dollars per year). What I’m saying here is that, even with insurance, and even before the financial nightmare of this last cycle, we’d run out of money.
