The Other's Gold

by Elizabeth Ames

  “Yeah,” said Lainey, and looked away. “I should apologize. I’ve had too much to drink, and, you know, somehow she brings it out in me! I don’t know, she’s still always so cheerful and it just, like, activates my nastiness.”

  Ji Sun nodded, and they were silent for a moment.

  “I wanted to ask her, tonight. If she kissed him,” Ji Sun said.

  “What?”

  “I’m going to ask Margaret, did she kiss Laurent. Did she lie to us.”

  “If she did, the worst part isn’t really the lie, right?”

  “No, I know, but I need to know. What happened. I feel like it’s getting worse, imagining it. Worse than it maybe even actually was.” Throughout dinner Ji Sun had watched Margaret, whom she hadn’t seen since their trip, replayed the way she’d looked that night in Connecticut, frenzied in her pale nightgown, sobbing in the center of the room as though pleading for her life.

  “In front of everyone, though? Even Mac?”

  “No, after. We’re getting drinks just us after this, yes?” Just us still meant the four of them, but Ji Sun wondered how much longer it would.

  Back at the table, the food had arrived and spirits had lifted. Everyone laughed and ate, save Margaret, who smiled but had her head on Mac’s shoulder, looked as though she’d been crying, too. Margaret and Lainey apologized in the same instant, hugged over the table, knocked a mango lassi into Mac’s lap.

  “Thank God for good breeding,” he said, and placed his sodden napkin on the table, stood to show off his clean crotch.

  “Yeah, yeah, thank your parents for that penis,” Alice teased, prompting a volley of dick jokes from the others, all of them drunker than she; though neither she nor Kushi was on call, they were both lightweights now for drinking so little as they were TTC.

  “It’s so good to be together, like this,” Alice said, and looked at Lainey, squeezed her hand. “I know it’s usually Margaret who says corny stuff like this aloud, but I’ve missed this. Us.” She laughed and reached for the bottle, went to refill her friends’ glasses. In the same moment that she noticed Margaret’s glass was still full, Mac cleared his throat, dinged his knife against his glass.

  “We have something to toast, too,” he said, and smiled at Margaret, who turned her face away, nuzzled into his shoulder.

  Alice knew it. She knew it. She could feel it coming. She braced herself at her seat as though for impact.

  “We’re pregnant! Well, she is,” he said, pointing at Margaret. “But we’re having twins, so I’m gonna go ahead and take credit for one of ’em!”

  The table erupted in more cheers and claps, with worried glances from all but Mac and Adam at Alice, whose face they could tell had gone white for how much red light it now reflected.

  Twins, twins, more twins. Twins more. Twins. Everyone was rotten with babies. Alice had prepared, in theory, for one of her best friends to become pregnant before she did, practiced how she would give herself over to real happiness for them in that moment, feel her sorrow later, alone. But she’d thought she’d have more warning, an email first, or a text. To learn this all together in this room, throbbing and claustrophobic, this acid trip of a womb, she could not take it.

  “I have to go,” Alice said. “I’m so sorry. I am really, truly happy for you, Margaret,” she said, “But I have to go home.”

  “No, I’m sorry! I wanted to tell you first, I wasn’t—we weren’t sure we’d share tonight.” She gave Mac a disappointed look. “It’s still super early.”

  “Yeah? How early?” No. She didn’t want the answer. She imagined Margaret losing the babies, and it wasn’t a fear in that moment, but a hope. She was ill at how easily this cruelty came to her, and she started to cry.

  “I guess everybody’s going to cry at this dinner!” She laughed. Let me be human. “I’m sorry, don’t get up, no, I’m leaving. I’ve got to go.”

  She was out to the door, hair purple and green in the last light it caught.

  “Sorry,” Kushi said, and stood to leave. He rifled through his billfold for cash. “Look, congratulations for real, you guys. And you, too, Lainey.” He bent low to kiss Lainey’s cheek before he followed Alice, already gone.

  “We shouldn’t have shared tonight.” Margaret spoke to Mac in a stern voice the others rarely heard. She’d held her tears for Alice, but she started to cry again now.

  “I’m sorry,” Mac said. “I’m happy! Excuse me for wanting to share our good news!”

  I’m not sorry, Ji Sun thought to say, just to break up the apologies. But she was sorry, that they were here, drunk and dissembling at this table, Alice gone, Margaret saying she wanted to go home, too, Lainey and Adam shifting in their seats.

  “But the miscarriage!” Margaret said. “I told you!”

  “Oh, God, that’s right, I’d forgotten,” Mac said. “I didn’t even think about that.”

  Alice’s miscarriage had not been a secret, but still, to hear her talked about between Mac and Margaret like this felt strange to Ji Sun, a reminder of how their partners were these additional rivulets, information from within their friendship flowing out, away from the source.

  Mac seemed to be doing such a poor job of comforting Margaret, and yet Lainey couldn’t manage to get up from her chair, go to her. Why were who you wanted to be and how you acted so hard to reconcile, even in such meager ways?

  “I’m sorry,” Margaret said, crying still harder. “I’m really emotional right now. I can’t take her being mad at me.”

  “No one is mad at you,” Ji Sun said, and elbowed Lainey, whose face looked to Ji Sun like a mask of judgment. “That’s not what this is about.”

  “Be mad at me!” Mac said. “I’m the one who spilled the beans.” He put his hand on Margaret’s belly, protective, and she looked down at his hand there, wiped her face.

  “We’ll throw you a shower, huh?” Lainey knew she needed to offer something, but she was disoriented. How had they gotten here? She’d only been gone for a few months, and only just discovered something about what she wanted for her future, her life, the direction in which she wanted to point her gaze and forge ahead, and she’d returned to find half her friends looking in a different direction, down, where they all looked now, to Margaret’s belly, half hidden beneath the table, but clearly changed now that they knew what was happening there, how the space had been occupied, colonized, claim staked not just by one potential person, but two, and to think it could happen just like that, the dread that it could be catching.

  PART IV

  The Bite

  NEW PARENTS,

  2014–2015

  Chapter 40

  Lainey was in some ways the last they expected to bundle her baby to her chest like this, wear chewable silicon jewelry, mortar and pestle baked pears. But then, wasn’t this all a bit of a costume, too, they wondered. Didn’t it fit with how Lainey wore menswear the year she got really into the newspaper, or wedge sneakers and candy necklaces the semester she spent flopped over couches at New Jersey warehouse raves? Or, her uniform in recent years, feminist firebrand and professional contrarian, leather jacket in the same silhouette as in her Occupy days, upgraded to the more expensive version, and worn over suits that she had professionally tailored? Even while pregnant, Lainey had criticized the women who had gone soft and dunderheaded as new mothers, and here she was, so soft that the others had the urge to crawl into her lap for comfort.

  When they were with her, as they were now, on a cold morning in March, two months after Elizabeth was born, Lainey’s devotion to her daughter erased any snide assessments, and all three of them could see that these were not mere accoutrements—that Lainey wasn’t trying on new motherhood so much as incarnating the maternal. She had molted her previous iterations, and though she was older now, and bone tired in the way a new nursing mother cannot help but be, she had a brushed, raw glow about her, as though even the
dust motes in the air around her had been sloughed away, and she could be seen clearly now. Even her hair, which they’d seen every color, and which she’d dyed with henna during pregnancy in an early nod to the avoidance of toxins she’d fully embraced now, was finally the perfect color for her, deepest auburn that framed her face, brought out her few freckles, and nearly black at the roots, ombré waves so natural they appeared to have been painted on by trees. She had become herself, it seemed, with Elizabeth’s fuzzy head peeking out of the raw silk wrap Lainey wore, just a shade lighter than her beige linen dress, so that the whole bundle of the baby appeared not just as part of her outfit, but part of her body.

  Lainey, addled as she was by love, was not unaware of how her friends perceived her on this, their first time all together since Elizabeth was born. She knew they could see her devotion, her obsession, really, with Elizabeth, beyond the unhinged plastic clips of her nursing bra and the birthplace coordinates ID bracelet Adam had given her, fat, raw birthstones like screws on either side, placed in a decorative ashtray on the coffee table since she didn’t want to risk the stones indenting Elizabeth’s head. She’d tossed out or given away any makeup she wouldn’t want Elizabeth to ingest, though she kept a bottle of Vamp on a bookshelf, small altar to the woman her friends knew, but could not see sitting before them now.

  “Oh, I’m just so happy you’re a mother now, too,” Margaret said. “It’s so special to share this time with you!”

  Alice felt a snap in her jaw and unclenched, knew she’d been close to cracking her crown. She’d been wearing her TMJ mouthguard even out of the house on postimplantation days, and it infuriated her that her jaw was now one more thing she could not control. I am stronger than this! Crack, pop, grind. She pictured her teeth snapping in half, rocketing out of her jaw, their sharp edges implanting in her friends’ fat, happy faces. She had used this mantra as a touchstone before, anytime her body was threatened since the accident. But it was no longer working. It had been a mistake to come. The others had already visited, and Alice had thought that if they came along with her, it might take some pressure off her to perform her happiness. But she could only see Elizabeth, swaddled and bound to Lainey’s chest, the tuft of her dark hair, the iridescent violet shine of her closed clamshell eyes. Elizabeth had slept the entire time they’d been sitting together so far, making catched breath little whinnies from time to time, punctums of Alice’s grief.

  Alice cleared her throat, more to keep her teeth from locking back together than to speak. But when her friends turned toward her, she bent to collect her purse.

  “I should probably get going,” she said. She wouldn’t cry. She was stronger than that at least.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Alice! I didn’t mean to be insensitive.” Margaret stood, came across the coffee table to kneel before her, take Alice’s hands in her own.

  “I’m fine! I’m just, I am happy for you, Lainey,” Alice said. “She is extraordinary.” It was possible to be happy for your friend’s joy and miserable for your lack at the same time, but IVF had robbed Alice of the ability to hold these two modes at once. Now she hated everyone with a new baby, Lainey included. This stage, called “embattled resentment” by her therapist, felt to Alice like the place she lived.

  That should be my baby, she thought, whenever she saw a baby. That should be my body, she thought, whenever she saw a pregnant woman. She had the urge to leap across the coffee table and snatch Elizabeth away from Lainey’s body. The bandage-colored wrap, like skin stretched to keep the baby near, appeared so greedy and ghastly in that moment that Alice thought she might throw up.

  Alice had hoped that by now she would stop attributing anything bad in her life as a kind of cosmic punishment for what she had done to her brother, but as she got older, she felt this sort of thinking spring up even more often, especially as she’d grown closer to becoming a parent herself, and fallen prey to all the convoluted magical thinking that her failed attempts at procreation inspired.

  There had been the bargaining, too. Please, God, I’ll give anything for my brother not to die. Let him live and I will never ask for anything ever again. These prayers passed through her even on the tractor, became constants in the days that followed, when her brother was unconscious in the hospital. She didn’t remember anyone ever using the word coma around her, though conversations around when he would regain consciousness were frequent, as were, after the surgery that saved his life, discussions of when he would “come out from under.” Alice still remembered the way this phrase had terrified her, how she’d imagined her brother digging himself out of a grave on the farm, back by the smokehouse, where the dogs were buried, and trying to strangle her the moment he saw her, dirt on his face and in his hair. It occurred to her now that he might still come out from under, and what would happen to her if he did?

  She was sure she had bargained away her firstborn child during those days when she was begging God to save her brother, but back then she’d only heard about this trade in stories, didn’t understand yet what it was like to have believed your whole life that your body would do this thing that you were told women’s bodies were made to do, only to find that it would not, could not, and no one could say precisely why.

  Have you done everything possible to reduce your stress? well-meaning women would ask. Well-meaning women had many questions: Have you tried acupuncture? Have you tried sensory-deprivation tanks? Have you tried Reiki massage? Have you tried meditation? Transcendental Meditation, though? Medication, though? Rescue remedy, also? Klonopin, just a pinch? Valerian root tea? White pine tea? White wine with peaches, in a plastic glass with ice cubes, poolside at an all-inclusive resort on the Big Island, before sex with your husband, after which you insert a menstrual cup into your cervix, a pillow under your bum, and two yoga blocks beneath your haunches to keep your legs in the air for a full three hours, longer if you can, leave your legs there all night and go out dancing, try to relax and let yourself let go. The body knows.

  Well-meaning women were also known to offer counsel concerning adoption, which Alice and Kushi had been considering more seriously in the last two years, but which she bristled to see trotted out so often as a means to boost fertility. Everyone’s sister or cousin or coworker had struggled for so long, years, Alice, they never thought it would happen for them, these fertile fools who never seemed to be the ones who struggled themselves would say, and put their hands on Alice’s arm. But then, just as these cousin’s coworkers signed the adoption papers/touched down in Ethiopia/brought the new baby home—Hark! a fertilized egg would implant and a positive pregnancy test would knock them sideways. And now their families were so full, these fools would say, and their hearts fuller still.

  Did the adoption agency workers have a way of sniffing this out, Alice wondered, through the stink of infertility, the deeper stench of those couples who, in the desperation with which she was deeply intimate, went through all the motions just hoping it might get them pregnant? Could the counselors tell which ones might cut and run, be out the door the moment they got that positive pregnancy test? Alice knew she would have to move utterly beyond thinking of adoption as a consolation prize before she could move further down that path. And she’d delivered enough babies on her ob-gyn rotation to know, absolutely, that if someone handed her one of those babies now, told her it could be hers, she would love that baby with her whole heart. It was only after she and Kushi had begun attending informational sessions on the emotional complexities of adoption that she began to doubt herself, wonder at what point some biological limitation would announce itself, impede attachment. She was a scientist, after all, even if she was one who now believed in something called “sticky baby dust.”

  After one such workshop, eighteen months earlier, she’d asked Lainey on the phone if she’d ever felt as though her parents loved their two biological children more. Alice wanted to protect against hurting her hypothetical adopted child in this way.

  Ins
tead of answering, Lainey had asked, “Did you ever feel like your parents loved any of your siblings more than you?”

  Alice felt as though Lainey had slapped her, and the phone burned against her cheek. She’d hung up.

  When Lainey called to apologize, Alice felt worse, as it confirmed that Lainey had known just how cruel her question was. But Alice hadn’t known that Lainey had just had a miscarriage herself, that she hadn’t told Alice she was pregnant so as to protect her, but was steamed now that all their time to talk for what seemed like years had been devoted to Alice’s fertility struggles, and, more recently, Alice interrogating Lainey about her own adoption.

  Lainey should have told Alice this instead of lashing out at her. But the miscarriage had made her mean and desperate; it had taught her how deep her own well of longing for a child went, even though the pregnancy had been a surprise. Adam had burst into happy tears when Lainey told him she was pregnant, and she hadn’t known his face could be so beautiful. The creases around his smile deepened, his dimples seemed to double, and he beamed from every pore. He was radiant. She had not even known she could make someone so happy, and what crushed her then was the knowledge that she would never be able to do so again. That the next time she told Adam she was pregnant, he would be eager, and happy, but he would also be afraid. And even if this paled against Alice’s losses, it was Lainey’s sadness, and she keened at what they’d lost. Lainey knew it was not always easy for Adam to be her partner, and that she could make someone so good and so steady so happy had been a greater gift than she could have anticipated. She mourned the baby that wouldn’t be, but also the wives Adam might have had, the easier women who would have been able to bring this unabashed joy into his life more often, who, insides less twisted, would have gotten pregnant the first time, had it stick, decorated a nursery while they worked full time and baked homey, healthy meals. Not sunken into another monthlong depression where she watched full seasons of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation in days, forgot, even as she watched, both everything that happened on the program and everything that was meant to happen in her life.