The Other's Gold

by Elizabeth Ames

  A few days after their phone call, Lainey did tell Alice about her miscarriage, by way of apology for having said what she had.

  “Oh, no,” Alice said. “I’m so sorry, Lainey.” There was a long pause and Lainey wished she had waited to tell Alice in person, as silence on the phone was too easy to interpret ungenerously.

  “I didn’t even know you were trying!” Alice burst out.

  Lainey felt accused. “We weren’t, well, not really. We weren’t not trying.”

  Alice hated it when people said this, hated the luck and ignorance they exposed about themselves, that they might just fuck and find themselves impregnated, like heartland teenagers in towns that didn’t teach about birth control.

  “That’s the same thing,” Alice said. “That’s trying.”

  “I just meant, you know, we aren’t, like obsessing about it yet or anything.”

  “Jesus, Lainey!”

  “I’m sorry, Alice! But this isn’t about you! I’m not talking about your obsession, because I’m not talking about you and Kushi right now! I’m talking about me!”

  Another long pause during which Lainey worried that Alice might hang up. Since Margaret had had her babies, there had been more pressure on the dynamic between her and Alice, with Margaret removed from regular rotation, and Ji Sun receptive, but staunch in her resolve not to have children, making it seem unfair to burden her with the intricacies of their cervical mucus, though Alice had. Lainey hadn’t realized how much better four was for ballast.

  She heard Alice take a deep breath.

  “You’re right,” Alice said. “No, you’re right. I know I take everything about trying to get pregnant incredibly personally. But I would think, well, I would think that especially now, you would understand that.”

  Lainey wanted to argue that it wasn’t so instant, but Alice was right. Even freshly acquainted with this longing, Lainey had wanted to throw her computer out the window when she saw pregnancy announcements. One of her colleagues had posted a picture of herself and her husband, holding a little pair of tiger-print sneakers in their cupped-together hands, like even the factory-fresh footwear of their future baby required a tenderness typically reserved for just-hatched chicks or live grenades. Expecting a baby Friedman cub in January! the caption said, and a growl had issued forth from Lainey’s throat in response.

  “I do, a little bit. I do understand that. And I’m sorry for taking it out on you. It’s just thrown me for a loop. I didn’t know how terrible it was. Physically, I mean. I’m so sorry you’ve had to go through this more than once, Alice,” Lainey said, and sucked breath through her teeth. Was there no way to be there for each other and not always be measuring their losses against the others, pitting pain against pain?

  The pain Alice felt now was too much to endure. She couldn’t be in a room with Elizabeth, couldn’t be near enough to smell her, hear her, practically taste the longing she felt for her in the fault lines she was cracking into her teeth. Lainey hadn’t offered to unwrap Elizabeth, pass her sleeping body across the table to her friends’ arms, let them cradle her, nuzzle the downy tufts of her furry head, breathe her perfect unpolluted scent, and this was a mercy rather than a selfishness, Alice knew, though everything about this room was punishment right now, and she fled, hungry, heartsick, not having remembered to leave the small gift, fishing it out of her bag on the street, tearing the yellow tissue paper from the sack to wipe the sick from her face.

  Chapter 41

  Again Alice had been pregnant, and again her body had announced it with, and rejected it like, vomit. She swung ferociously between the belief that they could not keep doing this, it was too difficult, and the insistence that this was the only thing worth doing, that they could not stop until it worked, stuck, brought them the baby that she wanted even more now, she would admit, since her friends had become mothers. It made sense that Margaret would have babies so young, though that she had become pregnant so soon after the incident with Laurent made what happened that weekend worse in a way, as though Mac had taken her home and tried to fuck her like a proper adult, knock her up. But with Lainey it had come from left field, and Alice couldn’t help but take it personally, now that Elizabeth was here, Lainey’s pregnancy having been easier to ignore than its successful end. It was so stupid to think But that’s my dream, as though it was winning a Nobel Prize and not the most mundane desire on the planet.

  Kushi wanted to move forward with adoption and take a break from IVF. He was resolute that this was not the same thing as giving up, but thought that pursuing both at once was simply too taxing. When he asked her, a week after the miscarriage, earlier in her pregnancy this time, but worse due to the effort that it had taken to get to that point, all the hands that had been on that one fertilized egg. Alice, even with her medical degree, was continually shocked by how completely hormones ruled her life: her mood, her energy, her skin, her appetites—everything. And looking at Kushi now, in their apartment as he got ready to leave for work, she wondered whether there was some version of couvade syndrome for trying to conceive, a sympathetic miscarriage. His skin was ashy and sallow, his stubble gray in patches that seemed to have sprung up overnight like mold. His tortoiseshell glasses, which always made him look elegant, seemed oversized now on his sunken face, and she giggled to think that he resembled Toby the Turtle from the Disney version of Robin Hood.

  “I’m not sure what’s funny about this, Alice,” he said, tucking a file into his work bag. “Alice?”

  She’d spun into guffaws, painful coughs of laughter that tore bits from her throat. She couldn’t stop.

  Kushi had always found her laugh so contagious, but he stood in silence now, looking down his nose at her, even more like the cowardly turtle in his reprove.

  “Are you done?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “Yes, I mean. I’m sorry.” Her throat was sore. “I’m done laughing, but I’m not done with IVF. I want to stick with the schedule.”

  “I’m part of this, too, Alice.”

  “It’s my body!”

  “I know that! Don’t you think I know that? I can’t forget that. But it seems like you can. This is hard on your body, this is too much!” He gestured at her body, now wrapped in a grubby warm-up suit from college that had long since become too tattered for even pajamas.

  She was surprised by how angry he was now, how he’d abandoned the sympathy he had in these years endlessly supplied.

  “But it isn’t, Kushi. We worked up this plan in consultation with Dr. Ferris and Dr. Frisch. This course of treatment is neither inadvisable nor unprecedented.”

  “Okay, well then it’s too much for me. Stop talking to me like a reluctant patient. This is our life!”

  Was it weakness that made him look like a turtle again? Kushi, like nearly every doctor she knew, didn’t lack for confidence, but she loved that he didn’t feel the need to walk into a room dick first, clear his throat, and cough up Doctor, though he did append the title to all of his credit cards. She’d thought this was cheesy until he explained that he wanted whoever to have to say Doctor before they butchered his last name, respect him before they resorted to racism.

  But now it made her furious, how he sunk into his shoulders, how his glasses grew. She began to laugh again, this time in a way that she could feel was cruel, but still, could not contain.

  “Jesus, Alice, are you losing the plot? Maybe we should talk about this later tonight, after you get some rest. You’re not working today, I take it?” He gave her a cold once-over, and she considered what cartoon animal she might resemble, maybe Fievel, or one of the bullying orphans, in her ratty pajamas, poking at others with her same lack.

  “You know my schedule,” she said, stung by the way he’d looked at her. “I know I’m a mess.”

  He softened, seeing her sadness, and put his hand under her chin. “I’ll bring home Chinese. If you’re still up, we can t
alk then.”

  He was barely out the door before she pulled up her message boards, TTC, subheading: IVF Success after Loss, and then her phone, the clinic’s number always on her list of recent calls, to schedule the next round of IVF.

  Chapter 42

  Nearly six months after Elizabeth was born, when Adam summoned them, one by one, then all at once, in the middle of a hot summer night, they feared, of course, the worst. All were friendly with Adam, but none save Ji Sun had the sort of relationship with him where they might receive texts or emails without the others or their partners copied, and even these wouldn’t come in the dead of night.

  It occurred to each of them, after the flash of car accident, health crisis, assault, after more outlandish or unlikely things, that she was missing: kidnapped, or run away; that Lainey might have killed herself. Even when by all accounts her life was the best it had ever been, when she had wept brightly at the table, their first brunch out together without babies, and said she wasn’t crying because she was sad, but because she was so acutely aware that she had never been happier, and she knew it could not last. That suicide crossed all their minds, a barb in their brains—why did this rise to the surface as a possibility?—that she could. Maybe it was that Lainey had said so, after Alexa’s death.

  “Of course I understand it. I could never do it, but I get it.”

  Lainey had thought about it a hundred times, so many times, yet she would never answer Yes to questions about suicidal ideation in any doctor’s office. She had everything ideation. Stepping in front of a train, bashing a rock into Walker’s skull, traveling to outer space, growing a penis, walking into the sea—none of these were things she could ever do, but nor were they thoughts that popped in unbidden, not voices she heard. They were just things she wondered about as she walked around, a human animal. What she couldn’t understand was people who didn’t imagine everything. What did they think about if not all the ways to live and die?

  But Lainey was, since Elizabeth’s birth, the most content and grounded that she had ever been. Scrubbed raw and exhausted, to be sure, but also suffused with that glow that was beyond anything people talked about pregnant women having. It was some kind of otherworldly luminosity, like she was a beacon now, and Elizabeth had made her so. A North Star, a lighthouse, dull but visible from any horizon, from any planet.

  Adam’s text read: Something happened. Please come when you can. As soon as you can.

  He didn’t answer when Ji Sun called, and neither did Lainey. Ji Sun texted both of them, then Adam alone: What is going on? Is Lainey okay??

  He replied right away: Lainey ok but can you get here? I need u

  That u was obscene. Its shape imprinted behind her eyeballs, white-hot little horseshoes of regret, shame, desire. Ji Sun scooched herself out from under Howie’s embrace, his snoring her sound machine. The heaviness with which he slept, the weight of his limbs, flung around her in the night, gave her the deepest sleep she’d had in her life. She wasn’t sure how the ping of Adam’s text had reached her there, thought it must have been that she was already aware, somewhere in her bones, that something had happened. She sat up and started to write Howie a note, then nudged him awake instead.

  “Something’s happened. Something with Lainey,” she said.

  “What? Now? What’s wrong?” He lifted his head from the pillow, put his hand on her shoulder.

  “I don’t know, Adam didn’t say. I’m going over. Go back to sleep. I’ll call you when I know more.”

  “All right, are you sure?” He was falling back asleep, but she was grateful for his willingness to wake, for how he never flinched at Adam’s name, even knowing, as he did, that she carried a torch of sorts, as he termed it, for him. She’d been so stunned when he asked her if she’d ever “had something” with Adam that she’d admitted, yes, she once thought they might end up together. She’d asked Howie how he knew.

  “I’m pretty attuned to desire,” he said. “I think it’s what makes me good at my job.”

  He was a painter, and she loved that he said he was good at it in this easy, unguarded way, the credit he gave his own emotional acuity undermining what might have otherwise felt like a more familiar male arrogance. (Had she ever heard a woman painter say so plainly she was good at her job? Even the dozens who were more attuned to desire than Howie, or any man she knew?) He was good at his job; she thought he was great at it. He painted mostly nudes, but a painting he’d done of Barack and Michelle Obama, based on a photograph of them embracing on a campaign stop in Iowa, gingham and promise and clouds, had gotten him enough acclaim that he’d taken a semester off from teaching. He didn’t get jealous, and though he wasn’t sleeping with anyone else, he’d told Ji Sun he wanted happiness for her, whatever that meant for their monogamy or future. Her friends found this New Agey, a red flag, but she chafed against how quickly they’d all fallen in lockstep toward creating nuclear families, even Lainey, whom she still thought might find some more radical way of living.

  She texted Adam:

  I’m on my way. Should I try to reach A & M?

  Alice already here. Yes, please bring M if poss

  Alice was already there? Ji Sun looked at the time stamp on the group text; it had arrived only ten minutes earlier. Alice couldn’t have made it to their place from hers in that time if she flew. Adam must have texted her first?

  How, after all these years, bonds assured, could she still feel a pang of jealousy at this jostling? Why would Adam think Lainey wanted Alice first? Would she? Would he?

  It wasn’t until she pulled up outside their building, and an ambulance roared past, that she thought, of course, Alice is a doctor. Alice is a doctor! At that, she flew up the stairs to their lobby. What had happened, why hadn’t Adam said? What state was Lainey in? If she needed a doctor, why were they meeting here, at their apartment, rather than at the ER? She nodded at the doorman, who knew her well, and looked at her phone as it pinged another text alert from Margaret.

  Elizabeth okay, right? Lainey wld have called if Elizabeth . . . ???

  Ji Sun had had the same thought, but now she wasn’t sure. If anything happened to Elizabeth, Lainey would be so destroyed that Ji Sun couldn’t imagine her texting, couldn’t imagine her at all. But Adam wouldn’t have said Lainey was okay if Elizabeth wasn’t.

  I’ll be there ASAP Margaret texted But pls text me to say they are okay, when you see

  Please a second, separate text.

  Ji Sun understood her desperation, and in the long pause before the elevator opened, she imagined wrenching the doors apart with her hands.

  Alice answered the door, looking both haunted and like the ghost that did the haunting. Ji Sun was struck by how drained of color her friend was, but more, to see that she had aged. When she looked at Alice, she still perceived the face she’d seen that first day in their dorm room: strong jaw, perfect teeth, long scar, and cheeks flushed with pink from her latest athletic exertion. Now, she saw a sliver of silver hair mixed in with the blonde, and crinkles in the corners of her friend’s eyes. Had all this aging occurred tonight?

  Alice pulled her in, hugged her. Ji Sun looked over her friend’s shoulder for signs and sounds of Lainey, Adam, Elizabeth. But her impatience lulled for a moment as her friend’s body shook against her. She pulled Alice closer, let her shudder.

  When she couldn’t wait any longer, she pulled away.

  “What happened? What is going on?”

  Alice shook her head.

  “Alice, Jesus. Are you okay? What is going on!”

  “Come in, come in. Everyone is okay.” She said this very carefully, like she had just learned the words. “Come in and sit down.” She took a deep draw of breath. “It’s . . . a lot.”

  “Alice, I am going to lose my mind.” Alice’s tremors had transferred to Ji Sun’s body now, and she shook her arms and shoulders, felt blood pump in her neck in the spot that it
always did when she was afraid. She put her fingers in the place, large as an eyeball to her touch, feared it would burst. “Tell me what is going on.”

  There was a knock at the door: Margaret.

  Alice looked at Ji Sun.

  “Better not to have to say it twice.”

  She opened the door and Margaret swept in, enveloped them both in frantic hugs, asked, “What’s going on? What’s happening? Where is Lainey?”

  She hadn’t tried to speak quietly, as Ji Sun only noticed now that she herself had done, from habit, thinking everyone might be asleep.

  Alice led them to the living room, where Adam sat, clutching a baby monitor in one hand and his phone in the other.

  When he looked up from the monitor, Ji Sun gasped again. She went to him. She didn’t run, but she took three steps to cover what usually took twelve.

  There was the feeling that she shouldn’t get too close, that he was fragile and could break. But she ignored it and took him in her arms, pulled him close. He shook on her shoulder and she stared at Alice and Margaret, waiting for them to say what to do, to say what happened.

  “Lainey bit the baby,” he said, and let his phone clatter to the table, put his hand over his own mouth.

  No one said anything. Alice put her hand over her eyebrows like a visor, index finger and thumb rubbing at her temples as though she might be able to reset her brain.

  “She what?” Margaret’s voice was so shrill that Ji Sun felt it coat her tongue, scratch her teeth. “Say again?” Margaret held her hands out like she was waiting to catch a baby that had been tossed down from a high tower. She still stood in the middle of the room like a sentinel.