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Andrew spoke with his mouth full. “If you had come to me when Leo left.” He reached for a glass on his desk and gulped down the dark liquid. “There are a handful of strong candidates who are interested now.” He wiped his hands on a napkin. “I’m going to have to think about it.” He stood and looked toward the door. “I’ll let you know.”
Chapter 6
Before she said a word, Dr.Evans pushed her glasses into her hair and rolled her chair backward. My hand fell toward my stomach, a protective barrier between the baby I knew I was carrying and the words she was about to hurl.
She cleared her throat. “The test was negative.”
Next to me, a strange garbled sound came from Kyle. I couldn’t tell if he was laughing, coughing, or crying. I tried to turn toward him, but my head felt too heavy to move. Dr.Evans said something else, but I couldn’t make it out. Her voice sounded far away and muffled. Her blurry image moved in slow motion, leaning across the desk toward me.
Kyle’s hand was on my shoulder, shaking me. “Are you okay?”
I took a deep breath and squeezed my eyes closed. When I opened them again, the room came back into focus. “There has to be a mistake.” Will was growing inside of me. I could feel him, had even had morning sickness today and had to bolt from the kitchen table after a few swallows of my breakfast. Kyle said it was because I’d made it with old eggs. As soon as the words left his mouth, his ears turned bright red. I knew with certainty then that he blamed me for our undiagnosed fertility problems.
“I’m sorry,” Dr.Evans said. The way her eyes leaked with sympathy reminded me of why I liked her so much and how I was sure we would have been the best of friends if we had met under different circumstances.
I reached for Kyle’s hand. He wiped it on his pants before giving it to me, but it still felt clammy.
“It’s not unheard of to need more than three rounds, but it is unusual.” Dr.Evans slid her glasses off again. “I think it’s time to start considering other options. An egg donor, a surrogate, adop—”
I shook my head. “We want to do another cycle.”
Kyle’s hand slipped out of mine. “No, we’re done. I’m done.”
I twisted in my chair so I faced him. “One more time.”
He flexed his fingers but said nothing.
Dr.Evans fidgeted with a candy dispenser on her desk, a peanut M&M with a surgical mask covering its mouth. “You don’t need to decide anything today. Nikki, I want you to go through a natural menstrual cycle before we start over.”
“I want another blood test.”
“I think it might be a good time for you both to talk to Dr.Keezer again.” Dr.Evans rummaged through her top desk drawer and pulled out a card for the therapist who’d evaluated us at the start of this whole process. Kyle reached for it. If it were up to him, he would have had me carried out of there in a straitjacket. I could still see the way he’d bitten down on his lip when he saw me painting Will’s room. It was a miracle he hadn’t bitten right through it.
I tore the therapist’s card from Kyle’s hand, folded it in half, and flung it toward the trash can. It bounced off the side and landed next to the desk. Kyle and Dr.Evans stared at it like it was a grenade about to explode. They were being unreasonable. It wasn’t crazy to think the blood test could be wrong. Doctors made mistakes all the time. A guy at work had gone in for a right-knee replacement, and they’d operated on his left. A friend from high school had been told she was having a girl and instead gave birth to a boy. A neighbor had had a sponge left inside of him after abdominal surgery. “There could have been a mix-up in the lab,” I said.
The noises outside Dr.Evans’s office became louder as I waited for her to respond. Phones rang. Voices murmured. Doors closed.
“Fine,” she finally said. “We’ll do another test.”
The smell of fresh paint mocked me.
The IVF didn’t work,the mocha walls screamed.
I cranked the windows open as wide as they would go, letting in the icy air, trying to get rid of the odor.
On the other side of the room, the empty crib bullied me.You will never be a mother.Standing in front of it, I closed my eyes and saw Will, the baby who never was, his mass of curly dark hair a tangled mess, his thumb stuffed into his mouth, his pudgy legs hanging out of his baggy diaper. I lulled him to sleep by singing a lullaby.Stop, you’ll give him nightmares,Kyle said in that joking tone of his that I hadn’t heard in months.
I didn’t know how long I stood there staring into the empty crib, living my imaginary life. I only knew I was putting Will on the bus for kindergarten. He bent to give his three-year-old sister a kiss before bravely marching up the stairs. Reality came crashing back when a bright light came on in the room and the windows banged shut. Kyle hovered behind me, wrapping me in a blanket and guiding me to the living room, where he built a fire while I shivered on the couch, tears streaking down my already wet cheeks.
The following Tuesday when I arrived home from work, the entire house smelled like paint, the room was green again, the crib had been replaced with the desk, and the medicine, the needles, and all other traces of IVF were gone. Kyle slept soundly in his recliner, paint specks in his hair, an empty bottle of scotch and small glass on the table next to him.
A few days after Kyle had converted the nursery back into an office, I called Dr.Evans to discuss next steps. There was a long pause on theother end of the line before she spoke. “You and Kyle need to get on the same page.”
“Why do you think we’re not?”
She hesitated. “He called me.”
“He called you?” I was the one who made all the appointments. I was the one with the clinic on speed dial. Kyle had never once contacted them. He always left that for me, acting as if the staff spoke a different language than he did. I pictured him in the driveway calling Dr.Evans from his Jeep and stealing glances at the living room window while they talked to make sure I wasn’t watching. “When?”
