slowly counted to five, scrubbing so hard I splashed water onto the countertop. “I can’t talk about this tonight. I can’t, okay?” Reluctantly I drew my eyes to his face, willing him to see this wasn’t the time.
“Okay.” Ben nodded, but I saw the shift in his face. The way his jaw tightened as he took a deep breath in through his nose. “So when?”
“When what?” I knew I was being unfairly evasive. After all, this wasn’t only my disappointment. Ben wanted to be a father more than anything.
“When will you be able to talk about it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hannah, I—”
“I don’t know!” I shouted, my rubber-glove-covered hands flying out of the sudsy sink, dripping soapy water all over the mat under my feet. “I have no fucking idea, actually. But if you don’t mind, I’d rather just do these dishes in peace and not think about babies or getting pregnant or IVF or any of it, okay?” My voice rose, unsteady and breathless. “Or at the very least, I’d like twenty-four hours to be pissed off about my still-shitty uterus before I even consider taking someone else’s castoff.” As soon as I said it I wanted to take it back. Stuff the words back into my mouth and swish them around until I could change their meaning. Because it had nothing to do with adopting anyone’s “castoff”—a truly horrible way to phrase it, and I had no idea where those words came from—and everything to do with me being terrified of adoption.
I had this sick fear we’d adopt a baby, I’d fall deeply in love with it and then the birth mother would change her mind in the eleventh hour and I’d be left with empty arms and a broken heart. All I needed to do was tell Ben that, to explain myself so he could at least understand my hesitation. But instead I said those ugly words, which pulled us further away from each other.
Ben started pacing, his bare feet leaving damp footprints on our kitchen floor thanks to the spilled dishwater. Back and forth, back and forth he walked in front of me, his hands pressed deep into his hips. “This is not just about you, Hannah. I know you have to deal with all these injections and hormones, and poking and prodding, but you are not alone in this. I’m right here, going through it, too, feeling shitty and angry about all the same things you are.”
I blinked away tears and tried to focus on his footprints so I didn’t have to look at his face.
“At some point we, you and me, have to decide when it’s enough. It’s been six years, Hannah, and I...” He paused, head bent to the ground, voice dropping. “I don’t know how much longer I can do this.”
“Tomorrow,” I whispered. “We can talk about it tomorrow night, okay?”
“Okay,” he said. “Tomorrow.” Then he turned and walked upstairs, and a moment later I heard our bedroom door click shut. I tried not to think about what might be happening behind that closed door. So I stayed where I was, my gloved hands hanging by my sides, only small droplets of water dripping from them now. My abdomen cramped, and I knew that by morning the pain, and my defeat, would be worse. Then I’d sit on the toilet behind a locked bathroom door and cry so hard I’d get the hiccups.
Ben was wrong—in some ways, I really was alone with this.
KATE
September
I heard the door creak open and then Hannah’s voice. “Kate?”
“Up here,” I shouted back, leaning against the window frame, my body tucked up so my toes just touched the other side of the sill. My pedicure was nearly grown out, the half-moon of each toenail peeking out from under the chipping polish. “It’s called Chinchilla,” the manicurist had announced—almost proudly, as if the name had been her idea—rolling the bottle of boring beige polish between her hands to warm it. “Our most popular neutral for fall.” I didn’t care about how trendy my toes were, only that they complemented the black skirt and jacket I wore to the funeral and didn’t shout wedding or date night, like my go-to coral color would have done.
It had been a month since my mom died, and I still felt strangely abandoned. My father had left when I was a baby, and despite the monthly letters he sent that I rarely opened—typed on impersonal white paper yet awkwardly personal in detail—my relationship with him was similar to my relationship with my dentist. A once-a-year visit for an hour that was about as unpleasant as a root canal. I only did it because my mom asked every year on her birthday for my father to join us for lunch. I think she hoped one day I’d let him off the hook for leaving us, somehow see in him what she still seemed to despite the disintegration of their marriage and his subsequent escape.
Mom had been alone in her beloved garden when she died—because while her cooking was atrocious, her green thumb was remarkable—one Sunday late afternoon while David, the kids and I made pizza and played Trouble. Now that she was gone I had lost my bearings, and though I could get the girls out the door to school dressed and with lunches packed, the rest of my day was typically spent puttering around the house, making lists of things I had no intention of doing and feeling sorry for myself. My mom drove me crazy at times, like all mothers do, but it had been just the two of us for so long and I loved her fiercely. Sometimes, especially at night, the pain got so bad I was sure I was having a heart attack just like she’d had, certain I’d inherited her silent heart problem and would face a similar fate.
David continually assured me I was not having a heart attack when the pain was at its worst, placing his stethoscope against my heaving chest in the middle of the night and taking my symptoms—racing heart, sweating, nausea—seriously, because he was my husband and loved me. He was more patient with me these days, not like when I stressed about Josie’s stuffy nose turning to pneumonia or the sliver in my foot from the deck going gangrenous. He was generally unflappable—he said he couldn’t get worked up about a sliver when he spent his days and nights trying to keep very sick or injured people alive—but I knew it was just who he was. And it was one of the things I envied most about him.
Hannah appeared in the doorway of our home office, a room I intended to use one day when I figured out what job title came after “stay at home mom,” with a look on her face that told me my days of holing up in my house were almost over.
“What are you doing?” she asked, stepping into the room and putting a plate filled with chocolate chunk cookies on the desk.
I pointed to her bare feet. “Why do you always take your shoes off? You know this is a shoe-on house.”
“Well, you don’t have shoes on. And why are you answering a question with a question?”
I gestured to the plate of cookies. “Stress baking again?”
“Work baking. Don’t get too excited, though. They’re gluten-free. Not bad, but gluten really does make everything more delicious.” She padded over to where I sat and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Are you okay, Katie?”
I pushed her away gently. “Go back to the door. I don’t want you breathing this in. You have your transfer in a few days.”
Hannah pointed at the cigarette in my hand. “That’s what I meant about what are you doing. I know the eighties are back in fashion, but think this might be a tad retro?”
I smiled and took a long drag, then turned my head and exhaled out the open window. “Yeah,
