The Choices We Make

Three pitchers of margaritas, a bottle of red wine, a mess of tacos and two rounds of Cards Against Humanity later, Hannah was drunk and snoring beside me on the couch. Watching her sleep, I brushed strands of hair out of her face and lay my hand against her cheek. “I’m going to help you, Hannah. I don’t know how yet, but I’m going to fix this.”

5

HANNAH

Though my hangover was mostly gone by Monday morning, I still felt like crap. My period was coming and, though I was ready for it, the thought of it still gutted me. One more month and a thousand dollars down the drain—quite literally. I sighed as I pulled out the box of tampons I’d hoped to tuck away with the pregnancy tests.

After throwing my hair into a ponytail—being a recipe developer meant I never wore my hair down at work—I quickly brushed my teeth, already feeling dull cramps in my abdomen. Ben was in the kitchen, downing a quick cup of coffee before he had to leave for the office.

“You all right?” he asked, swirling the mug in his hand, then drinking the last mouthful, his eyes still on me.

“All good.”

He watched me for a few seconds more, then put his mug into the sink. “I’m going to be late tonight,” he said. “Dad and I have to work on the proposal.” As a junior partner at his dad’s firm, he was currently involved in trying to secure a major project—the redesign of a chain of boutique hotels that stretched along Southern California’s coastline—and they were only two weeks away from presenting to the client.

“Dishwasher’s clean,” he added, seeing me eye his mug—which he had placed unrinsed in the sink—with irritation. “I’ll unload it when I get home, okay?” He was using his cautious, soothing tone; the one reserved for days like this. I think he figured if he stayed calm, I would, as well.

I longed to explode with anger, with sorrow, to yell at Ben if for no other reason than to expunge the sadness out of me. But Ben’s tone said, let’s be gentle and quiet and polite with each other. Like not looking an angry, aggressive dog directly in the eye—if we averted our gazes from our failure to become parents, we might be able to walk away unscathed. I wondered sometimes if Ben believed that being nice enough would smooth the disappointment out, like a hot iron over wrinkled cotton.

So, as always, I took the same tone with him, because this was the dance we danced—the steps well rehearsed, the cadence predictable. “Sure, sounds good.” I opened the fridge and grabbed a yogurt, then scowled and put it back. The thought of eating something creamy and cold made my stomach turn. Pouring a large mug of coffee, I popped the lid on the acetaminophen bottle and shook out two—three—pills.

Ben raised his eyebrow, leaning back against the counter. “Headache? Or gearing up for your meeting today?”

“Something like that,” I said. There was no point in telling him about the cramps. He’d run out of ways to say, “Sorry about your period” ages ago. I envied his ability to drink his coffee and go to work and to not analyze and obsess over every twinge in his abdomen.

He pushed off the counter’s edge and kissed me, tasting like coffee with a hint of mint toothpaste, and was gone a moment later. Sipping my coffee, I replied to my sister Claire’s text about Mom’s birthday party, then saw the voice-mail icon flash on the screen. With a deep breath I put the phone on speaker and listened to the message from West Coast Fertility I’d been avoiding.

“Hi, Hannah, it’s Rosey from Dr. Horwarth’s office. We got your blood test results back and I’m sorry I don’t have better news for you but—”

I hit the end call button, then placed the three acetaminophen tablets on my tongue and chased them down with coffee.

6

HANNAH

July

Once we got home from the clinic I read through the IVF information sheets while Ben made dinner, writing down the injection schedule on our fertility calendar in the kitchen drawer. Then we ate in silence—Ben had made me his mom’s jerk chicken, but even the spicy dish, my favorite, couldn’t lift my spirits.

“Hannah,” he began, his voice unsure. I was in the middle of scrubbing the marinade dish and stopped briefly when he said my name, clenching my teeth. He had to know I didn’t want to talk about it. The dance, Ben, I wanted to say. Stick to the steps we know.

“What’s up?” I asked, keeping my tone light, back to scrubbing. As though I was only thinking about the dish in my hands.

“I know we’re going to try IVF, but there are...other options, too. What about adoption? We haven’t talked about it in a while.”

I 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.

7

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, but I don’t care. Tell me, why did I ever stop smoking? I forgot how good it feels.” Hannah’s grandfather had been an occasional smoker, and until the unfortunate day when her grandmother caught us red-handed, we used to steal cigarettes out of his silver monogrammed cigarette case after school and run down the street to the park, where we’d hide behind the climber and giggle and cough while we smoked, feeling grown-up and wild and a little woozy from the nicotine.

“Feels good for now, until the lung cancer settles in,” Hannah said, dragging a chair up to the window. “Give me one.”

I pulled the pack out of her hand and tucked it under my arm. “No fucking way,” I said. “You’re about to make a baby. I’m not letting you put anything in that body of yours except kale and red meat. Speaking of which, the steaks are in the fridge marinating and the kale salad is in the crisper.” Back in the early days of trying to conceive, before the fertility medications and doctors, Hannah had scoured every website and piece of advice she could about baby making and had gone on a strict high-iron diet. It only lasted for a month, but it was also the only other time she got pregnant naturally. Unfortunately she miscarried almost immediately, but I still bought her organic red meat before every procedure, feeling superstitious about it all.

“Technically the baby was already made when my sad little eggs joined Ben’s very enthusiastic sperm in a plastic dish a few days ago—did I tell you that’s actually what they called his sperm? Enthusiastic.” Hannah sighed, tugging the pack from my hand and pulling a cigarette out. “Are these menthol?”

“Yup. I went old-school.” I lit the cigarette she held between her lips. She took a deep drag and coughed a little. “So you need to eat an extra helping of the kale to make up for this, okay? Promise me.”

“No need.” Hannah took another drag, not coughing this time. “This really is like riding a bike, isn’t it?”

I nodded and lit another cigarette right from the one between my lips, which had burned down to the filter. “Why no need?” I asked.

“It isn’t going to happen,” Hannah said, pushing my feet off the sill and coming to sit beside me. I didn’t comment right away. By now I was well used to her negativity when it came to all things infertility, and had learned jumping too quickly to the positive only pissed her off and shut her down. We rested our feet side by side on the chair she’d just vacated, and I commented on how nice her toenails looked, each covered with a fresh and glossy shade of lilac polish.

“Grape Frost,” she said, wriggling her toes a little. We smoked in silence for a moment longer.

“Look, I know it’s got to be hard to stay positive after everything, but—” I started.

“The embryos arrested.”

I swiveled to look at her. “What does that mean? Arrested?”

“It means they didn’t grow. Which means we won’t be doing a transfer,” Hannah said, looking down at her feet again.

“Okay, so next month, then.” I nudged her shoulder, hoping she’d look at me. She didn’t. “You’ve waited this long, you can do one more month.”

Hannah shook her head and pulled on her cigarette. The office was filling with smoke, but it was still early in the day. I had time to air it out before the girls came home, and David was on a long shift. Though I had only ever been a fair-weather smoker—picking up the habit during particularly stressful times and dropping it when life felt smooth and easy—technically I had quit twelve years ago, when I found out we were pregnant with Ava. But I kept a pack hidden at the back of my underwear drawer, just in case.

“We’re done, Katie.”

“What? No,” I said, placing my hand on her leg. “No, you are not done. Sure, take this month, take two months if you need to, but you can’t give up.”

She jumped off the windowsill so fast I lost my balance, dropping her cigarette into my glass of water before I could stop her. Then she peeled back the plastic cellophane on the plate, grabbing a cookie and pacing while she ate it, frowning as she chewed. Someone who didn’t know her as well might think the frown was about the arrested embryos, but I knew she was contemplating the cookies’ texture and flavor, and how to make them better.

“We’re not giving up—we’re giving in,” she said, her mouth half-full of cookie. “There’s a difference. Ben said he couldn’t do it anymore. And I sort of agree.” She stopped pacing, swallowing the mouthful and staring at the half-eaten cookie left in her hand. “More salt, more butter, less vanilla.”

I took the cookie out of her hand and had a big bite. “I say just add another cup of chocolate chips and you’re good to go.”

Hannah started crying.

“Or not. Maybe pecans?” I said.

“I’m a mess. I look terrible. I’m exhausted. I feel like shit. I’m crying all the time. Like, all the time, Katie,” Hannah said. “And you know how I hate to cry. Plus, none of my clothes fit. I’m fat.”

I shook my head. “You are not fat. You’re beautiful.”

“Tell that to my jeans and these zits,” she said, pacing again, still crying but less so. “All I do is think about babies. And hate everyone who has one. I can’t even stand going to Starbucks in the middle of the day anymore, because inevitably there’s some new mom sipping a latte and breast-feeding. Glowing in all her fucking new-motherness.” She looked at me pointedly. “And you know how much I love my London Fogs.”

I nodded, watching her carefully. “I know your love runs deep.”

“It really does,” Hannah said, sniffing and licking her fingers free of melted chocolate. “And in the few moments I have when I’m not thinking about babies or missing London Fogs, I’m injecting myself with needles. I’m a fucking human pincushion. Seriously. Have you seen my stomach lately?” Without waiting for me to answer she lifted her tank top and uncovered dozens of bruises and angry red dots, all blending together in a mesmerizing pattern better suited to an artist’s canvas than my best friend’s torso. I forced my eyes back to her face, which was blotchy from the strength of her tears.

I put my cigarette out in the glass where Hannah’s half-smoked one still floated and walked over to her. Taking the cookie out of her hands, I grabbed a tissue from the holder on the desk and gently wiped the remaining chocolate off her fingers.

“Thanks,” she said when I took another tissue and wiped her eyes with it. “I love you, Katie.”

“I love you, too, Hannah. We’re both sort of a mess, aren’t we?”

Hannah nodded, and a laugh bubbled out of her. “You stink, and so does this office,” she said. “David is going to lose it.”

“He won’t be home for hours,” I said, handing her another cigarette and taking one for myself. We lit them off the same flame from the lighter that came free with the pack of cigarettes. I inhaled deeply, feeling the cool burn of the menthol-flavored tobacco hitting my airway.

“Cheers to us,” Hannah said, tapping her cigarette to mine. “And for what it’s worth, there’s no one I’d rather be a mess with.”

“Me neither.”

We smoked that cigarette, and then Hannah went back to work, leaving me to get the smoke out the office with air fresheners and the big fan we kept in the basement. With the fan blowing full blast and a freesia-scented candle burning, I put the cigarette package back in my underwear drawer, headed to our bathroom with the plate of cookies and took the rest of the boring beige polish off my toenails.

8

HANNAH

October

“Are you seriously making popcorn?” Ben opened the fridge, pulling out a beer and an apple. He rubbed the apple on his jeans—his version of giving it a good wash—and, holding the glossy red fruit between his teeth, opened the beer with a quick twist. He held up the beer bottle with a questioning look, and I shook my head.

“No, thanks. I’m in the mood for something stronger tonight. And you love popcorn.” I turned the handle on the Whirley Pop popcorn maker, which was heating up on the stove. It had been a gift from my mom two Christmases ago, a “healthy snack” alternative to help me lose some weight. I had been a rower all through college and still wasn’t used to my softer body, though I didn’t like to admit that. Apparently one of Mom’s bridge friends had a daughter who had a terrible time getting pregnant, until she took up running and lost twenty pounds, then poof, twins. My mom was quite certain if I got thin—like my sister Claire was, like Mom had been her whole life—I’d finally get pregnant. While I had wanted to tell her to take the Whirley Pop and shove it, I thanked her for the gift and then promptly hid it at the back of a kitchen cabinet behind a stack of old bakeware.

Tonight was the first time I’d used the Whirley Pop, and only because we had run out of microwave popcorn.

“Wrong. I love melted butter,” Ben said. “Popcorn is just a vehicle for the butter.”

I rolled my eyes and continued turning the handle, hearing the first kernel pop. “I want to make tonight fun, or at least tolerable, and popcorn is fun. We can pretend it’s movie night...just without the movie.”

“Hannah, I love you. But popcorn isn’t exactly ‘fun,’ and looking through classifieds is nothing like movie night.” Ben took another bite of his apple, swishing it down with a sip of beer. I scowled, both at his attitude about what I had planned for our night and the whole beer and apple thing. While most people enjoyed salted peanuts or chips with a beer, Ben preferred fruit. He could eat whatever he wanted, blessed with his mom’s height and his dad’s metabolism, and that he chose an apple over nachos felt a little as if he was rubbing it in.

“I didn’t say it was like movie night. I said I wanted to make it fun...like movie night.” Ben just shrugged, and with a sigh I dumped the hot popcorn in a large bowl. “Can you hit Start on the microwave? Butter’s ready to go.”

“So how does this work?” Ben asked, taking a handful of popcorn and looking at the screen. I had already opened the site, having found it during my research mission earlier in the day.

“I think it’s like any ad site, you search and see what pops up.” I typed a couple of words in the search box and hit Enter. I was playing naive, because I didn’t want Ben to know I’d already done a pretty thorough search. I needed to know what to expect ahead of time, because Ben wasn’t exactly on board with the idea of surrogacy.

Two pages of hits came up, and, taking my own handful of popcorn, I scanned the first page.

“Okay, this one looks good. ‘In search of a loving couple to take this incredible journey with,’” I read out loud.

Ben snorted. “Nope. That one sounds too high maintenance.”

“Stop it. Just humor me, okay?”

He took another handful of popcorn and leaned over to kiss me on the cheek. “Fine,” he said, munching on the kernels. “Tell me more about this incredible-journey woman.”

“Thank you.” I shifted the laptop so Ben could see the screen better. “Thirty years old, mom of three. Good. We know her equipment works. Married—to the same man—for the past eight years, and she’s asking...whoa. Holy shit.” I pointed to the dollar amount in the ad, leaving a buttery fingerprint on the screen.

Ben leaned in and squinted. He was supposed to be wearing his reading glasses, which he’d finally had to admit he needed, but he was having a hard time accepting that at thirty-five he was aging...or at least his eyes were. “Forty thousand dollars?”

“That seems a bit high. Thought it was around thirty thousand? Maybe because she’s already had a successful surrogate pregnancy?”

“Go to the next one,” Ben said, taking a swill of his beer.

I sipped my gin and tonic and clicked on the next ad.

“So this one was a gestational surrogate before—that’s when she carries the couple’s embryo,” I explained.

“I know what a gestational surrogate is,” Ben said, getting up to grab another beer and a handful of grapes. “Need anything?”

I shook my head, reading on. “She didn’t like the medications when she did the gestational gig—can’t say I blame her,” I said, looking over at Ben. He nodded, settling back on the couch. We had briefly discussed trying to find an egg donor and maybe giving that a try using my own uterus. But the thought of paying for someone else’s eggs, then turning them into embryos, then trusting my uterus to let them grow... It left me weak with anxiety and despair.