Bringing in Finn (27 page)

Bill grimaced.

“Sorry,” she said, “too much information.”

“Just getting used to it,” he said. “Just never imagined I'd be privy to the details of my mother-in-law's urinary functioning.”

Rachel arrived to our curtained waiting room and handed Bill a cup.

“What?” Bill said.

“Just kidding,” Rachel said, amused at her joke. “Just didn't want you to feel left out.”

“Ha, ha,” Bill said. But when Rachel left to prepare the procedure room, he whispered, “Really, she loves me.”

Dr. Colaum allowed me in the procedure room for the transfer. I sat in a chair and watched the team position my mother at the edge of the table her feet lifted up in the stirrups. The table was so familiar to me, I wanted to reach over and pat it with my hand.

Tracey rolled gel over her stomach and pressed into my mother's bladder. I tried not to think about the speculum, catheter tube,
and urinary pressure. I wished I could do all the uncomfortable parts for her.

“I'm not getting a clear picture.”

“Have you been drinking water?” Rachel asked.

“I've had half a liter or so,” my mother said.

“It needs to be fuller,” Dr. Colaum said. “Let Sara coach you. She's come in here every time at full capacity.”

Tracey switched on the lights and the transfer team disbanded. My mother sat up on the table and began to chug water.

“I'm so embarrassed,” she said. “I didn't think full meant about to pee on the table.”

“Oh yeah,” I said, “they mean bursting.”

My mother's bladder was full thirty minutes later and the process started again.

Carli had shown us a photo image of the embryos when we arrived. She held the picture out toward us with long pale fingers. Two of the three had survived the thaw and were ready to transfer. I'd given the picture to Bill to hold during the procedure.

“Think good thoughts,” I said as I kissed the image of each tiny life.

Dr. Colaum turned the flat screen toward my mother and I so we could watch the implantation. She'd asked me to describe the process to her in detail the night before. “It is majestic,” my mother said now as we looked at the dark, vast terrain of her womb.

“Preparing two embryos,” Carli called through the window from the lab.

“Ready,” Dr. Colaum answered. “Transferring two embryos. Here we go, Kristine,” she said, her hands guiding the catheter into position.

I watched the embryos shoot into my mother's uterus. They looked as they always did—like comets jettisoning through space.

“Perfect placement!” Dr. Colaum announced. I saw Rachel's shoulders drop. Two embryos had transferred, and landed. I let out an audible sigh.

I asked my mother if she wanted to rest alone in the room, but she invited me to stay. We sat without speaking, listening to the hum of the ultrasound machine, our eyes still fixed on the spot where the embryos had landed. I pressed my hands on her belly and she placed her hands over mine as we waited, our eyes never leaving the screen.

 

Two days later,
my mother flew home to Virginia.

“Are you sure it's safe for her to travel?” I asked Tracey.

“Whatever has happened is done,” she said. Now we just had to wait nine days before my mother could take the pregnancy test.

I tried to go about my regular life. I scheduled days of work downtown, meeting my clients at the Cultural Center near Millennium Park. I found the activity in the loop invigorating and I liked watching the stretches of people trudging along South Michigan Avenue. At two o'clock on the Wednesday of the week before our pregnancy test, I took a break and walked toward Lake Street and Michigan, where there was a breezeway lined with restaurants and cafés.

My mother and I had talked by phone every day, but we'd taken the previous day off, ostensibly because we couldn't schedule it, but really because we both needed a break. We would not know the results of the test for another week, and we found it impossible to talk about anything other than a potential pregnancy.

When I called my parents' number, my father answered on the third ring.

“Let's see if she can peel herself off the couch to come to the phone,” he said.

“Is she okay?” I asked, feeling my heartbeat quicken.

“I'm feeling something!” my mother said, picking up the line.

Once my father hung up, she lowered her voice.

“I think your father is kind of freaked out,” she said. “He came in from tennis and found me still sitting in the chair in the living room where I was when he left two hours earlier.”

The skin on the back of my neck pricked.

“Of course I can't say for sure. It's been thirty years. But I swear I feel just like the other times. I am so tired I can hardly lift my hand off my leg. And my breasts are sore!” she said. Her voice shook slightly as she spoke. I pressed the phone harder into my ear. I heard Bill's voice in my head: “Don't read into anything. Don't assume anything until we take the pregnancy test.”

I attempted a casual tone, as if we were discussing a recipe.

“I haven't wanted coffee either.” My mother did not need to remind me of the meaning of the coffee aversion. I threw Bill's cautions aside. What my mother was describing was beyond what I had imagined. I wanted to hear about every twinge and sensation.

“It's the strangest thing,” she said. “Like finding myself in a country I love but haven't visited in thirty years. It's amazing the way the body or psyche remembers the sounds, the foods, the smells.

Across the street, the time flashed on a digital clock on the side of a bank.

I had agreed to be interviewed at 3:00 PM for a documentary on women's health and nutrition, the project of one of my longtime clients. The film crew was set up at an office building, just up the street. The clock read 2:55, but I didn't want to get off the phone.

“I have to go, Mom,” I said.

“Of course—I'm taking up your whole afternoon,” she said.

“I would stay on the phone with you all day,” I said, meaning it.

“I take the first pregnancy test at my doctor's office here on Friday, the official test Monday,” she said, confirming the schedule we'd
both committed to memory. “Tracey said she'd conference us both in to share the results on Monday afternoon.”

Tracey called, by herself, Monday at 2:30 PM, with the results. I could hear my mother breathing on the other end of the line. Bill stood next to me, leaning into my cell phone.

“The HCG numbers are low,” Tracey said. “I'm so sorry.”

I shook my head, feeling confused. The air around my eyes seemed fuzzy, as if static had interrupted my vision. Just yesterday my father had taken the phone after I'd finished talking to my mother and told me that he thought she was pregnant. I'd taken his observations as truth. He was not prone to premature excitability or exaggeration. I heard the words but could not reconcile what Tracey was saying.

“Are you guys okay?” Tracey asked.

No one spoke.

I eventually said, “Yeah,” and we hung up the phone.

Bill walked to the window. “Shit,” he said. “Shit, shit.” My mother was still on the line.

“Huh,” my mother said, after another minute. “I really thought . . . I physically felt . . . Even now, I feel . . . ”

“I know, Mom.”

“Huh,” my mother said again. Her voice sounded like a deflated balloon. We stayed on the phone, not speaking for another few minutes.

“I'll call you tomorrow,” I said.

“Okay,” she said.

Later that day I received a call from Dr. Kula, who'd heard about the test from Tracey.

“I'm here if you want to talk,” she said, and left her office number. I threw the phone onto the counter without listening further. I'd brought my laptop to the kitchen to see if I could do some work,
but I couldn't concentrate. I pushed the computer back on the counter, scribbled a note on an index card to tell Bill I was leaving, and stomped out of the house.

It was 5:00 PM, mid-February, and bitterly cold. I didn't care. When my friend's father died, she lost twenty-five pounds walking for miles a day, making a pilgrimage of her grief. I hadn't kept count of how many miles I had logged since we'd started trying to become pregnant, how many walks I'd taken when I was unable to bear the stillness of the house, the maddening inability to control our situation.

The sky was already shifting toward dark. I was warm inside the down parka I wore. The year before I'd splurged on a new one from North Face, a brown one with turquoise lining, that came down to the tops of my knees. I turned right on Barry Street and walked toward the lake, taking the same route I'd taken on that warm summer day when my mother had offered to be our surrogate. A harsh wind blew past, numbing my calves and fingers.

For some reason, I was most annoyed about the call from Dr. Kula. In our five years together, Dr. Colaum had never had a psychiatrist call us. My stomach clenched at the thought of being pitied or, worse, having become such a hopeless case that we needed unsolicited psychiatric support.

Before I'd seen Dr. Kula's number, I'd been feeling hopeful. Now I tried, through my heavy trudging, to return to that place. When we'd hung up the phone with my mother and Tracey the day before, Bill had reminded me that the way he looked at it, we had essentially started over with this round of IVF—a 33 percent success rate, a one in three chance. After five years of hating statistics, I now found them comforting. I didn't know for sure if my mother was up for another cycle, but if she was, we could try again.

When we talked the next week, my mother said she was open
to trying again but wanted to spend some time walking in the woods where she meditated.

“I was so sure this was an inspired vision, Sara,” she said.

“It still could be,” I said. My first coaching mentor in England always reminded me that just because something is inspired doesn't mean it comes easily. It was easier to see this for my mother than for myself.

My birthday came at the end of the month, and I asked Bill for an overnight in a small lake town, near the Wisconsin border. I wanted to go by myself and think—or, better yet, not think—and hike in one of the large national parks nearby.

Bill championed my request, sending me off with a Whole Foods bag of snacks and a couple of DVDs to watch on my computer if I felt lonely at night.

I drove to the small cabin I'd rented on a Friday night and woke Saturday to a startling light. Fresh snow had fallen in the early morning, and two feet of white shimmered on the ground. Snowplows had already cleared the major roads, and I found the state park easily, about ten miles west of the cabin. The parking lot was empty. I seemed to be the first and only visitor.

I chose a simple trail about three miles long. The path was feet-deep in snow, and my boots sunk in with each step. I hoped I would be able to see the green stripes that marked my trail. As I walked, the sun rose, and with it came just enough heat that I was sweating inside my coat by the end of the first mile.

I thought of pausing at a particular tree and asking the Divine Mother for guidance and some kind of sign. But as I stood there in the middle of the empty trail in piles of snow, the gesture seemed empty. I began to wonder if being in the park at all was a sane choice. I cleared my mind, the way I'd learned to do in meditation classes, and walked up a hill, following what I hoped was the trail.

“Please show me if we are on the right track,” I said to the trees and the snow, unable to help myself from asking something of the vast nature around me. I asked, and then again tried to quiet my mind.

When I'd attended retreats in England, the facilitators had taught a technique for looking for signs: “Pay attention to the shape of a particular tree, an animal on the trail, a specific visual image, and interpret the message at the end of the hike. Notice anything that stands out, then allow the meaning to reveal itself through your mind,” they'd instructed.

I heard and felt nothing of note, until I rounded the three-quarter-way point on the trail and caught sight of a dark green marker that affirmed I was on the way back to my car. I was cold again. The sun had dropped behind some clouds, and the sweat from the effort of climbing the hills was now chill and damp on my skin.

“Please show me if we are going in the right direction,” I said. At the mouth of the trail, I saw a single branch sticking up out of the snow. I pulled off the large ski gloves I'd borrowed from Bill and reached for the stick, pulling it out from the top. It was thin and long, made of strong, youthful bark. The branch was a single stalk that opened into two smaller branches; it was the shape of a Y.

 

My mother and
Bill also felt we should try again. RMI scheduled us for a spring cycle in May. My mother was happy that the May start would allow us to attend my cousin's (her nephew's) wedding in San Francisco. In early March, May seemed far off. This time, I was the one who wanted to start again immediately. Bill talked me around to seeing the extra time as a gift. We'd used up our insurance coverage three cycles ago and would again need to pay for this cycle, as we had for the last one, with our own means.

Bill took on a new client and sold another series of documentary vignettes. I increased my private-practice sessions and sold a
few magazine articles. Thus far, we'd kept current with every IVF treatment, paying cash as we went. For the last cycle, though, we'd dipped into our savings. We hadn't contributed to retirement in five years. My parents said they would offer us an interest-free loan for whatever we didn't have by May 1, but I didn't like the idea of borrowing money.