Then, everything changed one morning over bacon with Harrison. And suddenly, I didn’t want my period anymore. But it came just the same. Stubbornly. Resolutely. As if my body was saying: You asked for this, remember? It took us seven months to get pregnant with our first baby, and every time my period came it was more than disappointing—it felt punitive.
Even now—six weeks postmiscarriage—when this blood should signify a fresh start, a time to try again, it’s just a stark, ugly reminder of everything I have lost. And may never find.
Continuing my effort to give him time, I haven’t brought up trying again with Harrison, not since our endless back-and-forth conversations the week we got the fertility results back. But it’s there, rooted firmly between us, growing thick and unruly like one of the weeds in the garden. And I fear that one day, it will get so big, we won’t be able to see our way around it.
I slide in a tampon, change my underwear and get dressed. It’s not until I yank on a tank top that I realize I’m sweating from the effort. Why is it so freaking hot? I shuffle to the thermostat in the hallway. It reads eighty-one degrees. I punch the arrows with more force than necessary, wondering if Harrison accidentally bumped the temperature too high or turned it off altogether, and nothing happens.
And I know: The air-conditioning is broken.
As if the day cannot get any worse, I call three repair services and they’re all overbooked; the shortest wait time is five days. I make an appointment, text Harrison the news and slip out of the house, searching for relief. Though it’s not even ten, the air outside is just as stiflingly hot as inside, unmoving, as I make my way to the studio. I shut the door behind me and crank up the window unit as high as it will go. It rattles to life and I stand in front of the air blasting out of it until it turns ice-cold. Then I stand there a bit longer.
When I’m finally more comfortable, I sink to the floor, the cement cool beneath my bare legs. I lean my back against the wall of unfinished Sheetrock and thumb through my phone to the IVF message boards I’ve recently become obsessed with. It started innocently enough—I was just trying to get more information, to know exactly what in vitro entailed, so when Harrison was ready we could dive right in. I took meticulous notes about each step of the procedure, the names of the various drugs used, the days of the cycle that are for follicle stimulation, egg maturation, retrieval, implantation. But when I ran across the statistic that only twenty-nine percent of first IVF rounds are successful, my heart caught in my throat. Twenty-nine percent?
And that was when I found the message boards. Women describing in excruciating detail their latest procedures—the pain and bloating of hormone injections, the cautious excitement of implantation, the agonizing two-week wait, the heartrending disappointment of a negative pregnancy test. I created a profile so I could get into the boards, but I hadn’t posted anything yet. I was a lurker, glued to the daily trials of one woman in particular, as if watching a prime-time soap opera.
Today MissyK874 had her long-awaited doctor appointment for a pregnancy blood test. She had (of course) taken two drugstore tests, which had both been positive, but apparently with IVF, those results were unreliable thanks to the HCG hormone given for implantation. Her appointment had been at 9:15 this morning, and apparently I wasn’t the only one waiting with bated breath for the results.
MissyK874, any news? Sending lots of baby dust!
Fingers crossed it’s a sticky bean! We’re here for you.
Praying for your rainbow baby.
A text message alert pops up on my screen, blocking the message board from view. My heart revs when I see the name: Oliver. I click on it.
Where’s my pic? You promised.
* * *
He texted me first—which feels important to note—two days after New York, when I wasn’t sure how we left it or if I’d talk to him again or if I should talk to him again. Two days after Harrison looked at me when he got home from work and said, “Well?” and then listened patiently as I told him every single thing that had happened in New York—everything except that flicker in Oliver’s eye. I had started to think maybe I’d imagined it. That it was just an awkward situation and I had read too much into it.
And then Oliver texted me. It was a link to a Wikipedia article and one sentence: The Lincoln thing—it’s true. I clicked on it and scanned the page until I got to a section titled “Premonitions.”
About ten days before he was assassinated, President Lincoln claimed to have a vivid dream in which he saw a corpse decked in funeral vestments—its face covered—in the East Room of the White House. People around him were mourning loudly, weeping and sobbing, and when he asked “Who’s dead?” a soldier responded: “The President. He was killed.”
I reread it slowly. Once. Twice. And then texted him back: Is this supposed to make me feel better?
Oh, right. Guess not.
I bit off a smile, gnawing on my lip and trying to decide what to write back, when three dots appeared. And then: What about this?
I clicked the link through to an article about a man in the UK who had a dream that he had read the name of the winner of a big horse race in a newspaper. The next day he bet on the horse—and won. And it happened eight more times in the next year.
Now you think our dreams are somehow predicting horse races? I typed.
Worth a shot? Maybe there’s a horse named Bag of Teeth.
I laughed out loud and then replied: Wet Turkey Sandwich.
Him: Falling Off Cliff
Me: Masked Man
Him: Locomotive
Me: That’s actually a good racehorse name.
Over the next couple of days, we kept texting, sending weird links and tidbits we each discovered about dreams, as if trying to top each other with the strangest one.
Like a three-year-old American girl who would wake up some mornings asking where her lady’s maid was and calling her closet a “wardrobe” and even telling her mother—who was convinced her daughter was remembering a past life as a royal princess—to ring for breakfast.
We swapped stories of murders being solved, a woman saved from drowning, a bank robbery prevented, all thanks to dreams.
We shared facts. Like how dream scientists are called oneirologists. Or how twelve percent of people dream only in black-and-white. Or how dreaming was the genesis for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight. Turns out, not just the plots of famous novels are attributed to dreams: also the sewing machine, the periodic table, DNA’s double-helix spiral—even Google.
Paul McCartney wrote “Yesterday” after hearing it in a dream.
God, I love the Beatles, I replied to that one.
Who doesn’t? That’s like saying you love pizza.