Not everyone likes pizza.
97 percent of the world population likes pizza.
Are you just making up facts now?
How dare you! I’m a journalist. And then: Only 5 percent of the facts I state are made up.
And that’s how our texts devolved into something other than talking about dreams.
* * *
I blink at the screen now, and then scroll through my library of pictures and find the one I’m looking for. I hold my breath, hit send and wait.
The ellipses pop up and disappear at least four times.
And then: Is that Keanu Reeves?
I grin. Three days ago, out of curiosity, I downloaded the book Oliver ghostwrote for the celebrity chef Carson Flanagan and started reading it. When I told Oliver last night, he said it was only fair that I show him my work, too.
Yep.
I explain briefly about the mediocre theme and wait for the requisite male response—how Point Break or The Matrix is the Greatest Movie of All Time. It takes him three long minutes to type his reply and then:
I don’t know—he was pretty amazing in The Lake House.
I bark with laughter and it echoes off the steel garage doors. My phone buzzes in my hand.
Send me another.
My eyes light on the carnival painting dwarfing the easel it sits on. I snap a picture of it, but then hesitate. It feels personal, somehow. Too intimate to share, even though it originated in a dream about him. Or maybe because it was a dream about him. Or maybe it has nothing to do with the picture and everything to do with the way I feel when we’re texting: light, buzzy, eager. Eager to come up with the cleverest response. Eager for his reply. Slightly guilty for all the eagerness. It’s not like I’ve been hiding it from Harrison. He knows we’re still in touch. I even told him some of the bizarre dreams we’d uncovered in our online explorations.
Still, I stare at the picture, and instead of hitting send, I pull up the IVF message board up. MissyK874 still hasn’t posted, so I start browsing the other threads, and get lost in the world of other women with empty bellies that long for them to be full.
* * *
“Wow,” Harrison says, when he’s leaning against the frame of the open studio door that night. “You’ve been busy.”
After a few hours of sitting on the cement floor, I took note of my sore tailbone and it occurred to me that if the air wasn’t going to be fixed for five days, I needed to make it a little more comfortable in here.
Now, I’m lying propped on my elbow on an inflated air mattress, surrounded by blankets and pillows, eyes glued to Vanna White turning letters on the flat-screen I lugged in from the den. The television casts its blue glow on everything in the dark room, including Harrison, and I study the shadows and highlights contouring his face, his square glasses, the black of his wiry beard. I teased him relentlessly when he started growing it out, so I can never admit that I like it. But I do—and not just because it evokes a certain manly ruggedness, but because it’s novel, something unexpected on a face I’ve memorized after six years. It’s not just the beard that’s different, though. He’s been running more—at least five days a week instead of three; working later. I think about our dinner at Sorelli’s—how tired he looked. No, not tired. I was with him throughout his residency—I’ve seen Harrison look tired. It’s like he has the weight of the world on his shoulders. And I get a flash of guilt in my belly. Have I become so absorbed in my own grief, my own needs—the dreams, even—that I haven’t noticed what’s going on with my own husband?
“Come here.” I extend my hand to him.
He slips off his shoes and lies down beside me, fully clothed. He drapes an arm over my waist, pulling me closer to him. We watch as a contestant buys a vowel. An e.
“A watched pot never boils,” Harrison says, his breath hot on my neck.
“Dang it—it was on the tip of my tongue.”
“Sure it was.” I can hear the grin in his voice. I roll toward it and press my lips on his, as if I’m trying to trap the happiness. When I pull back, I look into his eyes, unsure how to phrase the question I want to ask.
“Is everything OK with you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know—you just seem different, lately.”
I feel his body bristle. “How so?”
“Well, the beard, I guess, for starters. You’re running more—”
“I like running.”
“I know, but it’s just, I don’t know—it seems like . . . I mean, I know things have been tough lately, with the baby.” My voice cracks.
“Oh, Mia,” Harrison says, rolling onto his back, forcing the air in the mattress to shift and wobble beneath us, and pulling me with him, so that I’m splayed across his chest, making me think that it is the baby he’s sad about. I wish he would just talk to me about it. That we could share in our grief together. And then come up with a plan. A way forward. His fingers gently and methodically smooth my hair. One of my ears listens to his heartbeat. The other to Pat Sajak as he moves on to the next puzzle: A Thing.
“I started today,” I whisper. “My period.”
He doesn’t respond, just keeps running the pads of his fingers over my scalp.
“Harrison,” I say, after a stretch of silence.
His hand stills.
“I’ve been looking into IVF.” His chest rises beneath my cheek and then falls as he exhales. “I know. I know you’re not ready yet. But I just wanted more information. It’s a pretty intense process.”
“I’ve heard that.”
“And it can take a couple of rounds—sometimes more. Only, like, twenty-nine percent are successful on the first try.”
“Mia,” he says. A warning.
I ignore it. “By the sixth attempt it increases to sixty-five percent. Of course the odds are a little better for us, because I’m under thirty-five and we’d be using my own eggs, but still it’s lengthy, an involved process. And I thought that if we at least get started, make an appointment for more information or an evaluation so that—”
“Mia,” he repeats. Sharper this time.
The ding of letters lighting up on the Wheel of Fortune board fills the room. “Three l’s,” says Pat.
And then Harrison: “I just . . .” He lifts his hand to his face, and I know he’s rubbing his eyes beneath his glasses. Something he does when he’s tired or thinking or both. “I need—”