Now, postimplantation, I was back to being sure that the only option I had was to walk away. It was too complicated otherwise. After a soft knock at the door, Trina, who had been waiting on the front porch of the octagon house to help me when we got home, walked in carrying a tray of steaming soup, while Parker fluffed my pillow for the tenth time. Everyone was treating me like I was sick, not potentially pregnant.
The doctor had advised twenty-four hours of bed rest, and then I was supposed to somehow figure out how to wait two entire weeks to figure out whether I was pregnant. It would be the longest two weeks of my life, even longer than the two weeks that my parents had shipped me off to a camp where you actually camped. Like outside. In tents. With no bathrooms. It was full-on atrocious.
“Your shoulders feel tense,” Parker said, sitting down beside me on the bed, rubbing them, his strong, callused hands feeling manly and good through my thin cotton dress. I closed my eyes as his fingers ran up the back of my neck.
“This is my special, super-duper pregnancy soup,” Trina said, making me open my eyes again. She had had three boys in three years, so I meant it when I said, “Seems like it works!”
She laughed.
Anything that might help me not let Parker down was fine by me. So, the memory of his touch on my skin lingering, I sipped the fertility soup. I think it was just chicken noodle, but whatever.
“I hope this works out,” Trina said. “You would be such a good mom.”
Maybe I hadn’t been clear enough with Trina. “No, no,” I said uneasily. “Parker is their dad. I’m just the surrogate. Nine months and my job here is done.” I looked at Parker to make sure Trina’s comment hadn’t rattled him and saw a cloud pass over his face.
I gestured to the stack of books on the table. “Well, friends, I need to do my implantation meditation.” (Yes. I was visualizing the embryos implanting. What could it hurt?) “And then I think I might dive into one of these amazing books and take a little nap.”
Parker jumped up. “Can I get you anything? Are you hungry? Thirsty? Do you need the TV remote or anything?”
“Honey,” Trina said, raising her eyebrow, “you’d better take him up on this while it lasts.” She paused. “And trust me. It doesn’t last long.” I shooed them both out of my room. I closed my eyes, visualizing the babies implanting, the way my stomach would grow over the next nine months or so, how I would give birth to these two big, happy, healthy babies. As my visualization continued, though, Parker wasn’t taking them home from the hospital alone. I was there, too.
I was feeding them and bathing them and putting them in their cribs. When Parker came up behind me, put his arms around me and kissed me as we watched them sleep, I sat straight up in bed. This wasn’t a part of the plan. Not at all.
And I realized that, while my mind was visualizing what Parker and I had agreed on, my subconscious might be thinking of something else entirely.
Parker
ONE MINUTE
I HADN’T STEPPED FOOT IN a doctor’s office since Greer’s death, and now, in the midst of IVF, it seemed like all I was doing. I tried to bury it. But every time I walked through the doors of a doctor’s office—even this small, hometown one that couldn’t have been more different from the upscale Palm Beach ones—I couldn’t help but think of her. My heart sank, but I smiled at Amelia as she climbed up on the brown table with the white paper sheet on top.
The only thing that Greer made me promise, when she agreed to keep living, was that I wouldn’t let her get translucent and veiny and bald and allow people in to see her. When we had gone back to the doctor together after she found out the cancer wasn’t responding, she had offered more treatments. Greer had said, “What are the chances that these treatments, which I assume will make me sick and bald, will work?”
The doctor had looked at her, resigned, and said, “Less than ten percent.”
I was a mess, but Greer didn’t skip a beat. She stood up, held out her hand, and said, “Dr. Taschel, I am most appreciative of your help. But I’m going to go home to enjoy the time I have left.”
The doctor protested. “Even if you don’t accept further treatment, we need to monitor the progression of the disease.”
I agreed for some reason, like I needed to know, via a scan, when she was dying.
“I’ll come back when I need hospice,” Greer said.
Vomit rose up the back of my throat, and I ran out of the room to be sick in the hall trash can. Hospice. I still hadn’t accepted that my bright, beautiful light could ever go out.
We made a pact on the way home to quit everything. And we did. We went to North Carolina. We went to Amsterdam. We went to Utah and Bali, LA and Bora Bora, Hawaii and Hong Kong. For almost an entire year, we traveled and sunned ourselves and made love and acted like we were on an extended vacation. I could pretend she was okay. But there were subtle changes—circles under her eyes, a change in her breath, the naps that she had to take in the afternoon.
The morning she woke up and said quietly, “Parker, take me back to Palm Beach,” I wanted to jump out the window and end it. I couldn’t bear the thought of living even a moment without her. I didn’t want this part. I couldn’t handle this part.
As Greer got sicker over those last few weeks, I kept my promise. Her beautiful hair had grown back and was almost to her chin. Her nurse—the same nurse they had hired for her mother only a few years earlier—did her hair and makeup every day so visitors could see the old Greer, not the dying one. That was maybe the worst part for me, because, even though she was leaving me, when she was made-up, she barely looked sick. I could sit across from her on the couch and pretend things were fine, that this was just a bump in the road.
To watch the person you love more than yourself suffer is hell on earth. But even then, I couldn’t be wholly sorry. Because we had one full, memorable year.
A year had never felt faster.
And now two weeks had never felt longer.
Every day I wavered between piercing fear that the embryos hadn’t taken, overwhelming joy that they had, and crippling panic over either.
Amelia swore she didn’t need an appointment to tell her what she already knew. She was nauseous and bloated and moody. She was positive she was pregnant. She had been cooking up a storm for the past couple of weeks. I tried to take her out, but she insisted that the babies needed an organic diet. She had a little calendar on the fridge where she was keeping tally of the fruits and vegetables she ate daily to make sure she got at least ten servings. That seemed like a lot to me, but I was unendingly grateful for the time and attention she was paying to my future child or, if things had gone really well, children. And we had gotten into quite a rhythm with our cooking. I’d play one of her Spotify playlists over the house’s sound system and pour a glass of flavored sparkling water in a wine glass for her, an Old Fashioned for me, on which Amelia insisted upon burning an orange rind. I knew already that I would never be able to drink it any other way now.
She would hand me vegetables and instruct me to dice or chop or whatever, and she’d get going on the fish or chicken. Sometimes she’d send me out to the grill. Amelia was a great cook, but that wasn’t what I loved about those nights. It was the talking, the sharing of secrets and laughter, the way we’d dance around the kitchen when a favorite song came on.