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She stood up, rubbing her arms. The room was cold, the sound from the TV too loud. “I don’t know what’s with me tonight,” she said. “Sorry I’m being weird. I’m going out on the balcony to smoke.”
“Want me to pause the movie?” Brent asked as she slid the glass door open.
She shook her head. “I can’t concentrate. Just let it run.”
She carried her cigarettes and lighter out to the balcony and sat on the chair overlooking the harbor, trying to shake off the unexpected sensation of losing something precious. Above her, the sky was filled with stars, and below her, lights flickered in the boats lining the piers. She couldn’t blame Brent for being irked by her tonight, she thought as she lit a cigarette. She wasn’t usually like this. It was as though Maya had crawled under the surface of her skin and she couldn’t simply brush her off.
Maybe Maya and Adam would get serious about adoption now. Maya would eagerly adopt, but Adam desperately wanted his own biological child. He’d be such a joyful father, either way. He’d cook for his kids. Make pancakes in the shape of animals, with Maya watching him, smiling, totally in love with her husband and their brood. Adam was equally smitten with Maya.
You only needed to be with them for two seconds to know he adored her. Why did Maya get to be loved like that and she didn’t? The thought made her feel small and churlish. She’d felt that way ever since they were kids, when Maya’d received their father’s attention at every turn. Maya had been so much like him—bookish and studious—while Rebecca had their mother’s vitality and spunk. Rebecca’d always been certain of her mother’s love, but it was her father’s she’d craved, and that seemed out of reach. “I have a scholar and an athlete,” he’d say of his two daughters, as though he valued them equally, but everyone knew which daughter he favored. Rebecca was smart, but Maya was smarter. Maya could sit still for hours, with a focus that was uncanny for a child. Their father would read to them in bed, and although Rebecca would try her best to pay attention, she could never make it to the end of a story. “You have ants in your pants?” he’d ask her with a resigned smile, and she’d nod, hopping out of the bed to play with her trucks or run around the house with her arms outstretched, pretending she was an airplane, leaving her younger sister behind to bask in their father’s love.
Rebecca blew a stream of pale smoke into the darkness, resting her head against the back of the seat. She hated when she relived the past as though it mattered, nursing an ancient jealousy over her sister’s treatment when they were kids. The truth was, they’d both suffered the same loss. If Maya was lucky enough to find a guy like Adam, Rebecca wanted to be happy for her.
That was part of the problem with her and Brent, wasn’t it? If she was ever going to get married, she should feel about a man the way Maya felt about Adam. So she and Brent were disaster junkies. Big deal. That didn’t feel like enough.
She stubbed out her cigarette on the concrete balcony, then turned to look through the sliding glass door. She could see Brent, the changing colors of the TV screen altering his features second by second. His eyes were wide, absorbed by the movie.
“Rebecca’s type triple A,” he’d said once, when they were out with friends, and she knew he meant it as a compliment. “You should see her in the field,” he’d added. “She never sleeps.”
She’d felt his admiration then. His love. He did love her. She had no doubt of that. What the hell more did she want?
5
Maya
THEY KEPT ME OVERNIGHT AFTER THE D AND C BECAUSE Elaine was concerned about the amount of bleeding I was having, but by morning I was doing much better. Physically, anyway. The nurse wheeled me outside to the sidewalk deck where two other women sat in wheelchairs, waiting for their rides home. I was relieved that neither of them had a baby in her arms. I would have lost it.
The woman in the next chair looked vaguely familiar, and I wondered if she was the mother of one of my young patients. I often bumped into them without having a clue who they were, although I would recognize their children anywhere.
Adam pulled up in his silver Volvo and got out. He was pale, his face drawn and tight. The nurse bent over to lock the brakes on the wheelchair, and just as I was about to stand up, the woman who looked familiar spoke up.
“Adam!” she said, and I instantly realized who she was: Adam’s ex-wife, Frannie. The one who’d decided she didn’t want children. I’d seen pictures of her in Adam’s old photo album. She lived in Boston, though, and I couldn’t imagine what she was doing next to me on the parking deck. I sank back into the wheelchair.
“Frannie!” Adam exclaimed with his usual effervescence in spite of the circumstances. The tight expression on his face vanished with a smile. He walked to the side of my chair, resting his hand on my back. “Maya, this is Frannie, my ex-wife. Frannie, this is Maya, my—”
“Current wife.” Frannie laughed. She had pretty teeth and thick, curly brown hair, but she looked as exhausted and pale as I felt. “Nice to meet you, Maya,” she said. “Though I feel like I’ve been run over, and you probably do, too.”
I nodded with a small smile. All I wanted was to get home and into my own bed.
Adam left my wheelchair to open the passenger door of the car. “So …” He looked at Frannie with a puzzled smile. “What are you doing in Raleigh?”
“My husband, Dave, put in for a transfer with IBM,”
Frannie said, “and we moved here last year. Better weather. Better for the kids.”
“Kids?” Adam had been reaching for my arm to help me stand up, but his hand stopped in midair.
Frannie laughed again. “I know, I know.” She ran a hand through her curls. “Don’t give me a hard time about it. I changed my mind about having them after all. We’ve got two. Just had my tubes tied, though. Two is plenty. They’re a handful.”
“Adam,” I pleaded, and he reached down again to take my arm. I let him guide me into the car, the muscles in my thighs quivering. He closed the door behind me, shutting out the rest of his conversation with the woman he’d left because she wouldn’t have children and who now had two while I—and he—had none.
It was another minute before he got into the car himself. He turned the key in the ignition, then glanced over at me. “Seat belt,” he said.
I buckled myself in and he pulled away from the curb.
“How do you feel?” he asked. “Do you want me to stop at the store for anything on the way home?”
I shook my head. The ache in my throat dwarfed the dull pain in my uterus. “If you’d stayed married to her, you’d have children now,” I said.
“Maya, don’t.”
“How can I not?”
“I’m not married to her. I don’t love her any longer. I love you.”
“But if you’d stayed married to her—”
“Stop it.” He turned the corner with such force that we nearly ran over the curb, and I reached reflexively for the dashboard.
I pounded my fist against the car door. “What’s wrong with me?” I asked the air. “Why is it so hard for me to have a baby when every other woman on earth can have as many kids as she likes?”
“That’s bullshit. You have plenty of company and you know it. Please stop beating yourself up over this.”
“Every single one of my friends has kids now,” I said. “I’m cut off from all of them. I buy them baby gifts. I try to keep up the friendships and I know they try, too, but it’s impossible. They have nothing in common with me anymore. They pity me.”
“Right now, you’re pitying yourself,” he said.
“Well, so what?” I snapped, hurt. “When do I ever pity myself? Let me have five minutes of self-pity, okay?”
We never argued. Never. Yet this felt strangely good and necessary. Cleansing, in a way. But when we came to a stoplight and I glanced over at him, I saw how tired he looked. I saw the lines that creased his forehead. The pink cast to the whites of his eyes. This was not only my loss.
I reached over. Rested my hand on his biceps. “Adam,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right, My,” he said with a sigh. “We’ll get through it.”
Adam tucked me into our king-size bed and handed me an ibuprofen and a glass of water. I swallowed the pill, then sank back into the bed. He leaned over and kissed my forehead. “I know this has been much harder on you than I can even imagine,” he whispered. “I know that, and I love you.”
“I love you, too,” I said. I opened my mouth to say more, although I wasn’t sure what words I expected to come out, but he pressed his fingers lightly to my lips.
“Get some sleep,” he said.
I was asleep before he had even left the room, and in my dreams, I saw Frannie sitting in her wheelchair, smiling at Adam.
I have eighteen children now, Adam, she said. Too bad you didn’t stay married to me.
6
Maya
TWO DAYS LATER, ADAM AND I SAT ACROSS THE DESK from my obstetrician, Elaine, in her office. I much preferred being on the other side of that desk, talking to my patients. Educating them. Reassuring them. But my fight for a baby had put me on this uncomfortable side of the desk now more times than I could count.
Elaine thumbed through my chart where it rested on the desk in front of her. She settled on a page, running her finger down it, stopping at the midway point.
“I noticed something during the D and C that made me curious,” she said, “and I see that you didn’t answer this question on your health sheet when you filled it out a couple of years ago.”
“What question?” I asked.
“Did you ever have an abortion?” Elaine looked at me over her reading glasses.
I hesitated. I hadn’t been asked that question before, at least not in front of Adam.
“No,” Adam answered for me, and for a moment, I let the answer hang in the room between the three of us.
“Why?” I asked Elaine.
“Well, there’s some scarring in your uterus that looks like what we might see, on a very rare occasion, from an abortion. Scarring can cause difficulty with conception and especially with holding on to a pregnancy. But since you’ve never had an abortion, that’s clearly not the prob—”
“I have.” I cut her off. “I had an abortion.”
“What?” Adam leaned away from me in his chair as though I’d burned him. “When?”
“When I was a teenager.” I looked at Elaine, but could feel Adam’s startled gaze resting squarely on my face.
“Were there any complications?” she asked. “An infection?”
I remembered pain that went on and on. Pain I’d ignored. I’d had more pressing things on my mind. “I don’t think so,” I said. “I had what might have been excessive pain, but I was too young to question any symptoms.” I would never tell them how young. Fourteen years old. My father had taken me to the clinic, and I remembered the drive home, even though I’d done my best to block all memories of that day from my mind. Daddy had been so quiet in the car. So quiet that I was afraid he no longer loved me. Finally, when we neared our street, our driveway, when we neared the moment that would end his life and tear mine apart, he said, “This is between you and me, Maya, honey. It’ll be our secret.”
Oh, God. My lost babies. They were my fault. I’d certainly thought about that abortion as I struggled to get pregnant, and I’d never forgotten that first baby, taken from my body only after I’d begun to show.
“Does this mean.” I cleared my throat, unable to ask the question burning in my mind. Next to me, Adam still sat stiffly in his chair, but he reached over to cover my hand with his. I felt so grateful for him, and so undeserving. “Does this mean there’s no hope?” I finally managed to say. “That even if I’m able to conceive again, another miscarriage is inevitable?”
“Not necessarily,” Elaine said, “but it probably does explain why you’ve lost three pregnancies. The in vitro took this time, and you’ll have to talk to Dr. Gallagher about trying again. I’ll send him my report from the
D and C and you can talk with him about the pros and cons of giving it another go.”
I thought of the months of hormone shots. The always-iffy implantation. The waiting to know if I’d conceived. The hopes raised. Dashed. Raised again. All of that would be nothing compared to the anxiety of once more being pregnant, then waiting for that fist to tighten around my uterus. I didn’t know if I could go through it again.
I felt sick to my stomach by the time we got to the car. Neither of us said a word until we’d pulled out of the parking lot into the street.
“I’m sorry,” I said then.
He didn’t take his eyes from the road. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
I hesitated. “It’s something I don’t like to remember. And abortion’s not supposed to have anything to do with fertility, but … I think I was afraid it … that it did have something to do with it. I mean, I got pregnant then, and now, as an adult, I have so much trouble conceiving, so I’ve always had this niggling fear that it was somehow related. Now it looks like it is.” My voice broke. I’d already felt responsible for our not having a child, worried that Adam blamed me, subconsciously or not. Now he had a concrete reason to do so. “I’m sorry, Adam,” I said again.
“Please stop apologizing, Maya.” The muscles in his jaw contracted. “I’m just pissed off you didn’t tell me. We’ve been trying to have a baby for three years—without much luck—and now I discover that you’ve kept a pretty damn significant piece of the puzzle from me.”
“I know.” I started to apologize again, but caught myself. “I wasn’t intentionally keeping it from you,” I said. “It’s something I’ve tried to forget. I …” My voice trailed off, and I turned my head to look blindly through the window. There was no excuse I could give him that was good enough.
He didn’t ask me how old I’d been when I had the abortion or who the baby’s father was, and I was relieved. I didn’t want to think about it. The damage done back then had harmed far more than my fertility.
Was Adam now wondering if there were other things I’d kept from him? Other secrets? Worse secrets?
If so, he would be right.
7
Rebecca
“YOU WANT TO STAY OVER?” REBECCA ASKED BRENT AS they pulled into the driveway of the massive Victorian she shared with Dorothea.
“What do you think?” He’d already put the car in Park and was opening his door. She was fine either way, as long as he gave her some space. Two days after returning from San Diego, Rebecca still hadn’t recovered from the conference. Too much food and not enough exercise.
“I swear,” she said as they walked toward the outside stairs that zigzagged up the side of the building to her second-story apartment, “four days of meeting and greeting, giving speeches and soaking up gorgeous scenery is more draining than a month in the field.”
“You got that right,” he said.
The lights on the first floor were burning. Every one of them, it seemed.
“Dot’s still up,” she said as they started climbing the stairs. “We should say hi.”
They stopped at the first landing and Rebecca knocked on the door that led to Dorothea’s kitchen. When there was no answer, she opened the door—Dot never locked anything—and poked her head inside.
“You up, Dot?” she called.
“Dining room,” Dorothea said.
They walked through the kitchen. The room was turquoise with violet cabinetry, bright yellow hardware, and white appliances. All Louisa’s work. Dorothea had given her partner free rein, and although she’d complained about the color combinations while Louisa was alive, she’d done nothing to change them now that Louisa was gone and Rebecca was glad. If she ever cared enough to decorate her own spare apartment, she would use Louisa’s energetic palette.
Louisa had been neat almost to the point of being finicky, but her artist’s eye craved color, the bolder the better. She would roll over in her grave—had she been buried instead of donating her body to Duke—if she could see her dining room now, Rebecca thought as she and Brent skirted the boxes and stacks of journals and papers that littered the floor.
Dorothea looked up from her seat at the head of the table, where she was typing on one of the two laptop computers in the room. “What time is it?” she asked. Long strands of gray hair were coming loose from her braid, but she looked pretty in the glow from the computer screen. Dorothea was sixty-seven now, and every once in a while Rebecca caught a glimpse of the knockout she must have been when she was younger.
Brent walked to the head of the table and leaned over to kiss Dorothea’s cheek, a shock of blond hair falling over his forehead.
“Whatcha up to?” he asked, folding his arms across his chest as he peered down at the screen.
“Watching tropical storms forming,” she said.
Rebecca pulled out a chair at the opposite end of the table and drew the second computer toward her. “Anything that looks like trouble?” she asked, getting online.
Dorothea moved the cursor around a bit, gnawing her lower lip as she studied the screen. “Hard to say right now. A few things … maybe. Maybe not.”
The dining room had been Louisa’s red room. The walls were painted a robust, deep red and one of her paintings—a huge stunning rectangular canvas covered with apricots—brought the room to life. The dining room used to be Rebecca’s favorite room in the house, but Dorothea now had so much stuff littered all over the table and the sideboard that the room had lost its charm. It sometimes worried her to see how Dorothea had let things go after Louisa died. Dorothea still had all her faculties. She was as brilliant and committed as ever, but the lack of caring about her surroundings, which served her very well in a disaster zone, didn’t work all that well in North Carolina. She never wanted company, with the exception of Rebecca and Brent and a few other DIDA regulars, because cleaning the house was, at this point, impossible. When Rebecca took over directing DIDA, she was going to have a mess on her hands.
“Next thing that comes up, we’ll get that brother-in-law of yours in the field,” Dorothea said to Rebecca. “I know he’s champin’ at the bit.”
Rebecca clicked the page for the National Hurricane Center. “As long as it’s not for more than two weeks,” she reminded Dorothea. She doubted Adam could take off more than that. No volunteers were required to donate more than two weeks a year with DIDA, but Dorothea had a tendency to forget that little detail.
