Джули Салливан - Friends and Strangers

“You think we’ll still be able to do the transfer on Saturday?”

“Sounds like it.”

“I’m excited,” he said.

She decided then that she would tell him in person what she had done, as soon as he got home.

On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday mornings, Elisabeth went to the clinic and let them draw her blood. It made no sense, but she felt as though if she kept doing this, it meant she hadn’t backed out entirely. Each day, the clinic called an hour later and said things weren’t moving as fast as they should be. Her levels were too low. Each day, they told her to double her dose of everything that night, and she said she would, before proceeding to do nothing. The drugs had gone out with the garbage on Tuesday.

Andrew got home after eleven on Friday night.

She was reading in bed, waiting up for him.

When he came into the room, she said, “I’m so happy you’re back.”

He looked deflated.

“What?” she said.

“The grill. It’s not going to work, is it?”

“What do you mean?”

“People were laughing during my presentation.”

“No.”

“I’m pretty sure one guy in the front row was playing Tetris on his phone. They were bored by the whole thing.”

“That’s because you didn’t have enough time to perfect it,” she said. “Maybe the prototype needs work. But that doesn’t reflect on the idea.”

“They hated the prototype and the idea,” he said. “Most people there met with ten or twenty potential investors. Only two wanted to meet me. They both said the same things: people do barbecue on cloudy days, and people like the taste of meat seared in charcoal. Now more than ever, apparently.”

They were the exact things she had worried about. But Elisabeth wasn’t happy or smug. She felt sorry for him.

“There’s another product like it that’s selling gangbusters, already in stores,” he said. “The inventor was on TV.”

“If that one’s selling gangbusters, maybe there’s room for two in the market,” she said.

“No. They said not.”

“Adversity is part of it, right? You can’t let two bozos in Denver decide your fate.”

“Elisabeth. Seriously. What am I doing?” he said. “When do I ever even grill?”

She laughed. Something in her unclenched. Elisabeth realized only now that she’d been waiting months for him to come to this conclusion.

“I think I knew from early on that it wouldn’t work,” Andrew said. “But I had this opportunity. I got to do the thing everyone wants to do. I got to follow my dream. I didn’t want to give up on that. Especially after what happened to my dad. It was like I was going to succeed for both of us, to make up for what he went through. No one ever says what you’re supposed to do when you realize your dream was kind of stupid in the first place.”

“You said yourself, you can come up with more ideas,” she said.

Andrew shook his head. “As it turns out, I’ve got nothing.”

Elisabeth stretched her arms out to him. “Come here.”

Andrew got into bed, fully clothed, and spooned her, pressing his chest to her back, holding on tight.

“I don’t know if it was even about the grill,” he said. “I hated my job. I wish I could have just said that and saved us this wasted year.”

“It wasn’t wasted,” she said.

She was thinking that maybe now they could return to Brooklyn, the grand experiment complete.

“You’re right,” he said. “It wasn’t. I like living here. I like being near my parents, having a backyard for Gil.”

Andrew got out of bed, went to the dresser, and picked up the check from her father.

Elisabeth’s body grew stiff at the thought of him asking her to accept it one more time, but Andrew held it out to her and said, “Rip it up.”

“What?”

“Go ahead. Rip it up. I wasn’t listening. I was being selfish. I get it now.”

Elisabeth felt like her husband had returned to her in some way she hadn’t known he was gone.

She tore up the check and let the pieces fall to the bed like confetti.

“Now what?” she said.

Andrew shook his head. “I don’t know.”

We start over from scratch, she thought. With nothing. Holy shit.

But she said, “Thank you.”

They had sex then. The first really good sex since Gil.

Afterward, lying in the dark, he said, “All week at that conference, I kept thinking about me, you, and Gil in the car tomorrow, and of the amazing thing that’s about to happen to our family. That kept me going.”

Elisabeth needed to tell him. No more lies. But how?

“The odds are, it won’t work,” she said. “I don’t want you getting your hopes up.”

“I know,” he said. “But at least we’re trying. And, hon? I have a feeling it’s going to work.”

Elisabeth felt angry; it was his own fault. She had tried to warn him.

She cried on the way to have her blood drawn the next morning, and she cried all the way home, wondering what the hell she was doing. The window of time to tell him was nearly closed. She dreaded the moment.

He was in the living room when she got back, sitting on the floor with Gil.

The phone rang—the clinic calling already—and she rushed to answer.

It was the doctor himself on the line. As rare as a unicorn sighting.

“I know we have the transfer of one embryo scheduled for this afternoon,” he said. “But I’m looking at your chart and I’m concerned about your body’s response this week. It’s almost like you weren’t taking any hormones at all. I hate to tell you this, I know you’re coming a long way, but the odds of a transfer working are basically zero. I’m afraid we should call it off and try a new regimen next month.”

Elisabeth took the phone up to the bedroom and closed the door.

“I want to go ahead with it,” she said.

“I can’t advise that.”

“It’s my call, right? As long as I’m paying.”

“Yes. But you pay me for my expertise.”

“It will be fine,” she said. “I know it.”

“All right,” he said. “As you said, it’s your call.”

Elisabeth was somehow separate from her body as she watched herself get in the car with her husband and child and head to the city. She was in awe of her own dishonesty.

Halfway there, Andrew said, “I’ll only say this once, but I feel strongly that we should put in both embryos to improve our chances.”

“Okay,” she said, digging the hole ever deeper. “Let’s do it.”

She reached over, took his hand.

Elisabeth showed up at the hospital right on time, along with twelve other women. It felt like something from the fifties, how they were made to sit together in the waiting room wearing hairnets and paper gowns. When it was her turn, she followed a nurse down the familiar hallway, into a room that looked like the inside of a spaceship. The nurses strapped her to the table and tipped it back.

The doctor came in, the one who was scheduled to do procedures today. She didn’t remember ever seeing him before. She was relieved that her doctor wasn’t the one. He might try to talk her out of it again.

Elisabeth hung upside down while the doctor talked about the Mets and inserted a tube through the wall of her uterus, planting there her last two chances of becoming a mother again.

He said, “Good luck, I’ll be rooting for you.”

She thanked him, knowing that all the luck in the world could not possibly make it work.

Elisabeth was wheeled out on a stretcher, and made to lie still for an hour. The nurse gave her a black-and-white photo of two perfect circles. Their insides looked like the surface of the moon.

They spent the rest of the weekend at the Carlyle. Even the smallest room was absurdly expensive, but Andrew insisted.