Karma Brown - The Choices We Make

After throwing my hair into a ponytail—being a recipe developer meant I never wore my hair down at work—I quickly brushed my teeth, already feeling dull cramps in my abdomen. Ben was in the kitchen, downing a quick cup of coffee before he had to leave for the office.

“You all right?” he asked, swirling the mug in his hand, then drinking the last mouthful, his eyes still on me.

“All good.”

He watched me for a few seconds more, then put his mug into the sink. “I’m going to be late tonight,” he said. “Dad and I have to work on the proposal.” As a junior partner at his dad’s firm, he was currently involved in trying to secure a major project—the redesign of a chain of boutique hotels that stretched along Southern California’s coastline—and they were only two weeks away from presenting to the client.

“Dishwasher’s clean,” he added, seeing me eye his mug—which he had placed unrinsed in the sink—with irritation. “I’ll unload it when I get home, okay?” He was using his cautious, soothing tone; the one reserved for days like this. I think he figured if he stayed calm, I would, as well.

I longed to explode with anger, with sorrow, to yell at Ben if for no other reason than to expunge the sadness out of me. But Ben’s tone said, let’s be gentle and quiet and polite with each other. Like not looking an angry, aggressive dog directly in the eye—if we averted our gazes from our failure to become parents, we might be able to walk away unscathed. I wondered sometimes if Ben believed that being nice enough would smooth the disappointment out, like a hot iron over wrinkled cotton.

So, as always, I took the same tone with him, because this was the dance we danced—the steps well rehearsed, the cadence predictable. “Sure, sounds good.” I opened the fridge and grabbed a yogurt, then scowled and put it back. The thought of eating something creamy and cold made my stomach turn. Pouring a large mug of coffee, I popped the lid on the acetaminophen bottle and shook out two—three—pills.

Ben raised his eyebrow, leaning back against the counter. “Headache? Or gearing up for your meeting today?”

“Something like that,” I said. There was no point in telling him about the cramps. He’d run out of ways to say, “Sorry about your period” ages ago. I envied his ability to drink his coffee and go to work and to not analyze and obsess over every twinge in his abdomen.

He pushed off the counter’s edge and kissed me, tasting like coffee with a hint of mint toothpaste, and was gone a moment later. Sipping my coffee, I replied to my sister Claire’s text about Mom’s birthday party, then saw the voice-mail icon flash on the screen. With a deep breath I put the phone on speaker and listened to the message from West Coast Fertility I’d been avoiding.

“Hi, Hannah, it’s Rosey from Dr. Horwarth’s office. We got your blood test results back and I’m sorry I don’t have better news for you but—”

I hit the end call button, then placed the three acetaminophen tablets on my tongue and chased them down with coffee.

6

HANNAH

July

Once we got home from the clinic I read through the IVF information sheets while Ben made dinner, writing down the injection schedule on our fertility calendar in the kitchen drawer. Then we ate in silence—Ben had made me his mom’s jerk chicken, but even the spicy dish, my favorite, couldn’t lift my spirits.

“Hannah,” he began, his voice unsure. I was in the middle of scrubbing the marinade dish and stopped briefly when he said my name, clenching my teeth. He had to know I didn’t want to talk about it. The dance, Ben, I wanted to say. Stick to the steps we know.

“What’s up?” I asked, keeping my tone light, back to scrubbing. As though I was only thinking about the dish in my hands.

“I know we’re going to try IVF, but there are...other options, too. What about adoption? We haven’t talked about it in a while.”

I slowly counted to five, scrubbing so hard I splashed water onto the countertop. “I can’t talk about this tonight. I can’t, okay?” Reluctantly I drew my eyes to his face, willing him to see this wasn’t the time.

“Okay.” Ben nodded, but I saw the shift in his face. The way his jaw tightened as he took a deep breath in through his nose. “So when?”

“When what?” I knew I was being unfairly evasive. After all, this wasn’t only my disappointment. Ben wanted to be a father more than anything.

“When will you be able to talk about it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hannah, I—”

“I don’t know!” I shouted, my rubber-glove-covered hands flying out of the sudsy sink, dripping soapy water all over the mat under my feet. “I have no fucking idea, actually. But if you don’t mind, I’d rather just do these dishes in peace and not think about babies or getting pregnant or IVF or any of it, okay?” My voice rose, unsteady and breathless. “Or at the very least, I’d like twenty-four hours to be pissed off about my still-shitty uterus before I even consider taking someone else’s castoff.” As soon as I said it I wanted to take it back. Stuff the words back into my mouth and swish them around until I could change their meaning. Because it had nothing to do with adopting anyone’s “castoff”—a truly horrible way to phrase it, and I had no idea where those words came from—and everything to do with me being terrified of adoption.

I had this sick fear we’d adopt a baby, I’d fall deeply in love with it and then the birth mother would change her mind in the eleventh hour and I’d be left with empty arms and a broken heart. All I needed to do was tell Ben that, to explain myself so he could at least understand my hesitation. But instead I said those ugly words, which pulled us further away from each other.

Ben started pacing, his bare feet leaving damp footprints on our kitchen floor thanks to the spilled dishwater. Back and forth, back and forth he walked in front of me, his hands pressed deep into his hips. “This is not just about you, Hannah. I know you have to deal with all these injections and hormones, and poking and prodding, but you are not alone in this. I’m right here, going through it, too, feeling shitty and angry about all the same things you are.”

I blinked away tears and tried to focus on his footprints so I didn’t have to look at his face.

“At some point we, you and me, have to decide when it’s enough. It’s been six years, Hannah, and I...” He paused, head bent to the ground, voice dropping. “I don’t know how much longer I can do this.”

“Tomorrow,” I whispered. “We can talk about it tomorrow night, okay?”

“Okay,” he said. “Tomorrow.” Then he turned and walked upstairs, and a moment later I heard our bedroom door click shut. I tried not to think about what might be happening behind that closed door. So I stayed where I was, my gloved hands hanging by my sides, only small droplets of water dripping from them now. My abdomen cramped, and I knew that by morning the pain, and my defeat, would be worse. Then I’d sit on the toilet behind a locked bathroom door and cry so hard I’d get the hiccups.

Ben was wrong—in some ways, I really was alone with this.

7

KATE

September

I heard the door creak open and then Hannah’s voice. “Kate?”

“Up here,” I shouted back, leaning against the window frame, my body tucked up so my toes just touched the other side of the sill. My pedicure was nearly grown out, the half-moon of each toenail peeking out from under the chipping polish. “It’s called Chinchilla,” the manicurist had announced—almost proudly, as if the name had been her idea—rolling the bottle of boring beige polish between her hands to warm it. “Our most popular neutral for fall.” I didn’t care about how trendy my toes were, only that they complemented the black skirt and jacket I wore to the funeral and didn’t shout wedding or date night, like my go-to coral color would have done.