Alix Ohlin - Signs and Wonders

Those nights, once she returned to the bedroom, Dan would hold her. He never cried. He always had hope. He said, “It hasn’t been that long.” He said this for six months, seven months, eight.

At the year mark, they made doctors’ appointments. Lisette’s results were normal. When Dan’s came back, he was very pale. He looked as sick as she’d ever seen him; even his bushy brown beard seemed to have wilted like some underwatered plant.

“It’s me,” he said. “I’m the one letting you down.”

The test was conclusive. His sperm — the doctor, with ill-advised jocularity, kept calling them his guys —were unlikely to ever produce a child. He didn’t have very many, and the ones he did have were not highly motivated. His guys were underachievers. They wouldn’t get their lazy asses off the couch. If they were a sports team they’d be in last place, with no possibility of a turnaround, even with the best coaching.

So that was that. No treatment existed. Nothing could be done.

They didn’t make love for the next two weeks. When Dan came home from work he’d go out for a long run, snaking through the curving streets of their town, and after that he’d make dinner or eat what she’d made and immediately afterward go upstairs to his office, pleading homework to correct, lesson plans to revise. On rehearsal nights, instead of waiting up for her, as he usually did, he’d be in bed by the time she got home, feigning sleep. On the weekends he went for marathon runs, returning soaked with sweat and aggravation, no tension having been released. He’d been a track star in high school, won a scholarship to college, graduated with honors. He offered free math tutoring after school to kids whose families couldn’t afford it. He’d never cheated, taken a shortcut, or quit a job because it was too hard. This was the first time he’d failed to meet his own standards.

As for Lisette, there were things she had to jettison. The vision of their children, their genetic cocktail, his brown eyes and her ash-blond hair. Of course she had already named them, kissed them, rocked them to sleep. In her mind — knowing it was dangerous, but unable and unwilling to stop — she’d dressed them up for Halloween, celebrated Christmas with them, watched them graduate from high school, wept as they left for college. She’d had months to embroider their beautiful, complicated lives. But now she had to bury them, erase their memories, throw away the notebook in which she’d kept the list of names: Evan, Veronica, Nicole, Jacob. Good-bye to their futures, good-bye to all of them whose faces she had seen so clearly.

So this is heartbreak, she thought. Something cracked beyond repair.

It was sad. She cried in the night, and first thing in the morning, and cried again when she gently laid the notebook in the kitchen trash and ferried the bag out to the curb. But Dan’s white, lightly freckled back turned away from her in sleep, the blank fragility of it, was the saddest thing she’d ever seen.

At a certain point, she just couldn’t take it anymore. Losing him, his touch, their closeness, was more than she could handle, especially on top of all the other grief. So in the middle of the night she reached over, his body wakelessly responding, and by the time he opened his eyes she was on top of him, moving, kissing his neck. Also crying a little. And it was weird, but he put his hands on her, and it seemed to help.

“I’m ashamed,” he said afterward. “I can’t believe I can’t do this.”

“It’s going to be okay,” she told him, and knew as she spoke the words that it was her job to make them come true.

After that night, they discussed some possibilities. They were chastened, serious, calm, as if they’d aged twenty years between the conversation in which they’d decided to start trying and this one. Lisette, her resolve firm in spite of her heartbreak, told him that she wanted to raise a child with him, to have a family, and there were other ways of doing it. Did he still want a family? He nodded, with the same grim look on his face as when he caught a student cheating: the situation was bad, and there were no excuses, but a good teacher moved past blame to look for root causes and better solutions.

This is when they started talking about other men’s sperm. They talked about adoption too, but Lisette couldn’t get excited about this option. She wanted to have a baby inside her, to feel the link of flesh and blood, the umbilical cord, the kick of tiny feet. Yet at the fertility specialist’s office, she balked. Looking over the sperm donor files, she couldn’t imagine this scenario, either. There just wasn’t enough information. It was like shopping online for the least returnable of all items. The data given — weight, height, education level — was wholly inadequate. She needed touch and texture, the expression in a man’s eye, the specificity of gesture. How he sits in a chair, or holds a glass in his hand.

Though she knew she had to be the strong one, to pull Dan along toward their future, she broke down after the afternoon with the donor files.

“I can’t make a baby this way,” she said to him, tears streaking hotly down her cheeks. “I couldn’t even buy pants this way.”

If her baby was not to be a stranger, she needed so much more than this.

At work, things shifted once again. Whereas she’d once seen the kids with their instruments as sensual embodiments of a bright future, she now saw each and every one as a reproach, as something she might not be able to have. Everything youthful about them — their braces, their high-pitched giggles, their stupid, stammering in-jokes — made her angry. She’d always hated window-shopping, because there’s no point in looking at things you can’t buy. She snapped at them, telling them they had no talent.

“You’re lazy,” she said. “You think you can coast, but you can’t. You’re going to embarrass me, and yourselves.”

They were surprised, but rolled with it. They were used to mercurial adults. They knew that it wasn’t the people around them but the activities in which they were relentlessly enrolled — swim team, orchestra, driver’s ed — that gave their lives structure, on which they could rely.

Packing up her bag one day after class she heard two boys talking around the corner in the hallway.

“What was up with Ms. Gilson today? She’s so bitchy. I think she hates me.”

“I bet she’s on the rag. You know how women are.”

Lisette stood there, shaking for a moment, then lost it. She dropped her stuff, her legs pulsing with adrenaline, and hurried down the hall after them. When they saw her — it was Tyler, violin, and Mark, French horn — they turned and blushed so hard that in another mood, she would’ve been compassionate. Instead she grabbed Tyler’s forearm and clenched it, hard, feeling the flesh give. If she’d been bigger and stronger, she might have broken it and flung his whole body against the wall.

“You think you know how women are? You think you know?”

“Sorry,” he said, his voice cracking.

“Do not let me hear you talking like that ever again. Either of you. Do you understand?”

They nodded.

“Get out of my sight.”

They weren’t going anywhere — why wouldn’t they go? — because, she realized, her hand was still on Tyler’s arm, her nails digging into his skin. She released him, feeling her fingers cramp. “Go,” she said.

Once they left the building she stood in the hallway with tears running down her cheeks. Angry at no one more than herself, for losing control, for embarrassing herself, for not having the life she thought she was going to. Then the janitor came, swishing his mop over the tiles, and she wiped her face and went out to the car.