Jodi Picoult - Sing You Home

I had a hunch that it wasn’t just Zoe who had infertility problems. My brother, Reid, and his wife had been married for over a decade and hadn’t been able to conceive yet, either. The difference was that, instead of forking over ten thousand dollars to a clinic, he and Liddy prayed a lot.

Zoe said that Dr. Gelman had a better success rate than God.

As it turns out, I have a total sperm count of 60 million-which sounds like a lot, right? But when you start figuring in their shape and speed, all of a sudden I’m down to 400,000. Which-again-seems like a pretty big number to me. But imagine that you’re running the Boston Marathon along with more than 59 million drunks-suddenly it gets a little more challenging to cross that finish line. Add Zoe’s infertility issues to mine, and we were suddenly looking at IVF and ICSI.

And then there’s the money. I don’t know how people pay for IVF. It costs fifteen thousand dollars a pop, including the medications. We are lucky enough to live in Rhode Island, a state that forces insurance companies to cover women between twenty-five and forty who are married and can’t conceive naturally-but that still means our out-of-pocket expenses have been three thousand dollars for each fresh cycle of embryos, and six hundred dollars for each frozen cycle. Not covered: the ICSI-where sperm are directly injected into the eggs (fifteen hundred dollars), embryo freezing (a thousand dollars), and embryo storage (eight hundred dollars per year). What I’m saying here is that, even with insurance, and even before the financial nightmare of this last cycle, we’d run out of money.

I can’t really tell you the moment it went wrong. Maybe it was the first time, or the fifth, or the fiftieth that Zoe counted out the days of her menstrual cycle and crawled into bed and said, “Now!” Our sex life had become like Thanksgiving dinner with a dysfunctional family-something you have to show up for, even though you’re not really having a good time. Maybe it was when we started IVF, when I realized there was nothing Zoe wouldn’t do in her quest to get pregnant; that want had become need and then obsession. Or maybe it was when I began feeling like Zoe and this baby to be were on the same page-and that I had somehow become the outsider. There was no room in my marriage for me anymore, except as genetic material.

A lot of people talk about what women go through, when they can’t have a baby. But no one ever asks about the guys. Well, let me tell you-we feel like losers. We can’t somehow do what other men manage to do without even trying… what other men take precautions to not do, most of the time. Whether or not it’s true, and whether or not it’s my fault-society looks at a guy differently, if he doesn’t have kids. There’s a whole book of the Old Testament devoted to who begat whom. Even the sex symbol celebrities who make women swoon, like David Beckham and Brad Pitt and Hugh Jackman, are always in People magazine swinging one of their children onto their shoulders. (I should know; I’ve read nearly every issue in the waiting room of the IVF clinic.) This may be the twenty-first century, but being a real man is still tied to being able to procreate.

I know I didn’t ask for this. I know I shouldn’t feel inadequate. I know it is a medical condition, and that if I suffered a cardiac arrest or a broken ankle I wouldn’t think of myself as a wimp if I needed surgery or a cast-so why should I be embarrassed about this?

Because it’s just one more piece of evidence, in a long, long list, that I’m a failure.

In the fall, landscaping is a hard sell. I do my fair share of leaf blowing and buzz cutting lawns, so that they’re prepped for the winter. I prune deciduous trees and shrubs that flower in the autumn. I’ve managed to talk a couple of clients into planting before the ground freezes-it’s always something you’ll be glad you did come spring-and I’m pretty sold on some red maple varieties that have spectacular color in autumn. But mostly this fall, for me, will be about laying off the guys I hired during the summer. Usually I can keep on one or two, but not this winter-I’m just too far in debt, and there isn’t enough work. My five-man landscaping business is going to morph into a one-man snowplowing service.

I’m pruning a client’s roses when one of my summer help comes loping down the driveway. Todd-a junior in high school-stopped working last week, when classes started up again. “Max?” he says, holding his baseball cap in his hands. “You got a minute?”

“Sure,” I say. I sit back on my heels and squint up at him. The sun is already low, and it’s only three-thirty in the afternoon. “How is school going?”

“It’s going.” Todd hesitates. “I, um, wanted to ask you about getting my job back.”

My knees creak as I stand up. “It’s a little early for me to start hiring for next spring.”

“I meant for the fall and winter. I’ve got my license. I could plow for you-”

“Todd,” I interrupt, “you’re a good kid, but business slows down a lot. I just can’t afford to take you on right now.” I clap him on the shoulder. “Call me in March, okay?”

I start to walk back to my truck. “Max!” he calls out, and I turn. “I really need this.” His Adam’s apple bobs like a cork. “My girlfriend-she’s pregnant.”

I vaguely remember Todd’s girlfriend driving up to the curb of a client’s house this July with a car full of giddy teens. Her long brown legs in her cutoff jean shorts, as she walked up to Todd with a thermos of lemonade. How he blushed when she kissed him and ran back to her car, her flip-flops slapping against the soles of her feet. I remember being his age, and panicking every time I had sex, certain that I’d be in the two percent of cases where Trojans failed.

How come, Zoe used to say, the odds are that, if you’re sixteen years old and desperate to not get pregnant, you will… but if you’re forty and you want to get pregnant, you can’t?

I won’t look Todd in the eye. “Sorry,” I mutter, “I can’t help.” I fiddle around with some equipment in the flatbed of my truck until I see him drive away. I still have work to do, but I make the executive decision to call it a day. I’m the boss, after all. I should know when it’s time to quit.

I drive to a bar that I’ve passed fifty times on my way to this job. It’s called Quasimodo’s and sports a bad paint job and metal grilles across the one window, which doubles as a lit Budweiser sign. In other words, it’s the sort of place nobody ever goes in the afternoon.

Sure enough, when I first walk inside and my eyes are adjusting to the light, I think it’s only me and the bartender. Then I notice a woman with bleached blond hair doing a crossword at the bar. Her arms are bare and ropy, with crepe paper skin; she looks strange and familiar all at once, like a T-shirt washed so often that the picture on the front is now just a blotch of color. “Irv,” she says, “what’s a five-letter loamy deposit?”

The bartender shrugs. “Something that calls for Imodium?”

She frowns. “The New York Times crossword’s too classy for that.”

“Loess,” I say, climbing onto a stool.

“Less what?” she asks, turning to me.

“No, loess. L-O-E-S-S. It’s a kind of sediment made by layers of silt that the wind’s blown into ridges or dunes.” I point to her newspaper. “That’s your answer.”

She writes it in, in pen. “You happen to know six across? ‘London streetcars’?”

“Sorry.” I shake my head. “I don’t know trivia. Just a little geology.”

“What can I get you?” the bartender asks, setting a napkin in front of me.