Jodi Picoult - Sing You Home

Maybe I just needed to get this over with.

I turned on the television. There was already a video playing. I watched for a moment, and then wondered if the person waiting on the other side of the trapdoor for the sample was listening.

It was taking forever.

In the end, I closed my eyes, and I pictured Zoe.

Zoe, before we’d started talking about a family. Like the time we’d gone camping off the grid in the White Mountains, and I woke up to find her sitting on a boulder playing a flute, wearing absolutely nothing.

Afterward, I stared at the sample in the cup. No wonder we couldn’t get pregnant; there was hardly anything there, at least in terms of volume. I wrote my name and the time on the label. I slipped the sample into the drop-off zone and closed the door, wondering if I should knock or yell or somehow let the technician know that it was ready and waiting.

I decided they’d figure it out, and I washed my hands and hurried into the hallway. The receptionist smiled at me as I left. “Thanks for coming,” she said.

Seriously? Shouldn’t that phrase be banned from use at an IVF clinic?

As I walked to my car, I was already thinking of how I’d tell Zoe what the receptionist had said. How we’d laugh.

When I wake up, I am lying on a pillow covered in purple fur, on the floor of a bedroom I do not recognize. Gradually, ignoring the sledgehammer at my temple, I sit up and see a bare foot, flame red polish. My tongue feels like it’s carpeted.

Staggering upright, I look down at the woman. It takes me a full minute to remember her name. I can’t really recall how we got here, but I do have an image of another bar, after Quasimodo’s, and maybe even another after that. I can taste tequila, and shame.

Sally is snoring like a longshoreman-the only saving grace. The last thing I want to do is have a conversation with her. I tiptoe out of the room, holding my pants and my shirt and my shoes in a ball at my groin. Did I drive here last night? I hope like hell I didn’t. But God only knows where I left my car.

Bathroom. I’ll go to the bathroom, and then I’ll sneak out of here. I’ll go home and pretend this never happened.

I pee and then wash up, dunking my head under the faucet and scrubbing my hair dry with a pink hand towel. My gaze falls to the counter, to a foil snake of condoms. Oh, thank God. Thank God I didn’t make that mistake, too.

Get a grip on yourself, Max, I say silently.

You’ve been here before, and you don’t want to go back.

Everyone messes up from time to time. Maybe I’ve had a few more instances than others, but that doesn’t mean that I’m down for the count. This wasn’t falling off the wagon. It was just… a speed bump.

I open the bathroom door to find a toddler sucking his thumb and staring up at me, with his older sister-a teenager-standing just behind him. “Who the fuck are you ?” she asks.

I don’t answer. I run past them, out the front door, down the driveway that does not have my car in it. I run all the way out of this suburban cul-de-sac in my boxers. At the juncture of the state highway, I throw on my clothes and dig in my pocket for my cell phone, but the battery’s dead. I keep running, certain that Sally and her children are going to chase me down in the minivan that was in the driveway. I don’t stop until I see a strip mall. All I need is a phone; I’ll call a taxi service to get me back to Quasimodo’s to pick up my car (which is, I hope, where I left it) and then I’ll take refuge at Reid’s house.

It’s not really my fault that the first place I find open is a restaurant whose proprietor is doing inventory on a Saturday morning. That the guy shakes his head when I ask to borrow the phone, and says I look like I’ve had a rough night. That he offers me, on the house, a drink.

Normally, we would have been home. After all, the progesterone shot had to be given between 7:00 and 7:15 each night-and it was easy enough to plan our evenings around that, since we didn’t have any spending money to go to a movie or out to dinner anyway. But Zoe had been invited to the wedding of two seniors who’d met in one of her group therapy classes at a nursing home. “If it wasn’t for me,” she’d said, “there wouldn’t even be a wedding.”

So I came home from work and showered and put on a tie, and we drove to the nursing home. In her purse, Zoe had the progesterone, alcohol wipes, and syringes. We watched Sadie and Clark, with their combined age of 184, get united in holy matrimony. And then we ate creamed beef and Jell-O-the food had to be denture-friendly-and watched the residents who were still mobile dance to big band records.

The happy newlyweds fed each other cake. Leaning toward Zoe, I whispered, “I give this marriage ten years, tops.”

Zoe laughed. “Watch it, buster. That could be us one day.” Then her watch beeped, and she looked at the time. “Oh,” she said. “It’s seven.” I followed her down the hall to the bathrooms.

There were two, one for men and one for women, each big enough to accommodate a wheelchair-or a husband who had to give his wife a progesterone shot. The women’s room was locked, so we ducked into the men’s instead. Zoe hiked up her skirt.

There was a bull’s-eye on the upper part of her butt, drawn in Sharpie marker. Every day for the past week, since we began these shots, I’d redrawn the circle after her shower. I didn’t want to hurt her by sticking the needle somewhere more painful than it had to be.

I had believed there was nothing worse than giving Zoe shots in her belly-mixing up the powder and the water and pinching the skin to inject the Repronex; dialing the dose on the handy-dandy syringe-pen that contained the Follistim. The needles were tiny and she swore they didn’t hurt, even though they left bruises on her abdomen-so many that sometimes it was hard to find a fresh spot for the next shot.

But the progesterone was different.

First, the needle was bigger. Second, the medicine was in oil, and just looked thicker and creepier. Third, we’d have to do it every night for thirteen weeks.

Zoe took out the alcohol swabs and a vial. I swiped the top of the vial clean, and then rubbed the center of the bull’s-eye on her bottom. “Are you going to be okay standing up?” I asked. Usually, she was lying on our bed.

“Just get it over with,” Zoe said.

Quickly I screwed the big needle onto the syringe and withdrew the dosage from the vial. It was tricky, because of the oil-sort of like sucking molasses through a straw. I waited till the fluid was a bit past the number on the syringe and then pushed on the plunger, to get it just right.

Then I twisted off the needle and attached a new one we’d use for the injection. It wasn’t as wide a bore, but it was equally nasty-a good two inches had to get jabbed into Zoe intramuscularly. “Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath, even though it was Zoe having the shot.

“Wait!” she cried out. She twisted toward me. “You didn’t say it.”

We had a routine. “I wish I could do this for you,” I told her, every night.

She nodded, and braced her hands against the wall.

No one ever tells you how resilient skin is. It’s meant to be tough, which is why it takes a little leap of courage to jam a syringe through it. But it was worse for Zoe than for me, so I kept my hands from shaking (a real problem at first) and plunged the needle into the center of the bull’s-eye. I made sure there was no blood mixing into the medication, and then came the hard part. Can you imagine the force it takes to push oil into the human body? I swear, no matter how many times I did this to my wife (and I did look at it that way-as something I did to her), I could feel every bit of resistance that her flesh and blood put up against the progesterone.