Jodi Picoult: Sing You Home

“I heard you got hurt.”

“Embarrassing news travels fast. Who called you, anyway?”

“I just think… I mean, we worked so hard to get to this point.” Max stumbles over the words, but I know what he means.

“You heard Dr. Gelman,” I tell him. “We’re in the home stretch.”

It seems ironic that, after all these years of trying, I am the one who is more relaxed about the pregnancy than Max. There were years when I was so superstitious I counted backward from twenty before getting out of bed, or wore the same lucky camisole for a week in an effort to ensure that particular embryo would be the one that actually stuck. But I’ve never made it this far before, where my ankles are blissfully swollen and my joints ache and I cannot see my feet in the shower. I’ve never been so pregnant that someone could plan a baby shower.

“I know we need the money, Zoe, but if your clients are violent-”

“Max. Mr. Docker is catatonic ninety-nine percent of the time, and my burn victims are usually unconscious. Honestly, this was a fluke. I could just as easily get hurt walking across the street.”

“Then don’t cross the road,” Max says. “When are you coming home?”

I’m sure he knows about the baby shower, but I play along. “I have to do an assessment of a new client,” I joke. “Mike Tyson.”

“Very funny. Look, I can’t talk right now-”

“You called me- ”

“Only because I thought you were doing something stupid-”

“Max,” I say, cutting him off. “Let’s not. Let’s just not.” For years, Max and I were told by couples with children how lucky we were; how our relationship had the luxury of being all about us, instead of who was cooking dinner and who was carpooling to Little League. But the flame of romance can be just as effectively doused by dinner conversations that center on estradiol levels and appointment times at the clinic. It is not that Max doesn’t do everything right-from massaging my feet to telling me I look beautiful instead of bloated. It’s that, lately, even when I am pressed up close against him, I feel like I cannot get close enough to touch him, like he is somewhere else. I have told myself that I’m imagining things. That it’s nerves on his part, raging hormones on mine. I just wish I didn’t have to keep making excuses.

Not for the first time, I wish I had a girlfriend to confide in. Someone who would nod and say all the right things when I complained about my husband. But my friendships had dwindled as Max and I began to devote ourselves entirely to combating infertility. Some relationships I’d ended, because I didn’t want to hear a friend talk about her baby’s first words, or go to a couple’s home for dinner and be confronted with sippy cups and Matchbox cars and stuffed bears-details of a life that eluded me. Other relationships had simply fallen by the wayside, since the only person who really could understand the cyclone of emotions involved in IVF was Max. We’d isolated ourselves, because we were the only pair among our married friends who didn’t have kids yet. We’d isolated ourselves, because it hurt less.

I hear him hang up. My mother, I see, has been hanging on every word. “Is everything all right between you two?”

“I thought you were mad at me.”

“I am.”

“Then how come you’re eavesdropping?”

“It’s not eavesdropping if it’s my phone and my kitchen. What’s wrong with Max?”

“Nothing.” I shake my head. “I don’t know.”

She schools her features into an expression of open concern. “Let’s sit down and unpack this feeling together.”

I roll my eyes. “Does that really work with your clients?”

“You’d be surprised. Most people already know the answers to their problems.”

My mother, for the past four months, has reinvented herself as the owner and sole employee of Mama Knows Best Life Coaching. This profession comes on the heels of her earlier incarnations as a Reiki instructor, a stand-up comedienne, and-for one very uncomfortable summer of my adolescence-a door-to-door saleswoman for her entrepreneurial invention: the Banana Sack (a fitted pink neoprene suit that shimmied over the fruit to keep it from going brown too quickly; unfortunately, it was mistaken repeatedly for a sex toy). By comparison, becoming a life coach is fairly tame.

“When I was pregnant with you, your father and I fought so much that one day I left him.”

I stare at her. How is it possible that, in the forty years I’ve been alive, I never knew this? “Seriously?”

She nods. “I packed and told him I was leaving him and I did.”

“Where did you go?”

“To the end of the driveway,” my mother says. “I was nine months pregnant; that was the maximum distance I could waddle without feeling as if my uterus was falling out.”

I wince. “Do you have to be quite so graphic?”

“What would you like me to call it, Zoe? A fetal living room?”

“What happened?”

“The sun went down, and your father came out with a jacket for me. We sat for a few minutes and we went back inside.” She shrugs. “And then you were born, and whatever it was that we’d been arguing about didn’t seem to matter. All I’m saying is that the past is nothing but a springboard for the future.”

I fold my arms. “Have you been sniffing the Windex again?”

“No, it’s my new tagline. Look.” My mother’s fingers fly over the keyboard. The best advice she ever gave me was to take a typing course. I’d fought her furiously. It was in the voc-tech side of my high school and full of kids who were not in my über-academic classes-kids who smoked outside before school, who wore heavy eyeliner and listened to heavier metal. Are you there to judge people or to type? she’d asked me. In the end I was one of three girls who got a blue ribbon from the teacher for mastering seventy-five words per minute. Nowadays I use a keyboard, of course, but every time I type up an assessment for one of my clients, I silently thank my mother for being right.

She brings up her business’s Facebook page. There’s a picture of her on it, and her cheesy tagline. “You would have known that was my new motto if you’d accepted my friend request.”

“Are you seriously going to hold social networking etiquette against me?” I ask.

“All I know is that I carried you for nine months. I fed you, I clothed you, I paid for your college education. Friending me on Facebook seems like a small thing to ask in return.”

“You’re my mother. You don’t have to be my friend.”

She gestures at my belly. “I just hope that she gives you the same heartache you give me.”

“Why do you even have Facebook, anyway?”

“Because it’s good for business.”

She has three clients that I know of-none of whom seem perturbed that my mother has no degree in counseling or consulting or anything else you’d want from a motivational coach. One client is a former stay-at-home mother who wants to rejoin the workforce but has no skills beyond making a mean PB &J sandwich and separating lights from darks. One is a twenty-six-year-old guy who recently found his birth mother but is afraid to make contact with her. And the last is a recovering alcoholic who just likes the stability of a meeting every week.

“A life coach should be on the cutting edge. Hip,” my mother says.

“If you were hip, you wouldn’t use the word hip. You know what I think this is about? The movie we went to last Sunday.”

“I didn’t like it. The book’s ending was better-”

“No, not that. The girl at the ticket booth asked if you were a senior, and you didn’t say another word for the rest of the night.”