“Right-o, well, you’re only young anyway. Plenty of time. Don’t leave it too late, though, ha ha.” The neighbours would walk away with a cheery wave.
However, when months of these exchanges turned to years, and our ‘hopefully soon’ failed to turn to ‘very soon’, nobody knew what to talk to us about anymore. And so they didn’t. Which should have been a relief but wasn’t.
In the earlier stages of our relationship, Petr and I agreed that we would rather buy a house and start a family young and then get married once we were more secure financially. It was an unspoken understanding between us that he would propose once I got pregnant with our first child, to demonstrate his commitment to me solidly. Once it became clear that conceiving would be near impossible for me, I could not help but feel as if he were withholding the proposal from me until I deserved it by finally fulfilling my end of the bargain. He could have asked me to marry him at any point during the fertility treatments. He must have known that I would have welcomed the assurance of such a gesture. And yet he chose not to, which may have been in accordance with our prior agreement, but it still made me suspect that he did not consider me worth marrying until he was sure I could give him at least one child.
We had gone to Costa Rica once, and while trekking through the treetops of the Monteverde cloud forest, our guide told us that there were fly maggots whose larvae sometimes got into the bloodstream of a tarantula. They would keep devouring thespider from the inside for years before it would finally perish. A prolonged, gruesome death. Still, few people could truly sympathise with a large, hairy, venomous spider. Yet Icould, because Iwasthe tarantula. My searing envy, my outrage at the unfairness of it, all the hate I felt without being able to direct it at anyone but my own body, all of it was gradually eating me up from the inside. It felt as if I were perilously close to becoming so hollow that I would collapse onto myself, unable to continue living.
“Renata, was that the doctor you spoke to?”
Petr walked up to me, his steps soft on the wood decor vinyl we had so carefully selected together.
“Yes.” I sighed and nodded, clenching my jaw muscles to prevent my lips from quivering. “The bloods confirmed it. No luck this time either.”
Petr nodded almost imperceptibly, not looking at me. His mouth was but a thin line in his hard-set expression.
“It was strange, though. I didn’t speak to our doctor, but to a different one. Apparently, ours is on long-term sick leave. Naturally, he wouldn’t tell me why, but it sounded serious.”
Still not meeting my eye, Petr toyed with the cream-coloured curtain, kneading the coarse fabric with his thinly elegant fingers.
“Oh dear, that’s not good,” he said with poorly concealed indifference.
“No,” I agreed before forcing myself to broach a topic I knew he would care about much more. “This new doctor said that he will take our case for the time being.”
“Right.”
Petr was gazing from the window at our next-door neighbour teaching his little daughter how to ride a bicycle. The longing in his eyes was like a corkscrew jammed into my heart, twisted deeper and deeper by my twin feelings of shame and guilt.
“So, what did he say we should do now?” Petr asked finally.
“He suggested that we take a break for at least one cycle to let my body recover from all the hormones,” I answered, my tone carefully measured. “He said that the four embryos we have used so far were of excellent quality and had every chance of success. That they surely would have all led to healthy pregnancies if only the uterine environment were at least somewhat suitable. But since they all failed to implant, it is unlikely that we will get a different result from any future transfers. He advised us to take a breath and to truly consider what we want to do next. Before we spend more money on what would likely only lead to further heartbreak.”
“He wants us to give up?”
Petr’s voice was an octave higher with agitation. He finally looked at me from beneath his dark, steep-arch eyebrows.
“No.” I shook my head. “No, he said explicitly that we can try again if we wish to. He only wanted to make sure we understood what our chances were. And he suggested that we talk about whether we really want another attempt when it’s so likely to be unsuccessful.”
“Of course we want another attempt,” Petr boomed indignantly. “What else can we do?”
Before I could respond, our discussion was interrupted by a scream coming from the street beneath our window. I quickly located its source. Two neighbourhood boys got into a fight, which seemed disproportionately violent to their tender young age. The dad of one of them struggled to pull them apart. There was blood on the face of the smaller ginger-haired boy. The interfering father struggled to hold his son in place, hands firmly squeezed around nimble shoulders. The curly boy shouted from the top of his lungs, straining to break free. His little, round face was contorted with rage.
I stifled a remark about the silver linings of involuntary childlessness, judging that Petr would not have appreciated it given the circumstances.
Several hours later, we were back in our bedroom, lying next to each other, both immersed in our pre-sleep habit, which meant that I was reading while Petr was scrolling through his phone.
“Let’s go on a holiday,” I spoke into the silence punctuated only by the occasional turning of pages. “We finally have the time since we are not doing any treatment this month.”
Petr took off the glasses he only wore at home and carefully placed them on the bedside table along with his mobile phone. His hair was still wet from his shower and smelled woodsy with a pleasant undertone of ginger from the shampoo he used.
“Change of scenery would be good for us,” I continued. “Maybe it will give us more of a perspective. Allow us to really think and talk about what to do next.”
Petr made a noncommittal sound in his throat. Which could have meant that he was considering it. Or that he was against it and was only considering how to tell me so.
“Please?”
“Alright.” To my surprise, he agreed. “I think that’s a good idea. But it will have to be Europe and not anywhere further; I can’t take more than a week off work.”
“Oh? Can we really go?” I caught myself beaming at him excitedly.
