I wanted an old house, something with history. Few of the original homes from the ’20s are still standing, though—all tiny bungalows. We settled on a four-bedroom Spanish revival built in the ’90s when the canals were refurbished. As a jeweler, I specialize in antique styles, everything from Byzantine to art deco. Although I’ve acquiesced to CAD and 3D printing, I do all the fabrication and stone setting myself. I like the traditional ways of crafting and incorporate as much of it into my work as possible. Our home is like my jewelry, new disguised as old. Just like that, we became one of the couples we used to watch, an assertion that it was attainable—the love, the life, the house along the canals.
Everything shifted when I got pregnant with Jasper. I felt self-conscious in my swollen body, exposed in my home. Suddenly, the tourists who paced the canals were no longer aspirational observers but voyeurs. The constant sirens that blared were no longer white noise I could ignore, the lights of the police helicopters that circled no longer fireflies pocking the sky, the private security cars that patrolled each night no longer a means of protection. I tried closing the blinds, something almost no one does along the canals, but I could still see strangers’ shadows as they walked by, could still hear the ambulance sirens. It felt like I was retreating, hiding from my own life.
Three months before Jasper was born, I asked Gabe if he thought we should move. Together we laid out the pros and cons of uprooting our life in my third trimester. The idea alone felt overwhelming. We agreed to table it for six months until we had a handle on parenthood. Now that this is Jasper’s home, the idea of moving is inconceivable. He loves spotting ducks when they land on the water, waving to tourists, knowing that a left out of our gate means a trip to the playground and a right means Café Collage. The sirens still keep me up at night. The tourists who stare at our house for too long make me uneasy. But Gabe reassures me that they’re an asset, not a threat. Potential witnesses, not perpetrators.
I open the gate to our garden and let Jasper into the yard. He bolts toward the door as I fold his stroller and haul it to the house. We can’t leave it on the patio, because despite the near-constant crowds, our neighborhood is a target for petty thievery.
Although it’s almost five, the June Gloom only burned off an hour ago, and the sky is still brightening with the last hours of day. A few tourists loiter along the canals. Two young women in floral maxi dresses stop outside our garden to snap a selfie. Jasper hardly registers them as he plays in the gated area in our living room while I monitor him from the stove in the kitchen space of our open floor plan, browning chicken for dinner. I’m a little over thirty-six weeks pregnant, and despite how uncomfortable I may look, I feel great. Sure, my tailbone throbs and my ankles have ballooned, but I still have energy and am eager to use it, particularly since I’m not working. I can’t be around the chemicals necessary for fabricating and don’t trust anyone else to make my pieces. The custom projects that constitute the bulk of my work have dried up. Engagements wait for no jeweler. Birthdays and anniversaries don’t either. Sketches for earrings and necklaces I may someday craft have piled up, tempering any impulse to design more consistently. This leaves me idle. I’m not good at being idle—it’s why I work with my hands—so I focus my energies on cooking dinner each night.
I don’t realize Gabe’s home until he slips his arm around my waist.
“Is that coq au vin?” he whispers into my ear.
I spin to kiss him more urgently than the moment calls for. For the first seventeen weeks of this pregnancy, I was too nauseated to believe I’d ever, in my entire life, want to have sex again. Recently, I find myself wanting it, wanting him. I can sense him wanting me too. Then the baby will roll or kick or hiccup, causing us both to giggle and diffusing the momentary lust. Our connection has already shifted with Jasper, less about us as a couple and more about us as a family. As we make room for this girl, I worry we’ll lose even more of the space we’ve reserved for us as lovers. Neither of us has a template of how to do this, the committed relationship or the involved parenthood, let alone both at once.
Gabe kisses me back, his mouth half open, the tip of his tongue probing mine. Suddenly, Jasper laughs. My eyes flit sideways to find our son standing at the gate, eager to be let out.
“Hey, buddy.” Gabe pecks me on the nose before scooting around to release our son. Outside, the sky is darkening, and a man walking a bike with an orange child seat fastened to the front glances into our living room before scuttling by. The near-constant construction has quieted. It’s just the ducks and the sirens greeting the night.
“How was your day?” I ask Gabe once we’re seated at the table and Jasper’s momentarily invested in his dinner. Gabe never divulges much about his work. His patients are famous or wealthy enough to seem famous, or otherwise private people. Mine are, too, though no one makes you sign an NDA to design an engagement ring. Instead, they flaunt it, which attracts me more clients. In fertility, everything is shrouded in secrecy. There’s nothing shameful about fertility problems. I had my own challenges with Jasper. Yet we’re taught to view it as a personal failure when we can’t get pregnant or can’t stay pregnant, a shortcoming that creates more silence. More shame. This stigma frustrates Gabe, but he honors his clients’ choices.
“Best part of my day’s just starting.” He reaches for my hand and brings it to his lips.
Gabe’s phone vibrates on the kitchen peninsula. He glances at it without moving to answer.
Since Gabe can’t tell me about his patients, he offers granular details on the soap opera unfolding with his staff. Cynthia, his head nurse, is constantly having problems with Stacey and Michelle, the receptionists: disorganized records, rotten food in the communal fridge, longer breaks than sanctioned. When he decided to open his own clinic, Gabe didn’t anticipate having to manage a team. This has always struck me as naive, part of why I’m a one-woman shop. Gabe gets tunnel vision when he sets his mind on a goal.
As he begins today’s installment of the Cynthia show, his phone continues to buzz.
“Maybe you should get that,” I suggest.
Gabe cuts a bite of chicken. “Whoever it is can wait.”
It’s sweet that Gabe tries to preserve this time. We both know, though, if someone’s calling so insistently, it can’t wait.
His phone buzzes again, and I nod to him to get it. He mouths “Sorry” and trots upstairs to answer the call.
“Aram, slow down.” Above us, the door to our office taps shut.
Aram is Gabe’s embryologist. The qualities that make him unparalleled at his job—diligence, fastidiousness, attention to detail—make him a headache to work with. One-person shop. It’s really the only way to go, although it’s impossible in Gabe’s world. You need multiple people to harvest and implant eggs, which means multiple headaches, too many nighttime calls. I play peekaboo with Jasper as we wait for Gabe to return, hiding my face behind my linen napkin, then fanning it away. He guffaws over a mouthful of broccoli before waving exaggeratedly at one of the guys who lives next door to us in the prayer-flag-adorned compound, walking with his surfboard tucked under his arm. The neighbor nods back. I smile even though we’ll never engage with him beyond these small moments. Still, we’re bonded in this strange life.
“Sorry,” Gabe says as he slips back into his chair.
“Everything all right?” I don’t expect an answer.
“Aram’s still on edge about the break-in.” Gabe digs into his food, immune to his embryologist’s nerves. “He’s overreacting.”
The break-in happened last week, when a drill to the dead bolt burst open the front door to his clinic. While that was the first time his office had been broken into, it’s been vandalized before, with anti-IVF messages graffitied across the door. This time, Gabe thinks it was paparazzi, not pro-lifers, seeking dirt on one of his clients. They didn’t find what they were searching for before the police arrived. For Gabe, it’s comforting to know how quickly the security system worked.
“Tell me about your day,” Gabe says instead.
“Let’s see, we stopped at Busy Bee for a class with Claire and Summer. Jasper’s really mastered his beep-beep-beep rendition in ‘Wheels on the Bus.’”
“Beep, beep, beep,” Jasper shouts. Gabe laughs. It’s genuine if overgenerous.
As I continue to chronicle our day, I realize how vapid it sounds. And indulgent. It’s not that I don’t like mommy-and-me classes or the way Jasper responds to any and all music. I’ll simply never get used to dropping forty dollars for a single session, then another sixty for breakfast with our neighbor Claire and her daughter, Summer, at Great White. Even though we can afford it, when you’ve spent your life counting every dollar, frugality is instilled in you like a sixth sense.
Gabe eats greedily, waiting for me to detail more about our unremarkable day. Jasper’s outburst at the coffee shop and the mysterious Gigi are the most noteworthy things that happened, but Gabe doesn’t need to hear about Jasper’s lowest moment. Before Jasper, Gabe hadn’t spent much time with children. Ironic, given he works in fertility. Although we’re in our thirties—me, mid; him, late—most of our friends are childless. While his sister has three kids, they live in the Bay Area, and we haven’t seen them since we first moved to California, before we had Jasper. We don’t have anyone to ask for advice, anyone to tell us that explosive tantrums are cognitively appropriate for toddlers. Gabe reads too much into Jasper’s mood swings, searching for signs of oversensitivity or behavioral issues, as though an eighteen-month-old should be in control of his emotions. I don’t want Gabe to fret, and in retrospect, today’s episode barely measures on the scale of tantrums. Plus, I’m embarrassed by my response, how quickly I’m prone to tears these days too. I don’t want Gabe to have to worry about me either.
