Known it was coming? How? Even I hadn’t known it was coming. I studied his face as he said, “Parker, no father could have wished for a better man for his daughter. You stood by her faithfully in the worst of the worst, and I know firsthand what kind of fortitude that takes. So I wish you and your new gal well. I want you to find happiness.”
Ohhhh… I almost laughed, but I cleared my throat instead. “Well, actually, um, no, sir. That’s not what I’m talking about, exactly.”
“Oh. Well, then just keep that talk in your back pocket for when the time comes.”
I smiled. “I’m not sure that time will ever come, but I appreciate it. But this is about something… different.”
He raised his eyebrow at me. “Will I need scotch?”
It was barely nine a.m., but, even so, I nodded.
He nodded, too, but didn’t move.
“Greer and I had embryos frozen before her treatments,” I started. “We had planned on having children together once she got well, but then…” I paused, looking down at my hands, the freshness of my pain this morning catching me off guard. I took a deep breath, not bothering to finish the sentence, because if anyone knew that Greer hadn’t gotten better, it was her own father. “I have these pieces of her just sitting in a freezer, and I thought I might try to have one of them.”
He looked positively confounded. “You’ve lost me, son.”
“Well, I would get a surrogate. And then I’d raise the baby…”
He shook his head. “You mean to tell me that you are planning on having my late daughter’s child, your child, with a surrogate?”
This was not going as well as the proposal chat.
I shrugged. “Well, I’m thinking about it.” I nearly gulped. “Yes, sir.”
That big bear of a man got up from his side of the desk. I got up, too, reflexively, defensively. He lunged at me, hugging me so tightly I thought I was going to lose feeling in my middle. He pulled back and wiped tears from his eyes, which I had seen him do only twice before. He grabbed me by the shoulders and said, “A grandchild would be just the thing.”
I realized that mine wasn’t the only life that had all but ended when Greer went. George’s had, too. He needed me. I needed him. And he was right: a grandchild would be just the thing.
AmeliaWORST-CASE SCENARIO
LYING ON A PAPER-COVERED TABLEin Dr. Salter’s tiny, old-fashioned Cape Carolina doctor’s office, eyes closed to block out the glare of the inhospitable fluorescent lights, waiting for the procedure that would change my life, I felt, for the first time in weeks, completely calm. We were here. This was happening. It was real. I sensed eyes on me, and I opened mine, realizing that it was Parker’s gaze I felt. When I smiled at him, he kissed my hand that he was holding in both of his. That was it, I realized. His being there was why I felt so calm.
Channeling my inner Greer, I had made Dr. Salter—poor Dr. Salter—take me into the lab before the implantation to see the embryos, which had been shipped to NC from Palm Beach for the occasion. We were implanting the two most viable ones: the teddy bear and the flower, as Greer had called them. They really did look uncannily like their namesakes.
“Hi, babies,” I had said to the two of them—a boy and a girl. “I’m Amelia, and I am going to be growing you for a while until you’re big and strong enough to come out and play. I have known your daddy, Parker, for a really, really long time, and I think he is going to be the best father in world. You two are extremely lucky babies.” I paused. “So get ready to get sticky and stay inside me for the next nine months—or a little longer if you want.” I touched my finger to the slide and whispered, “This is really important to a lot of people.”
So, yeah, it’s weird to talk to cells. But I wanted them to know that I was in this for the long haul.
I realized on the drive home how incredibly simple it had all been. All this buildup, all this worry. And, in a matter of minutes, it was over. It had happened. The actual process had involved little more than a tiny catheter and had been pretty darn easy. The mild sedative probably helped.
As Parker drove, unable to wipe the smile off his face, I, still blurry from the drugs, finally took a moment to reflect on all that had transpired the past couple of months.
While Parker and I were working out the details of this new arrangement—all while cohabiting at the octagon-shaped guest house on the Thaysdens’ property—my childhood friends still thought I was going to change my mind. They figured that before Parker and I could get our IVF scheduled and legal paperwork signed I would go starry-eyed for some man. They kept shoving eligible bachelors in my face, and they were allfine. A couple were actually really great. But what they didn’t understand was that it wasn’t the men I didn’t like.
All marriage was, it seemed to me, was one big competition. Who had a nicer car, who had a better house, who was more in love, who had better jobs, made more money, went on better vacations. I didn’t think social media had helped things much, but I thought the people who blamed it all on Instagram were wrong. The world had been this way for as long as I had been in it.
I had promised myself that I wouldn’t get caught up in the whirlwind when Thad and I got married. But I did. I couldn’t help it. I honestly did love him, so much. So why I felt the need to have everyone see and comment on that, I’m not sure. How I felt in my heart should have been enough for me. But when I started planning dinner dates based on which restaurants were the coolest and vacations based on what other people would think, not what I really wanted to do, I realized that I had become a person I never wanted to be. And then he left me for Chase, and, well, if you want to talk about losing the game, that was the way to do it. I had lost, once and for all.
The only way to truly stay out of the game, I thought, was to remove myself from it altogether. Now, when my friends talked about their awesome lives, I was sort of immune to it, like a spinster aunt. No one was in competition with me. At least, that’s how it felt, already. I could ooh and aah over their baby pictures and go to their showers and listen attentively about their latest trips.
I was competitive by nature. In sports, in life. And now I was out of the game, I thought again, as Parker helped me up the steps and into my bed at the Thaysdens’ little house. Theoctagon house was nothing if not charming. With the tall, angular ceilings and leaf fans, I felt like I was somewhere in the Bahamas, not Cape Carolina. But when I looked out my window, I remembered because I could see the tree. And the tree was decidedly Cape Carolina. Live oaks grew all around our houses, with gnarled branches that extended up and out and sideways. They were amazing to climb. When I was in my prime tree-climbing years at seven, Parker was only four, but around our neighborhood, four was definitely old enough to be climbing trees. Only, I don’t know why or how, but Parker just couldn’t get the hang of it. He could take on bigger kids at basketball, hang in backyard baseball, and run with a wild abandon, but the kid couldn’t climb trees. His shoes would slip if he had them on, but he’d get splinters if he was barefoot. And even when I hoisted him up, he’d only make it to the lowest branch. Then I’d scurry up to the top, and he’d look up at me and cry and cry.
So I went out to Daddy’s workshop one day and got a bunch of boards and nails and hammered those scrap pieces one by one, climbing as I went. I knew I’d be in trouble later. Mom would be mad that I might have hurt the tree, and Daddy would be mad I’d taken wood without his permission. But Parker wouldn’t have to cry over tree climbing anymore, so that would make it worth it. Sure enough, it worked. Parker climbed that tree for the very first time like it was nothing.
Light filled his eyes that day, like it did now, as he handed me a glass of water, sat down beside me, and said, “How are you feeling?”
I grinned up at him. “I feel great.” I was a little crampy and a little nervous, but much calmer than I had felt before the in vitro. The “before” is so often the hardest part—that was definitely true of this process. I was lucky because I had heard and read a million times that egg retrieval was by far the hardest part of IVF, and Greer had taken one for the team on that one. We’d done a test implantation the month before so that the doctor could see exactly where the embryo was likely to implant. I’d taken a few medications to increase the chances of implantation, and the usual estradiol and progesterone I took each month anyway had been adjusted a little. But, overall, it had been pretty easy.
