“Makes you marvel at the miracle of modern travel. I felt like a child again.”
The coffeepot sputters and gurgles its final stream.
“How was your night?” he asks me.
I didn’t sleep much—tracking his flight, watching for any typeof storm warning—but I don’t want to tell him that. Leo knows me, but he also knows what I tell him. We have been married only three years. There are still things to learn.
“I ordered from Pizzana with Tracy. She left around eleven. Then I did a little work.”
“What did you get?”
“The white pizza. And that chopped salad with the mushrooms.”
Leo hates mushrooms.
“Just remember, if you watchSummer Housewithout me, I’ll get an alert.”
“Not if I stream it from my phone.”
He lowers his voice to a growl. “You wouldn’t dare.”
Leo and I met at the Beach Cove, a private members-only club known for its outdated furniture and WASP culture. Neither one of us belonged—Leo insists they still don’t admit Jewish people—but we were both there for Fourth of July fireworks, invited by two separate people—my friend Tracy and his friend Luke.
The thing I remember about Leo was how out of place he looked. He was dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt, an eyeline grabber among the belted shorts and popped polos. I was surprised they let him in. And I also remember that I was attracted to him immediately. His towering frame (six foot four and two hundred and sixty pounds). His jet-black hair. And his slight English accent. He was born in Boston, raised until ten in London, and then went to boarding school in West Virginia. He’s a nomad, comfortable on the road. And though he’s seven years older than me, there’s something so playful about him you’d swear he was younger. He also looks it.
Pea sneezes in the other room.
“I miss you,” I say.
“Already?”
I take down a mug from the cabinet and pour a cup of coffee. I like it extra hot and black. I hold it between my palms. Outside I see a small bit of light start to creep through the night sky.
“I like it better when you’re here.”
Leo’s tone softens. “I know, baby. Me, too.” He clears his throat. “What time is the clinic?”
“Nine,” I say. I don’t want to tell him about how I needed to go in yesterday, because they weren’t sure of my progesterone levels.
Leo and I have been trying to have a baby since before we were married. We knew we wanted a family, and wanted one together, and after we got serious we started trying right away. Two fertility clinics and two years later we learned the reason it wasn’t happening: premature ovarian failure, which is a fancy way of saying my fertility is about the same as someone a decade older. We started to see Dr. Frankel at Reproductive Los Angeles after we got bad news at California Reproductive Center, hoping that maybe another doctor would give us better news. But we’ve done six IUIs and four egg retrievals, and we’ve never ended up with a single embryo, and I’ve never been pregnant. This month we did another Hail Mary IUI, just because.
“OK. Keep me posted,” he says. I can hear the slight wilt in his voice, the way it flattens out whenever we talk about this.
Leo is as supportive as he can be, but fertility is a language he does not speak. No matter how many times we hear the termslow ovarian reserve, high FSH, low AMH, they are just obscure data points to him. They aren’t real, not exactly. Not the way they are to me.
And he’s tired, I know he is. “How much more of this are we supposed to put ourselves through?” He keeps asking me.
I don’t know how to tell him that for me there is no answer. For me the answer is stillAs much as it takes to get our baby.
“I will,” I say. I want to change the subject. “And then I thought maybe I’d go out to the beach tonight.”
I can hear Leo’s smile through the phone. “They’ll love that.”
Just then I hear a rapping at the door. I startle and some coffee spills. I took over and see him waving through the glass.
“Jesus,” I say.
“What?”
