“Just ate,” I say, “but keep crushing it.” I flex my bicep at her, she flexes back.
“Honey!” Dave says. He immediately grabs the remote and turns down the TV volume. “How was the water?”
I flop my bag onto the counter and move to fill up a glass with water. “How did you know?”
Dad’s cheeks go wide into a smile. “Just the look,” he says. He takes a big bite of toast. “And also your board was gone.”
Marcella turns around, a spatula in her hand. She’s dressed in white linen pants and a blue-striped button-down. She looks like she just stepped out of a J.Crew catalog.
“Did you see Stone?” she says.
“Yeah.” I gulp down some water. “We ended up going to the Cove for breakfast.” I decide to leave out the part about Bonnie. I don’t want them to ask me how she is. I don’t want to have to tell them.
“I see him out there sometimes when he’s back. Boy can shred. A lot like the old man,” Dave says.
He grabs my mom’s elbow and pulls her toward him. He kisses her, and I look, briefly, away.
“You don’t need to be shredding,” my mom says.
The tension between them about the water hasn’t waned, but it’s also the one area where my dad drew a line that Marcella doesn’t totally cross. He’s yielded to her on most areas of life and family and parenting, but on this one, Dave was the law: His daughter would surf; she would love the water. And he’d be in there with her.
“How is Stone?” Dad asks. “Still in Denver?”
“Boulder. He never got married,” my mom says. “Jeff used to talk to me about it.”
“How could you after this one?” Dad extends his arm toward me.
“Well,” Marcella says. “Of course.”
She looks at me and smiles slightly.
I don’t want to talk about Stone, or Bonnie. And I realize how long it has been since I’ve spoken to my husband.
“I’m gonna head up; I need to do some work and call Leo.”
“Send my love!” Dad says.
I hear Marcella cover a stainless steel pot with a clank.
I go into my bedroom, and before I unplug my phone from in the charger I go to the bathroom. I still have my period, and I’m bleeding this morning in spurts of crimson—a reinvigorated day four. I feel the grief settle around me—both at another failed attempt and at the unknown of the future—our fight, Leo’s absence. But I notice, too, a thread of newfound freedom. Just a whisper, a small taste of it. If we do nothing, there will be nothing, but also: There’s nothing I need to do.
In the beginning, fertility treatment felt like a necessary step, a means to an end. Productive, even. After a year of not getting pregnant, we were doing something to change that. OK, so we have to take Clomid; OK, so we have to do IUI; OK, so we have to do IVF. They were just the steps we had to take to become parents. I never considered the possibility that they wouldn’t work. That nothing we did was going to bring us any closer. That, in fact, every month that went by made the possibility of our success bleaker and bleaker.
I’ve never been pregnant, but I have once seen double lines on a pregnancy test. About a year ago we did an IUI cycle that started as a potential IVF but not enough follicles grew—only one—and we pivoted to IUI. Less invasive but, more importantly, less expensive. I had done a myriad of shots, but we weren’t going to go through the out-of-pocket surgical procedure. And the month wouldn’t be a total waste. I knew it wasn’t going to work, but also—fertility treatment leads to magical thinking. But, maybe, perhaps—everyone had an exception story.
We weren’t supposed to test until day fourteen. Two weeks past procedure. Sometimes the trigger shot took a while to work its way out of your system—a week, ten days, tops. Two weeks was enough time for real pregnancy HCG to grow detectable in the body. Enough time to get a BFP (big fat positive). In the early days, before intervention, I became obsessed with testing. I’d test at day seven, day nine, holding the pink test strips up into the light and squinting. Did I see something? Maybe? No, just “line eyes.” All the terminology poured out of other hopeful women on Reddit. I found myself part of the TTC community, when before I would have cringed at the acronym. That was me, trying to conceive.
Leo quickly told me we had to exhibit some self-restraint. “This is too much of a roller coaster,” he’d say. “We’ll test on day fourteen, until then, we live our lives.”
The day came. I had been feeling unwell the past three days—unwelcome, normally, but in a pretest window, drenched in hope. Every wave of nausea or stuffed-up nose or abdominal twitch made me think maybe—just maybe—our luck was about to change.
I took the tests. Three of them, just to be sure. They were all positive.
I ran into the living room holding them up, screaming for Leo. “Look!” I said. “Do you see that?”
He did.
We cried; we held each other. We made plans to drive out to the beach that night. “We’ll hand them one,” I told Leo. “We’ll wrap it up and hand it to them.”
