He doesn’t say anything, just shakes his head.
We both look at the surfboard, abandoned on the deck.
“I’ll get it,” I say. I pick it up and lean it against the far side wall.
“My strong, incredible daughter,” he says. He pulls me toward him, and I feel his shallow sides, the way his body has thinned out. He used to be solid, more than a little round in the middle, but most of it is gone now.
I feel my chest constrict, and the water rise in my throat.
“Honey,” he says. “Come on. Don’t go there. Your old man is fine.” He exhales out a long breath. “But you know no one lives forever.”
“We’re not at forever yet,” I tell him. I lean my head on his shoulder.
“No, we’re not!”
We watch the ocean like that for a moment.
“Surf sucked anyway,” I say, and I feel his body relax against me—this tacit admission that I’m letting this one go.
He squeezes my shoulder.
“What do you say we make pancakes?” he says.
Dad heads inside to the kitchen, and I go upstairs. My hands shake as I unplug my phone and hit Leo’s name. It rings once, twice, three times, and then I’m met with the familiar click of his voicemail. I throw it across the bed, and it lands, gingerly, on a pillow.
My fear transforms, morphs back into anger. Where is my husband?
The memory comes immediately, automatically. In one moment I’m in my childhood bedroom, and in the next I’m back in the worst moment of our marriage. Our final egg retrieval. The last time we did IVF.
Six months ago Leo and I showed up at the surgery center beaten down from the meds but excited. Relentless hope. It was still there. We had done our trigger shot thirty-six hours before, but the timing at the clinic was off and they rushed me into the surgery, afraid I’d ovulate before they could collect the eggs. All I saw was the OR fading to black and then coming to in the recovery room with Leo sitting beside me.
“How did it go?” I asked. “Did we get them?”
We had seen four eggs on our ultrasounds. We were hoping to capture all four. A dismal number for someone my age, but what amounted to a lot for us. We’d never had more than three.
“Dr. Park will be in soon,” Leo said. He stood over me. He put a hand on my head, smoothed some hair down. I had lumbered into the waiting area with an ice pack pressed to my neck. I hadn’t been able to drink anything for eight hours and had a headache from the lack of water. Now, I felt fine.
“What happened?” I asked him.
I saw it on his face—the way he was struggling to pull it together, to keep composed, to keep composed for me.
“Let’s just wait,” he told me.
As it turned out, we didn’t get any.
“There was nothing of quality to retrieve,” Dr. Park said. He was sympathetic, so were the nurses. Two of them came in to tell us better luck next time.
“Let’s not lose hope,” Dr. Park said. “There’s a lot more we can do.”
Leo stood up then. He walked to the corner of the room, where the curtain met the partition, and turned his back to us.
“Sorry,” I whispered.
Dr. Park just nodded. “I’ll let you get some rest.”
He put a hand over mine, gently, and then took it away and was gone. I didn’t blame him. I knew he had another patient going in, another set of eggs to retrieve. It wasn’t his fault we hadn’t gotten any. It wasn’t anyone’s. And if it were someone’s, it was mine.
My eyes followed Leo. “Hello?”
