Jess gave Clara her bag and placed a hand on her shoulder, creating the slightest window of possibility that things were salvageable. “What you’re going through—” she started. And then three words that would hurt more than anything else did: “I can’t imagine.”
And maybe if Jess hadn’t articulated the horrible truth of it, her own failure of imagination, of empathy, the distance between them might not have widened so impassably. Perhaps Clara could somehow have found a way to be generous, reaching for Jess’s hand, pulling it even closer. Somewhere there was an alternate universe in which Clara could find enough room in her heart to answer, “You have nothing to feel bad about. All this, you deserve to have it. I want it for you.” But it wouldn’t be this universe. Because she couldn’t. She didn’t. Jess would have to live without this one thing.
A SPELL FALLS OVER THE CASTLE
2010–2014
Once upon a time, there were two women who were both with child, and then the first woman’s baby died, and the second one’s baby didn’t, and the second woman had no choice but to carry on, leaving her oldest friend broken and grieving behind her, without even a trail of breadcrumbs or shiny pebbles allowing the possibility that they could come together again.
Jess wished she could take it back. That fateful dinner in the tiny booth, whatever the words were that had sent Clara spinning, and everything she’d done before that, which she’d imagined was benevolence, sealing their collective fates. Getting pregnant just because she could, which turned out to be reckless, a disaster. Jess had convinced herself that everything would work out, because for her it tended to, and therefore that it wouldhave towork out if she and Clara were pregnant together, because surely no destiny could be so cruel…
She’d gone about it so clumsily, awkward and desperate, because the stakes seemed so high, and they really were, as the circumstances of their rift would attest to, dramatic and devastating. Clara had whirled around on that street corner, charging out of her life forever, and even if Jess had beenwilling to humiliate herself in such a fashion, she couldn’t have kept running after her. She had finally reached her limit. Stranded on that corner, so enormously pregnant, struggling to catch her breath, creating a spectacle, people stopping to ask if she needed help, which meant she must have really looked like she was in trouble, because this was a city where people didn’t talk to strangers.
A man had helped her call a taxi, because her hands were shaking so much that she couldn’t work her phone, and someone else had offered an energy bar, which she accepted, because she realized she was ravenous—she’d been too nervous at dinner to eat anything, and maybe something was off with her blood sugar, or her iron.
No one wrote self-help guides to processing the grief of losing your best friend. Jess considered this a few days later as she stood in the bookstore on her lunch break, perusing an entire shelf of titles about toilet training. Life goes on. The next aisle over were books about marriage, widowhood, divorce, raising teen girls, and postpartum depression, which Adam thought she should also pick up, even though the baby wasn’t born yet.
“You seem so sad,” he said.
“Of course I’m sad,” said Jess, but he didn’t understand, not really.
“You’ve still got me,” he said, kissing her hair, holding her as she cried, and she cried a lot, her emotions all turbocharged.Hormonal. And Jess hated that, how easy it was to explain away, and therefore dismiss, the weight of her loss, of her grief. Losing Clara was not as immediately consequential as losing her partner, it was true, but this was an essential, albeit invisible, wound, distorting Jess’s sense of herself, of who she was in the world.
She was powerless to stop the grief. Clara had gone, disappeared. She’d scrubbed her social media (not that she’d ever had much of a presence there). Jess’s texts remained unread, and when Jess called, she didn’t answer.
“Send an email?” Adam suggested. “You could write her a letter and buy an actual stamp?” He really thought the whole thing would blow over.
But then Miles was born, two weeks early, and he had a heart murmur, which would turn out to be fine, but for a while things were scary, and not long after, Jess was diagnosed with postpartum anxiety, which she realized she’d been living with ever since Bella was born, a very long time. The drugs brought relief, finally, and by the time her brain was sorted out, the matter with Clara had simply been added to a never-ending list of things to do, right after finally putting away all the laundry, which was never going to happen. Filed away under the subheading That Very Bad Time.
Months went by, a blur with two kids under two, and then the months turned into four whole years. Sometimes Jess felt as though she was barely holding on as the children grew. And there were days and weeks when she didn’t think of Clara at all because her life was so incredibly full, if often overwhelming. Perhaps it was only natural, Jess considered, on the occasions when Clara came to mind, that they’d drifted apart. Perhaps the mistake had been trying to hold on for so long.
Eventually, as she started to emerge from the storm that had taken hold of her, once she’d processed the grief, once she had found a therapist who managed to unlock so many of the mysteries of her mind, Jess was able to take responsibility for her part in what had happened, to understand how insensitive she’d been. One day while cleaning out thechildren’s bookshelves, she came across the copy ofOutside Over Therethat Clara had given Bella for her first birthday. Such a weird and creepy story, the kind of gift that no one but Clara would have given. Jess reread the loving inscription, “To Arabella, for the rest of your life…,” and she remembered how much Clara had loved Bella (Oh my god, Jess. Look what you made), realizing for the first time how hurt she must have been to cast that love away. So absorbed in her own life, her own storm, Jess had been oblivious to everything Clara was going through, how far apart their stories were, how fraught their common ground.
And then one day a package arrived on her doorstep.
AVOCADO STONES
2010–2015
Nick and Clara moved out of their sublet into an apartment of their own, the ground floor of a Victorian that had a backyard with an apple tree and big patio doors through which the sun poured in. In the doorway of the second bedroom was a line marked in increments with pencil, representing a child’s growth, inching halfway up the frame. Clara, who wouldn’t let Nick paint over it, would sit on the floor staring at the marks, imagining the force that must have driven that kind of growth. Somehow the child whose height had been measured in the doorway became her ghost child, the baby she’d miscarried, but she could see far into his future now. He was a boy with freckles, a bowl haircut, and gaps in his teeth. (The previous March, Jess—whose approach to Facebook privacy settings was pretty slapdash—had given birth to a son.)
Clara started making bread, preserving pickles and drying herbs for tea, all the things she hadn’t felt comfortable doing in the condo, that cold and sterile space that was never really theirs. When the weather was warm, she’d go into the backyard and lie in the sun, her skin absorbing the heat from the concrete patio slabs, a hat over her face because the sunhurt her eyes, and she didn’t care for sunscreen. She wanted goodness and she wanted light, vitamin D. She imagined the sun was an elixir. She started eating avocados by the crateful, having read that they had magic properties for fertility, perhaps suggested by their egg shape. Every time she cut into one and removed the stone, she’d clutch it in her hand and make a wish: “I want to have a baby.” As if magic was all it would take.
But there was also science, which was another kind of magic—magic that ended up costing all their savings, the money they’d been sitting on when they came across the sea. “It will all be worth it,” they kept telling themselves as the bills mounted. As one cycle failed and then another, the seasons passing until, finally, they had to wonder when they’d stop.
Every morning before work, Clara travelled to a fertility clinic downtown (the streetcar passed right by the library where Jess worked) to be examined by a nurse named Donna, whose perkiness seemed at first insufferable but then a promise, and soon Clara was in love with her and had placed her heart in Donna’s hands. At the clinic, Donna and her colleagues would take Clara’s temperature, examine her cervix, perform ultrasounds, and help track her weird menstrual cycle. When Clara’s eggs were ripe, they were injected with Nick’s sperm, which he’d be summoned via text to deliver. Nick and Clara didn’t talk about any of this at home. If they tried to, he’d end up confessing his fears that she was unhealthily obsessed with becoming pregnant, which would only make her angry. So she did her thing and left him alone to do his, both of them working toward the same imagined outcome.
They felt oddly estranged through all this, though they were often together, usually holding hands, but biologyemphasized their separation. And while it might have helped to make love, to provide some kind of connection, even ceremony, to the whole endeavour, Nick had been restricted from ejaculating outside of a schedule. He didn’t complain about this, as his remarkable sexual appetite had dissipated somewhat when he clued in that the only reason Clara was interested in having sex at all was for the purpose of procreation. And when she said she didn’t understand what difference it made, Nick protested that it made a big difference. They were both aware that this was a messed-up dynamic, but they crossed their fingers and hoped it was something they could work through once Clara finally became pregnant. Getting pregnant, Clara was sure, would be the answer to everything.
Before, she and Nick used to imagine what their child would be like. Boy or girl, his dark hair or her blond? Definitely crooked teeth, short-sighted. Clara thought a scattering of freckles. Their baby would be chubby, with fat rolls on its thighs, a pokey belly. She’d seen baby pictures of Nick’s son once upon a time and wondered if they were a clue. Gummy grins. Dimpled wrists. But now she didn’t care what the baby looked like. It didn’t matter.
The baby, to Clara, was mostly abstract now, an idea. Sometimes at the clinic, she forgot that a baby was even a possible outcome, that she was undergoing all these curious procedures and rituals as a means to an end. All the waiting and wishing and hoping had simply become the framework of her existence. Without all this longing, she wondered sometimes—by then it had been going on so long that she wore it like an itchy sweater—who would she even be?
“A baby isn’t everything,” Nick would sometimes dare to remind her. At one point they had decided to forgo thetrying, to take a break, for a whole year. It was a relief, but it also made her despairing. Clara had felt so lost.
“Don’t you think we could have a good life regardless?” Nick asked, but Clara refused to give in, as though it were a matter of will. He’d promised her they’d have a baby and she believed in that promise, even if Nick was willing to let it go because he feared it might destroy her. She really was obsessed. Even during the months when Clara wasn’t frequenting the clinic, she clutched her avocado stones. She ordered a necklace online that represented Heqet, the frog-headed goddess of fertility and childbirth. “Did you know,” she said to Nick, “that thousands of years ago Egyptian women wore amulets just like this?” And if it was good enough for them, she would take it.
It was unsurprising that it wasn’t only the Grimms who had the frog fetish. Frogs were archetypal. (At times like this, Clara could hear Jess’s voice in her head. Infertility in “Sleeping Beauty,” that poor woman in the bathtub. Clara was realizing that everything she ever needed to know had been right there in front of her all along, but she just wasn’t paying attention.) Maybe it was obvious: the connection between sperm and tadpoles? Or was it the symbolism of any animal who could have as many babies as that?
