She laughs. “I’m not advocating gay internment camps. It’s just—well, you know, you grow up Catholic, and it’s kind of nice when you make a joke about the Pope or talk about the Stations of the Cross and you don’t get a blank stare back in return. There’s something really nice about being with yourpeople.”
“Full disclosure,” I say. “I didn’t know the cross had stations.”
“I want my ring back,” she jokes.
We are interrupted by the shriek of a toddler who has run into the breakfast room, nearly crashing into a waitress. His mothers are in hot pursuit. “Travis!” The boy giggles and looks over his shoulder before he ducks under our tablecloth, a human puppy.
“I’m sorry,” one of the women says. She fishes him out, nuzzles his belly, and then swings him onto her back.
Her partner looks at us and grins. “We’re still looking for his off switch.”
As the family walks off toward the reception area, I watch that little boy, Travis, and I imagine what my own son would have looked like at his age. Would he have smelled of cocoa and peppermint; would his laugh sound like a cascade of bubbles? I wonder if he would be afraid of the monsters that live beneath his mattress, if I could sing him the courage to sleep through the night.
“Maybe,” Vanessa says, “that will be us someday.”
Immediately I feel it—that flush of utter failure. “You told me it didn’t matter to you. That you have your students.” Somehow I choke out the words. “You know I can’t have kids.”
“It didn’t matter to me before because I never wanted to be a single mom. I saw enough of that when I was a kid. And of course I know you can’t have babies.” Vanessa threads her fingers through mine. “But Zoe,” she says. “Ican.”
An embryo is frozen at the blastocyst stage, when it is approximately five days old. In a sealed straw filled with cryoprotectant fluid—a human antifreeze—it is gradually cooled to –196 degrees Celsius. The straw is then attached to an aluminum cane and stored in a canister of liquid nitrogen. It costs eight hundred dollars a year to keep the embryo frozen. When thawed at room temperature, the cryoprotectant fluid is diluted so that the embryo can be restored to its culture medium. It’s assessed for damage to see if it’s suitable for transfer. If the embryo survives mostly intact, it has a good chance of leading to a successful pregnancy. Cellular damage, if not extensive, is not a deal breaker. Some embryos have been frozen for a decade and still gone on to produce healthy children.
When I was undergoing in vitro, I always thought of the extra embryos we froze as snowflakes. Tiny, potential babies—each one a little different from the next.
According to a 2008 study in the journalFertility and Sterility,when patients who didn’t want more children were asked about their frozen embryos, fifty-three percent didn’t want to donate them to others because they didn’t want their children finding an unknown brother or sister one day; and they didn’t want other parents raising their child. Sixty-six percent said they’d donate the embryos for research, but that option wasn’t always available at clinics. Twenty percent said they’d keep the embryos frozen forever. Often, the husband and wife are not in agreement.
I have three frozen embryos, swimming in liquid nitrogen in a clinic in Wilmington, Rhode Island. And now that Vanessa has mentioned it, I cannot eat or drink or sleep or concentrate. All I can do is think of these babies, who are waiting for me.
Heads-up for all those activists out there trying so hard to prevent a constitutional amendment allowing gay marriage: nothing changes. Yes, Vanessa and I have a piece of paper that is now in a small fireproof safe in an envelope with our passports and social security cards, but that’s about all that is different. We are still best friends. We still read each other the editorials in the morning paper, and we kiss good night before we turn out the lights. Or in other words, you can stop law, but you can’t stop love.
The wedding was anticlimactic, a speed bump in the road of real life. But now that we are back home, it’s life as usual. We get up, we get dressed, we go to work. Which for me proves a necessary distraction, because when I am alone I find myself staring at the paperwork from the fertility clinic that was a second home to me for five years, trying to gather the courage to make the call.
I know there is no logical reason to believe that all the medical complications I faced will affect Vanessa as well. She’s younger than me; she’s healthy. But the thought of putting her through what I went through—not the physical worries but the mental ones—is almost too much for me to handle. In this, I have a newfound respect for Max. The only thing harder than losing a baby, I think, is watching the person you love most in the world lose one.
So I am actually looking forward to occupying my thoughts with something else today—my next session with Lucy. After all, at our last meeting, when I belted out a string of curses, I got her smiling.
When she walks into our classroom, however, she isn’t happy at all. Her burgeoning dreadlocks have been brushed out, and her hair is lank and unwashed. She has dark circles under her eyes, which are bloodshot. She is wearing black leggings and a ripped T-shirt and two different-colored Converse sneakers.
On her right wrist is a gauze pad, wrapped with what looks like duct tape.
Lucy doesn’t make eye contact. She slings herself into a chair, pivots it so that it is facing away from me, and puts her head down on the desk.
I get up and close the door to the room. “You want to talk about it?” I ask.
She shakes her head, but doesn’t lift it up.
“How did you get hurt?”
Lucy brings her knees up, curling into herself, the smallest ball.
“You know,” I say, mentally ditching my lesson plan, “maybe we should just listen to some music together. And if you feel like it, you can talk.” I walk toward my iPod, which is hooked up to a portable speaker, and scan through my playlists.
The first song I play is “Hate on Me,” by Jill Scott. I want to find something that matches Lucy’s mood, that brings her back to me.
She doesn’t even twitch a response.
I move on to frenetic songs—the Bangles, Karen O. Spirituals. Even Metallica. When we reach our sixth song—“Love Is a Battlefield” by Pat Benatar—I finally admit defeat. “All right, Lucy. Let’s call it a day.” I hit the Pause button on the iPod.
“Don’t.”
