I'll Be You(57)

My sister was quieter than I remembered, intently focused on her arrangements, frowning over accounting sheets that seemed to always end in red numbers. Our conversation was frequently stilted, and I wondered if that was because she didn’t know how to talk to me anymore, or if something else was bothering her. The fertility question, maybe? It had been seven years, and there was still no baby, though I’d found a bag full of ovulation kits under my sister’s sink. Sometimes, I heard her and Chuck talking in fierce whispers when I wasn’t in the room; he’d been sleeping more and more on the couch in the downstairs den, presumably because he was working late, but I had to wonder. The books by the side of her bed had names like You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life and Girl, Stop Apologizing: A Shame-Free Plan for Embracing and Achieving Your Goals.

I asked her, half joking, what those goals were, “because from where I’m sitting it looks like you’ve achieved most of your goals already.” Maybe I was projecting; maybe I just wanted her to be OK because I wasn’t prepared to deal with the alternative. I was selfish that way.

She smiled, a little wobbly. “You know. I just…hit a plateau. And I’m not sure what’s next. Don’t you ever feel…” She blinked and stopped, apparently unsure if she wanted to get into the endless morass of what I felt. “Anyway. Positive manifestation never hurt anyone, right? Isn’t that how you got sober?”

“No, you’re right,” I said, even though she wasn’t. What I’d accomplished was less positive manifestation than last stop before landing in a homeless shelter. But I smiled and let her hug me, and we both got a little teary as she whispered in my ear, “I’m so glad you’re here. I’m so glad you’re finally OK.”

Maybe she was right, I thought. Maybe I should read her books. Maybe I could use some positive manifestation, too.

I started to toy with the idea of staying in Santa Barbara. Maybe I could convince Elli to bring me on as a business partner. Why not be a florist? I had nothing left in Los Angeles—no auditions lined up, no career prospects worth mentioning, nothing but a tiny apartment with peeling paint and paltry few belongings. Tamar, my AA sponsor, had offered me a job at the hipster café that she managed, but beyond that, my life in Los Angeles had vanished into a yawning hole of nothingness. Here, I at least had my sister. I could start over again, back in my hometown, like winding my life back to the beginning and giving it another go.

One afternoon, Elli asked me to take over at the workshop while she went to an appointment with a fertility doctor. “We’ve been looking into IVF,” she said. She stood at a utility sink, prepping buckets. “It’s been a while, and nothing else is working.”

I stopped what I was doing and watched her, red hands plunged in cold water, her face a stone. “Kinda hard to get pregnant when you’re sleeping in separate rooms?”

She dropped the buckets to the ground with a clatter and by the time she turned to me she was smiling again. “Oh, that’s just because Chuck snores,” she said. “It’s been keeping me up at night.” She grabbed her purse and keys, looking at the wreckage of discarded flowers strewn across the floor of her shop. “You’ll clean this up?”

Her face was strained and pale. My sister had never been good at covering her fear. “Of course. You OK?”

“Fine,” she said brightly. “I’m still young. We have plenty of time to figure it out.”



* * *



—

I spent the afternoon prepping a massive delivery of pink roses destined for a wedding that weekend, and when I got back to the house I found my sister red-eyed in the kitchen, mashing potatoes with alarming vigor. Since my return she’d been vigilant about keeping alcohol out of the house, but now an open bottle of rosé was perched at her right hand, two glasses down. Chuck was puttering around outside, grilling dinosaur-sized steaks on the barbecue. There was an electric tension in the room, a smell of blood and plastic.

I dropped onto a stool with a tube of balm and began to rub it into my chapped palms. “How’d things go today?” I asked warily, sensing already that things had not gone well.

Elli stared deeply into the bowl. “I got some test results back,” she said. She stabbed at a potato lump with the masher. “And guess what? I’m infertile. They said there’s no point in going ahead with IVF.”

She burst into tears. I jumped up from the stool and came around the kitchen island and hugged her. She dropped the masher and it fell to the floor, splattered potato across my bare feet. Her skin under her sundress was hot, as if something had burst into flame inside her. “It’s something wrong with me,” she sobbed into my shoulder. “They called it primary ovarian insufficiency. My follicles aren’t functional. It might be genetic, they weren’t sure.”

“Oh God. I’m so sorry.”

She quivered in my arms, tense and broken. “Sam,” she moaned. “I’m never going to have a baby.”

“Of course you’ll have a baby,” I said firmly. “There’s more than one way to have a baby. You’ll adopt. Millions of people do.”

She shook her head, glanced toward the garden, and lowered her voice. “Chuck doesn’t want to look into adoption. He’s scared he won’t be able to bond with a child that didn’t come from him. Or me, for that matter. He wants a kid that’s a mix of us. He thinks it’s a biological thing, and he won’t love the child properly, you know? He says he’d rather not have a kid at all. That maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to be childless.” She was crying hard now. “IVF was my last chance.”