I'll Be You(58)

Fuck Chuck, I thought. He was the kind of person who was used to having life handed to him on a platter, and I’d watched him go stiff and tense when things didn’t feel easy. A dent in the bumper of the BMW, no milk for his coffee—even little things like that would make his neck go red and the pulse at his temple go wild.

Of course, I freaked him out with my messiness and unpredictability. Whenever I walked in the room I could feel his blood pressure rise, and I was sure he was counting the days until I left. So I could only imagine how he felt about this, my sister’s infertility, a crack in the foundation of his own home. No wonder they’d been sleeping apart.

“Well, there are still other options.” It felt strange to be the one doing the consoling, rather than the one being consoled. “You can get a donor or a surrogate or something.” Already, my mind was racing. What if.

“Maybe,” Elli said. She stepped out of my arms, used the back of her hand to wipe the snot away, and then cleaned it on a nearby towel. “But Sam…” She blinked at me, her eyes going soft. “You know this affects you, too, right?”

“Me?” I struggled to locate the connection she meant. “I mean, yes, it would be cool to be an aunt. But it’s not…”

I trailed off. The expression on her face was so forlorn. “Sam…if I have this ovarian insufficiency…you might, too. They said it’s often genetic. So you may never be able to have children, either.”

“Oh!” I felt a little lost. I picked up the balm, squirted more into my palm, began rubbing it into the backs of my hands. I was drawing out the moment, trying to hide the pang of guilt I suddenly felt. “Yeah, that’s not a problem.”

“You say that now. And I get it; with what you’ve been through the last few years, you might think you’ll never want kids. But you’re sober now! And if you stick with it and meet the right person, you might change your mind and want them after all.”

I hated this. I hated her unflagging belief in me, which I didn’t share. Even more, I hated what I was about to say to her, and the unfairness of it all. Why me and not her? Why was this the place where our DNA differed? If one of us couldn’t have a baby, why wasn’t it me, who didn’t want one anyway?

“No, I meant to say, I know I’m not infertile.”

She flinched, her face making a tiny shift from sorrow to surprise. “Wait—you’ve been pregnant? You never told me. Did you have an abortion? Or a miscarriage?”

I hesitated, reluctant to admit an inconvenient fact that I’d been hiding from her. Three years back, I’d emerged from that failed Ojai rehab attempt with my career in tatters, my bank account in negative numbers, and no casting director willing to meet with me. I couldn’t ask Elli for cash—not after throwing forty thousand dollars of her money down the drain on my rehab, and then another six thousand for my hotel bill. Instead, in a moment of desperation, I’d sold my eggs for twenty-five grand a pop, plus thousands in bonuses. The shady IVF clinic that paid me to jab myself with hormones was willing to overlook my addiction history because of my winning (if slightly fudged) vital stats: blond and fit, college educated, and quasi-famous.

I had never told Elli. Not just because I was afraid of her judgment about my financial desperation but because I had an uncomfortable feeling that her own attempts to get pregnant weren’t working out quite the way she’d planned. All those years, but no kids: It didn’t take much to figure out what was going on. I knew, somehow, that the news would hurt her.

There was no avoiding it now. “No, no—not pregnant,” I said. “I donated my eggs. Actually, sold them. For money. A couple times. So I know”—I struggled for the right words—“they work.”

The cords in her neck had gone tight. “You’re kidding.”

“Not kidding.”

“But…” Her mouth seemed to be caught in an epic struggle, twisting around words that didn’t want to come. “You’re a drug addict. And an alcoholic. Who would want your eggs?” Her nose flared, as if horrified by the thought of my tainted eggs, and the flawed children that might come from them.

“Ouch. That’s harsh.”

I watched her cheeks flush pink. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “But it’s true. People are afraid of their kids inheriting lifelong problems like yours.”

I stared at her in shock. Is this what she really thought of me? That I was somehow permanently tainted? A lifelong problem? How long had she been secretly judging me like this while pretending to be my champion? It’s not that I didn’t think she had perfectly legitimate reasons to feel that way about me—I was a fucking mess, and I knew it. And yet there was so much cruelty in the way she said it. Who would want your eggs? Was I really incurable? It felt like something noxious and buried had just unexpectedly bubbled to the surface between us.

“Well,” I said curtly. “I guess I shouldn’t volunteer to donate my fucked-up eggs to you, then.”

The minute these words came out, I regretted them. It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought of offering my own eggs to my sister before that moment. All afternoon, as I stripped thorns off roses, I’d wondered if this was where the journey might end. I would have done it. Would even have carried the baby, if they’d asked. I would have stayed sober for the sake of her child, I knew it. Maybe it would even have been good for me, the positive motivation I needed to start a new chapter of my life.