Everything After(7)

6



After they left the hospital, Ezra and Emily turned away from the East River, away from the rushing traffic on FDR Drive, and Ezra said, “I know you wanted dinner out tonight . . . but I’m afraid I won’t be the best company.”

Emily took his hand. “How about pizza and Law and Order?” she asked, as they headed west to Lexington Avenue, the hospital buildings giving way to tall towers of condos. “Special Victims Unit.” It was one of their go-tos. An easy way to spend time with each other but still be in their own minds. Together but apart.

“Throw in a bottle of wine, and you have yourself a date.”

Emily paused.

Ezra noticed. “Wait,” he said. “It’s . . . did your period . . . ?”

“Not yet,” she said. “But I’m not going to get too excited. It still might.”

Ezra pulled Emily to him and kissed her in the middle of the sidewalk, people swirling around them. His hands wrapped around her waist and held her body against his. She could feel the hardness of his muscles against the softness of her breasts. She loved how her body yielded to his.

“Get a room!” a cabbie shouted out the window of his taxi as he sped by, but they didn’t care. They barely even noticed.





7



Four days later, Emily and Ezra both had the day off.

“Anything?” Ezra asked, as Emily got back into bed after an early-morning trip to the bathroom.

She shook her head and smiled.

“Can we get excited yet?” he asked.

She slid closer to him, not wanting to get her hopes up, but also wanting to know, wanting it to be true.

“I hope our baby has your hazel eyes,” he said, looking into hers. “And your pouty lips.” He kissed hers.

She kissed him back and said, “Nuh-uh, I hope our baby looks just like you.”

She loved his Roman nose, his prominent cheekbones, his deep black eyelashes.

Ezra slid his hands under the T-shirt Emily had worn to bed, running his fingers in circles around the warm skin of her breasts. They felt heavier to her than usual. Then her focus was back on her husband, whose hand was now sliding down her stomach.

“Totally recreational,” he whispered.

Emily laughed. They tried not to make sex seem like a chore, but sometimes, when Ezra came home from an overnight call and woke her up because she’d texted him that she was ovulating, it seemed more an item on their to-do list than the sweet, romantic joining together it had been before sex was about fertility and the best position to ejaculate in so gravity could help them conceive.

Emily reached for him, not thinking of any of that. Just thinking about how much she loved her husband. How beautiful she found his body. How complete she felt when he was inside her.

“I love you,” he whispered, as she wrapped her legs around him, pulling him closer.

“I love you,” she answered, rocking into him, matching his rhythm.

Then the pitch of his breathing changed, and he thrust harder.

Her breathing changed, too.

His body stilled as he let out an “Oh” that was as much breath as it was sound.

Emily kept rocking against him until she came, too.

And then they both lay back on their pillows, Emily not worrying about tilting her pelvis up, elevating herself on a pillow, something her sister said absolutely helped with conception.

“Good thing the baby can’t see yet,” she said.

He laughed. “So you think it’s real?”

“I’m cautiously optimistic,” she told him, then took a breath. “We can take a test today.”

“I’ll get one right now!” he said, practically jumping out of bed, one leg in a pair of jeans before she could even respond. “I’ll be right back.”

“We can get one later,” she said, laughing.

Ezra smiled and kissed her again while buttoning his jeans. “Why put off until this afternoon what you can do this morning?”

Still laughing, she watched him grab his keys and wallet on his way out the door. When they first started dating, when they first were married, Ezra and Emily talked a lot about children, about the risks you took when you had them: What secrets would be hidden in their genetic code? What pathogens might they come in contact with? What accidents could befall them? Ezra said he thought about that every day—how kids could get sick, get hurt, die. But that it didn’t stop him from wanting to take the risk, once he was sure he could provide for a family, once he could care for one the best way he knew how.

“If you look at the statistics, it’s actually not that bad,” he’d said. “When I get too freaked out, I just read the statistics.”

“But when the statistic is your child, the percentage doesn’t really matter,” she’d told him. It was only a small percentage of women who died from multiple sclerosis in their late forties, but that wasn’t much comfort when her mother was included in that percentage. It freaked Arielle out so badly that when she was twenty-two, two years after their mother died, she’d started searching for a husband and vowed to have a child by twenty-six so that if she ended up with MS, too, if she died at the same age their mom did, she’d have a chance to see at least one child graduate from college, something their mother never had.