Everything After(8)

“That’s true,” Ezra had acquiesced, “but I’ve gotta find some way not to make myself crazy.”

She’d squeezed his hand then. “Having good coping skills is pretty sexy,” she’d said.

And they’d both started laughing. “I can cope with so many things,” he’d told her.

Emily wondered now, years later, if that was really true. He could get by with a kiss sometimes, he could talk to her sometimes, but often he needed to retreat inside himself and work things through alone, awash in his own frustration and anger. He managed. He went back each day ready to fight for a child’s life, to teach medical students how to fight. Over and over and over again. But she wondered at what cost—to him, to her, to their marriage. She felt the difficulties of her own profession, but his were so much worse—especially when he believed he was in control of it all, when he took each death personally. Emily wished she knew how to better help him—but she discovered that all she really could do was love him and try to understand him and hope that would be enough.



* * *



—

While Ezra went to the drugstore, Emily got out of bed, made coffee for both of them in her bathrobe. One cup of caffeine, she knew, was okay. Though maybe she’d just have half, to play it safe. Maybe a quarter. She took the prenatal vitamin she’d been taking for the last eight months, but now it felt more like a promise, less like a wish and a prayer.

Behind the kitchen was a door to a small second bedroom that would be perfect for a baby. They’d just have to find a new place for their boxes of textbooks and extra paper towels and whatever else they’d been storing in there since they moved in. Much to Emily’s chagrin, the room had basically become a glorified storage unit. She kept promising herself she’d sort through it the next time Ezra was on call. Now she really would have to. No more procrastinating.

Emily looked down at her body. She’d been so afraid for the last few days that this was a false alarm. That stress or exercise or worry about getting pregnant had just made her period late. But she felt it—that fullness in her breasts, the intensity of her sense of smell—she knew something was different.





v



After a few weeks back at the keys, I felt comfortable there again. Your father would start something on the guitar, I’d pick it up, and we’d speak through our music, telling each other how we felt, what we wanted.

“Everything just disappeared,” I told him one day, after we’d been playing for hours. “Everything but you.”

“I always feel that way,” he said, putting his hand on my arm, “when I play with you.”

The pressure of his fingers was all I could think about. I moved closer to him. He floated his finger down to my wrist, and then bent to put his guitar on the carpet.

“We don’t need instruments to make music,” he said. And we didn’t. Every day with him felt like a new song, a new melody.

He touched my cheek and looked into my eyes. The rhythm of our playing filled me. I leaned toward him. Our lips touched, and the music inside me crescendoed. We kissed and kissed.

We lay together on his bed, like we had been for the last months, touching each other, exploring each other’s bodies with our fingers and lips.

Then he pulled off my tank top, I tugged down his jeans. We both slid off our shoes. And the world was gone again. It was just me and him and the harmony of our breathing. It was skin against skin and breath against breath.

I felt his fingers and his tongue, and then he was back kissing my mouth and he whispered, “Do you want to?”

We hadn’t yet. I wanted to be sure of him, sure of us. He’d given me the time I needed to be certain, understanding that this wasn’t a choice I could take back or undo. And now I was. So I answered with a kiss of my own and a soft “yes.”

He reached over and fumbled in the pocket of his guitar case for a condom. I felt lost without him against me. And then he was kissing me and I was wrapping myself around him, pulling him closer. We rocked into the heat and the warmth and the music.

“Are you really sure?” he asked.

“Never surer,” I said.

I felt the fan blowing warm air across my skin.

And then I felt him, inside me.

And I was part of someone else for the first time.





8



Emily and Ezra smiled that whole day.

“We need to do things!” Ezra said. “We need to prepare!”

Emily laughed, swinging their clasped hands as they ambled down 2nd Avenue together, past restaurants and shops, dry cleaners and convenience stores, the city traffic humming beside them. “We have months to prepare. Plus I’m sure Ari has a list of what we need, filed away in her folder of spreadsheets.” Ari was always organized, the librarian of the family, keeping track of everyone’s schedules and making shopping lists and putting photographs in albums, labeled with the proper date. “We can just enjoy it now. Enjoy being happy.” Emily’s photos were in a jumbled shoebox somewhere under her bed.

“Let’s take our embryo on its first trip to a jazz club. I think there’s an open mic thing going on this afternoon. I want to make sure our child loves jazz.”

Emily lifted up Ezra’s hand and kissed it. On one of their very first dates—the first one after they had lunch together at a deli near the School of Global Public Health—they went uptown to Cleopatra’s Needle and listened to a jazz bassist play while they drank cocktails at the bar. Emily loved that Ezra loved music. And while jazz wasn’t her top choice, she loved how relaxed he looked when he listened, how the music seemed to take over his body, change his mood. And his love of jazz made her love it when she was with him—she hoped their baby would, too.