Trespassing(8)

“You’ll have to share your plate with Nini,” I say.

Claudette lets out an exasperated sigh, and if I took the time to look at her, I’m sure she’d be treating me to her best mom stare.

“Not fair,” Bella says. “Fendi has her own, Crew has his—”

“Bella—”

“Nini wants her own.”

My phone rings—“Rock-a-bye Baby”—and my heart flutters. It’s the lab, calling with today’s news. “Share for a second, okay?” I dig in my purse while Bella protests. “We’ll talk about it—”

“Not fair.” Bella crosses her arms over her chest.

I find my phone, press the “Answer” button, and hook an arm around my daughter’s waist to pull her off the picnic bench. I’m not supposed to lift her, but I can’t very well leave her having a tantrum at Claudette’s table. Neither can I deal with her and the lab at the same time. I lead her away from the playground and picnic area toward a line of pines, where it’s quieter.

Bella’s squealing and kicking. “Not fair, not fair, not fair.”

“Is now a good time?” the woman from the fertility clinic asks.

No. But I can’t not take the call. Waiting for news is nearly as stressful as the shots and procedures. “It’s fine. Just a moment.” I lower Bella to the ground and pull the phone from my ear for a second. “Bella, this is the baby doctor, and Mommy has to talk to her for a minute. Please.”

She’s in tears now, wailing at the top of her lungs.

But what can I do? I turn a few degrees to the left, walk a few steps so I can hear, and put my phone to my ear. “Sorry about that. What’s the news?”

“Mrs. Cavanaugh, of the oocytes we managed to fertilize, only one is developing. By the second day, we like to see a cell count of four to six, and the one that is developing, I’m sorry to say, is at only two.”

Numbness spreads from my heart to my fingertips. Deep breath. “So that means . . . wait. How . . . I’m not sure I under—” I press a hand to my other ear to deaden Bella’s screams. “We had six eggs. Twenty-five percent develop. That’s what you said. So how is it that we don’t have a single healthy embryo this cycle?”

“Twenty-five percent is the likely outcome, but as you know, assisted reproduction is an inexact science, and—”

I’m pacing now, wearing a trench in the grass around a tree. “It has only two cells?” Anger rises like bile in my throat. We’ve been cheated. It isn’t fair. I did everything right. Not once did I miss a dose of medication, not once did I neglect the needles, not once did I miss a pill.

And if I did everything right, how is it possible things have gone wrong?

“We’ll watch it,” the tech is saying. “There’s a chance it will still develop, but—”

A chance? I—we—deserve more than a fleeting chance! I hear about people all the time, “cursed” with unwanted pregnancies, women begrudging that it happened now instead of six months from now, couples pondering abortions because their kids are older, and they were almost out of the woods when they were surprised with an oops, despite their methods of birth control. But me . . . I’m a good mother, and yet it’s always a struggle for me to conceive.

“And no measured correlation between cell number and gestation.” The technician’s voice is flat, dry. I know she isn’t supposed to give me a sense of false hope or even prepare me for the worst. Just the facts.

“But even if it does develop”—I take another deep breath—“doesn’t that mean there’s something wrong with the embryo?”

“Not necessarily.”

It worked once, I remind myself. We have Bella. We have two embryos frozen at the lab. I spin to look at the proof that everything is going to be okay.

But Bella isn’t where I left her. A quick scan of the area turns up no sign of my daughter. “Bella!”

Another spin. She’s nowhere to be seen. “Bella!”

I realize I’ve hung up on the lab, but at the moment, I don’t care about anything as much as I care about glimpsing my kid.

My heart is beating like mad. My pulse throbs in my ears, and I feel my legs trembling as they carry me toward the playground.

Please, let her be there!

But the swings sway in the light autumn breeze, and only a pair of boys occupies the merry-go-round. Claudette is pouring juice for her kids, right where we left them, but my daughter is not seated at their table.

I scream at the top of my lungs: “Elizabella!”





Chapter 4

Centennial Park is a blur of colors spinning all around me, as if I’m at the hub of the merry-go-round. The auburn spread of leaves awaiting raking at the far end of the playground, the still-green grass, the knobby gray-brown trunks of decades-old maple trees, the offensively yellow ladder on the slide . . . Everything is a kaleidoscope of paint streaks on canvas, but I don’t register the one color I desperately need to see: the lilac of my daughter’s coat.

I can scarcely hear anything beyond the rapid beat of my heart, and even drawing a breath is difficult, but I scream at the top of my lungs: “Elizabella!”

And suddenly, I see her elbow, poking out beyond the massive trunk of a tree.