When the Lights Go Out(65)

eden

August 4, 1997 Egg Harbor

It’s been two weeks since they took my baby from me.

Today, Aaron and I sat in Dr. Landry’s office.

“The good news,” Dr. Landry said, face firm, undeviating, with no hint of a smile, “is that we now know you can get pregnant. Your body is capable of that. But maintaining the pregnancy is proving to be another matter.”

We had only been there a couple of minutes. Aaron and I sat beside each other on matching tufted armchairs, Dr. Landry on a swivel chair behind his desk. In my hand I clenched a tissue, dabbing at my cheeks as Dr. Landry stared at me.

I asked him, “How long until we can try again?” meaning all of us, another round of IVF at the cost of another ten thousand dollars, money that Aaron and I most certainly didn’t have because we didn’t have it the first time around. I now had three credit cards in my name and each were nearly maxed out. The minimum payment alone was more than I could pay. I’d never been in debt before; I’d never been behind on payments; I’d never been in the red. I’d never been bankrupt. It made me anxious, and yet I easily reasoned that it was money well spent.

I’d sell my own organs—a spare kidney or the lobe of a lung—before giving up on a baby.

He was dressed down today, no lab coat as usual, and, as Aaron attempted to cling to my hand, I pulled away, folding my hands in my lap. The numbness, the narcosis, it stuck around me like a cold that wouldn’t quit. When I wasn’t in bed crying, then I was numb. I felt nothing. I had only two modes these days: sad and numb.

Dr. Landry replied with “There’s really no definitive answer to that; we can try again whenever you’re ready,” but his words were blighted by Aaron’s incredulous sigh because Aaron, as he’d already told me, didn’t want to try again. He wanted to be through.

The reason was simple.

The reason was me.

For the last two weeks, I couldn’t bring myself to get out of bed. Morning, noon and night, I cried for my lost child, wondering how it was possible to grieve for something that was never truly mine.

Man plans, and God laughs. Isn’t that what they say?

Aaron didn’t want me to make another appointment with Dr. Landry. He had other suggestions for whom I should call instead: a therapist, a support group. Maybe all I needed was some time away, he foolishly believed. A trip by myself to one of those places I’ve forever longed to go. St. Lucia, Fiji, Belize. As if lying by the seashore and drinking a cocktail might help me forget the fact that I’d just lost a child, might annihilate that desire to ever have a child, so that when I returned I’d feel fresh, revived, happy.

“I don’t want a goddamn vacation!” I screamed at him then, lying in bed, blankets over my head, coming up from under the covers only for air. “I want a baby. Why don’t you get that, Aaron? What’s so difficult to understand?”

And it was only then in broad daylight, when I dared to poke my head out of my own dark cavern, that I could see Aaron’s eyes were red and swollen, his heart visibly broken like mine. His shirt was wrinkled, the buttons lined up incorrectly, his hair standing on end. His facial hair had grown threefold, proof to me that he, like me, wasn’t leaving the house, that he too couldn’t bring himself to go to work.

But I didn’t acknowledge this.

“I know what you’re feeling,” he said quietly, compassionately, his voice losing control as he wiped at his eyes with the back of a shirtsleeve.

“Trust me,” he said. “I get it.”

A better person would have realized that Aaron had lost something too. A better person would have consoled him, would have let him console and be consoled. But not me.

This was my loss, not his.

“Go away,” I barked then, and I heard it in my own voice, heard it and hated it but said it nonetheless. “You have no idea what I’m feeling. Don’t stand there and pretend you know what it’s like to lose a child.”

I returned to my cave, throwing the blankets back over my head where I could scarcely breathe.

“This baby. This pregnancy. This need to get pregnant,” Aaron lamented as he stood in the doorway, urging me to eat, to get out of bed, to go for a walk, to get some fresh air. “They’ve gotten the best of you, Eden. They’ve turned you into someone I don’t recognize anymore. Someone I don’t know.”

And then he reminded me of who I was before that day we decided to start a family.

Fun loving. Benevolent and genuine. Carefree.

“I’d give anything to go back to being Aaron and Eden. Just us. Just you and me,” he said, and for a bat of an eye I remembered us on our wedding day, riding in on horseback on Aaron’s family farm in a regal ball gown, exchanging nuptials beneath the nighttime sky. A celebration worthy of a fairy tale. I had found my everything. I had married my prince.

But suddenly my everything wasn’t good enough.

I needed more.

“I want to try right away. As soon as we can,” I told Dr. Landry today as we sat in his office, and it was then that Aaron stood up from his tufted armchair and left the room.


September 8, 1997 Egg Harbor

Aaron didn’t show up at the fertility clinic for today’s appointment.

For weeks I’ve gone through the whole rigmarole, the process of developing follicles, of returning to Dr. Landry’s office every few days to have my blood drawn and an ultrasound performed to see if there were any viable candidates for the procedure. I’ve been injected with a legion of hormones, each which leave blood blisters along my skin and a gamut of side effects, from headaches to hot flashes to moodiness and pain.