Along Came Trouble(32)
The Wombat kicked, and she rubbed the contact spot on her belly. “Yeah, I know. That’ll be the day, eh, kid?”
Love didn’t play fair, and Carly had never believed in any power beyond herself. She made her own luck. Just lately, she’d made herself an impressively shitty streak.
She returned to the kitchen and started gathering up the dishes and putting away all the sandwich fixings. It still felt weird to be in this kitchen without Nana. Like Nana was the kitchen, and without her here, Carly was bumbling around in an empty shell. She didn’t feel big enough to fill the place up.
“Good thing I’m getting bigger every day. Pretty soon, I’ll be spilling out the windows like Alice in Wonderland.”
The Wombat had no comment. Maybe he—or she—had gone to bed. Like a cat, the Wombat took a lot of naps, awakening primarily to kick her in uncomfortable places or, just as she was drifting off to sleep, to get the hiccups for forty-five minutes. Because there was nothing quite so sleep-inducing as a torso full of Mexican jumping beans.
She squirted soap into the sink and began running some warm water over the dirty plates and her breakfast cereal bowl.
She’d told Nana she was going to buy a dishwasher, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it, any more than she could bring herself to replace Nana’s radioactive-green dish soap with something environmentally friendly. It didn’t feel right to change anything, not when this was the only home she’d ever known. She wanted to preserve it like a museum so the Wombat could grow up here, surrounded by all of Nana’s things.
As if her grandmother’s love had soaked into the walls and the cabinets and the carpeting. The Wombat could breathe it in, but only so long as Carly didn’t throw away Nana’s collection of chipped coffee cups or her huge-ass microwave from 1987.
If Baby Wombat was indeed ever born—and Carly still had a hard time believing that a living, breathing human baby was at the end of this bizarre ride known as pregnancy—she figured she could use all the help she could get.
Two months to go, and she’d be a mother. You’d think it would have sunk in by now. She’d wanted this for so long—couldn’t remember a time in her life when she hadn’t wanted it—and now that it was actually happening, she often felt as though it were happening to someone else.
Some of her online infertility friends had warned her about this strange period of unreality called pregnancy. The battle to conceive became all-consuming, and then it happened, and you didn’t know what to do with yourself or how to think anymore. Your head space got completely warped by the experience of being not-pregnant.
It had certainly warped her marriage. The endless blood draws and progesterone injections took a lot out of even the most solid, dedicated, mutually infatuated couples, and she and Mitch hadn’t been one of those. Not by the end, at any rate, and probably not even on the day she married him.
The other dads-to-be had shown up for appointments with books and iPhones and crossword puzzles, offering their quiet, steadfast support to the women they loved. Mitchell hadn’t shown up at all, but he had unfailingly offered color commentary as he’d plunged that 22-gauge needle in her ass.
Christ, honey, this is depressing. How much longer are you going to keep this shit up?
I’m running out of places to stick this thing, babe. Pause. Chuckle. That’s what she said.
Holy crap, Carly, did you know this syringe was made by a company called Wang? That’s just all kinds of wrong.
At least he wasn’t the Wombat’s biological father. After refusing tests and putting her through three years of Clomid hot flashes and headaches, Mitchell had finally consented to have his sperm checked out, only to confirm her suspicion that she wasn’t the only one with second-rate reproductive organs.
A sensible person might have concluded that a biologically related child wasn’t in the cards, but nobody had ever accused Carly of being sensible, and Mitch seemed to take the sperm motility number as a personal affront to his manliness. She went through three rounds of IVF with donated sperm and a husband who cracked tasteless jokes and skipped appointments. Mitch lost forty pounds and bought a new wardrobe. At some point in the middle of round three, he told her it was their last hurrah. He didn’t want to do it anymore.
Then it worked.
Then he left.
Two months after she finally succeeded in getting pregnant with another man’s sperm—clinic-approved, cleaned, and sanitized, thankyouverymuch—Mitch packed two bags and jetted off to screw surfer girls in Baja.