Sing You Home Read Free Page B

There, the lining of my uterus looked like sea grass swaying in the current. A little white spark, a star, shot out of the syringe and fell between two blades of grass. We celebrated our potential pregnancy with a shot of progesterone in my butt.
    And to think, some people who want to have a baby only need to make love.
    My mother is on her computer when I walk into her house, adding information to her recently acquired Facebook profile. DARA WEEKS, her status says, WISHES HER DAUGHTER WOULD FRIEND HER. “I’m not talking to you,” she says, snippy, “but your husband called.”
    “Max?”
    “Do you have more than one?”
    “What did he want?”
    She shrugs. Ignoring her, I pick up the phone in the kitchen and dial Max’s mobile number. “Why isn’t your cell on?” Max asks, as soon as he picks up.
    “Yes, honey,” I reply. “I love you, too.”
    In the background I can hear a lawn mower. Max runs a landscaping business. He is busy mowing in the summer, raking in the fall, and snowplowing in the winter. What do you do during mud season? I had asked the first time we met.
    Wallow, he’d said, smiling.
    “I heard you got hurt.”
    “Embarrassing news travels fast. Who called you, anyway?”
    “I just think . . . I mean, we worked so hard to get to this point.” Max stumbles over the words, but I know what he means.
    “You heard Dr. Gelman,” I tell him. “We’re in the home stretch.”
    It seems ironic that, after all these years of trying, I am the one who is more relaxed about the pregnancy than Max. There were years when I was so superstitious I counted backward from twenty before getting out of bed, or wore the same lucky camisole for a week in an effort to ensure that particular embryo would be the one that actually stuck. But I’ve never made it this far before, where my ankles are blissfully swollen and my joints ache and I cannot see my feet in the shower. I’ve never been so pregnant that someone could plan a baby shower.
    “I know we need the money, Zoe, but if your clients are violent—”
    “Max. Mr. Docker is catatonic ninety-nine percent of the time, and my burn victims are usually unconscious. Honestly, this was a fluke. I could just as easily get hurt walking across the street.”
    “Then don’t cross the road,” Max says. “When are you coming home?”
    I’m sure he knows about the baby shower, but I play along. “I have to do an assessment of a new client,” I joke. “Mike Tyson.”
    “Very funny. Look, I can’t talk right now—”
    “You called me— ”
    “Only because I thought you were doing something stupid—”
    “Max,” I say, cutting him off. “Let’s not. Let’s just not.” For years, Max and I were told by couples with children how lucky we were; how our relationship had the luxury of being all about us, instead of who was cooking dinner and who was carpooling to Little League. But the flame of romance can be just as effectively doused by dinner conversations that center on estradiol levels and appointment times at the clinic. It is not that Max doesn’t do everything right—from massaging my feet to telling me I look beautiful instead of bloated. It’s that, lately, even when I am pressed up close against him, I feel like I cannot get close enough to touch him, like he is somewhere else. I have told myself that I’m imagining things. That it’s nerves on his part, raging hormones on mine. I just wish I didn’t have to keep making excuses.
    Not for the first time, I wish I had a girlfriend to confide in. Someone who would nod and say all the right things when I complained about my husband. But my friendships had dwindled as Max and I began to devote ourselves entirely to combating infertility. Some relationships I’d ended, because I didn’t want to hear a friend talk about her baby’s first words, or go to a couple’s home for dinner and be confronted with sippy cups and Matchbox cars and stuffed bears—details of a life that eluded me. Other