I want to put down two things about those two years, because “we did fertility treatment” is four words that cover an enormous amount of ground.
The first is the logistics, which nobody warns you about. Monitoring appointments are not scheduled around your life; your life is scheduled around a follicle. I did twenty-nine round trips to Alder Mesa, four hours in the car each time, most of them starting at five in the morning so I could be back for a nine-thirty call. I did injections in an airport bathroom in Denver, in a rental car outside a client’s office, and once in the coat room at a wedding.
Emory came to four of the twenty-nine.
He was, and I want to be exact, never cruel about it in that period. He was absent in the specific way of a man who has decided the thing is your project. He would ask how it went and then not listen to the answer, which at the time I put down to him being frightened.
The second thing is what it does to your standing.
Around month fourteen I stopped telling people. Not because of shame — because of the follow-up. Everyone has a cousin who tried a supplement. Everyone has a story about a couple who relaxed and it happened. There is no version of that conversation where you are not, by the end of it, the problem.
Bree was the one person I kept telling.
She was the only person on earth who had the whole timeline, every cycle, every number, every date. She had it because I gave it to her over sixteen years of friendship and two years of Sunday phone calls.
I have thought about that a great deal since. There was not one single fact about my body or my marriage in that period that she did not have.
Christmas two years ago is the one I go back to.
I had a monitoring appointment in Alder Mesa that morning, on the twenty-third, which I had scheduled for the twenty-third specifically so it wouldn’t collide, and it ran two hours long because the clinic was short-staffed.
I got to the house in Cordera an hour and ten minutes late, in my coat, holding the little insulated bag with the injectables in it, because they have to stay cold and there was nowhere else to put it.
Sixteen people at the table.
Winifred got up from the head of it, came around the corner, took the bag out of my hand — I did not let go at first, and the strap stretched between us — and carried it to the sideboard and set it down there like something that had been tracked in on a shoe.
Then she turned around and said, to the whole table:
“Give me that. There’s nothing wrong with my son. Some women just aren’t built for it. Now sit down and tell the table you’re fine.”
Sixteen adults. Forks in the air.
Emory looked at his wine glass and did not lift his head.
Bree was sitting directly across from him, holding her glass with both hands, and she did not say anything either.
Nobody did.
I said, “I’m fine.”
