Everything After - Jill Santopolo Page 0,8

tried not to make sex seem like a chore, but sometimes, when Ezra came home from an overnight call and woke her up because she’d texted him that she was ovulating, it seemed more an item on their to-do list than the sweet, romantic joining together it had been before sex was about fertility and the best position to ejaculate in so gravity could help them conceive.

Emily reached for him, not thinking of any of that. Just thinking about how much she loved her husband. How beautiful she found his body. How complete she felt when he was inside her.

“I love you,” he whispered, as she wrapped her legs around him, pulling him closer.

“I love you,” she answered, rocking into him, matching his rhythm.

Then the pitch of his breathing changed, and he thrust harder.

Her breathing changed, too.

His body stilled as he let out an “Oh” that was as much breath as it was sound.

Emily kept rocking against him until she came, too.

And then they both lay back on their pillows, Emily not worrying about tilting her pelvis up, elevating herself on a pillow, something her sister said absolutely helped with conception.

“Good thing the baby can’t see yet,” she said.

He laughed. “So you think it’s real?”

“I’m cautiously optimistic,” she told him, then took a breath. “We can take a test today.”

“I’ll get one right now!” he said, practically jumping out of bed, one leg in a pair of jeans before she could even respond. “I’ll be right back.”

“We can get one later,” she said, laughing.

Ezra smiled and kissed her again while buttoning his jeans. “Why put off until this afternoon what you can do this morning?”

Still laughing, she watched him grab his keys and wallet on his way out the door. When they first started dating, when they first were married, Ezra and Emily talked a lot about children, about the risks you took when you had them: What secrets would be hidden in their genetic code? What pathogens might they come in contact with? What accidents could befall them? Ezra said he thought about that every day—how kids could get sick, get hurt, die. But that it didn’t stop him from wanting to take the risk, once he was sure he could provide for a family, once he could care for one the best way he knew how.

“If you look at the statistics, it’s actually not that bad,” he’d said. “When I get too freaked out, I just read the statistics.”

“But when the statistic is your child, the percentage doesn’t really matter,” she’d told him. It was only a small percentage of women who died from multiple sclerosis in their late forties, but that wasn’t much comfort when her mother was included in that percentage. It freaked Arielle out so badly that when she was twenty-two, two years after their mother died, she’d started searching for a husband and vowed to have a child by twenty-six so that if she ended up with MS, too, if she died at the same age their mom did, she’d have a chance to see at least one child graduate from college, something their mother never had.

“That’s true,” Ezra had acquiesced, “but I’ve gotta find some way not to make myself crazy.”

She’d squeezed his hand then. “Having good coping skills is pretty sexy,” she’d said.

And they’d both started laughing. “I can cope with so many things,” he’d told her.

Emily wondered now, years later, if that was really true. He could get by with a kiss sometimes, he could talk to her sometimes, but often he needed to retreat inside himself and work things through alone, awash in his own frustration and anger. He managed. He went back each day ready to fight for a child’s life, to teach medical students how to fight. Over and over and over again. But she wondered at what cost—to him, to her, to their marriage. She felt the difficulties of her own profession, but his were so much worse—especially when he believed he was in control of it all, when he took each death personally. Emily wished she knew how to better help him—but she discovered that all she really could do was love him and try to understand him and hope that would be enough.

* * *

—

While Ezra went to the drugstore, Emily got out of bed, made coffee for both of them in her bathrobe. One cup of caffeine, she knew, was okay. Though maybe she’d just have half, to play it safe. Maybe a quarter.