The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,17
slit at her hairline, sewn tight. I hadn’t known then the wait that prospective parents endure. I had always thought, in the very back of my head where my past is stored, where hope lies in wait, that we would just adopt if science didn’t work for us. Making the decision to adopt would be the most difficult part, and I believed that the moment I let go of my self-absorbed need to give birth to my own biological child, a baby would miraculously reveal her face.
I did the math at the Crabtree Hotel the first night we arrived in Raleigh. It was roughly the same as yesterday and it would be the same tomorrow. But one day soon that number would radically shift.
“At least this isn’t a gamble, though,” I said.
Ramon was silent. He does this thing when we’re in bed and he doesn’t want to talk anymore, where he puts the pillow over his head and goes to sleep. But he hadn’t done that just yet.
“We get a kid if we do this. Not like with the IVF, where we wait and spend all this money we don’t have, and still it might not happen. This isn’t like that.” I thought of all the women in the waiting room at the hospital on the mornings I went uptown at daybreak for my appointments. Not one looked at another, as if we were competing for the few successes that day held. Statistics were statistics and there were not enough favorable outcomes for us all. If celebrities were there—and they always were, in their baseball caps and loose velveteen sweats and hoodies—we ignored them. Would they take everything due to their proximity to stardom? Would they get all the good luck, all the baby dust, all the magic, or had they too used up their wishes?
When they did call our names—first and last—we put our heads down and we went inside, and we took whatever we had coming, and then we went home or we went to work and we turned to chat rooms on the Internet. That’s where we got the information we needed: drink wheatgrass, it improves egg quality; eat pineapple, it helps with implantation—acts that made us think we were affecting change. As we chatted anonymously, without bodies, about what our bodies weren’t doing, it made us feel, however briefly, that the plans we’d made for our lives might transpire.
Still, I saw his expression when Ramon found out that I was not pregnant from our final course of IVF. I had gotten up for several mornings before he awoke and taken my own pregnancy tests, too impatient to wait for the doctor’s official word, and I had not told him for days that, no matter how many times I checked it, no matter how I saved each strip, comparing it with the one the following day to see if perhaps it had darkened just the slightest bit, the answer was still the same. It was after the fifth day of silence—a disposition uncommon to me—that Ramon had woken to my steady weeping over the bathroom sink. I had not heard him outside the door, and I turned as he opened it, and we both knew in that moment that everything had run out.
“I can’t think about this anymore right now.” Ramon stretched out his arm and turned out the light, signaling that not only couldn’t he think about it, but he wouldn’t be talking about it either. “Can you just wake me when all of this is over?”
I lay in the hotel bed and thought of other hotels I’d been in with Ramon, that first night he had run his finger along the deep grooved scar. I enjoyed what I now see as his disinterest in my scars. On the beaches of Italy I saw evidence of bodies ravaged by wars and childbirth and socialized medicine in scarred torsos, steel limbs, keloid cuts, eye patches, exposed without shame. I was just another war-torn body. But the ravages were also inside, where they had gone in several times and cut out the cancerous section of the colon, then sewed it back up, almost precisely enough for me not to notice. Each time they thought they had it all, something would be left behind and in they’d go again, and the scar tissue that grew out from those internal wounds coiled around me, an unstoppable moth vine or creeper, wrapping tightly to all the parts meant to stay open,