know that he’s ached for all of it, to be loved that way. A child, the biology of his parts and mine together, the science, is all we have left to give to each other.
One morning when the sky is just waking up in long strands of light, I think about the baby with the cloud thighs and I wake Jack, who’s snoring beside me, face pressed down into the pillow.
“Let’s have a baby. Let’s really try. Let’s be intentional.”
He blinks at me a few times and he agrees. We force a new chapter.
Baby-making sex is not a steamy, against-the-wall thing, it’s an unromantic, clinical, at-just-the-right-time thing. I learn about ovulation and periods and buy a plastic barrel of prenatal vitamins from Walgreens. I ask my doctors which medicines I’m allowed to take during pregnancy and I imagine decorating a nursery, which will be pretty but not dainty. We have official baby-making sex three times a month on the days that babies are supposed to like to be made the most, and afterward, I lie in bed with a pillow under my butt and my legs stuck up in the air.
“Do you think it worked?” Jack asks, leaning across the bed and looking at my belly. I laugh at him, we both laugh. It feels so good.
Often I think about what our baby will be like, long, lean body and little Tic Tac toes, bright blue eyes that will turn to mahogany just like her daddy’s, a mop of wet-looking dark hair that will fall out onto her crib sheet and give her silly bald patches. Having a thing we can yearn for together feels like stepping into a warm bath. I imagine the weight of her on my chest; I imagine her on Jack’s chest. I imagine all the ways she will heal me, heal us.
Every month for half a year, my period comes. The excitement of the trying wears off. We step out of the warm bath and all the little bits of hope have been sloughed off. The baby that was supposed to heal us begins to destroy us. I sit on the couch and cry as the cramps radiate around my middle like an inner tube, mingling with the pain, the awful burning that goes up and down my spine. Jack sits with me on the twenty-eighth day of each month and rubs the big red splotch on my back that the heating pad leaves behind. He brings me my water and cares for a brand-new affliction: infertility. Like always, he does the best that he can. He says the things he’s supposed to:
“It will happen when it’s meant to happen.”
“Don’t worry, the worrying isn’t good for you.”
“I love you. We could adopt.”
None of it helps me. The only one that can help is the baby.
Some days, I blame him. I get angry. I tell him he’s drinking too much, that he’s not trying as hard as I’m trying and it isn’t fair. He shuts down, shakes his head, and walks away from me. Our ocean grows a little deeper, a little wider, and our dots take a few steps inland. I start to blame my own body too. I look at it naked in the mirror. It’s a shitty, broken-down, malfunctioning machine with a tampon string hanging out and I just fucking hate it. I hate the way the light settles on it, I hate the hip bones that still stick out like a child’s, I hate it for all the ways it’s failed me. I decide to take it to a new mechanic.
Miss Carol is an ob-gyn in Baton Rouge. She delivered my brothers’ babies and she’s friends with my mom. She works in a giant women’s health complex where you can go to get liposuction or chemotherapy or a green smoothie. She’s called me “sugar” for as long as I can remember. Miss Carol wants to help us have a baby.
We visit her in fall 2011, when the first morning frost of the year is lying heavy on the ground. She sticks an ultrasound wand covered with freezing-cold lube into me to look at my uterus, and she presses down hard on my belly. A screen beside the bed lights up, and Jack and I both stare into my black, empty womb. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen it, its sad little moon crater. She presses more and moves her wand and decides that everything looks good. Jack looks at me and