The Long Accomplishment

by Rick Moody

  And so the day came to pass. Laurel said, “Pull over, pull over, I want to go in there.”

  “Where do you want to go in?”

  “I’m going in to talk to the guy at the pawnshop.”

  I wasn’t going in, and Hazel wasn’t going in, but Laurel didn’t need us, she only needed to be on the side of justice, and so she went into the store (this is her recounting it now, and my reconstructing), and she waited while a woman paid outlandish interest on some item that she wanted to get back but couldn’t afford to, and then, when the woman was done, she said to the pawnshop manager, “You sold items stolen from our house.”

  The pawnshop manager, not surprisingly, took issue with the diminutive lady walking right up to him and getting into the fine print on the items he had for sale, but Laurel was not through, at all, and she sketched out the entire thing to him, not forbearing to mention that my dead sister’s crucifix got melted down, and my grandfather’s pocket watch got sold, and the ring I had proposed to her with got melted down, and she could even tell him exactly who had brought the stuff in, which caused the pawnshop manager to go through his database, believing that she couldn’t possibly know who had brought the stolen merchandise in, whereupon he did in fact turn up the name of the perpetrator among his clients, after which he said that he would “freeze the account” of the perpetrator, so that he couldn’t continue to do business with the pawnshop. But still Laurel wasn’t done. She stood in front of the guy and said she would not leave until he apologized. A long standoff ensued. Laurel was not going to leave. The guy was definitely going to have another customer at some point, with the very forceful lady standing in front of him, waiting him out, so in due course he decided to yield: “I’m sorry, I didn’t know that stuff was stolen.”

  It didn’t change the outcome of the story, but it made us feel a bit better.

  This is one of the many reasons I love Laurel Nakadate. You definitely want her on your side when justice needs to be done.

  Then, after several months of licking our wounds, and incrementally coming to feel that we could sleep in our house in Dutchess County again, we got the final payout from the insurance company, who reminded us that we could use the money in any way we wanted. We didn’t, for example, need to buy four guitars and a bunch of used engagement rings. It was ours to do with as we saw fit. They were very nice about it. We paid the contractors, we paid off the car, and we still had enough left for two more rounds of IVF.

  Afterword: Winter and Spring 2014–15

  While we were living through these twelve months I have described, we thought of them as a stretch of mounting sorrows, each incident of loss or calamity adding onto the ones that had come before as an additional rude slap, and we felt that way despite the ultimate bounty that landed in our coffers through the good graces of our insurance company.

  Mounting sorrows are bad enough, but are they not compounded by writing about them? Why is it that I needed to write about these sorrows, these wastes that stretched out in front of us?

  In part, the compiling of these months has been automatic. Trouble this repetitious wants to be spoken about, wants to be shared, so one feels less alone. Trouble wants to be shared, contextualized, so it can be understood better, so that it might be avoided again. And because it’s hard to understand trouble of this density until it’s written down—the writing helps with the making sense—writing is a thing that in my case will inevitably happen. No useful accounts of life until they are committed to writing. Many were the points in this year I’ve described when I found myself telling Laurel that the stress was unbearable, not a thing to be borne, and yet in such moments I always knew I had to write about the period, too. Indeed, at one point, I was not sure I would be able to write anything else until I had attempted to render in words this, our annus horribilis.

  It was also worth writing about these months because of how they celebrate marriage, the stabilizing force of marriage, which never occurred to me at all until this year I’ve described. There wasn’t a need for marriage to be a stabilizing force, for me, until there were so many moments of instability, no need for marriage itself until the idea of marriage was in danger because of our difficulties.

  These are some of the things that happened to us in 2013 and 2014, therefore, and though there were bad days, and though Laurel and I have been known to toss a few choice obscenities in each other’s direction when really short-tempered, we have in fact been made stronger and more loving for all that we have gone through. We are humans in a marriage, not idealized figures out of a contemporary novel, and we have had a lot to get through. But in a great majority of cases we got through it by supporting each other, and our marriage has provided ample opportunities to learn more about how to support, when to support, and where to support.

  However, the best argument for setting down in print all of the annus horribilis is that it has, in fact, a happy ending. So let me try to get to the happy ending at last.

  In the months after the break-in, while Laurel’s mother was getting decidedly more ill, it was finally decided that Mary Ivie should move out to Portland, Oregon, to be nearer to Laurel’s brother Nick, and, by extension, her children in general, as Portland was a place that was, for most of her family, easier to get to than the middle of the state of Iowa. This was a difficult relocation to mount logistically, but once Mary was in Portland, where Nick was the first responder (in a way that was no doubt very difficult for him), Laurel, though concerned about being so far away, was freed up a little bit, for a time, and as a result there was a little extra room to concentrate on our own medical challenges.

  We did two more IVF cycles, therefore, paid for with our homeowners’ insurance payout, and while we made more viable embryos with each cycle, we were again unsuccessful with our second transfer. However, Dr. W. seemed to be getting closer to a theory of why we could not carry a baby to term, and the theory seemed to be that Laurel’s autoimmune challenges required serious medication at the beginning of each attempt at a cycle. He also believed that the embryos really did not like being outside of her body, did not like the storage medium they sat in when outside, did not like being tested, did not like the time in the lab.

  Which caused us, as a group, to come up with what I began to refer to, jokingly, as the Nakadate Protocol. (Of course, Dr. W. really came up with it, had probably used it before, and is probably using it still.) The Nakadate Protocol was simple, and, for us, a new approach: you should, if you’re worried about testing embryos, or about the embryos surviving outside of the mother, just avoid these steps. Just transfer several of the embryos, a surfeit of them, and don’t test. Surely, according to the Nakadate Protocol, one of those embryos will thrive.

  Our approach, it bears pointing out, is sort of dangerous if you don’t have a good idea about how many embryos are likely to survive the transfer. That’s the only way you avoid high-order multiples, as they are called. I joked with Dr. W. that if we had quintuplets, he had to agree to be photographed with them (and us) when we sold our story to the National Enquirer, and it was the one time I ever saw our doctor look briefly uncomfortable. But over the course of our four cycles, and two failed in vitro fertilizations, we had come to understand some of how Laurel’s body worked, and our much more potent worry, more potent than the threat of high-order multiples, was of being unsuccessful again.

  In the meantime, despite the love for and celebrity of our doctor, there were forces militating against his continuing to practice in New York City. In the middle of our last attempt at a cycle (the last attempt we had the money for, despite our many attempts to find insurance coverage somewhere for infertility), he relocated to Trumbull, Connecticut, where his medical group was trying to set up a satellite office, on the appropriately named Technology Drive, an address we never failed to laugh about. We therefore had to do all of our office visits in Trumbull. The Connecticut office of the medical group with which he was affiliated, where Dr. W. had reestablished himself, was never crowde
d, was always easy to deal with, and the people in the Trumbull office, Dr. W.’s staff, were really rooting for Laurel.

  So, in September 2015, with the Nakadate Protocol as our conceptual framework, and while Laurel’s mother was getting moved into the skilled nursing wing of a nursing home in Portland, we transferred five embryos. Dr. W. showed us a photograph of all five. It seems really odd that one could get emotionally attached to photos of embryos, but Laurel, who is after all a photographer, felt emotionally attached to the photos. The reproductive endocrinologists tend to rate the photos of the embryos, you know, and Dr. W. suggested that one of the embryos in the group portrait looked really good, according to these official standards. The one in the lower right of the group portrait was sort of a standout, so we had at least one very well-formed embryo, and unlike in earlier cycles, we had no idea if it was a boy or a girl. We agreed to transfer the other four, along with that one shapely one.

  The tech who prepares the embryos for transfer is called an embryologist, and at the Trumbull office, the embryologist was an Eastern European fellow, and he was also the embryologist of a western branch of the medical group where Dr. W. practiced. He was considered a superhero of embryology, and he jetted out to the East Coast to assist with transfers on particular days, and then flew back west. The regimented and closely monitored systems during the transfer procedure were fascinating. The stakes were high, of course. And this was especially the case when there were multiple embryos being transmitted. A kind of extreme and intensely serious hilarity hung in the air, especially when the embryologist tried to pronounce Laurel’s surname, which catches off guard even the best informed. We watched and waited, and the transfers went multiply according to routine, and then Laurel was carrying enough human embryos to bankrupt us completely, and to make the college education of our offspring completely out of reach.

  At first, as usual, we were sure it had not worked. Laurel, who can see a faint double line on a pregnancy test that no one on earth can see but her, who can see a desire for a second line as an actual thing, did multiple tests every day, but once inside the testing window, she still did not see a double line. Convinced we had failed, Laurel contacted Dr. W., who ordered a blood test to confirm the end of our last cycle. And that test failed to confirm the end. In fact, it was positive.

  Of course it didn’t mean anything certain, and getting a positive blood test at that point in our journey was like the homeowner with the underwater mortgage hitting the lottery ticket—you just don’t believe the luck is going to turn, so used to the bad luck are you, and you save the winning ticket and put it in a drawer for a few hours. The next day Laurel did see a second line, and after a few days even I could see it.

  From there we sailed through all of the traditional signs of a human pregnancy. There was a sack and it wasn’t empty, there was a heartbeat and it sounded good, and then Laurel, because she had PTSD, wanted to go back to register the heartbeat a couple more times, and we recorded the heartbeat with our phones, and Dr. W. made time for us and for multiple ultrasounds, and then he helped us with finding an OB-GYN, and we got a really great OB from New York–Presbyterian, and somewhere in there we got a phone call telling us the baby was genetically normal, after which the nurse said “… and would you like to know the sex?” To which Laurel said yes, she did want to know, and then, because I was driving, I heard her say, “That’s amazing,” which I interpreted correctly. In this way she was telling me what I already knew. It was my turn to be a father to a son.

  The rest of the pregnancy, including the very bad morning sickness, proceeded mostly the way these things are going to go, which is to say that the baby got bigger and appeared normal in every scan, and the mother appeared more pregnant as a result. Even the final trip to the hospital was routine. We were upstate, in Dutchess County, one morning, and Laurel was taking videos of herself with a heat-sensitive lens, and she was actually lying on the floor with the camera when suddenly there was liquid. This, according to Laurel, followed some similar liquid from the night before at a dinner party, some liquid that she had thought nothing about. The cumulative evidence seemed to suggest (though two weeks early) that something notable was taking place. No pain, no anxiety particularly, just fluid on the carpet, and we called the excellent OB-GYN, and she told us to drive to the hospital, which we did without any drama at all. It was a beautiful day in June, not too hot, and clear, and we arrived to check in, when Laurel flooded the chair in the insurance guy’s office, and he waived the signing of forms, and we were admitted. Laurel’s labor was extensive, but exactly long enough to do the job, and we actually watched some of The Bachelor, or was it The Bachelorette, in the hospital room, while a brace of intermittent thunderstorms caterwauled across the Hudson River from New Jersey. Laurel got her epidural, felt better, and then through some incredible technological innovation our room became the delivery room (full of, among others, a number of first-year med students, because we had signed a form welcoming them), and there was a momentous skidding out of our son, Theo.

  Given the struggle to get to him, he happened without fuss, and we were able to concentrate on trying to get to know him. And as I write these lines, he has just turned two, and we do know him, and he’s a big happy cherub of a boy with an easy smile, very dark brown eyes, and an obsession with trucks that I in no way caused.

  I tell you these things not because a child is the solution to infertility in all cases, nor because all bad luck gets reversed in the course of life, because neither is true. I love all my friends who want a child and have been so far unable to have one and I feel their ache. The more than four years it took for us to carry a pregnancy to term looked destitute and hopeless at many points, and that hopelessness was keen enough to still feel fresh. This story is not about the miracles of science and how they conquer all. There are no such miracles. And if science could be perfectly miraculous or at least entirely reliable we would have another daughter and/or a pair of twin boys, for whom we still grieve. But this story instead orbits around questions of grace, and by that I mean grace as an unearned outcome, an undeserved bit of good fortune that arrives for no other reason than that it just does. Not because we had suffered enough, but because sometimes grace is what happens. Sometimes life does take a turn for the better.

  Laurel’s mother was gravely ill at the time Theo was born, and she was just well enough to understand Laurel’s pregnancy, and when he was born, Laurel took to contacting Mary by FaceTime to show her Theo and images of Theo, to which on one occasion Mary said, while bearing another grandchild in her lap in Portland (and it was the last thing she said to Laurel): “The kingdom!”

  Which kingdom was this exactly? Should we think of Mary as having had one foot on the other side by that point, such that she knew she would not be long among us, such that she was feeling the expanses beyond? Is “the kingdom” an allusion to her interplanetary transit away from us? Should we think of the kingdom as meaning that children are a catalyst through which it is realized that the kingdom of heaven is at hand? Mary Margaret Ivie Nakadate was mother to five children, and she obviously believed in being a mother completely, and no doubt she was happy that Laurel was at last going to be a mother, and so maybe motherhood was the kingdom for Mary. Or maybe the instant of joy that she felt in beholding the picture of Theo was what she was referring to with the phrase. Maybe “the kingdom” is another way of expressing joy at becoming a grandmother again. Whatever the exact meaning of the image, which we will not ever know, for the speaker was someone whose language was failing entirely, it is an exceedingly powerful thing to say, and not a forgettable one. Laurel and I have often returned to wonder at “the kingdom” ever since.

  We waited for Theo to have his first vaccinations before we took him on the plane to see Mary in Portland, and that delay was at the suggestion of Theo’s pediatrician. We got the vaccinations a week early, and then we hastened to the airport, and landed at Mary’s bedside for her last days. Not long after we arrived, Mary
’s further suffering was at last commuted.

  There are limits to grace, there’s an inexplicability to it, then, because Mary Ivie was the grandparent most equipped by circumstances, and the most outwardly enthusiastic about playing an active role in Theo’s life, and she never got to embrace him, hold him, sing to him, delight in him completely. And there are limits to grace in that Laurel should not have had to go through her mother’s death when her child was newly born. And yet that is how it went.