Her Daughter's Mother

by Daniela Petrova

  I opened my mouth to speak, but no sound came out.

  “Hello?” she said again, waited, then hung up.

  I threw the phone on the floor. What would I have told her anyway? My partner left me? He decided he no longer wanted a baby?

  I wondered if anyone had ever canceled their transfer before. After all the hormones, the ludicrous amount of money, the shrink evaluation, the daily doctor visits, the endless pages to initial, the papers to sign, had anyone ever really called to say, Never mind?

  The phone buzzed on the floor. I brushed the tears away with the back of my hand and got up to get it.

  A text from Angie: Good luck today! I’ll be thinking of you. xo ♥

  * * *

  “Is your husband at work, too?” the woman sitting next to me asked.

  I looked up from the Vanity Fair I’d been leafing through. She had perfectly blow-dried hair, trendy highlights, and a flawless manicure that seemed out of place with the blue, giant-size hospital gown she was wearing. I scanned the clinic’s pre-op waiting room. Furnished with pastel armchairs and sofas, it looked more like the reception area of a law firm than a hospital. About a dozen women were having their transfers today. All of them were sitting with their men except for the two of us.

  I considered her question. A few days earlier I would have said, “My partner is at work,” stressing partner just enough to give it an accusatory quality. For years, I’d passionately defended my right to have a family without the formality of a signature, without the sanction of the church and government. I would explain at length that marriage was an inherently patriarchal institution that subordinated women to men. That the term wife meant I was someone’s property, whereas partner suggested equality. One thing I’d never considered was how easily a partnership could dissolve.

  “He has a really busy day at the office,” I lied. What was I to say? I’m doing it alone? Just the thought of it made my eyes well up. But what was I doing here then?

  “Tell me about it,” she said, leaning closer. “If it’s not a meeting, it’s an important conference call or a client.”

  I nodded and picked up my magazine, but she wouldn’t let go. “This infertility business is so difficult on relationships. We women do all the hard work—the injections, the hormones, the surgery—and all the guys have to do is jerk off into a cup. How fair is that? Then they bitch that we’re all moody and—imagine!—we don’t want to have sex.”

  I felt a lump in my throat. Just a week ago I would have rejoiced guiltily at how lucky Tyler and I were not to have to deal with any of that. He’d always come with me to the doctor’s appointments, even given me the injections, making all sorts of silly faces to make me laugh so that I’d relax. The hormones hadn’t really affected me much, either, except for making me feel bloated. I’d certainly never lost my sex drive. If anything, Tyler had seemed less interested these past few months. I’d assumed it was the stress. That, like me, he was feeling jaded, depleted after our latest miscarriage. It had never occurred to me that he might be having an affair. That he might bail on me, leaving me alone and childless after nearly a decade together.

  I’d thought about it all weekend, looking at it from every possible angle. He could deny it as much as he wanted, but I was sure he’d met another woman. There was no other plausible explanation. If he truly just wanted a break, he would have left before we’d started the donor egg cycle and wasted all that money—and with it our last chance to have a child.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, standing up. “I need to run to the ladies’ room.”

  In the bathroom, I splashed my face with cold water and stared at myself in the mirror. What am I doing here? I shouldn’t be having this embryo transfer. Not without Tyler.

  “Oh, honey, I’m sure he’ll be back,” my mother had said when I’d called her crying on Saturday morning. She was a smart woman who’d managed to escape Communist Bulgaria back in the day, but when it came to men, she was utterly delusional. I didn’t have it in me to point out that all three of her ex-husbands—my dad included—had left and never looked back.

  I’d spent the rest of Easter weekend at home with the shades drawn, curled up on the couch with my red tabby, Plato, binge-watching shows on Netflix. It’d been a relief when Monday had finally rolled around. I’d showered, dressed, and come to the clinic as if nothing had changed. In many ways, it hadn’t.

  Tyler and I had already paid and filled out all the required forms at the start of the process. There was a specific clause somewhere in there that asked what should be done with our remaining embryos in the event that one or both of us should die. Maybe even in the case of us splitting up one day. I couldn’t remember. There had been so many questions to answer, pages to initial, and consent forms to sign. But I was pretty sure there had been no mention of a separation in the midst of a cycle. Even lawyers wouldn’t think of something so absurd.

  Whatever the legal implications, could I really go ahead and have Tyler’s baby without his knowledge?

  I sighed and dried my face. I would go back inside, change out of the hospital gown, and go home. It was the right thing to do. I should have canceled over the phone this morning, spared myself the humiliation.

  In the waiting room, I paused and took in the scene: throw pillows and side tables piled with magazines; the muted flat-screen TV on the wall, permanently tuned to NY1. The familiarity of it ran like a chill through my body. Only the faces of the men and women, waiting anxiously for the one procedure that could change their lives, were different each time.

  A young couple huddled on the sofa in the back reading their iPads attracted my attention. Her feet in blue hospital socks rested against the coffee table, tapping nervously. He’d draped his free arm over her shoulders and was stroking her softly. I had a flashback of Tyler and me on that very couch. He’d always rubbed my back to calm my nerves before the transfer. With a stab, I realized there was probably some other woman he now—

  “Lana?” I heard the nurse call out behind me.

  I stood there gutted by the thought of Tyler, my Tyler, rubbing some other woman’s shoulders. Kissing another woman, I could deal with. But that simple—if imaginary—act of intimacy was what drove home for me his betrayal.

  “Lana Stone?” the nurse called out again.

  I turned with sudden determination. To hell with Tyler. He could be married with a kid before the end of the year. But this was it for me. The two embryos waiting to be transferred into my womb were my last chance at motherhood. I would never again be able to save enough money on my own for a donor, and my crappy eggs were clearly past their expiration date. Tyler could walk away from me, but he shouldn’t be the one deciding if I’d ever feel the kick of a baby, if I’d ever experience the pain and elation of birth.

  It was my choice to make.

  * * *

  In the taxi on the way home, I pulled up my egg donor’s profile on my phone and stared at her photo. “Will you bring me luck?” I whispered.

  The decision to use another woman’s eggs hadn’t been easy. Tyler and I must have browsed through hundreds of profiles. We’d joked that it was as if we were choosing a partner for a threesome. But to me, it had felt like we were picking out my replacement. After all, Tyler’s sperm was to fertilize her egg. I would just carry the baby they had made, even if the work was done in a lab without them ever meeting.

  If my child wasn’t going to inherit my DNA, I wanted it to at least carry my people’s genes. I longed for a connection, a common thread that would run through me, linking my baby to my mother, a gymnast who had defected from Communist Bulgaria during the Montreal Olympic Games. But there weren’t any Bulgarian donors to be found. I’d almost given up on it, thinking of using a Russian or other Eastern European woman, when one of the agencies called me with the good news. A Bulgarian girl had just signed up.

  Everyone thought I was foolish to go with a
donor I knew nothing about just because of a shared heritage. “What if she’s ugly?” friends asked. Then her file landed in my mailbox. If anything, Donor CN8635 was too beautiful. The baby wouldn’t look anything like me. But she was undeniably Bulgarian in appearance and that was the whole point. She had the same wide Slavic cheekbones as my mother, the same slightly elongated eyes, inherited from the Bulgar tribes who’d made their way south of the Danube from Asia in the seventh century. But while my mother’s eyes were brown, the donor’s were dark green. In many ways, she looked more like my mother’s daughter than I did. She even had her lithe, straight-backed gymnast’s figure. I’d inherited my father’s big-boned frame and had to work hard to stay in shape, spending hours on the elliptical each week.

  Donor CN8635 was twenty-one, an Ivy League graduate. She was an only child and there was no history of cancer, heart disease, or depression in her family. I had a feeling I would have liked her if I’d met her in person. But the process was anonymous. There were couples who insisted on meeting their donors and looked for agencies and girls who were okay with that. I didn’t understand it. Why complicate matters? Once the donor knows who you are, you can never be sure she won’t change her mind one day and come looking for your child.

  There are crazy people out there.

  3.

  KATYA

  THEN

  Seven months earlier

  “I don’t need a shrink,” I said, first thing after I walked in and sat on the sofa. I literally said that. First words out of my mouth. What was wrong with me?

  He nodded, picked up a legal pad and a pen from his desk, and sat on the armchair by the window across from me. I hadn’t expected him to be that young. I took a sip of my latte—I’d stopped at Starbucks on the way here—and left the cup on the side table.

  “I’m not depressed,” I said. “And I’m certainly not crazy.”

  I waited for him to ask what, then, had brought me to the Counseling and Psychological Services Center. But he just sat there, waiting, staring at my face a bit too hard, as if he were worried his gaze might slip down my shirt without his knowing. I was tempted to tell him that I was used to guys checking out my breasts but didn’t want to embarrass him. It was only our first session.

  “I’m Bulgarian,” I said instead. “Only crazy people go to the shrink in Bulgaria.”

  The hum of the city drifted in through the open window along with a cool breeze. The smell of rain and wet leaves. It had been hot and sticky when the semester started three weeks ago, but by mid-September the humidity was gone. The early autumn sky was an intense blue, smooth and solid like marble.

  “Anyway, I thought I better check it out,” I said. “The therapy thing, I mean. See what all the fuss is about. It’s free, after all. I guess the university wants to make sure we all have someone to talk to.”

  I took another sip of coffee. Looked at him. He couldn’t have been more than thirty. Handsome, in a dorky, earnest way. That puppy look, eager to please. I wondered if he blushed easily.

  “My friend Zoe is in the hospital,” I blurted. “In the ICU.”

  He leaned forward, locked me in his gaze. “What happened?”

  I ran my hand through my hair and began picking the split ends, unsure how much I wanted to tell him.

  Zoe was in my advanced econometrics course. We’d run into each other before—we were both econ majors—but had never really hung out much. Maybe because this was a tough class or because we were in the same dorm our senior year, we’d started studying together, comparing lecture notes and consulting on homework assignments. When she found out that in the four years I’d been at Columbia I’d barely set foot in Central Park, she took it upon herself to remedy that great injustice. Zoe was from New York. Brooklyn, really—as she loved to point out. Whatever. When you come from another country those distinctions don’t matter.

  Anyway, we went to the park together the other day. The weather had turned warm again and I loved it. After wandering the pathways for an hour, we sat on a bench by the pond with the model boats. I’m no fan of water: lakes, rivers, even small ponds like this one give me the shivers, but I wasn’t going to tell Zoe about it. And in all fairness, it was pretty—the Fifth Avenue skyline, the birds chirping in the trees around us, the kids pushing their scooters.

  I avoided looking at the water. But then two mothers pushing strollers stopped near the edge in front of us. There was a little boy with them, around five, who seemed fascinated by the boats. Zoe was telling me something about coming to the pond as a kid but I could barely hear her, my eyes trained on the boy, who sat down on the stone ridge that runs along the pond. He had on a pair of baggy jeans and a dark blue T-shirt with Superman on the front. His mother, chatting busily with her friend, was holding his denim jacket in her hand. The boy lay sprawled on his belly, leaning all the way over the stone. “This kid’s gonna fall,” I said, interrupting Zoe.

  “His mother is right there,” she said, but from what I could tell, his mother wasn’t paying him any attention. I stood up and walked over to the two women, who stopped talking and looked at me, confused, suspicious.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and pointed to the boy, “but I’m worried that he’s going to fall over.”

  The taller woman put her hand on his shoulder. “He’s okay, actually. We come here every day . . . But thank you.” Her voice was calm but her strained smile seemed to say, Mind your own business, weirdo. I turned to her friend for support, but she, too, was looking at me as if I’d grown a second head. I kept standing there. The two of them exchanged glances and, without a word, gathered the boy up and moved farther down the pond. I shook my head and walked back to the bench.

  Zoe had an amused smile on her face. “At least you didn’t get into a fight this time.”

  She was referring to an incident the week before when we’d run into a couple about our age arguing on the sidewalk on Broadway right outside the subway entrance. The woman had tried to stomp off, but the guy grabbed her by the arm. I told him to leave her alone, which didn’t go well. Both of them started shouting at me to mind my own business, the guy calling me a bitch. Zoe showed them the finger, hooked her arm around mine, and pulled me away.

  The night of our park outing, I caught her puking in the bathroom. It was the third time that week. At the sight of her pale, vacant face, I snapped. She’d been nice to me and I wanted to help her. I really did. I told her that she was stupid to do that. That she ought to accept she’s fat and move on. No point in torturing herself puking her guts out. If it were working, I could see how one could argue that it was worth it. But with all that purging, she was still overweight.

  “You have two options,” I told her. “Be fat and happy or be fat and miserable.” I meant to be supportive, of course. But I could see how it might have come off the wrong way. Jesus. How could I have been so stupid?

  I looked back at the shrink. “She tried to kill herself,” I said. “She came to my room in the middle of the night. All freaked out, sobbing. I barely understood her when she told me that she’d taken an entire bottle of Advil.”

  He shook his head, a faint frown across his forehead. “That must have been horrible.”

  “They pumped her stomach and all. But she’ll be okay, thank God.”

  “How about you? How do you feel?”

  I leaned back on the couch and looked at the ceiling. There was a tiny stain, the shape of a man’s profile, the nose barely jutting out like a Roman bust. I sighed and turned back to him. “I’m sad, I guess,” I said, and watched him make a note of it. “Angry. Guilty.”

  He looked up from his pad. “Tell me more.”

  I didn’t want to tell him more. I crossed my legs, listened to the student voices coming in through the open window. Guys shouting, throaty laughter. Girls shrieking in the distance.

  “Luckily, she wasn’t that smart about it,” I said finally
. “I mean, Advil? Everyone knows Advil will give you stomach ulcers before it kills you.”

  “Maybe it was a cry for help,” he said. I shrugged, and he went on. “I’m sorry you’re going through this. It must have been so scary to hear what she’d done.”

  She did it because of me, I wanted to tell him. “I’m only glad she’s better,” I mumbled.

  The back of my T-shirt felt damp against my skin. I zipped up my hoodie and wrapped my arms tightly around my chest. The shrink was looking at me intently, his head slightly tilted, nodding as if weighing my words with each movement of his head.

  “I’m afraid we are out of time,” he finally said, and stood up.

  I followed suit, feeling a bit frazzled at the abruptness. My hand shot forward but I pulled it back, uncertain. “I’m sorry. Do we shake hands? I don’t know the protocol.”

  He smiled. “No need to. I’ll see you next week.” Then, “One more thing before you go. We don’t use the word crazy in this office.”

  I stared at him. “Not even I’m crazy busy?”

  He shook his head.

  “How about I’m crazy about you?” I asked, batting my eyelashes.

  Another shake.

  “But that’s crazy!” I laughed and picked up my empty coffee cup. “Thanks, Dr. Wozniak.”

  “Call me Josh,” he said, and explained that he was a mental-health counselor, not a psychiatrist. Whatever. They were all shrinks, as far as I was concerned.

  At the door, I turned. “Josh?”

  He looked up from his notebook.

  “Maybe I am a bit lonely,” I said. “That’s why I came . . . in case you’re wondering.”

  He smiled again. “Perhaps we can start with that next time.”

  I nodded. Something told me that we wouldn’t. A lot could happen in a week.

  4.