47.
KATYA
THEN
“I’ll be giving the gift of a baby to a wonderful couple,” I told Josh. “The best, really. What a perfect match—a philosophy professor and an art curator. How glamorous. She’s beautiful, too.”
Josh cocked his head questioningly, in the adorable way dogs do. Behind him the sun shone brightly. I could see a patch of blue sky.
“I looked her up online,” I explained. “It was easy. How many curators are there at the Met with the name Lana?” Tyler had told me her name and what she did back when I first met him at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. It seemed so long ago. I couldn’t believe there had been a time when I wasn’t his student.
I got up and started pacing the room, too excited to stay still. Josh wasn’t happy about it. “Katya, please sit down.”
“Pretty name, right?” I said, and paused by the window. The tree branches below were starting to bud. “It’s really Svetlana but who can pronounce that in America?” I said before returning to the couch.
“You should see her,” I continued. “So elegant—cocktail dresses, skirts and blouses, scarves and high heels. Always high heels. I found photos of her at all these art benefits and functions. She did her undergrad at Princeton and her PhD at Columbia. Not bad, huh? And the whole partnership thing. I just love it. That’s my kind of woman: elegant, intelligent, and independent. EII. I want to be like her when I grow up.”
Josh chuckled. He and I had fallen into an easy stride these days. I’d come in, sit down, and start talking. I didn’t need much prompting or handholding. Josh’s occasional nod or laughter were enough for me to know he was listening.
“Of course, you can’t tell from the photos if she is nice,” I went on, “but I can’t imagine Tyler going for someone less than wonderful.”
Josh had a frown on his face now, like he didn’t get it or something.
“He’s the most awesome professor I’ve had,” I continued, ignoring Josh. “You can tell he loves teaching. That it really matters to him if we’re learning. I’ve never had so much fun in a class.” I paused, then unfolded and refolded my hands before I went on. “Tyler doesn’t seem to care that he’s in a dying field. He’s one of those absentminded professors who have their heads in the clouds. He’ll head home from campus, walking down Broadway but he’ll pass 112th Street, where his apartment is, and not notice until he has hit the traffic lights at 110th. Sometimes not even until the split to West End Avenue at 108th.”
“How do you know that?” Josh said, his firm voice betraying his rebuke.
“I saw him on campus the other day. I waved at him, but he was so absorbed in his thoughts, he passed me like a lamppost.”
Josh was looking at me with narrowed eyes, his head tilted, like he was judging me. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like it at all.
“I only followed him to make sure he was okay,” I lied. “That’s all. I’d looked him up online, so I knew his address. I found it under Lana’s name actually. She seems to have been there for over fifteen years. I try to picture her as a young girl—more or less my age—arriving in New York. She’s from Chicago, a Midwesterner.”
The shadow of reproach on Josh’s face grew thicker. “Did the agency tell you all this?”
“Oh, c’mon. What’s the big deal? I’m not stupid. I did my research. I suppose if I were doing this donor thing only for the money, I wouldn’t care. But this is my chance at redemption. I couldn’t—wouldn’t—just give my baby to anyone.”
Josh opened his mouth to say something, but I lifted my hand to stop him.
“I know, it’s not really my baby. Fine, the baby conceived with my eggs. Anyway, this baby is my way of paying back for Alex. I want to make sure that it has a stable home where it can grow up happy, surrounded by love. Not like Alex and me. Is that so wrong? To want to make sure that I’m not condemning that child to a neglectful mother? I mean, given my experience. Can you blame me?” I stared into his eyes, willing him to understand. “I’m okay with a brilliant, if preoccupied, father. But the mother, the mother has to be perfect. I would have liked to meet Lana, but I totally respect that she wants it to be anonymous. I love the fact that she’s already so protective of her child. Before it’s even conceived, she’s anticipating potential dangers. This is not a woman who would send her three-year-old son with her eight-year-old daughter to play in the sea alone.”
Josh nodded, scribbled something in his notebook. Outside, traffic droned on Broadway. A distant honking. The rumble of a truck.
“I can’t even begin to imagine how hard it must be on her. Luckily, she has a place to vent. She goes to an infertility support group. Every other Friday at the YMCA.”
“You’ve been following her, too?”
I couldn’t help it and grinned proudly. “She never bothers glancing back. A woman on a mission.”
Josh gave me that stern, judgmental look again. “You realize what you’re doing, right?”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m not stupid. It is the very thing Lana is afraid of. I know. And believe me, the last thing I want is to mess with the child’s mind. But before it has been created, I have to make sure its parents are going to be good.”
“You know that stalking is illegal and punishable by—”
“But I’m not stalking anyone. Check the dictionary. The legal definition of stalking is: Criminal activity consisting of the repeated following and harassing of another person. I’m not harassing them, am I? I’m simply gathering information. People do it all the time before signing all sorts of deals. It’s just that they usually hire private detectives to dig up the dirt if there is anything to be dug. I don’t know of any private eye going to jail because he’s doing his job. Nor the housewife who hired him to spy on her husband.”
Josh took his time. Finally, he nodded, a bit stronger than his usual I’m listening nod. More like: Okay, fair point. But I still didn’t feel like he approved.
“I can’t fuck this up,” I said. “Don’t you get it? This baby is my one chance at getting myself on track. I know it won’t bring Alex back but, in my mind, it’ll provide a counterbalance.”
I leaned forward, peering into Josh’s eyes. “So you see. I’ve got to do it right.” Only then would I be free.
* * *
I wasn’t scared of needles or blood, but injecting myself—and in the stomach on top of it—made me sweat like a pig. I’d gone to a training session at the clinic to learn how to do it. They told us to experiment on a grapefruit but no matter how much I practiced, the moment I looked at my own flesh, I panicked. I sat at my desk with my shirt lifted for like ten minutes, trying to summon the courage. One hand pinching my belly to get a layer of fat, the other hand holding the syringe poised to strike, alcohol wipe and a pad at the ready, next to me. There was something very counterintuitive about jabbing yourself with a needle in the softest of spots. I would get used to it, I was sure. The girls online who had done it a bunch of times said it got easier with practice. One wrote that she’d even done it standing in the bathroom of a plane.
I couldn’t believe Lana had gone through this nightmare eight times. And I was doing just one half of the process. The more I learned about her, the more I liked her. I had a total girl-crush on her at this point. She was everything my mother wasn’t and more—strong, protective, successful.
Every time I went to the clinic, I looked for her, hoping to see her sitting in one of the chairs, leafing through a magazine. It’s not like I would have gone over to talk to her—she would have recognized me right away—but just sneaking peeks at her, observing her in the flesh would have been cool. There was something so exciting about seeing in person someone you knew so much about and admired from afar. Like seeing a famous person on the street or in a restaurant. You don’t talk to them or anything but just their presence in the same location is rewarding. Like their awesomeness rubs off on y
ou or something. I’d once spotted Hilary Duff in SoHo and for the rest of the day I’d felt excited, as if I were somehow special.
So far, I hadn’t seen Lana in the waiting room, but maybe she came in the mornings while we donors were called in the afternoons. I’d thought she wouldn’t start her part of the cycle until they’d retrieved my eggs. But according to my online research, she already must be taking hormones to prepare her uterus for the embryo. She should be coming in for monitoring as frequently as I was, so that they could tweak the hormones if things were not developing right. Such a complicated game. Everything had to be just so and there were so many components to worry about.
I guess playing God was no joke.
48.
LANA
NOW
The ringing of the phone woke me. Sunlight streamed in through the window; I’d forgotten to pull the shades down when I’d finally crawled into bed last night. The clock showed 8:35 a.m. Who was calling me so early on Sunday morning?
I stretched, rubbed my eyes, and got up to look for the phone. By the time I dug it out from under the pillows on the sofa, the call had gone to voice mail. It was my mother. Of course. I decided to talk to her after breakfast and headed to the bathroom. I’d barely splashed cold water on my face when I heard it ringing again. I rushed to the living room to pick it up, the towel still in my hands.
“Mom, what’s so important that it can’t wait—”
“My own daughter is pregnant and she didn’t even bother telling me,” she said, her voice high and quavering, her accent thicker than usual. “How could you, Lana?”
I filled up my cheeks with air and blew it out hard as I sank into the sofa. This was going to be a long conversation.
“That I should find out from Tyler and not you,” she went on. “That is . . .” Her voice seemed to catch. “That’s insulting.”
What a bastard. I couldn’t believe he told on me to my mother. My knee-jerk reaction was to avert the crisis, to reassure her, make her feel better. Which only made me angrier. I was done taking care of her. My problems were far too great at this point to worry about her fragile ego. It was time I focused on myself. The baby growing inside me needed me.
“This is precisely why I didn’t tell you,” I snapped into the phone instead. “Because you make such a big deal out of everything. I’m sorry but I have other, more pressing problems to deal with right now than my mother’s hurt feelings. The world—believe it or not—doesn’t revolve around you.”
“Lana, this is not a way to speak to—”
“And that’s another thing: I’m sick of your admonishments, your prescriptions for how I should live my life.”
“I’m just worried about you, honey. Tyler told me you won’t let him go to the doctor with you. He’s really excited about the baby—”
“Mom, he left me.”
“If you’d only listened to me and married him.”
“Yeah, because getting married sure stopped Dad from leaving you, and then it sure kept Jack—”
“Relationships are hard. I’m not saying they aren’t.” She paused. “But a commitment like marriage makes you work at it. Otherwise, at the first sign of hardship, you pack your bags and go. That’s all I’m saying.” She sighed. “But, no, you were too good for marriage with all your feminist ideas.”
“Has it occurred to you,” I interrupted her, “that maybe I was too scared to get married?”
“Why would you be scared?”
“Because I didn’t want to end up like you. That’s why.”
I heard her swallow. “Like me? What’s wrong with me?”
“You forget I took care of you when Dad left and you fell to pieces, refusing to eat, crying yourself to sleep. Then again with Jack, then Paul.”
“So you thought that as long as you didn’t get married—”
“I wouldn’t be setting myself up for disappointment. That I wouldn’t be making myself vulnerable. Yep. That’s exactly what I thought.” I’d never before articulated it to myself—or to Tyler for that matter—but in retrospect it seemed obvious.
“Oh, honey,” she said, almost gasped. “I hate to tell you this, but when a man leaves you, it hurts just as much no matter what you’ve been calling him: boyfriend, husband, or partner.”
“Well, I learned my lesson, didn’t I?” I said, and started laughing. To my surprise, she joined in and the more we laughed, the funnier it became.
“We should do this more often,” I said after I’d calmed down.
“What? Fight?”
“I meant laugh, but, yeah, if we have to fight to get there, sure.”
Before we hung up, she said, “I just don’t see what’s so wrong with having Tyler there with you. It’s his baby, too, you know?”
Oh, I do know, I thought, and hung up. His and his student’s.
My baby would be the embodiment of Tyler’s betrayal. Literally.
* * *
As the day dragged on, I only got myself more worked up about it. Finally, I couldn’t help myself and typed up a text to Tyler: Did you know your mistress had been stalking me?
But remembering the newspaper report about his involvement with yet another student, I changed your mistress to Katya before sending it.
His reply came an hour later. I was on the sofa, scrolling aimlessly through the TV channels and making my way through a bag of Cheez-Its. I’d developed a craving for salty snacks. They also seemed to settle my stomach, so I had a good excuse. Plato was next to me, licking one of his hind legs intently.
Tyler’s message said: I told you she was crazy.
“Not crazy enough to stop you from fucking her!” I said out loud, and tossed the phone onto the empty end of the couch, startling Plato.
I heard it buzz again but refused to get it. When I finally did—on my way to the bathroom twenty minutes later—I found another text from Tyler: I hope you’ll reconsider and let me join you at the next doc’s appointment. If not, I’m sorry, but I’m prepared to fight it in court.
Feeling nauseous, my head buzzing with anxious thoughts, I curled up on the couch, hoping to find some peace. But it wasn’t meant to be. The neighbors’ Yorkie was yelping like he hadn’t been fed for days. How could such a tiny thing—he was smaller than Plato, for Chrissake—produce so much noise? I pressed one of my ears against the cushions and covered the other with one of the throw pillows. I could still hear it.
* * *
Dusk was settling into the room when I awoke. I went to the window and looked out. The gloaming could be beautiful in the city, the building façades dark and crisp against the deep blue of the sky to the west; the streetlights already on, glowing yellow with the promise of a night on the town. Music sounded faintly, probably from one of the bars around the corner. People, alone, in couples or groups, walked purposefully, rushing to get places. The pit in my stomach grew heavy. The day had come and gone. The evening ahead seemed long and empty. I had no plans, no place to go to, no loved ones to see.
My eyes rested on the photos on top of the piano. I took the one from Kilimanjaro and held it toward the fading light, scrutinizing my red cheeks, my smile, my fist pumped high above my head. As much as I hated to admit it, Tyler was right. Where had that daring, fun-loving girl gone? My world had shrunk. I’d let the infertility take over my life and, in the process, I’d lost so much of myself. I’d stopped going hiking, volunteering; I’d dropped out of the book club I’d started. I’d even neglected my work—the career I’d hustled so hard to build. One by one, I’d lost my friends—except for Angie, who was my infertility buddy, so it almost didn’t count—and then I’d lost my partner and now my job.
I put the photo down and returned to the couch.
I’d thought of myself as a strong woman. But it was only a mask I’d been hiding behind. I’d fooled everyone: my mother, Tyler, even myself.
I’d thought I was standing up for myself when I went to the clinic to have the embryo transfer despite Tyler bailing. Bullshit. That was the coward’s way. I’d gone through the back door, behind his back, hoping I wouldn’t be found out. What I should have done was call him on his behavior, tell him that walking out on me at that time was not okay. That if he wanted to go off with some other woman, it was his choice, but I was going to do this donor egg cycle—with or without him.
Instead, I had dug myself into a hole and there was no getting out of it. I could even lose my baby over it.
I tried to shake off the self-pity and opened my laptop, hoping some quick research would help me figure out my options. What I learned was that laws varied between states and that the contracts signed at donor agencies might not hold up in court. But I couldn’t find anything about parental rights in situations like ours. It would have been a different story if we’d already had the baby and been named as legal parents. But as it was, Tyler was undisputedly the father while I had no genetic connection to the baby and could be seen as nothing more than a gestational carrier. It didn’t help my case that Tyler and I weren’t married and that I’d proceeded with the cycle without his knowledge, let alone agreement.
Some might say I’d stolen myself a baby, only I’d done it before it was born. The fact that the “genetic parents” had been willing to give it to me just a few days earlier wasn’t the best defense. Even mothers who give up their newborns for adoption have the right to change their minds during a certain period after that.
It was time I sought legal advice. I jotted down the numbers of three reproductive rights lawyers on a piece of scrap paper and stared at it before scrunching it into a ball and tossing it on the floor.
Who was I kidding? I had no money to fight Tyler on this. Not without a job and with a baby on the way.
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