by Kate Rorick
And so, they went back to trying. To tracking cycles and circled days. And then . . . eleven months into this exhausting journey . . .
“Is that . . . a blue line?”
Nathalie stared at the little stick she had just peed on two minutes before.
She was a couple days later than normal. Then again, her normal was so short, she couldn’t really tell if this was just a longer cycle, or something more. She might be feeling different, then again, it might just have been the Mexican food they had for dinner last night. But she had an economy pack of pregnancy tests in her closet . . . might as well use one.
Now, there was a very, very faint blue line, staring back at her.
David came and peered over her shoulder. His brow came down. “I don’t know if I believe it. Is it supposed to be that light?”
“I don’t know.” She read and reread the box. “It says any line, no matter how faint . . .”
“So . . . we’re pregnant.” A smile broke across David’s face. With his hair still sticking up from sleep and blinking behind his glasses, he looked like the most adorable befuddled man in the world. He held up his hand. “High five!”
She slapped his hand, and then gave him a kiss. And went to call her doctor.
“Congratulations!” Dr. Duque’s nurse said on the phone. “We’ll want you in around six weeks for an ultrasound to confirm—let’s look at dates.”
But she and David had a vacation planned that week—wanting to get away from the stress of baby making, and a lot of craziness going on at David’s work, they’d planned a drive up the coast for Nathalie’s school’s spring break.
“No problem—the next week will be fine,” the nurse said. “The baby’s not going anywhere.”
Nathalie warmed at that. The baby. She had so many questions. Due date? Boy or girl? Left-handed or right? Any chromosomal abnormalities? Could she go to the gym? A million little thoughts running through her head nonstop. Meanwhile, the blue line was really, really faint. And she didn’t really feel any different—Mexican food aside.
Was this even real?
Then, she did start to feel different.
But, not good different.
It began with cramps. Not terrible ones, but ones that would make her think her period was coming, if she hadn’t known it wasn’t.
Her back hurt in a weird way . . . which answered the question of whether or not she would go to the gym.
And then she started spotting.
“Is it heavy, like a period, or lighter?” Dr. Duque asked, when Nathalie reached her on the phone.
“It’s lighter.”
“Okay, spotting in early pregnancy is normal. It’s your body adjusting. But if you would like to come in now, we can just check and see how things are going.”
“ . . . No,” Nathalie said. They were leaving the next day for their trip up the coast. She hadn’t even begun to pack. “I have an appointment in ten days, I’m sure it will be fine.”
It wasn’t fine.
They got all the way up to Carmel, near Monterey, checking in to their Airbnb overlooking waves crashing against the coastline. But before they could even breathe a sigh of relief, Nathalie doubled over from the cramps, curling up into a ball on the couch and staying there for the next two days.
And the bleeding got worse.
Then, she called a doctor.
Not her doctor. She called a random ob-gyn in Carmel. Sat in his waiting room for an hour before she could be squeezed in. David sat next to her, looking stricken. When they called her name, she told him to stay where he was. Patted his hand. Told him everything was going to be okay.
It wasn’t.
He was an older man, and tended to keep his eyes on the papers in front of him, rather than look at her.
He gave her a pregnancy test. Her HGC levels were there, but they were low.
“What does that mean?”
The new doctor hummed under his breath. “Could mean a lot of things. Could mean you’re not as far along as you think you are.”
“I am,” she said, and reeled the dates of her last cycle off to the blinking doctor. Then he hummed again.
“Well, then, combined with the bleeding,” he said, matter-of-factly, “I think it’s likely you’re miscarrying.”
That one word made the floor open up beneath her, and suck her in at a dizzying pace.
“You’re sure?” she asked weakly. “You don’t want to do an ultrasound or listen for the heartbeat?” She eyed the ultrasound machine in the corner, covered and unplugged.
“No point,” the doctor said. “Heartbeat wouldn’t be detectable at this stage.”
He looked at her then, and his eyes were not unkind. But this was news he must have had to give a thousand times in his career. He’d long since come to the conclusion there was no point in being sentimental about it. “The embryo will pass in the next couple days—you probably won’t be able to tell. It’ll just be like your period, maybe slightly heavier.”
But it didn’t pass. In fact, the pain only got worse. And while Nathalie writhed on the couch, David grew more and more anxious.
“When did he say the pain would pass?” David asked. “And why wouldn’t he do an ultrasound?”
But Nathalie didn’t have the answers. And she was kicking herself for not getting them.
Finally David had had it. He called Dr. Duque back in Los Angeles.
And Dr. Duque gave him a plan. Told him to bring Nathalie in, ASAP.
He threw all of their stuff into the car and drove the six hours home in less than five, delivering her to Dr. Duque’s office doorstep.
Dr. Duque gave Nathalie another pregnancy test—her HGC levels were exactly the same. Meaning, she hadn’t miscarried. But nor had the baby progressed.
“Let’s see what’s going on in there,” Dr. Duque said, but her normally secure smile shifted. Her jaw became set and her eyes focused. She prepped the ultrasound—transvaginal, because the baby would be too small to see otherwise. And then, on the screen . . .
Nothing.
Her uterus was empty.
Then the doctor shifted the wand, and looked elsewhere.
“There,” she said, pointing to a blob in the middle of another blob. “The embryo is in your fallopian tube. No wonder you’re in so much pain. It’s an ectopic pregnancy.”
Ectopic pregnancy. She had spent the last several days mentally making peace with a miscarriage. Somehow, an ectopic pregnancy was so much worse.
Because the baby was there, and growing . . . it was just in the wrong place.
And there was no way to get it to the right one.
“I want you to get your first dose of medication while being observed to see if we are going to need to do surgery or if the medication is going to work. I am going to send you to the emergency room to get that all started and you may need to be admitted overnight.”
Dr. Duque’s eyes were kind, and sad. She knew there was nothing rote about this.
“When?” Nathalie croaked.
“Now,” Dr. Duque replied. “The longer we wait, the higher the chance that your fallopian tube could rupture.”
So, they went to the hospital.
There, the nurse on call wheeled her into a curtained-off area—it was the ER after all, no private rooms here—giving her a thorough questioning about her medical history while they moved. Then, the doctor came in, gave her another confirming ultrasound and she was injected with methotrexate.
Chemotherapy medication.
They let her lie there for a little while as they kept an eye on the monitors, the drugs coursing through her system.
The same poison that couldn’t save her mother was now going to take her baby.
It’s not a baby.
It’s not a baby.
It’s not a baby.
She had to keep telling herself that. It wasn’t a baby. It was a ticking time bomb that could take out her fallopian tube at any minute and require major surgery to save her life. I
t would never be a baby.
They would never meet.
David sat next to her, listening to all the hum and bustle of an emergency room beyond the curtain, his gaze resting somewhere around her knees. They stayed that way, until the nurse came back with details for follow-up visits.
Then, they went home.
And that was that.
Oh, of course she had to deal with the next thirty-six hours of nausea and awfulness as a side effect of the chemo meds. And, they had to wait at least three months until the methotrexate cleared her system and her body had recovered before they were given the green light to start trying again. Still, even then she didn’t feel normal enough to try just yet.
And . . . just as they decided to start trying again, she looked at the calendar and realized her not-a-baby’s due date would have been the next week. And the sadness she had not allowed herself to feel began to creep in the edges.
And then David lost his job at Stanis and Lowe.
Laid off or quit, the result was the same. They were downsizing, and David took their piddly severance package. But the stress of the job hunt made them decide to forestall their baby-making plans.
David sat at home for three months, sending out résumés and going on interviews and watching Top Chef reruns before he landed a new gig, as in-house counsel at a major movie studio. A huge step up in terms of responsibility, salary, and benefits (and free theme park tickets). So much so that his signing bonus would cover his half of the down payment on a house.
Thus, they began house hunting. Another layer of stress to add to their lives, and so the baby plan was postponed once more.
It was only once they were in escrow and packing boxes that Nathalie felt she could toss her pill pack again.
And this time, it was as if her body was ready for it. She didn’t even have to tell David which days were circled on the calendar. They were leaving the hardship of the past behind them and enjoying a well-earned upswing in life. Everything fell into place, and suddenly, that blue line that had been so faint the first time practically leaped out from the pee stick and did a tap routine to loudly announce their fecund state.
But Nathalie wasn’t taking any chances. At six weeks on the dot she was in Dr. Duque’s office for an ultrasound. She signed up for every optional genetic testing available, minus amniocentesis because holy crap was that a big needle. She refused to tell anyone—or let David tell anyone—about the pregnancy until she was thirteen weeks along, and the dangers of the first trimester were over.
And after today, she was left feeling like the only one who cared.
A creak at the door and a shaft of light falling over the bed told her that David was hesitating on the threshold.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay.” She sniffled up the last of her drying tears. “Today was just horrible.”
He came up behind her, and lay on the bed next to her. Wrapped an arm around her waist, curling up against her, warming her with his body heat.
“It was pretty screwed up, wasn’t it?” he said, and she dissolved into giggles.
“I’m shocked the turkey wasn’t raw. And that Kathy didn’t scream the house down.”
Then his body started shaking against hers with laughter.
After a few seconds of catharsis, Nathalie sighed. “Well, at least we still have your parents. I know it’s predawn over there, but your mom is an early riser—can we call them? Give them the news?”
David’s parents were an interesting set, and even after knowing them for fourteen years, Nathalie still couldn’t figure them out. His father was a first generation Chinese-American, and his mother Italian, and both were academics. His father taught chemistry and his mother history. While David’s paternal grandparents were thrilled by his admission to law school, his parents were livid when they found out that David was pursuing a career in something “practical” rather than his passion, no matter how often he told them he enjoyed the law and didn’t have a passion beyond Nathalie. Nathalie hoped that her ambitions to teach would mollify them, but when they learned she intended to teach high school—public high school—their interest in her career became remote.
Normally, both Dr. Chen and Dr. Russo-Chen could be found in their cramped offices at UC Davis, but this year they had decided to take a joint sabbatical, and go to Italy. It would be about 5 AM there, Nathalie reasoned. Surely, they wouldn’t mind being woken up by such good news.
But David’s chuckling body stilled. “Oh . . . um.”
“Too early?” she asked.
“No . . . too late,” he replied sheepishly.
“ . . . You told them already?”
“You said Thanksgiving we could tell family. And my folks called yesterday to ask about their plants and they said they were about to take a two-week walking tour through Tuscany . . . so I told them. I figured one day wouldn’t make a difference.”
Nathalie felt her heart sink through the mattress. But all she said was “Oh.” Then, “What did they say?”
“Dad was cool about it.”
Cool. That is how one would describe the male Dr. Chen’s reaction to almost anything. Tomatoes. Sharks. Grandchildren. If it wasn’t a controversial stance on molecular chemistry, he didn’t really show any reaction.
Back when he’d first met her jovial, accountant/history buff father and the exuberant Midwestern hospitality of Kathy, it had been an awkward afternoon of trying to find things to talk about.
They eventually settled on the Manhattan Project.
“And Mom was . . . happy. You know, for her.”
Yes, for her. Dr. Russo-Chen was not the kind of Italian mother that pulled people to her bosom and spoon-fed them pasta until they were numb with love. She was the “my family is in Venice’s Golden Book, little schoolteacher, so I’m writing a thousand-page history of their exploits and can’t be bothered with things like food or plants” kind of person.
Although Nathalie doubted that was actually a type. Dr. Russo-Chen was highly original, as she was swift to tell you.
It just went to show how desperate she was for someone to be excited that she actually hoped David’s parents would fit the bill.
“Good,” Nathalie managed to say. But as his arm lifted off of her, she knew her body couldn’t hide her disappointment from him.
“I’ll finish cleaning up the kitchen,” David said, as he rose off the bed. “You get some rest.”
As he left, she lay there in the dark, wide awake. Finally, she had exactly what she wanted, exactly what she planned for.
And she had nothing but disappointment to show for it.
Chapter 3
“WELL, I WAS WONDERING WHAT CRAWLED up Nat’s butt to make her crazy about Thanksgiving this year. Now I know.”
Lyndi threw herself on the faded striped couch that dominated their little living room. It had been Marcus’s mom’s, purchased sometime in the ’70s. She’d been happy to gift it to Marcus when he moved halfway across the country, ready to upgrade to something from this century.
Their loss, because it was the comfiest couch Lyndi had ever lain upon. Especially after a whole day of being in Nat’s perfect IKEA-catalogue-with-aspirations-of-Pottery-Barn home.
With Nat staring daggers at her the whole dinner.
“I thought it was pretty funny,” Marcus said, sitting down next to her, pulling her feet onto his lap and beginning what Lyndi could only hope was an hour-long foot rub.
“I thought she was going to kill me for ruining her cornucopia—ooooohhh, right there.” His thumb pressed into her arch in a way that seduced her now just the way it had seduced her six months ago, when she first moved in.
She’d gone to art school, but due to her father’s worries about her future job prospects, Lyndi had minored in business, and so knew her way around a spreadsheet. A sprawling metropolis with creativity at its core seemed like the right place to be.
She’d thought about moving to the East Coast—New York, or DC, or th
e exotic wilds of Buffalo—but when you’re a California girl . . . there’s no place like Pacific sun.
Maybe she just wasn’t that brave. She didn’t know anyone on the other side of the country. And stepping out into the world was hard enough—doing it in an entirely unfamiliar environment was downright crazy to her.
But, she always figured, if life took her there, she’d go.
“I don’t think it was the cornucopia she was pissed about, babe,” Marcus said. And Lyndi, for all the foot rubbing, couldn’t ignore the tension that immediately bunched up inside her.
“She’ll get over it,” she replied nonchalantly. And Nat totally would, she decided. It was just today that had been sucky. Lyndi would apologize for the vomiting and the screwing up Nat’s speech, and everything would be fine.
In fact, one of the reasons she felt safe moving to LA was the fact that Nat was there. She knew that she could always turn to her sister if she needed something.
Just like she always had.
Nathalie was nine years older than Lyndi—and technically her half sister, Lyndi being a product of their dad’s second marriage. But from the very beginning Nat had always been Lyndi’s guide through girldom, her protector from all things stupid (like ice-blue eyeliner, and boys who insist that you can’t like X-Men comics), and her teacher about adult things—like how to do laundry, and how to tell Dad she blew all of her textbook money on art supplies.
Having Nat in LA (and David, too, who’d been with Nat since Lyndi was ten) made LA just a little bit safer.
So she moved. She bounced around on different friends’ couches and sublets, and bounced around trying different kinds of work. But nothing ever seemed to fit.
Her degree was in design . . . but she kind of hated graphic design. Spending all day on a computer made her feel like she didn’t have anything to show for her efforts beyond a jpeg file.
She decided what she wanted was something real. When what she created had form, shape, and weight. Something that she could stand back and look at, and something that would evoke a reaction.
That’s why she liked working at the floral start-up. She worked with real things—stems cut just that morning, bending and molding them into an explosion of color that made people inevitably smile.