Yes, her mother had snapped out of it, slowly but completely, humming back into life four years later as if their father hadn’t died from stomach cancer. For all of Avery’s high school years, especially the three when both Mara and Loren were out of the house, she learned to watch for clues, to check the air every day when she woke up, sniffing in the signs of her mother’s depression. Would today be a good day, her mother sitting at the kitchen counter in her robe, a cup of tea in her hands, asking Avery about English and math? Or would it be one of those days or weeks where she didn’t emerge from her room until evening? Or worse? A day Avery would have to gently pull her mother out of bed for a shower? Each morning when the alarm went off, Avery wondered who she’d have to talk to—the Visa representative, the P. G. and E repairman, her mother’s old bridge friends. “she’s good,” Avery learned to say, her voice crisp. “Just tired.”
One morning in the middle of Avery’s senior year, Isabel was making eggs at the range when Avery walked into the kitchen. “Scrambled’s okay, right?” Isabel said, pushing down the toast.
Avery nodded, sat down at the counter, saw her other mother, the one from the time before, the one who’d loved her children and husband. What a change from the bedraggled woman who crawled out of her room at dusk, only to discover that she was left with only one daughter at home. In an effort to keep her mother from hearing the silence of their house, Avery learned to talk about everything but her father, feeling that one wrong word would capsize them both. She knew neither she nor her mother could live through years like the ones they’d just survived.
As the truck lurched, backed up a bit, and then pulled forward, Avery started the car and followed the cement truck slowly down the street, passing the sweating flag woman, who stared at her watch, a staticky walkie-talkie blaring from her work belt. From habit, Avery began to think, That’s what happens when you don’t go to college, but she cut herself off. She’d read the books on mindfulness and forgiveness and karma. Even if she didn’t really believe any of the theories, she needed to practice being a person who could actually become pregnant. A person who deserved it.
“Mom. Mom! I told you I’d call you.”
Avery took off her sunglasses and put her Prada purse on the granite kitchen counter. She’d barely stepped into the house when she heard the phone ringing.
“But you’re so late. I thought maybe something had happened at the doctor’s.”
“There’s construction going on everywhere. I was stuck in traffic.”
“So? What’s the news? Is it good? I had to know. I figured that your appointment was over at 2.30, so even with the traffic, I timed it just right, didn’t I?”
“Yes, Mom.” Avery opened the fridge and took out Calistoga water, cradling the phone between her cheek and shoulder as she opened it. It was so hot. She wanted nothing more than to hang up the phone and go outside to the pool, sitting in the shallow end until she needed to get dinner ready. Had she even been in the pool at all this summer? She couldn’t remember. At one time in her life, water had been as known to her as air. She’d loved all the laps, the mileage, the way the world was shimmery through her goggles, the strength in her body as she pulled across the pool. But she’d stopped feeling that way after her father died, the tightness of water around her head clastropbhopbic, keeping her stuck in thought, all of them about those last minutes in the hospital. She’d quit the team and nvever compeated again, jumping in pools only to cool off, as she wanted to today.
“So?”
“I told you it wouldn’t be good news. I already knew.”
“But I thought maybe . . .” Even though Avery herself had hoped for the same thing, she was irritated, grinding her teeth as she listened to her mother go on. “You’ve just been through so much, sweetie. All those shots and blood tests and ultrasounds. I just want you to get the news you need.”
“Listen, I would have called you from the Dr. Browne’s if I had something worth telling. You know that. I’m sorry.”
Isabel gasped. “Don’t be sorry. I’m not sorry. I know you’ll get pregnant. Look how long it took your sister to get pregnant!”
“Oh, Jesus, Mom! Do you have to bring up Loren every time?” Even as she said it, Avery knew that Loren and she would always be placed side-by-side. Loren lived close by, in Walnut Creek, coming over often to Avery’s with first one, then two, and now three children. Isabel babysat frequently, calling Avery with updates: “Sammy’s learned to read!,” and “Jaden’s walking!” and “Dakota rolled over!”
Her mother was silent, and Avery could almost hear Isabel biting on her lower lip to keep more words from spilling out. “I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t mean that. It’s just that Loren is so lucky to have her children. I don’t really want to hear about her all the time You’re always comparing us.”
Isabel sighed. “Sweetie, I’m sorry. But we’re women in the same family. You have to remember how hard it was for her.”
Avery nodded. Loren had tried for almost three years before conceiving Sammy. And then in three years she’d had Jaden and Dakota. But now Avery was as old as Loren had been with Jaden. It was time. It was her time.
“I don’t think Mara will ever have children, so you’re next.” Mara lived in Philadelphia in a nine thousand square foot house with her architect husband, both of them so busy they rarely come to California on visits. She was a pathologist, cutting up who-knew-what for a living. Once when Mara was in medical school, she brought home a book about sliced up body parts, even a brain and a penis. Avery couldn’t sleep the night after she’d flipped through the entire book, unable to tear her eyes away from the glossy, cross-sectioned flesh. For days, the pictures popped up in her mind, the red and tan pieces of a human body. Mara had just laughed, saying, “God. Just don’t think about it. Let it go.” Even now, Avery shivered, thankful that Mara’s visits were few. Each time she did show up at a holiday dinner, she brought work stories, hearts in pans, cancer on skin, lungs with loops of disease. After what Avery had been through the past months, she didn’t need any more woeful tales about the body.
“I know, Mom. But you’re not . . . it doesn’t help when you call me all the time. I’m worried enough. This whole thing is driving me crazy. It’s like—it’s like this is all I am. All I’ve become. An egg. A broken egg.”
“You’re not broken. You’re the most put-together girl I’ve ever known. Look how well you did in school! How quickly you proved yourself at PeaopleWorks! This is just a minor setback for you, sweetie. I know about those.”
For a moment, the quiet dark years pressed against Avery’s throat, and she wanted to ask, “Do you miss him?” She wanted to know what it was that flicked Isabel into action again, brought her out of her room and back to her life of bridge games and gardening and Russian and history and art classes at the community center. But Avery didn’t ask, couldn’t, the rules still in place.
“Listen, Mom, Valerie, Luis, and Tomás are coming over for dinner, so I’ve got to get things ready. I’ll see you on the Fourth.”
“Should I bring anything?”
Every Fourth of July, the entire neighborhood closed off the cul-de-sac, hauled out their gas grills, and then lit illegal fireworks in the center of the court, while they waited for the sanctioned Monte Veda Fire Department’s yearly fireworks display. The women made pesto and grilled eggplant and lentil and walnut salads. The men stood over the BBQs and grilled salmon and chicken breasts and sometimes abalone or oysters. One grill continuously spun out hot dogs and hamburgers for the kids, who in the gathering of adults, felt safe to eat everything and run over everyone’s perennials and feed the pets Fritos and watermelon. Each year they’d lived there, Avery always warded off her mother’s gross green Jell-O salad with cottage cheese, saying, as she did now, “Oh, Mom. We’ve got so much. Just come and we’ll have a good time.”
“That’s what you say every year. One year, I’m just going to bring my salad. You know, the one your father love
d so much?”
Avery smiled, knowing that her father had hated the salad, but he’d loved Isabel, so with each bite, he’d said, “Delicious. This is my favorite.”
“You are our guest, Mom. Just come.”
Isabel sighed. Avery imagined her curling the cord of her old rotary dial phone around her finger. “All right. But you call me before if anything happens. You know.”
“Yes, Mom. I’ll call. Got to go.” Avery hung up, knowing that nothing was going to happen. Not this month. Not for awhile.
Tomás was asleep in Avery’s arms, Valerie eating as if it were her last meal. In fact, her best friend’s face looked too thin, Tomás sucking every last bit of fat out of her. “I had my cholesterol checked,” Valerie had told her last week. “One eighteen. One eighteen! My doctor wondered how I was still alive.”
Avery looked down at Tomás, the milk-drinker, her godchild, his beautiful brown face so sweet in sleep, his eyelashes long and black, his hair a fuzz of darkness.
“I am so hungry,” Valerie said, scooping up the last of the lasagna on her plate and then serving herself another square.
“I can see that, amor,” Luis said. “Hey, why don’t I just slide the cassarole in front of you?”
“Watch it, Luis,” Dan said, winking at Avery. “You’re on dangerous ground.” Dan smiled, his eyes dark with laughter. When she and Dan were first going out back at Cal, she had warned him, “Don’t ever say the word ‘fine.’ Don’t say, ‘It’s all right.’ Women know what fine and all right mean. And to be on the safe side, don’t talk about thighs or weight or hair. On a bad day, I won’t be able to take it.”
Luis nodded. “I know it, man.” But Valerie didn’t blink, cutting at the lasagna, flipping her long red hair behind her shoulder when it got in the way of her fork. Avery knew Luis wouldn’t care what size Valerie was; he loved her so completely, his eyes always on her, appreciative, glowing. After Tomás was born, he sobbed as he cut the umbilical cord, saying, “Dios mio,” and other Catholic Spanish sayings Avery and Dan couldn’t catch. To Luis, Valerie was a queen, La Reyna, as he called her.
In a different way, Avery knew how he felt because she looked at Dan with those same appreciative eyes. While she picked on him and teased him and felt he was her equal, she knew that he would protect her, care for her, love her. Sometimes at night, she wondered what she gave him, what he truly loved about her. Was it that she was beautiful? That she could earn a living? That she could cook? Then he would throw a heavy, sleepy arm across her and pull her close, and she would forget to figure out what their marriage was all about, safe in the warmth of her husband’s flesh.
Tomás made a small cry and stretched out an arm, turning a bit in Avery’s arms. She bent her head down and breathed him in. She knew her own baby would be as sweet and wonderful as him. Sometimes, when she watched Tomás, while Valerie took a long, soaking bath or went to the grocery store, she imagined that he was hers. When Valerie walked back into the house, Avery almost had to shake herself into the real world.
“So what did the doctor say? Did you ask him about the herbs?” Valerie asked, finally pushing her plate away. “Luis’s cousin Rosalinda swears by them.”
“I didn’t ask. I forgot. But he wants me to do acupuncture.”
“That’s crazy stuff, man,” Luis said. “The Chinese say our body is all connected by electrical currents, which is true. But to stick in needles to activate them . . . what is it? The chi? And a teacher at my school, she told me about cupping. They light a match in a cup and extinguish all the air and stick them on your back. To pull out the ‘bad humors’ or something. It’s superstition.”
Luis taught high school science at Las Palomas High School, and whether it was a cow’s eye or a frog or a twenty-five pound feral cat that his students had to dissect, it was straight forward and clear, muscles and nerves and flesh in clear understandable systems. In some ways, he was just like Mara, though he didn’t talk about it as much.
“Don’t get me started on superstition,” Valerie said. “Every time we leave on a trip, you’re genuflecting all over the place. Kissing your Saint Christopher and whatnot. How can that be scientific?” Valerie smiled and patted Luis’ shoulder. “There are things we just don’t know about, and getting pregnant is sometimes one of them.”
Dan nodded. “I know. One of the administrative assistants at work adopted a baby, not knowing that she was actually four months pregnant. She’d been trying for years, and then she and her husband decided to adopt. The night they brought the baby home, she realized what was going on. She thought she wasn’t having a period because of all the hormone treatments.”
Avery leaned in closer, hovering over the happy story that floated in the middle of the table. She loved these tales where the miracles happened. Sometimes, with the right crowd in Dr. Browne’s office, the women would begin to recount the unbelievable—the twins after five years of hormones, IUI, and then in vitero. The adopted baby who was now in the same grade with the baby the couple conceived after the adoption went through. The triplets, identical, no fertility drugs at all. The quads who weighed four pounds each and were now thriving. The sister of a friend of a women’s husband who didn’t even know she was pregnant and went in to the hospital for indigestion. All of these stories had to be true, and one of them just might end up being Avery’s. She didn’t care which because all of them ended happily with a child.
“Unbelievable, man,” Luis said, standing up and clearing dishes from the table. “God was sure good to us.”
“Superstition,” Valerie whispered as he and then Dan left the room loaded down with plates.
“No, maybe he’s right,” Avery said, pressing Tomás just a bit closer. “You guys are so lucky. Tomás is beautiful. Look at him!”
Valerie reached a hand over and rubbed Avery’s arm. “Hon, you’ll have a baby. I know it. Some people just take longer.”
“Yeah. So I’ve been told.” These were the stories that were harder to listen to—the couple who tried homopathetic treatments, psychotherapy, weeklong infertility retreats, acupuncture, IUI, and IVF for twelve years before giving up, having spent almost all of their retirement money . The co-worker’s daughter who had fibroids removed, tubes blown clean, a dye study, and a uterus scraped all for nothing. The woman who went to England for a new procedure that cost twenty thousand dollars and failed. Even afterward, she kept trying and was still at it ten years later.
“Look, it’s summer,” Valerie said. “We’re going to hang out by your pool and relax. Your body is going to be so rested, you’ll be pregnant by fall. You’re ripe, girl. Don’t get down.”
Avery smiled. “I am like a melon, a tomato, a plum.”
“Damn right,” Valerie said. “A veritable garden. You’ve just got to get seeded.”
“What?” Dan said, walking into the dining room, Luis behind him.
“Don’t ask,” Avery said, laughing. “I’ll explain it all to you later. I promise.”
Avery lay behind Dan, his body a strong silhouette in the bed. She pressed closer, wrapping an arm around him.
“What?” he asked, turning his head toward her. “Are you a little anxious?”
That was their term for needing each other—anxious. They would be at a party dancing to music in the middle of a room, arms tight around each other, and Dan would lean into her ear and whisper, “I’m feeling a little anxious,” rubbing the silk covering her back.
Now, while she would welcome the forgetfulness of sex, the familiar and comforting ways their bodies moved together, the skin she knew so well, she was actually anxious. Worried. Frightened. Even though Dr. Browne, Valerie, her mother, Loren, and all the women in the waiting room had declared that anxiety and stress of any kind would ruin her chances. That’s why she’d quit her job, despite how hard she’d worked for years. She couldn’t help it though, still feeling Tomás’ warm weight against her body, the empty space after Valerie had taken him from her.
“I’m . . . I’
m scared it’s not going to happen. Another cycle, Dan, and nothing.”
Without saying anything, he turned to her, pulling her across his chest. He was always so warm, she often thought of buttered toast or anything brown and hot when she was near him. He was so alive, she’d always known that it was her fault they couldn’t get pregnant—her body still and slim and cold.
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