Daughters for a Time

by Handford, Jennifer

  DAUGHTERS

  for a TIME

  Daughters

  for a Time

  Jennifer Handford

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2012 by Jennifer Handford

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Amazon Publishing

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781612182926

  ISBN-10: 1612182925

  For my three daughters

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part Two

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Part Three

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Acknowledgments

  Reader’s Guide

  Discussion Questions

  About the Author

  Prologue

  With my nose pressed against the glass of motherhood, I was on the outside looking in, consumed with a want so big I would wake in the night, craving the fleshiness of chubby cheeks and equally chubby thighs. I had it all planned out. I knew what kind of mom I wanted to be. I’d name her Samantha, but I’d call her Sam, Sammy, Samarooni. I’d give her sloppy, wet, suck-on-her-bottom-lip kisses. I’d blow raspberries on her tummy while she convulsed in giggles. My husband, Tim, and I would laze around with her in bed on Saturday mornings, squishing each other, arms and legs crisscrossed and tangled.

  What a big girl you are! I would coo, kissing the bottoms of her feet. What a big girl!

  In the early years of trying, I had become conspicuously present at the house of my older sister, Claire, bouncing her new baby on my knee, logging each moment with my niece as on-the-job training for what lay ahead. I furtively tore recipes from Family Circle and Woman’s Day at doctors’ and dentists’ offices, stowing away in my bottom desk drawer recipes for jack-o’-lantern-on-a-stick cookies, gummy-worm pudding, and cupcakes baked into ice cream cones.

  Plans were made. Claire and I would mother together, a tag team of kisses, juice boxes, and promises. Loving arms circling our daughters with assurances that their childhood wouldn’t be cut short, like ours had been.

  Years passed, though, and then I became that woman, the sad and desperate one. The one who overstepped her boundaries, the one in the checkout line who couldn’t help but touch a strange baby’s foot dangling from her mother’s Baby Bjorn, just to get a quick fix of that new silken skin. An anger and sadness consumed me, but of course, the babies themselves were always exempted from my fury. Them, I still loved. It was their mothers—those women who could do the one thing I couldn’t—who I grew to despise.

  More years passed, and still nothing. A single pink line, a viscous swirl of blood, an ache in my heart that nearly split me in two. “Not you,” my body would cackle. “Anyone but you.”

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Get up! Get out of bed! my mind blared.

  Forget it! my body countered. I was warm, the down comforter was as soft as a cloud, Tim would be gone soon, and most of all, I had cramps and the pillow jammed under my abdomen felt good.

  Get up, my mind admonished again, before your husband loses his patience with you and packs his bags as your father once did.

  He wouldn’t do that, some other part of my mind reasoned. He’s nothing like my father. I flipped over, blotted my tears on the pillow, and gave myself five more minutes.

  On the toilet, I peered between my thighs, watched blood swirl to the bottom of the bowl, and said good-bye to another month. Statistically speaking, each month was another fifty/fifty try, an even flip of the coin, but I was the idiot who couldn’t tear herself away from the roulette table, so certain that there had to be redemption for the loser who kept placing bets. Four years of trying, forty-eight months—now forty-nine—had to build up some sort of probability karma. Surely, next month would land in my favor, wouldn’t it?

  Not if you’re broken, my body jeered. If you’re broken, then it’ll never be your turn.

  I changed my pad, chose a super-maxi, and waddled out of the bathroom and down the steps to the kitchen.

  In the hallway, I caught my reflection in the mirror, saw the sadness that now resided in the purple shadows under my eyes. I reached for my face: Zits and wrinkles? There ought to be a law that forbids a thirty-five-year-old from enduring adolescence and aging at the same time. I gave myself a once-over: gray sweatshirt, flannel pajama bottoms, my hair as matted and drab as wet poodle fur. In the kitchen, another mirror, this one hung by the door so that I could check my face before leaving the house. Today I lifted it from the wall hanger and placed it facedown in the junk drawer.

  I walked into our kitchen, slipped into Tim’s cooking clogs, and bored my toes into the soft wool. Our kitchen was small, a space about the size of the walk-in refrigerator at Harvest—the restaurant that Tim and I owned. The restaurant that had now made Tim nearly famous, and the place from which I’d recently taken a leave of absence, after the depression brought on by infertility had left me ineffective at work, as impossibly flat as a deflated soufflé.

  Tim was pedaling on the stationary bike in the exercise room. I could hear the cranking of the bike through the floorboards, along with Bobby Flay’s muffled voice. Tim would click back and forth between the Food Network and CNBC as he put away twenty or so miles. I peered out the window over the sink. Spring was showing off its wares: pink and red tulips, grass greening, shiny leaves cloaking bare limbs. More evidence of the fertile ground all around me. I rinsed and wrung out the sponge to wipe down the countertop. A dusting of flour. Tim must have been baking.

  Our house was a cozy and quaint Cape Cod, one of a few small houses nestled among grander ones in our northwest DC neighborhood, one of the few houses that was actually occupied by a warm body in the middle of the day. Most of our neighbors were workaholics: lawyers, lobbyists, councilmen, doctors at the various hospitals, Capitol Hill staffers. Professionals who left early and returned late to their brick Colonials, faux chateaus, and Tudors. Breeders who popped out children like gumballs and then hired a staff of nannies to raise them.

  Claire, who was never short on opinions, occasionally commented on how someday Tim and I would “trade up,” once the restaurant became profitable. But I was happy in our fifteen-hundred-square-foot home, and Tim was too busy to care. The last thing I needed was more square footage to ramble around in.

  Claire had Maura, my three-year-old niece, an exceedingly adorable brunette: cuddly, loving, accessible, and warm. Kryptonite for a seemingly barren woman like me. The type of child who brought me to my knees with her peachy little-girl skin and watermelon kisses.

  Claire was an excellent mother, the
type who always had a clean tissue in her pocket, a Band-Aid in her purse, and a bag of Goldfish crackers in the glove box. She’d been perfecting her mom skills for over two decades, the result of having responsibility heaped on her at the early age of twenty, when our mother died and she became guardian to me, a defiant fourteen-year-old.

  I poured myself a mug of coffee and peeled three Tums from their foil wrappers. The artificially flavored orange chalk mixed with the strong French roast actually tasted good, like a hazelnut-and-Grand Marnier torte that I used to make—and Tim’s current pastry chef, Margot, sometimes still did.

  I padded down the hallway to the baby room. The baby room with no baby. A room painted and wallpapered years earlier, when my naive optimism fueled the false belief that I would be pregnant in no time. I sat on the edge of the bed, let gravity pull me down, and lay curled on my side with my knees pulled toward my chest. I hugged a teddy bear and let the tears flow easily. These days I was like a faucet.

  Was it so wrong to want a family? To imagine a Norman Rockwell life where the three of us ate dinner around the same table every night, laughing, jockeying for turns to talk, a heated game of Candy Land afterward, a marathon reading session before bedtime. Just one more! our child would beg, crawling over Tim’s chest, her hands cupped around his face, while I fluffed her pillows and straightened her comforter, readying her cozy nest for a good night’s sleep. Later, as Tim and I curled into each other, we’d laugh over a memory from the night. “God, she’s so funny,” Tim would say. “A little comedian,” I’d agree, nudging closer to him.

  Three years ago, after a year of trying to get pregnant, I had been diagnosed with endometriosis, which the doctors suspected to be the cause of my infertility and painful periods. Surgery followed, and then two more years of trying, but still no luck. This year’s theory was that my egg quality was poor. “The eggs might be there,” Dr. Patel, our fertility specialist, had said, “but they don’t want to come out.”

  Lazy, good-for-nothing, squatter eggs.

  Dr. Patel prescribed drugs to jump-start the ovulation process, a shocking dose of hormones to give my eggs a swift kick in the butt. Each month, Tim and I made a trip to the fertility clinic and I endured the humiliating experience of intrauterine insemination, a process whereby Dr. Patel strapped me into stirrups and used a turkey baster to direct my husband’s sperm to the right location. There, they rambled around looking for an egg to penetrate. Hello! Anybody home? Little did they know that my eggs were freeloaders, sponging off the system without doing an ounce of work.

  “I just don’t get it!” I cried to Claire one morning after I’d gotten my period. “Why can’t I get pregnant?”

  “You can! You will,” she insisted, though it seemed like she was starting to doubt it.

  “I knew this round wouldn’t work. Dr. Patel was out of the office on an emergency procedure and a resident had to do the insemination. The idiot couldn’t even find my uterus. Ended up injecting the sperm into my cervix! My cervix! Tim could basically do that!”

  “Everything happens for a reason,” my sister said. “Maybe this is God’s way of telling you that you’re not meant to birth a child.”

  “Thanks a lot, Claire! So God finds crack whores and single teenagers suitable to birth a child, but not me.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I’m just wondering if you should consider some alternatives.”

  “Alternatives?”

  “Like adoption.”

  I shook my head decisively. “Adoption is great,” I said. “I love people who adopt. But I really want to have my own child.”

  “But if you can’t, it’s an alternative. A baby’s a baby. Love’s love.”

  “It wouldn’t be the same,” I said defiantly.

  “Why are you so determined to perpetuate our gene pool? What’s so great about our family’s DNA? Poor Mom, dead at the age of forty.”

  “You have a baby, Claire,” I said, now angry. “How can you not get that I want to birth a child more than anything in the world?”

  “Of course I understand,” she said softly, setting a cup of tea on the table next to me. “I just hate seeing you in so much pain. How far are you willing to go?”

  “To the end of the earth.”

  I plopped into the corner of the sofa, sliding my body down the length of it. I placed my hands on my sternum where the gnawing pain was usually located, a nagging ache that had plagued me since Mom died. Acid churned in my stomach, the pressure lodged under my rib cage. Tums, Tagamet, Axid, Pepcid…Nothing worked. I needed something much stronger to extinguish the self-doubt that I was feeling. Today I needed an entire medicine chest: something for the cramps, something for the acid, something to dull the pain altogether.

  If my mother were here, she’d smooth back my hair, make me a cup of cocoa with a heaping spoonful of fluffernutter, and assure me, “It’s okay; your time will come.” But Mom wasn’t here and that left Claire, and Claire would never say that. Claire was a problem solver. She’d give advice, recommend reading, tell me to buck up and think of a new plan. “Did you get the article I sent on the couple who adopted twins?” Claire would want to know.

  The basement door squeaked when Tim came up from exercising. I wiped my eyes, slid off the sofa, and tried to lift my mouth out of its frown. Tim’s shirt was soaked with sweat and his disheveled sandy hair stuck up in every direction. His cheeks shone red. Vibrant was how he looked. The opposite of me. Every time I caught my reflection in the mirror, I couldn’t help thinking how much I resembled my father, Larry. Defeated was how I remembered him looking.

  “How are you?” Tim asked in a careful voice. Dealing with me these days was like walking on eggshells.

  “I’m fine,” I said, retrieving a Gatorade for him from the refrigerator.

  “Thanks.” Tim had the boyish looks of a model in a Polo advertisement, like a prep school lacrosse player fresh off the field. He wiped the sweat from his face with a wet paper towel and then looked at me. “How are you, really?”

  “Just the usual. Got my period in middle of the night.”

  “Of course you got your period.” As if there wasn’t a chance in hell that I would turn up pregnant. “We need to start the process. There’s a daughter waiting for us. Focus on that.”

  Tim had a childhood friend who adopted from China last year and their daughter was doing beautifully. Tim had already done some research, contacted the same agency that his friend had used, and requested the paperwork. It sat untouched on my dresser.

  This is my daughter from China, I had tried saying once, but the words got caught in my throat, like eating too much corn bread with nothing to drink. The daughter that melted in my mouth like a chocolate truffle was the one that I was unable to conceive.

  “Helen, come on,” Tim said. “Anyone can have a baby, but it takes a special woman to adopt.”

  The burning behind my breastbone flared. It was never Tim’s intention to hurt my feelings; he was just able to do it so well. As if these four years we’d spent trying to conceive had been just a silly exercise in biology and chemistry that didn’t really matter in the long run.

  “Not anyone can have a baby,” I reminded him.

  “You know that’s not what I meant.”

  “Sorry,” I said, wishing I didn’t take everything Tim said so personally.

  He exhaled and offered a smile. “Let’s start over. What are your plans for today?”

  I bit into a cranberry scone he’d whipped up earlier. My recipe. Though back when I was the pastry chef in our house, I’d used currants. It was buttery and light and the cranberries were tangy and chewy. Baking was my personal alchemy. I loved how the science of yeast, flour, and liquid could produce such delicious results. I liked, too, the reminder that there was a fine line that separated miracles from disasters. How all the skill in the world still required a dash of luck.

  “Let’s see, I’m going to do some laundry, pay some bills, go grocery shopping,” I said, trying
to sound efficient, like Tim. But what I really wanted was my flannel pajamas, my down comforter, a couple of these scones, and a pot of coffee. I had a week’s worth of soap operas recorded upstairs. I wanted to hear the opening music for Guiding Light because it reminded me so much of Mom that I could almost feel her.

  “Do you think you’d have any time to come into the restaurant?” Tim asked. “You know you’re always welcome to come in and work, whip up something for the night’s tasting menu.”

  “I know. I’ll think about it.”

  “It’d be good for you to get back to work a little, you know?”

  “Meaning?”

  “Just that it would be good for you to get out of the house for a while. For you to remember how much you used to love baking.”

  “True,” I said, wistfully remembering what it was like to spend a morning at my stainless steel workstation, my mixers, pans, and tins organized neatly in front of me, a giant marble slab covering a refrigerated space below. But true, too, was the memory of my last day at work when the devastation of starting my period flung me into a rampage, setting into flames with my blowtorch an entire rack of chocolate-hazelnut tortes.

  “We have rehearsal today at eleven o’clock, for tomorrow’s show,” Tim said. “I could always use your help with that.”

  For the last year, following a glowing article on Tim and Harvest in The Washington Beat magazine, my husband had enjoyed the status of a celebrity chef. Now, once a week, he prepared a gourmet meal in a five-minute bit on Good Morning Washington. Last week he seared foie gras, slid it onto pointed toast, and topped it with caviar. The bleached-blonde, C-cupped newsperson, Melanie Mikonos, was nearly orgasmic as she savored Tim’s creation, leaning into his arm. Unassuming Tim—a guy who was a thousand times cuter than he realized—just shrugged his shoulders like it was no big deal.