No Happy Endings

by Nora McInerny

  Chapter Eighteen

  Oops

  I never take naps. Even as a preschooler, I would lay (lie?) . . . I would be on my cot, belly up, staring at the ceiling while all the children around me snored softly. In college, when all my friends took pre-party snoozes, I’d sit on the couch watching Laguna Beach reruns and waiting for everyone to wake up so we could test out our fake IDs at Don Pablo’s. Even when I had my first child, and everyone kept insisting that I sleep when the baby sleeps, I spent my maternity leave using his naps as a time to unload the dishwasher, catch up on my trashy magazines, or just exist without a small person touching me.

  So when I woke up in a puddle of drool on my couch on a weekday, I was concerned. What the hell had happened and where did the past two hours go? My laptop was asleep on my chest, indicating that I had been in the middle of a work project. I’d started this project mid-morning. The clock claimed it was now afternoon. My body whispered “go back to sleep,” and that is exactly what I did. When I woke again, it was time to pick up Ralph from daycare. My day was over. I’d gotten nothing done. And I still felt like I needed to sleep for another six hundred years.

  For the next part of the story to seem rational, you should know that I have always turned to pregnancy tests in times of uncertainty. A sexual education that was based mostly in plant reproduction and the Virgin Mary (remember, Catholic school) meant that I have spent my life with an irrational fear of spontaneous impregnation. I took pregnancy tests before I was remotely sexually active, because who knows* how sperm is transmitted? Do we have proof that you can’t get pregnant from sharing a toilet seat with a woman who had sex right before peeing and may have had a small amount of sperm on her body that was then transferred to the toilet seat, where it shimmied from the edge of your thigh right up into your vagina and up to a waiting egg?* Could this anomalous nap be indicative of a uterine interloper? Of course not. I’d been dating Matthew for just a few months, and I’d had maybe one period since my brutal miscarriage.

  There was no possible way I could be pregnant, which is why I went to Walgreen’s and bought a five pack of the name-brand tests and texted my daycare lady that I would be late picking up my toddler. It couldn’t be in any way possible, which is why a hot-pink PREGNANT appeared immediately in the window as I was still peeing on the stick. Not remotely possible. But there it was. And standing in front of my tiny sink in my tiny bathroom, I watched my face react. I was shocked. I was happy! I was shocked that I was happy. And then I was sad.

  Aaron and I had always agreed to have a big family. Or, more accurately, I wanted a big family and I knew I could wear him down until he agreed to want one, too. I came from a family of four kids, born over a spread of eleven years. Two girls, two boys. Our family dynamic was aggressive and loving and sometimes maddening. When my dad shouted “Hog pile!” it was a signal to us to leap onto one of our siblings, one on top of the other, to crush them with our love but also with our bodies. Our dinner table was loud. Our house was energetic and filled with physical altercations over the remote control.

  That’s the kind of household I imagined for Aaron and me: one where I would spend upwards of a decade shouting “this is why I can’t have nice things!” while holding broken pieces of a lamp in front of dirty-faced kids who all blamed someone else for whatever had broken my favorite heirloom (or, more realistically, an impulse purchase from Target).

  That window—if it was ever really open—slammed shut the moment I saw that blood.

  Just two months before, we’d been laying in our bed, his hand on my stomach. He was dying, yes, but we didn’t say it out loud. Instead, we focused on the small life that was blooming inside of me while his had begun fading. His smile—once electric, beaming—was a small upward pull that only the right side of his face could manage. I watched his beautiful hands, now whittled down into fingers slenderer than mine, gently sink into the flush of my swelling tummy.

  I cried for a lot of reasons after I miscarried our second baby. One: I had miscarried a baby. Two: I had ruined the very end of Aaron’s life. Three: Ralph would be an only child. That miscarriage had been the first in a Triple Crown of losses that happened so quickly one after the other I didn’t even have time to be sad about the first one.

  Aaron was meant to be a dad, and he loved being Ralph’s papa. Aaron sang Bruce Springsteen as he rocked Ralph to sleep and coordinated his chemo naps with Ralph’s nap schedule. The two of them were each other’s favorite person, and I was happily the third wheel. Aaron’s cancer seemed to be held at bay, and because I am a very pragmatic and logical person, I credited not the team of medical experts working with Aaron, but our child. As Ralph approached two years old, Aaron’s cancer advanced. For the first time, he seemed truly sick. He couldn’t drive a car. He slept around eighteen hours a day. He had gotten so weak he couldn’t lift Ralph, who would instead climb into Aaron’s lap and lay for hours, sucking his thumb. If Ralph had kept Aaron alive, then surely another baby would do the same thing. If Ralph was the living embodiment of Aaron’s legacy, why wouldn’t I have another? Why wouldn’t I want Aaron to live on in as many people as I could possibly create inside of me? I had assumed that Aaron’s cancer had given us an immunity to other kinds of tragedy. What kind of a God is going to let you miscarry when your husband has brain cancer?*

  Over a year had passed since that miscarriage, since my dad’s death, and then Aaron’s. My brain had turned to goo. I couldn’t remember if I’d turned off the burner after dinner, or where my car keys were. I couldn’t remember the day or time of the meeting, or where I parked my car when it was time to leave because I had the details about both mixed up. I couldn’t remember having my period, either, but that could be explained away like all of the other things I was missing. My brain and my body were busy surviving. Any extraneous activities would be ceased until there was more bandwidth. I vaguely remembered reading something in Seventeen magazine two decades ago that had instilled a lot of additional pregnancy anxiety in me during my teen years. Maybe you didn’t need to have a period to get pregnant?

  All of this is making it sound as if this were an unplanned pregnancy, which, of course it wasn’t unplanned. Matthew and I had been dating for exactly four months before I took that test. Which puts the date of conception somewhere around the three-month mark. Which is . . . atypical? No, we did not say to one another “three months seems like the right mark to really solidify a blended family with the glue of a small baby.” But we also didn’t say “let’s not get pregnant right now.” We did spend a lot of time talking about a baby, and a lot of time engaged in activities that could have resulted in a baby. I will say this: if we are having sex and you ask if you need a condom and I say “don’t worry about it,” you should maybe worry about it.

  There was no need to tell Matthew just yet. It was so new. Anything could happen. And the idea of breaking his heart like I’d broken Aaron’s was too much. I’d wait. Just a few weeks, maybe more. Make sure this one was here to stick. Then I’d tell him. He’d be happy, right?

  The baby I’d lost just before Aaron died would have been ten months old by now. That pregnancy had ended at eleven weeks and six days, so close to that magical twelve-week mark that even though I knew that pregnancy loss is common, and that there was nothing I could have done to change the outcome, it still felt like I’d jinxed it somehow. Maybe I’d told too many people, too soon? Maybe it was that jog I took? Or sleeping on my stomach?

  There was no use telling Matthew just yet, not when there was still a chance that I could lose this. That anxiety was directly at odds with my excitement and wonder.

  Some days, driving to pick up Ralph, I let myself imagine another car seat in the back of my station wagon, Matthew’s daughter in between them, his son . . . wait, my car wasn’t going to be big enough for all of us. Neither was Matthew’s. Did we need a minivan? Those were my favorite days, the ones where I thought about the fact that only three kids could fit in the backseat, the days I let myself
believe we were going to have four.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Sad Nora and the Secret Baby

  REASONS I DON’T WANT THIS BABY:

  Matthew and I have been dating approximately five minutes and babies are more permanent than tattoos.

  Matthew and I don’t even live together and I’m not moving to his side of town because I like where I live, and I like my life.

  Ian is fourteen and it will ruin his life.

  Sophie is ten and it will ruin her life.

  Ralph is three and it will ruin his life.

  I am thirty-four and it will ruin my life.

  Matthew is thirty-seven and it will ruin his life.

  I won’t love this baby as much as I love Ralph.

  I won’t love this baby at all.

  I won’t love this baby, and the baby will know, and then reject me, and then I really won’t love it.

  I won’t love this baby and everyone will know and think I’m an awful person.

  This baby is somehow a sign that I didn’t love Aaron enough.

  This baby is a sign that I don’t know how birth control works.

  This baby deserves better than me (can I transfer this pregnancy to a worthy friend?).

  REASONS I WANT THIS BABY:

  I WANT THIS BABY.

  It’s not that I wasn’t excited to be pregnant, it’s just that I didn’t want anyone to know about my pregnancy, and I didn’t want to talk about it, and having a baby grow inside of me felt like a betrayal to my dead husband, our dead baby, and our love in general. In other words, things were fiiiiiiiine and everything was great.

  Things were fine and everything was great: I was in a beautiful relationship with a man who loved me. Our baby was growing inside of me, strong and healthy. My boobs had grown into absolutely perfect C cups. I cannot stress that last point enough: my boobs were absolute perfection. They looked like they’d been molded by the world’s most talented plastic surgeon. The kind of boobs where you think “Did she?” then, noticing how absurdly perfect and natural they looked, are forced to correct yourself. “Of course, she didn’t. Nobody’s fake boobs could look that good.” I spent a lot of time admiring and documenting these boobs, for any future surgical needs. I did not spend the same amount of time admiring or documenting the belly beneath them.

  All my pregnancies have been unlikely. We had just a few vials of Aaron’s pre-radiation, pre-chemo sperm, and the success rate of IUI with the added fertility drugs was quoted to us as anywhere around nine to sixteen percent. I’m not a gambler or a statistician or even someone who took real math classes in college, but I am a person who believes in the power of feelings, and those numbers felt very low to me. After the insemination, we had the infamous two-week wait: fourteen days spent with an uncanny focus on my uterus. That twinge I just felt—was it a fertilized egg implanting into the wall of my uterus? Or did I eat too much for lunch? My mind operated with an acute awareness of everything that could be potentially happening inside my body, which meant that for two weeks, I was only pretending to be at work, clicking all over a PowerPoint or a spreadsheet, while imagining the potential explosion of cells happening inside of me. The blood test itself was fast—the phlebotomist does not make small talk while she fills small vials with your blood—and then, it was back to work, back to waiting. My brain then shifted its focus from my insides to my phone. Everything felt like the buzz of my ringer, even when I banished my phone to my purse, under my desk. When the phone did ring, it was a nurse who knew I was currently creating a human being inside of me. I left work immediately after that phone call, because who can possibly work while they are growing a human life?* That secret glowed inside of me, so brightly it felt as if anyone who looked at me would see it: a golden orb beaming magic from the inside. Aaron and I danced in our living room when I told him he would be a father. We wiped tears from each other’s faces. It felt like a miracle. It felt like possibility. It felt like everything I had ever rolled my eyes at in my life was now located in my lower abdomen.

  This pregnancy felt different from the one that had given us Ralph, and the one that we lost. That happiness I felt when I took the test was at odds with this darker feeling that was taking over. As the pregnancy progressed, it felt like I was growing a black cloud inside of me, a sadness that coordinated with the size of the baby itself. Today, your sadness is the size of a sesame seed. Today, your sadness is the size of an orange.

  Our children, at this point, are spread across eleven years. We’ve spent the last few months marveling at how easily this group of five has melted into a family. How the Bigs started calling Ralph their little brother, without us ever even suggesting it. How the Bigs asked to spend the night at The Dollhouse, or to tag along to Ralph’s soccer games even though he only ever just stands there, in the middle of the gym, absolutely refusing to participate. We’d reached an accidental equilibrium that none of us ever expected. Sophie invited me to orchestra concerts, Ian walked off the soccer field and scooped Ralphie up in his arms. Matthew and I shared Google calendars. We’d become a family.

  As solid and average as our family felt, it also felt rare and fragile. We were all still new to one another. The Bigs spent some of their time at another house, with another parent. They had a whole different life that Matthew had separated from, that Ralph and I were not a part of. I knew from experience that a baby could make everything better. Or worse.

  I was two years old when my parents brought my little brother Patrick home from the hospital. He is now a beloved member of my family, but at the time? He was just a pile of screaming flesh, always red with anger. He screamed constantly, and I remember looking at him and wondering “Why did my parents do this to us?” Patrick grew into a toddler who refused to look at the camera for family photos, a child who could not possibly do his homework on time, and a teenager who graduated our high school as an act of mercy by the school president, who knew he was the last McInerny he’d ever have to see. Patrick was a pain in the butt right up through his early twenties, when he fell in love and fixed himself and is now consistently in the top two of our mother’s Favorite Child Ranking System, which she keeps on her fridge and is only partially a joke. Even good babies are a lot of work. They are completely helpless. They cry. They take up a lot of time and attention. That’s attention that many new couples spend on one another, not on sleepless nights and dirty diapers and warming bottles and pumping milk. That’s attention that the other kids deserved and needed. Ralph and Ian and Sophie had each had their worlds fall apart already, and I wanted this new world we had made to feel as safe and solid as possible. A baby did not feel safe. A baby did not feel solid. Babies don’t just cry. They sometimes die. My last baby had died. Babies die all the time, sometimes before they’re born and sometimes while they’re born and sometimes after! What if this one died? What if this one died, and we broke all the kids’ hearts, and our family fell apart? My concern, though, wasn’t just for the kids. My concern was for me. Maybe my concern was primarily for me, but considering the kids first made me feel like a slightly better person for all of the ambivalence I felt toward this pregnancy. I had just finally gotten my life onto solid ground. My first book—about my dead husband—was about to be published. Did I really want to stand up in front of a bunch of strangers to talk about Aaron with a belly full of another man’s baby? Could I survive another miscarriage?

  Ambivalence led to shame. Inside me, a human being was knitting itself together from the McDonald’s French fries and Coca-Cola I was consuming every single day. All around me, I had dear friends whose hearts were breaking because having a baby turned out to be harder than we thought it would be when we were in our twenties, popping a birth control pill at the bar and washing it down with cheap beer. I’d wanted siblings for Ralph, and here they were: all three of them. I’d wanted more life, more love, and here it was. What in the actual hell was wrong with me? And what was going to snap me out of this? All of this drama was mine alone. Matthew didn’t know
yet. To him, I was just a sleepy girlfriend with great boobs who cried a lot. How would I tell him, this man who had first heard “I’m pregnant” at twenty-two, and had wept in grief and shame at the news, so sure his life as he knew it was completely over? I wasn’t afraid that Matthew would weep, that he would be upset. I wasn’t afraid of his reaction at all, really. Matthew in his late thirties is just too steady to be rocked by something as little as a zygote.

  Pinterest and Instagram and YouTube would have you believe that the only way to tell your partner that you’re pregnant is through presenting them with a complicated riddle, ordering a hand-painted sign from Etsy, or painting “baby on board” across your naked stomach and standing around until your partner notices you’ve somehow painted legibly on your own torso. I kid you not, these are all suggestions I found while Googling “How do I tell my boyfriend I am pregnant?” I suppose I could have just said it, with my mouth and my words, but social media had poisoned my brain into believing that words were not enough! I had to have a thing, a theme, something to hand him.

  I settled for a pacifier, one of Ralph’s old cast-offs, which I had found in a junk drawer. I dusted it off and put it in a small box, which I handed to Matthew one evening when he came over. We were seated in our usual spot, making out like a couple of teenagers, when I paused. “Hey,” I said, “I got you something,” standing up to retrieve the box from my mantel.

  “It’s really just part of a gift. You’ll get the rest in a few months.”

  He smiled, like I was the most thoughtful person in the world, getting him a complicated two-stage gift. I watched him expectantly while he opened the box and pulled out the pacifier.