She flung the door open. “Hi! Sorry! I was in the—” Her breathless tumble of words hit a wall. The man standing on her doorstep was a total hunk, not the middle-aged pudge she’d been expecting. With his tousled black hair, boyishly handsome face, and athletic build, he looked like a movie star she would’ve plastered on her bedroom walls back in high school, or like a perfect combination of Coach Larez, the dreamy Venezuelan transplant who’d coached the boys’ varsity swim team her senior year, and her ex-boyfriend from tech school, Neil—the hottie who sadly hadn’t had much going on beneath his beautiful exterior.
“The basement?” he supplied for her, crooking one shapely black eyebrow in concern. “Is it still actively flooding?” He leaned forward slightly, as if ready to spring inside, carry her to safety, and secure the dangerous area.
“No.” She laughed. “I was in the lake. The basement’s fine except for the extensive water damage and major mold problems—all old, though. Would you like to come in and see it? I’m Kelsey, by the way.”
He grinned at her to reveal honest-to-God dimples, her one surefire weakness in men. “Thanks, Kelsey. I’m Everett.” He handed her his card, which read Floor Repair Pros. It looked kind of chintzy with its watery-blue background, like those business cards she could order online for free, but for all she cared, his contact info could have been scrawled on the back of a rumpled napkin. Those dimples! Ay yi yi.
She led him through the main level of the house to the basement door, hoping he wasn’t studying her wet backside and wondering if she’d peed her pants. I was in the lake. She couldn’t believe she had really said that out loud, without any further explanation. Although admitting to stumbling and falling in wouldn’t have been very smooth either. She opened the basement door and flicked on the switch, and they descended into the buzzing, fluorescent-lit space, which smelled like a cross between a boys’ locker room and a fisherman’s wharf.
Though the realtor had recoiled from the sight and the smell, Everett didn’t seem fazed in the slightest. He probably saw basements in more atrocious states all the time. After snapping on a pair of latex gloves and a blue face mask, he set to work, prodding the concrete walls and ceiling beams, crouching to examine the rust-stained drain in the floor, scraping mold samples, and taking notes on his clipboard. Kelsey wondered if it would be a good time to slip away and change into some dry pants. Maybe Melanie had a cute pair of yoga pants or leggings that would accentuate her butt. Her damp hair and clothes, in the perpetually damp basement, were starting to make her shiver.
“When did this happen?” Everett asked. The elastic strings of his mask were pushing his ears forward in a dopey, completely adorable way. Kelsey couldn’t see his mouth or dimples, just the straight bridge of his nose and his sparkling hazel eyes.
“I’m not exactly sure,” she admitted. “My family has been renting this house out for a long time. We think probably within the last two years.”
“I bet it was last April,” he said. “This area had record rainfall then, and a lot of the houses, especially on the north end, experienced flooding. You should have seen the lake. Some of the docks were completely underwater, and Harris Beach was covered by at least three feet of water.” She must have been staring at him in wonder because he shrugged and explained, “My uncle has a fishing cabin nearby, so I spend a lot of time here in the spring and summer.”
“Really?” she asked, unable to rein in her enthusiasm. “Where’s his cabin? How long have you been coming here?”
The dimple in Everett’s left cheek escaped his mask as he grinned. “It’s about two blocks south of the lake, on Clover Trail, but we have lake rights and a boat slip. My uncle’s been coming here for decades, and I’ve been joining him for, oh, probably about ten years now.”
So their paths hadn’t crossed when they were young adolescents. Kelsey was fairly certain she would’ve noticed a boy like Everett if they had. She wondered if Melanie would be impressed to have a contractor who was so knowledgeable about the area. She doubted Bill from Basement Restoration was a Lake Indigo local. A loose strand of her wet hair slithered over her shoulder, tickling her arm, and she shuddered from the cold contact.
“We can finish talking upstairs.” Everett peeled off his gloves with the efficiency of a surgeon, but his mask stayed on. “You must be absolutely freezing. What were you doing in the lake so early in the season, anyway?”
She liked that question, which demonstrated that he’d been listening and seemed like something a concerned date would ask, not a basement repair guy. She just knew he had a flirtatious curve to his lips as he asked it—if only she could see them. “I had only planned on wading in a ways,” she said, leading him back up the stairs. “But a hidden drop-off had other plans for me.”
“Oh, I’ve been there.” Everett laughed, an unexpected, breathy explosion, almost like a series of high-pitched sneezes.
Kelsey had to turn around to make sure he was indeed laughing. She didn’t want to embarrass him—or herself—by saying, “Bless you.” The laugh didn’t fit him at all, but she decided it made him even more likeable. It was the guys without the immediately obvious flaws a girl needed to worry about, like nearly perfect Tristan, with his hidden penchant for sleeping with other blondes.
They stood side by side in the foyer, Everett’s gorgeous smile finally liberated from the mask.
“So,” he said, leaning forward.
Kelsey leaned forward instinctively too. He had a tiny vertical line on his smooth, tanned cheek where the edge of his mask had put pressure on it, almost like a crease from a pillow. He tilted the clipboard so she could see his notes. Oh right. The basement estimate. He began rattling off his three-step plan for renovations—removing and treating the mold, drying out the basement and replacing the rotted plaster and lathes with new drywall, and installing a waterproofing system to prevent future flooding. It sounded legit, and his quote was a few hundred dollars less than Bill’s.
“We’re kind of in a hurry to get the house on the market,” she said. “When do you think you could have it done by?”
“Two weeks, tops.” He paged through the sheets on his clipboard. “I’m free to start next Monday.”
Basement Restoration hadn’t been available to start until the next Thursday, a fact that had bothered her antsy sister. Everett was offering a cheaper price and an earlier start date with a Lake Indigo native who really knew and respected the area. It certainly didn’t hurt that he was easy on the eyes, either, although she certainly wouldn’t mention that to Melanie as a selling point for fear of losing all credibility. All signs point to yes, she thought, remembering the Magic 8-Ball that had determined a majority of her life decisions when she was a thirteen-year-old.
“That sounds perfect,” she said, giddiness warming her limbs. “Why don’t you pencil me in?”
MELANIE HAD SPENT THE better part of the past two years waiting: waiting to ovulate; waiting for Ben to get home from work so they could try again; waiting to get her period, as she always, inevitably, did; waiting in doctors’ offices; waiting to find out test results; waiting for the other shoe to drop. She had read a whole lot of issues of People magazine and Us Weekly while she’d waited. And there she was, waiting again, this time to have her blood drawn since Ben had persuaded her the night before over the phone to follow her doctor’s orders. He’d even found a nearby lab for her that accepted their insurance.
She shifted her weight on the boxy, low-backed loveseat and wondered how Kelsey was faring with the guy from Flood Repair Pros. She was pretty sure they should go with Basement Restoration—Bill’s thirty-year-old company had all five-star reviews, and their work came with a lifetime guarantee—but she knew it never hurt to get more than one estimate. That was something her dad had taught her. He’d called that morning to see how she and Kelsey were managing, and when she told him about the extensive water damage in the basement, he’d been as disgruntled with the Holloways as she was.
“Mrs. Kingstad-Keye
s?”
Melanie leaped up from the loveseat, impatient to get the blood draw over with. But it wasn’t the phlebotomist who had called her. It was one of the receptionists at the front desk, the one with the hair-sprayed helmet of silvery-blond hair who had checked her in. The receptionist waved her over.
“Mrs. Kingstad-Keyes, I’m not seeing the order your doctor put in.” Her nasally voice sounded almost accusatory. “What was her name again?”
“Sarah Maroney.” Melanie stared down at her purse as the receptionist tapped away on the computer keyboard.
“I see all your past lab work but no new orders. I can try calling Dr. Maroney’s office again, but it might take a while for us to hear back, if you don’t mind waiting. Was today supposed to be a progesterone or HCG screen? I see you’ve had both.”
The receptionist’s voice was so loud that Melanie almost winced. She couldn’t help glancing over her shoulder to see who in the crowded waiting room had overheard. Hasn’t this woman ever heard of HIPAA? But before Melanie could answer the question in a hushed tone, the receptionist continued at maximum volume, “Progesterone levels are usually to measure if you’ve ovulated. HCG levels are to determine if you’re pregnant or to confirm a miscarriage. Have you had a miscarriage recently?” She said the word miscarriage as if it were something ordinary, routine—a haircut, a manicure, a miscarriage.
Melanie could feel the blood draining from her face. “Yes,” she hissed under her breath. “I had a miscarriage. I’m here for an HCG panel.” Dr. Maroney had directed Melanie to come in once every two weeks so they could make sure her pregnancy hormones were dropping appropriately over time and a D&C wouldn’t be required. She had added that Melanie and Ben shouldn’t try again until her hormones were significantly reduced.
Back on the loveseat, Melanie felt hot and lightheaded. The elderly woman in the chair across from her gazed at her sympathetically, and Melanie looked away. She wished that Ben were with her, as he had been for so many of her other appointments. God, she’d had a whole slew, and he’d been by her side at almost all of them, asking off of work so he could be there, holding her hand and making jokes to lighten the mood. But his optimistic brand of comfort had stopped working on her not too long ago. Sometimes she wanted to physically shake the hope out of him until he was as empty and barren as she was.
The year she’d finally completed her grueling PhD program in Biology and secured a tenure-track position at Kinsley College, she’d gone off birth control. She and Ben had joked about her getting pregnant too quickly and how that would look to her coworkers and students if she had to take maternity leave her first year. They had sex all the time—in the shower, on the stairs, on the rug in the living room, and once even in Melanie’s small campus office at the end of the Biology Department hallway, with the door locked and their paranoid hearts racing the whole time. “Never again,” Ben had sworn afterward, tucking his shirt back into his pants. “Unless you want me to die of a heart attack.” They were like newlyweds again, unable to keep their hands off each other.
After about seven months of passionate sex with no results, Melanie started to get worried. She knew the statistics: that about half of all healthy couples got pregnant after only three months, and over two-thirds got pregnant by six months. She started recording her basal body temperature every morning to try to determine when she was ovulating and to pinpoint her peak days to conceive. Sex became a little less spontaneous and a lot more scheduled. She bought ovulation kits to pee on, praying for a smiley face to indicate her egg was in position and ready to go. Many months, she didn’t get a single smiley face, then some months, she got a string of smiley faces, and she texted Ben eagerly to come home. Yes, ma’am, he texted back. I am your willing slave. Have your way with me. Despite his jokes, Ben was starting to worry, too, she knew. She saw it in the new fine lines around his mouth and his subtle, careful way of asking how she was feeling, usually around the time they were waiting to see if her period would arrive—and it always did.
At fourteen months, Melanie finally broke down and made an appointment with Dr. Maroney, the highly recommended ob-gyn she had hoped would monitor her pregnancy and deliver her baby one day. Dr. Maroney diagnosed her with infertility, the term like a cold, hard rock settling in Melanie’s gut. It was the fear that had been plaguing both her and Ben since the fun, lighthearted early phases of their trying had ended. “It’s just a clinical label,” Dr. Maroney had tried to reassure her, “mostly used for billing purposes. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t hope. There are still plenty of things we can try.” We, she’d said, as if making a baby suddenly involved three people: Melanie, Ben, and Melanie’s ob-gyn.
But first they had a month-long battery of tests to undergo: blood tests, a painful procedure to check the function of Melanie’s ovaries, and a semen analysis for Ben, which he found humiliating. The good news was Melanie’s ovaries worked and Ben’s sperm count was just fine. The bad news was Melanie wasn’t ovulating regularly, sometimes at all, and Dr. Maroney didn’t know why. But she thought fertility drugs might help. So they spent the next five months tinkering with the dosage to get it just right, and for the next six months, Melanie took the drugs on designated days, and they had sex on designated days, which was about as exciting as mowing the lawn or unloading the dishwasher. Sex had become a chore—no, worse than a chore because they felt so much pressure in the act. The stakes were so high, and it was so easy to fail.
Ben kept saying he thought they needed to take a break, go on a tropical getaway, and just forget about it all for a while. He thought things might happen naturally for them if they stopped trying so hard. He’d heard several stories of couples who had become pregnant, almost as if by accident, when they threw out their diligent schedules and just relaxed. He thought Melanie was too wound up by her full-time teaching schedule, academic committees, and research project, and the added stress of trying to get pregnant was just too much for her. But his well-intentioned advice only made Melanie feel doubly responsible for their infertility. Not only was it her fault she couldn’t get pregnant because of her anovulation, it was also her fault because her job was too intense and her normal temperament too high-strung. She stopped sharing her day-to-day worries and stressors with Ben as much. The intimacy in their marriage started to erode, little by little, and she didn’t know what to do about it. A baby was the one thing that could restore their happiness, but it was also the one thing that was tearing them apart. Then in early March—the only miracle that had ever happened to her, seemingly so small but really so colossal it had overflowed her heart—she had gotten a positive pregnancy test. She’d taken four of them just to be sure.
“Melanie Kingstad?” a woman called from the doorway to the lab. It wasn’t the nasally receptionist’s voice but a younger, kinder voice. “Keyes?” she tacked on uncertainly.
The phlebotomist led her to a back room with a blue pleather recliner. Though Melanie didn’t feel like making small talk, the young woman, Erin, seemed nervous and eager to chat. Melanie quickly ascertained that Erin was a newbie, only two weeks out of tech school, and though Melanie didn’t relish the thought of being a practice pin cushion, she also didn’t think she could bear to wait any longer for a more experienced technician. She gritted her teeth and looked away as the phlebotomist dug in her veins repeatedly and unsuccessfully. Finally the girl had to try her other arm, and Melanie knew her right inner elbow would be black-and-blue. A few seconds after Erin announced she was about to give up and ask for help, the tech finally found a vein and was able to fill the necessary vials. Melanie leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes.
When she had told Ben the good news, he had actually dropped to his knees on the carpet and wept. She had crouched beside him and draped her arms around his shoulders, and they had stayed like that for a long time. They decided not to make the announcement to their families and friends until Melanie was safely into her second trimester, so the rapidly multiplying ball of cells remained a shi
mmering secret between them—something miraculous and tender and alive and just for them. Every time they looked at each other, they couldn’t help breaking into ear-to-ear grins. Melanie scheduled her first prenatal appointment with Dr. Maroney, who was thrilled and wanted to see her at the eight-week mark.
But the day before her doctor’s appointment, Melanie started experiencing slight cramping. At first, she attributed it to a bad egg salad sandwich she’d had for lunch, but when she went to the ladies’ room in Cornelius Hall between her afternoon classes, she saw a dark, ominous streak in her underwear. Bright-red blood perfused the toilet-bowl water when she sat down.
She stuffed her fist into her mouth to muffle her sobs. Her baby was gone. She knew it with the same cold, rock-solid certainty she had experienced when Dr. Maroney had first diagnosed her with infertility. It wasn’t the normal, occasional spotting that some pregnant women experienced. There was way too much blood. It was a spontaneous abortion—a miscarriage.
Melanie texted her colleague Aimee to contact the department secretary to put up a sign on her three thirty class’s door, announcing that it was canceled. A few women came in and out of the bathroom, flushed the toilets, and washed their hands. But finally the bathroom emptied out, and Melanie was all alone. She wrapped her arms around herself to stop the shaking and let the tears slide freely down her face. She stared down into the bloody water, both desperate and afraid to see anything that resembled the tiny, beloved fetus.
One particular clot of blood, larger than the others, drifting on the surface, reminded her, strangely, of the red Betta splenden she’d had as a girl. The fish had been breathtaking, so beautiful it sometimes made her ache to look at it as its delicate fins had waved and fanned in an act of violence whenever she had held a mirror up to its bowl. It had died after only a few months in her possession, and she had flushed it, too, down the toilet, its small body no longer as vibrant, its fins closed around it, still. Her baby had transformed into a fish.
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