Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [15]
He gave me a wavering smile. “I . . . well. That felt better. That felt pretty good.” Together, we swept up the mess, filling a dozen garbage bags with the wreckage. Things improved after that. By spring, he was, as he put it, “stepping out,” whistling as I attached cuff links to the starched cuffs of his shirt, taking women to the benefits and balls my mother used to dread.
I picked up my cigarette butt and slipped it in my pocket, a thief removing the evidence, while I wondered about India’s strategy: whether she could get my dad to marry her, whether she was young enough to seal the deal by getting pregnant. I would watch. I would wait. I would do what I could to keep my father safe. India struck me as a formidable enemy and the money meant that the stakes were high . . . but I was my father’s daughter, and I loved him very much.
INDIA
You’ve been spotting, hon?” the nurse asked.
I nodded mutely. Spotting was what I’d told my obstetrician on the telephone that morning, spotting was what I’d written on the forms in the office that afternoon, but I was actually bleeding, not spotting. After three failed in vitro attempts, I knew the difference.
“Let’s take a look. Lean back, now. Deep breath.” I shut my eyes as she pushed the ultrasound probe inside me. Marcus squeezed my hand, and I thought how this office was the one place, maybe one of only a few in the world, where it didn’t matter what he was, that he’d sold his first business at twenty-five and started his own hedge fund at the age of thirty-one and now, twenty-six years later, had hundreds of millions of dollars and clients all over the world. Here, we were just another infertile couple, a little desperate, no longer young, flipping through limp magazines in the waiting room, hoping that we’d win the prize.
I knew, though, even before I looked at the screen, that it hadn’t happened this time. It was just like the previous two rounds: a positive pregnancy test, then rejoicing, even though I knew it was too soon. A few days later, a blood test had confirmed the pregnancy but revealed a low hCG count. hCG, as I’d learned, was human chorionic growth hormone, the stuff that shows up in your blood and lets you know that the embryo’s developing. The level’s supposed to double every forty-eight hours. In my case, that had never happened. The hCG number would rise, then stall, and then start dropping. A week or ten days later, the bleeding would start and I’d come to this office for an ultrasound, the crooks of my arms bruised from blood draws, and the doctor would tell me what I already knew: that there was a fertilized egg that had started to grow and then stopped. There was no heartbeat. You lose. Again. Blighted ovum, the Internet called it, though my doctor had never used those words, or any words that sounded like they assigned blame.
“I’m sorry, hon,” said the nurse. I’d seen her before, a no-nonsense lady in her fifties with short hair dyed blond and kind eyes. “Doctor will be right in.”
She pulled out the probe, pressed a pad against me, and left me and Marcus alone. It was sunny outside the windows, a perfect May morning, the whole city in bloom, from the daffodils in the planters in the median on Fifth Avenue to the trees in Central Park. “Shit,” I said, and shut my eyes. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.”
“Oh, babe,” said Marcus. He leaned forward to kiss my cheek, letting me feel the warmth of his skin and smell the cedar and vetiver in his cologne. He was crying a little. Perversely, that made me feel better, like I hadn’t forced him to do this. Marcus was in his late fifties, with three grown children, all of them out of the house and reasonably self-sufficient. He would have been well within his rights to tell me he was done with babies. But he hadn’t. Marcus loved me. He wanted me to have everything I wanted. “We can try again next month, if Dreiser says it’s all right.”
Dreiser was Dr. Theodore