Drives for two hours to give the clinic her blood. They will measure its HCG levels and call with the results. She did not test at home beforehand, as she typically does. She wants to make everything about this last-ever pregnancy test different, so that its result can be different too.
If this cycle fails, she isn’t having a biological child.
To adopt from China, your body-mass index must be under 35, your annual household income over eighty thousand. Dollars.
To adopt from Russia, your annual household income must be at least a hundred thousand. Dollars.
To adopt from the United States—as of January 15—you must be married.
Are you married, miss?
When her first caseworker at the adoption agency said “You do realize, I hope, that a child is not a replacement for a romantic partner?” the biographer almost walked out of the interview. She did not walk out, because she wanted to get onto their wait-list. That night she threw a potted cactus against her refrigerator.
The last time she had sex was almost two years ago, with Jupiter from meditation group. “Your cunt smells yummy,” he said, extending the first syllable of “yummy” into a ghastly warble. Wiped semen from the dark swirls of his belly hair and said, “You sure you’re not getting attached?”
“Scout’s honor,” said the biographer.
“Not that attachment is always a bad thing,” said Jupiter, “but I don’t really see us having that. I think we connect well sexually and intellectually, but not emotionally or spiritually.”
“I’m getting a Klondike bar,” said the biographer, rolling off the bed. “Want one?”
“Unless you’re secretly using me for this.” He held up five glistening fingers. “Are you having a Torschlusspanik moment?”
“I do not speak German.”
“‘Gate-closing panic.’ The fear of diminishing opportunities as one ages. Like when women worry about getting too old to—”
“Do you want a Klondike bar or not?”
“Not,” said Jupiter, and she could feel him wondering, now that he thought about it, if it might be true. Afraid of withering on her own vine, had she decided to steal his vegan cum?
She bit hard into the frozen chocolate, which sparkled along her tooth nerves, and he said: “Those things are so bad for you.”
Though she mentions no sex in her notebooks, it’s possible that Eivør Mínervudottír slept with lots of men. Lots of women. Who can say what she got up to with the other maids in Aberdeen, or with her shipmates on ocean voyages?
Also possible: she spent her whole life (apart from or including the eighteen-month marriage) without sex. Out of necessity. Out of choice.
But how many people have sailed to the Arctic Circle, slept in tents bolted to ice floes, watched a man’s skin peel off from eating the toxic liver of a polar bear?
In the clinic waiting room, under the vexing tinkle of the adult-contemporary station, the biographer does a pump of hand sanitizer. The news murmurs on a wall-mounted flat-screen and a few faces watch it and nobody talks.
“What are you in for today?”
She looks up: a blond-pigtailed woman is smiling from the chair opposite. “A pregnancy test.”
“Wow! So this could be it!”
“Unlikely,” says the biographer. But, yes, in fact, it could be. If this cycle works, the eleventh-hour victory will be a story to tell the baby. You showed up just in time. She notes that the woman wears a simple band, no rocky engagement ring. “What about you?”
“Day nine check,” says the woman. “This is my second cycle. My hubby says we should adopt, but I—I don’t know. It’s—” Eyes fill, shimmer.
The word “hubby” cancels out the lack of a diamond.
“At least you can adopt,” says the biographer, louder than she meant to.
The woman nods, unperturbed. Maybe she’s never heard of Every Child Needs Two; or forgot about it promptly after hearing it, because the law did not apply to her.
Compare and despair.
The biographer unbuttons her sleeve, hoists it, makes a fist. Nurse Crabby swabs the bruised skin. Archie was proud of his track marks and would neglect on purpose to wear long sleeves.
The nurse has trouble, as usual, finding a vein. “They’re way buried.”
“The one closer to the elbow usually works better—?”
“First let’s see what we can get over here.”
The biographer’s car crests the cliff and the ocean spreads below. Vast dark luminous perilous sea, floors white with sailors’ bones, tides stronger than any human effort. Sea stacks sleep like tiny mountains in the waves. She loves the sheer fact of how many millions of creatures the water holds—microscopic and gargantuan, alive and long dead.
In eyeshot of such a sea, one can pretend things are fine. Notice only the cares within reach. Coyotes on Lupatia Street. Fund-raising for lighthouse repairs. It’s why the biographer liked this country of pointed firs, at first: how easily here she could forget the hurtling world. She could almost stop seeing the blue lips of her brother, the gray jaw of her mother in the hospital bed.
While the biographer was hiding out in a rainy Arcadia, they closed the women’s health clinics that couldn’t afford mandated renovations.
They prohibited second-trimester abortions.
They required women to wait ten days before the procedure and to complete a lengthy online tutorial on fetal pain thresholds and celebrities whose mothers had planned to abort them.
They started talking about this thing called the Personhood Amendment, which for years had been a fringe idea, a farce.
At her kitchen table she eats a bowl of pineapple chunks.
Sips water.
Waits for the call.
When Congress proposed the Twenty-Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and it was sent to the states for a vote, the biographer wrote emails to her representatives. Marched in protests in Salem and Portland. Donated to Planned Parenthood. But she wasn’t all that worried. It had to be political theater, she thought, a flexing of muscle by the conservative-controlled House and Senate in league with a fetus-loving new president.
Thirty-nine states voted to ratify. A three-quarters majority. The biographer watched the computer screen splashed with this news, thought of the signs at the rallies (KEEP YOUR ROSARIES OFF MY OVARIES! THINK OUTSIDE MY BOX!) and the online petitions, the celebrity op‑eds. She couldn’t believe the Personhood Amendment had become real with all these citizens so against it.
Which (the disbelief) was stupid. She knew—it was her job as a teacher of history to know—how many horrors are legitimated in public daylight, against the will of most of the people.
With abortion illegal, said the congressmen, more babies would be available to adopt. It wasn’t hurting anyone, they said, to ban IVF, because the people with faulty uteri and busted sperm could simply adopt all those extra babies.
Which isn’t the way it turned out.
She finishes the pineapple.
Swallows the rest of the water.
Tells her ovaries: For your patience, for your eggs, I thank you.
Tells her uterus: May you be happy.
Her blood: May you be safe.
Her brain: May you be free from suffering.
Her phone rings.
“Hello, Roberta.” Kalbfleisch himself is calling. Usually a nurse does.
“Hello, Doctor.”
Is he calling himself because the news is different this time?
She stands with her back pressed against the refrigerator. Please please please please please please please.
Firs shake and shiver on the hill.
“I’m sorry,” he says, “but your test came back negative.”
“Oh,” she says.
“I know this is disappointing.”
“Yeah,” she says.
“The odds just weren’t, you know, in our favor.” The doctor clears his golden throat. “I’m curious whether—Well, have you—Let me put it this way: do you travel much?”
“Florida sometimes, to see my dad.”
“International travel.”
Take a vacation to console herself?
Screw. You.
Wait.
No.
He’s saying something else.
“So you recommend,” she says haltingly, “in light of my—difficulties, that I should go—somewhere where IVF is legal?”
“I am not recommending that,” he says.
“But you just said—”
“I am not giving you any advice that is against the law and for which I could lose my medical license.”
Has she, without realizing it, been talking to a human being?
“Do you understand me, Roberta?”
“I think so.”
“Okay then.”
“Thank you for—”
“Happy holidays.”
“You too.” She presses END.
Fingers the tea towel draped on the oven handle.
Watches the fir-fledged hill, the deep green waving.
Maybe he genuinely, sincerely believes she has the money for “international travel.”
Get in the shower, she tells herself.
Too sad to take a shower.