Floating in the cerulean sea on my makeshift raft, the sun burning a hole into me like the time I’d had a lump removed, I thought back to Daniel’s words: “Stop trying, Margaret, you’re wasting your time.”
Margaret. I’d always hated my given name. I grew up with a class full of cool names: Dawn, Jennifer, Kimberly, and the much-coveted Heather. But no, my mother decided to name me after a beloved aunt, and I was forever saddled with Margaret. I’d tried to make the much cooler nickname Margo stick, but it just never did.
But that was then; now I was floating in hell. The heat of the sun brought my jumbled thoughts back to my current situation. Something I could only blame on myself. We’d gone to Tahiti in the first place because of me. I thought a luxurious healing spa on a remote island was the answer for me, for us. I’d read an article in Cosmo at the nail salon while getting a pedicure about this special fertility spa, La Mar. Daniel didn’t want to go; I had to blackmail him to get him there. I threatened to reveal his affair to his parents if he didn’t give me this one last chance, if he didn’t fight for us.
For twenty years, I’d struggled to conceive. I’d gotten pregnant three times, only to feel the searing burn of having those babies fall from my empty womb, the ugly word fetus I just couldn’t bear to use. Daniel was hopeful, loving each time, only to draw further and further away from me as he lost hope of ever having the beloved son he craved.
Before my third miscarriage, horrifically at just past the four-month mark, the point that you announce it publicly, I found out Daniel was having an affair with my cousin, Corinne. Affair. Such a nice sounding word for such a vile, cancerous act.
As I continued to drift in the punishing, skin-searing sunlight without relief, my thoughts drifting to the blood, the mess, the screams of losing a baby. Daniel’s words, “I’m done trying,” echoed in my muddled head.
By the time I dragged Daniel to Tahiti, my marriage was in shambles. My life was in shambles. The year prior, I’d left a career I used to love. I was a labor and delivery nurse, but could no longer bear the anguish of seeing fresh new babies and their beaming parents only to know I’d never have what they did. Without my job, I was lost, drifting through life with one focus—save my marriage, and do it by having a baby. The child, the son hopefully, that my handsome, perfect doctor husband wanted more than anything.
And I’d do anything to make that baby. The fertility drug I was on caused weight gain, and I was a curvy girl to start with. Okay, I’ll be honest; I was overweight to start with. I’d always been heavier, big-boned my mother would say, but as my marriage crumbled, I turned to cake. I’d stop by the bakery every few days to pick up a spongy, buttery, yellow cake with buttercream icing. I indulged in this habit so frequently that I had to start rotating bakeries, like an alcoholic not wanting to go to the same liquor store too often.
Daniel, being the gym-addicted zombie that he was, nagged me constantly about my weight, wrapping it up in faux concern about my health. My health was fine; I wasn’t that heavy, it was the dimpled flab on my thighs that offended him. In the beginning, we’d had wild, kinky sex. Sex that degraded into perfunctory, in the dark, I-have-to-do-this-to-make-a-baby-with-you intercourse.
But, despite his resistance to going to the fertility spa in Tahiti, once we arrived things improved. Daniel was happy; I was hopeful. That first afternoon, in our plush sage green hotel room overlooking the turquoise ocean, we made love. He even kissed me. I tried not to cry afterward as he held me—it had been so long since there’d been any affection, intimacy between us. This trip, this place, was going to change our lives—I just knew it.
We met with a fertility doctor the next morning, with the sound of the waves almost like a song through the open window. The linen curtains floated in the salty breeze as he spoke. The man, his dark skin a stark contrast to his white coat, grimaced when he glanced over my file. Catching himself, he forced a smile at us.
“Yes, Dr. and Mrs. Nelson, there are substantial obstacles, but you know that. Our treatments here are holistic, natural. With your history, I’d recommend you take advantage of all of our courses of therapy.”
Daniel’s lips formed a hard line, his eyes narrowed. “All?” Daniel asked.
I could see the numbers floating above Daniel’s head as he added up the cost. As a prominent Los Angeles plastic surgeon, Daniel had money—an obscene amount of money. But he was cheap. We lived well, certainly a more luxurious lifestyle than I’d ever dreamed of as a homeless girl in Detroit, but Daniel’s intent was to build a legacy. He wanted family wealth, and that desire fueled his quest to have a child. As an ardent Catholic, divorce was out of the question, so he would never divorce me to have a child with his much-younger lover. Instead, he was stuck with me if he wanted to create a legitimate heir, in his eyes.
It was Daniel’s idea to rent one of the spa’s sailboats before we began our pricey treatments the next day. I didn’t know how to swim, and feared boats, but Daniel was so light, so airy that afternoon as we sipped a bottle of cold Pinot Grigio.
“C’mon, Margo,” he chided, “it’ll be fun. God knows we could use some fun.”
He only called me Margo when he wanted something; otherwise he coughed out the long name Margaret or a tepid “babe” on occasion. So I agreed, despite the angry knot in the pit of my stomach. And we had fun. Taking selfies with my iPhone, kissing, falling in love again. Or so I thought. Daniel was a skilled sailor, and yet he allowed the winds to carry our small skiff out. Too far out, too far away from the boundaries given to us when we rented the boat.
My lungs burned from the salt water that I coughed from them. I’d fallen asleep floating on a flat piece of log in the water, my head dropping into the cold ocean. I tried to think about Daniel, about what he’d done, but my brain felt as if it had been stuffed with cotton balls. I couldn’t think. Only my torso was draped across the driftwood, my numb legs dangled into the abyss of sea where the small fish that plagued me nibbled at my bare feet. I must have lost consciousness, because the last thing I remember was the searing heat of the golden sun fading into the coldness of a moonless night.
I must be dead, I thought. This is heaven, but my body feels like it is in hell.
I was certain that I was dead when I heard them. Women singing—the most magical sound I’d ever heard, a sharp contrast to my agony as I bounced on the waves.
When I awoke, I saw him. He was little more than a teen. Gleaming yellow hair floated across his forehead, and his long fingers swept it back as he peered down at me. Harsh pain wracked me—I’d hoped that death would be numb. Several times in the last few days, drifting through the ocean, I’d prayed for death to take me.
He pulled at me, my lifeless corpse as floppy as a ragdoll. “Jake!” the blond angel yelled over his shoulder. The sun had risen, and I was lying on sandpaper. As I opened my eyes again, the tide rose to me, wetting me anew.
The boy tried to lift me, and I groaned as he flung my aching body over his lean shoulders. He was naked—his skin a deep tan, golden and shining, as he carried me up the beach. I dozed off again as he walked—I lacked the strength to move. My eyelids felt as heavy as the dark draperies in my grandmother’s old Victorian, and I fell into a deep sleep, my cheek bouncing on the boy’s strong back as he lugged me across the sand.
“Jake!” the blond boy, the angel who was laying me on a bed made of palm fronds, shouted again toward the opening of the crude shelter.
When there was no answer, he looked down at me, his emerald green eyes brimming with kindness as he caressed my forehead with the palm of his hand. My eyelids were still made of cement, but I forced them open enough to meet the loving eyes of my savior, my angel.
“What’s your name?” he asked, his voice soft, almost a whisper. My lips were sealed, dry and cracked from dehydration. I couldn’t speak, but yet my ears heard my own voice answer the boy.
“Hope, hope, HOPE,” I chanted before my body shut down once again, plunging me into agonizing darkness.