“SEVENTEEN HOURS OF COOKING, AND NO one said thank you,” Nathalie grumbled as she spooned the last of the gluten-free (basically mush) stuffing into the trash. “And if it was so important for Marcus to have gluten-free stuffing, the least he could have done was EATEN the gluten-free stuffing!”
David, from the couch, grunted in agreement, which only managed to make Nathalie’s rage burn brighter. After days of decoration and preparation, after running out to the Whole Foods all the way in Glendale to find gluten-free bread crumbs, and after being the most agreeable, accommodating host on the planet, Marcus didn’t even touch the goddamned stuffing.
Okay sure, after Lyndi destroyed Nathalie’s brass cornucopia with her own announcement, the afternoon had gone slightly awry, so maybe he wasn’t hungry . . . but surely, he could have taken the stuffing home.
There was at least two-thirds of the turkey left over too, not to mention all the holiday mashed potatoes. Luckily, Dad had taken the triple berry pie back to Santa Barbara with them, lest they would have had to find space for that in the fridge, too.
It turned out, after Lyndi’s surprise, everyone pretty much forgot about the food. Instead, they had just stood stock-still in shock, until Kathy burst out with a screech that sounded like a Muppet being slaughtered.
“Oh, my baby is giving me a grandbaby!” she’d said as she grabbed Lyndi into a big hug, and then, Marcus with them. Lyndi, through being mobbed, barely kept a handle on that now-filled brass cornucopia. Nathalie had stepped forward to take it from her just in time.
As her father loosened Kathy’s grip on Lyndi, and placed a kiss on his little girl’s cheek, Nathalie moved off to the kitchen, to drain the cornucopia. Once she deposited it in the sink, she came back into the dining room.
“Um, I am, too,” she’d said, barely loud enough to be heard over Kathy’s mews of joy and their dad manfully trying to find something to say to Marcus—but mostly just making a lot of “Well!” and “That’s . . . well!” noises.
“Pregnant, that is,” she’d finished lamely. “That’s what I was trying to tell you. Before.”
Again the room stilled in shock. Until David—unfrozen for the first time in minutes—had stepped forward and thrown his arm around Nathalie’s shoulders. “That’s right!” he’d said. “We are having a baby. We’re twelve weeks—”
“Thirteen,” she’d mumbled.
“Thirteen weeks along, and are due in . . . May? May.”
No one moved. Nathalie waited for the strangled-Muppet sound from Kathy, but . . . nothing. Just leftover sniffles from her Lyndi-based joy.
“We are . . . really excited,” she’d said, forcing a smile up at David.
“Of course you are!” her dad had finally replied, coming over to kiss her on the temple and slap David on the back. “So are we, kiddo. So are we!”
And that was it. That was her big announcement. Um, I am, too.
Something that she’d been wanting, and preparing for, for years, reduced to an “I am, too.”
And an entire massive family dinner that should have been a celebration, reduced to no one eating, the wine being gulped by the people that could, Kathy sniffling over her cranberries, and awkward glances shared between sisters at the table.
“Hon, you don’t have to clean everything up now,” David said from the living room.
“Yes, I do, because if I don’t it will just sit out on the counter overnight and the food will go bad. And attract bugs. And then we will have to have the house fumigated and we’ll have to stay at a hotel and you know I can’t sleep at hotels!”
A pause before an answer of “Okay then” drifted in from the other room.
“How can you be so calm about this?” she yelled over the water filling the turkey pan. “Admit it—that was a disaster!”
“It wasn’t a disaster, hon,” David replied. Somewhat unconvincingly. “Your dad was super happy for you.”
That was the one solace. When her dad’s lips had hit her temple, he’d whispered, “You’re gonna be a great mom, kiddo,” in her ear. And she’d felt the warm rush of emotion across her cheeks, and tears beginning to sting her nose.
Then, he moved over to Lyndi, and placed a kiss on her temple . . . and no doubt whispered the exact same thing to her.
“You don’t think Lyndi puking in the cornucopia was a disaster?” She shut off the water just in time to hear David’s whispered and obviously not-meant-to-be-heard reply.
“And there it is.”
She stepped into the living room. “And there what is?”
“Nothing,” David replied immediately. But instead of letting him off the hook, she watched him, her hands dripping. Eventually, he said, “I’m sure Lyndi didn’t mean to ruin dinner, Nat.”
“She didn’t ruin it,” Nathalie replied immediately. “I can’t blame her for morning sickness. I mean, that’s just another thing we have in common.”
“But . . .”
“But . . . what is she doing?” Nathalie said finally. “She’s twenty-four and can’t decide on a career but she’s gonna have a baby? She can’t even remember to walk her dog!”
David’s brow came down. “When did Lyndi get a dog?”
“It’s a metaphorical dog, David!”
“Okay, okay!” David held up his hands in surrender. “I’m just saying, she didn’t do this on purpose. Step on your moment.”
“Our moment.” Nathalie huffed. “And I know she didn’t do it on purpose. That’s the problem! Obviously this entire thing was an accident for her, but she’s just going to trip into it and go ‘oh well, guess I’ll have a baby now!’ Because that’s how she is!”
She wiped the wet from her hands on the dish towel tucked into her back pocket. Lyndi, no doubt, would just have wiped her hands on her pants leg, if she even bothered to do the dishes at all.
“‘I didn’t like accounting, so I guess I’ll take an extra year and be an art major now!’” Nathalie mimicked in a high, little-girl voice. “‘I graduated so I guess I’ll be a graphic designer now!’ ‘Didn’t really dig that, so I guess I’ll be a barista!’ ‘No, now I’ll be a florist!’”
“Honey, she’s twenty-four. Not everyone is like you and knows exactly what their life is going to be,” David said calmly.
It was true. Nathalie had known since she was six she wanted to be a teacher. She had known since she was ten she wanted to teach literature. And she had known since she was nineteen that she was going to marry David Chen, who she met half-drunk at a college party, and they argued all night and into a 3 AM Del Taco run about the merits of Dickens’s early work.
Later, he’d confessed he hadn’t ever read any of The Pickwick Papers. He just wanted to keep Nathalie talking to him, so he took the opposite opinion of whatever she said.
No wonder he was a lawyer.
“Screwing up and figuring it out,” David continued, “that’s what someone’s twenties are for.”
“Yeah, but . . . she had only just begun screwing up. Now she won’t get to anymore!” Nathalie said. “This is her big screwup! And once she has the baby, she can’t just decide to drop it and do something else.”
“You think she’s making a mistake,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes. No.” She sighed deep, suddenly tired. “But you and I . . . we know what it’s going to take. We’ve planned for this. We’ve been trying forever!”
His brow knit. “We tried for two months before we got pregnant.”
She stared at him, her eyebrows disappearing beneath her bangs. Her nose began to sting. “We’ve been trying for three years, David.”
“I meant . . . this time,” David said eventually.
But it was too late. Nathalie just held up one hand, shook her head, and headed for the bedroom before she could break down in tears in front of him.
Stupid hormones.
She’d been on the knife’s edge of crying all day. All the stress of cooking, all the emotions of the announcement—then the fumble of said announcement. Add that to the funhouse ride of hormones her body was putting her through to grow a human . . . well, there was a reason she had avoided watching TV. One sappy refrigerator commercial and she would be lost.
But through it all, she thought she could count on David to be her support! To be outraged and pissed off with her. To be aghast at Lyndi’s lack of pie making and Kathy’s messing with the oven temp, and Marcus’s . . . sperm’s ability to bypass what she hoped was decent birth control. But instead, David sat there, his eyes forward on the TV, playing devil’s advocate.
Which, considering his lawyerly ways, wasn’t new for him.
But if his plan was to talk her around to a more open mind, he failed utterly.
I meant . . . this time.
As if the last three years had been a fluke, easily forgotten.
Nathalie remembered precisely when they began trying. It was on her thirtieth birthday. She had just made tenure at her school the year before, David was on track to be named a junior partner at Stanis and Lowe, his old law firm. And he was only months away from paying off his student loans. So, on her thirtieth birthday, after she and David and her friends had stumbled out of the bar after last call, Nathalie went straight to her bathroom, where she flushed her birth control pills down the toilet.
She was ready.
They were ready.
All they had to do was make a baby.
Which turned out to be harder than anticipated.
After five months of trying—of tracking her periods by plugging them into an app on her phone, which dinged whenever their algorithm said she was having a fertile day—Nathalie called her doctor for an appointment. Just to “check,” she’d said.
Dr. Duque—a woman a few years older than her with a mop top of wavy brown hair and an authoritative motherly vibe—gave her a cursory exam, looked at her tracking app, and said, “Hmm.”
“Hmm?”
“Listen—you’re very likely fine,” Dr. Duque said kindly. “You’re young, you’re healthy. Most people conceive within the first six months of trying.”
“It’s been five,” Nathalie replied.
“Your cycle is short,” Dr. Duque said. “The average menstrual cycle is twenty-one to thirty-five days. Yours are ranging from eighteen to twenty-three.” The doctor took out a pen and a little slip of paper that said “Menstrual Record Chart” and copied out the info from the app. “Your app is pretty low-tech, it’s predicting your fertility based on the average cycle, not on yours. So, instead of having sex when it tells you to, I want you to have sex every other day, between days five and fifteen of your cycle.”
Nathalie took the card, finding a sense of security in this scrap of paper that she hadn’t in all the technology the modern world could offer. Of course the app failed her—it wasn’t for her, it was for everyone! Now . . . now she had more than a ding on the phone telling her when to have sex.
Now she had a plan.
“If you haven’t conceived after eight months of trying, you should come back in and we’ll do some tests,” Dr. Duque said. “But seriously, don’t worry. Enjoy this time.”
Nathalie hugged Dr. Duque—yes, hugged. She wasn’t a super huggy person, but the relief she felt warranted it.
However, the relief was short-lived.
Nathalie and David had always enjoyed a healthy sex life, and at first David had found the novelty of having sex at the ding of a phone app kind of funny. But five months of that had taken its toll. So to be told he had to perform his husbandly duties on a more aggressive schedule was . . . not romantic, to say the least. Although, Nathalie tried! When the circled dates came up, she dolled herself up, cooked his favorite food, cued up certain scenes in Blue is the Warmest Color . . . but doing this every other day, on command, was a bit more challenging.
David, to his credit, was game. He just said, “We’re going to do what we have to do.” And so they did. For the next three months.
And then Nathalie made another doctor’s appointment. This time for both of them.
“It’s been eight months,” she told Dr. Duque, gripping David’s hand, “and still nothing’s happening, I just want to know . . .”
“Okay,” Dr. Duque said, nodding. “Let’s do some tests.”
The tests came back.
She was fertile.
David was fertile.
But for some reason his sperm kept missing her egg.
This only frustrated Nathalie more. Because there was no solution. If either she or David had fertility issues, modern medicine would be able to help. But as it was, she couldn’t hand David’s sperm a map of her uterus and a GPS. Instead, they just had to—
“Be patient,” Dr. Duque said, soothingly. “Again, you’re healthy, you’re young. If we reach a year without conception, then we’ll talk about more aggressive measures. But for now, keep trying. And don’t forget to—”
“To enjoy this time,” Nathalie repeated dully. “We know. And thank you.”
And so, they went back to trying. To tracking cycles and circled days. And then . . . eleven months into this exhausting journey . . .
“Is that . . . a blue line?”
Nathalie stared at the little stick she had just peed on two minutes before.
She was a couple days later than normal. Then again, her normal was so short, she couldn’t really tell if this was just a longer cycle, or something more. She might be feeling different, then again, it might just have been the Mexican food they had for dinner last night. But she had an economy pack of pregnancy tests in her closet . . . might as well use one.
Now, there was a very, very faint blue line, staring back at her.
David came and peered over her shoulder. His brow came down. “I don’t know if I believe it. Is it supposed to be that light?”
“I don’t know.” She read and reread the box. “It says any line, no matter how faint . . .”
“So . . . we’re pregnant.” A smile broke across David’s face. With his hair still sticking up from sleep and blinking behind his glasses, he looked like the most adorable befuddled man in the world. He held up his hand. “High five!”
She slapped his hand, and then gave him a kiss. And went to call her doctor.
“Congratulations!” Dr. Duque’s nurse said on the phone. “We’ll want you in around six weeks for an ultrasound to confirm—let’s look at dates.”
But she and David had a vacation planned that week—wanting to get away from the stress of baby making, and a lot of craziness going on at David’s work, they’d planned a drive up the coast for Nathalie’s school’s spring break.
“No problem—the next week will be fine,” the nurse said. “The baby’s not going anywhere.”
Nathalie warmed at that. The baby. She had so many questions. Due date? Boy or girl? Left-handed or right? Any chromosomal abnormalities? Could she go to the gym? A million little thoughts running through her head nonstop. Meanwhile, the blue line was really, really faint. And she didn’t really feel any different—Mexican food aside.
Was this even real?
Then, she did start to feel different.
But, not good different.
It began with cramps. Not terrible ones, but ones that would make her think her period was coming, if she hadn’t known it wasn’t.
Her back hurt in a weird way . . . which answered the question of whether or not she would go to the gym.
And then she started spotting.
“Is it heavy, like a period, or lighter?” Dr. Duque asked, when Nathalie reached her on the phone.
“It’s lighter.”
“Okay, spotting in early pregnancy is normal. It’s your body adjusting. But if you would like to come in now, we can just check and see how things are going.”
“ . . . No,” Nathalie said. They were leaving the next day for their trip up the coast. She hadn’t even begun to pack. “I have an appointment in ten days, I’m sure it will be fine.”
It wasn’t fine.
They got all the way up to Carmel, near Monterey, checking in to their Airbnb overlooking waves crashing against the coastline. But before they could even breathe a sigh of relief, Nathalie doubled over from the cramps, curling up into a ball on the couch and staying there for the next two days.
And the bleeding got worse.
Then, she called a doctor.
Not her doctor. She called a random ob-gyn in Carmel. Sat in his waiting room for an hour before she could be squeezed in. David sat next to her, looking stricken. When they called her name, she told him to stay where he was. Patted his hand. Told him everything was going to be okay.
It wasn’t.
He was an older man, and tended to keep his eyes on the papers in front of him, rather than look at her.
He gave her a pregnancy test. Her HGC levels were there, but they were low.
“What does that mean?”
The new doctor hummed under his breath. “Could mean a lot of things. Could mean you’re not as far along as you think you are.”
“I am,” she said, and reeled the dates of her last cycle off to the blinking doctor. Then he hummed again.
“Well, then, combined with the bleeding,” he said, matter-of-factly, “I think it’s likely you’re miscarrying.”
That one word made the floor open up beneath her, and suck her in at a dizzying pace.
“You’re sure?” she asked weakly. “You don’t want to do an ultrasound or listen for the heartbeat?” She eyed the ultrasound machine in the corner, covered and unplugged.
“No point,” the doctor said. “Heartbeat wouldn’t be detectable at this stage.”
He looked at her then, and his eyes were not unkind. But this was news he must have had to give a thousand times in his career. He’d long since come to the conclusion there was no point in being sentimental about it. “The embryo will pass in the next couple days—you probably won’t be able to tell. It’ll just be like your period, maybe slightly heavier.”
But it didn’t pass. In fact, the pain only got worse. And while Nathalie writhed on the couch, David grew more and more anxious.
“When did he say the pain would pass?” David asked. “And why wouldn’t he do an ultrasound?”
But Nathalie didn’t have the answers. And she was kicking herself for not getting them.
Finally David had had it. He called Dr. Duque back in Los Angeles.
And Dr. Duque gave him a plan. Told him to bring Nathalie in, ASAP.
He threw all of their stuff into the car and drove the six hours home in less than five, delivering her to Dr. Duque’s office doorstep.
Dr. Duque gave Nathalie another pregnancy test—her HGC levels were exactly the same. Meaning, she hadn’t miscarried. But nor had the baby progressed.
“Let’s see what’s going on in there,” Dr. Duque said, but her normally secure smile shifted. Her jaw became set and her eyes focused. She prepped the ultrasound—transvaginal, because the baby would be too small to see otherwise. And then, on the screen . . .
Nothing.
Her uterus was empty.
Then the doctor shifted the wand, and looked elsewhere.
“There,” she said, pointing to a blob in the middle of another blob. “The embryo is in your fallopian tube. No wonder you’re in so much pain. It’s an ectopic pregnancy.”
Ectopic pregnancy. She had spent the last several days mentally making peace with a miscarriage. Somehow, an ectopic pregnancy was so much worse.
Because the baby was there, and growing . . . it was just in the wrong place.
And there was no way to get it to the right one.
“I want you to get your first dose of medication while being observed to see if we are going to need to do surgery or if the medication is going to work. I am going to send you to the emergency room to get that all started and you may need to be admitted overnight.”
Dr. Duque’s eyes were kind, and sad. She knew there was nothing rote about this.
“When?” Nathalie croaked.
“Now,” Dr. Duque replied. “The longer we wait, the higher the chance that your fallopian tube could rupture.”
So, they went to the hospital.
There, the nurse on call wheeled her into a curtained-off area—it was the ER after all, no private rooms here—giving her a thorough questioning about her medical history while they moved. Then, the doctor came in, gave her another confirming ultrasound and she was injected with methotrexate.
Chemotherapy medication.
They let her lie there for a little while as they kept an eye on the monitors, the drugs coursing through her system.
The same poison that couldn’t save her mother was now going to take her baby.
It’s not a baby.
It’s not a baby.
It’s not a baby.
She had to keep telling herself that. It wasn’t a baby. It was a ticking time bomb that could take out her fallopian tube at any minute and require major surgery to save her life. It would never be a baby.
They would never meet.
David sat next to her, listening to all the hum and bustle of an emergency room beyond the curtain, his gaze resting somewhere around her knees. They stayed that way, until the nurse came back with details for follow-up visits.
Then, they went home.
And that was that.
Oh, of course she had to deal with the next thirty-six hours of nausea and awfulness as a side effect of the chemo meds. And, they had to wait at least three months until the methotrexate cleared her system and her body had recovered before they were given the green light to start trying again. Still, even then she didn’t feel normal enough to try just yet.
And . . . just as they decided to start trying again, she looked at the calendar and realized her not-a-baby’s due date would have been the next week. And the sadness she had not allowed herself to feel began to creep in the edges.
And then David lost his job at Stanis and Lowe.
Laid off or quit, the result was the same. They were downsizing, and David took their piddly severance package. But the stress of the job hunt made them decide to forestall their baby-making plans.
David sat at home for three months, sending out résumés and going on interviews and watching Top Chef reruns before he landed a new gig, as in-house counsel at a major movie studio. A huge step up in terms of responsibility, salary, and benefits (and free theme park tickets). So much so that his signing bonus would cover his half of the down payment on a house.
Thus, they began house hunting. Another layer of stress to add to their lives, and so the baby plan was postponed once more.
It was only once they were in escrow and packing boxes that Nathalie felt she could toss her pill pack again.
And this time, it was as if her body was ready for it. She didn’t even have to tell David which days were circled on the calendar. They were leaving the hardship of the past behind them and enjoying a well-earned upswing in life. Everything fell into place, and suddenly, that blue line that had been so faint the first time practically leaped out from the pee stick and did a tap routine to loudly announce their fecund state.
But Nathalie wasn’t taking any chances. At six weeks on the dot she was in Dr. Duque’s office for an ultrasound. She signed up for every optional genetic testing available, minus amniocentesis because holy crap was that a big needle. She refused to tell anyone—or let David tell anyone—about the pregnancy until she was thirteen weeks along, and the dangers of the first trimester were over.
And after today, she was left feeling like the only one who cared.
A creak at the door and a shaft of light falling over the bed told her that David was hesitating on the threshold.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay.” She sniffled up the last of her drying tears. “Today was just horrible.”
He came up behind her, and lay on the bed next to her. Wrapped an arm around her waist, curling up against her, warming her with his body heat.
“It was pretty screwed up, wasn’t it?” he said, and she dissolved into giggles.
“I’m shocked the turkey wasn’t raw. And that Kathy didn’t scream the house down.”
Then his body started shaking against hers with laughter.
After a few seconds of catharsis, Nathalie sighed. “Well, at least we still have your parents. I know it’s predawn over there, but your mom is an early riser—can we call them? Give them the news?”
David’s parents were an interesting set, and even after knowing them for fourteen years, Nathalie still couldn’t figure them out. His father was a first generation Chinese-American, and his mother Italian, and both were academics. His father taught chemistry and his mother history. While David’s paternal grandparents were thrilled by his admission to law school, his parents were livid when they found out that David was pursuing a career in something “practical” rather than his passion, no matter how often he told them he enjoyed the law and didn’t have a passion beyond Nathalie. Nathalie hoped that her ambitions to teach would mollify them, but when they learned she intended to teach high school—public high school—their interest in her career became remote.
Normally, both Dr. Chen and Dr. Russo-Chen could be found in their cramped offices at UC Davis, but this year they had decided to take a joint sabbatical, and go to Italy. It would be about 5 AM there, Nathalie reasoned. Surely, they wouldn’t mind being woken up by such good news.
But David’s chuckling body stilled. “Oh . . . um.”
“Too early?” she asked.
“No . . . too late,” he replied sheepishly.
“ . . . You told them already?”
“You said Thanksgiving we could tell family. And my folks called yesterday to ask about their plants and they said they were about to take a two-week walking tour through Tuscany . . . so I told them. I figured one day wouldn’t make a difference.”
Nathalie felt her heart sink through the mattress. But all she said was “Oh.” Then, “What did they say?”
“Dad was cool about it.”
Cool. That is how one would describe the male Dr. Chen’s reaction to almost anything. Tomatoes. Sharks. Grandchildren. If it wasn’t a controversial stance on molecular chemistry, he didn’t really show any reaction.
Back when he’d first met her jovial, accountant/history buff father and the exuberant Midwestern hospitality of Kathy, it had been an awkward afternoon of trying to find things to talk about.
They eventually settled on the Manhattan Project.
“And Mom was . . . happy. You know, for her.”
Yes, for her. Dr. Russo-Chen was not the kind of Italian mother that pulled people to her bosom and spoon-fed them pasta until they were numb with love. She was the “my family is in Venice’s Golden Book, little schoolteacher, so I’m writing a thousand-page history of their exploits and can’t be bothered with things like food or plants” kind of person.
Although Nathalie doubted that was actually a type. Dr. Russo-Chen was highly original, as she was swift to tell you.
It just went to show how desperate she was for someone to be excited that she actually hoped David’s parents would fit the bill.
“Good,” Nathalie managed to say. But as his arm lifted off of her, she knew her body couldn’t hide her disappointment from him.
“I’ll finish cleaning up the kitchen,” David said, as he rose off the bed. “You get some rest.”
As he left, she lay there in the dark, wide awake. Finally, she had exactly what she wanted, exactly what she planned for.
And she had nothing but disappointment to show for it.