The Choices We Make. Karma Brown
had been her idea—rolling the bottle of boring beige polish between her hands to warm it. “Our most popular neutral for fall.” I didn’t care about how trendy my toes were, only that they complemented the black skirt and jacket I wore to the funeral and didn’t shout wedding or date night, like my go-to coral color would have done.
It had been a month since my mom died, and I still felt strangely abandoned. My father had left when I was a baby, and despite the monthly letters he sent that I rarely opened—typed on impersonal white paper yet awkwardly personal in detail—my relationship with him was similar to my relationship with my dentist. A once-a-year visit for an hour that was about as unpleasant as a root canal. I only did it because my mom asked every year on her birthday for my father to join us for lunch. I think she hoped one day I’d let him off the hook for leaving us, somehow see in him what she still seemed to despite the disintegration of their marriage and his subsequent escape.
Mom had been alone in her beloved garden when she died—because while her cooking was atrocious, her green thumb was remarkable—one Sunday late afternoon while David, the kids and I made pizza and played Trouble. Now that she was gone I had lost my bearings, and though I could get the girls out the door to school dressed and with lunches packed, the rest of my day was typically spent puttering around the house, making lists of things I had no intention of doing and feeling sorry for myself. My mom drove me crazy at times, like all mothers do, but it had been just the two of us for so long and I loved her fiercely. Sometimes, especially at night, the pain got so bad I was sure I was having a heart attack just like she’d had, certain I’d inherited her silent heart problem and would face a similar fate.
David continually assured me I was not having a heart attack when the pain was at its worst, placing his stethoscope against my heaving chest in the middle of the night and taking my symptoms—racing heart, sweating, nausea—seriously, because he was my husband and loved me. He was more patient with me these days, not like when I stressed about Josie’s stuffy nose turning to pneumonia or the sliver in my foot from the deck going gangrenous. He was generally unflappable—he said he couldn’t get worked up about a sliver when he spent his days and nights trying to keep very sick or injured people alive—but I knew it was just who he was. And it was one of the things I envied most about him.
Hannah appeared in the doorway of our home office, a room I intended to use one day when I figured out what job title came after “stay at home mom,” with a look on her face that told me my days of holing up in my house were almost over.
“What are you doing?” she asked, stepping into the room and putting a plate filled with chocolate chunk cookies on the desk.
I pointed to her bare feet. “Why do you always take your shoes off? You know this is a shoe-on house.”
“Well, you don’t have shoes on. And why are you answering a question with a question?”
I gestured to the plate of cookies. “Stress baking again?”
“Work baking. Don’t get too excited, though. They’re gluten-free. Not bad, but gluten really does make everything more delicious.” She padded over to where I sat and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Are you okay, Katie?”
I pushed her away gently. “Go back to the door. I don’t want you breathing this in. You have your transfer in a few days.”
Hannah pointed at the cigarette in my hand. “That’s what I meant about what are you doing. I know the eighties are back in fashion, but think this might be a tad retro?”
I smiled and took a long drag, then turned my head and exhaled out the open window. “Yeah, but I don’t care. Tell me, why did I ever stop smoking? I forgot how good it feels.” Hannah’s grandfather had been an occasional smoker, and until the unfortunate day when her grandmother caught us red-handed, we used to steal cigarettes out of his silver monogrammed cigarette case after school and run down the street to the park, where we’d hide behind the climber and giggle and cough while we smoked, feeling grown-up and wild and a little woozy from the nicotine.
“Feels good for now, until the lung cancer settles in,” Hannah said, dragging a chair up to the window. “Give me one.”
I pulled the pack out of her hand and tucked it under my arm. “No fucking way,” I said. “You’re about to make a baby. I’m not letting you put anything in that body of yours except kale and red meat. Speaking of which, the steaks are in the fridge marinating and the kale salad is in the crisper.” Back in the early days of trying to conceive, before the fertility medications and doctors, Hannah had scoured every website and piece of advice she could about baby making and had gone on a strict high-iron diet. It only lasted for a month, but it was also the only other time she got pregnant naturally. Unfortunately she miscarried almost immediately, but I still bought her organic red meat before every procedure, feeling superstitious about it all.
“Technically the baby was already made when my sad little eggs joined Ben’s very enthusiastic sperm in a plastic dish a few days ago—did I tell you that’s actually what they called his sperm? Enthusiastic.” Hannah sighed, tugging the pack from my hand and pulling a cigarette out. “Are these menthol?”
“Yup. I went old-school.” I lit the cigarette she held between her lips. She took a deep drag and coughed a little. “So you need to eat an extra helping of the kale to make up for this, okay? Promise me.”
“No need.” Hannah took another drag, not coughing this time. “This really is like riding a bike, isn’t it?”
I nodded and lit another cigarette right from the one between my lips, which had burned down to the filter. “Why no need?” I asked.
“It isn’t going to happen,” Hannah said, pushing my feet off the sill and coming to sit beside me. I didn’t comment right away. By now I was well used to her negativity when it came to all things infertility, and had learned jumping too quickly to the positive only pissed her off and shut her down. We rested our feet side by side on the chair she’d just vacated, and I commented on how nice her toenails looked, each covered with a fresh and glossy shade of lilac polish.
“Grape Frost,” she said, wriggling her toes a little. We smoked in silence for a moment longer.
“Look, I know it’s got to be hard to stay positive after everything, but—” I started.
“The embryos arrested.”
I swiveled to look at her. “What does that mean? Arrested?”
“It means they didn’t grow. Which means we won’t be doing a transfer,” Hannah said, looking down at her feet again.
“Okay, so next month, then.” I nudged her shoulder, hoping she’d look at me. She didn’t. “You’ve waited this long, you can do one more month.”
Hannah shook her head and pulled on her cigarette. The office was filling with smoke, but it was still early in the day. I had time to air it out before the girls came home, and David was on a long shift. Though I had only ever been a fair-weather smoker—picking up the habit during particularly stressful times and dropping it when life felt smooth and easy—technically I had quit twelve years ago, when I found out we were pregnant with Ava. But I kept a pack hidden at the back of my underwear drawer, just in case.
“We’re done, Katie.”
“What? No,” I said, placing my hand on her leg. “No, you are not done. Sure, take this month, take two months if you need to, but you can’t give up.”
She jumped off the windowsill so fast I lost my balance, dropping her cigarette into my glass of water before I could stop her. Then she peeled back the plastic cellophane on the plate, grabbing a cookie and pacing while she ate it, frowning as she chewed. Someone who didn’t know her as well might think the frown was about the arrested embryos, but I knew she was contemplating the cookies’ texture and flavor, and how to make them better.
“We’re not giving up—we’re giving in,” she said, her mouth half-full of cookie. “There’s a difference. Ben said he couldn’t do it anymore. And I sort of agree.”