I couldn’t answer. My daughter was still crying. I rocked her, and I shushed her, and I told her it was okay, Mama was here, Mama had her.
I didn’t know yet how much of a lie that was. Nothing was okay.
But to understand why those words broke me the way they did, you have to understand the six years before them.
The first year, we laughed about it.
“It takes time,” Ben said, the first month the test came back negative. We were sitting on the edge of the bathtub in our little rented apartment, and he took the stick out of my hand and tossed it in the trash like it was nothing. “We’ve got all the time in the world, Claire.”
I was twenty-eight. He was thirty. We had been married for a year. He was right. We had time.
So we practiced. That was his word for it, with a wink. We practiced a lot. We bought a house with a backyard and a second bedroom painted a soft gray that we called “the office,” even though we both knew what it was really waiting to be.
The second year, I started tracking everything.
I had an app on my phone. I had a thermometer by the bed. I had ovulation strips in the bathroom cabinet, lined up like little soldiers. I knew my cycle better than I knew my own phone number.
“Tonight,” I’d text Ben at work. Just that one word.
He’d send back a heart. Always a heart.
Every month, I’d sit on the edge of the bathtub with a test in my hand, and every month there would be one line. Just one. I started to hate that line. I dreamed about it. One stubborn pink stripe, mocking me.
The third year, I went to see a doctor.
Dr. Mendez was a kind woman in her fifties with reading glasses on a beaded chain. She ran test after test. Blood work. Ultrasounds. A procedure where they pushed dye through my fallopian tubes to see if they were blocked. Nobody tells you how much that hurts. I gripped the edge of the table and stared at a poster of a sunset on the ceiling and tried not to scream.
