Best Friends Forever (18 page)

and Patti, startled, had groped for her skirt and lost her grip and would have gone tumbling ten feet to the ground if Jordan hadn’t been there to catch her. Later, with the two of them sitting on the lid of the Petril os’ hot tub, he’d wiped the tears from her face and assured her that nobody had been able to see anything (even though he had been able to make out a faint shadow underneath the taut nylon of her panties, and the sight had excited him wildly).

They had gone to prom and graduation and Ohio State University together, where he’d studied criminology and she’d majored in early childhood education. He’d wanted to be a policeman since one had come to his sixth-grade class on Career Day. Jordan had been impressed by the man’s uniform, by his gun, certainly, but, more than anything, by his aura of compos-ure, the stil ness at his center, the way he’d gotten the whole class to quiet down just by standing in front of them and slowly removing his tinted sunglasses (a feat Mrs. McKenna, their teacher, could manage only sporadical y). Jordan craved that kind of authority, the silence that emanated from the man. At his house, his mother screamed at his father, and his father hol ered at Jordan and his brother, Sam, and al four of them were given to bawling at the television set when the Bears and the Cubs disappointed. So he’d gotten his degree, and three years after graduation, he’d married Patti and moved to a walk-up apartment in a three-story

building

in

a

Polish

neighborhood in Chicago that had one bedroom, a tiny gal ey kitchen, and a glassed-in porch that rattled every time the El went by. They’d take long walks on Saturday mornings, go shopping in the afternoon, and spend Sunday cooking elaborate feasts from one of the ethnic cookbooks Patti had bought and invite a bunch of friends over and eat from mismatched bowls on the floor. Patti got a job as a reading specialist in the neighborhood elementary school, and Jordan worked his way up through the ranks of the Chicago police department.

When they were thirty, they’d decided that smal -town life suited them better than Chicago. Jordan had taken the job in Pleasant Ridge, and they’d moved from their apartment in the city back home, into a three-bedroom

house

in

the

same

neighborhood where Patti had grown up. The

house

needed

some

updating

—particularly the bathrooms, which boasted foil wal paper in psychedelic 1970s patterns

—but there was a big backyard, and a finished basement, an apple tree growing outside their window, and of course it was baby-proofed, wanting only a baby.

Patti threw out her birth control pil s the month of her thirtieth birthday. At night, Jordan would pause, balanced on his elbows, to look down at his wife, flushed and breathing hard, and he would marvel, We

could be making a baby. We could be

starting a whole new life. The first month, nothing happened, but neither of them worried. By the third month, they were making anxious jokes about how they’d keep trying until they got it right. After six months with nothing to show but some rug burns from the night when they’d decided to spice things up and do it on the living room floor, Patti cal ed her gynecologist for an appointment, but the doctor couldn’t find anything wrong with either one of them. Patti’s eggs were healthy and her uterus was inviting, and Jordan’s sperm were plentiful and perky, but for whatever reason, nothing had taken. “Just keep trying,” the man said, and so they had, every other day, except on days fourteen through eighteen of Patti’s cycle, when they did it every morning, Patti’s cycle, when they did it every morning, and Jordan showered and shaved while his wife lay in bed with her legs pretzeled and held in the air.

Patti’s doctor put her on Clomid, which made her moody and gave her backaches and acne and caused her to gain, as she put it, ten pounds in ten minutes. Four months later, Jordan came home to find his wife weeping and waving a pregnancy test over her head like the Olympic torch.

“Final y,” she cried, throwing her arms around his neck, “final y!” Jordan hauled the el iptical trainer into the basement and replaced it with the crib that had held Patti’s nieces and nephews. Six weeks later, she’d come out of the bathroom one night after dinner with her eyes wide and her face pale. Jordan had scooped her into his arms, the way he had when he’d carried her over the threshold of their hotel room on their wedding night, and driven her to the emergency room. Too late.

“The good news is, we know you can get pregnant,” the doctor had told them as Patti lay crying on the hospital bed after the D and C. Good news, thought Jordan, turning a wa y.

Yeah, right. More hormones were added to the mix. Patti stopped eating foods that weren’t organic. Then she stopped eating meat and dairy altogether, and added fistfuls of vitamins and supplements—iron and folic acid, flaxseed oil and garlic capsules—to her morning regi-men. When she started smel ing vaguely like shrimp scampi, Jordan knew better than to mention it. She joined an online support group. Then she joined a real-time support group that met each week at the hospital, and encouraged Jordan to attend with her, but after one night spent listening to a bunch of weepy women and their beaten-down husbands talking on and on about deteriorating fol icles and poor motility, “pree” and “PCOS,” Jordan had decided he’d had enough. “If it’s meant to happen, it’l happen,” he’d told Patti, parroting a line their doctor had given them. “We have to let nature take its course.” She’d looked at him with big, mistrustful eyes before pointing out that she was thirty-two, almost thirty-three, that she didn’t have forever. Clearly, nature needed some help.

She got pregnant again that September and miscarried November third. Their doctor told them to wait a few months before trying again, but Patti ignored him. She also neglected to pass this piece of information on to Jordan, who would have been happy to abstain. Sex with Patti had become as routinized, and every bit as pleasant, as emptying the dishwasher or taking out the trash. Instead of looking down at her in ecstasy and thinking We could be making a

baby, the only thought going through his head as he pumped and thrust (always in the mis-sionary position, to maximize their chances, Jordan’s body slick with sweat and Patti’s teeth bared in a joyless grin) was Please, please, let it work this time. It was God’s joke on him.

When he was fourteen, sex was al he thought about and al he wanted, and even the cleft of a peach in the produce section could get him going. Now that he could have al the sex he wanted—or at least al the sex he wanted during the six days when Patti was most fertile—al he wanted at night was a cold beer and a soft pil ow.

By January, Patti was pregnant again. By the middle of February, they were back in the hospital, Patti crying on the bed, Jordan standing beside her, their doctor at the ultrasound monitor, saying These things

happen and Sometimes it’s for the best and You’re young and healthy, you just need to be patient.

In the car, on the way home, Jordan, stumbling, had suggested that maybe they could adopt or think about a surrogate. He’d read an article somewhere, and there’d been that actress who’d given the interview on TV…Patti had turned on him, eyes blazing, lips drawn into something just short of a snarl. “You want to just give up? After everything I’ve been through, you want to just quit?”

“No,” he’d said, backing off clumsily. No, of course he didn’t want that. He just thought that maybe they could give themselves a break. Tears spil ed from his wife’s eyes. “I don’t want a break,” she’d said, her voice cracking. “I want a baby.”

They moved from the hormones to in vitro. Instead of having sex, Jordan got to masturb-ate into a Dixie cup every other month, with a tattered copy of Penthouse in his free hand and a nurse hovering on the other side of the door. Patti spent two nights a week at her infertility support group, and every spare minute online, researching homeopathic remedies and alternative medicines, or studying first-person accounts from women who’d managed to give birth to healthy babies in spite of a history of miscarriages, in spite of breast cancer or a tipped uterus or a missing fal opian tube, in spite of strokes or lupus or polycystic ovarian syndrome or, in one case Patti had shown him, in spite of having no arms and no legs.

She was pregnant again by April. She lost that baby (that was how she’d started referring to her miscarriages, as “lost babies”) the third week of June. On the Fourth of July, they were supposed to attend a neighborhood picnic, then drive into Chicago and watch the fireworks over Lake Michigan. At four o’clock, Patti handed Jordan a hol owed-out watermelon fil ed with fruit salad and told him to have fun. “You’re not coming?” he’d asked.

“I can’t,” she’d said, and he knew why. Larry and Cindy Bowers, who lived down the street, were hosting the party, and Cindy was pregnant with twins. Sarah and Steve Mul ens from the next block, who surely would be invited, had a three-month-old, a little boy named Franklin whom Steve insisted on wearing strapped to his chest like a bomb. Steve had told the rest of the men that he had started a blog that was al about the baby—“about our adventures together,” was how he’d put it—and instead of looking at him like he was crazy, the other men had nodded solemnly, had tapped at their BlackBerries, bookmarking the link. Patti got pregnant again in September, and after she’d lost that baby the last week in October, she came home from her support group and announced that she wanted to hold a memorial service.

Puzzled, Jordan looked up from his magazine. “For what?”

She’d stared at him as if he’d grown a second head. “For our babies.”

He’d folded his magazine and set it down on the side table. “Patti,” he’d said. His voice was calm, even though he could feel four years’

worth

of

frustration

and

disappointment seething in his veins—the pil s and the shots and the IVF cycles (none of them were covered by insurance, and their respective 401(k) s had dwindled from thousands to hundreds of dol ars), the nights Patti had spent weeping at her support groups or welded to her laptop, convincing herself that this was going to happen, that she could make it happen by sheer force of wil , the way books about pregnancy had crowded every novel and biography from their shelves, how every conversation they had—in bed, in the car, over dinner, on vacation—came back to this: sperm and egg and the empty crib in the third bedroom, so sunny in the mornings, tucked up under the dormer windows. “You can’t have a service for something you flush down the toilet.”

It was an awful thing to say. He’d known it was an awful thing to say almost before he’d finished saying it, even before he saw Patti’s eyes narrow and her hands bal into fists. She’d taken three steps toward the kitchen. Then she’d stopped, turned, picked up the cedar box that they’d bought on their honeymoon in Mexico and heaved it, as hard as she could, at Jordan’s head. The corner of the box had caught him in the corner of his left eye. The pain was instant and enormous. “Ow,” he cried. “Ow, shit!”

Patti had stalked to the bedroom, closed the door and locked it, leaving him sitting there with the box broken in his lap and blood running down his cheek.

He’d packed a towel ful of ice, held it against his face, and driven himself to the emergency room, where he’d told the attending physician and the nurses and, later, the ophthal-mologist on cal that he’d walked into an open door. If a woman on his watch had given him an excuse half as lame, he’d have brought in the social workers before the lie was out of her mouth, but the eye doctor just told him to tilt his head back while she gave him drops. “You’ve got a bad scratch on your cornea,” she proclaimed after he’d spent an eternity with his chin propped on a metal crosspiece, trying not to blink as she shone violet-tinted light into his eyes. No surprise. Every time he blinked, it felt like there were grains of sand rubbing against his eyelid.

“What do we do?” Surgery, he thought glumly. He’d probably need surgery, and wouldn’t that be a perfect ending to the perfect day?

“Can’t do much of anything but wait,” the doctor said. She gave him an antibiotic cream and a prescription for Percocet, and told him he might notice his eye watering on and off as it healed.

Back home, he’d cleaned up the mess, sponging blood off the carpet, throwing the broken cedar box away. At nine o’clock at night, he’d tried knocking at the locked bedroom door.

“Patti?” he’d cal ed. She hadn’t answered.

“I’m sorry,” he said. Stil nothing. “If you want to have a service, that’s okay,” he said.

“Whatever you want.” Silence…and then her voice had come, cool through the door.

“What I want,” she’d said, “is for you to sleep somewhere else tonight.”

They’d stayed together for another year. Jordan went back with her to her support group.

He’d sat beside her, holding her hand while she cried. They had done couples’ therapy and had had date nights every Saturday: dinners and movies, then back to the dark house where there was no sitter to pay and dismiss. They’d slept underneath the darkened third bedroom, which was now empty—at some point after the night of the box, Patti had gone to her mother’s for the weekend, and Jordan had devoted a Saturday morning to dismantling the crib and carrying it, piece by piece, down to the basement. When they made love, Jordan got used to reaching up to caress his wife’s cheek and having his hand come back wet with her tears.

Later, he’d decide that their marriage had died the instant she’d picked up that box, but at the time he’d managed to convince himself that they were doing okay. They’d gone to the Bahamas for their tenth anniversary, and on the plane ride back, Patti had fal en asleep with her head on his shoulder, and he’d thought, with pride swel ing his chest, of the title of a poem he’d read in col ege: Look!

We have come through. He thought they had.

And then had come the dentist.

Jordan shook his head and rubbed roughly at his eyes. The left one was watering again, so he wiped it with a napkin. It had healed, but it stil watered three years later, and sometimes he had double vision, which, technical y, he should have told the town manager about, but he never had. What was a little bit of blurriness compared to a busted marriage, and babies that never were?