The Matchmakers of Minnow Bay (24 page)

“Thank you,” Colleen says, and unbuckles herself. “Just FYI, Jenny doesn't know.”

“What?”

“I told her it
was
a mole removal. She doesn't get babies; she doesn't have the mom muscles. Or not yet, at least. Hurry up, my appointment is in ten minutes.”

I hustle to pull on my hat and gloves and follow her to the parking elevator. “So it
is
actually a state secret?”

“Well. Yes. A little bit.” She is moving at the speed of light, whether to avoid my questions or lose me in the twisting pathways, I'm not sure.

“Slow down! I'm totally confused.”

“I told you, appointment in ten minutes. Oops, no, five. Hustle up.”

I race after Colleen, who clearly has spent her fair share of time in this clinic/hospital. She knows exactly where to go, to a waiting room absolutely jam-packed with stressed-looking couples, holding hands and whispering to each other. I trail behind, slack-jawed.

“This doesn't make any sense.”

“Why?” she asks as she waves hello to the receptionist, swipes an ID card at a computer kiosk, signs something with the tip of her finger.

I pause, trying to pluck the right words from a garden of thorns.

“Because I'm single?” she asks, doing it for me. “Single women have kids.” She starts circling the waiting room.

“Slow down,” I tell her. “Sit down. Start from the beginning. Talk to me like I just joined this conversation a week ago.”

I hear the words out of my mouth and furrow my brow. “I did only join this conversation a week ago,” I say more for my benefit than hers. In that time we've talked a lot, spent a lot of time together. In that time, without my noticing, we've become friends.

My new friend stops in her tracks and spins around on me. She drops the card she was holding into her handbag and lets it hang off her shoulder. Takes my right hand in her left and my left in her right. We are a two-woman game of ring around the rosy. Then she squeezes my hands hard and her bland face falls away.

“I'm scared,” she says. “I don't feel good about this.”

I open my mouth to ask one thousand questions at once. Why are you doing it? What is it that scares you? How did you get here? How can I help? But all that comes out is, “Okay. I'm here.”

Her eyes fog over with tears. “It's a very lonely thing, infertility.”

I am surprised when she says this. I know nothing about infertility but I know about Minnow Bay and I know it is very hard to be lonely there. She could have chosen among so many old friends and neighbors to come up here with her, instead of me, a woman she's only known for a week. The town is full of people who love her and would want to help in any way they could.

But then I think of the special loneliness I feel whenever a certain special sort of mom-moment comes up. An event, a moment, a problem, that
before,
no matter how old you were, you would bring only to your mother. And then
after,
you only hold inside.

This, I have to imagine, is a mom-thing.

“Colleen O'Donnell?” calls a CNA in a purple outfit before we can even sit down. “Colleen?”

In an instant, Colleen's face wipes back to neutral. She lets go of one hand but not the other, yanking me to the exam threshold where the CNA stands. “Hi, Janet,” she says. “This is my friend Lily. She's going to be on call in case the doctor needs supervision.”

Janet laughs good-naturedly. “Sounds like a good plan,” she jokes. “Do you need to empty your bladder?”

Just like that, Colleen vanishes into the bowels of the clinic without another word. I wait, uncomfortable and confused, in the insipid pink waiting room. The seats are that vinyl-fabric hybrid that you cannot slouch in without falling to the ground, so I sit up straight and put my feet flat on the floor like I am a Catholic school student trying not to be called on.

To my left and right and straight ahead are couples, waiting, clutching hands, whispering. On the table next to me I find, perversely, a magazine called
Modern Pregnancy.
On my phone, I type “H-Y-S-T” because that is Latin for lady parts, as far as I can remember, and Google autofills for me with, among other things, “HSG test for infertility.” That's got to be it. Oh, Google. If you weren't so helpful, I'd be creeped out right now. I tap and tap until I get to a reputable website, and start reading.

As near as I can understand after reading two articles and watching a slightly horrifying video, an HSG is when they inject you with some dye that shows up on an X-ray. Then they take a bunch of pictures to follow the dye backward to the ovaries and see if it gets where it's supposed to go. If it gets stopped at the fallopian tubes, it turns back, and that means tubal blocks. And then, depending on where the tubal block is, that may mean conceiving the old-fashioned way is out of the question.

The site helpfully explains that this is not a first step for diagnosing infertility. Not even close. In fact, if this is accurate, before I met Colleen, she might have spent a year, maybe two, trying other methods of conception. And all of this without a prospective father by her side. I am perplexed. Why would she put herself through this? Why would she want to be a single mother?

Will she tell me about all that, I wonder, when she gets done with her appointment? And, if she doesn't, am I allowed to ask?

A woman shifts her position on her own hard waiting room sofa. She leans into me, her husband engrossed in a
Sports Illustrated.
“The wait times here are awful,” she says to me.

I nod, as though I have the first idea.

“It's not so bad,” she goes on. “The HSG.”

I look at her in surprise.

“Your phone. I'm sorry. I don't mean to pry. It's just that we're all in this together, you know?”

I don't, but I can tell that wouldn't be a kind thing to say. “Mmmhmm.” Then, after a moment's thought, I add, “Did you have one? An HSG?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, actually it came up clear. No blockage. Well, there was blockage on my left side. I thought, great! One whole pathway for eggs to come down, still half-working! But it turns out the left side is the only one making viable eggs. The other side makes miscarriages. I mean, come on, right? And then I spent a year figuring that out. Talk about heartbreak hotel. Now I'm ancient but they're still going to attempt to harvest.”

“To harvest?”

“Can't you tell? Look at these jowls. I'm so full of estrogen just looking at a muffin adds five pounds to my face. I'm going to need a chin bra soon.” She laughs anxiously. More loneliness, I think.

“Anyway, today's the day. Wish me luck.”

“Good luck,” I say almost automatically. Then I pause. “No, really. It's … it sounds like it's been so hard.”

She rolls her lips together. I see tension in her eyes, her shoulders. I wonder if she too has a closet full of dreams unfulfilled. “It's better when I come in here,” she says. “I waited so long, and I feel like it's all my fault most of the time. It's helpful knowing I'm not the only one, you know?”

I set my phone on my lap and reach for her hand. “You're not,” I tell her, and keep on waiting for Colleen.

*   *   *

An hour later, she reappears on Janet's arm. Janet deposits my friend next to me and tells me they gave her a mild sedative to prevent uterine cramping during the test. I say, “How did it go?” and Janet replies, “You'll have to ask her,” and walks away just like that.

I look at Colleen's face. It is soft and dull and uninformative. Rather than press her for information, I lead her, in quiet silence, back to her car. Help her into the backseat, where she can sit with her legs up, her back against the window. She is quiet. Her eyes are blank.

But then I get in, and buckle my seat belt, and turn the key in the ignition, and softly, almost inaudibly, the tears begin. I look into the rear-view mirror as I back out, then quickly look right and left, pretending I didn't see.

“It's not going to happen,” Colleen tells me after about thirty seconds. She is not weeping or wailing. But the tears are clogging her throat, and her words are thick.

“What do you mean?”

“Tubal blockage. Or some such bullshit.” I don't think I've ever heard her use a curse word before. “It's the end of the road. Literally.”

“Are you sure? Don't you need a second opinion?”

“I
need
to stop getting injected and poked and tested,” she says. “I'm not up to this anymore.”

“Oh, honey,” I say, because I'm not sure what else to say. I think of the woman in the waiting room, a year further into the process than Colleen and still quite hopeful under it all. “Don't make any decisions right now.” The sentence has an echo to it I can't place at first. And then I remember. I am sitting with my mother in her oncologist's office after she laid out all the possible treatments for what she termed as “palliative care.” “Don't make any decisions right now” is what doctors say to patients who are screwed.

“I'm not making any decisions,” says Colleen now. “I mean, I already made my decision, last week. If this test went one way, I was going to keep trying. If it went the other, then I was going to start adopting.”

“And it went the adopting way?” I ask, catching her eyes in the mirror.

She nods. “I don't know why I'm crying. It's six of one, half a dozen of the other.”

I think of the packed waiting room and the parade of couples, all trying to do what she wanted to do. “You're crying because you're human, and disappointment is human.”

“What is it about me that makes me want to have
my own
child so badly?”

“It's not just you. The clinic was packed with other people with the same dream.”

“Other
couples.
Not other people.”

“That's true,” I admit. In the time I was there, I didn't see another single woman in the clinic. Don't single women try
not
to get pregnant? I know that's been my main aim in life, at least in the sex department.

“And that's the thing,” she goes on, her voice gaining strength. “As hard as this rigamarole has been, it's harder still because it's not the
right
way to do things. The doctors think I'm a lunatic. They tell me to come back when I'm married.”

“What? Not really!” I am ready to have any such doctors disbarred, or whatever you do when you hate a doctor.

“Not really. Not in those words. But they do suggest that parenting is hard enough when there are two of you, and you need a partner to survive the rigors of IVF, and so on and so forth.”

I consider my next words carefully. “It sounds like you agree.”

“I guess even a little taste of infertility treatment is all I need to be dissuaded,” she says sadly. “I feel like such a quitter.”

I look at her again in the rear view mirror. She does not look like a quitter to me.

“Colleen, can I ask you a rude question?”

“Of course.”

“Why do you want to get pregnant? You're single.”

She sighs heavily. “Exactly. Exactly, exactly, exactly.”

I move my eyes straight ahead, as though my mind is one hundred percent on driving. It is not.

“You're going to wait me out?” she says, when I don't say anything.

“I'm interested. I want to know, genuinely.”

She sniffs. “I'm not sure I want to talk about it.”

“Okay,” I say. “No problem.” But it
is
a problem, to me. She is still brokenhearted and I still want to help her. I want to know how to help.

We drive quietly in her teary silence. I turn on the radio, find a classical station. They break from music, do the weather. More precipitation, they warn in those cozy public-radio voices. Up to a foot.

As if on cue, it starts to snow. I keep driving the speed limit, but now the wipers are on intermittently and the blacktop is turning white.

Five miles go by in silence. Then ten. The flurry is moving with us, not accumulating. Each mile is new snow, always crystalline, always transformative. I sneak another peek at Colleen. She is sleeping. The sedative, the crying, or both. I try to put together everything I know. She wants to have a baby. She wants the baby more than the husband you're supposed to get in order to get the baby.

That's not so crazy. Or maybe it is? But it's what she wanted. Wanted a lot, from what I can tell.

I haven't given a lot of thought to babies. I have thought I might like to be a mother, when it's come up in conversation. Or rather, that I might be good at it. But when Mitchell told me he was never going to have children, it wasn't much of a blip on my radar. I figured either he'd change his mind, I'd change mine, or we'd never get married. Honestly, I never thought Mitchell would marry me in a million years, so it was largely a moot point.

Colleen, though, knew what she wanted, and didn't care about getting someone else on board to get it. That's beautiful. That's brave. I look over at her again. She is drooling on the seat belt. I grab my phone and ask Siri for the number to the Cho Gallery. Siri obliges and I call Jenny.

“Jenny?” I whisper into the phone.

“Huh? Speak up? Is that Lily?”

“I can't talk much louder. Colleen is sleeping in the backseat.”

“What? Why is she—oh, right. Good news or bad news?”

“About the mole?” I ask, thinking quickly.

“What mole? About the fallopian tubes.”

My mouth falls open. “You know?”

“Of course I know. God, she must think I'm a moron. When, in fact, I'm actually a snoop.”

“Does everyone know?” I ask, my Minnow Bay paranoia carrying me away.

“Of course not. This is private.”

“But not so private you didn't find out,” I say, gazing out on the snowy, empty highway.