14
Once the Election Day lunacy had died down, it was time for another November tradition: Christmas. Sure, the holiday itself wouldn’t arrive for over a month, but thanks to the eagerness of retail stores to tape cardboard reindeer cutouts in their windows, what was once a celebration of Jesus’ birth now covered pretty much the Virgin Mary’s entire third trimester. This time of year set the perfect tone for Susie’s second egg harvest since we were going for a kind of immaculate conception of our own.
Nobody told Susie what Dr. S had said—that, succeed or fail, this would be the last time we could use her as an egg donor. Knowing her, she was mentally preparing herself to go through this for the next several years—the mood swings, the constant trips back and forth to L.A.—if that’s what it took. We wouldn’t put her through that, though. As Dr. S told me over the phone, there wouldn’t be much point anyway.
She got on a plane, just after Thanksgiving, and we received a warning that her dark side was making an ugly appearance.
“She is being such a little pill!” Mrs. Tappon cautioned us over the phone. “She’s cranky, she doesn’t want to talk to me, she just mopes around. She’s not herself.” To all of us, this was fantastic news.
None of us wanted Susie to suffer, but secretly, it was hard not to find her discomfort encouraging. Clearly, the double dose of medication was having an effect. Both her foul mood and the pregnancy scare had given us a renewed sense of optimism going into our second in vitro attempt. She could produce viable eggs. We could have this baby. It was all possible. Of course, her disrupted cycle turned out to be a false alarm, but somehow, that didn’t matter. For a moment, we believed in her reproductive system again.
I went with Drew to pick Susie up at the airport, fully prepared to encounter a fearsome, feral version of the sweet, loving girl I’d come to consider like a sister myself. She certainly didn’t look any different. She bopped up to us, full of energy and hugs.
“How was the flight?” I asked, because that’s what everyone asks when they pick someone up at an airport.
“It was good.”
“Are you hungry?”
“I’m okay.”
“Did you check any bags?”
“Yeah, just one.”
Enough airport talk. It was time for the Big Question. “So . . . how are you feeling?”
“Eh,” she said, shrugging, “a little crampy.”
Drew and I turned toward each other, jaws unhinged. “A little crampy?” This was worse than we thought. I’d never heard Susie complain before, certainly not about herself. For her to confess even the tiniest sliver of discomfort, she must have felt like absolute shit.
Huzzah!
The Christmas season provided the perfect distraction from the ominous business of baby making, mostly because it wasn’t really all that Christmassy. It was Christmas in L.A., a surreal spectacle all its own.
Christmas in Los Angeles is how I imagine St. Patrick’s Day to be at the Betty Ford Center. They can’t really do it the way it’s supposed to be done, but you have to give them credit for at least stapling up a few shamrocks and saying “Erin Go Bragh.” Everything to do with Christmas is so antithetical to L.A.—snow, pine trees, the spirit of giving—that it’s a little jarring every year to see twinkling lights once again ringed around palm trunks and plastic Santas propped merrily on chimneyless roofs.
The night Susie arrived, we took her out to dinner at the Grove, the same glitzy outdoor mall where Drew and I had our first date. We ate on the second floor of a steakhouse, just inside a huge picture window that overlooked the moonlit fountain outside. As we talked about everything but eggs, we looked out and saw snow fluttering softly around the square. The flakes were actually tiny soap shavings, shot out of blowers on the roof, but it added to the feeling that magic was in the air, that with the right technology, the impossible could happen.
Early the following morning, we walked nervously through the doors of Westside Fertility. By now, we’d come to know virtually everyone in the office. It was our Cheers, where everyone knew our name, but they were always just a little sad we came. They were friendly people and they’d become invested in our situation—the young woman giving eggs to her gay brother and his partner—only to have our story become an unexpected downer. Now we were the two gay guys with the infertile sister, a family doubly cursed when it came to reproduction. The Westside employees were almost as nervous as we were about what would happen when Dr. S brought Susie into the exam room today.
“Susie!” a woman shouted, sprinting across the waiting room with her arms outstretched.
“Hi Debra!” Susie squealed, as the two embraced warmly.
“You look so good!”
“You, too!”
Debra was the liaison to egg donors. She and Susie had been talking regularly on the phone and had grown really close.
“I have some news,” Debra said. “I’m pregnant!”
She seemed almost apologetic, a little hesitant to say it, knowing the circumstances that had brought us there. If she thought her announcement might upset Susie, she didn’t know her that well after all. Susie gave her a second, even bigger, hug. “I’m so happy for you!” she said.
They exchanged emails so they could keep in touch during Debra’s maternity leave. “And don’t worry,” Debra said. “When I’m gone, you’ll be in good hands. I want you to meet our new donor coordinator. Maxwell!”
Drew and I couldn’t believe it at first, until we saw his face emerge through a doorway. It was Maxwell from Rainbow Extensions, our old caseworker, who’d left when the agency relocated to Alabama.
“You’re alive!” Drew shouted. We’d kind of suspected after all the mysterious caseworker disappearances that when people left Rainbow Extensions, they were fed into a meat grinder in the alley. It was nice to see Maxwell in one piece and not as a series of sausage links.
“I’m fine,” Maxwell said, cordial but a bit dismissive. He clearly wasn’t as excited to see us as Drew was to see him.
“You work here now?” I asked.
“Yeah, I got to know the folks at Westside pretty well when I was at Rainbow, so it was a good move for me.”
Drew wasn’t interested in Maxwell’s personal story. “You have to tell us what the fuck is going on at that place,” he said. “It’s such a disaster.”
Maxwell just smiled nervously and shrugged. “They’re great.”
“They’re the most disorganized bunch of idiots I’ve ever met in my life.”
Maxwell smiled blankly. He clearly wasn’t in the mood to say anything bad about his previous employer, at least not to Drew. “Nice seeing you guys,” he said, then he returned to his office.
“Moron,” Drew muttered under his breath.
Other than Maxwell’s unexpected reappearance, everything about this visit was fairly routine. I was summoned to make a deposit, and by now I didn’t even need to read the instructions taped inside the door of the specimen room. “Wash hands and penis, open cup . . .” Yeah, yeah. Start wrestling, boys.
By the time I returned to the waiting room, Susie was already in with Dr. Saroyan. There was no big news on the TV monitors today. The only sound was Drew typing feverishly on his Blackberry.
Taptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptap.
Drew is a compulsive emailer, especially when he’s nervous. He’s the Michael Phelps of mini keyboards, his thumbs tapping out sentences at world-record speed. He types faster than most people talk. Smart phones are his cardio.
I studied the photos on the Wall of Babies. Next year, we might be up there. Me and Drew, leaning over a bassinet with a little girl in pink booties or a little boy who has my nose and Drew’s eyes. I could see it, our condo’s living room as a backdrop, Drew in his favorite green checked button-down, me in the red and blue striped polo I always wore on casual Fridays. We’d be smiling, of course—not fake junior high yearbook smiles but real smiles, big ones, because we would always be smiling, the three of us, our family.
Taptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptap.
It was when the tapping stopped that I knew it was time to look up. I smiled, but this one was far from sincere. I was terrified. There, in the doorway, stood Dr. S, in the same spot he’d appeared after the last egg harvest. He saw us glance up at him, and he stopped walking. This was it. We were about to find out what a difference an extra 75 IUs of Menopur made.
We waited for Dr. S to speak, but instead, he just sighed and dropped his gaze to the ground.
It was not good news.
Susie wasn’t crying in the recovery room this time. She was just as disappointed as she’d been after our first attempt but a lot less shocked. Deep in our hearts, we’d all feared this outcome.
There were seven eggs, the same as last time. The extra medication had no impact. Susie was a seven-egger, and there was nothing we could do about it.
At least Dr. S hadn’t made a bad joke. Susie awoke from the anesthesia to find him leaning over her, a concerned look on his face. “Susan,” he said. “Sit up. We need to talk.”
He helped Susie pull herself into position so that they sat eye to eye. As he spoke, he took on the tone of a concerned parent. He showed more empathy than you’d usually get from a doctor, but his voice was firm because his message was serious. “I’m very concerned about your ability to get pregnant,” he began.
Susie said nothing, just nodded and listened. She’d been hoping for a bonanza of eggs, for a post-op high five rather than this.
“Do you have any idea how much medication I had you on?” Dr. S intoned, gravely. “You’re a young girl. You should’ve . . . look, you want to have a baby of your own, right?”
Susie nodded vaguely. She was determined not to break down this time.
“I’m going to be blunt. You can’t afford to wait. Not five years, not two years. You need to do it now.”
Susie’s voice shook, half from the medication she was on and half from weariness. “I don’t even have a boyfriend.”
Dr. S stood up, sighing. He clutched his forehead in his palm and began pacing. “We need to figure something out!” In frustration, he bolted out the door.
Twenty minutes later, we sat down in Dr. Saroyan’s office. A morbid distress hung in the air, like we were attending a funeral for our dreams of parenthood. Dr. S was nodding quietly. His lips were pursed, and he had a determined look on his face. He leaned forward in his chair, his palms face down on his desk. “Okay,” he said. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”
“We need to give Susie the eggs,” I interrupted.
“No!” she shouted.
“Yes, Susie! You need them more than we do. We’ll freeze them for you.”
“I don’t want them! I gave them to you!”
“Drew, tell her she needs to do this.”
Drew just shrugged. He didn’t want to hear from me or Susie at that moment. He was looking at Dr. S.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “What were you going to say?”
Dr. S shook his head. “Gerald, we’re not going to freeze these eggs for Susan. That’s stupid.”
“Stupid?” I’d expected my offer to be called “brilliant” or at least “magnanimous.” “Stupid” stung a little.
“We’ve come all this way, and we’re going to keep moving forward. I want to see if Tiffany can get pregnant with Susan’s eggs.”
“But she couldn’t. We tried that.”
“We’re going to try again,” he insisted. “And Susan, when we’re done, we’re going to do one more round of hormones.”
“What?!” I said. “We don’t want to put Susie through this again.”
“The next time will be for her. We’ll freeze those eggs as a backup plan if she ever needs them.”
Susie shook her head. “I don’t want to freeze eggs.”
“Too bad. You’re doing it. Listen, Susan, you are a very special person. I like you very, very much.” Susie rolled her eyes, not because she was embarrassed or she doubted his sincerity but at herself because she knew that all the tears she’d been holding back were about to burst out.
“Here!” Dr. S said, pushing a preemptive box of tissues her way. Susie grabbed the first one, and Drew immediately took the second.
“I’m very touched by what you are doing for your brother. It is a beautiful thing, and it’s not your fault that you have such terrible, terrible eggs.” He picked a perfect time to lighten the mood. Both Drew and Susie laughed from behind their sniffling. “You need to do this. I’m very serious.”
“Thank you,” Susie said. “But I’m not going to do it.”
“Susie, you’re doing it!” Drew insisted.
“No, I’m not!”
“Yes, you are,” Dr. S shot back, “because I’m going to pay for it.”
“He said she was the nicest person he’s ever met!” The last thing the world’s proudest brother needed was another excuse to brag about Susie, but now he had plenty of new material. “You should’ve heard him talk about her. I’m telling you, he just adores Susie!” We were on our way home from the clinic, doing our routine check-in call with Mrs. Tappon. Dr. S’s offer had given this call a much more upbeat tone than it otherwise would have had.
“That’s very nice,” Mrs. Tappon said. “But he doesn’t need to pay for Susie to freeze her eggs. Your father and I will pay for it.”
“No way,” Drew said. “Jerry and I are paying for it.”
I truly appreciated this family’s generosity, but I’d reached my breaking point with their inability to accept anyone else’s. “Just let him pay for it!” I shouted.
Susie was quiet. Since the meeting, she’d clearly had a change of heart. The fear of never having a baby was burrowing into her mind. Now she seemed open to the idea of freezing her eggs.
We talked about Susie all day and all night, about her gift to us, the ways in which she’d touched everyone who worked at Westside Fertility and about what she should do moving forward. We barely talked about the more imminent topic—our embryo transfer. There was no question this would be our last opportunity with Susie’s eggs. Just like last time, we had only seven to work with, and now they sat in a petri dish somewhere in the offices of Westside Fertility, with my sperm trying diligently to turn them into potential people.