I’M EXPECTING MY PERIOD ON SUNDAY, but it doesn’t come. I still don’t have it by the JIC class on Tuesday, which is about Hanukkah. Again! Already! I make a note to buy jelly doughnuts: two years in a row makes a tradition.
On Wednesday I print out a final draft of my novel. The pages have a heft to them, a thrilling, weighty presence. I touch the pile softly with my fingers and then, checking that no one is watching through the window, with my lips. I fire off an email to my agent, telling her I’m finished. In celebration, I eat six Mr. Christie Pirate cookies. I’m craving carbs.
By Friday at noon my period still hasn’t arrived. When Degan calls from work, I feel brave enough to say I might be pregnant. Might be. But he is still doubled over with a week of hard clients and a cold—he wants to wait until the morning to take the test.
On Saturday, Degan sleeps late. When he finally wakes, he calls up to me at my desk. “Did you take it?”
“I was waiting for you,” I call back down.
We go into the bathroom together. I crouch over the toilet and aim into a cup, to make sure there’s enough pee for the test to come out accurately. I unwrap the foil and dip the stick in. A line creeps across the screen, a single line. The familiar punch to the gut: I will never get pregnant again.
“It’s negative,” I say.
And then we both see a second line emerging, perpendicular to the first, forming a plus sign. Plus, for positive.
We peer at the plus sign like senior citizens peering at the small print of a crossword puzzle. “I can’t really believe it,” I say.
We whoop and hug, but there’s a hollowness to the celebrations. Degan wants to make love, but I curl my body away. He crawls over the bed toward me, puts his stubbly face next to my belly. “Hello, little one.”
He looks up at me, his blue eyes wide. “Oh! I just remembered! I had a dream last night that we had a little boy. He couldn’t speak, and then all at once he came out with a full sentence.”
I smile. “A boy.”
“Not a boy yet.”
“No,” I agree. “Just a little blastocyst.”
But “blastocyst” is what we called the first baby, and we both fall silent, remembering.
We rest in the afternoon, and cook paneer and chickpea curry. Then we go out for ice cream. “My tummy hurts,” I say on the drive home.
“I’m feeling sick, too. My cold.”
Degan sniffs, pulls out his hanky.
“Should we make Havdalah when we get home?”
“I don’t feel like it.”
His face is hard, and I recognize the look he gets when he’s triggered, when difficult things from his childhood have been, as Charlotte would say, “re-stimulated.”
“I keep thinking about our talk with Rabbi Klein,” Degan says suddenly. “I feel bullied into making a decision. Especially now.”
“I don’t think she was trying to—”
But Degan interrupts. “If there was ever a thought of me converting, it’s gone.”
“Do we have to talk about this right now?”
“Last week, when you were away, Harriet got me in trouble—like a child—for being ten minutes late to class.”
“I know,” I say. “I just think this isn’t a great time to get into it.”
But getting into it is exactly what Degan wants to do. He veers out into the passing lane. I flinch as a station wagon barrels past us.
“I can drive,” he says.
“I know. I’m sorry. It’s just with the baby …”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“To drive?”
“To do anything.”
I’m silent. I know he’s lashing out because I’m here.
Later, we sit on the couch, studying for the final exam for the JIC. Half the things on the checklist we received, things we are supposed to have learned over the year, have never even been mentioned by Harriet in class. We flip through our books, looking for the answers to fill-in-the-blanks, multiple choice. “This is bullshit,” Degan says.
“You seem pretty down about Judaism,” I say, thinking how quickly he has swung from one extreme to the other.
He grunts.
I say, “I’m worried you won’t want to celebrate Hanukkah.”
He agrees. He might not want to.
For the first time it occurs to me that Rabbi Klein might be right. That it’s better to have both people committed.
A single tear rolls down my cheek. Degan softens, holds my hand. He says, “I’m angry at everything right now. It’s hard for me to speak at all from this place.”
I nod.
He says, “I want to go through the Jewish calendar systematically and learn about every holiday.”
I refrain from saying that this is what we were supposed to be doing during the class.
Rubbing my eyes, I push myself up off the couch and close the textbook. In the bathroom, I splash my face with water. When I sit on the toilet, my underwear is full of bright red blood.
The sack of cells has heard our fighting. It thinks it isn’t welcome.
Come back, little plus. Please come back.
I bleed all day in a numb kind of stupor. Degan sits beside me in bed, an arm around my shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he keeps repeating. “I’ll be better.”
He, too, thinks our fighting has scared the baby away.
Shabbat is waning, but we don’t make Havdalah. We don’t say the Shehechiyanu, the prayer for firsts; we don’t get the textbook back out to read the prayer for conception, or the one for losing a child. I’m in between, in an awful place of limbo. Part of me wishes to wake up soaked through with blood. If this is what is happening, I’d rather get it over with.
Instead, the pale dawn brings more of the same. The blood in my underwear is still fresh and red—which the Internet unilaterally declares to be a bad sign—but still only splattered delicately across the cotton. The crimson drops are oddly beautiful, like a fresh kill on crisp white snow. Out on the street there’s the sound of a car door slamming, then a man’s muffled yelling. I make decaf coffee, take a few notes at my desk. Eat a breakfast of oat bran and organic yogourt. Bargaining for what I’ve already lost. Degan will be gone at work all day; I’ll be here alone, losing our second child.
I sit down to answer emails but find myself unable to concentrate. The spotting continues. Mid-morning I get up from my desk and speed-walk over to the drop-in clinic on Dufferin as though possessed. In the waiting room, I flip through greying fashion magazines and read the doctor’s framed degrees on the wall. One is in Hebrew; Sokol is a Jewish name.
When I finally see the doctor, a balding man with wiry eyebrows that peak above his horn-rimmed glasses, he is preoccupied and brief. He says that an ultrasound won’t show anything at this point, but he will check my beta levels. Then we can see if they rise over the next several days.
Back in the apartment, I change my pad, which looks like the second day of my period. More blood, still bright red. Degan comes home from work and runs me a bath, makes me a cup of hazelnut tea. Later, we drive up to the synagogue for our last class with the JIC.
When we get there, another student stands at the front of the room. “Harriet has been a wonderful teacher,” she says.
The rest of us sneak sideways looks at each other. Beside me, Debra snickers.
“I’d like to present her with a gift.”
Harriet flushes, and undoes the paper. The gift is a framed copy of Eshet Chayil—“a woman of valour”—the hymn sung in the home on Shabbat in which a man thanks his wife for all she has done over the week. A woman of valour is energetic, righteous, capable.
“You guys are so sweet!” Harriet says sheepishly. But she looks like she cannot believe anyone would think her worthy of being called valorous.
As promised, the exam questions are exactly as they appeared in the study guide. We whip through the multiple choice, short answer and fill-in-the-blanks. People start handing in their tests fifteen minutes after they’ve been distributed. A half-hour later, everyone is outside in the hall, saying goodbye, keep in touch, Chag Sameach.
“Merry Christmas!” Debra shouts.
Gales of laughter. The laughter of pent-up release.
And then we leave, in groups of twos and threes. The class is over, just like that. We float out into the snowy darkness, into our different stories, our various versions of what-happens-next.