What Burns Away (4 page)

The three boys beside us grew silent. The asshole kid wearing the fedora clapped.

Noticing their attention fixed upon us, Miles sat back down and leaned in close to me. With his steaming cup of tea held high—to our disappointment, the restaurant served no wine—he lowered his voice.

“Claire, happy birthday. I love you. And despite your desire to leave on every light in the house when you go to bed, and although you
never
make chili con queso as good as mine, and even though you put chicken bones in the garbage disposal, which makes me insane, I love you still. I love that you make everyone you talk to feel like the most important person in the room.

“I love your big, loud laughter, and I love the way you play with Jonah, making spaceships out of blankets and boxes, launching him through the atmosphere in his booster seat. I love your pie crust. I love the way you kiss me. And maybe most importantly, I love the way you dance in your underwear when you're happy. I know you've been out of sorts since the move, babe, and I hope you'll be happy again soon.” He touched his mug to mine. “Claire. Happy birthday!”

I sipped from my tea, feeling my bottom lip quiver while I blinked back tears, wishing that motherhood, that being his wife, that the privilege of those things alone could heal what was broken in me.

From his pocket Miles pulled out a gift, my favorite photo of Jonah making a spooky face in his Halloween shark costume. The picture was matted and placed inside a four-by-seven silver frame, engraved with the words “Boo Forever.”

I hooted then. My big, loud laughter for Miles, the tears streaking my cheek, and I recognized a tiny bit of myself in the mounted image of Jonah's grin. I understood the way a child locks your love, how Miles and I would, no matter what, always be the two people who loved Jonah more than anyone else ever could.

Miles arranged the gift between us and said, “We have such a sweet boy, don't we? All those years of worrying we'd never get a baby, and we got the best one there is.”

He gulped down the rest of his tepid chai and appropriated the mug, tucking it into the pocket of his sports jacket from which he had produced my gift. Noting my usual look of disapproval when he pinched a glass, he blushed. “A little souvenir to remember the night.” Then he picked up a spongy slice of green tea cake from our tray, eating most of it in one bite, and brushed the crumbs from his newly mounting belly.

On the long, subzero walk to the car, we held hands, and despite my attempt to embrace the sweetness of Miles's gestures, his unusual attempt to be unrehearsed, the framed photograph, and a beautiful toast in my honor, I felt myself retreat. After all we had endured with the move and me giving up my career for his dream, followed by the heralding of my middle age that made me feel more old than middle, I had hoped the evening would somehow reassure me that I was—and that we as a family would always be—okay.

Out front of our house, Miles asked, “Kiss me?”

So I gave him my cheek and rubbed my hands together, forcing another grin in his direction, while I again slid from the moment into a memory of Dean guiding me across the creek, where we found a sandy stretch alongside the bird sanctuary and explored the uncharted parts of each other, ending the night on our backs, breathlessly regarding the summer constellation Scorpius, with its mythological sting.

When Miles opened the door, the sitter greeted us with, “Wow, you guys are home early!”

From the ten-dollar bills he kept held together with a paper clip, Miles peeled away twenty bucks and handed them to her. “Thank you,” he said reaching for the girl's coat, which hung as thick and downy as a sleeping bag from a hook in the front hall.

And while he saw her out, I kicked off my shoes and slipped into Jonah's room. There I coiled up on the rug beside his crib. I closed my eyes and listened to the white noise machine project the crash of waves—the noise I still miss most.

Miles whispered through the door, “Claire, come to bed.” But when I didn't respond, he crept in and covered me with the blanket I kept on the back of the rocking chair, tucking it tight around my body to keep out the cold.

Once, Miles would have lifted me from the floor and carried me to bed, coaxing me out of sleepiness and into passion with his lips and breath and warm, deft doctor's hands. But I could no longer even imagine such brazen desire on his part, much less on mine. I wanted to blame its disappearance on our move to the Midwest, whose lake waters, devoid of a changing tide, lacked the kind of dependability that kept me steady.

But I see now that my knock from our equilibrium was no fault of Madison but something that started seven years prior, in the meteorology lab back East when those images of the past returned to me. Unobstructed, looping like a movie reel, they grew more frequent during our futile efforts to make a baby; once we had Jonah they lessened some, but worsened again with the stress of the move, during which I bottomed out completely.

For three years prior to arriving in Madison, after the house was done, I'd made getting pregnant the new project and the central theme of my life. I thought about it at work, at home. I dreamed about babies—human babies, animal babies, myself as a baby.

I took all the assessments: ovulation testing, ovarian function tests, luteal phase testing, luteinizing hormone tests, follicle-stimulating hormone tests, estradiol tests, progesterone tests, prolactin tests, free T3 tests, total testosterone tests, free testosterone tests, DHEAS tests, androstenedione tests, cervical mucus tests, ultrasound tests, hysterosalpingograms, hysteroscopy, laparoscopy, endometrial biopsy.

And I made Miles get tested too.

Again and again I asked him to jerk off into a cup and deliver the specimen for semen analysis testing to the lab at the University of Connecticut Health Center, where he worked. And for me, he did this eleven times in desperate attempts to quell our frustration and disappointment.

“Are you sure?” I would plead. “It doesn't make sense. The results can't keep coming back normal.” I wanted answers, scientific findings, to substantiate our failure.

Each time he took a test, Miles responded by handing me the printout from the lab screening and said nothing.

Sperm count: 40 Million

Sperm motility: Grade A .90

Sperm morphology: Regular .60

Pus cells: Absent, Volume 3 mil

To my dismay, we tested normal every time on every screening. Miles and I were both scientists, yet for us science failed to provide a hypothesis that explained exactly why we could not conceive. We were older, yes, but all the statistics were in our favor. Our parts worked, and our hormone levels—despite our “late parental age” of thirty-seven and thirty-eight years old—were, by all technical definitions, exceptional.

Yet with all those thermometers and charts, all those visits to make love in his office and at my lab, with all those quickies in the car, the planned overnights at downtown hotels and little inns by the sea, with all that lingerie I ordered online, we were disappointed every month, finding my period there again on day thirty-three, almost exactly at noon.

Gradually we lost our sense of humor and gained, instead, an awareness of our collective failure. Both of us blamed ourselves, then each of us quietly blamed the other. Finally, following Miles's announcement of “I just can't do this anymore, I feel like a farm animal,” we conceived a baby without any scientific interventions on our fourth wedding anniversary.

When I came down the stairs with six smiling pregnancy test sticks, the sum total of two boxes, a bouquet of optimism that I presented to Miles where he sat on the couch writing a grant, he looked up at me, then examined each one.

“I guess there was nothing wrong with us,” he announced, pulling me into his arms. For a moment he held my face between his hands, his eyes wide open and glossed with tears. “Finally,” he whispered. Then he pulled me onto the couch, the weight of my body creasing his stacks of manila envelopes and medical journals as he climbed on top of me, breathing me in deeply, kissing my wrist, and directing my arms around his neck.

We held each other a long time. I cried from exhaustion and joy. And with most of our clothes on, clinging to each other, we surrendered the blame and made slow, deliberate love. Our jeans kicked off into crumpled piles by our toes, we kissed. Deep kisses. Kissing until our bodies boasted a celebratory rhythm and Miles's research notes slipped off the couch and scattered across the floor.

And for those first fourteen weeks of gestation, Miles read aloud to me each night from
What
to
Expect
When
You're Expecting
, whose title he edited with a black Sharpie marker to read instead:
What
to
Expect
Obsess
about
When
You're
Expecting
Obsessing
.

Nervous, we remained tentative with our humor and our hope, anticipating the second ultrasound, waiting for the thud of the heartbeat to confirm the good news we would deliver to the world. Each of us raced to that appointment on our lunch breaks from work and waited in the darkened room, our hands folded in our laps, as we fixed our gazes onto the screen.

The sonographer guided the jellied end of the knob over my belly as I studied the black-and-white projection, depicting a clear image of our baby's head on a tiny tadpole body.

The technician said, “Let's see.”

On the screen the image was static.

“Shouldn't it be right there?” I said. “The flicker?”

“Just a moment,” the technician told me, nodding at my husband as she stepped through the door.

But I already knew from my husband's exhale, the furrow of his brow, his false smile, that there was no more baby.

“It's early,” he whispered into the dark. “We haven't told anybody. And this is good news, really, that we even got pregnant.”

Something inside of me unhinged. “
Good
news?”

“We can try again.” Miles squeezed my hand as the doctor walked in.

I didn't squeeze back.

After that, Miles never mentioned the miscarriage.

I took a cab back to work.

The following day, another cab drove me to and from my D&C at the hospital where Miles held his clinic. There, a surgeon dilated my cervix before putting me under general anesthesia to remove the contents of my uterus, first using vacuum aspiration to take away the lifeless fetus, then a metal rod with a sharp loop to perform the curettage to prevent infection, scraping and scooping my insides that already felt broken.

While I was in the recovery room, Miles did not come to greet me. He said he wanted to be there, but I asked him not to. He didn't push it. Diving into a private sorrow, I chose to endure the loss of our baby alone because seeing Miles's disappointment only made me hurt that much more, believing my body was responsible for failing us and our marriage somehow.

Six months passed before we finally made love again, when following a holiday celebration for Miles's lab staff, we had drunken sex on the rug by the fireplace, where I woke up with my high heels and cocktail dress on, under a quilt Miles tossed over me on his way up to bed. The next morning, while I stood at the coffeemaker rubbing my eyes, he planted a wet one on my check and handed me a pint glass he had pilfered from the bar, filled to the lip with orange juice. “Fun night?” he said, a question to which he tentatively awaited my agreement.

Four months later, when I was too sick to hide it any longer, I announced to Miles that I was pregnant with our son Jonah. I had taken the initial pregnancy test at work, pushing away any glee as I dropped the result stick in the biowaste bin behind the Atmospheric Resources Lab where I conducted my research.

During workdays, when I knew Miles was with patients and too busy to contact me, I scheduled my ob-gyn appointments, along with the first three ultrasounds—one at seven weeks, one at twelve weeks, and one at twenty weeks, more pictures of my tiny baby than younger, more fertile moms ever get.

I didn't want Miles at those screenings because I knew if we lost Jonah, he would never shatter the way I would. So I made the pregnancy all mine. And as I navigated my fears for all nine and a half months of my term, I did so mostly alone, turning inside myself, hiding in the walk-in closet when I needed a good cry.

Jonah was born two weeks past his due date, a big ten pounder, with both of us present. And once we moved beyond the complications of his birth—the cord around his neck, the slice through my middle, both of us battered and bruised—Miles and I went home and clung to each other inside the farmhouse we had restored and finally furnished together. By the time the baby was seven or maybe eight weeks old, a time when I could not yet discern where my son began and I ended, Miles's desire for me became inexhaustible.

It was me, once insatiable and greedy with our love, who grew ambivalent about our marriage, struggling with the idea of sex after childbirth, incapable of recalling how exactly we came to make the sweet baby boy who took everything I had to offer. And as my breasts became a food source, their circumference expanding while my mind withered from sleep deprivation into something as sharp and capable as a bowl of oatmeal, Miles sought me more than he ever had in our shared life.

“Claire,” he would whisper. “Let me touch you.”

On the rare occasion that I attempted to undress for him, out of a sense of obligation for his patience and relentless desire, I grew modest in the company of that blousy flesh stitched together by a raised purple seam, where my formerly taut belly had been a place of pride. Instead, I wore my postpartum body like a relic of the labor trauma we were all fortunate enough to survive, but for me, my body seemed an impossible source of pleasure.

“Your body is so much curvier, and sexy and full,” Miles whispered to me one night, taking a milk-drunk Jonah from my arms and lowering him into the bassinet beside our bed. “And I miss you, Claire. I want to be close to you.”