Claiming Noah

For my family

‘And ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.'

Kahlil Gibran,
The Prophet

Thursday, 30 September 2010

‘S
he has your eyes.'

Catriona laughed at her husband's joke, even though she didn't find it particularly funny. She welcomed any distraction from the acute vulnerability she felt at her nakedness covered only by a stiff hospital gown, and nerves so debilitating she could barely keep her body still on the examination bed.

‘Let's hope he doesn't inherit his father's sense of humour,' she said.

Together Catriona and James stared at the petri dish that sat next to a microscope and a catheter on a bench in the corner of the procedure room. In the dish was an embryo – a floating speck smaller than a grain of sand – created for them five days earlier. After enduring two months of hormone injections, blood tests and egg-extraction surgery they were finally at the implantation stage of their IVF cycle.

Doctor Malapi walked into the procedure room, and the sight of his familiar face calmed Catriona's nerves. There was something in his kind smile, his gentle way of speaking that put her at ease, even though the lilting tone of his voice also caused her to feel so drowsy that she sometimes struggled to pay attention to what he was saying.

‘It's hot in here, isn't it?' he said as he walked over to a remote control sitting in a bracket attached to the wall. He pressed a button and the air-conditioning unit emitted a rattle in response, but otherwise seemed to offer no relief from the heat.

Doctor Malapi turned to Catriona and James. ‘Well,' he said, clasping his hands together. ‘Let's make a baby, shall we?'

He instructed Catriona to lie back on the bed while the embryologist, a young woman wearing a surgical cap and scrubs, prepared the catheter. James took hold of Catriona's hand and squeezed it gently in mute support. She wet her lips, which had gone dry, with the tip of her tongue and looked up at him, wondering if her face showed the same mix of concern and excitement. He looked like a kid on Christmas morning who wasn't sure if the wrapped present under the tree held a skipping rope or a snake. He didn't even seem to realise that his glasses had slipped down on to the bridge of his nose, so she reached over to him and pushed them back into place. When they first started dating four years ago she had encouraged him to switch to contact lenses, but now she couldn't imagine him without his glasses; they were as familiar to her as his smile, which crinkled his cheeks like origami folds, and the solitary patch of grey hair on his left temple.

The embryologist handed the catheter to Doctor Malapi and left the room.

‘Are you ready?' he asked as he stood poised with the catheter in his hand. ‘If you like I can put on some Barry White while we do this part.'

Catriona and James laughed politely at what was obviously one of his often-repeated repertoire of jokes. But, in spite of his poor sense of humour, Catriona appreciated his attempt to lighten the mood. She and James felt lucky to have found Doctor Malapi. They had spent a lot of time with him over the past few months and were impressed with the care he had taken to explain the complicated IVF process to them. He had been recommended to Catriona through a woman at work who had suddenly decided, at the age of forty-five, that she wanted to have children. Catriona was nearly a decade younger, but she shared the woman's frustration of her body not aligning to her change of heart. Catriona was sure that if she had wanted children ten years earlier, she would have fallen pregnant easily. Then she wouldn't be lying on this bed, waiting for a doctor to shove a tube into her nether regions while her husband fretted beside her.

‘Doctor Malapi,' Catriona said as he sat on a stool at the end of the bed, ‘how long will it take before I know if I'm pregnant? Can I do a test in a couple of days?'

Doctor Malapi shifted from his seated position behind Catriona's bent knees so he could look at her while he answered her question. ‘We don't recommend taking a home pregnancy test. The hormones we gave you while we were trying to develop your eggs can distort the reading, so we don't want you thinking you're pregnant if you're not, or vice versa.'

‘That makes sense,' James said.

‘The nurses at the front desk will organise for you to come in for a blood test in two weeks,' Doctor Malapi said. ‘That will tell us whether or not you're pregnant. So, you'll need to take it easy until then, just in case you are.'

He instructed her to take a deep breath as he inserted the catheter into her uterus. She stared at a television mounted on the ceiling for women who were in her predicament, even though it wasn't turned on. She wished it was, if only to drown out the sounds in the room that exacerbated the intensity of the situation – the rattle from the air conditioner, the tick of the clock on the far wall and the occasional rustle as Doctor Malapi shifted position. Trying to keep the lower part of her body still, Catriona wiped her hand across her face and collected the few drops of moisture that had pooled in the crevice above her top lip. She felt sweat prickling under her arms and dampening the fabric of the hospital gown bunched under her back.

Catriona flinched as she felt a sudden jolt of pain, and James squeezed her hand tighter.

‘Are you okay, babe?' he asked, his eyes wide with concern.

She nodded and wriggled her fingers, trying to get him to loosen his grip on her hand. Catriona knew that if James could swap places with her, he would. The one sore point in their otherwise happy marriage was that James's desire to take care of her sometimes clashed with her well-developed independence. As she often tried to explain to him, she had taken care of herself for more than thirty years before she met him, and she had done a good job of it. She didn't need someone to make sure she had taken time between meetings to have lunch, or to tell her that she needed to turn off her laptop and get some sleep. James usually responded with a smile and a promise that he wouldn't say anything any more – a promise that he promptly broke at the same time the next day.

Towards the end of the fifteen minute procedure, Catriona wondered again how she would respond if her child ever asked how they were conceived. It wasn't as sweet and straightforward as the
Where did I come from?
book her mother had read to her when she was young.

Well, darling, after Mummy had surgery and Daddy jerked off into a container, a scientist put the eggs and sperm together in a little plastic dish. Then, after you spent a few days in something sort of like an oven, a nice doctor pushed you out of a tube and into Mummy's womb.

She stifled a laugh and resisted the urge to share the thought with James and Doctor Malapi. Laughing didn't seem an appropriate reaction considering what was happening. James was used to her blurting out inappropriate things at inappropriate times, but Doctor Malapi would probably think she had gone mad.

After a few more awkward minutes, Doctor Malapi carefully withdrew the catheter. ‘Okay, you're all done,' he said.

Catriona drew her knees together and straightened the gown over them while Dr Malapi called the embryologist back into the room. She inspected the catheter under the microscope, presumably to make sure the embryo hadn't clung on to the tube in defiance instead of obligingly transferring to its new home, while Dr Malapi busied himself at the sink.

‘Can I sit up?' Catriona asked him after the embryologist confirmed the catheter was empty and left the room again.

‘Not just yet,' he answered without turning around. ‘We'll keep you lying down for ten minutes or so. After that you're fine to get up and walk around.'

After he finished at the sink, Doctor Malapi turned back to face Catriona and James. A few beads of sweat decorated the lined skin of his forehead, which he blotted with a handkerchief before he addressed them. ‘Now, I have to reiterate that we don't know for sure if the embryo will transfer successfully, so don't be too disheartened if you don't fall pregnant first time around. Remember that for couples over thirty-five, like yourselves, the success rate from the first implantation is just over thirty per cent.'

‘So, what happens if we don't get pregnant?' James asked. ‘How long do we have to wait until we try again?'

‘That's up to you. We can book another procedure as soon as you like, but your embryos will last for years in the cryogenic unit, so there's no rush.'

Catriona let out an involuntary shudder. She had been horrified when Doctor Malapi explained how their extra embryos would be snap-frozen, like a bag of peas from the supermarket. He had shown them the cryogenic unit – a cylinder with mist bubbling on the surface like a witch's cauldron – but since then every time he mentioned it Catriona pictured her potential sons or daughters shoved into the freezer in the clinic's tea room, among leftover lamb casserole and half-eaten loaves of bread. Doctor Malapi told them four viable embryos had been created during the fertilisation stage of their IVF cycle; the three extras were going into the freezer with the lamb casserole until she and James decided what to do with them.

‘Well, okay, then,' Doctor Malapi said. He smiled at them both in turn. ‘I'll leave you to rest for a while. Just come out when you're ready and the nurses will set up that blood test for you in two weeks.'

He rested his hand on James's shoulder before he walked out the door. ‘Good luck. I'll keep my fingers crossed for you.'

‘Thank you,' Catriona and James said in unison.

•  •  •

The mood in the car on the ride home was a mixture of excitement and apprehension. Catriona and James chatted non-stop about the procedure, the blood test and the declining quality of Doctor Malapi's jokes as they left the city and drove through the terrace-lined streets of their neighbourhood, a suburb in the inner west of Sydney that managed to retain its quaint village atmosphere despite the abundance of million-dollar properties and cafes charging twenty dollars for a plate of scrambled eggs.

Catriona and James both worked full-time and long hours – Catriona was a marketing manager at a telecommunications company, and James was a financial planner – so it was unusual for them to be driving home so early in the afternoon that peak-hour traffic had not yet clogged the roads with a parade of commuters. The streets near their local primary school were just starting to fill with cars as parents readied themselves for finishing time.

‘That'll be you one day,' James said as they passed a woman walking towards the school, presumably to pick up her child, while pushing a younger child in a pram.

Catriona stared at her, trying to picture herself in the woman's place, but failing.

‘Can you really see me with a baby?' she asked James, her voice thick with the concern she felt every time she thought about becoming a mother. It wasn't pregnancy or childbirth that made her nervous; it was knowing that her way of life would transform to one that was unknown, and largely out of her control.

‘Of course I can. You'll be a great mum.'

She wondered how he could say that with such confidence.

‘Hypocrite, more like,' Catriona said, trying to sound more upbeat than she felt. ‘After years of telling everyone I'm not mother material.'

‘Who cares?' James said with a shrug as he pulled up to a set of traffic lights and looked across at her. ‘People change their minds.'

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Or have it changed for them.'

He smiled at her and reached across the gearstick to squeeze her knee. ‘I knew I'd wear you down eventually.'

She couldn't help but smile back at him. He was right. Catriona knew from early on in their relationship that James was desperate to become a father. He cast longing glances at babies in cafes and leafed through toy catalogues from the pile of junk mail on the coffee table. Conversations with friends and family were abandoned as soon as children walked into the room because James preferred playing with the kids to talking to the adults.