The Choices We Make (10 page)

I stood up and brushed some stray pieces of grass from my pants, wanting to escape this moment as quickly as possible. “It was just an idea. Let's pretend like I never brought it up.”

* * *

Later that night, after David and I were home and in bed—our backs to each other—I finally gave in and turned him toward me, apologizing for everything and telling him the option was off the table. Even Hannah, the one who wanted a child more than anything else, agreed it was an unrealistic idea fraught with too much risk. He was right; I may have been well-intentioned, but I was wrong.

After that, we had spectacular makeup sex and fell asleep in each other's arms. But my sleep was restless as I dreamed of Hannah pulling a tray of tiny babies nestled in polka-dotted cupcake holders out of her oven, declaring it was okay, she didn't need my help, she had found the right ingredients after all—it was all in the eggs. I woke in the morning, headache thankfully gone but stomach unsettled from the rich bread pudding and boozy margaritas and strange dream, wondering if I really could just let the idea go like I'd promised both Hannah and David I would.

19

HANNAH

My blades sliced through the water, the single rowing shell cutting a smooth trail across the surface of the Aquatic Cove, which was still relatively tranquil this early on a Sunday morning. Only a couple of boats dotted the water, and seagulls occasionally pierced the quiet as they dived for breakfast. With each drive my lungs burned and my toes cramped—it had been a while since I'd been out on the water; I was out of shape. I'd barely slept the night before, and it was cold, my fingers numb. But the familiar sense of calm I always felt when I rowed settled into my bones within three sweeps, and I was glad I'd paid my membership fee to the rowing club for another year.

Catch. Drive. Finish. Feather.
As I worked my body through the strokes, breath coming faster and arms quivering with the effort, I thought about Kate and the night before.

I want to carry a baby for you.

At first I'd been shocked. Then filled with gratitude. Then certain—no matter how kind and selfless—the gesture had no merit and that Kate would see that as soon as the margaritas stopped flowing.

So when she said she'd drop it, I, too, tried to put it out of my mind. But then while we cleaned up dinner and got ready to play cards, I suddenly became light-headed and nauseous. After excusing myself for a bathroom break, I sat on my bed and tried to catch my breath. Maybe it was some kind of strange delayed reaction, but in that moment—and for only a moment—I indulged the idea. What if Kate
did
carry a baby for me? Yes, it would technically be her baby, but it would be my child to bring home. To a crib we'd set up where the new steel desk now sat—in the office, which I'd been reserving for the nursery up until last week when Ben, in a display of uncharacteristic superstition, suggested half-jokingly that if we turned it into an office, maybe then we'd get pregnant. Like somehow we could trick fate. I'd smiled at his optimism and agreed it was probably time to pick out a desk—knowing full well if we were telling the universe anything, it was that we were giving up.

But a baby, with Kate.
It would be different than it would have been with Lyla. Kate was my best friend, and no matter how we got a baby, she would always be in its life. Unlike my fear about Lyla wanting to keep the baby, I wouldn't worry about Kate—she would not break my heart like that. If someone asked me how I knew I could trust her so completely, I would simply answer, “Two decades, that's how.” Plus, if we did this, we would have an amazing story to tell for years to come.

But it was a fantasy, and while intoxicating to imagine even briefly, not a reality I could afford to focus on. The complications could be astounding—even if David and Ben, who most certainly would have serious reservations, agreed to consider it.

And so with a few splashes of water on my face and a deep breath, I'd let the fantasy go and had headed back downstairs for cards and another drink.

But as I sweated out the previous night's alcohol and highly caloric bread pudding on the fog-draped water, I thought it again:
What if?

* * *

“How's the bread?” Ben called out from the back patio, where he was grilling jerk chicken over the pimento wood chips he had shipped from Jamaica a few times a year. The smoke curled through our screen door, and I inhaled deeply, mouth watering at the smell.

“Almost ready to go in,” I replied, kneading the ball of sweet dough a few times before using my pastry cutter to turn it into eight equal pieces. Rubbing my flour-covered hands on my apron, I lifted the lid on the rice that was simmering away in a combination of coconut milk, garlic, onions, thyme and allspice and almost ready for the rinsed kidney beans. Beside the pot of rice was another filled partway with vegetable oil, boiling gently. Back to the bread, I rolled each piece into a cigar-shaped loaf and then set the loaves into the hot oil, where they bubbled and fried with the heady scent of vanilla and sugar.

We had Ben's parents over every month for an authentic Jamaican dinner—and even though his mom was the expert, Ben and I liked to prepare the food. I loved the challenge of sourcing the ingredients for the recipes—like pig's tail and callaloo, a green leafy plant similar to spinach, for pepperpot soup, or Scotch bonnet peppers for jerk marinade, or breadfruit that could be roasted, fried or boiled with coconut milk—and how my kitchen smelled when the spices and scents all mingled together. Ben loved the food, having grown up with traditional dishes like ackee and salt fish for breakfast, dinners of curried goat with bammy bread and jerk everything.

By comparison, when my mom had to take over all the cooking from my grandmother—who had lost her sight when I was a teenager—our diet consisted mostly of grilled cheese sandwiches on white Wonder bread with a side of sweet gherkins. Anything that was easy to prepare ended up on our plates. Until the afternoon my grandmother sat me down and begged me to do the cooking, saying if my mother served her another sweet gherkin she might have to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. My grandmother had nurtured my love of food, of experimenting in the kitchen, and was the main reason I ended up in the career I did. She had been a beautiful cook, though more traditional in her style—with dishes like roast rosemary lamb with mint jelly, lobster rolls on homemade buns thick with fresh creamed butter, spiced butternut squash soup and peach cobbler with cinnamon whipped cream generally on the menu.

I had many times imagined us in our kitchen with our children, Ben teaching them the importance of grilling jerk over pimento wood and how you should never use canned kidney beans for rice and peas, and me showing them how to fold in stiff-peaked meringue when making soufflé or the magic of homemade buttercream icing.

Swallowing the lump in my throat, I used a wooden spoon to push the Festival bread around in the oil and turned the loaves over so they would be fried and crispy on both sides. I was draining the deep golden bread on paper-towel-lined plates when Ben came through the door with the meat.

“Smells amazing,” I said, dumping the glass measuring cup of rinsed kidney beans—which had soaked overnight in water and were now plump and deep burgundy red—into the rice and giving it all a stir. “We're all set. Just need your mom and dad. And...there they are,” I said, when the doorbell chimed.

Almost an hour later, full of rice and peas, chicken and the crispy-on-the-outside-doughy-on-the-inside Festival bread, we all sat in the backyard under a patio heater that made early December's chill disappear, eating mango ice cream and chatting about how it looked like rain tonight. Ben's mother, Evie, who was tall but soft around her edges, put her scraped-out glass dish down and sat forward in the teak garden chair, fixing her deep brown eyes on me. “So tell us. What's happening?”

Ben glanced at me, and I focused on my ice cream, which was half-eaten and starting to melt.

“Mom, not now.”

“Evie, let's just leave it alone tonight, okay?” Nathan, Ben's dad, looked over at the two of us and smiled. Though a massively successful, creative man, he didn't look the part. He was quite tall, standing an inch or so above Ben, and thin, with salt-and-pepper hair he unfortunately combed over and glasses that were perhaps a decade or so past being fashionable. But he had a face that appeared younger than his sixty-two years, and brilliant blue eyes that Ben had inherited.

“What?” Evie exclaimed, waving a hand to dismiss Nathan's request. “We haven't had an update in a few weeks, and I, for one, would like to know where we're at with the whole grandbaby project.”

When we first started trying for a baby, I welcomed Evie's questions and interest. My mom often asked, sure, but in ways that grated on my nerves—like did I realize my chances of conceiving dropped significantly after the age of thirty, or when was I going to stop drinking coffee and eating nitrites and take my fertility seriously? Evie, on the other hand, talked about having a grandchild as if it was the only reason she had been placed on this earth—to spoil it with love and her Jamaican cooking. When her constant questions started to wear thin, Ben patiently reminded me of Sarah—his older sister who had died of leukemia when she was only two and before Ben was born. He had never known his sister, but she was a constant presence in the Matthews house, in the pictures on the walls and in Evie's stories. Ben thought, rightly so I suspected, that Evie saw our child as a way to recapture some of that time she'd missed out on with Sarah.

And so as the years went on I thought a lot about Sarah, which only added more stress to the pressure-cooker situation we were in. Now when Evie brought the baby thing up, which she did in exactly this way every time we saw them, I had to fight the urge to ask her to please shut up. I wanted to shout that we had tried everything, and that unfortunately it didn't look as though there was going to be a baby after all.

“Mom, please stop.” Ben stood up quickly, a frown crowding his face.

“Ben, sweetheart, I was only trying to—”

“Stop!” Ben barked loud enough that I jumped. Evie looked as if she was going to cry, and I sat openmouthed and in shock. I'd never heard Ben speak to his mom like that—she walked on water as far as he was concerned. “You want an update? Here you go.” Tears filled his eyes, and I knew he was seconds away from losing it completely. It scared me, seeing him like this, but I sat where I was and watched him unravel. “We tried in vitro and not a single embryo lived. Not one.” He held up his index finger and shoved it up toward the sky violently. “So we are out of options. And don't even think about bringing up adoption. Apparently it's not an option, either.” I started at this—watching him as he stood there in front of us quivering with anger—and wondered what that meant. Last I knew we had agreed to put adoption on the back burner, not eliminate it completely as an option. But perhaps we had both been lying to each other. Me about Lyla, and Ben about being ready to close the adoption discussion for the time being.

Before I could get a word out Ben took off, storming through the house and slamming the front door. I knew he was probably on our front steps, where we often liked to sit with midafternoon coffees or glasses of wine, depending on the day and our moods, watching the neighborhood go by.

“I'll go,” Nathan said, rising from his chair and following Ben. I kept my eyes on the back porch screened door, willing them to come back so I didn't have to sit with Evie in awkward silence. My mind raced, trying to figure out what to say to her, and what to say to Ben later after everyone had left and it was just the two of us.

“I had a miscarriage once,” she said. I glanced over at her, but she kept her eyes trained on a loose thread hanging from her sleeve. “Sarah was about a year old, and when I found out I was pregnant, well, let's just say I didn't handle things well. There was a lot of screaming, crying and carrying on.” She looked at me wryly, a small smile on her lips. “But as my momma told me—that woman loved her Jamaican proverbs—‘If yu cyaa get turkey, satisfy wid John Crow,'” she said, her patois smooth and lyrical. “Which basically means you need to make the best of it and be content with what you have.”

“Good advice,” I said, my voice cracking. I cleared my throat and took a sip of water.

Evie nodded. “It was. When I lost the baby I sunk in a deep pit of guilt, thinking it was my fault or that I'd somehow caused it by wishing it hadn't happened in the first place.”

“I can understand that.”

“I'm sure you can,” Evie said, watching me closely. “So let me say it to you, because I love you like a daughter and would never want you to feel even for a moment the way I did. If yu cyan get turkey, satisfy wid John Crow.”

I smiled and stood up when Evie did, allowing her to wrap her arms around me. “Don't give up faith,” she whispered, her mouth close to my ear and her breath carrying the sweet smell of mangoes and cream. “You just never know what's around the corner.”

20

HANNAH

I was on my fourth cup of coffee and second cinnamon bun when Ben walked into the kitchen, bleary-eyed in his boxers and T-shirt.

“What's up?” he asked, scratching the stubble forming on his chin. He never shaved on the weekends and by Sunday it looked as though he had dipped his chin in coffee grounds. “It's five o'clock in the morning. On a Sunday.”

“Hi! Morning!” I went on my tiptoes to kiss him on the mouth. He smelled like mouthwash, which meant he was up for good. “Want a cinnamon bun? Fresh out of the oven.”

“Think I'll stick with coffee until the sun comes up.”

I grabbed him a mug from the cupboard, then sat back down and took a gulp of my coffee. “Too hot, too hot. Careful, it's hot.”

Ben laughed. “Thanks. I'm guessing this isn't your first cup?”

I held up four fingers and took another, smaller sip.

“That explains a few things,” Ben said, sitting down beside me. “What are you working on?”

I tapped my keyboard to wake my laptop's screen up. “I've been thinking that you're right.”

“Oh?” Ben sipped his coffee and settled into the stool, splaying his knees to the side and resting his elbows on the island. “I'm looking forward to hearing this.”

“We should look into adoption.”

“Hannah, I don't think—”

“Hear me out.” I turned the computer screen toward him. “I've bookmarked a bunch of sites. Some for domestic adoption. Some for international. And I found a couple of blogs from adoptive parents here in San Francisco. One of them got a baby six months after they finished their home study. Can you believe it? Six months. Here I was thinking it could be years, but that isn't always the case. So I started a profile page for us. It's not live yet—don't worry. And I sent an email to an agency, but seeing as it's—” I glanced at the time in the right-hand corner of the screen. “Five after five on a Sunday morning, I'm guessing we won't hear anything back today.”

“How long have you been up?” Ben asked, squinting at the screen while I flipped between pages.

“Since three.”

“Seriously?”

“Couldn't sleep. Also, you're not going to believe this, but did you know I could actually breast-feed if we adopted? I'd have to take some medication and pump for a while, but I could breast-feed, Ben.”

I glanced over at him then, and in his face I saw so many different emotions I wasn't sure which one I needed to pay attention to first. He looked equal parts curious, concerned and dismayed.

“What? What are you thinking?” I asked, worried he didn't seem as excited about all this as I was.

He closed the laptop. “I'm thinking that things got a bit dramatic last night and that's my fault, and that you don't need to do this. I'm okay, promise. It's okay.”

Shortly after Evie told me not to lose faith and hugged me for a full minute without breaking her grip, Ben and his dad had come back. I could tell Ben had been crying, but he seemed better when he hugged his mom and apologized. We didn't talk about any of it after his parents left, because I knew the best thing I could do for him was to not turn the incident into a discussion point.

“I know you're okay,” I said, placing my hand against his cheek. “Honestly, it isn't about that. I had an epiphany last night, oh, around two in the morning when I got up to counting five hundred sheep and realized I wasn't going to fall back asleep.”

“You actually counted to five hundred sheep?” Ben smirked and took my hand, kissing my palm.

“I really did. But after I gave up on that, I decided I was tired of being a victim in this whole thing. I'm sick of thinking about how unfair it is, because that isn't getting me anywhere.”

“So was that your great epiphany?”

“That, and realizing when I leap forward fifty years and look back over my life, I see two things clearly. One, you and I have had a long happy marriage, and I'm still baking you cinnamon buns on Sunday mornings.”

Ben smiled at that and grabbed the half bun still on my plate, taking a giant bite. “I like that vision,” he said, after he'd swallowed. “And two?”

“Two, I am a mother and you are a father. I have no idea how it happens, but it doesn't matter. So I want to adopt. Or at least try. Basically I'm going to fake it 'til I make it, or something like that.”

Ben leaned forward to kiss me. “I'm in. I'm one hundred percent in.” His lips moved from mine to my neck, where they lingered softly. I sighed, a familiar pleasurable sensation starting in my toes and spreading upward.

“I like where you're going with this,” I said, shifting away from him despite his murmurs to stay where I was, that he wasn't quite done. “But I need to tell you one more thing.”

He grumbled somewhat impatiently.

“Give me a sec. I'll be right back.” A few minutes later I was back, a shopping bag in one hand and a large box in the other.

“What's all that?”

I took a deep breath. “After the last negative test I went and bought maternity clothes. Three outfits. I tried on one of those fake bellies and told the salesgirl I was three months pregnant.” I held up the shopping bag.

Ben raised an eyebrow, a smile playing on his lips, but he didn't say anything. “Also, I told you I got rid of all the pregnancy tests but that was a lie. Three weeks ago I ordered two dozen more.” I shook the box, the tests shifting around inside.

“That's a lot of pee sticks.”

“Yes, yes it is.” I laughed and put the box on the kitchen table. “I'm going to donate them to the women's clinic in town, and I'm going to give the outfits to Claire. Even though I'm sure she'll say they aren't her style or something equally annoying.”

I turned the bar stool around so Ben was facing me, then straddled him and wrapped my arms around his neck, pressing my body tightly against his.

“Where were we,” I whispered, kissing him deeply, the mint of his mouthwash now dulled by coffee and sticky cinnamon icing.

“Right about here.” He lifted my arms over my head and pulled off my shirt. I shivered as his hands ran over my shoulders, my back, my breasts, and was soon breathless and pulling him off the stool to the floor. In my haste to get our naked bodies aligned and horizontal, I lost my balance and slipped off the stool. He tried to break my fall and I landed on top of him before rolling to the side. We both started laughing, then stopped just as suddenly when my mouth found his.

Ten minutes later and still naked on the floor, his boxers and my bottoms lying beside us, and a couch cushion under our heads, I looked over at him and grinned.

“I forgot how fun that could be.” I snuggled into his chest and he threw an arm over me, his fingers rubbing around and around on my still-flushed skin.

“I know,” Ben said, sighing. “When did it stop being fun?”

“I can't remember exactly. Somewhere between cycle ten and ‘you're never going to carry a baby'?”

“Hannah, don't do that.”

“Why not? Might as well joke about it—otherwise it's just sad. I'm tired of being sad all the time.”

“You're right. Screw it. Literally.” I laughed as he kissed the spot between my breasts, and I held his head there for a moment, feeling his stubbled chin tickle me gently. “It's time to start having fun again.”

“I agree. But...one more thing first.”

Ben started kissing a trail down toward my belly button. “What?” he asked, between kisses.

I bit my lip. “I think you might freak out, but don't freak out. It's going to be fine.”

“Hannah...” Ben stopped midway down my body and gave me a look.

“I put a deposit down on a puppy somewhere between the international adoption search and making the cinnamon buns. A Coton du Tulear, which is basically a small white dog that doesn't shed. My grandparents had one. I've probably mentioned him? George? They're very calm. You won't even notice it's here.”

“A dog. We're getting a dog?”

“Yes! You will love it—I'm telling you. They are so cute. And small. Tiny, really. Wait, I'll show you the pictures—”

Ben held up a hand. “Later. I think this is more important than a... What's it called again?”

“Who cares,” I said, lying back with a sigh. Ben smiled, then ducked his head and started up where he left off.