Sing You Home: A Novel Read online

  The end, I leave hanging. There’s a need in all of us to finish a phrase we know, and so I’m hoping to get him to mutter that final “crowd.” I glance at Mr. Docker, but the maraca remains clenched in his hand, silent.

  “Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack; I don’t care if I never get back.”

  I keep singing as I step in front of him, strumming gently. “Let me root, root, root for the home team; if they don’t win it’s a shame. For it’s one, two, three—”

  Suddenly Mr. Docker’s hand comes flying up and the maraca clips me in the mouth. I can taste blood. I’m so surprised I stagger backward, and tears spring to my eyes. I press my sleeve to my cut lip, trying to keep him from seeing that he’s hurt me. “Did I do something to upset you?”

  Mr. Docker doesn’t respond.

  The maraca has landed on the pillow of his bed. “I’m just going to reach behind you, here, and get the instrument,” I say carefully, and as I do, he takes another swing at me. This time I stumble, crashing into the table and overturning his breakfast tray.

  “What is going on in here?” Wanda cries, bursting through the door. She looks at me, at the mess on the floor, and then at Mr. Docker.

  “We’re okay,” I tell her. “Everything’s okay.”

  Wanda takes a long, pointed look at my belly. “You sure?”

  I nod, and she backs out of the room. This time, I sit gingerly on the edge of the radiator in front of the window. “Mr. Docker,” I ask softly, “what’s wrong?”

  When he faces me, his eyes are bright with tears and lucidity. He lets his gaze roam the room—from its institutional curtains to the emergency medical equipment in the cabinet behind the bed to the plastic pitcher of water on the nightstand. “Everything,” he says tightly.

  I think about this man, who once was written up in Money and Fortune. Who used to command thousands of employees and whose days were spent in a richly paneled corner office with a plush carpet and a leather swivel chair. For a moment, I want to apologize for taking out my guitar, for unlocking his blocked mind with music.

  Because there are some things we’d rather forget.

  The doll that I buried at a neighbor’s house on the day my father died was called Sweet Cindy. I had begged for her the previous Christmas, completely suckered by the television ads that ran on Saturday mornings between cartoons. Sweet Cindy could eat and drink and poop and tell you that she loved you. “Can she fix a carburetor?” my father had joked, when I showed him my Christmas list. “Can she clean the bathroom?”

  I had a history of treating dolls badly. I cut off my Barbie dolls’ hair with fingernail scissors. I decapitated Ken, although in my defense that had been an accident involving a fall from a bicycle basket. But Sweet Cindy I treated like my own baby. I tucked her each night into a crib that was set beside my own bed. I bathed her every day. I pushed her up and down the driveway in a stroller we’d bought at a garage sale.

  On the day of my father’s death, he’d wanted to go for a bike ride. It was beautiful out; I had just gotten my training wheels removed. But I’d told my father that I was playing with Cindy, and maybe we could go later. “Sounds like a plan, Zo,” he had said, and he’d started to mow the back lawn, and of course there was no later.

  If I had never gotten Sweet Cindy for Christmas.

  If I’d said yes to my father when he asked.

  If I’d been watching him, instead of playing with the doll.

  There were a thousand permutations of behavior that, in my mind, could have saved my father’s life—and so, although it was too late, I told myself I’d never wanted that stupid doll in the first place, that she was the reason my father wasn’t here anymore.

  The first time it snowed after my father died, I had a dream that Sweet Cindy was sitting on my bed. Crows had pecked out her blue-marble eyes. She was shivering.

  The next day I took a garden spade from the garage and walked to the neighbor’s house where I’d buried her. I dug up the snow and the mulch from half of the hedgerow, but the doll was gone. Carried away by a dog, maybe, or a little girl who knew better.

  I know it’s stupid for a forty-year-old woman to connect a foolish act of grief with four unsuccessful cycles of IVF, two miscarriages, and enough infertility issues to bring down a civilization—but I cannot tell you how many times I’ve wondered if this is some kind of karmic punishment.

  If I hadn’t so recklessly abandoned the first baby I ever loved, would I have a real one by now?

  By the time my session with Mr. Docker ends, his daughter Mim has rushed from her ladies’ auxiliary meeting to Shady Acres. “Are you sure you didn’t get hurt?” she says, looking me over for the hundredth time.

  “Yes,” I tell her, although I suspect her concern has more to do with a fear of being sued than with genuine concern for my well-being.

  She rummages in her purse and pulls out a fistful of cash. “Here,” Mim says.

  “But you’ve already paid me for this month—”

  “This is a bonus,” she says. “I’m sure, with the baby and everything, there are expenses.”

  It’s hush money, I know that, but she’s right. However, the expenses surrounding my baby have less to do with car seats and strollers than with Lupron and Follistim injections. After five IVF cycles—both fresh and frozen—we have depleted all of our savings and maxed out our credit cards. I take the money and tuck it into the pocket of my jeans. “Thank you,” I say, and then I meet her gaze. “What your father did? I know you don’t see it this way, but it’s a huge step forward for him. He connected with me.”

  “Yeah, right on your jaw,” Wanda mutters.

  “He interacted,” I correct. “Maybe in a less than socially appropriate way . . . but still. For a minute, the music got to him. For a minute, he was here.”

  I can tell Mim doesn’t buy this, but that’s all right. I have been bitten by an autistic child; I have sobbed beside a little girl dying of brain cancer; I have played in tune with the screams of a child who was burned over eighty percent of his body. This job . . . if it hurts me, I know I am doing it well.

  “I’d better go,” I say, picking up my guitar case.

  Wanda doesn’t glance up from the chart she’s writing in. “See you next week.”

  “Actually, you’ll see me in about two hours at the baby shower.”

  “What baby shower?”

  I grin. “The one I’m not supposed to know about.”

  Wanda sighs. “If your mother asks, you better make sure you tell her I wasn’t the one who spilled the beans.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll act appropriately surprised.”

  Mim reaches out her hand toward my protruding belly. “May I?” I nod. I know some pregnant women think it’s an invasion of privacy to have strangers reaching to pat or touch or offer parenting advice, but I don’t mind in the least. I can barely keep myself from rubbing my hands over the baby, from being magnetically drawn to the proof that this time, it is going to work.

  “It’s a boy,” she announces.

  I am thoroughly convinced that I’m carrying a girl. I dream in pink. I wake up with fairy tales caught on my tongue. “We’ll see,” I say.

  I’ve always found it ironic that someone who has trouble getting pregnant begins in vitro fertilization by taking birth control pills. It is all about regulating an irregular cycle, in order to begin an endless alphabet soup of medications: three ampoules each of FSH and hMG—Follistim and Repronex—injected into me twice a day by Max, a man who used to faint at the sight of a needle and who now, after five years, can give me a shot with one hand and pour coffee with the other. Six days after starting the injections, a transvaginal ultrasound measured the size of my ovarian follicles, and a blood test measured my estradiol levels. That led to Antagon, a new medication meant to keep the eggs in the follicles until they were ready. Three days later: another ultrasound and blood test. The amounts of Follistim and Repronex were reduced—one ampoule of each morning and night—and th
en two days later, another ultrasound and blood test.

  One of my follicles measured twenty-one millimeters. One measured twenty millimeters. And one was nineteen millimeters.

  At precisely 8:30 P.M. Max injected ten thousand units of hCG into me. Exactly thirty-six hours later, those eggs were retrieved.

  Then ICSI—intracytoplasmic sperm injection—was used to fertilize the egg with Max’s sperm. And three days later, with Max holding my hand, a vaginal catheter was inserted into me and we watched the embryo transfer on a blinking computer monitor. There, the lining of my uterus looked like sea grass swaying in the current. A little white spark, a star, shot out of the syringe and fell between two blades of grass. We celebrated our potential pregnancy with a shot of progesterone in my butt.

  And to think, some people who want to have a baby only need to make love.

  My mother is on her computer when I walk into her house, adding information to her recently acquired Facebook profile. DARA WEEKS, her status says, WISHES HER DAUGHTER WOULD FRIEND HER. “I’m not talking to you,” she says, snippy, “but your husband called.”

  “Max?”

  “Do you have more than one?”

  “What did he want?”

  She shrugs. Ignoring her, I pick up the phone in the kitchen and dial Max’s mobile number. “Why isn’t your cell on?” Max asks, as soon as he picks up.

  “Yes, honey,” I reply. “I love you, too.”

  In the background I can hear a lawn mower. Max runs a landscaping business. He is busy mowing in the summer, raking in the fall, and snowplowing in the winter. What do you do during mud season? I had asked the first time we met.

  Wallow, he’d said, smiling.

  “I heard you got hurt.”

  “Embarrassing news travels fast. Who called you, anyway?”

  “I just think . . . I mean, we worked so hard to get to this point.” Max stumbles over the words, but I know what he means.

  “You heard Dr. Gelman,” I tell him. “We’re in the home stretch.”

  It seems ironic that, after all these years of trying, I am the one who is more relaxed about the pregnancy than Max. There were years when I was so superstitious I counted backward from twenty before getting out of bed, or wore the same lucky camisole for a week in an effort to ensure that particular embryo would be the one that actually stuck. But I’ve never made it this far before, where my ankles are blissfully swollen and my joints ache and I cannot see my feet in the shower. I’ve never been so pregnant that someone could plan a baby shower.

  “I know we need the money, Zoe, but if your clients are violent—”

  “Max. Mr. Docker is catatonic ninety-nine percent of the time, and my burn victims are usually unconscious. Honestly, this was a fluke. I could just as easily get hurt walking across the street.”

  “Then don’t cross the road,” Max says. “When are you coming home?”

  I’m sure he knows about the baby shower, but I play along. “I have to do an assessment of a new client,” I joke. “Mike Tyson.”

  “Very funny. Look, I can’t talk right now—”

  “You called me—”

  “Only because I thought you were doing something stupid—”

  “Max,” I say, cutting him off. “Let’s not. Let’s just not.” For years, Max and I were told by couples with children how lucky we were; how our relationship had the luxury of being all about us, instead of who was cooking dinner and who was carpooling to Little League. But the flame of romance can be just as effectively doused by dinner conversations that center on estradiol levels and appointment times at the clinic. It is not that Max doesn’t do everything right—from massaging my feet to telling me I look beautiful instead of bloated. It’s that, lately, even when I am pressed up close against him, I feel like I cannot get close enough to touch him, like he is somewhere else. I have told myself that I’m imagining things. That it’s nerves on his part, raging hormones on mine. I just wish I didn’t have to keep making excuses.

  Not for the first time, I wish I had a girlfriend to confide in. Someone who would nod and say all the right things when I complained about my husband. But my friendships had dwindled as Max and I began to devote ourselves entirely to combating infertility. Some relationships I’d ended, because I didn’t want to hear a friend talk about her baby’s first words, or go to a couple’s home for dinner and be confronted with sippy cups and Matchbox cars and stuffed bears—details of a life that eluded me. Other relationships had simply fallen by the wayside, since the only person who really could understand the cyclone of emotions involved in IVF was Max. We’d isolated ourselves, because we were the only pair among our married friends who didn’t have kids yet. We’d isolated ourselves, because it hurt less.

  I hear him hang up. My mother, I see, has been hanging on every word. “Is everything all right between you two?”

  “I thought you were mad at me.”

  “I am.”

  “Then how come you’re eavesdropping?”

  “It’s not eavesdropping if it’s my phone and my kitchen. What’s wrong with Max?”

  “Nothing.” I shake my head. “I don’t know.”

  She schools her features into an expression of open concern. “Let’s sit down and unpack this feeling together.”

  I roll my eyes. “Does that really work with your clients?”

  “You’d be surprised. Most people already know the answers to their problems.”

  My mother, for the past four months, has reinvented herself as the owner and sole employee of Mama Knows Best Life Coaching. This profession comes on the heels of her earlier incarnations as a Reiki instructor, a stand-up comedienne, and—for one very uncomfortable summer of my adolescence—a door-to-door saleswoman for her entrepreneurial invention: the Banana Sack (a fitted pink neoprene suit that shimmied over the fruit to keep it from going brown too quickly; unfortunately, it was mistaken repeatedly for a sex toy). By comparison, becoming a life coach is fairly tame.

  “When I was pregnant with you, your father and I fought so much that one day I left him.”

  I stare at her. How is it possible that, in the forty years I’ve been alive, I never knew this? “Seriously?”

  She nods. “I packed and told him I was leaving him and I did.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “To the end of the driveway,” my mother says. “I was nine months pregnant; that was the maximum distance I could waddle without feeling as if my uterus was falling out.”

  I wince. “Do you have to be quite so graphic?”

  “What would you like me to call it, Zoe? A fetal living room?”

  “What happened?”

  “The sun went down, and your father came out with a jacket for me. We sat for a few minutes and we went back inside.” She shrugs. “And then you were born, and whatever it was that we’d been arguing about didn’t seem to matter. All I’m saying is that the past is nothing but a springboard for the future.”

  I fold my arms. “Have you been sniffing the Windex again?”

  “No, it’s my new tagline. Look.” My mother’s fingers fly over the keyboard. The best advice she ever gave me was to take a typing course. I’d fought her furiously. It was in the voc-tech side of my high school and full of kids who were not in my über-academic classes—kids who smoked outside before school, who wore heavy eyeliner and listened to heavier metal. Are you there to judge people or to type? she’d asked me. In the end I was one of three girls who got a blue ribbon from the teacher for mastering seventy-five words per minute. Nowadays I use a keyboard, of course, but every time I type up an assessment for one of my clients, I silently thank my mother for being right.

  She brings up her business’s Facebook page. There’s a picture of her on it, and her cheesy tagline. “You would have known that was my new motto if you’d accepted my friend request.”

  “Are you seriously going to hold social networking etiquette against me?” I ask.

  “All I know is that I carried you
for nine months. I fed you, I clothed you, I paid for your college education. Friending me on Facebook seems like a small thing to ask in return.”

  “You’re my mother. You don’t have to be my friend.”

  She gestures at my belly. “I just hope that she gives you the same heartache you give me.”

  “Why do you even have Facebook, anyway?”

  “Because it’s good for business.”

  She has three clients that I know of—none of whom seem perturbed that my mother has no degree in counseling or consulting or anything else you’d want from a motivational coach. One client is a former stay-at-home mother who wants to rejoin the workforce but has no skills beyond making a mean PB&J sandwich and separating lights from darks. One is a twenty-six-year-old guy who recently found his birth mother but is afraid to make contact with her. And the last is a recovering alcoholic who just likes the stability of a meeting every week.

  “A life coach should be on the cutting edge. Hip,” my mother says.

  “If you were hip, you wouldn’t use the word hip. You know what I think this is about? The movie we went to last Sunday.”

  “I didn’t like it. The book’s ending was better—”

  “No, not that. The girl at the ticket booth asked if you were a senior, and you didn’t say another word for the rest of the night.”

  She stands up. “Do I look like a senior, for God’s sake? I color my hair religiously. I have an elliptical machine. I gave up Brian Williams for Jon Stewart.”

  I have to give her this—she looks better than most of my friends’ mothers. She has the same poker-straight brown hair and green eyes that I do and the kind of funky, eclectic style that always makes you look twice at someone, wondering if she planned the outfit meticulously or just rummaged in the depths of her closet. “Mom,” I say, “you are the youngest sixty-five-year-old I know. You don’t need Facebook to prove it.”

  It amazes me that someone—anyone—would pay my mother to be a life coach. I mean, as her daughter, isn’t her advice the very thing I’ve tried to escape? But my mother insists that her clients like the fact that she’s survived a great loss herself; it gives her credibility. She says the vast majority of life coaches are nothing more than good listeners who, every so often, can give a procrastinator a kick in the pants. And really, what are the best credentials for that, outside of being a mother?