“Two lines, two lines, two lines,” I chanted as I peed. After all, I’d be forty in a few months. No time to waste. We’d been trying since we got married.
I set the test on the edge of the sink, not looking at it, heart knocking. Three minutes, the instructions said. One hundred and eighty seconds. “Come on, two lines,” I said, channeling my sister’s cheerleader attitude toward life, minus the sugarcoating that she seemed to put on everything. “You can do it!”
A baby. Even now, the cells could be multiplying inside me. A mini-Nathan on the way. A boy. The image was so strong I could feel it in my heart, my rib cage already expanding with love—my son, my little guy, with blue eyes like his daddy’s and brown hair like mine. I could see his little face, the soft blue newborn cap on his perfect head, a beautiful baby, warm in my arms. Mrs. Coburn—Eloise, that was—would look at me with newfound admiration (an heir!), and Nathan Senior would cluck with pride over Nathan IV (or perhaps a different name. I was partial to David).
One hundred and seventy-two. One hundred and seventy-three.
I decided to go for two hundred to give the pregnancy hormones a chance to really soak in. To give those two lines a chance to shout their news.
A baby. A husband was already pretty surreal after twenty years of singleness. Somehow, it felt greedy to be asking for a baby, too.
But I did want a baby, so much. For the past six or seven years, I’d been telling myself I was perfectly fine without one. I’d been lying.
One hundred and ninety-eight. On hundred and ninety-nine.
Two hundred.
I reached for the stick.
One line.
“Well, shit,” I said.
The disappointment was surprising in its heft.
I wrapped the pregnancy test in some tissues and buried it in the trash.
Not this month, little guy, I told my nonbaby, swallowing. I wouldn’t cry.
It was okay. It had been only four months. I could have wine tonight at Eric’s party. And Nathan would be sweet when I told him. He’d say something like, “At least it’s fun trying.”
But if it took too much longer, it wouldn’t be. I’d known friends who went through this, the grim tracking of the ovulation cycle, the way making love becomes insemination, as romantic as a turkey baster. One of my college friends, in fact, had said she preferred the turkey baster. “I don’t have to pretend that way,” she’d said.
I’d bought a six-pack of pregnancy tests. Hadn’t really envisioned needing more. My periods had always been regular; a good sign, the doctor said. But now, there was just one lonely test left, since last month, because I hadn’t believed the negative test, I had repeated it the next day.
The lights went off. I jazz-handed, and they came back on.
“Next month,” I said, my voice bouncing off the tile of the bathroom. Then I looked at myself in the mirror and smiled until it felt real. I was lucky. Nathan was great. If we couldn’t get pregnant, we’d adopt. We’d already talked about it.
I imagined my sister, Ainsley—my half sister, really—would get knocked up the first month she tried. She rarely had to work for anything. Happiness just fell in her lap.
Well. Sitting in the bathroom wasn’t going to make me feel better. Coffee would, and now that I knew I wasn’t pregnant, I could have another cup. I left the bathroom and made my way downstairs. It seemed like a five-minute walk.
Nathan’s bread and butter came from designing high-end homes—faux Colonials and Victorians and Arts and Crafts “bungalows” that were 4,800 square feet on half an acre of landscaped perfection. Westchester County, just north of Manhattan, couldn’t seem to get enough of them.
We lived in an older neighborhood of Cambry-on-Hudson, Nathan’s hometown, the same town where my sister and parents lived. Nathan had torn down a house to build his masterpiece on this lot—a vast modern house with walls of glass and dark wood floors and minimalist furniture. He’d built it just after his divorce, thankfully; I didn’t want to live in a house where another wife had made her mark.
But I needed a couch for flopping. The one drawback to living in this architectural jewel was the lack of a flopping couch. Yes. We could get rid of a couple of those angular chairs and replace them with my squishy pink-and-green couch from Brooklyn.
Not that pink and green matched the color palette of the house. Still, I could probably stick it in a bedroom somewhere. We had five, after all. Seven bathrooms (seven!), a huge eat-in kitchen, a dining room that could seat sixteen. Living room, family room, study, den—I still mixed them up sometimes. Laundry room, mudroom, butler’s pantry, modest wine cellar (if any wine cellar could be considered modest), and even a media room in the basement with a huge wonking TV and six leather recliners. In the four months of our marriage, we’d managed to watch one movie down there. There was even a special bathroom off the garage to wash a dog. We didn’t have a dog. Not yet.
I loved Nathan. I loved this house. I even loved (or really, really liked) his sister, Brooke, who lived three-quarters of a mile down the street, next door to Nathan’s parents. This new life would just take some getting used to. Soon, I’d feel right at home. Soon, I’d even master the light switches. There were so many.
What I really wanted was for time to fast-forward to when things felt more real, more solid. In three years, this house would feel like home. Our child’s things would brighten up the place, a basket of toys, finger paintings hanging on the fridge and dozens of pictures of the three of us, laughing, smiling, snuggling. I would know how to turn on every light in the house.
I went into the study (or was it the den?) that served as both Nathan’s and my home office. “Good morning, Hector, noble prince of Troy,” I said to my orange betta fish. He was still alive, bucking the odds at the age of four. Nathan had bought him a gorgeous, handblown bowl when I moved in, replacing the one I got at Petco, and filled it with real plants to oxygenate the water. No wonder Hector was thriving. I watched my pretty fish for a minute, drinking my coffee, pushing against melancholy.
Tonight, when Nathan got home, I’d grab him the second he walked through the door, and we’d do it against the wall. Or on the floor. Or both. We’d be flushed and mellow at Eric’s party. And tomorrow, I’d make crepes, one of my few culinary specialties. The forecast was for rain, so we could stay in and read and watch movies and make love all weekend long—just for us, not for the baby—and he’d smile at me every time he glanced my way.
My sister and Eric lived in this same town; in fact, they knew Nathan before I did. Ainsley had never mentioned Nathan to me back when I was dating; while I wasn’t positive, I thought it was because she didn’t want me on her turf. Our parents had moved to Cambry-on-Hudson a month after I started at NYU, when my brother, Sean, was a junior at Harvard, so only Ainsley spent her teenage years here. She viewed it as the epitome of perfection.
Me, I’d lived in Brooklyn since I was twenty, about a year before it became the capital of hipsters and microbreweries. Yet here I was, in a town where the nannies had degrees from Harvard, where my mother-in-law invited me for lunch at her beloved country club each week, where my sister took hot yoga classes.
Speaking of my sister, there was a text. Can’t wait to see you and Nathan tonight!
Her not-so-subtle way of reminding us to come. And the emojis... I sighed. All her life, Ainsley had been not-so-subtle. She was a people-pleaser and, I had to admit, it grated. I understood why, but I just wanted to take her aside and tell her to turn it down a few notches.
And then I’d remember how she used to crawl into my bed when she was four. I texted back. We can’t