When the Lights Go Out by Mary Kubica

Author:Mary Kubica [Kubica, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781488023576
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2018-09-01T21:12:21+00:00

eden

May 28, 1997

Egg Harbor

As spring ripens into summer, tourists reappear. The town comes to life with a certain vivacity that was missing during the dismal days of winter. Trees burgeon, flowers bloom.

Miranda and her three boys appear like magic at my front door each day that I’m not working—and often, I’d venture to guess, when I am—toting blueberry loaves and apple pies.

As the boys play in the tree swing (that by now was meant to hold my own child, the two of us nestled snugly together, he or she on the seat of my lap, weightless and grinning as we lift off from the ground and take flight), Miranda and I sip lemonade. As always she sells short the joys of marriage and motherhood, while little Carter crawls on the lawn before us on all fours, eating dirt. She complains about everything from what a jerk her husband, Joe, can be—coming home late from work, missing dinner, not helping with the boys’ bedtime routine—to the monotony of her days, to the amount of food three growing boys consume. She can never keep the cabinets fully stocked, she tells me, because the minute she buys it they eat it all, which leads into an onslaught on the difficulties of grocery shopping with three boys, and she describes it for me: the poking and the prodding of each other, the name-calling—birdbrain, imbecile, idiot—the running off headlong down the market’s aisles, bumping into strangers, begging and crying for things that Miranda has already said no to, trying to sneak it past her and into the basket, screaming and calling her names when she snatches it out of their dirty hands and returns it to the store shelf.

“That must be so difficult,” I say, trying my hardest to sound empathetic, but when Miranda replies with “You have no idea, Eden. Can you even grasp how lucky you are, getting to grocery shop alone?” it’s all I can do not to scream.

I would give life and limb to grocery shop with a child.

Miranda doesn’t bother asking how the fertility treatments are going, though just last night Aaron and I made the decision to give in vitro fertilization a try. Or rather, I should say, I made the decision to give in vitro a try. The cost of it is extortionate, thousands of dollars for a single cycle, for Dr. Landry to go inside one time and pluck an egg or two from my ovaries to combine with Aaron’s sperm, making an embryo, a baby, in a culture dish. As one grows bacteria. It seems scientific, synthetic, and yet there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for a child.

I know this now.

But Aaron isn’t so sure. As we stood in the kitchen last night, both of us speaking in acerbic tones, he calculated the costs we’ve paid over the year, all the pelvic ultrasounds and semen analyses, the Clomid cycles, the trigger shots, intrauterine insemination. The grand total tallied up to some ten thousand dollars already spent trying to create a child, an expenditure that will nearly double with one single cycle of IVF.

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