Mommy Man (18 page)

15

The Ten Excruciatingly Long Days of Christmas

N
o one was more
of an afterthought to In Vitro Round 2 than Tiffany. She was the last part of the process, she was nobody’s sister, and if she couldn’t get pregnant this time, there was a good chance we’d replace her as our surrogate. As coldhearted as it seemed, two strikes is all a surrogate usually gets when there are so many others who could do the job. It was hard not to think that, if we gave Tiffany the ax, we’d probably never see her again. Sure, we’d bonded with her on a deeper level than we expected, but our relationship was still defined by the baby we were supposed to have together. Would we really meet up with her in two years or ten years to show her the child we’d had with someone else? And what if we never had a kid? Would the sight of her just remind us of our shattered dreams? Bleak as it seemed, Tiffany was either going to be a vital part of our extended family—or a footnote. “What was that second surrogate’s name again? Tammy? Bethany?” It didn’t matter how much we cared about and admired her. Fate could just as easily turn her back into What’s-Her-Womb.

We were resigned to keeping our expectations low this time, but Dr. S was no help. “They’re perfect!” he shouted. “Perfect!”

We’d just arrived at Westside Fertility, on the morning of the embryo transfer, and Dr. S rushed out to greet us, tripping over his scrubs as he pulled them up to his waist. It was almost as though he’d been keeping an eye on the door so he could tell us at exactly the moment we arrived, like a kid eager to show off his school art project to his parents. In this case, his macaroni and glitter masterpiece was a curled-up ultrasound photo of three bumpy circles on a gray background.

“Three embryos?” I asked, remembering that was exactly as many as we’d had last time.

“Yes! All tens!”

“Great,” Drew said.

“Yeah, great,” Susie added.

Dr. S seemed disappointed by our lack of enthusiasm. “Guys, this is awesome!”

“We had three embryos last time,” I reminded him. “Two of them were tens.”

Dr. S shook his head. “Next to these, those were garbage.”

“Hey guys,” Eric said, as he and Tiffany walked in behind us. “What’s up?”

“We have three embryos,” I monotoned. “All perfect tens.”

“Great,” Eric said, exactly as excited as we were.

“Yeah. Great,” Tiffany concurred. “So are we transferring all three?”

Drew shrugged. “Why not?”

“You guys,” Dr. S said. “There’s a very, very high chance of triplets.”

“Great,” we all seemed to say in unison. Dr. S sighed. A minute later, he was leading Tiffany down the hall to begin the procedure.

We were prepared to wait an hour before we saw Tiffany again, but it was only a few minutes later that Eric came to get us.

“She said you guys can come back.”

“Really? Is she decent?”

“She’s recovering. She doesn’t mind if you see her.”

I assumed this meant Tiffany would look pretty much like she always did—fully dressed, fully upright—but when we entered the embryo transfer room, she was neither. Clad only in a hospital gown, she was posed on what appeared to be a backward-tilting luge that might launch from the starting gate at any moment. Her legs were in the air, spread apart, and held up by stirrups. Her body sloped downward to the abdomen before leveling off at the neck. It seemed like a position invented to torture Chinese political prisoners that someone just happened to discover was also helpful in getting embryos to attach to the wall of a woman’s uterus.

“Hi!” Tiffany said, cheerfully, as we spread out around the outskirts of the room.

“Are you sure you want us in here?” I asked, guiltily. I half-shielded my eyes, unsure which would be ruder—not making eye contact or gazing directly at a woman in embryo-attachment position.

“It’s fine,” Tiffany assured me. Clearly, she had overcome whatever modesty she had around us. While we were keeping our emotional distance from her, she was welcoming us freely into a realm of personal privacy that normally included only her husband.

“How are you doing?” Susie asked. She fearlessly sauntered up right beside Tiffany.

“I have to pee,” Tiffany confessed. “Like, really badly.”

“How long do you have to stay like this?”

“The doctor said an hour,” Eric replied.

“How long do I have left?” Tiffany pleaded, shifting her weight back and forth to find a slightly less excruciating spot on her medieval contraption.

Eric checked the clock. “Fifty-two minutes.”

Tiffany groaned.

It was all so strange, knowing that three embryos created by my sister-in-law and me were tucked away inside this woman we barely knew, just inches away. In nine months, one or more of them might slide out of her, with a face, a Social Security number, and twenty tiny appendages protruding from its extremities, more or less. Drew and I might be dads to a person who was, in some form, in this room with us right now.

All Tiffany could think about was her bladder.

“Oh my God! I really have to go!” she whimpered. She shifted some more, clutching the sides of her torture luge, struggling to hold in her pee.

“You can’t even go to the bathroom?”

“No! She’s not allowed!” Eric insisted. “The doctor was very clear!”

“How long now?” Tiffany asked.

“Fifty-one minutes.”

I really wasn’t sure what my role was at that point. On the one hand, I’ve never felt within my rights to tell a woman she couldn’t relieve herself. On the other, I didn’t want Tiffany peeing out my baby.

In any other circumstance, Drew and I would have done anything to ease her pain, screaming at the doctor to just let her go to the bathroom, dammit. Instead, we just played dumb.

“We can check with Dr. S, but you know what he’s going to say . . .”

“I’m sure he’s with other patients. Do we really want to bother him?”

Tiffany squirmed and danced, even though she was in no position to do either. I couldn’t decide: Were Drew and I the world’s biggest assholes, or were we just being good parents?

Tiffany’s bladder was wrung through the Iron Maiden for forty-four minutes, after which we all decided unanimously that it had been an hour. It was the length, without commercials, of an hour-long TV show, so that was good enough for me. We called the doctor in. “She really has to urinate. Is that okay?”

“What?!” He threw his hands up and focused on Tiffany. “These guys won’t let you go to the bathroom?”

Susie flew home, and a few days later, Drew and I joined her. The entertainment industry traditionally shuts down for the holidays, so we regularly spend the last two weeks of the year visiting our families on the East Coast.

With the possible exception of the Clauses, no family takes Christmas as seriously as the Tappons. It’s the one time of year all four kids can get together, and they always arrive loaded with gifts. Their ceiling-scraping Christmas tree is buried in them—neatly wrapped boxes with bows and tags that feature everyone’s names in every possible combination in the “To:” and “From:” fields. Packages for more distant relatives and friends are dispersed throughout the house underneath one of the half dozen other trees.

Rochester is a perfect place to spend the holidays because there’s almost always snow, and it’s so freaking cold that no one wants to go outside. It’s like a Norman Rockwell Christmas, where people sit around all day, swapping stories by the fireplace. Drew and his siblings still wrote a note to “Santa” every Christmas Eve, though their notes took on a snarkier tone as they entered their twenties and thirties. “Susie’s been a good little girl this year. Please bring her some new ovaries.”

The afternoon of the twenty-second, a car pulled up in the driveway.

“He’s here!” Drew shouted, and he sprinted outside in shorts, barefoot, to give his brother Peter a hug.

Since declaring our arrangement “fucked up,” Peter had done a complete 180. All he wanted to know as he lugged his shopping bags full of gifts over the threshold was if we’d heard from Dr. S’s office yet.

I shook my head. “Any minute now.”

Two hours went by, with no call. I wondered if the lab would screw up again and forget to give us the results. This time, we’d have to wait until after Christmas. That would ruin everything—or maybe save the holiday from gloom. I couldn’t be sure.

As usual in a family that size, there were half a dozen conversations going on simultaneously when we were all called to dinner. We gradually assembled in the dining room as Mrs. Tappon put a platoon-sized meal on the table. Ham, turkey, fresh-baked rolls, side dish, side dish, side dish. Nine chairs were squeezed in around the table, gathered from every room in the downstairs.

“Where should I sit?” each of us seemed to ask at the same time. As we negotiated our positions near our favorite foodstuffs, I felt a vibration in my pocket.

It was a private number, but I knew who was calling.

“Hello?”

In an instant, the entire room fell totally silent. Everyone stopped scrambling for seats, put down whatever food they were holding, and turned toward me, tense with anticipation.

“Hello, Gerald?” I heard Aida say. It was only two words, but I got the sense from her tone that she knew the results.

“Yes?”

“I have some good news!” she continued. I looked around the room, just then realizing that no one else had heard what I’d heard. They were all still waiting, searching my expression for clues.

“Hold on,” I said. “I’m going to put you on speaker.”

Mrs. Tappon was stone-faced. She thought I was being foolish to broadcast the call to the room. She was sure it was another letdown. She didn’t know I’d already figured out what Aida was going to say.

Everyone leaned in. “Tiffany’s blood test came back,” Aida said. “She scored a 142. You’re definitely pregnant!”

The cheers shook the room. Drew, Susie, and I shared a tight hug that seemed to last for hours. All around us, the rest of the family paired off in every possible combination and hugged everyone else. But the three of us never let go.

“Congratulations!” the nurse shouted, trying to be heard over the rest of us. I’d almost forgotten she was on the phone.

“Thank you so much! You made our Christmas!”

I had to walk into the other room to finish the call. Keeping the ebullient Tappons quiet would have been impossible at this point, but the nurse had much more to tell me. She had already scheduled Tiffany’s first ultrasound for Tuesday, January 6. She even gave me the baby’s due date: September 1. Our baby. This wasn’t just a hypothetical kid anymore.

I was just about to hang up when I realized I’d forgotten to ask one very important question.

“Is there any chance we’re having triplets?”

Aida chuckled. “With a 142, it’s probably a singleton.”

I couldn’t believe it. A baby. I was going to be a dad.

16

IPs in the Closet

W
e had been officially pregnant
for about ten days when I concluded that we’d already reached the best stage of parenthood. When your kid is just a batch of rapidly dividing cells clinging to a uterine wall, he’s still perfect. He hasn’t Nerf-gunned your boss at a dinner party yet. She hasn’t joined a doomsday cult that worships a flying boot. And they definitely haven’t shouted “I hate you!” and then locked themselves in their bedroom for three days. Better still, it’s only prenatally that you get to play all those wonderful prospective parent games like “What’s the Most Ludicrous Name We’d Willingly Give Our Child?” and “How the Hell Are We Going to Fit a Crib in This Space?”

Two dads have it even better. Yes, your fetus is igniting furious mood swings, morning sickness, and bizarre food cravings but not to either of you. At most, you get a grumpy text about it once in a while. You’re not even the guy who has to run out at 3:00 a.m. to buy peanut butter and pickles. (Sorry, Eric!)

I wanted to take full advantage of the golden days while they lasted, but there was only one early pregnancy game Drew was interested in playing:

“Don’t Tell Anyone We’re Pregnant!”

“Don’t Tell Anyone” was as natural as pregnancy itself. It was probably played by every species in the animal kingdom. Nervous hummingbirds would hum out their own name for it, which was “What? Can’t I Just Build a Nest and Sit in It for a Few Weeks? Don’t Be So Nosy!”

The reason for the radio silence was obvious: Everyone wants to make those initial “We’re Pregnant!” phone calls, but no one wants to make that awful second round of phone calls less than nine months later, the ones that undo the first round of calls and invite all kinds of references to things Oprah once said. Still, I hated the idea of holding back such a huge piece of information from the people I cared about. Hadn’t I sworn off keeping Major Life Secrets after all those years in the closet?

Besides, this wasn’t some ordinary pregnancy. Tiffany had been carefully screened and tested for Jerry/Drew fetus preparedness. Those thousands of baby photos on the wall of Westside Fertility attested to that. I hated to think we were sitting on the best news of our lives for no reason, but Drew insisted on sticking to the straight people’s playbook on pregnancy. He had another rule, too: “No shopping.”

I was dying to browse for baby goods—shrunken dining utensils, inflatable bathtubs shaped like turtles, and footie pajamas with bunnies on them.

“Jerry, you can’t buy anything until you know this is real!” Drew insisted.

“I’m not talking about buying a crib or a swing set or something that’ll haunt us forever if the baby doesn’t make it. Maybe just a onesie. One onesie!”

“No onesies!”

I was stunned by how fast this had gone from a playful bicker into a full-on fight—our first official argument as parents.

“Fine, I’ll go without you,” I said.

“You’re not going!”

I was furious. It was the happiest time of my life, and the person who made me the happiest was trying to squash it.

“What are you afraid of? You think if we lose the baby, all we’re going to worry about is the drawer full of onesies we need to get rid of? Or if we don’t have any baby stuff, that’ll make it easy? ‘Well, so much for that. Let’s move on!’ Because that’s bullshit. It’s going to be unbearable with or without the onesies. But at least we will have had a little while to enjoy it first.”

“Jerry,” Drew warned. “Don’t go!”

I went. Alone. I walked the aisles of Babies R Us and imagined the future. Pushing a stroller. Tucking a human the size of my forearm under an Elmo blanket. Comparing diaper disposal pails to determine which one held the stink in the best. I saw a talking potty and thought, “Wow, someday we’ll need one of those.” From across our condo, a robotic voice would say something like, “Nice poopin’, dude!” and a tiny person who lived with us would fill up with pride. I didn’t buy anything, but I got exactly what I needed out of the experience.

On the way out of the store, my cell phone buzzed. It was an email from a friend of ours, someone we’d agreed not to share our news with just yet. “OMG!” she wrote. “drew told me!!! so excited for you both xoxoxoxoxo!!!!!”

Maybe he was willing to relax just a little.

There’s no day all year when it’s harder to go to work than the first Monday in January. I’m so used to having two weeks off for Christmas that I always resent a return to the grind after so much freedom. This year, it should have been harder than ever, knowing how much work must have backed up on my desk while I was away, how fast I’d need to resume the manic pace of producing a manically paced TV show. And yet, I didn’t mind a bit.

I was still in baby bliss. Yes, I’d no doubt be walking into a shit storm, but so what? I was doing it all for my baby. My boss could keep me there all night, and it wouldn’t phase me. I was looking much farther into the future, to September 1.

I made it about an hour before I started telling people my news.

No one was more ecstatic than my boss. He never struck me as a hugger before then, but he practically leapt across his desk to embrace me.

“I want to go to all the medical appointments,” I told him. “I’m going to miss a bit of work, but I’ll stay late to make up for it, or I’ll come in early, or you can dock my pay, or . . .”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “This is bigger than work. It’s your family.”

“Great,” I said. “My first ultrasound is tomorrow morning. I’ll be in at eleven.”

I’d only planned to tell a couple of people, but I was on such a roll, I couldn’t stop. Once I told Marcello, I had to tell Steffen. Once Steffen knew, Travis was bound to catch wind of it, so I might as well tell him.

It felt like I was coming out all over again, except this time I wasn’t worried how people would react. Just about the only person I didn’t tell was Bernie. I was still bitter about our Prop 8 spat. He voted against my happiness, so why should he get to share in it? Midday, an email popped up in my inbox. “So I never found out,” he wrote. “Are you starting the new year with a successful pregnancy?” Instead of replying, I hit “delete.”

At three in the afternoon, I was in a meeting with a few segment producers in my office. A “private” call came in on my cell phone. I’d been expecting the doctor’s office to confirm our ultrasound in the morning, and here they were, right on schedule. I figured it would be quick, so I answered it. “Just a sec, guys,” I said.

“Gerald, hi it’s Aida from Dr. S’s office. I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

I did my best to keep smiling, but already I felt queasy. Bad news? Shit. This was it. Drew was right. None of the people in my office knew the good news yet. A second ago, good news was all there was. Why did I have to pick up the call? “I need to take this. Can we finish later?”

The second they were gone and the door was closed, I sat back in my chair and sighed. “How bad is it?”

“Tiffany’s been bleeding and cramping a lot,” she said. “She just spoke to Dr. S. He told her that if she soaks through a whole pad, she needs to go right to the emergency room because that means she’s having a miscarriage.”

Ugh. She was being so casual yet so graphic. It was the worst sentence I’d ever heard.

“Are we still having our ultrasound tomorrow?”

“If Tiffany makes it through the night, then yes.”

And just that quickly, I had a new worst sentence I’d ever heard. “If Tiffany makes it through the night, then yes.” I couldn’t bear to think about the flip side of that statement, the one that resulted in “then no.”

“I knew it!” Drew shouted.

Because I was the one who got the call, I had to break the news to Drew. I repeated what the nurse said, then I tried my best to cheer him up.

“It might be nothing. Lots of women bleed and cramp when they’re pregnant.” I wasn’t sure I believed it myself as I said it, so I quickly did a Google search at my desk. Yes, indeed, lots of women bled and cramped when they were pregnant. Whew!

“This is why you don’t tell people. We shouldn’t have said anything!”

“I’m really scared, Drew.”

“I knew it!” Drew repeated.

“Are you going to tell Susie what’s going on?”

“No!” Drew shot back. “We’re not telling anyone. Let’s see what happens tomorrow.” Now we had two levels of secrecy—people who didn’t know we were pregnant and people who didn’t know we might be losing the baby.

There was a knock on my door. I had been secluded in my office for ten minutes, an eternity. A coworker poked her head in. “Everything okay, Jerry?”

“Yeah,” I said, forcing a smile. “Just fine.”

Work made the day go by faster than it had any right to. I spent every moment in fear of feeling my cell phone vibrate again. That night, I turned my ringer on and left my phone at my bedside, just in case an urgent call or text came while I was asleep. It was a relief when the sound that woke me up was my alarm clock the next morning.

As Drew and I arrived at Westside Fertility, I half expected the receptionist to stare at us sadly, shaking her head and saying, “Sorry, I was about to call you.” Instead, we were greeted like we always were and told to have a seat until Tiffany arrived. A few minutes later, she did. She looked miserable and sick, like she hadn’t slept all night. I’d never felt so relieved.

A few minutes later, Tiffany was lying on an exam bed, and Drew and I were pelting Dr. S with questions.

“How common is this?”

“Is it going to go away?”

“Is our baby okay?”

Dr. S had Tiffany lift up her shirt, exposing her belly. For the first time, I realized she had her navel pierced. I wasn’t sure I should know that. I made a halfhearted effort to look away, but Tiffany just rolled her eyes and groaned. “Oh, please . . .”

Dr. S rubbed a wand over Tiffany’s midriff, and a big gray blob appeared on a monitor across from her. Inside the gray blob was another blob, a white one. I had no idea which of these blobs, if either, represented our baby. Was it some composite of both blobs, or was it just a tiny speck amid all the noise, still too small to be distinguishable?

Drew held my hand as we waited silently for Dr. S to speak, but for a long time, he said nothing. He repositioned the wand over and over, shook his head repeatedly, sighed more than once, and typed a few times on a dull tan keyboard.

“Well, guys,” he said finally, “there’s a lot of blood in there.”

Drew squeezed my hand harder. I could feel his bones pressing against mine, as if there were no skin between us, just two skeletons clinging as tightly as they could.

“I have no idea what we’re looking at,” I confessed.

Dr. S used a pen to point at the monitor. He waved it around the gray blob, which took up about 80 percent of the screen. “All of this is blood,” he said.

“That’s a lot of blood,” I replied.

Dr. S nodded. “It’s a lot of blood. That’s not good. We implanted three embryos, right?”

“Yeah.”

“There’s a chance Tiffany is just rejecting the third embryo, after which the blood will clear out. I can’t tell for sure.”

“So that could happen, and the other embryo could still survive, right?”

“Yes, they could.”

They? I realized Dr. S was leaving out possibly the most crucial detail of all.

“You said the third embryo is being rejected. Does that mean there are two left?”

“Oh yes,” he said. “Didn’t you know? It’s twins.”

For the first time, Tiffany smiled. “You guys couldn’t tell?” she said, pointing at the screen. “Those are the embryos.” I never could have found them on my own, but now they seemed perfectly obvious. Two tiny peanut shapes, each inside its own little clearing amid the blobs. They had oversized heads, translucent skin, and barely discernible limbs, but they were unmistakably fetal, just like out of a health class textbook.

I gasped, turning to Drew. I was ready to throw my arms around him, but he was shaking his head. “We only got a 142. We thought that meant a singleton.”

“Oh no, it’s definitely twins,” Dr. S said. “Count them!”

“We’re having twins!” I beamed. I squeezed Drew’s hand again, but at the same time, I felt him let go. He looked as if he might pass out.

“Want to hear their heartbeats? “ Dr. S asked.

He moved his wand some more, and soon we heard the rapid throbbing of each baby’s heart, one at a time. I never expected to experience so much from a first ultrasound. Dr. S explained that because they were conceived in vitro, these fetuses were six weeks old already. I still couldn’t believe there were two of them. Two babies—my kids. I felt an instant attachment. Even though they lacked faces, I fell in love.

I was also paralyzed with fear.

“Are they going to make it?”

“I really don’t know, guys.” Dr. S showed us how the sacs containing the fetuses were barely making contact with the uterine wall. “The blood is keeping them from fully attaching.”

“Is there anything we can do?”

He shook his head. “Just wait.”

I felt impotent. I’d been quietly gloating about not having to deal with morning sickness and the other inconveniences of pregnancy, but now I would have done anything for the comfort of knowing my babies were inside me, that their fate was in my hands.

“What’s going to happen? I know you can’t predict, but . . .”

I was hoping he’d say something to cheer us up, but if there was a silver lining, it was too cloudy right now to see it. “If we’re lucky,” Dr. S said, “one will survive.”

Just to be safe, he ordered Tiffany to go on immediate bed rest. He set up another ultrasound for the following Tuesday because these babies would need to be monitored closely. “Call my office immediately if you have any more bleeding or cramping,” he instructed.

He tore off his surgical gloves and switched off the monitor. “Here,” he said, tearing a crinkled paper out of the machine. He handed it to me, a still image of our two fetuses, the thin wall of their egg sacs separating them from a sea of blood.

“I know it’s hard to say,” I started, “but what are the odds of them making it for the next nine months?”

“I’d say the chances of Tiffany carrying either one to term are about fifty-fifty.”