That’s when we became a couple.
I lean against the tree in the Diamonds’ old backyard. Cheryl and I had been good for so long. We had a brief breakup in college. That was more my doing than hers. Everyone told us that we were too young to settle down and never experiment with anyone else. We gave it a try, but for me no one else measured up. We got engaged our senior year of college, but we promised ourselves no marriage until Cheryl finished med school. We stuck to that plan. Then we got married and she got the residency of her dreams and then, following on this smooth, predictable, happy streak, we decided to have kids.
This is where things went wrong for us.
Cheryl — or should I say we? — couldn’t get pregnant.
If you’ve had fertility issues, you know the stress and strain. Cheryl and I both wanted kids. Badly. It had been a given. We wanted four. That was our plan. We had agreed to that. But we tried for months and months and nothing happened. When you want to get pregnant, it seems as though everyone else in the world — the worst people, the most undeserving people, the people who don’t even want children — are all getting pregnant. Everyone is getting pregnant but you.
We visited a specialist who ran tests and more tests and discovered the culprit was me. Yes, we all know that it’s “no one’s fault,” that you’re in this together, that it doesn’t make you less of a man yada yada yada, but discovering that my sperm count was too low to have children messed with my head in an awful way. I know better now, I guess. I know about toxic masculinity and all that, but when you grow up the way I did, in a place like this, a man has certain jobs and responsibilities and if he can’t even get his own wife pregnant, well, what kind of man is that?
I felt shame. Dumb, I know. But your feelings don’t know from dumb.
Cheryl and I tried and failed at IVF three times. The strain between us grew. Every conversation was about having a baby or worse, when we tried not to let it consume us — we’d been told that sometimes if you just relax, it magically happens — it became the figurative elephant not only in the room but in the bed. That elephant never left us.
Cheryl was great about it.
Or so I thought.
She never blamed me, but being an idiot with self-esteem issues, I let my imagination run wild. She is looking at me differently, I thought. She is looking at me and finding me wanting. She is looking at other men — virile, fertile men — and wondering how she ended up with such a dud.
It almost destroyed us.
Then we got some good news. One of my dad’s old Revere buddies was a general practitioner in New Hampshire. Dr. Schenker told me that he’d had the same issue and got cured with varicocele surgery. I don’t want to go into the details and you don’t want me to, but in short, you remove swollen veins inside the scrotum. Long story short: It worked. Suddenly my sperm count soared past normal.
Four months later, Cheryl was pregnant with Matthew.
It was all good again.
Except it wasn’t.
The years of infertility hell had played havoc with us and our relationship, but once Matthew was born, I thought that it would be behind us. And it was. Until I found out that while saying all the right things to me, Cheryl had gone behind my back and visited another fertility clinic to look into donor sperm. She hadn’t gone through with it. That’s what she kept reminding me. She explained it so clearly — she had been desperate not just to have a baby but to put us both out of this purgatory and so for a moment, a brief stupid moment, she considered getting donor sperm, something she knew that I would never agree to, and not telling me.
It was, she admitted, an awful thing to even consider. She apologized profusely. But I didn’t accept the apology. Not at first anyway. I was hurt. Her actions played into all my stupid insecurities and so then I lashed out. She had broken my trust — and I compounded the issue by handling it badly.
Through the back window of my family home, I see movement. I move behind a shrub, and when I see my aunt Sophie enter and sit down alone at the kitchen table, my heart bursts. She wears a blue formless housedress. Her back is hunched. Her hair is in bobby pins but some wisps have escaped and dangle in her face. A potpourri of emotions course through me. Aunt Sophie. My wondrous, generous, kind, fierce aunt who raised me from the time my mom died of cancer. She looks weary, spent, old before her time. Life had sucked away that vitality. Or had it been my father’s illness?
Or me?
Aunt Sophie always believed in me. Others caved. But never, ever Sophie.
I am not sure how to handle this, but I find myself tentatively approaching the back window. She has the radio on. Sophie always loved playing music in the kitchen. Classic rock. Of course, it might not be a radio anymore. It might be an Alexa or some other kind of speaker device. I can hear Pat Benatar belt out that we are young, heartache to heartache. Sophie had loved Pat Benatar and Stevie Nicks and Chrissie Hynde and Joan Jett. I creep up the back porch steps and without thinking about it, I lightly rap my knuckles on the window.
Sophie looks up and sees me.
I expect her to be startled or confused or — at the very least — thrown off by my sudden appearance. I expect some kind of understandable hesitancy, even for a moment or two, but with Aunt Sophie, there is none of that. She has always meant unconditional and ferocious love, and that’s all I’m seeing here. She jumps up and beelines straight for the back door. Her face is already a sun shower — bright smile, wet tears on her cheeks. She flings open the door, looks left and right in a protective way that tweaks my heart, and says, “Get in here.”
I listen. Of course. I flash back to the days my dad would come home late from a night shift and wonder where I was, and Aunt Sophie would make up an excuse and sneak me in through this back door so he wouldn’t know. I step inside and close the door. She hugs me. She feels smaller now, frailer. I’m afraid at first to squeeze too tight, but she’ll have none of that.
I want to hold back, stay upright and focused, to not give in to the emotion of the moment, but I don’t stand a chance. Not with Aunt Sophie. Not with an Aunt Sophie hug. I feel my knees buckle and maybe I let out a small cry, but this frail woman of towering strength holds me up.
“It’s going to be okay,” she tells me.
And I believe her.
Chapter 25
Briggs Correctional Officer Ted Weston told Max and Sarah his story once, twice, thrice. Max and Sarah stayed quiet for most of it. Max nodded encouragingly. Sarah stood leaning against a corner of the prison office they were using as an interrogation room, arms folded. When Ted finished his tale for a third time, proudly winding down with how he spotted the warden and the prisoner getting into the warden’s car, Max kept nodding and then he turned to Sarah and said, “I like that last part best. Don’t you, Sarah?”
“The part about spotting the warden’s car, Max?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, me too.”
Max started plucking his lip with his index finger and thumb. He did this to stop himself from biting his nails. “Do you want to know why Sarah and I like that part best, Ted? I can call you Ted, right?”
Ted Weston’s smile was uneasy. “Sure.”
“Thanks, Ted. So do you want to know why?”
Weston gave a half-hearted shrug. “Sure, I guess.”
“Because it’s true. I mean it. That part of the story — the way you looked out the window and spotted the car and did kind of a ‘whoa hold up a moment’ thing — when you tell that story, your face beams with honesty.”
“It really does,” Sarah added.
“Like you’re using a high-end moisturizer. The rest of the time — like when you’re telling us about how you took poor sick David Burroughs to the infirmary late at night—”