“So my PGT results are garbage. Only one embryo is normal, maybe,” Brook says. She’s been talking about her week. Which sounds like the week from hell. When she described her job as a public defender as “just like living in Dante’s Inferno,” I asked her why she did it. She just looked at me and said, “I’m the best shot they have. If I don’t help them, who will?”
“What do you mean the embryo is normal, maybe?” I ask.
“PGT is a genetic test. All the embryos were no-gos except one, which was mosaic. Basically, in laymen’s terms, that means ‘maybe it’s normal, maybe it’s not.’ Which as a lawyer, I find really offensive.”
“I’m not doing PGT,” says Hannah. She shrugs at me. “Call me old-fashioned.”
“Or an Earth Mother,” Brook says. She waves the thought aside. “Anyway. I’m stressed. Worried. And slammed at work.” She looks at us all. “Damn, I want a cigarette. Ugh, I hate that I want a cigarette. I’m going to quit. Starting now.”
“Try hypnotism, I heard that helps,” Hannah says.
“Will you do the transfer?” Carly asks.
“I don’t know, we might try another retrieval first,” Brook says. Then she blows out a long breath and rubs her hands through her bright copper hair. “You know, why can’t my husband have had superman sperm? I told him all that biking would crush his nads and kill his sperm. But did he listen? No. And all those hours in the hot tub. It fried them. And who wears tighty-whities? They should call them the sperminators, cause that’s what they do, they eliminate sperm. I swear, it’s hopeless. If I had neon lights pointing to my eggs his little buggers would swim the other way. Enough about me, let’s talk about you.”
Everyone turns and looks at me.
“Me?” I ask in surprise.
“Sharing is caring,” Brook says.
Carly crosses her legs and then says, “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
I shake my head. “No. That’s alright. I’m…I have stage four endo, tubal factor, and I’m single, so I’m using a donor.” I look at the understanding expressions on the faces of the women around me and decide that I don’t need to hold back, “I’ve been waiting years for Mr. Right to help me make a family, and on New Year’s I decided Mr. Right isn’t coming and I’m done waiting, I’m moving on. I want a baby, a family. So here I am.” I hold out my hands, encompassing me, sitting in the basement of Clive’s Comics at the fertility support group.
“I’m definitely bringing you honey. And a rose quartz pendant,” Hannah says.
Brook rolls her eyes at Hannah, and Carly says, “Good for you. What sort of donor did you choose? Tall to match your height? Good job? What sort of information do they give you again?”
A light blush covers my cheeks as I think about Josh in “The Production Room.”
“Well, um, I didn’t use an anonymous donor. I asked my brother’s best friend.” I watch as all their expressions shift from surprise to interest.
“Did you blackmail him?” asks Brook.
“What? No!” I say. “Why would you think that?”
Brook shrugs. “If you aren’t blackmailing him then is he blackmailing you?”
“What?”
“Oh my gosh, Brook, seriously? He’s obviously also her best friend or in love with her. Clearly,” Hannah says.
“No.” I shake my head. “Not really. We were never close.”
“Huh,” Hannah says.
Brook studies me with a frown.
Then Carly says, “He has a fertility fetish.”
“Yes. That’s it!” Brook says.
“What’s a fertility fetish?” I ask.
Carly nibbles on her pink glossy lips and doesn’t answer, so Brook says, “A fertility fetish is what you call those guys who are constantly donating sperm to the sperm banks. They get off on the idea of having, like, three hundred kids. Or those guys who have twenty kids by six different women. Or like that fertility doctor who switched his sperm for the husband’s sperm in all his patients and had like a thousand kids.”
“You’re kidding—”
“That’s a fertility fetish,” she says.
“He doesn’t have that,” I say.
Brook holds out her hands as if to say then what?
“He’s just a nice guy,” I try to explain. “I’ve known him almost my whole life, he knows my family, and he’s a nice guy. He just wanted to help.” Something in my expression must give away the fact that there’s something inside me that doesn’t quite believe this explanation. Josh never did say why he’d changed his mind. Why did he?