And useless. Another year of months passed, in rage and depression, so much blood through the cervix, so many filaments of hope gone forever. Her brother Bobby’s third child, a boy, was born. Her father had a mild stroke and retired from the Lawrenceville school, shortly after which he and Johanna’s mother sold their house and moved out to live nearer their favorite child and his growing brood.
It was with these first （official） steps of her infertility journey that Johanna felt the strong embrace of her husband’s money for the very first time. In the midst of her great and ambient distress it was at least good to know that they could pay for whatever interventions Dr. Lorenz Pritchard felt like tossing their way, especially since they were both still young, and there were, as he was forever telling them, always new protocols and procedures coming down the pike. “Whatever we need,” Salo had told her, before they even got home from that first appointment. “Whatever it takes.”
What it ended up taking was the next four years of their lives, beginning with the vindication of Salo’s sperm, and moving on to the “blowing out” of Johanna’s fallopian tubes not once but three times （she could not be ignorant of the extreme unpleasantness of this procedure after the first time, sadly）， and four rounds of doctor-assisted insemination and six of hormone-assisted egg production, extraction, fertilization, implantation, and ultimate disintegration.
It was in Dr. Pritchard’s office, during the postmortem on this sixth go-round, that the dreaded S-word was first mentioned.
“I don’t want to do that,” said Johanna, between sobs.
“It is my recommendation,” said Dr. Pritchard. “At least that you explore the possibility. You two are not having a problem producing viable embryos, but they are not surviving the transfer. I’ve had many patients who have been able to work around this impasse by means of a surrogate. You might have to ask yourself, do I want to be pregnant or do I want my children to be born so that we can be a family?”
Salo, she noticed, was silent. Was he asking himself the question or was he wondering what his wife actually wanted?
“Oh, of course. The latter. I know, but it’s hard to give up.”
“You’ve done everything, Johanna.” At some point after year two, she had become “Johanna” and Salo “Salo.” “Above and beyond, I would say.”
“Me, too,” said Salo. “I mean…”
“One more,” Joanna said sharply. “Okay?” She blew her nose and attempted some humor. “One more, for the road. And then yes, I promise. I’ll do it.”
And so it was back to the injections and the extractions, and four perfect eggs landed in one of Dr. Pritchard’s petri dishes, the Cradle of Life, as she had privately taken to thinking of them. Those four perfect eggs, fertilized, began to bubble and brew their way into being, as had fully thirteen of their proto-siblings, and when the time came to transfer these precious final quintessences of Oppenheimers, Dr. Pritchard chose three at random to journey on to the dubious destination of their mother’s womb （her much maligned womb） and dispatched the fourth to a freezer in a special facility somewhere in Connecticut, there to wait for the surrogacy they all, even Johanna, expected to ensue.
One more, for the road.
Who knows why it worked, at last and so spectacularly. She’d had the good-news pregnancy test twice before, and once, even, brutally, a stoic little heartbeat, so loudly magnified in Dr. Pritchard’s ultrasound room that it hammered like something out of Edgar Allan Poe, but it was still gone only two weeks later （after she had told everyone, including, in floods of tears, her parents）。 So when she made her way down that long and terrifying corridor in Dr. Pritchard’s office at the six-week mark, and wiggled up onto that table of torture with its unforgiving crackle of sanitary paper, and pulled up her shirt for Loretta, the Irish sonographer, to goop her abdomen with gel, she had only the barest hold on her own imminent devastation.