Page 22 of Counting Backwards

“Jessa, there’s nothing wrong with either of us except for your glaring lack of patience or, I don’t know, your intense and debilitating fear of your own inadequacies.”

“Wow, Vance. You’re so opposed to a urology visit that you’d prefer attacking me? Why did you even go to the trouble of making this appointment today if you were just going to be a jerk about the whole thing?”

He stopped walking and turned toward me, dislodging my hand from where it’d been wrapped around his arm.

“Jessa, I made the appointment because I’m tired of you freaking out—not because I thought anything physical needed attention. I’m just fed up with your constant fixation, and maybe I was also trying to do something to help you. Like if a doctor told you that you’re fine, you’d give it a rest and calm the fuck down. But now this doctor has gone and opened a whole can of worms, and this time the focus is on me. So, what? Now you want me to go down to that office, whack off into a cup? What if I bump into someone I know there? What am I supposed to say?”

“If you bump into someone?That’swhat you care about? What people will think? Really, Vance?” The worst part was that I wasn’t even surprised. It always came back to appearances with him. He must have heard the defeat in my voice because he reached out for my hand and lowered his volume again.

“No, all I’m saying is I just don’t see why we’re going for test after test, putting ourselves through the wringer like this. This is supposed to be a fun and exciting time for us. It’s only been six months, Jessa!”

“Right... ,” I started. “And nothing we’re doing on our own is working.” I felt my eyes fill with water. Vance saw it too, and his voice softened.

“Look,” he said, “I want you to be happy. I know how important this is to you. I thought I could suck it up and jump on the medical intervention bandwagon—even though six months is really no time at all.” He looked back toward the door of the doctor’s office. “But, Jess, you’re sucking all the joy out of this process, making it so clinical. Then each month you get upset that wefailed. Talking about failure over and over makes me feel like such a loser.”

“I never said—”

“You can’t even get a diagnosis of infertility until you’ve been trying for a year,” he interrupted. “Why can’t we just keep living our lives, and if you get pregnant, great, and if not, maybe one day we find another way to build a family?”

Was he trying to goad me? After all the years I’d waited to have my own family again. To hear an echo of my mother in a baby’s laughter or look into a child’s face and see the same shade of hazel I remembered from my father’s eyes. I longed for the joy of having a shared history with a child, teaching them about my parents and my parents’ parents and grandparents. What an amazing experience it must be to forge those common connections with mini versions of ourselves. He knew how important it was to me to try for that.

“You know I want kids,” he said. “But...” He trailed off as he looked away, his gaze moving toward the traffic light at the corner, where a few pedestrians huddled around a coffee cart.

As I waited for him to find the words, I wondered how we could possibly be so out of sync with each other. I had only a few real goals in my life, but they meant everything to me. Making partner clearly hadn’t panned out. Was Vance going to take this away from me now too—the family I’d been pining for ever since my teens?

Finally, he looked back at me. “I feel like it’s killing everything else between us. Why am I not enough for you, just on my own? Was I always just a means to an end?”

“A means to an end?” I repeated, my head rearing back in surprise.

Vance’s phone chimed from his pocket. He didn’t reach for it, but he glanced at his watch with a harried expression.

“Look, I have to get back for a meeting. The Plantico deal is turning into a disaster, and I have to prep for Florida in the morning. Let’s table this.” He stepped toward the subway entrance.

“No.” I grabbed his arm. My voice sounded desperate even to my own ears. I had forgotten that he was leaving for Tampa in the morning.

He was right. The attempted baby-making had damaged other parts of our relationship, all the little things that had been good before. I wondered for a split second if he was right about the other part too—that he was simply the man I’d chosen to be the father of my children, that my love for him wasn’t real. Had I just been auditioning men to play a role in the manifestation of some vision I’d concocted as a child? But no, that was ridiculous. I loved so much about Vance, and he should know that.

“Please, you can’t just say something like that and then leave.”

He glanced in the direction of the subway before answering.

“I just hate that this conception thing is taking over our whole marriage, okay? We don’t talk about anything else anymore. I missus.”

“But this is all about us. Us, and our next stage as a family.” Even as I argued, I knew that at least some of what he was saying was true. I had retreated from him recently.

He looked back at me for a long moment, then just sighed.

“I don’t know, Jess. Things are changing between us. You used to come to me for help, but lately it’s like you’re going rogue on one thing after another. I tell you to dial it back at work, and you ignore me. I tell you to stop with the pregnancy tests, so you go behindmy back. This isn’t who we are. I don’t understand why you’re not listening to me anymore, why you...” He trailed off for a moment. “I guess I just miss being your partner.”

Partners. Was that ever what we’d been? I saw us more as president and vice president—a team, for sure, but not the same. I’d always appreciated Vance’s confidence and ability to take the lead on major decisions, shouldering that burden of being in charge. Maybe he just didn’t like his VP stepping out of line, and I bristled at the thought. But then I reminded myself how well our dynamic had once worked. I could be doing better too.

He sighed again as he studied my face a moment longer. “I really have to go,” he said. He leaned down to give me a perfunctory kiss on the cheek. Then he turned toward the subway, leaving me to stare at his back as he descended into the underworld.

***

The next morning as I drove south on the Jersey Turnpike, I was still thinking about our conversation. After so many years of being in sync and happy, I was allowing my obsession with having a baby to damage everything that had been good between us. I wondered if I was putting even more distance between us by not telling Vance what Gram had shared with me about her childhood. But there was no reason he needed to know. Gram had been visibly distressed when she told me about how her family had to change their last name and move to a new town all because her father had risked his reputation to help somebody. All these decades later, it was still hard for her to confront what her family had been through in the name of standing up for what was right.

I took great pride in coming from people with such strong principles. But I could already hear Vance in my head, arguing that Grandpa Harry should have done things differently, that he could’ve achieved the same results without losing everything he’dworked for. Even if that wasn’t true, Vance was always so sure he knew better than everyone else. I didn’t want to give him the opportunity to find fault with Grandpa Harry or his actions. Didn’t everyone have secrets they never shared with a spouse anyway, hidden gems they wanted to keep for themselves? I was sure I’d read something like that in one of those Esther Perel books on relationships. This new tidbit about my history felt like something Gram had gifted to me, a fragile but important point of pride that I could savor on my own without having to open myself up to Vance’s negativity.