Page 77 of Night Songs

When it was time for the procedure, I felt clean and pure, the space inside me as sterile as the operating room where they put me under.

The surgery was successful.

But three months later, there was still no baby.

We tried everything my mother’s money could buy—new fertility treatments with sharp-angled acronyms like ART, IVF, FSH. Trips to Spain and Thailand to sample their local fertility offerings. But they simply didn’t work.

I remember grieving in a strange void where only I floated, mourning something that had never existed. It was like the grief I had for my parents—amorphous and unjustified, missing someone I did not know nor could picture in my mind with any emotional specificity. It was grief without an object—only a terrible wrongness reaching to every corner of my body.

Micah and I discussed adoption, and while I objectively loved the concept, I could feel myself resisting the notion. It wasn’t that I didn’t think I could love such a child. There was a surplus of love stored up in my body, ready to be directed at any sweet, vulnerable thing.

But some nights, when Micah was asleep and my thoughts were allowed to ferment undisturbed, I wondered if my infertility was something even more elemental, morefatedthan anything I’d done in this life. Perhaps I was not meant to have children. A girl with a creature inside of her who had no memory of her mother’s love and could not control the terrible thoughts that entered her mind. Who sometimes sensed a nameless, shapeless doom on the horizon, waiting for her.

Perhaps such a person was not meant to be a mother.

So I did what people have been doing for centuries to cope with pain—I buried myself in work. If I was unable to create life, at least I could createsomething else. With my mother’s money, I co-financed a documentary investigating a popular company’s corrupt business practices, and for the next few months, I lost myself in the greed of strangers.

I drifted to another part of the world I’d built with Micah, far enough away that he couldn’t touch me, but close enough that he knew I was still there.

I was working on something important, so he couldn’t directly fault it. Instead, he matched my commitment, devoting himself even more obsessively to his own work, spending early mornings and late nights in the hot shop, coming home streaked with ash. We were two dedicated people, working side by side on things we loved, and wasn’t there something inherently romantic about that? Even if we’d stopped being romantic with one another? I didn’t care if it was delusional; I wanted delusion. It was comfortable. I clung to it.

In February, Hess flew to Arizona to escape the winter, and I put on a happy face. She wanted to go hiking, so we drove two hours north to a trailhead in a valley of red rock formations jutting up from the earth. I had heard of this place from friends who talked of it being an “energy vortex,” but Micah and I had never taken the trip.

This was life sucked of moisture, reduced to its vibrant, chalky essence.

And yet for all of its dryness, there was something soft about the air, like an element other than water moved through it, caressing my skin as Hess and I scrambled up the rocky incline.

At the top of the hike, we sat on a large flat rock and looked out over the valley between the two pillars of the cathedral formation. We were the only ones there, and the silence had the same softness as the air, like silk against my eardrums.

I tried to feel for the energy that supposedly buzzed straight from the earth’s core up into this rock. Maybe that was the strange softness—the energy releasing and becoming like tiny, smooth particles in the air.

“What’s going on, Rhea?”

I tensed, suddenly feeling cornered. It was just me and her up here, with miles of scorching, bone-dry desert spreading out in every direction.

“What do you mean? Everything’s good,” I said casually, careful not to sound too defensive. Hess knew I’d had an operation to boost my fertility, but I’d downplayed the situation, and she didn’t know how long we’d been trying.

She put her hand on mine. “I know you, honey. You can tell me.”

I felt a crack form, and something warm and salty leaked into my chest. I was so careful about what I said to Micah for fear that I’d express a toxic thought. Even around friends, when they could stand listening to me talk about fertility, I didn’t dare tell them how I was really feeling. Giving air to the thoughts and feelings, I believed, would make them even more poisonous.

But it had been so long since I’d let it all out, and I felt safe with Hess, like maybe it wouldn’t count if I told just her. It’d be like talking to myself.

I told her I had tried to make my body into a pure, beautiful place. Somewhere untainted where someone else might want to live.

But it hadn’t worked.

And I didn’t think it was just bad luck.

The universe knew something I didn’t, that there was something inherently wrong with me, and I wasn’t supposed to have a baby.

She studied me suspiciously. “What would make you think that? That the universe doesn’t want you to have a baby?”

“How else am I supposed to interpret things? It’s clearly not in the cards for me.”

“That’s it?” she asked, and I was a little confused.

“Um… yes? What else?”