Part One: Ten Years

For a decade, Kevin and I had held onto one single hope: that somewhere ahead of us there was a day when two small voices would call us Mom and Dad.

Ten years is not a figure you arrive at all at once.

It assembles itself out of months, and the months assemble themselves out of a particular kind of waiting that has a shape to it, and after a while you stop counting in years at all and start counting in cycles.

We were twenty-nine and thirty-one when we started.

We were thirty-nine and forty-one when I was wheeled into that operating room.

And in between, we had a house with a room in it that we did not use for anything.

Not a nursery.

We never called it that, not once, in all those years, because naming it would have been a kind of claim and we had learned very early on not to make claims.

It was the back bedroom.

It had a bed in it that nobody slept in, and a stack of flat-packed shelving that Kevin never built, and a window that got the morning light, and for about eight of those ten years neither of us said a single word about it to the other one.

That is a thing nobody tells you about a long stretch of trying.

It is not loud.

There is no steady weeping in it.

What there is instead is a slow and careful editing of your own conversation, so that the two of you can go through a whole evening side by side without either of you stepping on the one subject that is sitting in the middle of the room with its hands folded.

Friends had children.

Then those children had birthdays, and the birthdays had numbers on them that told us exactly how long we had been at this.

Kevin’s cousin had two.