The Choices We Make. Karma Brown

her cigarette to mine. “And for what it’s worth, there’s no one I’d rather be a mess with.”

      “Me neither.”

      We smoked that cigarette, and then Hannah went back to work, leaving me to get the smoke out the office with air fresheners and the big fan we kept in the basement. With the fan blowing full blast and a freesia-scented candle burning, I put the cigarette package back in my underwear drawer, headed to our bathroom with the plate of cookies and took the rest of the boring beige polish off my toenails.

8

      HANNAH

      October

      “Are you seriously making popcorn?” Ben opened the fridge, pulling out a beer and an apple. He rubbed the apple on his jeans—his version of giving it a good wash—and, holding the glossy red fruit between his teeth, opened the beer with a quick twist. He held up the beer bottle with a questioning look, and I shook my head.

      “No, thanks. I’m in the mood for something stronger tonight. And you love popcorn.” I turned the handle on the Whirley Pop popcorn maker, which was heating up on the stove. It had been a gift from my mom two Christmases ago, a “healthy snack” alternative to help me lose some weight. I had been a rower all through college and still wasn’t used to my softer body, though I didn’t like to admit that. Apparently one of Mom’s bridge friends had a daughter who had a terrible time getting pregnant, until she took up running and lost twenty pounds, then poof, twins. My mom was quite certain if I got thin—like my sister Claire was, like Mom had been her whole life—I’d finally get pregnant. While I had wanted to tell her to take the Whirley Pop and shove it, I thanked her for the gift and then promptly hid it at the back of a kitchen cabinet behind a stack of old bakeware.

      Tonight was the first time I’d used the Whirley Pop, and only because we had run out of microwave popcorn.

      “Wrong. I love melted butter,” Ben said. “Popcorn is just a vehicle for the butter.”

      I rolled my eyes and continued turning the handle, hearing the first kernel pop. “I want to make tonight fun, or at least tolerable, and popcorn is fun. We can pretend it’s movie night...just without the movie.”

      “Hannah, I love you. But popcorn isn’t exactly ‘fun,’ and looking through classifieds is nothing like movie night.” Ben took another bite of his apple, swishing it down with a sip of beer. I scowled, both at his attitude about what I had planned for our night and the whole beer and apple thing. While most people enjoyed salted peanuts or chips with a beer, Ben preferred fruit. He could eat whatever he wanted, blessed with his mom’s height and his dad’s metabolism, and that he chose an apple over nachos felt a little as if he was rubbing it in.

      “I didn’t say it was like movie night. I said I wanted to make it fun...like movie night.” Ben just shrugged, and with a sigh I dumped the hot popcorn in a large bowl. “Can you hit Start on the microwave? Butter’s ready to go.”

      “So how does this work?” Ben asked, taking a handful of popcorn and looking at the screen. I had already opened the site, having found it during my research mission earlier in the day.

      “I think it’s like any ad site, you search and see what pops up.” I typed a couple of words in the search box and hit Enter. I was playing naive, because I didn’t want Ben to know I’d already done a pretty thorough search. I needed to know what to expect ahead of time, because Ben wasn’t exactly on board with the idea of surrogacy.

      Two pages of hits came up, and, taking my own handful of popcorn, I scanned the first page.

      “Okay, this one looks good. ‘In search of a loving couple to take this incredible journey with,’” I read out loud.

      Ben snorted. “Nope. That one sounds too high maintenance.”

      “Stop it. Just humor me, okay?”

      He took another handful of popcorn and leaned over to kiss me on the cheek. “Fine,” he said, munching on the kernels. “Tell me more about this incredible-journey woman.”

      “Thank you.” I shifted the laptop so Ben could see the screen better. “Thirty years old, mom of three. Good. We know her equipment works. Married—to the same man—for the past eight years, and she’s asking...whoa. Holy shit.” I pointed to the dollar amount in the ad, leaving a buttery fingerprint on the screen.

      Ben leaned in and squinted. He was supposed to be wearing his reading glasses, which he’d finally had to admit he needed, but he was having a hard time accepting that at thirty-five he was aging...or at least his eyes were. “Forty thousand dollars?”

      “That seems a bit high. Thought it was around thirty thousand? Maybe because she’s already had a successful surrogate pregnancy?”

      “Go to the next one,” Ben said, taking a swill of his beer.

      I sipped my gin and tonic and clicked on the next ad.

      “So this one was a gestational surrogate before—that’s when she carries the couple’s embryo,” I explained.

      “I know what a gestational surrogate is,” Ben said, getting up to grab another beer and a handful of grapes. “Need anything?”

      I shook my head, reading on. “She didn’t like the medications when she did the gestational gig—can’t say I blame her,” I said, looking over at Ben. He nodded, settling back on the couch. We had briefly discussed trying to find an egg donor and maybe giving that a try using my own uterus. But the thought of paying for someone else’s eggs, then turning them into embryos, then trusting my uterus to let them grow... It left me weak with anxiety and despair.

      I couldn’t explain how, but I knew—I knew, deep inside—that my body would never carry a baby to term. And I couldn’t handle one more negative pregnancy test or chemical pregnancy. Sure, we could also get donor eggs, fertilize them with Ben’s sperm to make embryos and then find a gestational surrogate, but the cost to do that would be astronomical. And we’d already spent thousands of dollars to get to this point—surfing for surrogates on date night.

      “So she’s only willing to be a traditional surrogate, which is perfect for us.” Ben nodded again, and I smiled at him before looking back at the screen. I was nervous, so much more invested in this than I cared to admit.

      “Married, healthy, two kids, good BMI, no family disease, had a recent psychiatric evaluation...” At that Ben raised his eyebrows but didn’t comment. “Huh. Okay. Says she would prefer a Christian, traditional couple, and wants a relationship after the birth.” I chewed a stray cuticle, trying to decide how I felt about that. The Christian thing didn’t worry me, even though Ben and I were not religious, but a relationship after the baby was born?

      “I guess that’s not so different from adoption,” Ben said, shrugging. “What do you think about that?” I knew he wasn’t keen on doing a surrogacy, but I loved him for appeasing my need to look at all the options.

      “Let’s go to the next one,” I said, swallowing the lump in my throat. I was weeks off the fertility medications now, so I couldn’t blame the tears that sprang to my eyes on that anymore. What I wished I could say was that I loathed every second of this, no matter what I had said about the popcorn and fun. I wanted to have my own baby, not pay someone else to have one for us.

      I hated that I’d dragged Ben into this sad mess, where we were spending our Saturday night reading surrogate classified ads and pretending it was something we wanted to do. I was worried that I couldn’t make myself talk to Ben about how much adoption scared me. How I preferred the idea of surrogacy because the baby would at least be genetically linked to one of us. But most of all, and the thing I hadn’t said aloud to anyone, ever?

      I was deeply ashamed to be an infertile woman. I despised my body for failing me, failing Ben and our marriage, on the most basic of things.

      Pushing that shame and sadness down, I read the next few ads