Sing You Home

ZOE

Everyone wants to know what the sex is like.

It’s different from being with a man, for all the obvious reasons, and many more that you’d never imagine. For one thing, it’s more emotional, and there’s less to prove. There are moments that are soft and tender, and others that are raw and intense-but it’s not as if there’s a guy to play the dominant role and a girl to play the passive one. We take turns being protected, and being the protector.

Sex with a woman is what you wish it was with a man but it rarely seems to be: all about the journey, and not the destination. It’s foreplay forever. It is the freedom to not have to suck in your stomach or think about cellulite. It is being able to say, that feels good and, more important, that doesn’t. I will admit that, at first, it was strange to curl up in Vanessa’s arms when I was used to resting against a muscular chest-but the strangeness wasn’t unpleasant. Just unfamiliar, as if I’d suddenly moved to the rainforest after living in the desert. It is another kind of beautiful.

Sometimes when a male colleague finds out I am with Vanessa, I can see it in his eyes-the expectation that every night is a girl-on-girl porn video. My current sex life is no more like that than my former one was like a love scene with Brad Pitt. I could sleep with a man again, but I don’t think I’d enjoy it, or feel as safe, or as daring. So if I am not filled by Vanessa-in the literal sense, anyway-I am fulfilled by her, which is way better.

The real difference between my marriage to Max and my relationship with Vanessa has nothing to do with the sex, actually. It’s about balance. When Max would come home, I’d wonder if he was in a good mood, or if he’d had a good day-and I would become the person he needed me to be accordingly. With Vanessa, I get to come home and just be me.

With Vanessa, I wake up and think: This is my best friend. This is the most brilliant person in my life. I wake up and think, I have so much more to lose.

Every day is a negotiation. Vanessa and I sit down over coffee, and, instead of her burying herself in the newspaper-like Max used to do-we discuss what needs to be done. Now that I’ve moved in with her, we have a household to run. There’s no man who’s expected to change the lightbulbs that burn out, or take out the trash. If something heavy has to be moved, we do it together. One of us has to mow the lawn, do the bills, clean out the gutters.

When I was married, Max would ask what was for dinner; I’d ask if he picked up the dry cleaning. Now, Vanessa and I map out our chores. If Vanessa needs to run an errand on the way home from school, she might pick up takeout. If I’m headed into town, I’ll take her car for the day, so that I can fill it up with gas. There is a lot of talking, a lot of give-and-take, when it’s just two women in a kitchen.

It’s funny-when I used to hear gay people using the term partner for their significant other, it seemed strange to me. Weren’t heterosexual spouses partners, too? But now I see that this isn’t the case, that there is a difference between someone you call your “other half” at a cocktail party and someone who truly completes you. Vanessa and I have to invent the dynamic between us, because it’s not the traditional husband-wife deal. The result is that we’re constantly making decisions together. We’re always asking each other for opinions. We assume nothing. And that way, we’re a lot less likely to get our feelings bruised.

You’d think that by now, a month into this relationship, some of the blush has worn off, that I might love Vanessa but not be quite as in love with her-but it’s not true. She’s still the one I can’t wait to talk to after something phenomenal happens at work. She’s the one I want to celebrate with when, three months after my hysterectomy, I’m still cancer-free. She’s the one I want to lounge around with on a lazy Sunday. For this reason, a lot of chores that we could divide and conquer on weekends take twice as long, because we do them together. Since we want to be together anyway, why not?

Which is why we find ourselves in the grocery store on a Saturday afternoon in March, reading the labels on salad dressing, when Max walks up to me. I hug him, a reflexive habit-and try not to look at his black suit and skinny tie. He looks like the kid from high school who thought if he dressed like the cool guys he’d become one by default, except it never really works that way.

I can feel Vanessa, burning behind me, waiting for an introduction. But the words get stuck in my throat.

Max holds out his hand; Vanessa shakes it. This is hell, I think. The man I used to love and the woman I cannot live without. I know what Vanessa wants, what she expects. For all the protesting I’ve done to convince her that I’m not leaving her anytime soon, here is the perfect proof. All I have to do is tell Max that, now, Vanessa and I are a couple.

So why can’t I?

Vanessa stares at me, and then her mouth tightens. “I’m just going to grab the produce,” she says, but as she moves away, I feel something snap inside my chest, like a string too tightly wound.

Max’s friend appears, a clone in a similar suit, with an Adam’s apple that bobs like the plumb bubble in a level. I mumble through a hello, but I am trying to see over his shoulder to the root vegetable bins, where Vanessa stands with her back to me. Then I hear Max inviting me to his church.

Fat chance, I think. I imagine showing up in front of that homophobic group and holding hands with Vanessa. We’d probably be tarred and feathered. I mumble a response and make a beeline for her.

“You’re pissed at me,” I say.

Vanessa is squeezing mangoes. “Not pissed. Just kind of disappointed.” She looks up. “Why didn’t you tell him?”

“Why did I have to? It’s nobody’s business but yours and mine. I just met Max’s friend, and he didn’t say, Oh, by the way, I’m straight.”

She sets down the fruit. “I am the last person in the world who wants to wave a banner or march in a Pride parade,” Vanessa says. “And I get that it’s not easy to tell someone you used to love that you love someone else. But when you don’t say it out loud, that’s when people fill in the silence with their own stupid assumptions. Don’t you believe that, if Max knew you were in a same-sex relationship, he might think twice before he pickets against gays again? Because all of a sudden it’s not some faceless queer in a crowd, Zoe, it’s someone he knows.” She looks away. “And me. When I see you working overtime to not call me your girlfriend, it makes me think that, no matter what you say to me, you’re lying. That you’re still looking for that escape hatch.”

“That’s not why I-”

“Then why not? Are you ashamed of me?” Vanessa asks. “Or are you ashamed of yourself?”

I am standing in front of the cartons of strawberries. I once had a client who, before she was in hospice with ovarian cancer, had been a botanist. She couldn’t eat solid food anymore but told me she missed strawberries the most. They were the only fruit in the world with seeds on the outside, and because of this, they weren’t even really berries. They were part of the rose family, not that you could tell by looking.

“Meet me outside,” I say to Vanessa.

It is raining by the time I catch up to Max at his truck. “That woman I’m with. Vanessa,” I say. “She’s my new partner.”

Max looks at me like I’m crazy. Why would I run out in the rain to tell him this? Then he starts talking about my work, and I realize Vanessa is right-he’s misunderstood, because I haven’t told him the simple truth. “Vanessa is my partner,” I repeat. “We’re together.”

I can tell the moment that he understands what I am saying. Not because of the invisible shutters that close over his eyes but because something bursts inside me, sweet and free. I don’t know why I thought I needed Max’s approval in the first place. I may not be the woman he thought he knew, but that goes both ways.

Before I know it I am headed back to Vanessa, who’s waiting with the grocery cart under the dry overhang of the store. I find myself running. “What did you say to him?” Vanessa asks.

“That I kind of want to be with you forever. Except forever’s not long enough,” I tell her. “I may be paraphrasing a bit.”

The expression on her face makes me feel the way I do when, after months of winter, I see that first crocus. Finally.

We duck our heads in the rain and hurry to Vanessa’s car to load the groceries. As she puts the bags into the trunk, I watch two children pass by. They are preteens, a boy with peach fuzz on his face and a girl who is smacking her bubble gum. Their arms are locked around each other, one hand in the other’s back jeans pocket.

They don’t look old enough to watch PG movies, much less date, but no one even blinks as they walk by. “Hey,” I say, and Vanessa turns, still holding a bag of groceries. I put my hands on either side of her face and I kiss her, long and lovely and slow. I hope Max is watching. I hope the whole world is.

When most people hear screaming, they run in the opposite direction. Me, I grab my guitar and run toward it.

“Hi,” I say, bursting into one of the pediatric rooms at the hospital. “Can I help?”

The nurse, who is valiantly trying to take an IV out of a little boy, sighs with relief. “Be my guest, Zoe.”

The boy’s mother, who’s been holding him down while he struggles, nods at me. “All he knows is that it hurt going in, so he thinks it’s going to hurt coming out, too.”

I make eye contact with her son. “Hi,” I say. “I’m Zoe. What’s your name?”

His lower lip trembles. “C-Carl.”

“Carl, do you like to sing?”

Adamantly, he shakes his head. I glance around the room and notice a pile of Power Ranger figurines on the nightstand. Pulling my guitar in front of me, I begin to play the chords for “The Wheels on the Bus,” except I change the words. “The Power Rangers… they kick kick kick,” I sing. “Kick kick kick… kick kick kick. The Power Rangers they kick kick kick… all day long.”

Somewhere in the middle of the verse, he stops fighting and looks at me. “They also jump,” he says.

So the next verse we sing together. He spends ten minutes telling me everything else the Power Rangers do-the red one, and the pink one, and the black one. Then he looks up at the nurse. “When are you going to start?” Carl asks.

She grins. “I already finished.”

Carl’s mother looks up at me with utter relief. “Thank you so much…”

“No problem,” I say. “Carl, thanks for singing with me.”

I have no sooner exited the room and turned the corner than another nurse runs up to me. “I’ve been looking all over for you. It’s Marisa.”

She doesn’t have to tell me what’s the matter. Marisa is a three-year-old who’s been in and out of the hospital for a year with leukemia. Her father, a bluegrass musician, loves the idea of music therapy for his daughter, because he knows how much music can transport a person. Sometimes I go in when she is alert and happy, and we’ll do a sing-along of her favorites-“Old MacDonald” and “I’m a Little Teapot” and “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” and “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean.” Sometimes I’ll go in during her chemo treatments, which make her feel like her hands are burning, and I’ll create songs about dipping her hands in ice water, about building igloos. Lately, though, Marisa’s been so ill that it’s been her family and me just singing for her, while she sleeps through a drugged haze.

“Her doctor says within the hour,” the nurse murmurs to me.

I quietly open the door to her room. The lights are off, and the gray light of late afternoon is caught in the folds of the hospital blanket that covers the little girl. She is still and pale, a pink knit cap covering her bald head, glittery silver nail polish on her fingers. I was here last week when Marisa’s big sister applied it. We sang “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” even though Marisa slept through it. Even though Marisa wasn’t conscious to know that someone cared enough to make her look pretty.

Marisa’s mother is crying softly in her husband’s arms. “Michael, Louisa,” I say. “I’m so sorry.”

They don’t answer, but they don’t have to. Illness can make family of strangers.

A hospital worker sits beside the bed, making a plaster cast of Marisa’s handprint before she passes, something that is offered to the parents of any terminal pediatric patient. The air feels heavier, as if we are all breathing in lead.

I step back, beside Marisa’s sister, Anya. She looks at me, her eyes red and swollen. I squeeze her hand, and then, in keeping with the mood, I begin to improvise on my guitar, instrumental riffs that are somber and in minor keys. Suddenly Michael turns to me. “We don’t want you playing that in here.”

Heat rushes to my cheeks. “I-I’m sorry. I’ll go.”

Michael shakes his head. “No-we want you to play the songs you always play for her. The ones she loves.”

So I do. I play “Old MacDonald,” and one by one, her family join in. The hospital worker presses Marisa’s hand to the plaster, wipes it clean.

When the machines connected to Marisa begin to flatline, I keep singing.

My Bonnie lies over the ocean. My Bonnie lies over the sea.

I watch Michael kneel down at his daughter’s bedside. Louisa curls her hand over Marisa’s. Anya jackknifes at the waist, an origami of grief.

My Bonnie lies over the ocean. Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me.

There is a high-pitched hum, and then a nurse comes in to turn off the monitor, to rest her hand gently on Marisa’s forehead as she offers her condolences.

Bring back.

Bring back.

Bring back my Bonnie to me.

When I finish, the only sound in the room is the absence of a little girl.

“I’m so sorry,” I say again.

Michael holds out his hand. I do not know what he wants, but my body seems to. I hand him the pick I’ve been using to strum the guitar. He presses it into the plaster, just above the spread of Marisa’s handprint.

I hold myself together until I walk out of the room. Then I lean against the wall and slide down until I am sitting, sobbing. I cradle my guitar in my arms, the way Louisa was cradling the body of her daughter.

And then.

I hear a baby crying-that high, hitched shriek that grows more and more hysterical. Heavily I get to my feet and trace the sound two doors down from Marisa’s room, where an infant is being held down by her tearful mother and a nurse while a phlebotomist attempts to draw blood. They all look up when I enter. “Maybe I can help,” I say.

It has been a hellish, busy day at the hospital, and my drive home is consumed by the thought of a large glass of wine and collapsing on the couch, which is why I almost don’t pick up my cell phone when I see Max’s name flash onto the screen. But then I sigh and answer, and he asks me for just a few moments of my time. He doesn’t say what it’s for, but I’m assuming it has to do with paperwork being signed. There is, even after a divorce, no shortage of paperwork.

So I am completely surprised when he arrives with a woman in tow. And I’m even more shocked when I realize that the reason he’s brought her is to save me from the newly degenerate life I’m living.

I’d laugh, if I didn’t feel like crying quite so much. Today I watched a three-year-old die, but my ex-husband thinks that I am what’s wrong with this world. Maybe if his God wasn’t so busy paying attention to the lives of people like Vanessa and me, he could have saved Marisa.

But life isn’t fair. It’s why little girls don’t make it to their fourth birthdays. It’s why I lost so many babies. It’s why people like Max and my governor seem to think they can tell me who to love. If life isn’t fair, I don’t have to be, either. And so I channel all the anger I’m feeling at things I cannot change or control, and direct it at the man and woman sitting on the couch across from me.

I wonder if Pastor Clive, who runs the largest gay-bashing fraternity in these parts, has ever considered what Jesus would think of his tactics. Something tells me that a progressive rabbi who ministered to lepers and prostitutes and everyone else society had marginalized-someone who recommended treating people the way you wanted to be treated-wouldn’t exactly admire the Eternal Glory Church’s position. But I have to give them this: they are smooth. They have circular rhetoric for everything. I find myself fascinated by Pauline, who won’t even call herself a former lesbian, because she sees herself as so blatantly heterosexual now. Is it really that easy to believe what you tell yourself? If I had said, in the middle of all those failed pregnancies and miscarriages, that I was happy, would I have been?

If only the world were as simple as Pauline seems to think.

I am trying to trap her in her own circular logic when Vanessa gets home. I give her a kiss hello. I would have anyway, but I’m particularly happy that Pauline and Max have to watch. “This is Pauline, and of course you know Max,” I say. “They’re here to keep us from going to Hell.”

Vanessa looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “Zoe, can we talk for a minute?” she says, and drags me into the kitchen. “I’m not going to tell you you can’t invite someone into our house,” she says, “but what the hell are you thinking?”

“Did you know you’re not a lesbian?” I say. “You just have a lesbian problem.”

“The only problem I have right now is getting these two people out of my living room,” Vanessa replies, but she follows me back inside. I see her getting more and more tightly wound as Pauline tells us that everyone gay has been sexually abused and that femininity means wearing panty hose and makeup. Finally, Vanessa reaches her limit. She throws Max and Pauline out and closes the door behind them. “I love you,” she tells me, “but if you ever have your ex-husband over again with that poor man’s Anita Bryant, I’d like enough advance notice to get away first. Three thousand miles or so.”

“Max said he had to talk to me,” I explain. “I figured it was about the divorce. I didn’t know he was bringing backup.”

Vanessa snorts. She steps out of her high heels. “I don’t even like the fact that they were on my couch, frankly. I feel like we ought to fumigate. Or hold an exorcism or something-”

“Vanessa!”

“I just didn’t expect to see him in my house. Especially tonight, when I…” Her voice trails off into silence.

“When you what?”

“Nothing.” She shakes her head.

“I guess you can’t blame them for wishing that, one day, we’ll wake up and realize how wrong we’ve been.”

“Can’t I?”

“No,” I say, “because that’s exactly what we wish about them.”

Vanessa offers me a half smile. “Leave it to you to find the only thing I have in common with Pastor Clive and his band of merry heterosexuals.”

She walks into the kitchen, and I assume she’s getting the wine out of the fridge. It is a tradition for us to unwind and tell each other about our days over a nice glass of Pinot Grigio. “I think we still have some of the Midlife Crisis,” I call out. It’s a wine from California that Vanessa and I bought just because of the name on the label. While I wait, I sit down on the couch, in the spot Max vacated. I flip through the channels on the television, pausing on Ellen.

Max and I sometimes watched her, when he got home from landscaping. He liked her Converse sneakers and her blue eyes. He used to say that he wouldn’t want to be stuck in a room with Oprah, because she was intimidating-but Ellen DeGeneres, she was someone you’d take out for a beer.

What I like about Ellen is that (yep) she’s gay, but that’s the least interesting thing about her. You remember her because she’s good at what she does on TV, not because she goes home to Portia de Rossi.

Vanessa walks into the living room, but instead of bringing a glass of wine, she is carrying two champagne flutes. “It’s Dom Pérignon,” she says. “Because you and I are celebrating.”

I look at the bubbles rising in the pale liquid. “I had a patient die today,” I blurt out. “She was only three.”

Vanessa sets both glasses on the floor and hugs me. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to.

You know someone’s right for you when the things they don’t have to say are even more important than the things they do.

Crying won’t bring Marisa back. It won’t stop people like Max and Pauline from judging me. But it makes me feel better, all the same. I stay this way for a while, with Vanessa stroking my hair, until I am dry-eyed and feeling only empty inside. Then I look up at her. “I’m sorry. You wanted to celebrate something…”

Color rises to Vanessa’s face. “Some other time.”

“I’m not letting my crap day trump your good one-”

“Really, Zo. It can wait-”

“No.” I turn on the couch so that I am cross-legged, facing her. “Tell me.”

She looks pained. “It’s stupid. I can ask you later-”

“Ask me what?”

Vanessa takes a deep breath. “If you meant what you said yesterday. After we ran into Max at the grocery store.”

I had told her that I wanted to be with her forever. That forever wasn’t long enough.

And in spite of the fact that this is never how I imagined my life-

In spite of the fact that there are people I have never even met who will hate me for it-

In spite of the fact that it has been only months, not years-

The first thing I do every morning is panic. And then I look at Vanessa and think, Don’t worry; she’s still here.

“Yes,” I tell her. “Every word.”

Vanessa uncurls her fist. Inside is a gold ring with a constellation of diamonds dotting its surface. “If forever’s not long enough, how about the rest of my life?”

For a moment I cannot move, cannot breathe. I am not thinking of logistics, of how people will react to this news. All I am thinking is: I get Vanessa. Me, and no one else.

I start crying again, but for a different reason. “A lifetime,” I say, “is a decent start.”

I am surrounded by clouds. They brush the toes of my sneakers. They litter the floor. I might go so far as to say I’ve landed in Heaven-except that I’ve been dragging my feet to avoid shopping for a bridal gown, which makes this whole experience a little more like Hell.

My mother is holding out a gown with a sweetheart neckline that dissolves into a skirt of feathers. It looks like a chicken that ran into a combine. “No,” I say. “Emphatically no.”

“There’s one over there with Swarovski crystals on the bodice,” my mother says.

“You can wear it,” I mutter.

It was not my idea to come to the bridal salon in Boston. My mother had a dream that revealed us shopping here, in the Priscilla showroom, and after that there was no escaping a trip. She is a big believer in the predictive power of the subconscious.

My mother-who took a week to adjust to the fact that Vanessa and I were a couple-is even more excited about the wedding than we are. I secretly think she loves Vanessa more than she loves me, since Vanessa is the grounded, good-head-on-her-shoulders daughter she never had-the one who can talk about IRAs and retirement planning and who keeps a birthday book so she never forgets to send a card. I think my mother truly believes Vanessa will take care of me forever; whereas with Max, she had her doubts.

But I’m itchy, in this place that’s full of other brides who have weddings without complications. I feel like I’m being smothered by tulle and lace and satin, and I haven’t even tried on a single dress yet.

When the salesclerk approaches us and asks if she can help, my mother steps forward with a bright smile. “My gay daughter’s getting married,” she announces.

I can feel my cheeks burn. “Why am I suddenly your gay daughter?”

“Well, I’d think, of all people, you’d know the answer to that.”

“You never introduced me before as your straight daughter.”

My mother’s face falls. “I thought you wanted me to be proud of you.”

“Don’t make this my fault,” I say.

The salesclerk looks from me to my mother. “Why don’t I give you a few more minutes?” she asks, and she slinks away.

“Now look at what you’ve done. You’ve made her uncomfortable,” my mother sighs.

“Are you kidding?” I grab a sequined pump from a rack. “‘Hi,’” I mimic. “‘Do you have this shoe for my mother the sadomasochist? She wears a seven and a half.’”

“First of all, I’m not into S and M. And second of all, that shoe is absolutely hideous.” She looks at me. “You know, not everyone is out to attack you. Just because you’re a new member of a minority group doesn’t mean you have to assume the worst about everyone else.”

I sit down on the white couch, in the middle of a mountain of tulle. “That’s easy for you to say. You aren’t getting pamphlets, daily, from the Eternal Glory Church. ‘Ten Tiny Steps to Jesus.’ ‘Straight≠ Hate.’” I look up at her. “You may feel like trumpeting my relationship status, but I don’t. It’s not worth making someone squirm.” I glance at the salesclerk, who is wrapping a gown in plastic. “For all we know, she sings in the Eternal Glory Church choir.”

“For all we know,” my mother counters, “she’s gay, too.” She sits down next to me, and the dresses pouf up around us, a tiny explosion. “Honey… what’s wrong?”

To my great embarrassment, my eyes well up with tears. “I don’t know what to wear to my own wedding,” I admit.

My mother takes one look at me, then grabs my hand and pulls me up from the couch and downstairs onto Boylston Street. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“The bride’s supposed to be the focus of all the attention,” I sob. “But what happens when there are two brides?”

“Well, what’s Vanessa wearing?”

“A suit.” A beautiful white suit she found at Marshalls that fits like it was tailored to her. But I have never worn a suit in my life.

“Then I’d think you can wear anything you want…”

“Not white,” I blurt out.

My mother purses her lips. “Because you were already married?”

“No. Because-” Before I can say what has been lying smooth and heavy on my heart, like a fresh layer of asphalt, I snap my mouth shut.

“Because what?” my mother urges.

“Because it’s a gay wedding,” I whisper.

When Vanessa proposed, I never even thought twice about saying yes. But I would have been entirely happy to get married at a courthouse in Massachusetts, instead of having a big ceremony and reception. “Come on, Zo,” she had said. “There are two times in your life everyone you love comes together-your wedding and your funeral-and I know I won’t have nearly as much fun at the second one.” But even as I sat down every night with Vanessa at the computer to research bands and venues for the reception, I kept thinking I would find the escape hatch, the way to convince Vanessa to just take a vacation to Turks and Caicos instead.

And yet.

Unlike me, she’d never walked down an aisle. She’d never been fed wedding cake or danced until there were blisters on her feet. If that was what she wanted, then I wasn’t going to deny her the experience.

I wanted everyone to know how happy I was with Vanessa, but I didn’t need a wedding to do it. I just wasn’t sure if that was because this was still new to me or because I had heard loud and clear what Max thought-that a gay marriage isn’t a real one.

I cannot explain why this even mattered. We weren’t going to be asking Pastor Clive to officiate, after all. The people who would be invited to our wedding loved us and wouldn’t be judging the fact that there were two tiny brides on the cake, instead of a bride and a groom.

But to get married, we had to cross the Rhode Island border. We had to find a minister who was supportive of gay marriage. Eventually we would have to hire a lawyer to draw up papers to give each other power of attorney for medical decisions, to become beneficiaries on each other’s life insurance policies. I wasn’t ashamed of wanting a lifetime with Vanessa. But I was ashamed that the steps I had to take in order to do it made me feel like a second-class citizen.

“I’m happy,” I tell my mother, although I am bawling.

My mother looks at me. “What you need,” she says, waving her hand dismissively at the bridal salon behind us, “is none of this. What you need is elegant and understated. Just like you and Vanessa.”

We try three stores before we find it-a simple ivory, knee-length sheath that doesn’t make me look like Cinderella. “I fell in love with your father during a fire drill,” my mother says idly, as she fastens the buttons on the back. “We were both working at a law firm-he was an accountant and I was a secretary-and they evacuated the building. We met next to a chain-link fence, and he offered me half a Twinkie. When the building got the all clear, we didn’t go back inside.” She shrugs. “At his funeral, a lot of my friends said it was just bad luck that I fell for a guy who died in his forties, but you know, I never saw it that way. I thought it was good luck. I mean, what if there hadn’t been a fire drill? Then we never would have met. And I’d much rather have had a few great years with him than none at all.” She turns me so that I am facing her. “Don’t let anyone tell you who you should and shouldn’t love, Zoe. Yes, it’s a gay wedding… but it’s your wedding.”

She turns me again so that I can see myself in the mirror. From the front, this could be any pretty, simple dress. But from the back, everything is different. A row of satin buttons gives way, at the waist, to a fan of pleats. It’s as if the dress is opening like a rose.

As if someone watching me walk away might think, That’s not what I expected.

I stare at myself. “What do you think?”

Maybe my mother is talking about the dress, and maybe she’s talking about my future. “I think,” she says, “you’ve found the perfect one.”

When Lucy walks into our conference room, I am already picking out a melody on my guitar and humming along. “Hey there,” I say, glancing up at her. Today her red hair is matted and twisted. “Trying for dreadlocks?”

She shrugs.

“I had a roommate in college who wanted dreads. She chickened out at the last minute because the only way to get rid of dreadlocks is to cut them all off.”

“Well, maybe I’ll just shave my head,” Lucy says.

“You could do that,” I agree, delighted that we are having what could almost be called a conversation. “You could be the next Sinéad O’Connor.”

“Who?”

I realize that, when the bald musician ripped up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live in 1992, Lucy wasn’t even alive yet. “Or Melissa Etheridge. Did you see her perform at the Grammys when she was bald from chemo? She sang Janis Joplin.”

I take out my pick and begin the chord progressions for “Piece of My Heart.” From the corner of my eye, I watch Lucy staring at my fingers as they move up and down the frets. “I remember hearing that performance and thinking how brave she was, as a cancer survivor… and how it was the perfect song. Suddenly it wasn’t about a woman standing up to a guy-it was about beating anything that thought it could take you down.” I play a thread of melody and then sing the next line: “I’m gonna show you, baby, that a woman can be tough.”

With a strong chord I finish. “You know,” I say, as if this thought has just occurred to me, instead of being a lesson I’ve planned all along, “the thing about lyrics is that they work really well when they connect personally to the musician-or the listener.” I start playing the same melody again, but this time I improvise the words:

Didn’t you ever feel like you were all alone, well yeah,

And didn’t you ever feel that you were on your own.

Honey, you know you do.

Each time you tell yourself that you’re out of luck

You wonder how you ever, ever got so stuck.

I want you to listen, listen, listen, listen already

Gotta know that I am ready to help you, Lucy.

Gonna show you I am ready to help you, Lucy-

Just as I am beginning to really rock out, Lucy snorts. “That is the lamest crap I’ve ever heard,” she murmurs.

“Maybe you want to take a stab at it,” I suggest, and I put the guitar down and reach for a pad and a pen instead. I write out the lyrics mad lib style, leaving gaps and spaces where Lucy can instead substitute her own thoughts and feelings.

Sometimes you make me feel like.____________________

Don’t you know that I____________________?

I do a fill-in-the-blank pattern like this for the entire song, and then set it on the table between us. For a few minutes Lucy just ignores it, focusing instead on a tangled strand of her hair. And then, slowly, her hand reaches out and pulls the paper closer.

I try not to get too excited about the fact that she’s taken an active step toward participation. Instead, I pick up my guitar and pretend to tune it, even though I did this before Lucy arrived today.

When she writes, she hunches over the paper, as if she’s protecting a secret. She’s a lefty; I wonder why I haven’t noticed that before. Her hair falls over her face like a curtain. Each of her fingernails is painted a different color.

At one point, her sleeve inches up and I see the scars on her wrist.

Finally, she shoves the paper in my direction. “Great,” I say brightly. “Let’s take a look!”

In every blank, Lucy has written a string of expletives. She waits for me to look at her, and she raises her eyebrows and smirks.

“Well.” I pick up my guitar. “All right, then.” I put the paper on the table where I can see it, and I begin to sing, certain that if anyone would understand anger and anguish it would be Janis Joplin, and that she won’t be rolling over in her grave. “Sometimes you make me feel like a motherfucking asshole,” I sing, as loud as I can. “Don’t you know that I… cocksucker-” I break off, pointing to the page. “I can’t quite read that…”

Lucy blushes. “Uh… fucktard.”

“Don’t you know that I… cocksucker fucktard,” I sing.

The door to the hallway is wide open. A teacher walks by and does a double take.

“Come on, come on, come on, come on and take it… Take a motherfucking shithole asswipe…”

I sing as if this is any song, as if the swear words mean nothing to me. I sing my heart out. And eventually, by the time I finish the chorus, Lucy is staring at me with the ghost of a smile playing over her lips.

Unfortunately, there is also a small crowd of students standing in the open doorway, caught on the tightrope between shocked and delighted. When I finish, they start clapping and hollering, and then the bell rings.

“Guess that’s all the time we have,” I say. Lucy slings her backpack over her shoulder and, like usual, makes a beeline to get as far away from me as possible. I reach for my guitar case, resigned.

But at the threshold of the door, she turns around. “See you next week,” Lucy says, the first time she’s acknowledged to me that she has any plan to return.

I know it’s supposed to be good luck if it rains on your wedding, but I’m not sure what it means when there’s a blizzard. It is the day of my wedding to Vanessa, and the freak April snowstorm the weathermen have predicted has taken a turn for the worse. The Department of Transportation has even closed patches of the highway.

We came to Fall River the night before, to get everything sorted out, but the majority of our guests were driving up today for the evening ceremony. After all, Massachusetts is less than an hour away. But today, even that seems too far.

And now, if a weather disaster isn’t enough, there’s a plumbing snafu, too. The pipes burst at the restaurant where we were planning to hold our reception. I watch Vanessa try to calm down her friend Joel-a wedding planner who took on our nuptials as his gift to us. “They’ve got three inches of standing water,” Joel wails, sinking his head into his hands. “I think I’m hyperventilating.”

“I’m sure there’s somewhere that can hold a party on short notice,” Vanessa says.

“Yeah. And maybe Ronald McDonald will even agree to officiate.” Joel looks up sharply at Vanessa. “I have a reputation, you know. I will not, I repeat, not have French fries as an hors d’oeuvre.”

“Maybe we should reschedule,” Vanessa says.

“Or,” I suggest, “we could just go to a justice of the peace and be done with it.”

“Honey,” Joel says. “You are not wasting that gorgeous peau de soie dress on a city hall wham-bam-stamp-you-ma’am wedding.”

Vanessa ignores him and walks toward me. “Go on.”

“Well,” I say. “The party’s the least important thing, isn’t it?”

Behind me, Joel gasps. “I did not hear that,” he says.

“I don’t want everyone to drive up here and risk their lives,” I say. “We’ve got Joel as a witness, and I’m sure we can drag in someone else off the street.”

Vanessa looks at me. “But don’t you want your mother here?”

“Sure I do. But more than that, I just want to get married. We’ve got the license. We’ve got each other. The rest, it’s just gravy.”

“Do me a favor,” Joel begs. “Call your guests and leave it up to them.”

“Should we tell them to bring their bathing suits for the reception?” Vanessa asks.

“Leave that part up to me,” he says. “If David Tutera can fix a wedding catastrophe, so can I.”

“Who the hell is David Tutera?” Vanessa asks.

He rolls his eyes. “Sometimes you are such a dyke.” He takes her cell phone off the table and presses it into her hand. “Start calling, sister.”

“The good news,” my mother says, as she closes the bathroom door behind her, “is that you’re still walking down an aisle.”

It took her five hours, but she managed to make it to Massachusetts in the storm of the century. Now, she is keeping me company until it’s showtime. It smells of popcorn in here. I look at myself in the wide industrial mirror. My dress looks perfect; my makeup seems too dramatic in this dim light. My hair, in this humidity, doesn’t have a prayer of holding a curl.

“The minister’s here,” my mother tells me.

I know, because she already popped in to say hello to me. Maggie MacMillan is a humanist minister we found in the yellow pages. She’s not gay, but she performs same-sex marriages all the time, and both Vanessa and I liked the fact that there wasn’t a religious component to her ceremony. Frankly, after Max’s visit, we’d both had about as much religion as we could stand. But she really sold us in her office by whooping with delight when we’d told her we’d be crossing the border to Massachusetts to get married. “I wish Rhode Island would get with the program,” she’d said with a smirk. “But I suppose the legislature thinks if they give gays and lesbians civil rights, everyone in the state is going to want them…”

Joel sticks his head inside the door. “You ready?” he asks.

I take a deep breath. “Guess so.”

“You know I tried to get you a gay magician for the reception, but it didn’t work out,” Joel says. “He vanished with a poof.” He waits for me to get the punch line and then grins. “Works every time with a nervous bride.”

“How’s Vanessa doing?” I ask.

“Gorgeous,” he says. “Almost as gorgeous as you.”

My mom gives me a kiss on the cheek. “See you out there.”

Vanessa and I made the decision to walk down the aisle together. Neither of us has a father around to escort the bride, and this time, I didn’t feel like I was being given away into someone’s safekeeping. I felt like we were there to balance each other. So I follow Joel out of the women’s room and wait while he gets Vanessa out of the men’s room. She is wearing her white suit, and her eyes are bright and focused. “Wow,” she says, staring at me. I see her throat working, as she tries to find words that are big enough for what we are feeling. Finally she reaches for my hands, and rests her forehead against mine. “I’m afraid that, any second now, I’m going to wake up,” she whispers.

“Okay, lovebirds,” Joel says, clapping his hands to interrupt us. “Save it for the guests.”

“All four of them?” I murmur, and Vanessa snorts.

“I thought of another one,” she says. “Rajasi.”

We have been trading, for the past four hours, the names of people we think will brave the elements to celebrate our wedding with us. Possibly Wanda, from the nursing home-she grew up in Montana and is used to blizzards. And Alexa, my office assistant-whose husband works for the DOT, and who could probably hijack a snow-plow to get her here. It stands to reason that Vanessa’s longtime hairdresser will probably be one of the guests waiting for us, too.

With my mom, that makes a whopping four people at our party.

Joel leads us through a tangle of gears and pulleys and equipment, past stacks of boxes and through a doorway. A short curtain has been set up, and Joel hisses a command: “Just follow the runner and be careful not to trip over the gutters… and, ladies, remember, you are fabulous.” He kisses us on our cheeks, and then Vanessa reaches for my hand.

A string quartet begins to play. Together, Vanessa and I step onto the white runner and make the hard right turn at the edge of the curtain-the place where we step onto the aisle of the bowling alley we will be walking down, the place where the guests can see us.

Except there aren’t four of them. There are nearly eighty. From what I can see, everyone we called earlier today-everyone we advised not to come in this treacherous weather-has made the trip to be here with us.

That’s the first thing I notice. The second is that this AMC Lanes & Games bowling alley-the only spot in town that Joel could rent out completely on such short notice-doesn’t even look like a bowling alley anymore. There are vines woven with lilies lining the gutters on either side of the aisle we’re walking down. There are fairy lights strung overhead and on the walls. The automatic ball return is draped with white silk, and on it are frames with the faces of my father and both of Vanessa’s parents. The pinball machines are draped in velvet and covered with appetizers and heaping bowls of fresh shrimp. The air hockey table sports a champagne fountain.

“What a quintessentially lesbian wedding,” Vanessa says to me. “Who else would tie the knot in a room full of balls?”

We are still laughing when we reach the end of the makeshift aisle. Maggie’s waiting, wearing a purple shawl edged with a rainbow of beading. “Welcome,” she says, “to the blizzard of 2011 and the marriage of Vanessa and Zoe. I’m going to refrain from making any jokes about lucky strikes, and instead I’m going to tell you that they’ve come to honor their commitment to each other not only today but for all the tomorrows to come. We rejoice with them… and for them.”

Maggie’s words fade as I look at my mother’s face, my friends’ faces, and, yes, even the face of Vanessa’s hairdresser. Then Vanessa clears her throat and begins to recite a Rumi poem:

When she is through, I can hear my mother sniffling. I pull out of my mind the ribbon of words I’ve memorized for Vanessa, an E. E. Cummings poem with syllables full of music.

There are rings, and we are both crying, and laughing.

“Vanessa and Zoe,” the minister says, “may you avoid splits and always play a perfect game. As you’ve pledged in this ceremony, in front of family and friends, to be partners for life, I can only say what’s been said thousands of times before, at thousands of weddings…”

Vanessa and I both grin. It took us a long time to figure out how to end our ceremony. You can’t very well say I now pronounce you husband and wife. By the same token, I now pronounce you partners sounds somehow lesser-than, not a true marriage.

Our minister smiles at us.

“Zoe? Vanessa?” she says. “You may kiss the bride.”

Just in case you aren’t sure that the Highlands Inn is lesbian-friendly after you call its phone number (877-LES-B-INN), there is a row of Adirondack chairs in all the colors of the rainbow set on a hilltop. It hasn’t escaped my sense of irony that this little corner of open-minded paradise is set in Bethlehem, New Hampshire, that maybe this sleepy namesake town at the edge of the White Mountains could be the birthplace of a new way of thinking.

After our wedding ceremony-which may have been the only ceremony in the world that has included both a chocolate-Grand Marnier ganache cake with real gold leaf and a midnight game of cosmic bowling in the dark-Vanessa and I wait out the storm to drive to our honeymoon destination. We have plans to cross-country ski, to go antiquing. But we spend nearly the first twenty-four hours of our honeymoon in our room-not fooling around, although there are lovely interludes of just that. Instead, we sit in front of the fireplace, drinking the champagne the inn owner has given us, and we talk. It seems impossible to me that we haven’t exhausted our stories, but each one unfolds into another. I tell Vanessa things I have never even told my mother: about what my father looked like the morning he died; how I’d stolen his deodorant from the bathroom and kept it hidden in my underwear drawer for the next few years so that, when I needed his smell for comfort, I’d have it. I tell her how, five years ago, I found a bottle of gin in the toilet tank and I threw it out but never told Max I’d stumbled across it, as if not speaking of it would mean it hadn’t really happened.

I sing the alphabet for her, backward.

And in return, Vanessa tells me about her first year of school counseling, about a sixth grader who confessed that her father was raping her, who ultimately was moved out of the school and the state by the same father, and who-periodically-Vanessa still tries to Google to see if she survived. She tells me about how, when she buried her mother, there was still a bitter, hard nut in her heart that hated this woman for never accepting Vanessa the way she was.

She tells me about the one and only time she tried pot in college, and wound up eating an entire large pepperoni pizza and a loaf of bread.

She tells me that she used to have nightmares about dying alone on the floor of her living room, and it being weeks before some neighbor noticed she hadn’t left the house.

She tells me that her first pet was a hamster, which escaped in the middle of the night and ran into the radiator vent and was never seen again.

Sometimes, when we’re talking, my head is on her shoulder. Sometimes her arms are around me. Sometimes we are at opposite ends of a couch, our legs tangled. When Vanessa had first given me the brochure for this place, I had balked-did we have to hide out with the other quarantined lesbian couples during our honeymoon? Why couldn’t we just go to New York City, or the Poconos, or Paris, like any other newlyweds?

“Well,” Vanessa had said, “we could. But there we wouldn’t be like any other newlyweds.”

Here, we are. Here, no one bats an eye if we’re holding hands or checking into a room with a queen-size bed. We take a few excursions-to the Mount Washington Hotel for dinner, and to a movie theater-and each time we leave the grounds of this inn, I find us automatically putting a foot of space between us. And yet, the minute we come back home, we are glued at the hip.

“It’s like tracking,” Vanessa says, when we are sitting in the inn’s dining room at a breakfast table one morning, watching a squirrel dance across a lip of ice on a stone wall. “I nearly got kicked out of graduate school for writing a paper that advocated separating students by ability. But you know what? Ask a kid who’s struggling in math if he likes being in a mixed-level class, and he’ll tell you he feels like a moron. Ask the math genius if he likes being in a mixed-level class, and he’ll tell you he’s sick of doing all the work during group projects. Sometimes, it’s better to sort like with like.”

I glance at her. “Careful, Ness. If GLAAD could hear you now, they’d strip you of your rainbow status.”

She laughs. “I’m not advocating gay internment camps. It’s just-well, you know, you grow up Catholic, and it’s kind of nice when you make a joke about the Pope or talk about the Stations of the Cross and you don’t get a blank stare back in return. There’s something really nice about being with your people.”

“Full disclosure,” I say. “I didn’t know the cross had stations.”

“I want my ring back,” she jokes.

We are interrupted by the shriek of a toddler who has run into the breakfast room, nearly crashing into a waitress. His mothers are in hot pursuit. “Travis!” The boy giggles and looks over his shoulder before he ducks under our tablecloth, a human puppy.

“I’m sorry,” one of the women says. She fishes him out, nuzzles his belly, and then swings him onto her back.

Her partner looks at us and grins. “We’re still looking for his off switch.”

As the family walks off toward the reception area, I watch that little boy, Travis, and I imagine what my own son would have looked like at his age. Would he have smelled of cocoa and peppermint; would his laugh sound like a cascade of bubbles? I wonder if he would be afraid of the monsters that live beneath his mattress, if I could sing him the courage to sleep through the night.

“Maybe,” Vanessa says, “that will be us someday.”

Immediately I feel it-that flush of utter failure. “You told me it didn’t matter to you. That you have your students.” Somehow I choke out the words. “You know I can’t have kids.”

“It didn’t matter to me before because I never wanted to be a single mom. I saw enough of that when I was a kid. And of course I know you can’t have babies.” Vanessa threads her fingers through mine. “But Zoe,” she says. “I can.”

An embryo is frozen at the blastocyst stage, when it is approximately five days old. In a sealed straw filled with cryoprotectant fluid-a human antifreeze-it is gradually cooled to -196 degrees Celsius. The straw is then attached to an aluminum cane and stored in a canister of liquid nitrogen. It costs eight hundred dollars a year to keep the embryo frozen. When thawed at room temperature, the cryoprotectant fluid is diluted so that the embryo can be restored to its culture medium. It’s assessed for damage to see if it’s suitable for transfer. If the embryo survives mostly intact, it has a good chance of leading to a successful pregnancy. Cellular damage, if not extensive, is not a deal breaker. Some embryos have been frozen for a decade and still gone on to produce healthy children.

When I was undergoing in vitro, I always thought of the extra embryos we froze as snowflakes. Tiny, potential babies-each one a little different from the next.

According to a 2008 study in the journal Fertility and Sterility, when patients who didn’t want more children were asked about their frozen embryos, fifty-three percent didn’t want to donate them to others because they didn’t want their children finding an unknown brother or sister one day; and they didn’t want other parents raising their child. Sixty-six percent said they’d donate the embryos for research, but that option wasn’t always available at clinics. Twenty percent said they’d keep the embryos frozen forever. Often, the husband and wife are not in agreement.

I have three frozen embryos, swimming in liquid nitrogen in a clinic in Wilmington, Rhode Island. And now that Vanessa has mentioned it, I cannot eat or drink or sleep or concentrate. All I can do is think of these babies, who are waiting for me.

Heads-up for all those activists out there trying so hard to prevent a constitutional amendment allowing gay marriage: nothing changes. Yes, Vanessa and I have a piece of paper that is now in a small fireproof safe in an envelope with our passports and social security cards, but that’s about all that is different. We are still best friends. We still read each other the editorials in the morning paper, and we kiss good night before we turn out the lights. Or in other words, you can stop law, but you can’t stop love.

The wedding was anticlimactic, a speed bump in the road of real life. But now that we are back home, it’s life as usual. We get up, we get dressed, we go to work. Which for me proves a necessary distraction, because when I am alone I find myself staring at the paperwork from the fertility clinic that was a second home to me for five years, trying to gather the courage to make the call.

I know there is no logical reason to believe that all the medical complications I faced will affect Vanessa as well. She’s younger than me; she’s healthy. But the thought of putting her through what I went through-not the physical worries but the mental ones-is almost too much for me to handle. In this, I have a newfound respect for Max. The only thing harder than losing a baby, I think, is watching the person you love most in the world lose one.

So I am actually looking forward to occupying my thoughts with something else today-my next session with Lucy. After all, at our last meeting, when I belted out a string of curses, I got her smiling.

When she walks into our classroom, however, she isn’t happy at all. Her burgeoning dreadlocks have been brushed out, and her hair is lank and unwashed. She has dark circles under her eyes, which are bloodshot. She is wearing black leggings and a ripped T-shirt and two different-colored Converse sneakers.

On her right wrist is a gauze pad, wrapped with what looks like duct tape.

Lucy doesn’t make eye contact. She slings herself into a chair, pivots it so that it is facing away from me, and puts her head down on the desk.

I get up and close the door to the room. “You want to talk about it?” I ask.

She shakes her head, but doesn’t lift it up.

“How did you get hurt?”

Lucy brings her knees up, curling into herself, the smallest ball.

“You know,” I say, mentally ditching my lesson plan, “maybe we should just listen to some music together. And if you feel like it, you can talk.” I walk toward my iPod, which is hooked up to a portable speaker, and scan through my playlists.

The first song I play is “Hate on Me,” by Jill Scott. I want to find something that matches Lucy’s mood, that brings her back to me.

She doesn’t even twitch a response.

I move on to frenetic songs-the Bangles, Karen O. Spirituals. Even Metallica. When we reach our sixth song-“Love Is a Battlefield” by Pat Benatar-I finally admit defeat. “All right, Lucy. Let’s call it a day.” I hit the Pause button on the iPod.

“Don’t.”

Her voice is thin, thready. Her head is still tucked against her knees, her face hidden.

“What did you say?”

“Don’t,” Lucy repeats.

I kneel beside her and wait until she turns and looks at me. “Why not?”

Her tongue darts out, wets her lips. “That song. It’s how my blood sounds.”

With its driving bass and insistent percussion, I can see why she’d feel this way. “When I’m pissed off,” I tell her, “this is what I play. Really loud. And I drum along to the beat.”

“I hate coming here.”

Her words cut through me. “I’m really sorry to hear-”

“The special ed room? Seriously? I’m already the school’s biggest freak, and now everyone thinks I’m retarded, too.”

“Mentally challenged,” I correct automatically, and Lucy gives me the look of death.

“I think you need to play some percussion,” I announce.

“And I think you need to go f____________________.”

“That’s enough.” I grab her wrist-the one that isn’t injured-and tug her to a standing position. “We’re going on a field trip.”

At first I am dragging her, but by the time we are headed down the hallway, she is tagging along willingly. We pass couples plastered to lockers, making out; we skirt four giggling girls who are bent over a phone, staring at the screen; we weave between the overstuffed lacrosse players in their team jerseys.

The only reason I even know where the cafeteria is, is because Vanessa’s taken me there for coffee other times when I’ve been at the school. It looks like every other school cafeteria I’ve ever seen-a life-size petri dish breeding social discontent, students sorting themselves into individual genuses: the Popular Kids, the Geeks, the Jocks, the Emos. At Wilmington High the hot lunch line and kitchen are tucked behind the tables, so we march right down the center of the caf and up to the woman who is slinging mashed potatoes onto plates. “I’m going to need you to clear this area,” I announce.

“Oh, you are,” she says, and she raises a brow. “Who died and left you queen?”

“I’m one of the school therapists.” This is not exactly true. I have no affiliation with the school. Which is why, when I get into trouble for doing this, it won’t really be devastating. “Just a little ten-minute break.”

“I didn’t get a memo about this-”

“Look.” I pull her aside and, in my best educator voice, say, “I have a suicidal girl here, and I’m doing some esteem building. Now, last time I checked, this school and every other school in the country had a suicide prevention initiative on the docket. Do you really want the superintendent to find out that you were impeding progress?”

I am completely bluffing. I don’t even know the name of the superintendent. And Vanessa will either kill me when she hears I did this or congratulate me-I’m just not sure which.

“I’m going to get the principal,” the woman huffs. Ignoring her, I move behind the counter and begin to grab hanging pots and pans and turn them over on the work surfaces. I gather ladles, spoons, spatulas.

“You’re going to get reamed,” Lucy says.

“I don’t work for the school,” I reply, shrugging. “I’m an outsider, too.” I set up two drumming stations-one makeshift high hat (an overturned skillet), a snare (an overturned pot), and leave the metal server door at our feet to be the bass drum. “We’re going to play the drums,” I announce.

Lucy looks at the kids in the cafeteria-some of whom are watching us, most of whom are simply ignoring us. “Or not.”

“Lucy, did you or did you not want to get out of that awful special ed room? Get over here and stop arguing with me.”

To my surprise, she actually does. “On the floor is our kick drum. Four beats, even. Kick it with your left foot, because you’re a lefty.” As I count off, I hit my boot against the metal doors of the serving table. “You try it.”

“This is really stupid,” Lucy says, but she tentatively kicks the metal, too.

“Great. That’s four-four time,” I tell her. “Now your snare is at your right hand.” I hand her a metal spoon and point to the overturned pot. “Hit on beats two and four.”

“For real?” Lucy asks.

As an answer, I play the next beat-eighth notes on the high hat: one-and-two-and-three-and-four. Lucy keeps up her rhythm, and with her left hand copies what I’m doing. “Don’t stop,” I tell her. “That’s a basic backbeat.” Over the cacophony I pick up two wooden spatulas and do a drum solo.

By now, the entire cafeteria is watching. A group of kids groove to a makeshift rap.

Lucy doesn’t notice. She’s pouring herself into the rhythm as it shimmies through her arms and her spine. I start singing “Love Is a Battlefield,” the words raw, like flags ripping in a wind. Lucy can’t take her eyes off me. I sing through one chorus, and then on the second, she joins in.

No promises. No demands.

She’s grinning like mad, and I think that surely this breakthrough will be written up in the annals of music therapy-and then the principal walks into the cafeteria, flanked by the lunch lady on one side and Vanessa on the other.

My spouse doesn’t look particularly happy, I might add.

I stop singing, stop banging the pots and pans.

“Zoe,” Vanessa says, “what on earth are you doing?”

“My job.” I take Lucy’s hand and pull her in front of the serving station. She is absolutely mortified to be caught in the act. I hand the principal the spatula I’ve been drumming with and push past him without saying a word, until Lucy and I are facing the entire room of students. Quickly I raise our joined hands in a rock-band victory moment. “Thank you, Wilmington High!” I yell. “Peace out!”

Without another word-and with the stares of the principal and Vanessa boring into my back-Lucy and I ride out of the cafeteria to a round of applause and high fives. “Zoe,” she says.

I drag her through unfamiliar halls of the school, intent on getting as far away from the administration as possible.

“Zoe-”

“I’m going to get fired,” I mutter.

“Zoe,” Lucy says. “Stop.”

With a sigh, I turn to apologize. “I shouldn’t have put you on the spot like that.”

But then I see that the flush in her cheeks wasn’t shame but excitement. Her eyes are sparkling, her smile infectious. “Zoe,” she breathes. “Can we do that again?”

In spite of Wanda’s warning, I am still a little taken aback to open the door of Mr. Docker’s room at Shady Acres and find him shrunken and faded in his bed. Even when he was in one of his quiet, catatonic states before, he was able to be moved to a rocking chair or to the common room, but, according to Wanda, he hasn’t left his bed in the two weeks since I’ve seen him. He hasn’t spoken, either.

“Morning, Mr. Docker,” I say, taking my guitar out of its case. “Remember me? Zoe? I’m here to play some music with you.”

I have seen this before with some of my patients-especially those in hospice care. There’s a cliff at the end point of a person’s life; most of us peer over the edge of it, hanging on. That’s why, when someone chooses to let go, it’s so dramatically visible. The body will seem almost transparent. The eyes will be looking at something the rest of us can’t see.

I start finger picking and humming, an impromptu lullaby. Today isn’t the day to get Mr. Docker to engage. Today, music therapy is all about being the Pied Piper, taking him peacefully to the point where he can close his eyes and leave us all behind.

As I play wordlessly for Mr. Docker, I find myself tearing up. The old man was a cranky, bitter bastard, but it’s the thorn in your side that leaves the biggest hole. I put down my guitar and reach for his hand. It feels like a bundle of sticks. His eyes, a rheumy blue, remain focused on the blank, black screen of the dormant television.

“I got married,” I tell him, although I am sure he’s not listening.

Mr. Docker doesn’t budge.

“It’s strange, isn’t it, how we wind up in places we never would have imagined. I bet you never thought, when you were in your big corner office, that one day you’d be stuck here, in a room that overlooks a parking lot. You never imagined, when you were ordering everyone around, that one day there might not be someone to hear you. Well, I know what that’s like, Mr. Docker.” I look down at him, but he continues to stare straight ahead at nothing. “You fell in love once. I know you did, because you’ve got a daughter. So you know what I mean when I say that I don’t think anyone who falls in love has a choice. You’re just pulled to that person like true north, whether it’s good for you or bound to break your heart.”

When I was married to Max, I mistook being a lifeline for being in love. I was the one who could save him; I was the one who could keep him sober. But there is a difference between mending someone who’s broken and finding someone who makes you complete.

I don’t say it out loud, but this is how I know that Vanessa will not hurt me: she cares more about my well-being than she does about her own. She’d break her own heart before causing even the smallest hairline fracture in mine.

This time when I glance down, Mr. Docker is looking right at me. “We’re going to have a baby,” I tell him.

The smile starts deep inside of me, like a pilot light, and fans the flames of possibility.

Saying it out loud, it’s suddenly real.

Vanessa and I are standing at the reception window of the fertility clinic. “Baxter,” I say. “We’ve got a meeting to discuss a frozen embryo transfer?”

The nurse finds my name on her computer. “There you are. Did you bring your husband today, too?”

I feel my face flush. “I’m remarried. When I called, you said I needed to come in with my spouse.”

The nurse looks up at me, and then at Vanessa. If she’s surprised, her face doesn’t register it at all. “Just wait here,” she says.

Vanessa looks at me as soon as she leaves her desk. “What’s the problem?”

“I don’t know. I hope there’s nothing wrong with the embryos…”

“Did you read that article about the family that was given the wrong embryos?” Vanessa asks. “I mean, God, can you imagine?”

I shoot her a pointed look. “Not helping.”

“Zoe?” At the sound of my name, I turn to find Dr. Anne Fourchette, the clinic director, walking toward me. “Why don’t you two come into my office?”

We follow her down the hall to the paneled, posh space that I must have been in before but have no recollection of seeing prior to this. Most of my visits were in treatment rooms. “Is there a problem, Dr. Fourchette? Did you lose them?”

She is a striking woman with a fall of prematurely white hair, a bone-crushing handshake, and a drawl that extends my name by three or four extra syllables. “I’m afraid there was a misunderstanding,” she says. “Your ex-husband has to sign off on the release of the embryos. Once he does that, we can schedule a transfer.”

“But Max doesn’t want them. He divorced me because he didn’t want to be a father.”

“Then it’s really all academic,” Dr. Fourchette replies brightly. “It’s a legal technicality we need to cover before we can schedule your appointment with a social worker.”

“Social worker,” Vanessa repeats.

“It’s something we routinely do with same-sex couples, to address some of the issues that you might not have considered. If your partner has the baby, for example, Zoe, then once he’s born, you’ll have to formally adopt him.”

“But we’re married-”

“Not according to the state of Rhode Island.” She shakes her head. “Again, it’s nothing to worry about. We just have to get the ball rolling.”

That familiar wave of disappointment floods me; once again this baby track is full of hurdles.

“All right,” Vanessa says briskly. “Is there something Max has to sign? Some form?”

Dr. Fourchette hands her a sheet of paper. “Just have him send it back to us, and as soon as we get it, we’ll call you.” She smiles at us. “And I’m really happy for you, Zoe. Congratulations to you both.”

Vanessa and I don’t speak until we are outside the clinic, riding down together in an otherwise empty elevator. “You have to talk to him,” she says.

“And say what? Hey, I’m married to Vanessa and we’d like you to be our sperm donor?”

“It’s not like that,” Vanessa points out. “The embryos already exist. What plans does he have for them?”

The doors slide open on the ground floor. A woman is waiting, with a baby in a stroller. The baby is wearing a white, hooded sweater with little bear ears sticking up.

“I’ll try,” I say.

I find Max at a client’s house, raking out mulch and twigs from the flower beds in preparation for spring landscaping. The snow has melted as quickly as it arrived, and it smells like spring. Max is wearing a shirt and tie, and he’s sweating. “Nice place,” I say appreciatively, looking around the grounds of this McMansion.

Max wheels at the sound of my voice. “Zoe? What are you doing here?”

“Liddy told me where to find you,” I say. “I was wondering if you’ve got a minute to talk?”

He leans on the rake and wipes the perspiration from his forehead, nods. “Sure. You want to, uh, sit down?” He gestures to a stone bench in the center of a hibernating garden. The granite is cold through the fabric of my jeans.

“What’s it like?” I ask. “When it’s blooming, I mean?”

“Oh, it’s pretty awesome, actually. Tiger lilies. They should be up by the end of April, if I can keep the beetles off of them.”

“I’m glad you’re still doing landscaping. I wasn’t sure.”

“Why wouldn’t I be doing it?”

“I don’t know.” I shrug. “I thought you might be working for your church.”

“Well, on Mondays I do,” he says. “They’re one of my clients.” He rubs his jaw with his fist. “I saw a sign outside a bar, saying you’d be singing. You haven’t performed since before we got… well, for a long time.”

“I know-I sort of fell back into it.” I hesitate. “You weren’t at the bar…?”

“No.” Max laughs. “I’m cleaner than soap these days.”

“Good. I mean, that’s really good. And, yeah, I’ve been doing a little singing here and there. Acoustically. It keeps me on my toes for my therapy sessions.”

“So you’re still doing that.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know. A lot about you has… changed.”

It is so strange, to encounter an ex. It’s as if you’re in a foreign film, and what you’re saying face-to-face has nothing to do with the subtitles flowing beneath you. We are so careful not to touch, although once upon a time, I slept plastered to him in our bed, like lichen on a rock. We are two strangers who know every shameful secret, every hidden freckle, every fatal flaw in each other.

“I got married,” I blurt out.

Since Max hasn’t been paying me alimony, there’s really no reason he would have known. For a second he looks completely baffled. Then his eyes widen. “You mean, you and…?”

“Vanessa,” I say. “Yes.”

“Wow.” Max shifts, sliding centimeters away from me on the stone bench. “I, uh, didn’t realize it was so… real.”

“Real?”

“Serious, I mean. I figured it was some fling you had to get out of your system.”

“You mean the same way you were a casual drinker?” As soon as I say the words, I regret them. I’m supposed to be here to win Max over to my side, not to antagonize him. “I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.”

Max looks like he’s about to be sick. “I’m glad you told me face-to-face. It would have been really tough to hear that through the grapevine.”

For a moment, I almost feel sorry for him. I can only imagine the flak he’ll get from his new church buddies about me. “There’s more,” I say, swallowing. “Vanessa and I want to start a family. Vanessa’s young and healthy, and there’s no reason she can’t have a baby.”

“I can think of a pretty major one,” Max says.

“Well, actually, that’s why I’m here.” I take a deep breath. “It would mean a lot to us if the baby Vanessa had was biologically mine. And there are three embryos left over from when you and I were trying. I’d like your permission to use them.”

Max’s head snaps up. “What?”

“I know this is a lot to take in at once-”

“I told you I don’t want to be a father…”

“And I’m not asking you to. No strings attached, Max. We’ll sign anything you want to guarantee that. We’re not expecting you to support a baby in any way-not with money, or with your name, nothing. You won’t have any obligations or responsibilities to the baby, if we’re lucky enough to have one.” I meet his gaze. “These embryos-they already exist. They’re just waiting. For how long? Five years? Ten? Fifty? Neither of us wants them destroyed, and you’ve already said you don’t want kids. But I do. I want them so bad that it hurts.”

“Zoe-”

“This is my last chance. I’m too old to go through in vitro again to harvest more eggs with an anonymous sperm donor.” With a shaking hand I pull the form from the clinic out of my purse. “Please, Max? I’m begging you.”

He takes the piece of paper but doesn’t look at it. He doesn’t look at me. “I… I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.”

You do, I realize. You just won’t say it.

“Think about it?” I ask.

He nods, and I stand up. “I really appreciate this, Max. I know this wasn’t what you expected.” I take a step back. “I, um, guess I’ll call you. Or you call me.”

He nods, then folds the paper in half and half again, and tucks it into his back pocket. I wonder if he will even look at it. If he’ll tear it up in little pieces and rake it into the dirt. If he’ll send it through the wash in his jeans so that he cannot read the words anymore.

I start walking down to the curb, where I’ve left my car, but I am stopped by Max’s voice. “Zoe,” he calls out. “I still pray for you, you know.”

I face him. “I don’t need your prayers, Max,” I say. “Just your consent.”