Page 41 of Take What Hurts

Mackenzie smiled, and a far too warm, wonderful surge of affection rose in her chest like the inevitable changing of the tide. “Morning! Worked out my coffee machine, I see?”

Elliott hitched her brow up, and Mackenzie watched her teeth sink into her bottom lip. “Want to know a secret?”

Mackenzie leaned a hip against the countertop. “Always.”

Elliott braced her hands on the counter across from Mackenzie and lowered her voice. Mackenzie thought she meant it to be teasing, but the lowering of her voice, the gravelly sound that came out, well, she tried not to think about the vibrator in the top drawer of her dresser, but her fingers were tingling for it. “I have the same machine.”

And Mackenzie laughed, because of course she did. Of course this was one more thing they shared without any effort or prior planning whatsoever.

They sat at the table for two against the big window in the kitchen and admired the view while they sipped the strong coffee Elliott had made and nibbled at their respective, slightly stale bagels that Mackenzie had found in the back of her refrigerator. Occasionally they spoke—usually when Mackenzie scrolled across an interesting piece of news from the night prior. Usually something to do with the administration and usually something fucked up. They found that, thank god, they shared a mutual hatred for the man who occupied the Oval Office and his cronies and relished the results of elections on the East Coast.

Eventually Elliott took a breath and locked her phone and looked at Mackenzie.

Feeling Elliott’s eyes on her, Mackenzie looked up and saw a question there. “Is everything okay?”

Elliott hesitated for a moment before she spoke. “I went looking for the bathroom this morning.” Mackenzie thought that was an odd way to start a conversation but gave her the benefit of the doubt with an encouraging nod. Elliott’s brow furrowed. “I opened the wrong door. I’m sorry.”

Elliott’s eyes dropped down to the table, and it took Mackenzie’s brain a minute to connect the dots. Once the full, miserable picture presented itself, she squeezed her eyes closed once, before she brought them to Elliott’s. “You saw the nursery.” It came out softly and was accompanied by a sinking feeling.

This was the moment, then. This was why. Why she never brought people to her apartment. Only Frankie, who knew the whole sordid tale of who Mackenzie was behind the curtain. Because how would one ever explain away a crib and baby-animal decals on the walls and a changing table and a nursing chair?

Elliott nodded, another question in her eyes that she didn’t verbalize. It appeared that she was going to wait for Mackenzie to explain. Mackenzie sat with it for a moment. She could ask Elliott not to worry about it. Tell her she didn’t want to talk about it. The thought of that made the twisting and lurching in her stomach worse, though. So she settled on telling Elliott the truth.

“Reilly and I tried for a long time to have a baby.” Her mind threw her still frames of the different needles, and the yellowing bruises that had covered her stomach for years. Elliott was silent. “We started out with a less invasive method, and there was some fertilization issue, so that didn’t work.” She sucked in a breath and plowed on, ignoring the memory of the negative tests and unending cycle tracking, Reilly’s flat-out refusal to take a break or to have a go herself. “So we did IVF. Well, actually, ICSI. Kind of the same thing, but Google will tell you all you need to know. Anyway, it wasn’t as ‘guaranteed’ as we thought it would be. We thought we had some success our first cycle, but our only embryo—” She cut herself off, feeling her voice waver. “Well, it didn’t work out, but we found out early.” As if that made it better.

“Then we tried again the next cycle, and it didn’t really work at all. Nothing really grew. So we canceled that one.” She stopped again and took another sip of her coffee, steeling herself. “Then we had our third cycle, and it fucking sucked. They overcompensated on the drugs, and there was some mild overstimulation. Basically, I spent a lot of time drinking Gatorade and eating salty chips.” A mirthless laugh left her mouth, and Elliott smiled weakly.

Mackenzie clasped her hands together to still the small tremor that had started there. Elliott’s sock-covered foot lightly pressed on the top of hers under the table, and she took a shallow breath. “But we got heaps of eggs. Finally. And they were good. The embryos were growing… But then all but one stopped.” Stomach twisting at the memory of that little embryo, she pushed on. “The one that was still growing was a really, really good embryo.” She shoved down deep the memory of her and Reilly sharing a glass of sparkling cider on the eve of their transfer, toasting the “little embryo that could.” Bile burned her throat as it rose, the memory of the cautious optimism they’d shared that evening—before they’d made love in the glow of the prospect of finally realizing their dream of having a family—like acid. Their best chance. And, they’d already agreed, their last chance.

“Anyway, things went well. We had a positive home test, positive blood test, great scans.” Her eyes prickled, burned, and welled, as she remembered the tiny black-and-white image of their baby. Just a tiny yolk and sac, but present. There. Growing. The tiny flickering on the screen that the technician had said was their baby’s heartbeat, strong and sure. The comments from the doctor that there were no visible risk factors for this pregnancy. She shuddered in a breath. “I even had the morning sickness and the lightheadedness and the extreme tiredness. And it was a fucking relief to feel that sick and that miserable, you know?” Elliott’s face was red, and her eyes were glossy. Mackenzie had to look away.

“There’s a test you can do now that tells you about any genetic conditions your baby might have. And it also tells you the gender. I think it was around fourteen weeks we had that?” She couldn’t remember, and it almost made her laugh—the fact those details had been the most important, most essential thing for so long, and that they’d simply fallen out of her head. She ignored the soft gasp from across the table—Elliott connecting the dots, a single tear breaking the levy and sliding down her flushed cheek. “And when we found out we were having a healthy baby girl, well, our world just erupted, because how amazing,” Mackenzie whispered. “We were having a little girl. We even named her after that. Addison.”

“Fuck.” Elliott’s voice was as thick as molasses. And Mackenzie’s own tears finally broke the levy, spilling down her cheeks.

Mackenzie swallowed the bile in her throat. “I went to the twenty-week scan alone. Reilly had an unavoidable work trip. And, man, our little girl… her little face was so—” Mackenzie’s shoulders shuddered as a racking sob finally escaped her, the gaping hole in her chest positively tearing her apart. Elliott was beside her in a second, on her knees, her strong hands gripping Mackenzie’s thighs tightly as though she could stop her from breaking apart entirely.

“Mackenzie, you don’t have to⁠—”

“No,” Mackenzie said roughly through another shuddering sob. Firmer than she’d intended, and Elliott flinched but didn’t let go. “You need to hear it. Because of—” She paused, considering the words. She didn’t know which ones to choose. Nothing felt right in the wake of the previous evening. Vaguely she registered that Elliott was giving her an out. Giving her the opportunity to pack this part of herself back away. Keep intact the projection of herself she was comfortable with people outside her immediate orbit seeing. She found she didn’t want that. She wanted Elliott firmly in her orbit. Wanted her to know about the worst moment of Mackenzie’s life. And the realization stole her breath. “Because of whatever we are to each other.”

Elliott nodded, staring up at Mackenzie with wide, bottomless brown eyes that held more distress than even last night. Mackenzie unclenched her hands and placed one on top of Elliott’s. And Elliott flipped hers over and squeezed Mackenzie’s where it lay, while Mackenzie settled for staring at a spot of chocolate in the foam on her cappuccino. She inhaled a fortifying breath. “Her face was so beautiful. The technician showed me her tiny button nose, and her little lips. She had ten fingers and ten toes. Then, while I was just fawning over her little hands and feet, the technician went quiet.”

She remembered it vividly. The technician had moved on to double-check the heart. She mentioned before she started that it could take her a minute to get the heartbeat on the monitor because babies move around a lot. Mackenzie had frowned at the time, because she hadn’t seen her little girl move much at all. When she’d mentioned it to the technician, she’d put it down to her girl being asleep. The technician had mentioned that at the beginning and had said a sleeping baby would make the scan easier.

“She moved the wand around a lot. For what I thought was a pretty long time. Then she stopped and gave me this weird smile. She said she’d just need to run and get the doctor. I didn’t think anything of it, but she left me with a picture of her little face on the screen.” Mackenzie shuddered with a sob and brought her arms around herself, clutching at her ribs. Like it would keep her together. “After a while they came back, and the doctor told me there was no heartbeat.”

Elliott sucked her bottom lip into her mouth. “I’m so sorry. So sorry.” She scrambled up and wrapped Mackenzie in her strong arms, holding her so tight that it quelled the splitting in her chest. Mackenzie buried her face into Elliott’s shoulder and let the tears flow into the soft fabric of Elliott’s T-shirt.

She vowed right then that she wouldn’t tell Elliott what came after that. Not today. She wouldn’t tell her about how she hadn’t known how to tell Reilly, but all she’d wanted to do was talk to her wife. So she’d called her and told her, and Reilly had been silent before she’d asked what had caused it. And when Mackenzie told her she didn’t know and couldn’t ask right then, how Reilly had berated her for failing to find out. How Reilly hadn’t flown home to be with her. How Mackenzie had scheduled the procedure to remove their daughter from her body alone. How when the procedure was finally over, Reilly had wanted to pretend like the whole thing had never happened.

She wouldn’t tell Elliott right now about how—after—she’d bled like women do after they have healthy, live babies, or how she’d had to take pills to stop lactation. How the aching loneliness burrowed into her body and lived there still, not helped by the fact that she didn’t know who to talk to about what had happened, and how she’d never understood exactly what had happened. How the confusion and lack of resolution still kept her awake at night sometimes, haunted by whether it had been something she had caused, because of something she’d done. The doctor had assured her it wasn’t that. That it was most likely developmental. Her therapist had spent months encouraging her to believe the doctor. But she knew in her gut, and by the wave of guilt that overcame her late at night while she stared unblinking at the ceiling, that she never would. Not really.

No, she wouldn’t tell Elliott any of that today. She would, one day, if she got the opportunity. But not today.

After, Elliott had asked if she could hold Mackenzie, and if Mackenzie had ever had the constitution to refuse, it hadn’t shown itself today. So when Elliott lay down on the sofa on her side, back against the cushions, Mackenzie had curled into her, and Elliott had tugged Mackenzie tight against her chest. And they just lay there, Mackenzie breathing slowly in time with the rise and fall of Elliott’s chest.

Then, tears dry, Mackenzie had lifted her head out of the crook in Elliott’s elbow to find Elliott’s eyes closed. Her long lashes brushed at the dark circles under her eyes, and her face, usually so rigid with concentration or thought, was soft and relaxed and young. Mackenzie tried to stop her hand from drawing a line down the sharp plane of Elliott’s nose to her soft lips but found she couldn’t. When she was done, her hand rested there on Elliott’s cheek, and she felt the barely there sigh leave Elliott at the touch.