by
C.J. Hauser
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After the insemination, she tells Brynn to lie still for about ten minutes. Then she asks Brynn if she wants to keep the vial.
“Yes?” Brynn says.
“I forgot to keep all my kids’ stuff,” the nurse says, “and now they ask where it is.” She leaves.
“No one asked me that the last times,” Brynn says, still lying on the table. “About the vial.”
“You could turn it into a Christmas ornament,” I say. “Hang it on the tree every year and reminisce.”
Brynn laughs. “Or I could keep it in a drawer somewhere and take it out when they want to do anything and say, ‘Why don’t you ask your father about that?’ ”
I am wheezing I am laughing so hard.
Ross Sutherland is a poet and playwright and an all-around gorgeous madman. He has this podcast called Imaginary Advice and the “Sutherland Dunthorne Luck Index” is my favorite episode. There’s a running gag among his friend group that whenever something good happens to his friend fellow writer Joe Dunthorne, something bad happens to Ross. And so they devise a test to determine whether this is true. They go to a casino together. And sure enough, Joe wins some money and Ross loses all of his money. Theory proved! But then they talk about what happened in the casino. Ross asks Joe why he cashed out when he did, and Joe says it was because he’d won some money. He cashed out not because he was financially prudent but because he’d achieved a sort of narrative completeness: man goes to casino, plays cards, wins money, the end. Ross, on the other hand, had been up and down throughout the night, too, but he didn’t stop playing. Not because he loved gambling but because, he sort of realizes as he’s talking about this, the story of the night couldn’t quite seem over to him until he’d lost all his money.
It had nothing to do with luck. It had to do with what kind of story expectations they were carrying around inside them. For Joe, the story he was in didn’t feel over until something good had happened. For Ross, only losing everything could feel like the end.
I told Lindsay because she was beautiful and kind and patient and loved good things like birds and I wondered what she would say back to me. What would every good person I knew say to me when I told them that the wedding to which they’d RSVP’d was off and that the life I’d been building for three years was going to be unstitched and repurposed?
Lindsay said it was brave not to do a thing just because everyone expected you to do it.
Jeff was sitting outside, in front of the cabin with Warren, as Lindsay and I talked, tilting the sighting scope so it pointed toward the moon. The screen door was open and I knew he’d heard me, but he never said anything about my confession.
What he did do was let me drive the boat.
The next day it was just him and me and Lindsay on the water. We were cruising fast and loud. “You drive,” Jeff shouted over the motor. Lindsay grinned and nodded. I had never driven a boat before. “What do I do?” I shouted. Jeff shrugged. I took the wheel. We cruised past small islands, families of pink roseate spoonbills, garbage tankers swarmed by seagulls, blowing fields of grass and wolfberries, and I realized it was not that remarkable for a person to understand what another person needed.