Safe from the Sea by Peter Geye Read Free Book Online Page B

dialed the pay phone.
    “Hey,” he said, “I didn’t think I’d catch you.” The phone at Natalie’s office had rung five times before she’d picked up.
    “I was starting to think you’d forgotten me. I left messages on your cell.”
    “I don’t have cell reception up here. Sorry. I was going to call last night.”
    “It doesn’t matter. I worked late last night anyway. New clients.” She was a management consultant and never discussed clients by name. The late nights were a job hazard. “How’s your father? How’s everything going?”
    Noah looked out the window at the galloping lake, he glanced at his father. “It’s hard to say. We went fishing yesterday,” he said as though it were the strangest thing. He paused. “What about you?”
    Her voice turned grave. “Now that you’re in the middle of the woods, I’m finally going to ovulate again. Of course.”
    He could hear her crying and felt an impulse to hang up the phone, not because he didn’t want to hear what she said but because he knew that whatever he replied would be monumentally wrong.
    “Okay,” he began cautiously. “I know the timing is terrible, I know it stinks, and I wish I were there—”
    “But you’re not,” she interrupted. “I thought this would be the month. I wish you were here.”
    “I know, me, too. But we might have to wait until next time.”
    “What if there isn’t a next time?”
    A next time. Since their most recent failure, an ectopic pregnancy that had taken Natalie months to recover from, she had come to suspect that the reason things weren’t working—the reason their efforts had yielded nothing but endless fretting, thousands of dollars in fertility-clinic bills, and a terminal attitude—was that they hadn’t been doing everything together. “You go to the clinic at eight in the morning to drop off your sperm, and I go at noon to be inseminated between a tuna-fish sandwich and a conference call—I mean, how could we expect anything? It’s just unnatural,” she had said, ignoring the fact that their course of action couldn’t be anything but unnatural. So they’d decided they would make their clinic visits together, sure that the next time things would be different. The next time was now.
    He tried again. “I know this hasn’t been easy.”
    “Hasn’t been easy? Noah, they had an easier time putting a man on the moon than they’ve had getting me pregnant. Keeping me pregnant anyway.” She blew her nose. “Maybe you could overnight it.”
    He could practically see her, sitting behind her desk at work, looking out the fourteenth-story window. The tears, he’d not often seen them for any other reason.
    “There’s an OB/GYN at St. Mary’s hospital in Duluth. You’d have to go down there, but I bet we could make arrangements. They could still inseminate me tomorrow.”
    Inseminate , the sort of word that had become stock in the parlance of their infertility. All the words— prescription , ovulation , suppository , uterus , fallopian , cervix , endometriosis , laparoscopy , motility —made the whole thing feel like a science project.
    “I’m sure I could make an appointment.”
    “So we could overnight it? Nat, honest to God.”
    “What?”
    “Let’s be reasonable.”
    “Injecting myself with a syringe full of fertility drugs every night is reasonable?”
    “Is it the end of the world if we have to wait another month?”
    “What if you’re there for three months, what happens then?”
    This startled him, and he looked across the dining room at his father, whose chin was on his chest. He must have been sleeping. “I’m not going to be here for three months. Listen, I just got here. I can’t very well leave tomorrow. My father needs me right now. He’s not well, remember?” Across the dining room Olaf twitched, his head bobbed up, and he looked around the restaurant, confused. “He can hardly get his feet off the ground.”
    “What’s wrong with him? Where is he