The Fertility Star

The Fertility Star

Milly blamed me. Always and for everything and so when we began to doubt our ability to conceive a child…she blamed me. She said that my sperm count was low and that it always had been. News to me. She said that I was probably shooting blanks, like when a referee starts a race. And for a minute I believed her. Hell, I’d done my share of drugs in college and quiet as it’s kept, the code loving loser who guys liked to tease actually caught an STD, yep, from a woman I met while studying in Prague…and I’m proud of it. Some guys go their whole lives without sleeping with a loose woman, and some guys, like me, take it when and where they can get it. And it, got me. Look. I’m trying to lighten up the truth. Milly blames me for us not being able to have a baby. And a baby is all Milly ever really wanted.

What I had to do to get them the sample they needed is none of your business but I came back with a confirmed sperm count to rival a full grown male elephant. Ok, I exaggerate, but only a little. That night, manhood rebooted, I drank expensive imported beer, watched baseball, and walked with a renewed bounce in my step. Afterall, my sperm count was fucking ‘amazing’. But, that didn’t help my Milly. No, she took my new found strut to mean that it was her fault. That the only thing she ever wanted, a baby, was the one thing that she could never have. Not because of me. But because of her. Milly blamed Milly.

She stopped smiling, went to work without motivation and made love without connection. I assured her that it was fine and that we just had to have more sex…in different rooms…all over the house. The next two months I lived like a porn star and it was…exhausting. And then it happened…morning sickness…mood swings…weight gain.

The pregnancy test came back negative. So we took another and it came back…negative. Milly cried and cried that night, like an infant pulled off of its mother’s tit. And I held her close so that she could hear my heartbeat. And together we did something I thought only kids did. We opened up the blinds and wished upon a star. A big bright twinkling star that seemed to be placed there, shining out from jet blackness, just for us to see. We held hands. We closed our eyes and we wished for a baby no matter what the doctors said.

The doctors said that Milly was infertile and that her womb was unable to support life. Unable to support life is what they told her. I grabbed the doctor by his shirt collar and slammed his head against his office wall. By the time I let him go Milly was hysterical. He dropped all charges but banned us from his office.

The walk home from the police station that night was surreal. Everything seemed to move too slow, cars made simple turns and I heard airplanes when I could see none. Milly and I held hands as we walked down on the center line of a dark two-lane side-street. She lit a cigarette even though we didn’t smoke. I took a drag and coughed.

Rain can be relaxing when you let it but tonight it was just cold, wet and pelting us in sheets of hard droplets. Wet shoes suck and our socks were drenched and itchy. Like our hope. Milly heard it first.

The sound wasn’t exactly like a baby crying but if you really, really wanted to hear a baby crying then that was what it sounded like. Like a baby crying. Milly simply turned down the dark alley without saying a word. Searching. I followed because when Milly gets like this you don’t get in her way. You do as Milly tells you. You do it quick. The first dumpster was full of garbage and old mildewy clothing. The second was overflowing and silent but…from the third, the dumpster behind the comic book store…there was a definite sound. Like a newborn kitten whining for its mother.

Milly reached for the dumpster lid butI grabbed her hand. The look we shared was confirmation of our common intention to love whatever we found in that dumpster. I let go of her hand.

As she gently and cautiously removed the dumpster lid I lost all air in my lungs. Not like being punched in the solar lexes, exactly, more like the air was violently snatched from my lungs leaving me gasping. It was as if what my eyes were showing me didn’t make sense and so, without control, I stumbled backwards, into a group of garbage cans and onto the ground. “Milly! Get away from it!” But Milly was never good at taking orders from men…especially not me and so she did what any new mother would do. She took off her jacket and leaned into the dumpster. It seemed that she was in there for a decade but slowly she pulled up a squirming little bundle and held it to her breast. “Shhhh, shhhhhh, now, Mama’s got you…shhhhh…”

A soft purring or buzzing or vibrating seemed to flow out of her arms, not the purring of a cat, not the buzzing of a bee and certainly not the crying of a baby. But…Milly smiled.

And like that, the sparkle that had packed up and left my girl’s eyes returned brighter than ever. She smiled and somehow, as though on cue, I smiled…and that’s when Nathanial smiled at us for the first time and that night, in an alley that smelled like garbage, we realized that Nathanial was our son. And that the star had granted our wish.

It didn’t matter that he didn’t look like other children…or that he was definitely of the grey variety of alien. Definitely grey on the outside but behind his huge blinking black eyes…I can see the same sparkle, the same joy and the same light I’ve always seem in Milly’s eyes…he must have gotten it from his mother.

But sometimes, late at night, I worry that his biological parents might come back looking for him.