Last best chance, p.1
Last Best Chance, page 1
First published 2024 by
FREMANTLE PRESS
Fremantle Press Inc. trading as Fremantle Press
PO Box 158, North Fremantle, Western Australia, 6159
fremantlepress.com.au
Copyright © Brooke Dunnell, 2024
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Every reasonable effort has been made to seek permission for quotations contained herein. Please address any enquiries to the publisher.
Cover image: Ulas&Merve, Stocksy.com
Cover design: Nada Backovic, nadabackovic.com
ISBN 9781760992934 (paperback)
ISBN 9781760992941 (ebook)
Fremantle Press is supported by the State Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries.
Fremantle Press respectfully acknowledges the Whadjuk people of the Noongar nation as the traditional owners and custodians of the land where we work in Walyalup.
Brooke Dunnell has worked as a manuscript assessor and mentor, creative writing competition judge, and workshop facilitator. Her short fiction has appeared in journals and anthologies including Best Australian Stories, Meanjin, The Big Issue fiction edition, New Australian Fiction 2021 and New Australian Stories 2, and she was one of Westerly’s Mid-Career Fellows in 2023. Her short story collection Female(s and) Dogs was shortlisted for the 2020 Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award and the 2021 Woollahra Digital Literary Award. Her unpublished manuscript The Glass House won the Fogarty Literary Award in 2021 and was published in 2022 by Fremantle Press. Brooke lives in Boorloo/Perth with her husband and two snoring Cavalier King Charles spaniels.
For Andrew
Rachel
Cycle day 2 (CD2)
It wasn’t yet seven-thirty in the morning when Rachel Mather wriggled out of her underpants and kicked them across the exam room floor. Once they’d skidded safely beneath the chair that held her handbag, she turned so her bum brushed the edge of the gurney, then hoisted herself up. Friction made the protective square of white cotton, like a giant sanitary napkin, rumple, and she yanked the corners to straighten it beneath her buttocks.
Her legs pimpled in the cold. She slouched to look at her feet, wiggling her toes to get warmth into them. She’d brought socks but left them in her bag. Staring at socked feet was in some way worse than the artificial chill.
Someone knocked, then turned the door handle. ‘Ready?’ a female voice called, shoes squeaking. Rachel couldn’t remember seeing her before. ‘Rachel Mather?’ A flat-ironed fringe hung in the nurse’s eyes.
‘That’s me.’
The nurse pulled a clipboard from under her arm and flicked through the papers. ‘You’ve started to bleed?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fresh red blood? Not brown?’
Rachel had been getting her period for thirty years; she knew what it meant to say it had started. ‘Red as jam. Strawberry jam,’ she elaborated. ‘You know. I guess it could be—what, blackberry.’
The nurse eyed her through the curtain of her fringe.
Rachel tried to smile. ‘Sorry. I guess that’s a bad example.’
‘Are you nervous,’ the nurse said, without the upwards inflection of a question. Leaving the clipboard on a bench Rachel recognised from IKEA, she sat heavily on a wheeled stool and scooted it towards Rachel’s feet. ‘You can lie down now. You know the drill?’
‘I do.’
Holding the hem of her skirt between her legs until the final moment, Rachel swung one calf at a time into the stirrups, then lowered herself down until her back met the rustling cover. Some nurses offered a pillow, but not this one. Rachel touched her chin to her chest so she could see.
The nurse scuttled like a crab to one end of the room and withdrew the white wand from its holder. Excalibur, Rachel thought, as she always did at this moment. Next, the nurse snapped a cream-coloured sheath over the end, then squeezed clear lubricant onto it. The device prepared, the nurse rolled back to Rachel and used the wrist of her free hand to swipe her hair out of the way.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Bit of pressure.’
That was Rachel’s cue to drop her head back and close her eyes.
There was the brief sting of resistance, then the rush of warmth as the transducer entered. Rachel had been told many times—by medical professionals, not boyfriends—that her cervix was low, and she sucked in her breath as the probe butted against it.
‘Is that a bit uncomfy?’ the nurse asked. ‘Sorry.’
‘It’s okay,’ Rachel lied.
The nurse reached for a notebook and pen. ‘Secretarial duties.’ Her eyes met Rachel’s and there was the faintest trace of a grin.
Emotion drove up Rachel’s oesophagus and collected at the top of her throat. Just one hint of humanity and she was ready to sob.
She clicked the pen hard to drive away the feelings, letting the notebook fall open. At the top of the page was the letter E with a box next to it, and below that two columns headed L and R. Gritting her teeth as the probe moved, Rachel wrote her name and date in the space provided.
The nurse had turned to peer at a big screen crowded with black-and-white constellations, tracking a course through the stars. ‘Okay.’ She pressed buttons on a keyboard until there was a beep. ‘Endometrium, three point two.’
Rachel copied the number into the box labelled E.
‘Day one today?’ the nurse asked. ‘Or day two?’
‘It started yesterday afternoon, so. Day one and a half, I guess.’
The probe swung to the left. For a moment Rachel held her breath, sure she’d just been gored through the kidney, but almost as soon as it struck, the pain was gone. ‘Bowel, bowel, bowel,’ the nurse murmured. Rachel looked at the screen, unsure how these clouds of particulate were different from the others. ‘Lots of bowel this morning.’
‘I had my All-Bran.’
‘Here we go.’ The keyboard emitted another beep. ‘One, two …’ Rachel’s hopes rose. ‘No, that’s not—three. Okay. Left, three small.’
Rachel wrote this in the L column.
The nurse found the right ovary and scanned its surface. ‘Three as well.’ Rachel put the numeral under R, fingers slipping around the thin pen. ‘You’re forty-one?’
‘Forty-two.’
The nurse frowned as if she knew better. Counting follicles wasn’t like reading tea-leaves, Rachel thought, then corrected herself: it was. It was predicting the future.
‘All done.’ The nurse pulled the wand from between Rachel’s legs and held it up, showing the rust-coloured stain at the end. After a long, silent second of contemplation, she pulled the sheath inside-out.
Cheeks flushing, Rachel shut the notebook and held it out. ‘My birthday was a few weeks ago,’ she said. ‘It’s March.’
‘Jeez.’ The nurse looked grim, and for a moment Rachel felt the sharp pain of another person’s doubt. ‘March already? Wasn’t it just Christmas?’
‘Tell me about it.’
The nurse took the notebook. ‘Six follicles isn’t terrible for forty-two. Are you for IVF or embryo transfer?’
‘Transfer.’
She smiled. ‘Oh well, it doesn’t matter then. Just the lining. They put you on HRT?’
All this information was in the clipboard. Freeing her legs from the stirrups, Rachel sat up. ‘I’m doing the ovulation induction injections.’
‘Really?’ The nurse shrugged. ‘I would’ve thought …’ She rolled her stool over to the wall calendar. ‘Well, if all goes to plan, let’s see.’ Her chin bounced as she counted the dates. ‘Two weeks, then three, four, five days—the first likely date for your transfer is the nineteenth, if you want to pencil that into your diary.’
Feeling fluid seep from the tunnel the wand had pressed through her, Rachel reached for the box of scratchy tissues and held a handful between her legs. The screen was frozen on an image of her ovary, mostly white with three black seeds scattered across it. Three was not her worst number, but it was close.
But, as the nurse had said, the follicles didn’t matter. They were the means to an end.
The nurse squinted at the coloured dots that coded each date on the calendar. ‘I’m on transfers that week!’ she said, and Rachel’s heart sank at how genuine she sounded. ‘I’ll probably see you.’
‘I’m not—I won’t—’ Rachel inhaled to collect her thoughts. ‘I’m not doing the transfer here.’
The nurse’s face tightened in suspicion. ‘What? Where are you having it?’
‘Overseas.’
‘Oh.’ For a beat, they were both silent. ‘Right. You’re that patient.’
Rachel wanted to tell her that this betrayal was also contained in the file, but instead she just nodded. ‘That’s me.’
Rachel had first visited this fertility clinic years earlier. Her marriage to Ben had been over for six months, and the devastation left in its wake found a focus: she didn’t want to get old without at least trying to have a baby. This was the biggest clinic in Perth, advertised on FM radio and fertility podcasts, and she figured it was worth a consultation. She was thirty-eight then, rosebud young compared to now, with rich ripe eggs going to waste every month.
The doctor who saw her suggested she go straight to IVF instead of insemination. She was older, in her late fifties, with waves of elegant grey
As Rachel’s head buzzed from the terminology, the doctor found a different slip of paper in her drawer. ‘I know I’m blunt,’ she said, ‘but I don’t like to get anyone’s hopes up. The truth is, if you want this, you need to give yourself the best chance.’ She marked the paper, then looked up. ‘Do you want a baby now?’
Rachel couldn’t have said no, even if that had been the answer.
‘I want to try.’
The doctor pushed the paper across the desk.
It was a list of fees for treatment, with a sharp tick beside one of the highest amounts. Donor sperm insemination, the procedure Rachel had inquired about, was a few rows above. The price alongside it was much, much lower.
She told the doctor she’d think about it, but never went back. The difference in price was egregious, wasn’t it? The situation couldn’t be that dire. Rachel had regular periods, minimal cramping, if that meant anything. Her cervical screens were always clear. Why did the clinic offer low-intervention treatments if they didn’t want to perform them? To get patients in the door, probably.
The boutique clinic where she’d ended up had the more charismatic Dr Leonard, who had agreed with her position: she was only thirty-eight, with reasonable test results; no reason to think a couple of rounds of insemination wouldn’t have the intended outcome. When they hadn’t, and subsequent cycles involved more and more interventions—induced ovulation through pills and injectables, then basic IVF, then hormone replacement therapy and genetic testing and even fertilisation by way of a microscopic needle depositing a single spermatozoon into each egg, a procedure Rachel hadn’t even know was possible until they recommended it—she was embarrassed to remember the doctor at the big clinic and how her prediction was turning out to be right. Rachel had already spent double the amount that had driven her away, and she felt herself chasing this dream until there was no money left.
She was only back because no other clinic would work with the overseas doctors. They considered it too risky, not knowing exactly how things would proceed. Dr Leonard himself had been grave, like a father warning his daughter off a bad-news boyfriend.
‘These foreign places can be cowboys. It’s never quite clear what you’re getting into.’ He folded his hands together sadly and Rachel despised him, this man who now spoke like she should have known better. ‘If we’d started with IVF earlier, perhaps …’ He’d given her a weighted look.
Trying to keep her voice from trembling, she said, ‘You thought my chances were good when we started.’
‘Hindsight is difficult,’ he said, as if he hadn’t just indulged in some revisions of his own. ‘There’s a lesson here for everyone.’
Rachel’s was in humility. She went back to the big clinic and the female doctor gave her the grace of pretending they’d never met. Her hair was white now, like a queen in a fantasy novel. They’d do bloods and scans for the first few days of her cycle, before she left the country. At the end of the appointment, the doctor handed over a different slip of paper.
It was a statement indemnifying the clinic if there were any issues overseas. Rachel signed eagerly this time.
The waiting room was full when Rachel emerged, sanitised and dressed, to register for her next scan. You could only book in for a particular date, not a precise time, so a queue of women formed even before the clinic opened. The patients came in waves: shift workers first, either on their way from work or in a hurry to get there, clutching thermoses and looking bleary; then office workers in slacks and shell tops, thumbing emails as they waited; and last, patients whose jobs were mysterious or non-existent, catching the end of the monitoring window after sleeping late or dropping children at school, dressed in gym gear or loungewear or jeans. Once she’d seen a woman in a cocktail dress sticking on fake eyelashes as she waited.
The transition to the last group had begun during Rachel’s ultrasound, and she saw shorts and thongs on lower limbs as she made her way to the desk. In the public parts of the clinic she kept her eyes lowered, trying to maintain a sense of privacy and avoid the wistful, knowing looks that could sometimes be exchanged here, the other patients acting as if they’d seen to the very depths of her soul and been startled by their own reflection.
There were a couple of women ahead of her, so Rachel snagged a copy of the day’s newspaper to flick through. A few pages in, below the headline CASPIE APPEARANCE ALMOST CONFIRMED, was a large image of a woman hurrying towards an SUV. The shot had been taken on the sly, from beyond the vehicle Cassandra Caspie was approaching. The tech entrepreneur had an irritated expression, which was unflattering. Rachel guessed there were at least a couple more photogenic versions snapped in the seconds before Caspie spotted the paparazzo and that the one with her mouth hanging open and a V creased into her forehead had been chosen deliberately. Rachel felt sorry for her until she reached the caption: Caspie is rumoured to have delivered triplets in a home birth at her Auckland mansion.
Sucking her teeth, she folded the paper and dropped it back on the rack. The woman was ten years younger than Rachel, a genius and a billionaire, and now apparently the mother of an instant family. She didn’t need sympathy over a bad photo.
After paying for the appointment and getting a reminder card with Sunday’s date, Rachel was able to leave. It was bright outside, and the heat roused every pinprick of lubricant she’d attempted to wet-wipe away. She crossed the road to her car with inner thighs tacking together, humidity releasing the sharp odour of antiseptic.
Without a proper shower, you couldn’t be truly clean after a scan. It was like sex in that way, the clammy pressures leaving a latent dampness set off by warmth and movement. When Rachel got to work, she would immediately lock herself in a cubicle and perform a second cleansing, change into a clean pair of knickers, and trade the thick sanitary napkin for a tampon. But the moisture would linger; she knew that from experience. This was not her first date with the wand.
The law firm where she worked was a crawl through peak-hour traffic to the other side of the CBD. At a red light she stopped behind a four-wheel drive with three kids in the back, straw boaters knocking together. Behind the wheel, their father rested his forearm on the edge of the wound-down window and tapped along to a beat Rachel couldn’t hear.
Glancing in her rear-view mirror, she tried to imagine a child in the back seat of her own car. A chunky backwards-facing bassinet; a cushioned black booster; a primary-schooler colouring in a book; a teenager with earphones, eyes fixed on a screen. But the space was too empty for the superimposition, the seat crevices too free of crumbs.
Someone beeped to let her know the lights had changed, and she yanked her foot off the brake.
A few years earlier, Rachel had asked her mother if she’d pictured herself with kids before having them. She was thinking about trying to have a baby on her own but felt thrown at never being able to imagine her future offspring. Some of her friends claimed they’d known their own kids since before conception, like they were hanging out in some other realm, waiting patiently to be born.
Usually, Jean Mather wouldn’t have indulged a question like that, would’ve waved it away like an annoying fly, but they were looking after her brother’s twins and she must have been feeling nostalgic.
‘I always saw myself with older children,’ she commented, rocking the boy on her lap. Rachel was feeding the other, trying to aim the bottle between the dense gums. ‘Eight or nine years old. Never with a little baby.’ Jean offered a dazed smile. ‘But they have to be babies first, don’t they?’
Unless you adopt, Rachel thought, but didn’t want to interrupt when her mother was being honest. ‘But you always knew you’d have kids?’
‘Well, that’s what you did, in my day.’ Realising what she might have admitted to, Jean’s neck stiffened. ‘Fine with me, of course, because your father and I wanted them. We had Conny right away, didn’t we?’
