Just Breathe

He looked up and, for an instant, she saw a dark flash in his gaze. “Sure,” he said, pushing back from the table and organizing his briefcase. “Why else would we have sex?”

This resentful attitude had started several months ago. Duty sex, for the sake of procreation, was no turn-on for either of them, and she couldn’t wait for his libido to return.

There had been a time when he’d looked at her in a way that made her feel like a goddess, but that was before he’d gotten sick. It was hard to be interested in sex, Jack often said these days, after getting your gonads irradiated. Not to mention the surgical removal of one of the guys. Jack and Sarah had made a pact. If he survived, they would go back to the dream they’d had before the cancer—trying to have a baby. Lots of babies. They had joked about his single testicle, they’d given it a name—the Uni-ball—and lavished it with attention. Once his chemo was finished, the doctors said he had a good chance of regaining fertility. Unfortunately, fertility had not been restored. Or sexual function, for that matter. Not on a predictable level, anyway.

They had decided, then, to pursue artificial insemination using the sperm he’d preserved as a precaution before starting aggressive treatment. Thus began the cycle of Clomid, obsessive monitoring, frequent visits to North Shore Fertility Solutions and bills so enormous that Sarah had stopped opening them.

Fortunately, Jack’s medical bills were covered, because cancer wasn’t supposed to happen to newlyweds trying to start a family.

The nightmare had come to light at 11:27 on a Tuesday morning. Sarah clearly remembered staring at the time on the screen of her computer, trying to remember to breathe. The expression on Jack’s face had her in tears even before he said the words that would change the course of their lives: “It’s cancer.”

After the tears, she had vowed to get her husband through this illness. For his sake, she had perfected The Smile, the one she summoned when chemo landed him in a puking, quivering heap on the floor. The you-can-do-it-champ, I’m-behind-you-all-the-way smile.

This morning, feeling contrite after their exchange, she had tried to be sociable as she flipped through the brochure for Shamrock Downs, his current project, a luxury development in the suburbs. The brochure touted, “Equestrian center designed by Mimi Lightfoot, EVD.”

“Mimi Lightfoot?” Sarah had asked, studying the soft-focus photographs of pastures and ponds.

“Big name to horse people,” he assured her. “What Robert Trent Jones is to designing golf courses, she is to arenas.”

Sarah wondered how challenging it was to design an oval-shaped arena. “What’s she like?”

Jack had shrugged. “You know, the horsy type. Dry skin and no makeup, hair in a ponytail.” He made a whinnying sound.

“You’re so bad.” She walked him to the door to say goodbye. “But you smell delicious.” She inhaled the fragrance by Karl Lagerfeld, which she’d given him last June. She’d secretly bought it, along with a box of chocolate cigars, for Fathers Day, thinking there might be something to celebrate. When it turned out there wasn’t, she had given him the Lagerfeld anyway, just to be nice. She’d eaten the chocolate herself.

She noticed, too, that he was wearing perfectly creased trousers, one of his fitted shirts from the Custom Shop, and an Hermès tie. “Important clients?” she asked.

“What?” He frowned. “Yeah. We’re meeting about the marketing plans for the development.”

“Well,” she said. “Have a good day, then. And wish me luck.”

“What?” he said again, shrugging into his Burberry coat.

She shook her head, kissed his cheek. “I’ve got a hot date with your army of seventeen million motile sperm,” she said.

“Ah, shit. I really can’t change this meeting.”

“I’ll be all right.” Kissing him goodbye one more time, she suppressed a twinge of resentment at his testy, distracted air.

After the procedure, she followed the exit signs to the elevator and descended to the parking garage. Freakishly, the clinic had valet parking, but Sarah couldn’t bring herself to use it. She was already indulged enough. She put on her cashmere-lined gloves, flexing her fingers into the smooth deerskin, then eased onto the heated leather seat of her silver Lexus SUV, which came with a built-in car seat. All right, so Jack had jumped the gun a little, buying this thing. But maybe, just maybe, nine months from now, it would be perfect. The ideal car for a soccer-mom-to-be.

She adjusted the rearview mirror for a peek at the backseat. At present, it was a jumble of drafting paper, a bag from Dick Blick Art Materials and, of all things, a fax machine, which was practically a dinosaur in this day and age. Jack thought she should let it die a natural death. She preferred to take it to a repair shop. It had been the first piece of equipment she’d bought with her earnings as an artist, and she wanted to keep it, even though no one ever faxed her anymore. She did have a career, after all. Not a very successful one, not yet, anyway. Now that Jack was cancer-free, she intended to focus on the comic strip, expanding her syndication. People thought it was simple, drawing a comic strip six days a week. Some believed she could draw a whole month’s worth in one day, and then slack off the rest of the time. They had no idea how difficult and consuming self-syndication was, particularly at the beginning of a career.

When her car emerged from the parking lot, the very worst of Chicago’s weather flayed the windshield. The city had its own peculiar brand of slush that seemed to fling itself off Lake Michigan, sullying vehicles, slapping at pedestrians and sending them scurrying for cover. Sarah would never get used to this weather, no matter how long she lived here. When she had first arrived in the city, a wide-eyed freshman from a tiny beach village in Northern California, she thought she’d encountered the storm of the century. She had no idea that this was normal for Chicago.

“Illinois,” her mother had said when Sarah had received an offer of admission the spring of her senior year of high school. “Why?”

“The University of Chicago is there,” Sarah explained.

“We have the best schools in the country right here in our backyard,” her mother had said. “Cal, Stanford, Pomona, Cal Poly…”

Sarah had stood firm. She wanted to go to the University of Chicago. She didn’t care about the distance or the god-awful weather or the flat landscape. Nicole Hollander, her favorite cartoon artist, had gone there. It was the place Sarah felt she belonged, at least for four years.

She’d never imagined living the rest of her life here, though. She kept waiting for it to grow on her. The city was tough and blustery, unpretentious and dangerous in some places, expansive and generous in others. Great food everywhere you turned. It had been overwhelming. Even the innate friendliness of Chicagoans had been confusing. How could you tell which ones were truly your friends?

She had always planned to leave the moment she graduated. She hadn’t pictured raising a family here. But that was life for you. Filled with surprises.

Jack Daly had been a surprise as well—his dazzling smile and irresistible charm, the swiftness with which Sarah had fallen for him. He was a Chicago native, a general contractor in the family business. His entire world was right here—his family, friends and work. There was no question of where Sarah and Jack would live after they married.

The city itself was part of Jack’s blood and bone. While most people believed life was a movable feast, Jack could not conceive of living anywhere but the Windy City. Long ago, in the dead of a brutal winter, when she hadn’t seen the sun or felt a temperature above freezing for weeks, she had suggested moving somewhere a bit more temperate. He’d thought she was kidding, and they had never spoken of it again.

“I’ll build you your dream house,” Jack had promised her when they got engaged. “You’ll learn to love the city, you’ll see.”

She loved him. The jury was still out on Chicago.

His cancer—that had been a surprise, too. They had made it through, she reminded herself every single day. But the disease had changed them both.

Chicago itself was a city of change. It had burned to the ground back in 1871. Families had been separated by the wind-driven firestorm that left nothing but charred timber and ash in its wake. People torn from their loved ones posted desperate letters and notices everywhere, determined to find their way back to each other.

Sarah pictured herself and Jack stepping gingerly through the smoldering ruins as they tried to make their way back to each other. They were refugees of another kind of disaster. Survivors of cancer.

Her front tire sank into a pothole. The jolt sent an eruption of mud-colored slush across the windshield, and she heard an ominous thud from the backseat. A glance in the mirror revealed that the fax machine had done a swan dive to the floor. “Lovely,” she muttered. “Just swell.” She pressed the wiper fluid wand, but the ducts sputtered out only an impotent trickle. The warning light blinked Empty.

Traffic crawled in a miserable stream northward. Stuck at a stoplight for the third cycle, Sarah thumped the steering wheel with the heel of her hand. “I don’t have to sit in traffic,” she said. “I’m self-employed. I might even be pregnant.”

She wondered what Shirl would do in this situation. Shirl was her alter ego in Sarah’s comic strip, Just Breathe. A sharper, more confident, thinner version of her creator, Shirl was audacious; she had a screw-you attitude and an impulsive nature.

“What would Shirl do?” Sarah asked aloud. The answer came to her in an instant: Get pizza.

The very thought brought on such a craving that she laughed. A craving. Maybe she was already showing signs of pregnancy.

She veered down a side street and punched in “pizza” on her GPS. A mere six blocks away was a place called Luigi’s. Sounded promising. And it looked promising, she saw when she pulled up in front of the place a few minutes later. There was a red neon sign that read, Open Till Midnight and another sign that promised Chicago’s Finest Deep Dish Pizza Since 1968.

As she pulled up the hood of her coat and made a dash for the entrance, Sarah had a brilliant idea. She would take the pizza to share with Jack. His meeting was probably over by now and he’d be starved.

She beamed at the young man behind the counter. The name Donnie was stitched on the pocket of his shirt. He looked like a nice kid. Polite, a little shy, well-groomed. “Pretty nasty out there,” Donnie commented.

“You said it,” she agreed. “Traffic was a nightmare, which is why I took a detour and ended up here.”

“What can I get you?”

“A thin-crust pizza to go,” she said. “Large. And a Coke with extra ice and…” She paused, thinking how good a nice cold, syrupy Coke would taste. Or a beer or margarita, for that matter. She resisted temptation, though. According to all the fertility advice books she’d read, she was supposed to keep her body a temple free of caffeine and alcohol. For many women, alcohol was often a key factor in conception, not a forbidden substance. Getting pregnant was a whole lot more fun for people who didn’t read advice books.

“Ma’am?” the kid prompted.

The “ma’am” made her feel old. “Just the one Coke,” she said. Right this very minute, a zygote might be forming itself into a clump of cells inside her. Giving it a shot of caffeine was a bad idea.

“Toppings?” the kid asked.