Twin A and Twin B

Press play. 

The image of the sonogram ricochets across our little universe. Twin A and Twin B. 

Now, rewind.  

Samantha, our surrogate, clenches her teeth as the doctor guides the embryo through a tube, while Chris covers his eyes. A speck of hope appears on the monitor. Samantha smiles at us. I cry. The doctor performs the same feat with a second embryo.  

Rewind some more.  

The nurse shows Chris and me to the room. Inside are a couple of chairs, an assortment of DVD porn that is intended for straight men, some comically sad DVD porn featuring men in leather that is intended for us, and remote controls neither of us will ever touch.  

“Do you want to do this together?” the nurse asks. 

Chris nearly spits with laughter. “No thanks,” he says. I would have been game.  

Rewind to the beginning.  

A New Year’s Eve party in New York City, the first December after 9/11. Chris is there. He has just left the seminary after spending two years studying to become a Jesuit priest and struggling to reconcile his faith and sexuality. I am there too, a few months after watching the burning towers from my law school dorm on Mercer Street and deciding to come out to my parents. The party is in a Tribeca loft. A magnetic force—lust, love, something—pulls us together.  

Fast forward.  

Ten years. There are a dozen fertilized eggs. I create a two-column chart to track the doctor’s daily updates. One column says B atop it for the embryos fertilized with my sperm; the other says C for those fertilized by Chris. On the third day, lots of marks represent viable embryos. By day five, half are crossed out. And by day seven, the doctor tells us none of our embryos are suitable for freezing. He says this outcome cannot tell us anything about the odds of success for the embryos already inside Samantha. We don’t believe him.  

Days. Numbers. Probabilities. It’s been this way since the beginning, when we decided to implant two embryos to increase our chances of having a child on the first try. 

Pause.  

Breathe.  

Think good thoughts. 

There. A pregnancy test. The first sonogram. Joy. Crazy, heart-thumping, think-the-world-is-yours kind of joy. The double-wide stroller, the crowded dinner table, the matching holiday outfits—they are all real to us. 

Fast forward. Not too far, though, or you might miss it.  

Just three weeks. Three weeks of my sister and my mother asking about “the twins.”  

It’s the day of Samantha’s second sonogram. Hours pass. A phone call from the 203 area code. 

“There were two heartbeats at the first sonogram,” the doctor says. “Today, there was only one.”  

Twin A remains. Twin B is gone.  

A blood test a week later will confirm it. Another doctor will call.  

“The demise of Twin B likely occurred at the eighth week.”  

Fast forward. We need to fast forward. 

The child who began as Twin A, our daughter Emma, is born in a California hospital room. My mother and Samantha’s mother are there, and they are dancing to the Beatles. I hold Emma for the first time, look into her tiny brown eyes and say, “We’ve been waiting so long for you.” 

“Does she have ten toes and ten fingers?” Chris asks the nurse. 

“Yes, yes she does.” 

One last fast forward. 

Emma is eight years old. She asks frequently for a brother or sister, and my heart breaks a little more every time. I wonder if, having shared eight weeks in the womb with Twin B, she holds some innate sense of loss, the way Chris and I hold the imagined memories of a child we never had, the way we hold on to the printout of the first sonogram. 

I lied.  

Fast forward again.  

Another doctor. Another embryo. Our hopes for another child.  

Pause.  

Breathe.  

Think good thoughts.  

Brad Snyder’s work has appeared in HuffPost Personal, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, Hippocampus Magazine, Under the Gum Tree, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Bay Path University and is currently working on a memoir. Brad lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his husband, daughter, son, and sometimes-warring cat and dogs. You can find more of his work at bradmsnyder.com and follow him online @bradmsnyderwriting. 

This essay first appeared in The Dillydoun Review, issue 3 (April 2021).