I started dating Meg’s best friend Carly during the summer after Junior year of college, then married her in 1994, just a month after graduating. We immediately started trying to get pregnant. Due to an eventual diagnosis that Carly’s fallopian tubes were blocked, we had to resort to in vitro fertilization, which my first job’s health insurance actually paid for back then. Four embryos resulted from the first IVF cycle in the summer of ’96. Two were frozen and two were implanted into Carly and both took.
Three months into the pregnancy, Meg and Carly had gone shopping together on Black Friday. Meg was driving home on the interstate, with Carly in the passenger seat, when some maniac with a rifle started shooting into the backs of cars from a perch next to an overpass where he couldn’t be seen by oncoming cars. A bullet smashed through the rear window and the seat and hit Carly in the back, tearing a hole in the abdominal section of her aorta. As she hemorrhaged internally, despite Meg’s desperate efforts to stop the exterior bleeding after pulling the car into the breakdown lane, Carly realized she was dying and begged Meg to be a surrogate for her other two embryos. Her last words before losing consciousness were “Josh needs them.”
Carly and our unborn children died that day, before paramedics could even reach them in the chaos of dozens of crashed cars that resulted before the police shot the gunman. We hadn’t even known their gender at the time, but it was revealed in the autopsy that they were a boy and a girl. We had discussed Michael and John as names for boys and Cassandra and Amy for girls, so Michael and Cassandra were the names that went on the tombstone with Carly.
I felt at first like I had died with them. The only clear memories I have of the next two weeks are of Meg. She never left my side, when I’d probably have starved myself if left alone.
It took me almost three months after Carly’s death to agree to Meg’s surrogacy of the two remaining embryos, as she prepared her body for implantation. Then, another two months passed after that before I gave in to Meg’s renewed attempts to get me into bed. Between an entry Meg discovered in Carly’s diary indicating that she planned to invite Meg into our bed for a threesome if I had a vasectomy we had been discussing and Meg already being pregnant so I didn’t have to worry about impregnating her, I gave in to our first of many nights of passion as Meg moved in with me, initially for the duration of the pregnancy.
I knew Meg was offering comfort, both emotional and physical, after losing Carly. But, I also knew we couldn’t realistically have the relationship she craved as husband and wife. As the pregnancy progressed, she wasn’t at all prepared to end things with me or to say goodbye to the twin girls her body was growing and just be their aunt.
The compromise we reached was that Meg would adopt the girls and co-parent them with me, living in the same house. We would maintain separate bedrooms and avoid our daughters or anyone else ever seeing us as an intimate couple. For public purposes, at least, a sexless pseudo-marriage. Our parents expressed some doubts about the living arrangement, but came to see it as the best option for raising their grand-daughters with two parents.