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hurt so much she couldn’t sleep on her stomach, and yet that was her favorite position for sleep, facedown, without so much as a pillow. Now she had to contend with new sleeping quarters, a sagging twin bed in this strange, sunny room that smelled like artificial pine trees.
    All she had wanted was to get away—as far away as possible. When she was in Connecticut, facing the utter wasteland her life had become, moving to Pluto had seemed too close. But now she was at loose ends; from a distance, things somehow looked worse than they did when she was standing in the middle of them. And the bizarre, unfathomable fact was, she missed Peter.
    Peter, Melanie’s husband of six years, was very tall for an Asian man. Tall, broad in the shoulders, startlingly handsome—people on the streets of Manhattan occasionally mistook him for the chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Melanie had met Peter at a bar on the East Side. Peter, at that time, had worked on Wall Street, but shortly after he and Melanie married he became a market analyst at Rutter, Higgens, where he met Ted Stowe, Vicki’s husband. Vicki and Ted were expecting their first child; they were moving to Darien. Melanie and Vicki became good, fast friends, and soon Melanie was pestering Peter about moving to Connecticut, too. (“Pestering” was how Peter described it now. At the time, to Melanie, it had seemed like a mutual decision to move.) Melanie wanted children. She and Peter started trying—nothing happened. But Melanie had fallen in love with a house, not to mention the green-grass-and-garden vision of her life in Connecticut. They moved and became the only young couple in Darien without children. At times, Melanie blamed her fertility problems on the suburb. Babies were everywhere. Melanie was forced to watch the stroller brigade on its way to the school bus stop each morning. She was confronted by children wherever she turned—at the Stop & Shop, at the packed day care of her gym, at the annual Christmas pageant of St. Clement’s Episcopal Church.
    You’re so lucky, the mothers would say to Melanie. You’re free to do whatever you want. You can sit through dinner and a bottle of wine at Chuck’s without sixteen hundred interruptions, without all the silverware and half the dinner rolls ending up on the floor, without the waitstaff glaring at you like you’re something stuck to the bottom of a mortician’s shoe. The mothers were kind; they pretended to envy Melanie. But she knew that they pitied her, that she had become a woman defined by her faulty biology. Never mind that Melanie had graduated from Sarah Lawrence, that she had taught English to the hill tribes of northern Thailand after college; never mind that Melanie was an avid gardener and a dedicated power walker. When the other women saw her, they thought: That’s the woman who’s trying to conceive. The one who’s having difficulty. Barren, maybe. Something’s wrong, poor thing.
    Peter didn’t acknowledge any of this, and Melanie knew now, in the post-breakup where deep, dark secrets oozed out like sludge from the sewer, that he’d never cared whether they conceived or not. (No wonder she’d had such trouble! Everyone knew the game was 90 percent attitude, positive thinking, visualization.) Peter had tried to make her happy, and the best way he knew to do this, being a man, was to spend money on her in flabbergasting ways. Weekend trips to Cabo, the Connaught in London, the Delano in South Beach. An Yves Saint Laurent velvet blazer that had a two-month waiting list. A twelve-ounce black truffle flown in from Italy in a wooden box packed with straw. Orchids every Friday.
    As the months of infertility dragged on, Melanie immersed herself in starting seeds, digging beds, planting shrubs and perennials, mulching, weeding, spending nearly a thousand dollars on annuals and herbs and heirloom tomato plants. She let the two beautiful little girls who lived next door cut her tulips and hyacinths for