The Ones We Choose

by Julie Clark

  We’re silent for a few minutes before she says, “What about the clinic? Aaron never told them, and now he can’t.”

  The responsibility sits inside of me, low and heavy. “I know. I’ve been thinking about that nonstop. But if I notify the clinic, they’d have to confirm with Aaron. Which means they’d eventually contact Jackie.”

  Both of us turn to look back at the house, where, inside, Jackie is trying to comfort Aaron’s parents despite her own grief.

  “It would destroy her,” I whisper.

  “But ethically—” Rose starts.

  “He donated twelve years ago. That means any child conceived with his sperm wouldn’t be of age for several more years. I don’t have to do anything immediately.”

  Rose nods. “So now what?” she asks. “You’re just going to continue holding on to the secret and hope that no one will discover the truth?”

  “I’m not going to abandon Jackie now. It’s my secret, and I sure as hell won’t ever say anything.” I look across the yard to Miles and Nick, sitting shoulder to shoulder at a picnic table. I know what I’m doing is wrong. It’s deceitful, and it tears me apart because I love Jackie and I’m terrified the truth will come out, somehow. But Miles trumps all. And he always will. “I can’t take Nick away from him.”

  “And if Jackie finds out?”

  I’m growing exasperated. “How could she possibly find out?”

  “Even though Aaron’s not around to tell them doesn’t mean there isn’t documentation somewhere.”

  “There’s no documentation identifying us.”

  I look at Miles and Nick again, sitting there, in nearly identical poses, not talking or moving, simply staring off into the crowd. My stomach clenches. Light and dark hair, fair and olive skin. Different, yet unmistakably similar.

  “Right,” Rose says, following my gaze. “I’m sure you’re right.”

  TAKOTSUBO CARDIOMYOPATHY

  * * *

  No one’s ever died of a broken heart. Except why do we have so many phrases that describe the physicality of grief? Heartsick Heartbroken Heartache. The heart bears the brunt of our grief, and it takes a toll. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy is a condition that mimics a heart attack. Its cause? Severe emotional or physical stress. Turns out, you can die of a broken heart after all.

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Miles and I arrive at Rose’s for Thanksgiving a half hour late. When she opens the door, I hand her the pecan pie I made and follow her back to the kitchen. My parents sit next to each other on the couch, and Miles races past them. “Hey, Grandma. Hey, Grandpa,” he calls, before joining Josh in the backyard with a soccer ball.

  “Happy Thanksgiving,” I say from the doorway.

  “Same to you,” my father says, and my mother beams.

  I slip into the kitchen before either of them can start a deeper conversation. I made the gesture, now I’m going to put some distance between us.

  I hadn’t wanted to come, but Rose talked me into it. “It just seems like a facade,” I told her when she suggested it. “All of us, sitting around the table pretending we’re a Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving portrait.”

  “Where else are you going to go?” she asked. “Denny’s?”

  “Maybe we’ll go to Bruno’s,” I said, although I knew Miles would kill me. He loved Bruno but thought Bruno’s eclectic group of friends were weird.

  “Just come. Maybe you could bring Jackie and Nick.”

  “I already invited them, but she said no. They’re not going to celebrate this year, just try to get through the weekend with pizza and movies.”

  “God,” Rose said. “I can’t even imagine it.”

  I couldn’t stop imagining it—how brutal it must be for them, living among the artifacts of Aaron’s life, as if he might return any minute. To have to constantly remind yourself he never will.

  “I won’t make it a big production,” Rose said. “I promise.”

  “Fine,” I agreed.

  Now I stand in her kitchen, watching Rose baste the turkey. “Not too much longer,” she says, checking the thermometer.

  I pour myself some wine and gesture toward the small kitchen table, where a game of Risk is set up. “World domination?” I ask.

  Rose smiles, closes the oven door, and begins mashing potatoes. “The kids are playing that with Dad.”

  My head snaps around. “Dad’s playing games? That’s new.”

  Rose tests the consistency of the mashed potatoes and resumes mashing. “I know. But he loves it. It’s sweet.”

  I study the board and count up players and colors. Five. “Are you or Henry playing too?”

  “No, just the kids and Dad.”

  “Who’s the fifth?”

  Rose freezes, and suddenly, I know. “Miles,” I say, turning on her. “When is this happening?”

  She brushes a piece of hair off her forehead with the back of her hand and resumes mashing. “Tuesdays, while you’re teaching your night class.”

  “Rose—” I start.

  But she interrupts me. “Look. I’m sorry. It started a couple of weeks ago. Miles seems to love it. It’s not hurting anyone.”

  I set my wineglass on the counter. “It’s hurting me,” I say.

  She comes out from behind the stove and pulls me toward a chair. “Would it make you feel any better to know that Miles is much more engaged with Mikey, Hannah, and Josh than he is with Dad? I promise you, he loves the game, but he doesn’t give two shits who’s sitting in that fifth chair.”

  I picture the way Miles is around strangers—except Aaron—and know what Rose says is probably true. Miles has a way of tuning adults out. It’s what he’s done to Liam for years. Mom said this would happen, and Rose is right. His cousins, Rose, and Henry are more than enough buffer.

  —

  Dinner itself is uneventful, as I position myself as far away from my father as I can. It isn’t until after dessert and the kids have left the table that my father turns to me and says, “So, Paige, have you figured out that work issue yet?”

  My mother’s eyes shift between us, sparkling and hopeful.

  “No,” I say to him. I turn to my mother and explain. “I ran into Dad at Dillon’s a few weeks ago when I was trying to get caught up on some work.” I hope my tone will communicate that this isn’t the reconciliation she’s been hoping for.

  But my mother latches on to this tenuous link. “Peter, Paige is working on the most interesting study.” She turns to me, her face flushed, finally discovering the opening she’d been waiting for. “Paige, tell your dad about it. It’s fascinating!”

  Something inside me shifts. First, it’s Tuesdays with Dad playing Risk. Now my mother wants me to catch Dad up on my study, as if he’s just been out of town for a couple of weeks. All of the grief and tension I’ve been suppressing begins to unravel.

  “We’re studying why some men abandon their children,” I say, looking directly at him. “They carry a gene that physically impedes their ability to bond. I’ve found a way to fix you, Dad, if you’re interested. I could give you some of the synthetic hormone, and maybe for the first time, you’ll be able to resist the urge to disappear on us.”

  Rose’s fork freezes midway to her mouth, and my mother looks horrified. “Paige,” she scolds.

  With a flush of shame, I realize I’ve gone too far—no hormone can keep my father from leaving us this last time.

  I pinch the bridge of my nose, warding off a headache that’s growing behind my eyes. “That was uncalled for. I’m sorry,” I say to all of them. “It’s been a tough few weeks.”

  My father holds up his hand to wave away my words, and I can’t help but notice the slight tremor of his fingers, making me feel even worse. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “It’s understandable.” He turns to me. “I know, better than you might think, what I’ve put you through.”

  “Don’t try to pretend my not wanting anything to do with you is the same as what you did to me and Rose.�
��

  He folds his napkin carefully, the entire table watching him. “I’m not talking about that,” he says. “Your study makes a lot of sense to me. My father was a cold and neglectful man. If what you say is true, I’m glad whatever my father passed on to me wasn’t passed on to you.”

  My mother reaches out and places her hand over his.

  Rose stands, almost in tears. “Would anyone like more coffee?” she asks, holding up the pot and looking around the table, desperate to move the conversation forward.

  I shake my head. “It’s getting late. I think Miles and I should go.”

  Four pairs of eyes watch me push back from the table and stand, but no one speaks or tries to stop me. “Thanks for dinner, Rose. It was delicious.” I set my napkin on the table and walk toward the bottom of the stairs, where I call for Miles and tell him to say goodbye to everyone while I wait by the door.

  He heads into the dining room, and it isn’t until I hear him say, “Goodbye, Grandpa,” that what’s left of my resolve shatters, leaving me wiping away tears, alone in the dark foyer, wondering what kind of person I’ve become, and whether I’m so different from my father after all.

  —

  The following week I sit down with Jenna and Bruno. “I want to look at Scott’s inhibitor gene,” I tell them.

  Scientists have only been able to study the before and after of a gene methylation in humans. No one has ever observed one while it’s happening.

  “The one from his most recent sample?” Jenna asks.

  “All of them.” I wait for Bruno to object, which he does.

  “We can’t allocate lab resources for something like that,” he says. “It’s not in the IRB. If we get audited, we couldn’t explain it.”

  “We’re rerunning samples we’ve already gathered, which does fall under the IRB,” I argue. “Look it up.”

  Bruno pulls up the document we wrote five years ago and scans it. I wait for him to get to the consent section. When he does, his eyes lock on to mine, a flicker of excitement growing.

  I offer a tiny smile and shrug. “I drafted it so that we could retest any of the subsamples at any time. It doesn’t limit what we’re testing for.” I turn to Jenna. “I want you to coordinate it. Do you have time?”

  She nods. “I can spread out my caseload, no problem.”

  “Has he signed up for phase two?” I ask Bruno.

  “Yep. He says the study was important to Mara and she would have wanted him to see it through.”

  If there’s a way for the inhibitor gene to turn itself off, I want to find it. Not just for the scientific discovery, but for myself. For the little girl who always hoped someday her father might change into someone better. I think about my father, playing Risk with the kids, and wonder what’s changed. The fact that he’s dying? Or something more?

  I turn to Jenna and begin to outline how I want her to isolate and compare Scott’s inhibitor gene, the air between us crackling with possibility.

  NATURE VERSUS NURTURE

  * * *

  Nativists believe in the idea that genetics determines everything, not just your hair and eye color, but also your personality and abilities. Nurturists believe that what you were exposed to as a child—both physically and emotionally—shape who you ultimately become. But the truth is, both sides are correct. Our genes influence our behavior, and our behavior influences our genes. And our life experiences are what activates or silences all of it.

  Scientists have recently discovered a gene that might be responsible for perfect pitch, the ability to identify any note, or to produce a specific note on demand. But just because you have the gene doesn’t mean you automatically have the ability. That skill has to be developed through exposure and instruction. Genes must sometimes wait for experience to turn on.

  Can someone without the gene learn perfect pitch? Perhaps. We can modify behavior and train our bodies and minds to behave a certain way, and changes can occur on a cellular level too. This is how our genes were designed—to take their cues from experiences and the environment around them.

  A long time ago, I chose to silence my pain instead of dealing with it. I’m paying the price now. My instincts are asleep, no matter how many times Rose yells at me, telling me what to do or reminding me what’s at stake, I can’t seem to hear her clearly. Her advice is a tangle of notes, unfollowable.

  If nurturists were to study me, they’d say this is a learned behavior, that my childhood taught me to be disengaged and distant as a means of protecting myself. But if a nativist were to crack me open, maybe she’d see a genetic variance caused by the repeated heartbreak of a little girl who believed she would never be enough, so eventually, she stopped listening.

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I’m snooping in Rose’s closet, looking for a sweater of mine that she borrowed a year ago that I’d like back. She claims it’s hers, so I have to snatch it without her knowing. I ease the door open while she’s busy in the bathroom, planning to grab it and shove it in my bag before she catches me, when I see a gorgeous red dress hanging on the back of the door, tags still on.

  I hold it in front of me and look in the mirror. “What’s the new dress for?” I call.

  Rose comes out of the bathroom and pulls up short when she sees which one I’m holding. “Oh, it’s for a party next weekend.” She turns away and begins organizing the jewelry on her dresser, a sure sign she’s hiding something.

  “Rose?” I ask.

  She turns around. “It’s for Liam’s holiday party.”

  I sit down hard on the bed, the dress in a pile on my lap. Of course, Liam’s annual holiday party. I feel as if my life is spinning away from me, leaving me stranded somewhere I don’t want to be.

  Rose takes the dress and hangs it back up. “Don’t wrinkle it.”

  I turn on her. “No, we wouldn’t want you to show up in a wrinkled dress for Liam’s big party.”

  “Paige, what would you have me do? Not go?”

  I close my eyes for a moment and then open them again. “It’s like I’ve been lifted right out of his life,” I say. “Everything stays the same—same holiday party, same guests, same everything. The only thing missing is me.”

  She sits down on the bed next to me. Late-afternoon sunlight hits the corners of the room, and I can see dust in the air, floating on invisible air currents. A pair of Henry’s muddy running shoes are kicked off in the corner next to an overflowing laundry basket.

  “Paige, you lifted yourself out.”

  “Why do you keep blaming me? You act as if I did this all on my own.”

  “You are hanging on—so tight—to this idea of safety. If I can just stay over here, inside this square, nothing can hurt me. But look around you! You can’t protect yourself from getting hurt. Aaron still died. You still lost Liam. Dad’s going to die too, and it’s going to hurt like hell, whether you want to admit it or not. Life cannot be lived inside the penalty box.”

  “Oh, you’re making hockey metaphors now?” I joke. But what Rose said makes sense. I’m lonely. I miss Liam’s calls. His jokes. The way he’d wrap me in his arms and squeeze just the right amount until I relaxed into him. I flop back onto the bed. “This isn’t how I want it to be.”

  Rose lies down next to me and I wiggle closer to her, the two of us staring at the ceiling. “Remember when we were little and you’d crawl into my bed at night because you were scared I’d disappear before morning?” I ask.

  She links her pinkie with mine, the way we used to. “You taught me how to be brave. And I can’t, for the life of me, figure out how or when you forgot.”

  —

  We’ve got the preliminary results from the tests Jenna’s running on Scott’s old samples, and I’m running through them, again and again, trying to track what’s going on. She’s gone back to the very first sample we took in the hospital after Sophie was born, which shows a fully intact inhibitor gene on his Y chromosome. She’s making her way through subsequent samples
, and she’s matching them up with the anecdotal data to make sure there isn’t a different inciting event, prior to Mara’s death, that escaped our notice the first time.

  Bruno comes into the office near the end of the day and tosses a stack of lab reports on my desk. “While you and Jenna work on your science fair project, we’ve got four grad students rotating through the lab on a twenty-four-hour schedule to cover you guys. Jake Murphy skipped all his classes yesterday.”

  “Get the names of his professors. I’ll make a couple of calls.”

  He sits at his desk and stares at me. “You seem . . . motivated to figure this out.”

  I flip a folder closed and open a new one. “I’m always motivated to figure something out. You know that.”

  He shakes his head. “This is different.”

  I look up at him and shrug. “Maybe it is. I can’t help but think of what this means for all the kids out there whose fathers are like mine.” Before he can lecture me on Sophie Sullivan again, I say, “This isn’t some attempt to save anyone. It’s more for myself, to be honest. The idea that a father can change like this means much more to me than it might to you.”

  Bruno grabs a folder from my desk and opens it. “What are we looking for?” he asks.

  —

  As I’m leaving my office, Jackie calls. “Hi,” I say, “I’ve been thinking about you.” A cold winter wind bites through me. I wrap my arms around myself, hugging my purse to my chest.

  “Beverly is driving me crazy. She keeps calling, harassing me about Christmas or just crying into the phone. I feel for her, I really do, but I can’t take it. I can’t be that person for her, you know?”

  “Maybe you should be honest. Tell her you need some space.”

  Jackie snorts. “She doesn’t know the meaning of space. The morning after our wedding, she called us from the lobby of the hotel, wondering if we were interested in meeting for breakfast.”

  I laugh. “What’d you do?”