He Gets That from Me

by Jacqueline Friedland

  Chapter 10

  DONOVAN

  JUNE 2018

  Have you ever found yourself standing at the edge of a skyscraper, somewhere like the rooftop of the Standard Hotel, everyone around you partying it up, and for the briefest moment, you wonder what it would be like if you just fell over the railing? What would you feel, falling like that? Would you hear people screaming in your wake? Or would the city suddenly fall silent, like everything had halted in the world around you, and there would be only a quiet stillness, nobody moving but you, no one to catch you at the bottom?

  This feeling of vertigo is exactly what hits me as I read the results of the paternity tests. I don’t even waste time closing the door to my office before I click on the email attachment to download the report. Chip convinced me that we should both get tested as possible fathers to Kai; as long as we were bothering to submit the test for one of us, he argued, why not get full information?

  I read the words at the bottom of the report again. The alleged father is excluded as the biological father of the tested child. This is what it says on the report for Chip’s test as well. Non-matching alleles observed at the loci listed. I feel paralyzed as I read the information on the screen over and over again. Alleged father lacks genetic markers that are contributed to a child by a biological father. I haven’t even called Chip. I just keep reading it, again and again. The alleged father is excluded.

  “Hey, Don?” A voice at the door pulls me out of my trance and I look up to see Erica standing in the doorway holding multiple unwieldy rolls of plans. I quickly close the window on my computer.

  “Yeah, sorry. What’s up?” My voice sounds off, muted and viscous, but maybe I’m the only one who notices.

  “Hey, I just wanted to give you a heads up about an issue we’re having with the client,” she starts—hesitant, as usual.

  I suddenly feel as though I’m suffocating, as though someone has literally stuffed a pillow over my face and I simply, utterly, cannot breathe. “You know what, I’m sorry.” I erupt from my chair and grab for my bag on the floor. “I’m having a bit of a family emergency. There’s something I’ve got to take care of. You handle it. I trust your judgment.”

  She watches me, her eyes and mouth agape, as I haul ass out of the room. I imagine she continues watching me as I book it toward the elevator, but I am focused mostly on trying to get air into my lungs. I need to get outside, need air. I hurry to the stairwell, past the heavy metal door, and down the concrete steps, as the feeling of a vise pinching my chest continues to intensify. My peripheral vision dulls, the cream-colored walls around me fading nearly to oblivion, and I worry that I might faint, but I keep hurrying down toward the street exit.

  When I finally emerge into the humid summer sunshine, there are so many people milling about on the sidewalk that there is no relief. I haven’t had a full-on panic attack like this since I was a teenager. I can feel the sweat pooling in my armpits, on my chest. I hurry to the crosswalk and make my way to toward the little park in the middle of Union Square. At the closest bench, I drop my bag to the grass and pull my phone from my pocket to dial, barely able to form a coherent thought.

  On the third ring, she finally picks up.

  “Hey,” she says happily into the phone.

  “Mom,” I choke out. “Oh, thank God.”

  “Honey, what is it?”

  As soon as I hear her voice, the reaction is almost instantaneous. My overactive amygdala shifts gears, bringing me out of the panic state. My lungs begin to open, and it feels as though I can swallow again. I sink down and lean back against the warm bench, grateful for the tree branch providing shade above me.

  “I was having an attack. Like high school. But I’m okay now. It’s going away.” I huff into the phone as I undo the top two buttons of my dress shirt and rub a hand against my damp chest. A group of young women are gathered on a patchwork raft of picnic blankets several feet away from me, chatting happily into their takeout containers.

  “Are you sure? Where are you?” I can detect the concern in her voice. I’m not the only one who remembers how awful those panic attacks were for me.

  “No, I’m okay. It’s just . . .” To my horror, I start to cry.

  “You got the report.”

  I don’t answer, but simply let out another weepy yelp.

  “Listen to me, baby, breathe,” she tells me, and I do as she says, crying softly and focusing on my breath. I watch people coming and going throughout the park—men in suits, nannies with strollers, everyone seemingly so relaxed. Two birds pick at a pizza crust protruding from the overstuffed trash can beside my bench.

  My mom does the best she can, saying all the right things about how we’ll figure this out and how family isn’t just about blood. Her effort is not in vain. After a few minutes of listening to her calming words, I’m more collected, more focused. It’s not the substance of what she’s said, though—more of a trained response from the years she coached me through my teenaged panic. The strategies she pieced together from the self-help books, the therapists, even a couple of episodes of the Donahue show, they’ve left her with a bit of expertise when it comes to me and my panic.

  “You know what, Ma,” I finally interrupt, sitting up a little straighter and rubbing the heel of my hand against my face, scrubbing against the wetness beneath my eyes. “I’m good now. I have to go.”

  She sighs heavily into the phone. “Good” is so far from where I am, and we both know it.

  “I’ll keep the phone with me,” she says.

  I dial Chip next, but of course, he doesn’t pick up. It’s always so hard to get a hold of him during the day. I send him a text to call me when he can, and then I look up the number for the Yale Fertility Clinic on my phone. I notice two text messages from Erica and a sudden pile-up of emails in my inbox, but I cannot focus on anything right now other than the fact that Kai is not my biological son.

  I leave a message for Dr. Pillar and ask that they have her call me as soon as possible.

  So it is that Chip and I find ourselves sitting across from doctors Pillar and Brookstone in a small conference room at the Yale Fertility Center in New Haven a week and a half later. Dr. Pillar’s curly hair has grown longer than I remember it being before, and a few deep lines across the olive skin of her forehead are evidence of the time that has passed since we last saw each other.

  Back when we began the surrogacy process, it was Dr. Pillar who ordered the extensive battery of tests on Chip and me, as well as the significantly more exhaustive examination of our surrogate. Only after receiving acceptable results across the board did she authorize fertilization of the eggs her team had harvested from our donor.

  Other than a couple of follow-up phone calls, we’ve had almost no interaction with her since the successful births of our babies back in 2008. Though now when I say “our babies,” it feels like I ought to use that term loosely.

  Dr. Brookstone is the director of the Fertility Center and the Center’s Fertility Preservation Program. He wasn’t here when we availed ourselves of the Center’s services all those years ago, but even if he had been, we probably wouldn’t have met him. Every procedure we did at the Center was considered routine, even ten or eleven years ago, and Dr. Pillar was more than capable of overseeing our case on her own. Or so we thought.

  Based on their expressions as they study us from across the glossy conference table, I would hazard a guess that nothing about our situation qualifies as “routine” any longer. Dr. Pillar was unwilling to even engage in discussion with us until she re-ordered the paternity tests and supervised the testing herself. So now, for the third time, we have received test results that prove Kai is not genetically related to Chip, to Teddy, or to me.

  Dr. Pillar was able to access the records from the BirthPlace at UCLA, and it turns out there were six other babies birthed in the hospital on the day Teddy and Kai were born. Five of them were girls, and the one other boy was Asian. There were four babies born the day before our
boys arrived—two girls, a black boy, and a white boy who was seven weeks premature, meaning that he weighed less than four pounds. We were in the delivery room when our boys were born. We held them each before the nurses whisked their tiny bodies off to the nursery. We certainly would have noticed if one of them had returned from the nursery weighing literally 50 percent less than he had an hour before. None of these baby profiles seem to allow for the possibility of the switched-at-birth scenario.

  The next logical explanation is that the fertility clinic screwed up with the embryos—implanted our surrogate with the wrong fertilized egg, meaning that they took an embryo belonging to another patient, with genetic material from other parental hopefuls, some other egg, someone else’s sperm, and implanted it into our surrogate’s uterus. How could they make an error of this magnitude? And does this mean that one of our fertilized eggs ended up being carried by another woman? Is our baby somewhere out there in the world, thinking he belongs to a different set of parents?

  “It’s simply not possible,” Doctor Brookstone is explaining, the salt-and-pepper whiskers on his chin lending authority to his words. “The Center has had strict protocols in place since well before my tenure whereby the chain of custody for a fertilized embryo could never be interrupted. There is no possible way that your surrogate could have been implanted with the wrong embryo. That kind of error does not get made in this institution—not now, and not eleven years ago, when you first arrived here.” He removes his eyeglasses and starts wiping one of the lenses with the corner of his lab coat as he glances over to Dr. Pillar, as if he expects her to say something. She nods at him, and he sighs.

  “Look,” Dr. Brookstone continues on an exhale, “as far as we can conjecture, there is only one other possibility. It’s a long shot, but at this point, it’s the only idea that is a logical possibility. With your permission, we would like to contact your gestational carrier and collect a DNA sample from her as well.”

  “Our surrogate? Why?” Chip is sitting forward in his seat, his long torso pitched at an angle suggesting that he is getting ready to rise, to leave. Are they saying that the boys have belonged to the surrogate all along, that we thought they were the result of the implantation but in fact they were her babies to begin with?

  “But we’ve already confirmed that Teddy is biologically related to Chip,” I interrupt, answering my own question.

  “Strange things can happen in our field,” Dr. Pillar responds gently. “Let’s just rule her out as a mother before we start any wild goose chases.”

  “And when that DNA test comes back negative for any connection,” Chip pushes, “then what?”

  “Well, then . . .” Doctor Pillar looks blankly at Dr. Brookstone and then back at us. “Then, I don’t think we know.”

  It’s only a few hours later when I see Maggie’s name flashing across the screen of my cell phone. Chip has been at the gym since shortly after we got back into Manhattan, training for another marathon. I’ve been in our home office, reorganizing the drawers of my desk for the past twenty minutes, trying to distract myself by purging my files of old insurance bills and MasterCard statements.

  “Donny,” she says, and I can hear the worry in her voice. “I just finished work and had this message waiting about going to a Quest lab. What’s going on?”

  It’s probably been a good three or four years since we’ve spoken, and I feel badly now that I haven’t done a better job of keeping up with her. After everything that went down for her in California, it just got harder and harder to know what to say. Even so, once somebody houses your children inside her body for nearly a year, a certain lifelong bond is created.

  I lower myself onto the wood floor of our study and lean my back against the wall as I fill her in on the Relativity DNA tests, the negative paternity tests, and the meeting at the Fertility Center.

  “Well, clearly they screwed up with the embryos,” she says when I’m done. “Whatever they claim their protocol is, they obviously didn’t follow it. What are you going to do?”

  “Chip and I have been asking ourselves that question all afternoon. Are we even supposed to try to figure out where the embryo came from?” I put Maggie on speakerphone and start shoveling the stack of old papers into a black garbage bag.

  “Does it matter?” she asks gently. “You and Chip are his parents, his family.”

  Maggie’s kindness brings me back to that moment in the delivery room in California. Teddy was the first baby to arrive, and as Maggie had asked, the young doctor handed him straight over to me. I held him, all slimy and warm in my arms, as Chip cut the umbilical cord with that bent-looking medical scissor. I looked down at Maggie, who was smiling back at us with a sheen of sweat coating her forehead. Her eyes were a little shiny as she told me, “That boy is finally where he belongs.” Then she got back to work pushing out the second baby.

  Maggie’s sister, Tess, ended up coming to California to look after Maggie’s son during the delivery. She brought Wyatt to the hospital the next day to meet the babies. He was only two years old, and the social worker suggested he should have the closure of seeing the babies outside his mother’s body before we carried them away to the other side of the country. Some nurse on duty that day who didn’t know any better put a big sticker on Wyatt’s T-shirt that said, “I’m a big brother!”

  Chip and I looked at the little boy in panic, unsure what to say to make the moment one of clarity but also kindness.

  “No,” Maggie had explained to everyone from where she was still recovering in bed, “the babies belong to our friends, Donovan and Chip. They are the daddies. Wyatt and I are just their very good friends.”

  Tess reached out to take the sticker off Wyatt’s shirt, and the poor child started to cry that he wanted to keep the babies.

  “No, sweetie,” Maggie said again as she reached out toward him and pulled him onto the bed. “Remember that time when we watched Mittens because Miss Lydia went on vacation? And then we had to give him back when she got home?”

  Wyatt nodded as he wiped his hand under his nose.

  “Well, this is like that. Chip and Donovan are back from their vacation, and now it’s time for us to send the babies home with them.” Wyatt nodded, making a visible effort to stop his carrying on.

  A bubble forms in my throat as I remember Wyatt like that— too young to understand what was happening, but so eager to cooperate with his mother. At that moment, I thought we’d be very lucky if our sons grew into little gentlemen like Wyatt. I also remember wondering whether Maggie planned to have more children who would grow to be as sweet as that little guy.

  I swallow hard so the emotions my memories are evoking won’t creep into my voice. Maggie doesn’t need that.

  “You guys should sue that clinic six ways to Sunday,” Maggie is saying on the other end of the line, drawing me back to the present. I’m touched again by how protective she is of Chip and me. She’s been that way from the beginning.

  There’s a sudden wail in the background, like a child crying.

  “Caleb,” Maggie says, her voice slightly muffled, “if you don’t give him back his giraffe right now, there will be no cookies at all. Sorry,” she says, her voice louder again. “These kids are at it again,” she apologizes.

  “Wait, what?” I’m stunned. “What kids? I thought you couldn’t . . . Who . . . ?” I have so many questions that I don’t even know where to start.

  She gasps a little into the phone. “Oh, gosh, no! Not my kids. Sorry. I drive my neighbor’s kids home after school every day since we’re coming from the same place anyway.” Her tone changes a little as she adds, clearly more for their benefit than mine, “Usually they’re very good company, but I think they’ve forgotten their manners today.”

  “You’re teaching now?” I find myself smiling for the first time all day. I close the trash bag and depress the speakerphone button, moving the phone back to my ear. “I’m so thrilled to hear it.”

  “Ethics-based art classes for K th
rough 5,” she says with pride. “Listen”—the shrieking in the background is intensifying— “I’ve got to run and get these kids settled down. Do me a favor and keep me posted about all this, okay? And no matter what answers you find about where the embryo originated, don’t you forget who that boy’s fathers really are.”

  Chapter 11

  MAGGIE

  FEBRUARY 2008

  The sound of a door closing wakes me from where I’ve been napping on the couch. As I sit up, the extra weight of my engorged breasts is instant torment, reminding me why I felt the need to lie down in the first place.

  “How was it?” I ask, twisting to face Tess and Wyatt as they unload themselves behind me in the small vestibule of my apartment.

  Wyatt is already crouched down, struggling to open the Velcro of his red and blue Spiderman sneakers. He mumbles back at me, “Good, good, good.” Dark curls fall toward his face as he focuses on his shoes, and I sigh internally thinking about how much he hates it when I cut his hair.

  “What should we do with this one?” Tess asks. She’s holding a pile of mail in one hand and an obnoxiously large bouquet of pink ranunculus flowers in the other. Her eyes travel toward the kitchen.

  It’s been four days since I’ve been home from the hospital, and I’m wondering if I should email Nick and tell him to stop with the incessant flower arrangements. I’m just afraid that if I acknowledge the deliveries at all, he will use that as an opening, an opportunity to get back under my skin. His eleventh-hour regret over his actions doesn’t mean that I can necessarily forgive his nasty comments, his jealousy, his surprising bigotry. What I know for sure is that I need more time to decide how I feel, and the overpowering scent of calla lilies and roses permeating the one-bedroom walk-up Wyatt and I have been renting in LA is not helping to clear my head.