He Gets That from Me

by Jacqueline Friedland

  Finally, I catch a glimpse of Teddy, his blond hair still somehow perfectly coifed. Just like his father. In spite of myself, I am stung by the thought. I maneuver through the crowd of excited parents and lift Teddy into a bear hug before his feet hit the parking lot. I feel tears spring to my eyes as we connect, and I am overcome by my love for this child, and for his brother.

  “Ooof,” Teddy says when I squeeze too tightly. I lower his feet to the ground and release him as Chip emerges beside me. I look back to the bus to see Kai waiting at the top step, just like all the boys before him. When our gazes connect, a wide grin takes over his face.

  I will not cry. Not here. Not now. I should have thought to grab my aviators out of the glove box in our Land Rover. He bounds down the steps and I open my arms. He jumps straight into my chest and clutches me so tightly that this time I am the one getting smothered.

  “Yuck, you’re so sweaty.” He pulls back and wrinkles his nose.

  And just like that, I am at ease again. This is my kid, through and through. No matter his biological origin, this child is one and the same with the infant I bathed in the kitchen sink of our old apartment, the baby I wrapped in swaddling blankets in the middle of the night, the toddler I taught to swim at the old Reebok Sports Club, the boy who asked me to sit in his room during late-night thunderstorms until he was well past nine years old. Now he’s whispering something to me about how Teddy brought home a trophy.

  “Can we get sushi?” Teddy appears beside us, bursting with energy despite the long bus ride and their departure from Vermont so early this morning. “Dad said.”

  I glance over at Chip, who laughs and shakes his head. “No, I didn’t.” He wraps an arm around Kai and corrals us toward the other end of the parking lot.

  “You did.” Kai looks from Chip to me. “The night before we left. Pa?” Kai looks over to me for validation, his big eyes wide with excitement and hunger.

  “Fine, whatever.” I smile at them. “We’ll stop somewhere after we get back to the City, but I promised Nonna we’d bring you guys over for Sunday dinner tonight.”

  Kai and Teddy catch sight of our SUV and hurry toward it; they’re already lifting the door of the trunk and throwing in their bulging bags before Chip and I have reached the front of the car.

  Chip grabs my hand before heading to the driver’s side. “We’ve got this,” he says quietly.

  His words slide over me like a balm, and I allow myself to hope for the first time since learning the horrible news about Kai that maybe he’s right. Maybe there is nothing to do here except enjoy our kids. What does it matter where our son came from? As far as we know, there’s no one out in the world searching for him or crying over his absence, so why not just put this whole thing to bed and let us keep enjoying our family?

  My mother keeps glancing at me across the table, where I’m wedged between Chip and my sister, Gina. The worry lines in her forehead seem to be deepening by the minute.

  “Donny, you didn’t have any of the garlic bread,” she says, shoving an oblong basket toward me.

  “Ma, I’m fine, stop.” I push the bread away, toward Chip, who’s just finished refilling his plate with second helpings from several of the ceramic dishes on the table. I look mournfully at the lasagna on his fork and remind myself that not everyone has a turbo-charged metabolism. Kai rises from his seat and rounds the table, passing by his two older cousins, Flora and Ethan, until he reaches my father’s chair. “Nonno, can I?” He motions to my dad’s lap. My dad is leaning back in his chair, hands resting on his rotund middle. The creases around his eyes deepen as he smiles at his grandson.

  “You’re not getting too old for this?” He hauls Kai onto his lap without waiting for an answer.

  Kai picks up my dad’s fork and claims the last bites of pasta on the dish in front of them, as if the plate is his own, as if everything about this life is his for the taking.

  “Can we be excused?” fourteen-year-old Ethan asks, and I hear Gina sigh beside me.

  “Not yet,” she answers on a huff. “Nonna worked hard preparing this meal so we could all take time to enjoy it together.” She widens her eyes at him in a way that says, “Don’t you ask me again.”

  He nods, but his lips tighten in protest.

  “Check this out,” Teddy says to Ethan, then crosses his blue eyes, shifting both pupils down toward his nose. Ethan laughs and then shows everyone how he can curl his tongue into a shamrock, his foul mood already forgotten. Gina often bemoans her kids’ mercurial mood swings and the trials of single parenting, especially during puberty, but right now she’s smiling at Ethan’s theatrics like she can’t help herself.

  Flora leans across Teddy’s seat and drops a half-eaten piece of garlic bread onto Ethan’s plate.

  “Gross! I don’t want it if it already has your spit all over it.” He picks it up and makes as if to toss it back onto his sister’s plate.

  “Guys.” Gina’s word is a bite, decisive. Any trace of a smile has disappeared. Even so, with her dark hair pulled into a low braid, she looks more like another teenager sitting at the table than the middle-aged mother that she is.

  “It’s fine, let them get up,” my mom says, so much softer than she was when we were that age. The sudden scraping of chairs and clattering of porcelain dishes fill the air as the kids clear their places before scrambling to the basement.

  Once it’s quiet again, my mother asks, “So, they liked the camp?” What she wants to ask is whether I’ve had more panic attacks, whether I’m about to have a complete emotional breakdown, whether we’ve figured anything out about Kai, his history, his future. But she starts with camp.

  “They loved it,” Chip says. “They’re already planning what they want to bring next summer, how they want to set up their bunk bed if they get to share again.”

  “Next summer.” Gina says it like a declaration, like we’ve made some sort of collective decision, and I realize instantly that yes, we have made a decision. Or rather, I have made a decision.

  “Yeah, next summer,” I say, and then I turn toward Chip. “We’re going to drop this search for answers about Kai.”

  Chip cocks his head and raises an eyebrow, his whole body poised in question as he waits for me to say more.

  I shrug, as though it’s suddenly obvious, and then look back at my parents. “Even if the clinic did use the wrong embryo, what does it really matter, right? What good will it do us to find answers like that at this point?”

  “What about the doctors?” my dad asks, leaning back in his chair again, showing off that paunch of his. “Don’t they have a duty to their other patients, a legal obligation, to report what they’ve done with a patient’s genetic material?”

  His question makes me think of that book about Henrietta Lacks we read in our book club a few years back, a true story about a woman in the 1950s whose cancer cells were harvested without her explicit consent. The doctors kept this woman’s tissue without her knowledge, and then they performed studies on her cells without ever informing her. By experimenting on her cells, doctors learned how to grow cancer outside the body, in a lab, and that knowledge became the basis of all sorts of groundbreaking inventions, from a polio vaccine to— coincidentally enough—IVF.

  I remember the book because of the heated debates we had in our twelve-person book group about the medical ethics. Several of our friends felt that the doctors’ decisions were within acceptable boundaries of medicine at the time, and that the benefits to society far outweighed whatever wrongs might have been perpetrated against the Lacks family.

  I wonder if our situation is like that. Two people out there in the world have provided biological material, this time in the form of an egg and sperm, and although those people are not aware of how that material has been used, the benefits of allowing events to proceed on their current trajectory far outweigh any arguments in favor of alerting the providers of said material.

  “Whatever duty they might have, they’re pretty much grasping at str
aws at this point.” I glance over at Chip, who nods in agreement. “Maybe they check the records for every single fertilized egg that was in the clinic when we got pregnant and then follow up with all of those patients. And then what happens when they find the person whose egg Kai came from? We have to give him back? Yeah, no.”

  Before I can add anything about the preposterousness of such an idea, Chip chimes in, “The people at the clinic insist that the embryos simply couldn’t have gotten switched. Their protocols.” He waves a hand in the air, like it’s shorthand for all the explanations they gave us.

  “Don’t you think we should just let it go?” I ask, looking at my mother.

  Her dark eyes shift immediately toward my father, looking to him for an opinion, so I keep hammering at the point.

  “There are plenty of people out there who don’t know who their genetic parents are. Certainly, there are plenty of kids who don’t know who their fathers are.” I think again of the paternity tests available at every corner Walgreens. “But beyond that, there are the babies who get left on church steps, at firehouses—it happens, and they survive.”

  Everyone is just letting me talk now, allowing me to convince myself. And it’s working, the convincing. I’m talking myself into this.

  “Of course I would prefer to know more about Kai’s genetic history, but not if the price of information is possibly losing the right to keep him.”

  I am beginning to get more comfortable with the fact that Kai is not genetically mine. It’s okay because, as I am finally realizing, nothing has to change. Shame on me for taking so long to get here, but I finally understand that so long as we get to keep our family together, everything will be all right.

  Chapter 13

  MAGGIE

  JULY 2018

  The ringing from my backpack surprises me, as I don’t usually get cell reception out here in the sticks. I’m just finishing my lunch break at the summer camp where I’m in charge of the crafts curriculum for academically talented children ranging in age from four to thirteen years old. I stop wiping the sandwich crumbs from my denim cutoffs and quickly fish around in my pack for my phone, sighing as I do. The heat of the Arizona summer sun has me in a constant sweat, making every movement feel objectionable.

  When I see the 203 area code, I imagine first that it’s spam, but then I remember the clinic in New Haven. “Hello?” I answer, unsure whether I will be able to hear anyone on the other end. I drive out to Prescott every day because I haven’t found any similarly creative summer teaching opportunities near Sedona. My cell reception is even worse out here in the desert than it is when I’m surrounded by the red rocks near the house. Amazingly, though, this call has come through.

  “Ms. Wingate, this is Dr. Pillar from the Yale University Fertility Center calling. Is this an okay time to talk?” Her tone is pushy, as though she is not really giving me a choice.

  I glance at my Swatch and see that I still have about eight minutes before the next period starts. “Yeah, sure,” I say, and walk the few steps back to the shaded picnic table where I finished my sandwich moments ago. I lower myself onto the splintery bench, waiting for her to continue.

  “We’ve received the results of the maternity test from QuestLab, and you are a match for Kai Rigsdale,” she says.

  “Well, right.” I run my finger over a pair of initials carved into the wood of the table. “I carried him,” I remind her. “I was the GC.”

  “Right,” she says, “but you are also his biological mother. The test confirms it.”

  “Wait, what?” I look up from the picnic table, as though the doctor is sitting on the bench across from me. Maybe the reception isn’t as good as I thought. “Did you just say the report shows that I am his biological mother?” I repeat it back to her, sure that I’ve gotten it wrong.

  “Yes, exactly.”

  A counselor is heading in my direction, a group of eleven-year-old girls trailing behind her. I rise from the bench and head toward the mess hall, away from the approaching campers.

  “But that’s impossible,” I argue as I walk. “Those embryos were transferred into my uterus fertilized. I didn’t make either of those babies.”

  “Well yes, but it seems that only one of the embryos that we transferred managed to implant in your uterus effectively— the one that became Teddy Rigsdale. The other one must have failed, and then you conceived a baby on your own, the natural way.”

  “But if I was pregnant with the one embryo, I couldn’t have gotten pregnant on my own. That’s impossible.”

  There is silence on the other end as I climb the steps to the mess hall porch, and I am hopeful that the doctor finally realizes how ridiculous she is being.

  “Doctor?” I finally prompt, but then I hear a beeping on my phone, indicating that the call was dropped. “Wait! Hello?”

  I quickly press the call-back button, but now I have zero bars showing up and can’t get any sort of signal. I start hightailing it to the main office so I can use the landline. “Tom,” I bark at the CIT who’s staffing the front desk, “I need to use the phone in Calla’s office. Family emergency. Can you send someone down to the barn to cover for a few minutes?”

  After pushing all the right buttons to get through the automated menu and then sitting on hold for another six minutes, I finally get a real, live human being on the phone. I explain that I was on a call with Dr. Pillar and we got cut off. The operator apologizes but says that Dr. Pillar has just gone into an exam room for a procedure and cannot be interrupted. She’s going to have to call me back. I give the woman the phone number for the landline, as I’m certain that she won’t reach me a second time if she tries my cell. Then I add a list of frenetic instructions about how if she returns my call between 5:00 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., I will be driving back to Sedona, and she can try my cell but I will have my son in the car with me and likely won’t be able to speak freely, so it might be best that if she can’t return my call before 5:00 p.m., to please try me tonight at my home number, which I rattle off for the woman.

  Having done all I can at the moment, I have to return to the craft barn, where I will calmly teach children how to do a Chinese staircase pattern with their lanyards as I try not to imagine what on earth Dr. Pillar could have meant. What I understood her to be saying is so far and away beyond the realm of human possibility that I know it’s best not to dwell on it until I can have a real conversation with the doctor. For now, I will simply pray that I misunderstood. The alternative—that the second Rigsdale baby, Kai, is actually my own biological child—is simply unthinkable. I look down at the blank screen of my cell phone and try not to see the gaping hole, the abyss that I could fall into, if it turns out I was carrying my own baby all those years ago and then accidentally gave him away.

  Chapter 14

  DONOVAN

  JULY 2018

  Erica isn’t calling me back. We’re scheduled to meet with the Wenzo execs in three days, and I regret that I’ve been too distracted by of all the confusion about Kai to focus on this project properly. But now that Chip and I have opted for blissful ignorance, I’m trying to get back in the game on this pitch.

  Unfortunately, while I was busy fixating on embryos and alleles, everything seems to have fallen to shit at the office. This morning, as I arrived with my non-fat half-caf mocha latte, I noticed that many of the younger associate brokers were giving me not-so-subtle sidelong glances. As I tried to determine whether I was imagining the surreptitious rubbernecking, the way they all stopped talking as I walked by, I began to realize that, in retrospect, this worrisome behavior from the firm’s junior associates has been going on for weeks. I was just too muddled up in the brain to register it. I called over to Wen King Partners this morning and got the runaround from their end as well. Now, as I sit at my desk waiting for multiple return calls that are not materializing, I also grasp that Erica has been acting somewhat shifty and unavailable recently, and a narrative finally begins to crystallize in my mind. I’ve been at this job for lo
ng enough to know when something is dirty, when someone has been double-crossed. And apparently this time, the stooge being screwed over is me.

  I scroll through my emails, trying to focus on other clients and potential leads, but the fact is, Wen King is the biggest fish I’ve landed in quite some time, and it’s hard to get excited about anything else when this deal is looking increasingly like my best missed opportunity.

  As I read through an email from the manager of a Turkish bath and body products company who is looking to open a pop-up shop in midtown, my phone finally rings. I realize with a thud that it’s my cell, not my office phone, that’s ringing from beside my keyboard.

  “Hello?” I answer without looking at the caller ID.

  “Mr. Gallo-Rigsdale, it’s Dr. Pillar from the Yale Fertility Clinic.”

  “Hi, Dr. Pillar.” I glance at my open office door but decide privacy is not necessary for what we need to discuss. “I was actually going to call you today.” I lean back in my swivel chair. “Chip and I talked, and we don’t want to waste your resources on a wild goose chase with respect to the embryo’s origin. I think it’s time to shut down this inquiry and chalk it up to medical mystery.”

  “Mr. Gallo-Rigsdale.” Her tone is firm, suffused with some sort of warning that has me instantly on edge. “We received the DNA results from Maggie Wingate’s test. She is a perfect match to your son’s profile.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re getting at.” I sit up straighter in my seat to focus, thinking, yes, Maggie was a good match for us, a great match.

  “She is the biological mother. The test confirms it.”