by Beth Martin
Jamie overheard and looked at Annette. “Didn’t Irene tell you? There’s this amazing man, Aiden. He’s actually Irene’s boss at her new job.” She continued in a baby voice at Ophelia, “he’s agreed to put a munchkin in Aunt Jamie tummy.”
“That’s a terrible idea. What happens if Irene gets fired again?” Annette asked. Jamie glared at her as she took a sip of of wine. Someone needed to say it.
“It’s up to Irene not to get fired again,” Jamie said hotly before returning her attention to the baby.
“How is your new job going?” Annette asked.
“It’s work,” Irene said curtly before taking a long swig of her beer.
Annette was trying to be social. She had hoped Irene would reciprocate even a little. “When is Ray getting here?” she asked as Tom came to the living room to join them.
“Didn’t your mother tell you?” he said. “Clara isn’t feeling well, so they won’t be joining us.”
Annette sighed. She had been looking forward to seeing her brother and having Irene with her like back in the day. Her holiday wasn’t living up to her expectations. And with Irene and Jamie constantly bickering, no one could even engage in pleasant conversation.
“That will be me soon,” Jamie sang to Ophelia who seemed to be basking in all the special attention. “Staying at home getting ready for baby.”
Irene sighed. “Maybe we should hold off a little bit on getting pregnant. Wait a month or two.”
“Why?” Jamie shot back, glaring at Irene with her jaw clenched. “I’m ready to have a baby now. We have a donor. There’s no reason to wait.”
“You’re just really busy with the gallery opening and everything involved with that. You’ve got too much on your plate. We should wait until life settles down a little,” Irene suggested.
“My show will be over in a month. That’s not a reason. You just don’t want to see me happy.” Jamie got up and handed Ophelia back to Annette. Ophelia didn’t know what to make of the two women arguing and just looked from one to the other.
“Irene has a point,” Annette said, trying to help her friend. “The first trimester is especially trying. Expecting saps out all your energy. I wasn’t able to keep up with everything at work and just wanted to sleep all the time.”
“I think I can handle it,” Jamie snapped.
“I’m just saying, once you have a baby, your life will be different,” Annette added.
Jamie gave Annette a cold look. “Maybe for you, doing this all by yourself.”
“Ouch,” Annette said, trying her best not to roll her eyes. Jamie was still young and naive. No amount of explaining to her the realities of having a baby would make her actually get it. She would have to learn the harsh truth for herself.
“Can we just try to have a nice evening?” Irene said.
Jamie stood up and crossed her arms in front of her chest. “You don’t want us to have a baby at all, do you? Why won’t you just admit it instead of coming up with lame excuses to keep me from getting pregnant?”
Irene covered her face with her hand. “I want a baby. I’m just not sure Aiden is the best choice.”
“What the fuck is wrong him?” Jamie shouted. “He’s everything you could want for our child’s genetics. He’s perfect.”
“You don’t know him like I do,” Irene said in a dangerously quiet tone.
“Oh, I know him really well.”
Irene sighed. “You met him once.”
Jamie threw her hands up, “He came over to remove my implant.”
“Shit,” Annette said to no one in particular. The other two women were so engrossed in their fight, Annette might as well not have been there.
Jamie continued ranting. “He saw my painting and wanted to talk about my art. I know you don’t give a shit about it, but he did. He connected me with the gallery for my art show. So, yes, I think I know him pretty well.”
“It’s all so fast…”
“Oh come on,” Jamie said.
Annette felt like she should have a bucket of popcorn while watching the spat. Instead, she had a sleeping Ophelia, already bored of the fight, on her lap.
Jamie was just getting started. “You’ve been dragging your feet ever since we decided to start a family. Now that we’ve finally gotten a man to agree to father our baby, you want to back out.”
Irene hung her head. She looked sad. Annette knew she must have a good reason for not trusting this Aiden person, but she clearly wasn’t able to verbalize it to Jamie.
“Maybe you could get a puppy?” Annette suggested.
Jamie turned to her and said, “Fuck you,” before storming out of the apartment.
Annette glanced at Tom who just shrugged his shoulders in return. She knew her best friend’s relationship had been strained recently, but Irene never mentioned that it had gotten this bad.
“Just like college,” Annette said, raising her glass in a mock toast.
Irene frowned at her beer before finally raising it as well. “I wish Ray were here. Then it would really be like college.”
“So he could awkwardly hit on you, refusing to accept that you’re gay?” Annette asked, smiling to herself.
“Yeah,” Irene said. “Maybe I should go.” She set her half-full can on the coffee table and left.
Tom stood up stiffly. “I’m going to go see how your mother’s doing in the kitchen.”
Annette looked down at her sleeping baby and whispered, “And then there were two.”
··OOO··
Irene had special photoreactive paper tucked in her blazer. She couldn’t get her device into the office and take pictures, but the paper would allow her to copy some of the files. Specifically, she wanted to get a hold of all the women who had been selected to receive the so-called quality DNA. If she could, she also wanted to find the men who had been tagged as such, but suspected Aiden kept those files elsewhere.
She slipped Rose’s profile back into the cabinet and was about to grab the next profile when she heard footsteps on the circular stairs. Quickly closing the drawer, she turned around to see Aiden come down.
“Good morning team,” he said, smiling brightly at the four workers in the office.
“Good morning,” they all said back.
“I trust you all had a good holiday yesterday?” he asked. Irene nodded, and the others did as well.
“I did,” Bobby said, smiling widely.
“Good,” Aiden said. “Bobby, I wanted to go through some of the new members with you.”
“Of course,” Bobby said.
“The rest of you can return to work,” he added. Sharon went back to her typewriter. The other employee hadn’t even bothered looking up from his meticulous spreadsheets when their boss arrived. Irene had been working closely with Bobby since she started, so she joined him and Aiden at the center of the long table.
Aiden sat down and said, “Let’s see if we can find some married pairs that also make a good match. I think it’s so important for children to be raised in a traditional family, don’t you?”
Bobby had been raised by a single mother. He talked about his family drama a lot. “I guess. I always figured two parents made for more people to mess a kid up.”
“What do you think, Irene?” Aiden asked.
This felt like a trick question. “I think children should have lots of people in their lives to love them, including parents, grandparents, godparents, aunts, and uncles.”
“God knows I could have used more love growing up,” Bobby joked.
Aiden gave Irene a sideways glance, but dropped the subject. Irene pulled the newest membership profiles from the cabinets and they started going through them. They worked together the entire morning, giving Irene no chance to make copies of the files.
At noon, the other three employees left for lunch, leaving Aiden and Irene alone in the office.
“Why don’t you come upstairs for lunch today?” he offered. “I started some chili simmering this morning. I made an entire pot,
much more than I can eat myself.”
“That sounds great,” Irene said, “but I wanted to finish up some of the promotional material before taking a break.”
“Don’t take too long,” he said as he disappeared up the steps.
She didn’t have much time. She pulled out the drawer labelled ‘female QD’ and took out the top five. Laying the pages on the table, she retrieved the photo paper tucked in her blazer and set a sheet on each profile. She just needed to rub the back of each page and the static charge would activate the photo ink. It would darken anywhere there was black pigment below.
It worked like a charm, each page slowly gaining the text details from the profile underneath. She tucked the photo paper back in her blazer and returned the files to the cabinet before going upstairs.
“Perfect timing,” Aiden said as she let herself into the kitchen. He was wearing an apron over his business clothes and oven mitts. He opened the antique oven and pulled out a square pan of cornbread, placing it on top of the range. “Please, take a seat.”
Irene sat at the table and waited stiffly for Aiden. He cut up the bread into squares and poured some chili into a bowl, placing it on the table in front of Irene. “Thank you,” she said.
She waited until he was also seated before she started eating. This was by far the blandest chili she had ever tasted. It was basically tomato soup with a little bit of meat in it. “It’s very good,” she said.
“Thanks. It’s my mother’s recipe.” They ate in silence for a moment.
“Your wife is pretty amazing,” he said between bites.
Irene thought about their fight from the previous day. When Irene left after Jamie, she hadn’t been able to find her and their apartment was empty. She assumed Jamie had gone to the gallery. “She is,” she agreed.
“I must confess, I was having reservations about being a donor for you two.”
Irene nodded. “She’s wanted a baby for a long time.”
“What do you want?”
The question caught her off guard. It wasn’t something she normally asked herself. “I don’t know. I guess a better future. A world worth bringing a new baby into.”
“You know what I want?” he asked, clearing the empty bowls from the table. He gave her a mischievous smile. “Ice-cream.”
Irene couldn’t help but smile. Aiden pulled two little bowls out of the cabinet and filled them with ice-cream from a pint stored in the freezer. “I hope you like mint chocolate chip.”
He set the little bowls at the table and they started eating the green, whipped ice cream. “Ask me something,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m about to be the father of your baby. All you know about me is within the confines of AQD. Aren’t you curious to learn more?”
“Okay,” Irene said, licking her spoon. “Football or soccer?”
“If you’re talking about the name of that game where you kick a black and white ball on the ground, the answer is soccer. If you’re asking which I played growing up, the answer is track.”
“You did track?” she asked.
“Not intentionally at first. I was the awkward scrawny kid growing up. I got bullied a lot, and ran away from a lot of fights. Turned out I was pretty fast, and got recruited by the track coach.”
Irene nodded. She had been a softball player herself.
“Ask another,” he said.
“If you had a billion dollars, what’s the first thing you’d buy?”
“A yacht,” he said. Irene burst out laughing at his answer. “I would move AQD headquarters onto it and spend my days cruising around the world. I think it’s an excellent plan.”
Even though she still didn’t like him, she was enjoying their conversation. The genial man she had been conversing with over lunch was how Adain presented himself to other people including Jamie. She could see why her wife was so taken with him. But why had he chosen to show Irene his other side? Perhaps she would have been more trusting of him if he hadn’t brought her to the creepy medical room or given her the crazy, rambling notebooks at a house that wasn’t even his. But now they were having a totally pleasant lunch together in the farmhouse, which she was pretty sure was actually his home.
“Okay,” she said. “Serious question this time. Why haven’t you had a child until now?”
His expression went from amused to stony and unreadable. “It just hasn’t come up.”
“And now you're ready to father your one child, with me and Jamie,” Irene said. There was no changing Jamie’s mind about having Aiden act as their donor, but maybe she could change his.
“Isn’t that the goal of every human being? To make their mark on the world and leave it a better place for their progeny. All my life, I’ve wanted to be a father, to watch my child grow and mold them into a good person. To see someone I created inherit the world we live in.”
Instead of looking hopeful about his goal, he just seemed sad. For a flash of a second she saw him as human. He was struggling with his legacy and she admired his candor. For a moment, she could actually see him as a father to her kid.
But it was only a moment. She forced a smile, and he flashed his signature smile. “I should get back to work,” she said.
“Yes,” he agreed. “Your boss probably wouldn’t approve if you returned late from lunch.”
··OOO··
Irene didn’t bother checking in with Jamie. She had spent every evening at the gallery, planning her opening. Not even once did she think to send Irene a message to let her know she was running late, but Irene didn’t care anymore. Jamie was going to do what she wanted to do, regardless of how it affected anyone else.
Irene drove to the south side of town, where the apartments were rent-controlled and single parents could almost afford to get by. As she walked from her parking spot along the block, she looked for a particular apartment number. It was on the ground floor, so at least she didn’t need to climb any stairs.
She knocked on the door. “Who’s there?” called a woman’s voice. Irene waited. As soon as they checked the peephole, they’d let her in.
Angel opened the door just a couple inches. “Irene, what are you doing here?”
“I need your help,” she said.
He opened the door a little wider and let her in. “Victory warned us not to get involved with you,” he said.
Irene smiled. Victory was pretty old school. “That’s because I’ve crossed over to the dark side. I’m working undercover for the FBI.”
“Shit,” Angel said. “Come in. Take a seat.”
She walked into the small apartment. The living space had a small sitting area along with a dining table and kitchenette. Angel’s son was at the table working on homework. The apartment didn’t have nice furnishings, but it was thoughtfully laid out and clean. Irene pulled the copies out of her blazer and handed them to Angel.
“These are profiles for women,” she said. “There should be enough information to figure out who they are.”
“Why don’t you bring them to the FBI?” he asked, leafing through the copies.
“They only care about the possibility of a terrorist attack, not about the actual people involved.”
Angel held his device in front of the top page and said, “Read data.” He watched his device as it scanned in the text and analyzed it. “This one is a Trisha Small.” He went through all five profiles, identifying the woman corresponding each one.
“How many of them have a child?” Irene asked.
Angel poked at his device for a moment. “None of them,” he said.
Irene shook her head. She wanted to get to the male donors, the ‘quality DNA’ used to impregnate these women. Then she remembered Aiden’s story. “Can you look up traffic accidents involving a bicycle? One where a child died from at least eight years ago.” Maybe the late friend who inspired Aiden to form AQD would hold answers.
Angel spoke the details into his device and they waited while it found a match.
“One match found,” the computerized voice of the device said. “Amir Lazuli, surgeon.”
“Can you send that to me?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said. Irene held out her device and tapped it against his.
She looked at the profile. Ten years ago, Amir got in a tragic accident when he was biking near home. The accident killed the baby boy strapped in the child seat. A year later, Amir died in another car accident. She flicked her finger down, scrolling to the picture at the top of the profile. Her heart dropped.
“I need to go,” she said.
Angel nodded. “I’m happy to help, but it might be best if you don’t come back. Especially if you’re working with the feds.”
She mumbled an agreement before rushing out of the apartment and outside into the dark evening. She looked back down at her device. The picture was unmistakable. Amir Lazuli was Aiden Stone.
fifteen
“I’m disappointed,” Rick said. Yet again he had caught up with Irene during her Saturday run. “You shouldn’t be sharing information on this investigation with anyone. Not even the Social Department.”
Irene huffed and sped up, but Rick had no problem keeping up with the increased pace. She wished she could lose him. “If I had some way to reach you when I found something, then I’d go to you first.”
“What was so important that you had to see your former coworker?”
“I found the profiles of women who are members of AQD who were picked to be matched with their elite donors, or quality DNA. I need to find out who the men are who’ve been labeled as quality DNA. They’ll hold the key to how AQD has been breaking progeny laws.”
“It doesn’t matter it they’re freezing enough sperm to fill a swimming pool. You need to focus on uncovering the attack on the Genome Database.”
Irene was huffing, trying to keep up the pace and talk at the same time. Rick slowed down and once she got her breathing back to normal, she said, “Aiden knows Michael Shark is reporting to the FBI. He thought I might be the mole, and took me to a medical facility to try and scare me. I really believe he’s doing some sort of human experiments there.”
