by Jance, J. A.
In the years since Ali had been in charge of the program, she’d a number of successes. She had four certified teachers, three RNs, and two full-fledged pharmacists to her credit. One girl had graduated from med school and was doing her residency in pediatrics at a hospital in Tucson, while two others had embarked on premed studies at the University of Arizona. At NAU that year, she’d added in two more education graduates, one B.A. and one M.Ed. That graduation speech, otherwise boring as hell, had also brought on board a computer-science graduate as well as another four-year nursing graduate. Arizona State had yielded two more teachers, one a B.A. and another an M.Ed, along with a determined young woman who had grown up in Jerome and who’d set her sights on becoming a mining engineer.
Two years earlier, realizing that scholarships for boys were most often sports-based, Ali had added boys and trade schools to the mix. That was how a boy named Raphael Fuentes, a kid with zero athletic capabilities, had just completed a course of studies at the Cordon Bleu in Scottsdale, while another young man was now a sophomore drama major at the University of Arizona, intent on becoming a costume designer rather than an actor.
“This year’s awards were handed out earlier in the spring,” Ali resumed. “Without Leland there to help with the first sort, it was a lot more work than it’s been in the past. Still, hard work or not, it’s very rewarding. And later this summer I’m hoping to have a kind of homecoming gathering where I’ll be inviting all current and past Askins scholars here to the house so they can get together, chew the fat, and compare notes.”
“Agnes, too?” Sister Anselm asked.
Agnes Gray was someone Ali and Sister Anselm together had helped rescue from a polygamous cult near Colorado City. At the time Agnes left what was known as the Encampment, she’d been wise in the ways of animals but terribly lacking in formal education. Since then she had earned a GED and completed training as a veterinarian’s assistant. Now, though, she had enrolled as a freshman at Northern Arizona University, intent on becoming a veterinarian. Ali had fudged the scholarship’s Verde Valley resident stipulation enough that Agnes’s studies were also being funded by the Askins Foundation.
“Agnes, too,” Ali replied.
“I’m glad to hear it,” Sister Anselm said. She put down her empty cup and glanced at her watch. “I should probably be going. Is B. around? I’d like to say hello to him before taking off.”
“You missed him,” Ali said. “He had meetings scheduled in Japan for Monday, which happens to be today on this side of the international date line. He’s not due home until the end of the week. Lucky guy, too,” Ali added. “We’ve got a slew of back-ordered computers that are due to be delivered sometime this week which will entail a huge installation project, a bullet he so happens to be dodging.”
“That’s what you’ve got all those energetic young people for, isn’t it?” Sister Anselm said, rising to her feet.
“Exactly,” Ali agreed.
Once Sister Anselm had sped away in her bright red Mini Cooper, Ali took both empty coffee cups into the house. After refilling hers, she came back outside, carrying the book she was reading and accompanied by her long-haired miniature dachshund, Bella. While Bella explored the garden at her leisure, searching for stray rodents or bunnies, Ali sat watching and thinking.
When she fled home to Sedona from California years earlier, her life had been a shambles and she’d felt totally defeated. Holed up in the double-wide mobile home she’d inherited from her Aunt Evie, Ali hadn’t envisioned that any of this would come her way—not the house, the view, the garden, the dog, the statue. She hadn’t anticipated having that coterie of scholarship kids in her life nor a best friend who happened to be an eighty-something Sister of Providence. As for remarrying someone who was fifteen years younger than she was? That hadn’t been on Ali’s radar back then either.
Bella finished her exploratory tour of the garden and came back to Ali, asking to be scooped up and held.
“That’s right, girl,” Ali crooned aloud to Bella. “I never saw any of this coming, but I’m glad it did.”
With that, she picked up the book and located her place. She had ordered a signed copy of Alex Munsey’s new book, The Changeling. She’d started to read it when it first came out, but her reading had been interrupted and she hadn’t had time to finish it.
On that sunny afternoon, sitting and reading in the cool shade of her wisteria-lined front porch, Ali Reynolds had no idea that before the end of the week people and events from those bad old times in California were about to reach out and bite her in the butt, because, as that old saying goes, no good deed ever goes unpunished.
3
Burbank, California, March 2003
Ali Reynolds kicked off her high heels, spun away from her desk, and stared out the window of her second-story corner office. As the news-anchor-in-chief of the network’s Los Angeles affiliate, she had been deemed worthy of corner-office treatment. That didn’t mean much today. There was a smog alert outside, and a layer of gritty brown air obscured all but the nearest lanes of traffic down below. Yes, there were mountains out there somewhere, but today they were totally invisible.
The news team had gone over the upcoming headline stories for the evening newscast, and she had a quiet hour to herself before she needed to be downstairs, where Angela, the station’s go-to beauty wrangler, would see to her makeup and hair. Between the five o’clock news and the next broadcast at eleven, Ali was supposed to have a few hours off, except that wouldn’t be the case tonight. Her husband, Paul Grayson, would be sending a car to pick her up and carry her off to the home of some Hollywood bigwig or other, where she and Paul were due to grace a fund-raiser for a political candidate whose name Ali didn’t know and didn’t care to learn. Whoever it was, he was the current darling of the network execs, and Paul and Ali had drawn the short straws of being there for the meet and greet. For Ali, however, all that meeting and greeting was starting to get her down, and that was only the start of it.
She had met Paul Grayson, a powerful network executive, when she was working for the Chicago affiliate. Theirs had been a whirlwind romance. Paul had wooed her with high-end dining, always accompanied by expensive wines, and had seen to it that fresh flowers were delivered to her dressing room on a daily basis. His marriage proposal had been accompanied by an offer to give her a lucrative promotion to the evening news anchor at the network’s flagship station in L.A.
Her first husband, Dean, had died of glioblastoma while Ali was still in her twenties. His battle with cancer had been a short but terrible trip from initial diagnosis to over and out, leaving Ali a widow who was also seven months pregnant. As a single mother with a demanding career, she’d had little time or interest for the dating game. When Paul eventually came calling, Chris had been fourteen years old and a freshman in high school.
Back then she’d thought it would be good for Chris to have an adult male in his life. He was close to Ali’s parents, but Edie and Bob Larson were back home in Sedona—too far away for anything but intermittent connections. Unfortunately, Ali’s dream of a cozy family life for the three of them hadn’t turned out the way she’d hoped. Paul had no children of his own, and he came with very limited parenting skills. At a time when Chris was an adolescent and starting to test parental limits, Paul had expected that his new stepson should hop to at every issued order. Seven years later they barely tolerated each other. Now twenty-one, Chris was about to finish his degree at UCLA. He still lived at home, but he spent most of his time in the casita down by the pool rather than in the house itself.
As for the marriage? That wasn’t exactly living up to expectations either. Sure, Paul’s home was magnificent—a mansion, really—and a far cry from the home she’d grown up in behind her parents’ Sugarloaf Café in Sedona and a huge step up from the grim digs she and Chris had lived in on the East Coast and in the Midwest as she struggled to establish herself in the television news business. So she’d felt a bit like Cinderella when she came to live
in the house on Robert Lane as a new bride, but seven years later the marriage was on the ropes. The house was Paul’s house, furnished and decorated to his tastes rather than hers, and she still felt like a bit of an interloper.
As for Paul? He was glad to have her around as a visible social prop on those occasions when a spouse was called for, but he seemed to be drifting away from her. She had suggested marital counseling more than once, but he’d scoffed at the idea. Besides, his time was too valuable for him to bother wasting any of it on a shrink. Eventually Ali had come to feel at home with his indifference. It was a lot less complicated than walking on eggshells both at home and on the job.
Her work at the station wasn’t exactly a bed of roses either. Because Ali was promoted from outside rather than from within and championed by the executive privilege of her spouse, she had walked into a situation where there was plenty of resentment and very little camaraderie. The longtime female reporter who had expected to take over the news-anchor position left the station in a huff a few weeks after Ali’s arrival, and her abrupt departure had made things worse instead of better. Ali made friends with people at affiliates in other locations up and down the West Coast, but at her own station? Not so much.
She was often deployed as the station’s standard-bearer at various charitable events around the city. Her visible participation was good for ratings. The downside was that although her PR work outside the station gave her better standing in the community as a whole, it made her even more of a pariah at work. In other words, the complications both at home and in the office left her too drained to tackle doing something about either one, so she kept her head down and did what was required—including showing up at whatever event—a wine tasting of some kind—was on the calendar for tonight. There was something terribly depressing in all that. Ali would attend and go through the motions, but her heart wouldn’t be in it. She felt utterly useless—as though nothing she did really mattered.
At that point a call came through from Diane, the receptionist at the front desk downstairs. “There’s someone here to see you. Her name is Alexandra Munsey. She doesn’t have an appointment, but she said you chatted briefly at the Kidney Foundation luncheon a week ago. She was wondering if she could have a few minutes of your time.”
Ali tried not to roll her eyes. She met a lot of people at events like that. They were usually looking for a charitable donation of some kind, or else they were searching for a speaker or a celebrity to spark interest in an upcoming event. But PR was one of Ali’s primary responsibilities, and in these days of post-9/11 security precautions, stray visitors weren’t allowed to wander through the station without an official escort.
“Sure,” Ali said. “Tell her I’ll be right down.”
There was a crowd in the lobby, made up mostly of people waiting to be the live studio audience for the station’s midafternoon talk show. They were an enthusiastic, excited group, gabbing energetically among themselves. None of them looked at all familiar. At last Ali picked out someone who did. A woman sat alone on one of the lobby’s bright yellow love seats, staring up at the bank of high-def TV screens lining the wall. The previous week, as Ali was leaving the dais, having served as a luncheon speaker, the woman had approached her and they had exchanged a few words, none of which Ali could recall at the moment.
Seemingly unaware of the other people milling around in the room, Alexandra Munsey stared blindly at the action on the various screens, but she didn’t appear to be absorbing any of it. Ali paused for a moment and studied her visitor. It was difficult to tell how old she was. From her fashionable attire and figure, Ali’s initial impression was that the woman was reasonably well-off and probably somewhere in her forties or fifties, but the careworn features of her face made her appear much older.
“Ms. Munsey?” Ali asked.
The woman started as though awaking out of a sound sleep. “Yes,” she said, quickly regaining her composure. “Alexandra, really, although you’re welcome to call me Alex. Thank you for agreeing to see me on such short notice, Ms. Reynolds.”
“No problem,” Ali returned. “And please feel free to call me Ali. Since we met at the Kidney Foundation luncheon, I’m assuming your wanting to see me has something to do with that?”
“Yes and no,” Alex replied. “I’m involved with the Kidney Foundation, of course, but this is primarily about my son, Evan. He’s twenty-one, and he’s been on dialysis for the past three years. He needs a kidney transplant, and that’s why I need to talk to you.”
Ali felt as though she’d been punched in the gut. Alex was probably several years older than Ali, but Evan Munsey was almost the same age as her own son, Christopher. Chris was healthy, going to school, and getting on with his life, while Alex Munsey’s son was most likely dying.
“I’m so sorry to hear that,” Ali said, but she was waiting for the pitch—waiting for Alex to ask if Ali would consider underwriting the cost of the operation. Ali’s star presence in the room had been noted, and the people waiting to be let into the studio fell silent, listening in on their conversation with avid interest.
“Why don’t you sign in?” Ali suggested. “Then we can go up to my office, where we’ll have some privacy.” She waited while Alex signed in on the visitors’ clipboard. “If you’d like, we could stop by the break room and pick up some coffee or—”
“No, thanks,” Alex interjected. “No coffee—I’m fine.”
They made their way up in the elevator without exchanging another word. Wanting to put her guest at ease, Ali directed Alex to sit in one of the guest chairs before sinking down in the chair beside her rather than seating herself behind her desk. For an informal chat, side by side was better.
“Three years on dialysis,” Ali said at last. “That has to be tough.”
Alex nodded. “It is. Evan got sick on a trip to Mexico right after he graduated from high school. The first doctor he saw thought he’d caught some kind of bug. It wasn’t until we got him home and into an ER here in the States that they finally diagnosed him. By then Evan was already in kidney failure. He nearly died. But don’t feel sorry for him. He’s a tough kid. He went ahead and enrolled at UCLA. He can’t take a full load, but he’s keeping up with the courses he’s able to take, and he’s getting good grades in those.”
So Evan was going UCLA, too. Was there a chance that he and Chris had ever met or been in the same class together? Ali wondered.
“What’s he studying?”
“He hasn’t declared a major yet,” Alex said with a smile, “but he’s leaning toward a double major in microbiology and criminal justice. He’s always loved crime dramas on TV. He’s hoping for a job in forensics of some kind. He doesn’t want to be a cop out on the street. He’d rather be one of the guys in the white uniforms examining evidence in some high-tech crime lab.”
“Good for him,” Ali said. “These days forensics are the name of the game.”
“And, in a way, forensics is why I came here today to talk to you,” Alex continued. “Evan has been on the organ-recipient waiting list for a long time. It’s awful to have to sit around hoping for someone else to die so he can live. Recently one of his doctors suggested that maybe we could find someone, a close relative perhaps, who might be willing to give up a single kidney. I don’t qualify as a match, and neither does his dad, but there might be someone out there who could be a match—a half brother or half sister, maybe.”
Ali stumbled over that one. “Evan has half siblings?” she asked.
“That’s the whole problem,” Alex replied. “I don’t know for sure. He may have half siblings, and then again he may not, and you may be my only hope for finding out.”
“Wait,” Ali said, holding up her hand. “You’re saying your son may have half siblings that you know nothing about? How can that be?”
Alex answered Ali’s questions with another of her own. “What do you know about artificial insemination?”
“I’ve heard the words, of course,” Ali allowed, “bu
t other than that I don’t know anything about it.”
“Then allow me to enlighten you,” Alex Munsey said, “because that’s the real crux of the matter.”
4
Burbank, California, March 2003
As the two women settled in to talk, Alex Munsey launched into her story. “Jake, my husband, and I tried for years to get pregnant. Finally, with my biological clock ticking away, we went looking for a fertility clinic and were referred to a Dr. Gilchrist—Edward Gilchrist—in Santa Clarita. That’s where we were living at the time, in Santa Clarita. After doing some tests, Dr. Gilchrist determined that Jake had a very low sperm count—an almost nonexistent sperm count—and suggested that we consider other options.”
“In vitro, then?” Ali asked.
Alex shook her head. “The test-tube thing wasn’t for us. We chose IUI instead—intrauterine insemination. It’s performed as a simple in-office procedure. We were lucky, and I got pregnant on the second try. The day we brought Evan home from the hospital was the happiest day of my life, and he was a perfect baby—an easy baby and a great kid.” She paused for a moment before adding regretfully, “He’s already spent years on dialysis. Without a transplant he’ll never have anything like a normal life.”
“So who was the sperm donor?” Ali asked.
“That’s the thing,” Alex replied. “We never knew the donor’s name, although we saw his photo. Dr. Gilchrist had a book in his office—something he called his catalog—that contained photos and detailed bios for each of the donors. As I seem to remember there were fifty or so in all.”
“That’s where you went shopping for your sperm donor?”
