Tangled Roots

by Marcia Talley

  ‘What’s in the envelope?’ I asked as I unzipped my carry-on and removed my toiletry bag.

  Julie shuffled several pages. ‘There’s a schedule of events.’ She looked up from the page. ‘We’re due in the conference room at four for a meet and greet, followed by cocktails at five and dinner at six at a restaurant called the Silver Stallion.’

  ‘It’s practically next door,’ I said. ‘We drove by it on the way in.’

  Julie looked up. ‘Sounds like a gay bar.’

  I laughed. ‘It’s a family place, I think. Steak, chicken, chops.’

  ‘A vegetarian’s delight,’ she said.

  When I returned from hanging up my toiletries on a towel rack in the bathroom, Julie said, ‘Here’s a list of my known half-siblings with contact information. The ones with an asterisk are supposed to be here,’ she said, starting to count. ‘Six boys and five girls, including me. None of these people live anywhere near Baltimore,’ she said. ‘And look! I have a half-ling in Australia! I’ve never been to Australia.’

  ‘When do you want to go downstairs?’ I asked my niece.

  ‘A little after four, maybe?’ She grinned nervously. ‘I plan to be fashionably late.’

  ‘If it’s all right with you, then, I’ll put my feet up for a little while.’

  ‘Go for it,’ Julie said. ‘I’m going to wash my hair again. There’s a hair dryer in there, I hope.’

  After repeated shampooing, Julie’s hair had nearly returned to its natural apricot color, but another washing couldn’t hurt. ‘Go for it,’ I said.

  Two hours later, my niece and I, both freshly showered and smelling like Best Western’s Aromae Botanicals bath bar, presented ourselves at the door to the hotel’s single conference room. Julie vibrated with excitement.

  ‘Welcome!’ David Moody said. While he beamed at Julie, I searched his face for a resemblance to my late brother-in-law, but with the exception of his ice-blue eyes, David had the dark-haired, olive-skinned good looks of his mother, Karen, who stood next to him behind the table.

  ‘Welcome,’ Karen Moody said, handing me a ‘Hello, my name is’ stick-on name badge and a Sharpie. ‘You must be one of the sister-moms.’

  ‘I’m with Julie,’ I told her, neatly side-stepping the question.

  Karen peeled a gold star off a roll of stickers and pressed it onto the upper right-hand corner of my nametag. Since she wore a similar gold star, I figured the star identified me as a sister-mom whether I liked it or not.

  ‘Take off a shoe,’ Karen said after I’d finished writing ‘Hannah’ on my nametag and returned the Sharpie.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘It’s an ice breaker.’ She grinned, revealing a row of impossibly even, improbably white teeth. ‘Take off your right shoe and throw it in that pile in the middle of the room. As soon as everyone gets here, we’ll have some fun.’

  Swell.

  Julie and I did as we were told.

  About two dozen chairs had been arranged around the sides of the small conference room. Julie and I limped over to claim two chairs next to a small table set with a tub of ice studded with small, eight-ounce bottles of water.

  ‘Diddle-diddle-dumpling,’ I muttered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Never mind, Julie,’ I said. Doesn’t anybody read nursery rhymes to their children any more?

  As we waited for the ‘fun’ to begin, Julie and I sat quietly, observing as her half-siblings and their sister-moms arrived and the pile of shoes in the center of the room gradually grew.

  ‘So far, nobody looks the least bit like me,’ Julie said, sounding disappointed.

  ‘That’s because you’re the image of your mother,’ I reminded her. ‘But, look. The Cardinale genes are pretty strong. Check out all the dimpled chins.’

  Julie touched the dimple in her own chin and smiled. Suddenly, she grabbed my arm. ‘Oh my god, that guy over there?’ She nodded in the direction of the door. ‘He looks just like Colin, but all grown up! Like one of those pictures of missing kids on milk cartons all, um, what do you call it?’

  ‘Age progressed?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  As the room filled up Julie pointed out the various traces of Scott she detected in his offspring. The blue-gray eyes, the sandy hair, the fair skin, the square-shaped ears and the dimple, always the dimple. ‘And that guy over there with the buzz cut? Jeesh! He looks just like Sean and Dylan the summer they went whitewater rafting with Outward Bound!’ After a moment, she added, ‘I’m getting seriously weirded out, Aunt Hannah.’

  In truth, I was, too.

  ‘How can I connect in any real way with so many siblings?’ she whispered. ‘I feel like I’m part of a herd, not a family.’

  ‘It gives a whole new meaning to the concept of family, doesn’t it, Julie?’ I said, reaching out for her hand and squeezing it affectionately.

  Nearly every chair had been taken by then: half-lings and sister-moms sitting in a ring, eyes darting about, sizing up one another. Eventually, Karen Moody strolled to the center of the circle and clapped her hands for attention. ‘Welcome, diblings and sister-moms!’

  Julie turned to me and mouthed, ‘Diblings?’

  ‘Ugh,’ I muttered.

  Karen continued to clap-clap-clap which we took as a sign we were to join her, as if applauding ourselves for turning up.

  ‘OK, now,’ she said after the applause died away. ‘When I say “go”, everybody run to the center of the room and grab a shoe. Then, you have to find the owner of that shoe and get acquainted!’

  I’d played this game before, back in my corporate days, so I’d already set my sights on the turquoise and gray Keens of a sister-mom who came in with her daughter and retreated shyly, like Julie and I had, to a corner.

  Karen shouted ‘Go!’ and the scramble began. After everyone had been reunited with his or her shoe, I found myself back in the corner near the ice tub with Gloria, owner of the Keens, and her daughter, Nevada. Gloria, far from being shy, turned out to be a cheerleader for the Donor Sibling Registry.

  ‘Next game!’ Karen announced.

  ‘I’ll sit this one out on the sidelines, if you don’t mind,’ I said.

  ‘Me, too,’ Gloria agreed. ‘I have enough of touchy-feely HR exercises back at the office. I once had to convince a co-worker to drink blue buttermilk.’

  ‘Bleah!’ I said. It made my toes curl just thinking about it.

  I did not regret my decision: the next ice breaker involved a jar of M&Ms and a game of twenty questions.

  ‘My favorite food is nachos!’

  ‘The cartoon character that describes me best is Superman!’

  ‘Describe my personality in one word? Oh, that’s so hard … bubbly!’

  While that went on around us, Gloria turned to Julie and asked, ‘Have you signed up at the DSR?’

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ Julie said. ‘David found me on Gen-Tree.com. Tell me about DSR.’

  ‘Sixty-thousand members strong and counting,’ Nevada explained. ‘You put in your donor number and get matched up with half-siblings who share the same donor number. Donors can register, too,’ she added. ‘If they want to, of course. Our donor, Number 7135, hasn’t gone online yet.’

  Julie’s eyes grew wide and she turned to me as the significance of what Nevada had said sank in. No way Scott would have gone online, Julie knew that. And no wonder he had acted so negatively when he learned about Julie’s DNA test kit.

  ‘The largest half-sibling group match they’ve found so far is two hundred,’ Gloria informed us, her face serious. ‘The guy keeps track of his kids on an Excel spreadsheet.’

  ‘That’s creepy,’ Julie said.

  ‘Donor 7135 lived in Chicago, or so I assume because that’s where the clinic was,’ I said. ‘Julie noticed that a lot of her half-siblings still live in the Chicago area. Doesn’t anybody worry about incest?’

  ‘Part of my sex education has always been knowing my donor number,’ Nevada said, looking directl
y at Julie.

  ‘I’ve only just found out,’ Julie said, sounding defensive.

  Nevada shifted her steely-blue gaze to me. Clearly I’d come up short in the sister-mom department.

  ‘Well,’ Julie said, moving on. ‘That’ll certainly take the zing out of a first date. Hi, I’m Julie and my father was sperm donor number 7135. How about you?’

  I was still mulling over the ego maniac sitting in his office and keeping track of his offspring on an Excel spreadsheet. ‘Isn’t there any law to limit how many kids a donor can father?’

  ‘In my opinion,’ Gloria said, ‘there should be a cap on sales, but so far, nada.’

  ‘But the sperm banks keep track of everything, right?’

  Gloria wagged her head. ‘Here’s the scary thing: less than half the women who come to a sperm bank end up reporting their pregnancy back to the bank.’

  ‘Well, there ought to be a law,’ Julie said.

  ‘I agree, but the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t. We tried to get a law passed that would limit the number of times an individual donor’s sperm could be used. It would also mandate the reporting of donor conceived births and require post-conception medical updates about the offspring, you know, in case there turned out to be medical issues with some of the donors.’

  ‘That sounds like a no-brainer,’ Julie said. ‘What happened?’

  Gloria smiled grimly. ‘You’re gonna love this. The FDA determined that such a law would infringe on the right to privacy and the right to procreate, giving the government control over who has children and with whom.’

  I’m afraid I laughed out loud. ‘Sorry,’ I said, feeling everyone’s eyes turn from their M&Ms to me. ‘And this is coming from the same government that wants to tell women when and how they can have access to birth control, or to a legal abortion?’

  ‘God Bless America,’ Nevada said.

  The M&M game eventually drew to a close and we were herded into the lobby for drinks. In the area where the hotel normally served breakfast, the reunion organizers had set up cartons of Box-o-Wine – both red and white – a frosty pitcher of margaritas, and a bowl of fruit punch. They’d whipped up onion-herb dip for the potato chips and cut up veggies, and someone had put small bowls of mixed nuts out on each of the little, square tables. I lost track of Julie as I grazed among the hors d’oeuvres; I hadn’t eaten since the pretzels on the plane.

  When I caught up with Julie again, she and Nevada were giggling over something another one of their half-sisters, a girl named Beth, had said.

  ‘Brothers!’ Julie hooted. ‘I should know. I have three of them.’ Julie didn’t add that they would be half-siblings to the others, too. I’d leave it to her on when, and if, to blow Scott’s cover.

  ‘Come with me,’ Nevada said to her sisters. ‘You need to meet Andy Zimmer. We’ve known about each other for a couple of years. He’s been trying to track our donor down, and he’s so close.’

  Leaving me to nurse my Pinot Grigio in relative solitude.

  Andy turned out to be the Outward Bound version of Sean and Dylan who Julie had singled out earlier at the ice breaker. I watched from a distance as he was backed into a corner near the fireplace by the trio of half-sisters who fluttered around him like groupies.

  I studied Andy’s profile, so eerily like that of my nephews. If I painted a full head of floppy, Sean-style hair on his short-cropped head, Andy could easily have passed for the lookalike captured on Mrs Turner’s video. And if he were the donor son who had confronted my brother-in-law in his own backyard on the day he died, Andy would have to know from her nametag that Julie was Scott’s standard-issue daughter. How many Cardinales can there be?

  ‘He’s close to tracking our donor down,’ Nevada had said. If only she knew how close.

  I managed to catch Julie’s eye by waving my plastic wine glass in a please-fetch-me-another kind of way. When she returned with a refill, I shared my suspicions about Andy.

  ‘No way,’ Julie said.

  ‘Way!’ I said. ‘Turn around and take a good look at him.’

  Julie squinted in Andy’s direction. ‘Maybe from a distance,’ she said. ‘But if you’re right, Aunt Hannah, how can we prove it?’

  ‘Maybe one of us can corner him at dinner,’ I said, just as Karen Moody appeared in the lobby ringing a small handbell.

  ‘Better you than me,’ Julie said as we joined the parade heading next door to the Silver Stallion, where I was dismayed to see that Karen had arranged assigned seating for our dinner. Tented name cards decorated with the DNA helix placed me at the far end of a long community table and Julie at the other. Andy was seated near the middle, next to Nevada’s mother, Gloria, and I ended up with bubbly Beth. If there was a method to Karen’s madness, it totally escaped me.

  By the time dessert rolled around (homemade rice pudding!) even Beth’s wild-and-crazy stories about growing up with a succession of five stepfathers failed to keep my eyelids from drooping, so I excused myself from the table. ‘Over to you,’ I whispered in Julie’s ear as I left. ‘You can tell me about it in the morning.’

  THIRTY-TWO

  Sunday morning, an hour before the shuttle that would take us back to the airport, I parked my luggage next to a square, marble-topped table not far from the fake fireplace in the hotel lobby and headed for the breakfast bar. While I waited for Julie to shower, dress, finish packing and join me, I filled a bowl with corn flakes from a dispenser, grabbed a cup of blueberry yogurt from a mini-fridge, snagged a cup of coffee and sat down.

  About five minutes later Julie managed to find me. She’d stopped at the make-your-own waffle machine and was carrying a banana and a chunky Belgian waffle swimming in syrup, topped with a generous swirl of whipped cream. ‘How do you stay so thin?’ I asked, eyeing her breakfast and silently calculating the calories.

  Julie scooted her chair forward, leaned over her plate and whispered, ‘Hardly any of Dad’s children are fat, did you notice?’ Wielding a plastic knife and fork, she sawed a corner off the waffle, popped it into her mouth, closed her eyes and chewed appreciatively. ‘High metabolism must run in the family,’ she said, waving her fork. ‘Thank you, Dad.’

  I dumped the yogurt onto my cereal, stirred and dug in with a spoon. ‘Sorry to run out on you last night, but I just couldn’t keep my eyes open. Did you get a chance to talk with Andy?’

  ‘No such luck,’ she said. ‘He bugged out shortly after you did.’

  ‘Darn,’ I said. ‘Maybe he’ll show up for breakfast.’

  ‘It still feels totally surreal,’ Julie said. ‘I keep wishing my brothers were here, the ones I grew up with, I mean.’

  Because of his age, Georgina had decided not to tell Colin. Dylan had zero interest in meeting his extended family; he’d expressed anger at his father, in fact. Sean had been keen, but even if he hadn’t been warned to stick around town by Baltimore’s Finest, his class schedule would have kept him away from Des Plaines.

  ‘I hope they come around,’ I said, remembering the fury with which Dylan had greeted the news that his father had been a sperm donor, treating it as an act of betrayal.

  Julie must have been thinking the same thing because she said, ‘You’d think Dad had been unfaithful to Mom the way Dylan carried on. But, Dad hadn’t even met Mom yet!’

  ‘Give them time to …’ I began, and then I spotted Andy Zimmer, carrying a duffle bag and looking spiff in slim jeans and a long-sleeved polo shirt that brought out the blue in his eyes.

  ‘Julie!’ I whispered. ‘There’s Andy. Go ask him to join us.’

  Rather than leap to her feet as I would have done, Julie unfolded herself casually, stood and wandered in Andy’s direction, waylaying him just short of our table.

  ‘Mornin’, Andy.’ Julie’s smile dazzled. ‘Would you like to sit with us?’

  Andy grinned and dropped his duffle bag next to her chair. ‘Thanks. Watch that for me, will you?’ With a glance at Julie’s plate he said, ‘There’s a waffle over there just cal
ling my name.’

  Julie sat down and scooted her chair forward, nudging Andy’s bag with her foot to make room. Her brow furrowed. She reached into her pocket and grabbed her cell phone. After a quick glance around the room, she ducked her head under the table. As I watched, mystified, I heard the distinctive sound of a shutter closing.

  When her head surfaced again, I whispered, ‘What the heck are you doing?’

  Instead of answering, she handed me her cell phone and refocused attention on her waffle.

  I studied the screen. Julie had photographed the checked baggage tag wrapped around the strap of Andy’s duffle. I raised an eyebrow. Julie made a flicking motion with her thumb and forefinger, indicating I should enlarge the image. I did.

  BWI to MDW.

  Midway is the airport in downtown Chicago, and BWI …

  My heart did a quick rat-a-tat-tat as my eyes focused on the date. On August 18, the day that Scott Cardinale was murdered, Andy Zimmer had flown from Baltimore back to Chicago on Southwest Airlines Flight 2097.

  ‘He told me he’d never been to Baltimore,’ Julie said. ‘Liar.’

  ‘I wonder what time that flight was?’ I said, calling up the Safari app and doing a quick search. ‘Six p.m.,’ I told her.

  ‘Time enough …’ Julie began, then, ‘Shhhh. He’s coming back.’

  ‘Let me handle this, Julie.’

  Her eyes narrowed, but she nodded.

  ‘So, tell me about your family, Andy,’ I said as he joined us at the table. ‘We didn’t get much time to chat last night.’

  ‘I had two moms, never a Dad. My moms were great, don’t get me wrong, it’s just …’

  He smiled. ‘Mom always said I was conceived on the corner of Drexel and 57th during her lunch hour. No man involved.’

  ‘Did you miss not having a dad?’ Julie wanted to know.

  Andy shrugged. ‘Sometimes, like if there was a father-son event at school. People should be more sensitive, you know? But mostly my father was like a relative who died before I was born.’