Mother Knows Best

by Kira Peikoff

  “I hear Amateur Babysitters is not to be missed.”

  He laughs as a nurse calls him back. “Mr. Glasser? We’re ready for you.”

  “Go stallion, go,” I whisper as he gets up.

  “I’m bringing strength in numbers,” he jokes. Under my sweater, I cross my fingers.

  Waiting to be called next, I glance at the other patients on the white leather couches. There are three other women in their twenties or thirties tapping on their cells. Are any of them the mysterious Jillian? I know she is also going to have her eggs retrieved today so that Nash can carry out the illicit mitochondrial transplant this afternoon.

  I find myself fixated on one woman with striking red hair—it tumbles over her shoulders in waves worthy of a shampoo commercial. Her face, which is absorbed in her phone, radiates youthfulness—creamy skin, rounded cheeks, a smattering of freckles. She must be barely twenty-five.

  That’s about how old I was when I met Ethan. Such an innocent time, back in the B.C. era—before Colton. I smile to myself, thinking of the days when he would leave me little love notes around my apartment—If you’re reading this, I miss you right now, or Can’t wait to see (all of) you later. I saved each scrap in a shoebox that still lives in our closet.

  The woman looks up and catches my eye, and any doubt I had about her identity vanishes. Only a shrewd scientist, however young, could possess a stare so penetrating. I tighten my arms across my chest as a thought both wondrous and disturbing crosses my mind: soon, a piece of her will be in me.

  Jillian’s lips stretch almost imperceptibly, but I can’t tell whether she means to smile or sneer. Either way, a surprising coldness emanates from her eyes.

  I don’t like it one bit.

  * * *

  JILLIAN

  I sidle up to Nash as soon as the door to the lab closes behind us. It’s been a grueling day so far: he extracted twenty-three of my healthy eggs in a short procedure under intravenous sedation. Claire produced only eleven eggs, so we will have that many chances to form the perfect embryo.

  After my procedure, I recovered for an hour in a private room while the anesthesia wore off, and Nash sweetly brought me some apple juice and Tylenol. I was touched that he attended to me himself, rather than a nurse. Then I went home to freshen up and mentally prepare for the transplant. Now it’s after four pm, and I’m sore but excited to get to work. Nash dismissed his entire staff early, encouraging his nurses, lab technicians, embryologist, and receptionist to “get a head start on the weekend.”

  Which means we are finally alone.

  “You ready?” I whisper into his ear. He pulls away from his microscope. As our eyes lock, I feel a stab of anxiety. His impassive expression reminds me of when he’s about to deliver bad news to a patient. He probably means to seem unthreatening, but he triggers the opposite effect instead.

  He looks away. “Soon.”

  “You better not be getting cold feet.” I point angrily at the incubator, where all of our eggs are waiting inside at a toasty thirty-seven degrees centigrade in ninety-five percent humidity. “If I went through all this for nothing—”

  “Relax,” he interrupts. “It’ll happen.” But his face is inscrutable.

  I wait for him to notice the effort I’ve made to look good for this moment—which wasn’t easy only hours after being knocked out by powerful drugs. At home, after they wore off, I showered, shaved my legs, and curled my hair, then applied eyeliner, mascara, and blush.

  But this is not how I envisioned my fantasy … the two of us high on our mutual admiration, tearing off each other’s lab coats in celebration of our forbidden success.

  “Everything ready to go?” His voice is painfully neutral.

  “As ready as ever.”

  Under an inverted microscope powered to 30,000-times magnification, we will extract the nucleus of one of my eggs so all that remains is the shell—including its healthy mitochondria. Then, using my pioneering technique, we’ll extract the nucleus of one of Claire’s eggs and transplant it into my egg’s empty shell to form one perfect hybrid egg, with my mitochondria intact. We’ll repeat the procedure for each pair of eggs we have, then mix the hybrids with Claire’s husband’s sperm.

  After five days of growing in petri dishes, each embryo will have grown to around 100 cells. We’ll pluck five to ten trophectoderm cells from each one with a laser and analyze them under a microscope in a technique called PGD—preimplantation genetic diagnosis—to make sure none of Claire’s harmful mutations were inherited. Then we’ll evaluate which embryo is the best candidate for implantation. In the Darwinian world of assisted reproduction, only the strongest one has a shot at actual personhood.

  “I’ll go prepare the sperm.” Nash stands abruptly, his stool screeching out from under him. “Why don’t you start without me?” His smile seems oddly strained. “You invented the cell polarization maneuver, so it’s only fair.”

  My mouth opens in surprise. Are you sure? I almost ask. But this is my opportunity for greatness, as he himself predicted. There’s no way in hell I’m going to argue. The only sad part is that we deserve cameras and reporters documenting this turning point in the history of mankind—the first time anyone has genetically intervened to prevent the transmission of a fatal disease. But one day, hopefully within our lifetimes, I’m confident the world will come to its senses and honor us.

  I smile gratefully at him. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  “You deserve it.”

  I suppress a twinge of regret, remembering the secret recording I made in case I needed to blackmail him one day. But now I see he’s not selfish enough to steal my spotlight. We’re equal partners.

  * * *

  Twenty-five minutes later—longer than usual to prepare sperm—he returns from the adjacent room where semen samples are tested, washed, and stored. I look up from my microscope to catch him wincing. At first, I worry he’s in physical pain, but then his lips purse and I realize something is wrong.

  “Spit it out,” I tell him.

  “I didn’t want to say anything.” He lets out a heavy sigh. “But I just double- and triple-checked. Ethan’s sperm count is only four million with two percent morphology.”

  “What? You’ve got to be fucking kidding.”

  Fifteen million is low for sperm, and most of his are abnormal. How are we supposed to create the perfect embryo now?

  “There’s still a chance,” Nash says, reading my mind.

  “The odds are terrible. I can’t believe this.”

  “I know.”

  I set down my pipette and pull off my mask. “What the hell am I doing, then?”

  “Finish the job. It’s still possible.”

  “Bullshit.”

  After all our months of prep, all the strings I’ve pulled, including things he doesn’t even know about, this was one outcome I had not anticipated: doomed to failure by pure dumb bad luck.

  “Don’t give up.” He touches my shoulder. “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

  His strained optimism is crushing.

  “Okay, okay,” I say slowly, thinking. “Give me another half an hour.”

  “Good. I’ll go prep the sperm.” He retreats to the other room. “At least we’ve come this far, right?”

  I nod. “Who knows what could happen?”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  * * *

  When the time is up, he comes back to check on me. “How did it go?”

  I switch off the microscope; my eyes are burning from the intense focus. “Mostly fine. Couple casualties.”

  “What happened?”

  “Punctured the cytoplasm on one, tore the nucleus on another.”

  He frowns. In all our trial runs, I’ve shown the precision of a marksman.

  “Sorry,” I tell him, making a point to seem ashamed. “I guess I was nervous.”

  “So how many hybrids did we get?”

  “Nine.”

  “That could still be enough.”
r />   “Hope so.” I manage the smile of a good sport. “You’re doing the ICSI now?”

  Intracytoplasmic sperm injection—shooting the sperm directly into the egg—will give us our best shot at forming embryos. This way, Ethan’s shitty sperm won’t have to swim to find their target. But with such bad specimens, all nine tries could still fail.

  “Yeah,” he replies. “Shouldn’t take too long.”

  I keep my expression neutral. “I’ll wait. Maybe we can do dinner after? Toast to possibilities?”

  “Sure. Sounds like a plan.”

  * * *

  An hour later, after changing out of my scrubs and into the sundress I stashed in my locker, I find myself sitting across from him at a fancy Italian restaurant across the street. It’s packed with couples out for date night, and the atmosphere is appropriately romantic: white globe lights decorate the perimeter, and each table has a pink rose floating in a glass bowl.

  Nash is dressed in dark slim-fitting jeans and a gray V neck that reveals his pecs and upper arms. I must admit, I never knew his body under his lab coat was so jacked. For a forty-something guy, he is in killer shape.

  When a waiter arrives to show us the wine list, I push it away.

  “Two vodka martinis, please.”

  “Coming right up.”

  The waiter marches off, and Nash winces. “I actually don’t drink.”

  “Oh. Like at all?”

  He pauses. “I’m ten years sober.”

  I wait for details, but he offers none. The revelation makes me strangely happy. As he watches me for a reaction—judgment or disgust—I realize why: he’s opening up to me.

  “Good for you,” I tell him. Then, with an ironic smile, “I’ll drink to that.”

  The waiter returns and sets down two pungent martinis filled to the brim. I delicately raise one, and he touches his plain old ice water to it.

  “To us,” I say, deliberately pausing before I add, “Succeeding.”

  He smiles. “Cheers.”

  My nostrils flare from the burn of the vodka sliding down my throat. Almost instantly, I feel myself relaxing.

  “You know,” he says, “no matter what happens, I couldn’t have gotten this far without you. So, thank you.”

  Emboldened, I plant my elbows on the table and lean in, squeezing my breasts together. His eyes zero in on my cleavage. Despite the loud voices and clinking silverware around us, we might as well be alone. A pleasant warmth pulses between my legs. Maybe my fantasy isn’t so far off after all.

  “You really think we have a chance?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “Not great, but I’m cautiously optimistic.”

  I tilt my head. “Funny, that’s what I’ve been thinking about you.” As soon as the words escape, my heart stampedes into my throat.

  His eyes widen. “Oh?”

  “You’re a patient man, Rob …” I risk a smile, acknowledging my use of his first name. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed how often you ask me to work late. But …”

  He clears his throat. “But what?”

  “Nothing ever happens.”

  How many hours I’ve spent trying to decipher his mixed signals, his appreciative glances one day and minimal attention the next.

  “Well, you’re a beautiful young woman and I’m your boss. I can’t just take advantage …” He trails off as if waiting to be contradicted. That lustful look I’ve witnessed on certain late nights bares itself again. The difference is that this time, we both know it.

  Coyly, I slip a finger into my bra. “I’m not that hungry anymore. Are you?”

  “I think,” he says, “we should get the check.”

  * * *

  As I unlock my apartment twenty minutes later, his body presses up behind mine. He strokes my stomach an inch above my pelvis. Every nerve ending in his path fires up as if for the first time. I’m no virgin, but my body has never responded to touch like this before.

  I turn around and lift my face up to his. “I’ve wanted you this whole time.”

  He bends down to kiss me. His lips are soft and expressive, edged by sexy stubble. I press my mouth harder against his, and he wraps his arms around me. Making out, we blindly push open the door, traverse my apartment, and fall onto my bed. He rips off my dress and kisses my neck as I drag down his jeans. Naked, he is perfection. Toned, trimmed, and hard.

  “Are you sure?” he asks, hovering over me. “You must be sore.”

  “I’m fine.” My vagina is tender from the egg retrieval, but I don’t care.

  I grab a condom from my nightstand and tease him with my tongue as I put it on.

  A moan escapes him. “I’m not going to last.”

  I roll onto my back. “Get on top of me.”

  We rock together in a blissful rhythm that starts off slow—the cautious union of two bodies meeting for the first time—and then picks up speed until I can feel him in my deepest reaches. Everything else falls away in the throes of mind-numbing pleasure.

  But before I lose control altogether, I thrust harder until it hurts, and the pain brings me back. I know my intensity will make him come faster. Soon he does, with a groan of pure ecstasy.

  I’m already thinking of the next step. We lie there, panting, until our eyes meet.

  “Did you come?” he asks.

  “Of course, how could I not?”

  “Oh, good. I wasn’t sure.”

  I pull his stubbly chin down to kiss it. “That was hot.”

  He slides off the condom, and I point to my small garbage can beside the bed. He tosses it in. I lie back against the pillows and close my eyes.

  “Be right back,” he says, and disappears into the bathroom.

  When he returns, he’s smiling. “You’re something else, you know that.”

  Oh, I think, I know.

  ABBY: NOW

  As soon as Mom leaves my room, I head under my bed and retrieve the testing kit. I was feeling bad about my plan to sneak into her room while she’s sleeping and swab her cheek, but now I don’t. She’s already convinced I’m a brat, so what’s the difference?

  It’s time to figure out who the real liar is.

  At six PM, I go down for dinner—leftovers, nothing special. Dad’s exhausted from all his furniture customers, and Mom doesn’t mention our fight or the note. She talks more to Dad than me; they discuss boring things like whether he paid his parking ticket from last week. She warns him that a judge could issue a bench warrant if he forgets, and then he could be arrested. I swear, she’s so dramatic sometimes.

  When I tell them I need to study, they excuse me. I spend the next hour in bed on my laptop, researching. She can’t eat or drink for thirty minutes before giving the spit sample, which should be fine, since I’m waiting until she’s asleep.

  Google says that the special Q-tip brush in the kit needs to graze the inside of her cheek to pick up “squamous epithelial cells from the outer epithelial layer of the mouth.” Then I have to quickly put the swab stick into this thin plastic tube, where it will mix with something called “DNA stabilization buffer liquid.” That way, the sample will stay safe in the mail until it reaches the company’s lab in Burlington, North Carolina, where they will separate the DNA from the bacteria and whatever other junk is in saliva. A few weeks after that, Riley should get an email that her report is ready to view, since Riley is the one who registered the new kit.

  Mom and Dad’s nighttime routine is super predictable. They get into bed around ten, watch one episode of a show, and turn out the lights by eleven. Mom also takes a sleeping pill sometimes because of her anxiety. I’m sort of hoping that our fight today stressed her out enough to take it.

  At my bedtime, nine PM, she and Dad come in to give me a kiss and wish me good-night. She asks if I want to read a chapter in Harry Potter, but I tell her I’m too tired.

  “Sleep well,” she calls from the doorway. “Night night.”

  Dad blows a kiss. “We love you, Abby Caddaby.”

  “Love you too,” I
mumble.

  Their footsteps grow quiet as they go to their room.

  I throw off the covers and sit up. I can’t fall asleep by accident. My alarm clock reads 9:06 PM. I play games on my laptop and kill time on YouTube, getting more antsy by the minute. The usual stuff—cat memes, prank videos—barely distract me. Even secretly checking Instagram is not too exciting tonight.

  Finally, at twelve fifteen AM, I can’t take it anymore. I slide out of bed with the swab stick and tiptoe down the hallway to their room. It’s silent behind the door except for the sound of Dad’s snoring.

  I close my eyes and force myself to breathe in. I can do this. I need to if I want the truth.

  I give the door a quick, firm push to get past the squeaky hinges. Once my eyes adjust to the darkness, I drop to my hands and knees and crawl on their soft rug to my mom’s side of the bed. The moonlight shines through the slats in the blinds, helping me find her in the otherwise dark room. She’s on her side facing away from Dad, with one hand under her pillow and the covers pulled up to her chest. Her mouth is slightly open, and her eyes are twitching back and forth under her eyelids.

  I crawl up to the bed and carefully bring the swab tip near her lips, above a spot of drool on her pillow. My heart is beating fast and my hand is trembling. At the last second, I yank it back.

  I let a whole minute pass just sitting there on the floor. Her chest rises and falls evenly under the blanket. I decide to do a simple test. If she wakes up, I’ll tell her I couldn’t sleep. If not, I’ll know it’s the right time.

  I gently touch the blanket near her shoulder. Nothing. I rest the full weight of my hand on it. She doesn’t move. It must be the sleeping pill. I’m going for it.

  It happens so fast: I insert the swab into the corner of her open mouth so it soaks up the drool. When I twirl it to coat the whole tip, she stirs—her eyes flutter, and she scratches at her cheek. I drop to the carpet. The swab is wet.

  I hear the blanket moving around. She must be changing position. Then she goes quiet again. I count to twenty before I peek. She’s on her stomach facing the other way, breathing steadily again. She looks so pretty and peaceful with her hair tumbling across the pillow. Part of me wants to climb in bed next to her and forget the whole experiment.