“I don’t either,” she said, and then turned to Dr. Grovit. “So we’re talking one egg. The odds were so slim. Why would William even make an attempt?”
“He thought he was God,” Dr. Grovit said as he shook his head. “As much as I hate to admit it, he had a knack for making scientific miracles happen. At the least, I think we can agree that if there is a baby, there is just one.” Dr. Grovit addressed Dr. Wilson, “What happened to the test vials of sperm?”
Dr. Wilson let out a groan. “We were under the assumption the vials were being discarded, but now I’m not so sure. I think we have to assume that some of these samples made it to Lifely.” His nose twitched as if he’d smelt something offensive. “Clearly, your father was interested in long-term DNA studies, and if there was one sample worth studying, despite the low odds, it was yours and your brother’s.”
I drained the last of my water. “Isn’t it possible my egg is sitting in a freezer somewhere?”
“No,” Dr. Wilson said. “Sperm sits in a freezer. Science is just now figuring out how to successfully freeze, unfreeze, and fertilize eggs. At that time, eggs had one purpose—fertilization followed by immediate insemination, typically within forty-eight hours.”
“Shit,” I said, and I meant it. “I don’t know why, but all this time I’ve been thinking this kid would be a toddler or small child. But if what you’re saying is true and my egg had to be used immediately, I may be the mother of a teenager.”
“Sixteen years old to be exact,” my mother chimed in. “Is there anyone else we can talk to? There had to be a lab assistant that facilitated the transfers to Lifely. My husband never touched administrative work.”
“I thought about that,” Dr. Wilson said as he opened his folder. “The lab turned over about every twelve months depending on who was headed to a fellowship or medical school. I wrote down everyone I could remember and researched the names online.” He passed over a sheet of paper with contact information.
Dr. Grovit’s glasses slid to the tip of his nose while he ran his finger down the list. It was faint, but his finger shook slightly. “Why is there a question mark by Liz James?”
“I didn’t try to locate her, because I don’t think she’d be of any help. She wasn’t a medical student.” Dr. Wilson smirked, seeming somewhat amused at the memory of Ms. James. “Lizzy was a bit loose and not much of a typist. She had a few flings with some of the younger guys. She was supposed to be managing medical supplies, but let’s just say not all the medications found their way to an assigned shelf or bottle.”
“I don’t remember her,” Dr. Grovit said.
“She didn’t last long,” Dr. Wilson replied. “She left when she was about four months pregnant.”
My mother’s brain synapses fired a millisecond ahead of mine. “This woman left because she was pregnant?” she asked.
Dr. Wilson nodded.
My mother rose unsteadily. She smoothed the folds of her dress and readjusted the belt accentuating her narrow waist. “I haven’t had a great run with doctors,” she said, and then smiled at Dr. Grovit. “Present company excluded. However, I can confirm that my husband surrounded himself with very intelligent people. If his lab
assistants knew how to make a baby in a petri dish, then I’m pretty sure they knew how to prevent conception the old-fashioned way. No one on this campus mistakenly impregnated Liz James. And, since I’m still receiving the exceedingly generous health benefits from this institution, I can’t imagine why a single woman on the company health plan would leave four months into a pregnancy.”
Hello, chutzpah. Thanks, Mom, I mouthed. Finally a lead—the name of a woman with a questionable background, working in close proximity to my father, in the same lab with my egg and my brother’s sperm, and most probably pregnant seventeen years ago.
twenty
My mother and I returned to Hilltop with ten minutes to spare before curfew. We pulled into the lot just as the service-challenged receptionist left for the day.
My mother wiggled her fingers politely in a halfhearted wave. “That one hates me,” she said, flashing her most disingenuous smile.
“Happy birthday to your daughter,” the receptionist replied.
I matched my mother’s smile and said, “Thanks for remembering.” Then I turned to my mother. “I said it was my birthday.”
“Then you’ll need to come get me again next weekend so I can take you birthday shopping.”
“I’m sure Dr. Grovit will be able to get you a pass for the weekend. Your medical coverage only applies if you are in residence through the treatment period, but Dr. Grovit talks a good game.”
My mother crossed her fingers and gave me a kiss. “I know, but I didn’t realize how much I wanted out of here until our field trip today.”
“We have to be careful,” I reminded her. “We could find something awful.” I hesitated as I thought about Loose Lizzy, the department floozy. “If Dr. Wilson was right about the missing medications, this Liz James could have been a drug addict to boot.”
My mother let out a whopping laugh. “Do I need to point out the irony? You were raised by a substance abuser.”
She had me there. We were, of course, having this conversation in the parking lot of a rehab facility. “True,” I admitted. “And you got yourself knocked up too.”
“I did indeed,” she said proudly. “Basically, I did everything wrong, and you still turned out fine.”
I considered my mother’s assessment of the situation alongside my father’s generational DNA studies. My father suspected that nurture had more impact than nature. In the field of epigenetics, DNA could be manipulated by a subject’s surroundings. To prove his hypothesis, my father had separated Teddy and Frank at birth, placing Frank in a low socioeconomic environment with uneducated parents. Yet Frank had thrived and if my mother was right, a child produced by me and my brother might have the DNA chops to weather a disadvantaged household.
A thread of hope.
We hugged goodbye and made plans for the weekend. With Frank’s help, we hoped to locate Lizzy James quickly. It wasn’t brain surgery. This woman was either raising my child or she wasn’t.
twenty-one
Katrina was stretched out on the living room floor when I got home. Her stomach rose and fell with each controlled breath. “Am I boiling water?” I asked.
“Not yet,” she exhaled and rolled over onto her side. “My back is achy, but I’m fine. How was your day?”
I laid down beside her and filled her in on Dr. Wilson and Liz James, but before I could cover my mother’s theory that my kid was a fighter, capable of conquering a dysfunctional upbringing, Katrina started to bawl. Uncontrollable sobs followed incoherent babbling.
“Oh my god,” I gasped. “Are you in pain?” Katrina had moved from her side to all fours, and I got right down on the floor with her. I had heard about women giving birth in this position. It didn’t seem gravitationally possible, but what did I know?
“No,” she cried, droplets of tears hit the knotty pine floor. “No pain. Help me up.”
I pulled her to her feet and led her over to a secondhand couch I had picked up at the recycling center, based on a tip from Bob. Katrina dug into a large pocket on her maternity dress and produced a crisply starched, monogrammed hankie. This one had an O on it.
“I can’t believe how self-centered I’ve been for the past nine months,” Katrina said, wiping her nose. “This Lizzy James seems horrible. The whole thing is just horrible and here you’ve been taking care of me while Jonathan’s been away. It should be the other way around.” The tears started to flow, a veritable hormonal explosion. I looked at Katrina’s hands—her fingers, normally slender, were puffed up like stubby cocktail franks.
“Wow, you look really uncomfortable,” I said.
“See?” she wept. “I’ve been getting all the attention, but this birth is no mo
re important than your child.” Katrina placed my hand on her belly, and I felt her baby thump a foot or hand out at me. The immediacy of the sensation frightened me, and I yanked my hand away.
“It’s still not real for you, is it?” Katrina led my hand back to her stomach, and I relaxed into the gentle rhythm of her swimming baby.
I studied the thin fabric covering Katrina’s midsection. A yard of material and half an inch of skin and tissue were the only things that separated us from a full-term being. In less than two weeks, we’d be assigning personality traits to this baby. What a calm baby, a delightful or cranky baby, a good little sleeper, a huge eater and oh, that smile. Better yet, this baby would be responding to our prompts with a stretched out arm or tiny fingers curled around ours.
“My sketches,” I sighed, recognizing the shortcomings in the drawings of my potential child. “They’re completely one-dimensional, aren’t they?”
“It’s partially our fault,” Katrina said. “It seemed so bizarre, this plot of your father’s to steal your eggs. I think we haven’t been taking it seriously in the last year. But now that I’m weeks away from having a baby, I can appreciate what you may have missed.”
I nodded and borrowed a dry corner from Katrina’s hankie.
“I think you’d have more success finding this child if you envisioned him or her as a whole person. A person with thoughts and interests and emotions. Not simply a physical rendering, but what they’d be doing and how they’d be acting.”
I was twelve when my egg was taken. This kid could be sixteen now. I had no idea how to piece together the life of a teenage girl or boy, but the idea pried open that part of my brain that had been locked. It was as if I’d had a pounding headache that gave way to sublime relief, a mental breath.
“Jet black hair,” I stammered as a vision formed behind my eyelids. “The woman outside of Bob’s house had jet black hair. I remember her moving a strand of hair away from her face to get a better look at me.” My sketchbook had slid under the couch. I couldn’t get to it fast enough.
twenty-two
friday, april 25
With my mental health week coming to a close and the beginnings of a sketch in my possession, I was eager to impress Frank with my progress. I took a few steps back from my easel. The hair wasn’t dark enough, so I rubbed the charcoal hard against the canvas surface. The woman I remembered had bottle-black hair, cut in a tight pageboy. She was medium-height, five-six or -seven, and skinny, maybe a few years younger than myself. I drew the woman leaning in with one shoulder forward, because I was still convinced she had been moving toward me. The twinkle of a jangly earring peeked out from the sharp border of her bob. Unfortunately, I had to leave the oval of her face completely empty, giving her a ghostly appeal.
It would have to do for now, as I was confident the rest of my memory would surface soon enough. As Katrina had urged, I forced myself to see this person as a whole. The minute I stepped back and considered my peripheral memory, something appeared in the woman’s hands. She had been carrying a paper bag. With one shoulder sloped, I remembered the bag had heft, and there were odds and ends spilling out of it. I thought there may have been plastic tubes. Maybe supplies for one of Bob’s dioramas, I thought. I remembered the tubes because as the woman turned to go, one of the hoses got caught around her skinny jeans.
I scooped up my sketch and headed down one flight to Frank’s makeshift office. From the staircase window, I could see Cheski and Lamendola pulling in. Perfect timing.
“Frank, I’ve got something,” I said. I found a random nail on the wall, hung my sketch and pretended to model the canvas like Vanna White turning block letters. Cheski and Lamendola arrived in time to catch my television game show spoof.
“Asian?” Cheski asked, noticing the straight dark hair.
I thought about it. “No, but that’s a good question. At least we know what she’s not.”
“Was she pretty?” Lamendola asked.
Again, good question. “I don’t remember being turned off by her looks so no, she wasn’t unattractive.”
Cheski pulled a folded sheet of paper out his pocket. It was a photocopy of a Facebook page. “Is that her?”
I stared at the picture, a glam shot of a woman with too much of everything. The hair was black alright, so black it bled purple. Instead of a short cut, the salon-styled hair was voluminous and windswept, framing a perfectly drawn face, not with pencils but with make-up brushes.
“She looks like the aggressive perfume lady at a cosmetics counter,” I said.
“But is it the same woman you saw?” Cheski repeated.
Frank leaned over my shoulder to grab a look. “Who is she?”
I shook my head. “That’s not the woman I saw.”
“Too bad,” Cheski said, “because I think this woman is who Katrina saw at HG storage. Cheryl Goldberg.”
“Another Goldberg cousin?” Frank asked.
“Go ahead,” Lamendola urged his partner. “You’re dying to tell them what we found.”
Cheski tacked the Facebook image up on the wall next to my sketch. “Cheryl Goldberg is David Goldberg’s wife. Harry Goldberg’s cousin-in-law.”
“What was she doing at Harry’s place?” I asked and then stopped. “Ohhh,” I said knowingly. “She wasn’t breaking in, was she?”
“Breaking in the mattress Harry’s got stored in the back office, maybe,” Cheski laughed.
“Interesting,” Frank said as he started his first lap of the day around the cramped room. “So Harry is having an affair with his cousin’s wife. I knew there was something off about him. Do we think David Goldberg knows?”
“Maybe,” Cheski said. “I’m just not sure if the bad blood goes any deeper than this affair.”
“How’d you find out they were screwing around?” I asked.
“We’ve been driving through the industrial parking lot for the past two days,” Lamendola said. “Yesterday we saw Harry arrive around noon and then a half hour later, a woman showed up with the scarf and sunglasses.”
“Twenty-three minutes after that,” Cheski chuckled, “Cheryl came out and Lamendola followed her home. We checked the address. The house belongs to David Goldberg.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean Harry and his cousin’s wife are having an affair,” I reasoned.
“Yeah, it does,” Frank said. “There’s no other reason for David Goldberg’s wife to be at his cousin’s place of business, especially if the cousins don’t get along. Now that it’s come up, the mattress in the HG offices did catch my attention on our first walk through.”
“Maybe it’s for the night guard?” I challenged.
Cheski shook his head. “I checked in on Harry after David’s wife left. I may be old, but I remember what a crumpled shirt and a flushed face look like.”
“I wonder if Harry is sleeping with Cheryl to get information on his cousin’s business. But even if that’s true,” Frank answered his own question, “it’s inconsequential unless it links back to the Goldbergs being involved in a garbage scam that led to Bob’s death.”
“Otherwise, it is what it is.” Cheski shrugged, his palms open. “Two small business owners that cut a deal with the wrong company. Just like Charlie described—the Goldbergs got stuck on the wrong end of a recycling shell game.”
“But why are the warehouses empty now?” I pushed. “It doesn’t make sense. In fact, do we even know that David Goldberg’s warehouse is empty? That information came from Harry, but then again, he’s sleeping with his cousin’s wife. Maybe he lied about his cousin’s warehouse.”
Everyone with a badge in their pocket fell silent. No one had spoken directly to David Goldberg since Harry’s warehouse was found empty. Lamendola walked out of the room with his cell phone in hand and returned within seconds. “Confirmed. The DG Self Storage warehouse is empty too.”
I kept
up with my questions. “Is it possible Harry emptied both warehouses to divert attention away from him and any association with Bob?” I pondered. “You have to admit that his closed-eyed reaction to Bob’s name was sly.”
“That’s possible,” Frank said as his eyebrows rose. “You know what else I’m thinking?”
We all waited.
“When Barbara left town, she dropped the duties typically reserved for a widow. There hasn’t been a funeral.” Frank took another lap. “Who else knows Bob is dead?” he continued. “There hasn’t been anything in the paper.”
“Harry Goldberg and all the workers at the recycling center are aware of Bob’s passing,” I said. “But some of them think it was an accident.”
“I think the question Frank is getting at is when did Harry Goldberg know Bob was dead?” Cheski said, turning to Frank. “Did he know before us, and was he trying to clear out those warehouses before anyone linked the two events?”
“Exactly.” Frank pointed at Cheski. “And then there’s the doughy man,” he added. “If he pushed Bob, then he is certainly aware of Bob’s fate. In fact, since the news is not fully public, then the only people who know Bob is dead are those we’ve told and those involved.” He motioned to my sketch. “If this woman knew Bob was dead, why would she be at his house?”
“Maybe she was looking for him? It’s possible she didn’t know he was dead,” I said, thinking about the bag in her hand. “Maybe her intent was to give him the contents of the bag?”
We all stared at the drawing of the department store paper bag with a spaghetti-like string sticking out the top.
“It could also be evidence she wanted to hide,” Frank said.
Cheski walked up to my sketch. “Are these tubes or elastic bands?”
“Why?” I asked.
Cheski gave Frank a forlorn look.
Frank sighed and sat down. “Bands are used to enlarge a vein before shooting up.”
Drawing Blood Page 10