Drawing Blood

by Deirdre Verne

  “Whatever works for you. So what do you think about Corey?”

  “Few people remember details from more than fifteen years ago. To make matters worse, I’ll be catching her off-guard. She’s likely to get defensive. I may just tell her why I’m there and leave my card.”

  “No,” I blurted out. “That’s not good enough.”

  “Let’s be realistic. What can we expect to get out of her in a ten-minute surprise meeting?”

  Now it was my turn to take a quick walk around the woods. I stretched my legs and wandered over to the old fort. As kids, we had covered the interior with leftover silver foil wallpaper, and the floor was a patchwork of discarded linoleum. The fort’s archaeological evidence supported my early interest in repurposing materials. I remembered an intense feeling of satisfaction when we lugged what had otherwise been designated for the trash to the woods. Teddy and Charlie thought I was crazy, but once the fort was complete, I had the last laugh.

  The fort made me think about Dr. Corey and her interest in working in my father’s lab. It had been no mistake that her career path led to obstetrics with a specialty in high-risk pregnancies. My father’s work must have dovetailed with her goals to better understand genetics and obstetrics.

  I explained the link to Frank. “I don’t think my father’s lab was just a summer job for her. There had to be a greater benefit. What if she assisted his long-term epigenetics research? Think about it. We know what my father was doing. He’s admitted it to us, yet we’ve never found any documentation.”

  “We never asked,” Frank replied.

  “True, but since scientists are in the business of studying and documenting, we know it’s somewhere.”

  “So the question I want to ask her,” Frank continued, “is whether she had access to documentation related to your father’s study. How was the research data collected and stored? I can ask the question as if I already know that’s what she’d worked on.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking, and it matches what Dr. Wilson remembered.”

  “But he didn’t remember what her role was in the labs.”

  “That’s my point. He didn’t remember, because she probably didn’t have a day-to-day role, like washing the beakers. Assuming her job was to track and document, then that would give her a reason to have contact with the surrogates. It would also coincide with my mother’s memory that my father wouldn’t lower himself to handle administrative tasks. Dr. Corey was probably the one who arranged the transport of the samples to Lifely.”

  “Okay, and maybe that’s why Dr. Wilson didn’t know what Dr. Corey did, because he and the other lab assistants would have flipped out if they knew their sperm was being sent off without their permission.”

  I nodded.

  Frank turned his head up to the sky and scanned the woods. “I like this thinking spot. Can I borrow it sometime?”

  “Yes, but now I need you to return to your first seat.” I helped Frank up and led him back to the other stump.

  Frank did as I directed. The moment he sat down, I returned to our original topic. There was something about the diorama in the storage unit that bothered me.

  “We haven’t talked about the ID tag. I drew the doughy man with a tag, but the man in the diorama wasn’t wearing a tag.”

  “You’re right. I still need to follow up with more local companies that use tags,” Frank said. “May I add to your list?”

  “Go for it.”

  “I need to talk to David Goldberg. We know Harry is a liar, but we don’t know enough about his cousin David.”

  “All we know is that David’s wife is sleeping with his cousin, Harry.”

  thirty-five

  The hatchback of the Gremlin was packed with enough shopping bags that I actually worried they would be the straw that broke the car’s back. My mother and I were returning to rehab where, for the remainder of her stay, she’d be the best dressed patient in group therapy.

  “You wouldn’t believe the whining,” my mother lamented about the group. “You just can’t believe what passes for a crisis these days. There are two or three girls about your age who think their parents’ divorce is worthy of their self-absorbed drama.”

  “I can’t see you sharing during these sessions.”

  “What would I say? My husband was instrumental in my son’s death? My son was adopted and separated from his twin brother, but he didn’t know until months before he was murdered? These people have no idea what drama is.”

  “How about My daughter eats from garbage pails?” I suggested.

  “Now that I mentioned.”

  “Mom,” I yelled.

  “You have to say something. You can’t just sit there in silence or you’ll lose privileges.”

  “But my Dumpster diving had nothing to do with your drinking,” I retorted.

  “Of course it didn’t, but you should have seen their faces.”

  “Let me guess. You’re saving up the story of my egg theft to wow them on your last day?”

  My mother smiled slyly. “Maybe.”

  I pulled into the front drive of the rehab and turned off the key. The sun hung low in the sky, and I could almost feel the grapevines in the distance soaking in the last of their solar vitamins. Tomorrow, I promised myself, I would work on the farm. If I wedged Katrina in a comfortable chair, she could strip the sweet potatoes of their new tubers while I did the planting. There was too much going on to think ahead to the harvest. By the time the sweet potatoes were grown, my mother would be out of rehab, Katrina would have a baby, and I might have a child—or rather, a teenager. My mother would be a grandmother, which seemed inconceivable at the moment. How many kids visit their grandmothers in rehab?

  My mother looked sadly at her new home. “It’s as if none of these people ever enjoyed their poison.”

  “Come on, it’s only a few more weeks.” I emptied the trunk and carried my mother’s packages into the lobby. On Sunday night, a so-called free time, patients gathered socially in the small meeting pods on the main level. A few waved to my mother, and she smiled back blankly, that same fake smile she had offered me as a kid when she was more interested in her refill than my homework. The only available table had an opened bottle of water and a half-eaten bag of chips on it. I moved the discarded food aside and set down my mother’s new spring wardrobe. I looked around the room to make sure I caught the eyes of my mother’s fellow patients. Then, I picked up the chips and started to munch.

  “You are doing this on purpose,” my mother hissed.

  I reached for the bottle of water to wash down the chips.

  “You wouldn’t,” she said.

  “I won’t if you promise to stop using me as your emotional crutch in therapy. You’ve got to get to the real stuff if you want to get better.” The real stuff, I thought. If I truly considered the real stuff in my life, I’d be a permanent resident at this facility. I inched my hand closer to the water bottle until my mother caved.

  “You win,” she said, and I put the bottle down.

  I gave her a hug, which she graciously returned. “Seriously, Mom. I want you back.”

  I returned to Harbor House around ten that night. Frank, Katrina, and Charlie were in the barn enjoying the last of the Christmas lights. Frank had reverted to his traditional six-pack of beer while Charlie looked like the before picture for the brochure of my mother’s rehab facility. Katrina had her legs propped up on a cardboard box. Her shoeless swollen feet looked like she’d been smashing grapes in an Italian winery for the last nine months.

  “Trina, I think Frank was kidding when he asked you to give

  him a week.” I rubbed her toes. “Feel free to have this baby whenever you want.”

  “I’m never doing this again,” she moaned.

  “One and done,” Charlie chimed in and Frank laughed. Clearly, I had arrived late to the party.<
br />
  “Okay,” Frank said as he passed out scraps of paper and pencils. “I’ve come up with an investigative game. I’d like you to write down possible links between the people in Bob’s diorama and Bob. To assist you, I’ll display the photos we took of the artwork.” Frank fired up his iPad and placed it on the table.

  “What do we get if we win?” I asked.

  “The respect of the tax-paying public.” Frank shrugged. “It’s what keeps me coming to work every day.”

  I was intrigued by Frank’s motivation to serve. On some level, I felt that people like Bob and I were also serving, but our public extended beyond the borders of Cold Spring Harbor. Global sustainability, an unwieldy goal, had to start at a local level. Try telling that to my neighbors whose garbage I regularly pillaged.

  Katrina made a useless attempt to bend over and reach for the iPad. “It’s such a diverse group.” She squinted at the picture. “There’s children, young adults, and seniors in this picture. I can’t see them participating in the same thing given the differences in their ages and physical capabilities.”

  “Unless it’s something like singing,” Frank said. “The funny thing about vocal ability is that it’s not dependent on the singer’s appearance, like an athlete. People of all shapes and sizes can have amazing voices.”

  “So they’re in a band.” Charlie chuckled.

  “How about Mensa?” Katrina said. “IQ is detectable at a young age. That would give the little girl a reason to be at the table.”

  “It’s possible. Bob always struck me as a smart guy,” I said, and then added. “In keeping with the concept of how they think, maybe their commonality is an idea, a shared philosophy?”

  “Like a religion?” Charlie said.

  “Please don’t say cult,” Frank added. “I don’t have the energy to infiltrate a cult.”

  “Then how about a church choir?” Charlie countered.

  The singing angle seemed plausible. Music had a way of bringing people of various ages together, although Bob never hummed more than his favorite Sesame Street tune. Besides, there was nothing else in the diorama to indicate music. I’d need a treble clef fashioned out of a discarded paper clip to go with the music theory.

  “We need more options,” I said encouragingly. “What else can a diverse group of people share?”

  “Art?” Frank asked. “Or maybe collecting?”

  “That’s true,” Katrina said. “I collected recipes as a kid.”

  “If this was some type of group, I’ll bet they communicated or maybe even met online,” Charlie said. “Most clubs have email chains, or they congregate in chat rooms or on groups sponsored by search engines.”

  “Damn.” Frank lowered his beer. “We only checked Bob’s work computer, because we thought this was strictly work related. We never checked to see if Bob had a personal computer at his house.”

  I looked at my watch and then remembered I had given it to Lizzy James. “Isn’t it late, Frank?” I said. “I need to sleep, and Bob’s house isn’t going anywhere.”

  “Tomorrow?” Frank asked Charlie.

  “I’m there,” Charlie slurred.

  thirty-six

  monday, april 28

  I woke up the next morning feeling energized. In the past few days, we’d made an enormous amount of progress, and I felt like my contributions had made a difference. Frank and Charlie were headed to Bob’s house in search of his personal computer. With my finished sketch of Cheryl Goldberg, Harry would have a hard time denying that the woman spotted at his office door was his cousin’s wife. Small cracks, Frank said, would lead to big breaks. We also had a witness, the tuba lady, who could place Harry on site the night the warehouse had been emptied. Finally, we had a good feeling that the doughy man was represented in the diorama, and assuming Bob had labeled the dolls as we suspected, the doughy man’s name most likely started with an L. Most importantly, I had remembered that the skinny jeans woman had black hair.

  I dug through my closet and came up with a backpack that I stuffed with my sketchbook, some pencils, a water bottle, and a jar of peach jelly. I tiptoed out the front door to the barn, retrieved my bicycle, and pedaled south on Shore Road, where I made a quick right into the neighborhood of Laurel Hollow. It was a lovely area. On a map it mirrored Cold Spring Harbor like the matching wings of a butterfly. Laurel Hollow’s nearest neighbor was the Sound View labs, and many of the homes in the area belonged to doctors and researchers associated with the famous laboratory. As I neared my destination, oncoming traffic picked up, but that was to be expected since it was seven a.m. on a Monday morning.

  About halfway through the maze of streets, including two or three wrong turns, I stopped in front of a grand Colonial with carved columns supporting a circular-roofed portico. Map in hand, I stared at the circle mark I had made last night after Googling Dr. Carolyn Corey’s home address. Getting a glimpse of Dr. Corey on her way to work was just the type of move that would piss off Frank, but I couldn’t resist the temptation. Clearly, I couldn’t wait until tomorrow when Frank was scheduled to see Dr. Corey.

  There was a shiny BMW in Dr. Corey’s driveway and a wooden play set in the back yard. I looked around the neighborhood and realized I was insanely exposed. If my purpose was to get a peek at Dr. Corey, standing without purpose in the middle of the street would trigger a phone call to the police by an observant neighbor. With my luck, Cheski would be on call and actually arrest me. Truth be told, I had no intention of spying on Dr. Corey; I simply wanted to see the woman responsible for sending my fertilized embryo to its final destination.

  I buried my head in my map, which I figured would buy me a few minutes posing as a lost biker. Just when I had memorized every esoteric symbol on my map, Dr. Corey’s across-the-street-neighbors, a suited couple with travel coffee mugs, shuffled out to their own BMW. As soon as the neighbors backed out, I cycled down their driveway and pulled my bike behind an overgrown azalea bush. My hiding spot had an unobstructed view of Dr. Corey’s house.

  By 7:45 a.m., I still sat in a pile of dirt picking sticky azalea blossoms off my shorts. For all I knew, Dr. Corey had delivered a baby in the middle of the night and wasn’t even home yet. I rose to stretch my legs when a beat-up Honda Civic pulled up in front of Dr. Corey’s house. I scrambled forward through the bushes to get a better look. Three women got out of the car. One of the women opened the trunk and took out a vacuum cleaner. In my new position, closer to the street, my only cover was the neighbor’s mailbox.

  The woman emptying the trunk instinctively turned in my direction. “CeCe!”

  “Norma?” It was my mother’s housekeeper. “What are you doing here?”

  Norma hurried across the street and shoved me farther back into the bushes. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she repeated over and over until I felt like slapping her across the face. “I tell you later.”

  “When later?”

  “Come to the side door when you see the car leave.”

  I waited patiently while Norma, and the two other cleaning women entered Dr. Corey’s house. A few minutes passed, and Dr. Corey came outside with two adorable girls who looked to be about two and four years old. A year ago, I would never have been able to guess a child’s age, but my excessive sketching had honed my age-detection skills. Both girls had thick, dark hair and medium skin—unlike their mother, whose face was the map of Ireland. It was brief, but I got a good look at Dr. Corey. Harmless, was the first word that came to mind. By all accounts, she was patient with her children and took the time to listen to one of the girls tell what seemed to be a meandering story. She strapped each girl into their car seat and through the back window of the car, I could see her tenderly kiss her daughters. Darn, I thought. Why can’t she have a witch’s nose with a mole the size of quarter on her chin? Or a glass eye and a limp?

  I waited until Dr. Corey drove slowly away before scurrying across the stree
t to the side door.

  Norma waited for me. “I’m sorry,” she repeated.

  “I get it,” I said. “You’re sorry.”

  “Really, I’m sorry,” she said again.

  “Why would you be sorry?” I asked. Wasn’t that supposed to be my line? I wondered why I didn’t feel more guilty hiding out in a stranger’s driveway to spy on a doctor I had never met.

  “How did you find out?” Norma said, opening the door for me as I followed her inside Dr. Corey’s house. “I should listen to your mother. She said you were the smart one. Did you follow me?”

  I tilted my head. This didn’t made sense. Why did Norma think I had followed her, and why the hell was she so dreadfully sorry? She seemed to think I understood, but I was completely lost. I decided to go along with her misinformation to see where it took me.

  “At first I wasn’t sure it was you,” I said, “but then I began to wonder …”

  “See, I knew I should say no to your father.”

  My father? The same one who’d been in exile for the past year since he’d been accused of facilitating my brother’s murder? This was too weird even for me to bluff my way through. I hadn’t seen or heard from my father since the trial six months ago, and although he ultimately did not take the fall for my brother’s death, the shame had forced my dad out of town. I had no idea where my father had relocated. All I knew is that my mother’s bills got paid. Of course, I hadn’t made a single attempt to find him, and my mother hadn’t been back in the land of the sober long enough to really question this arrangement.

  If I had to guess, I’d say my father was in Europe. He had always enjoyed the finer things in life, as if he considered himself royalty. For this reason, I’d imagined him strolling through Bruges or sipping coffee in the south of France. It had been a convenient dream from which I sensed I was about to wake.

  “Norma, can we sit and talk?”

  The house, a cookie cutter version of every other upscale Long Island McMansion, had the requisite marble countertops, stainless-steel appliances, and enough tech equipment to blow a circuit breaker or two. It was unimpressive in its sameness. It was, however, exceptionally clean, and that was Norma’s handiwork. It concerned me that she’d had contact with my father, and although I didn’t truly know where her loyalties lay, her affection for my mother had seemed genuine in the past. I hoped this was still true, because I couldn’t keep up this charade much longer.