“You’re not going to tell him?” I balk, unable to check my emotions. “What’s the difference? His mother was an anonymous stranger before. Isn’t this better?”
“Except that one of us was his biological father.”
We’re all quiet as we absorb the statement.
“We might tell him,” Donovan backpedals. “It’s just. We’ve had no time to figure anything out. Can we just wait a couple of days before you book your flights?”
“He has a biological brother,” Nick says. “Grandparents.”
We’re all silent again, each of us thinking, all of us struggling.
“Yeah, yeah, no, I know,” Donovan says.
“We’d like to bring Wyatt,” I add.
“Right,” Donovan says. “We just. We have to be careful with Kai.”
I feel an unexpected and illogical rage at this man who is telling me how to behave with a child who is my own flesh and blood. I suddenly want to grab the boy out of whatever posh apartment he’s been living in and bring him straight to the family where he actually belongs. One glance at the vein pulsing in Nick’s neck tells me he feels it too. And yet. We don’t know this child.
After a few more rounds of talking in circles, Donovan finally suggests that we reconnect in a couple of days to discuss when and how a plan for a visit might work.
Even though we seem to have persuaded him to grant what we’ve asked, I’m not feeling particularly victorious at the moment. With little left to say, we make awkward goodbyes and end the call. Meanwhile, we have to figure out how to explain to our son, our parents, our siblings—ourselves—that the second child we wanted so desperately has actually been out there all along.
The next day, I’m sitting on the floor of the master bathroom with my back against the shiny white cabinetry, holding the phone against my ear and listening to Tess on the other end of the line.
“I still don’t understand what you mean,” she snaps at me, like I’m being purposely abstruse. “How could the baby possibly have been yours? That doesn’t make any sense. It’s not possible.”
I repeat for her, again, the facts that Dr. Pillar explained to me about how it is apparently not impossible for a woman to conceive a second baby when she is already pregnant with a first. It’s just so incredibly rare that nobody sees fit to mention it during ninth grade biology. I also rattle off a few of the stories I found online about other women around the world who have conceived multiples this way. There was a couple in Arkansas who conceived a baby boy nearly three full weeks after the woman had become pregnant with a baby girl. An American woman in the 1960s. A woman in Essex, England in 2007. Another in New Zealand in 2015.
“But how do they even know that? Couldn’t the babies have just developed at different rates?” Tess asks.
I stare through the glass wall of our empty shower at the brightly colored shampoo bottles lined up along the floor. “There are tests they do on the babies that show proof.” I shrug, even though she can’t see me. “They use bone age tests and look at the lungs, I don’t know. I’ll send you the articles. Regardless, the DNA here, in this particular case, proves conclusively that one of the babies was my own. Tess, I literally sold my child.”
“Aren’t you supposed to wait a certain amount of time after they implant the embryos before you have sex?” she demands. “Can’t you ever follow a rule? Like, ever?”
“We waited! I don’t even remember how long we were supposed to wait—seven days, twelve?—but we followed the instructions!”
We’re yelling at each other, panicked, overwhelmed by the situation.
“Okay, okay, okay,” she says, like she has to talk me down from my own unreasonableness. “Let me think for one freaking second.” I picture her rubbing her manicured hands over her eyes as her lawyer brain begins to work on overdrive. “I know someone. He does custody cases. That’s really what this is at this point. I mean, we could argue it’s a contract case, that you agreed to sell one service, and that was to carry someone else’s child. You never agreed to hand over your own biological child. But geez, these contracts aren’t enforceable where you live, and they aren’t enforceable in New York, where the baby lives.”
“He’s not a baby,” I say.
Tess quiets for a moment. My statement carries weight, regret. But then she is back at it, thinking aloud as she rolls full steam ahead. “We could try to sue under the laws of California, since surrogacy contracts are enforceable there and that’s where the babies were born. Though I don’t know anything about the statute of limitations; I’d have to look that up.”
“Tess, stop it. Just stop. Who said anything about a lawyer? Why are you going straight to a legal battle?” I pause before adding the most important point. “I don’t think we’re going to take him back.”
She’s silent.
“He has spent ten years living with another family,” I continue, “growing up with a different brother. How can we force him out of that if he’s happy? And my own family. It’s the three of us here. Pulling in a fully-formed, ten-year-old child from New York City to live with us—do we want that?”
“How about it’s not about what you want, it’s about what’s right. He’s your son. My nephew. He belongs with his family.”
“Look, I’m not saying I’d send him away if he wanted to live with us.” I throw the tissue I’ve been holding toward the trash can in the corner but it falls to the floor, several inches short of its intended destination. “I just want to be fair to him, and I imagine that what he wants is to stay with his adoptive fathers and brother in the life he’s always known.”
“Really?” Skepticism nearly drips through the phone.
“We’re setting up a trip to go meet him. I don’t think there’s anything else to do yet.”
“Fine.” She sounds deflated, victim to my opinions. “Let’s at least talk through strategy in case you do decide to go to court. Okay?”
“Yeah, okay, fine.” I push myself off the floor and catch a glimpse of my disheveled appearance in the mirror above the sink. My eyes are rimmed in red, and the shadows beneath them are darker than usual. I start to run a hand through my messy curls but then give up and just stare at my strange reflection instead. The image staring back is just me, but it’s also not. A mother of two, but not.
“As I’m thinking it through,” Tess says, “I suppose your best approach is coming at it from a custody angle. Otherwise, you’d end up litigating in California, which wouldn’t be good for Kai, or any of his parents, having to travel for the court time. And with custody cases, the question is always, always, the best interests of the child. So, just in case you do decide you want your kid back, from this moment forward, you don’t so much as take a sip of water without asking yourself if it’s in the best interest of your long-lost baby. Got it?”
“Kai isn’t a baby anymore,” I say again, this time more aggressively. My hand finds its way to my stomach, where I can feel a whisper of a scar through my T-shirt. Beneath that, there is only emptiness. Even though I don’t know where Kai belongs, I’m filled with regret over this child who could have been mine.
The front door slams, meaning that Nick is back from his morning hike with Wyatt.
“Listen, the guys just got back,” I tell Tess. “I’ll let you know when we’re coming.”
“Shoot me a text after you’ve told Dad, too.” She hangs up without saying good-bye, and I imagine she’s already scrolling through her contacts, searching for this attorney’s number, being the stalwart sister she always has been. It’s no wonder she was always my parents’ favorite. At least I will never have to admit this mistake to my mother.
“What did you expect, Maggie?” she would say, “that you could re-invent reproduction and there’d be no risks? Too much re-inventing with you, not enough worrying.” After she finished berating me, what advice would she offer? If I had reconciled with her sooner, I would have had more time getting to know her as an adult, more time to collect wisdom from her. I
nstead, it was only a few intermittent phone calls and two short visits before her brutal diagnosis and then her abrupt decline.
I’ll have to call my Dad and confess about all this sooner rather than later, though. A grandson lost.
But first, we have to tell Wyatt. Nick and I decided last night that we shouldn’t keep any secrets from him—that there is too much potential for heartache in a situation like this, so we better be honest right from the start. Wyatt was so young when I carried the babies for the Rigsdales that he doesn’t remember much about that time, but we’ve discussed the surrogacy pretty openly with him over the years. Even so, how do we tell him now that the brother he always wanted has actually been living on the other side of the country for ten whole years?
Wyatt and Nick are in the kitchen. Wyatt is holding a bag of frozen blueberries, and Nick is pouring almond milk into the blender. I watch them from the entryway for a moment as they collect ingredients for whatever smoothie combination they’ve dreamt up this time.
“Hey,” I finally say. “You guys look like you got a good workout.” Wyatt’s hairline is damp with sweat, a couple of wet curls pasted to his forehead, and Nick’s grey T-shirt is soggy with patches of perspiration. I’ve been struck several times over the years by how different Wyatt’s rustic lifestyle in Arizona has been from my own sterile upbringing in Manhattan, where I was always surrounded by concrete, glass, and steel. The contrast is all the more glaring at the moment as I consider my other child, nearly 3,000 miles away, living in a place that I couldn’t wait to escape.
Nick’s holding the top to the blender in midair, as if he can’t decide whether to bolt or continue moving forward like this is just an ordinary day. I fix him with a pointed stare and he nods back, ready. He covers the blender, then unplugs it from the wall.
“Your mom and I wanted to talk with you for a minute,” he tells Wyatt.
Wyatt glances from Nick to me and back to Nick. There’s a flicker of fear—he thinks he is in trouble for something—but the look disappears as quickly as it arrived, probably because the kid rarely steps out of line. Then his eyes narrow in suspicion. “What? Is this more about my phone?”
We finally caved and let Wyatt get a cell phone, nearly two years after most of his friends got theirs. But as Wyatt makes sure to tell us at every opportunity, we are still much stricter than his friends’ parents about when and how he’s allowed to use it.
“No, it’s not about the phone,” I say. “Sit.” I gesture toward one of the wooden stools at our kitchen island.
He climbs into the seat, a look of skepticism on his tanned face, as Nick comes to stand beside me.
“We learned some pretty crazy news,” I tell him, “and we’re trying to figure out how to deal with it.”
“Okay?” The word comes out almost impatiently, like he wants me to just get on with it, so I take a deep breath and dive in.
“Those babies I carried when you were a toddler. . .” I start, and he nods.
My eyes stray to Nick, who nods for me to keep going, so I turn back to Wyatt. “It turns out that only one of the babies was the biological son of Chip or Donovan. The other one was actually our own biological child. Your dad’s and mine.” I take another quick breath and then add, “Kai. He’s ours. Our child.” It’s odd to articulate these facts yet again, when I am still struggling to wrap my mind around the idea myself.
Wyatt’s eyes narrow in confusion, just the way Nick’s did when he first heard the news last night.
“I don’t understand,” he says, looking from Nick to me for answers, as if I have the answer to anything at all.
I run through all the science again and explain how it was possible for a second baby to have been conceived during the existing pregnancy. Wyatt listens quietly until I’m finished and then says, “Okay, first of all, yuck.” He crinkles his nose as he looks from Nick to me and back to Nick again, making clear his disapproval of any type of sexual congress between his father and me. Then he asks, “But now what?”
I meet Nick’s eyes again. I have no idea how to answer Wyatt’s question when I still have so many questions of my own. “Your dad and I are trying to figure that out. We’ll probably take a trip to New York to meet him.”
“Just the two of you?” He shifts in his seat, like he’s preparing to argue.
“We’ll all go. I wouldn’t leave you with no one here. You can have a visit with Grandma and Pops.”
“What about seeing him? Kai.” His says the boy’s name tentatively, like an experiment.
“Maybe on the second visit?” I see no reason to rush into anything, and answering with a question sometimes softens the blow when I tell Wyatt things he doesn’t want to hear.
He turns his face away from me and gazes out the glass of the sliding door that leads to the backyard. I look at Nick for guidance, but he only shrugs in response. I open my eyes extra wide at him in a silent plea for him to say something, do something, but he just shrugs a second time and then turns around and walks back over to the blender.
When the harsh sounds of the blender finally stop, Wyatt turns back to me.
“It’s weird,” he says, telling it like it is. “Right? Isn’t it weird to have a whole other brother I’ve never met?”
I nod, vigorously. “So weird,” I agree, trying to validate his feelings, give him the freedom to say more.
“Can you at least take a couple of pictures when you’re with him so I can see what he looks like?” Wyatt asks, accepting my decision. “Do you think he looks like me? For his sake, I hope he doesn’t have these.” He puts a hand to the curls he’s always complained about.
“As long as his dads are okay with it, we’ll take a bunch of shots. Or . . .” I study Wyatt for a moment. He stands nearly as tall as I am now; a hint of a shadow is just starting to appear on his chin. Maybe he’s more grown-up than I give him credit for. “Maybe you should come and meet him yourself. I just don’t know. None of us knows what’s right in this situation. Let me think about it, okay?” I’m regretting that I don’t have a more defined position on our next steps, that I can’t provide Wyatt with that security, but every question seems to beget more questions. There are so many issues I never could have anticipated when I found that magazine ad back at Bed, Bath & Beyond all those years ago.
My indecision seems to mollify Wyatt rather than destabilize him. His whole posture shifts and he changes the subject. “Will we stay with Grandma and Pops the whole time? Not even one night in a hotel?”
He’s suddenly more disappointed that he won’t get to order room service than he is by the knowledge that he was robbed of his natural sibling. I don’t know whether his attitude stems from the fact that he’s a thirteen-year-old boy, meaning he just doesn’t look too deeply into much of anything, or from the basic reality that it’s 2018 and families today look a million different ways of normal. Either way, I’m relieved that he still seems calm, comfortable.
I walk over to the stool and wrap my arms around his sweaty shoulders. As I kiss his head to signal the end of this big, important talk, I take in his smell—half boy, half man, soap, and sweat—and I am filled with love. Is this the feeling I would get hugging Kai? I find myself hoping not—because if it is, the thought of what I’ve lost is simply unfathomable.
I need to get myself to New York to see that boy so I can convince myself that he isn’t mine, not really, and then I will say good-bye to him one more time.
Chapter 18
DONOVAN
JULY 2018
Gina emerges from the back door of the kitchen again and sets a large bowl of macaroni salad on the tempered glass of the patio table. “What possessed you to go straight to an attorney?” she asks as she rearranges the platters of pickles and tomatoes already on the table.
My gaze travels to the plastic wrap covering the macaroni as I contemplate her question, wondering again whether any of my actions have been the correct ones since the day we decided to try the Relativity test.
“The clinic recommended it,” I finally answer. “And I didn’t know what she was going to do.” I can’t seem to stop talking about Maggie, second-guessing the comments she made on the phone about not uprooting everyone’s lives. She didn’t sound sure about much of anything herself. I wonder again if it was some sort of ploy. Even if her promises were in earnest, what’s to stop her from changing her mind and trying to gain custody of Kai?
As if he’s been summoned by my thoughts, Kai comes running out the door from the kitchen, along with his cousin, Ethan. Both of them are equipped with multiple Nerf guns, and they make a beeline for the small bit of forest behind the house, leaving the door wide open behind them.
“Door!” Gina and I call out simultaneously. Kai pauses as Ethan runs back to slide the screen closed.
Ethan spares me a quick glance before he bounds back down to the grass and declares with uncharacteristically youthful glee, “Outdoor Fortnite.” He and Kai are immediately busy within the trees, setting up forts and outposts that I assume are meant to mimic that video game they both love so much.
I motion for Gina to follow me back inside so the kids won’t overhear. As we step into the kitchen, I’m hit by a rush of blissfully cool air and the somewhat less appealing scent of peppery bologna.
“She wants to come and meet him—or re-meet him, I guess,” I tell her as I pull a wicker chair out from under the kitchen table and slump down onto the circular cushion. Each time I say it, I feel more defeated.
“And?” Gina asks noncommittally. She unfolds a wax-paper package and begins arranging deli meat on a platter at the counter.
“I just don’t know if it’s a good idea.” I let out a long sigh that’s filled with not even a quarter of the apprehension I feel. “Teddy was always the one who used to wonder aloud what it’d be like to have a mom. Kai is different. He bottles things up, lets them fester. I always thought he got that from me.” I snort.
Gina doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even look up, as she continues fanning slices of corned beef into a circle. Her petite shoulders are pinched so tightly toward her ears that I’m feeling a crimp in my own neck.
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