‘It sounds like such an ordeal.’
‘It’s not easy. Five years of heartbreak. It put a strain on us, that’s for sure.’
‘But it was worth it?’
They were sitting on the patio, overlooking the landscaped backyard. A plastic ride-on fire truck, a trike and a swing set sat on the grass.
‘Of course it was worth it. But you’re best off knowing the facts going in.’
‘Get yourself a good lawyer.’
‘If you’ve got the money, go to America, where they have surrogacy agencies.’
‘Avoid Mexico; the word is they treat the women terribly.’
‘And Cambodia; it’s completely unregulated there.’
‘Don’t even think about starting the process unless you’ve got a hundred grand put aside.’
‘At least!’
When she left, clutching a list of names and numbers, Priya’s head was spinning. But she felt now she had a roadmap. The money she had earned from the house gave her a range of options. She still hadn’t decided on a course of action but she felt she was getting closer.
She took the scenic route home along the coast. When she came over the crest of the hill she had a perfect view of the Coogee inlet. A canary-coloured strip of sand divided the promenade from the water, and beyond the yellow lay the boundless blue, flashing silver where the waves caught the sun. She slid her sunglasses down over her eyes and imagined herself at the beach with a toddler wearing a floppy hat, a miniature bathing suit and flip-flops half the size of Priya’s hand.
The buildings around her new neighbourhood were old but well preserved. They were the colour of milkshakes: strawberry, banana and peppermint. She took in the view and the sea air and wished she didn’t feel so desolate. In Coogee, it seemed she only saw people who looked like her behind counters in shops or driving cabs, except for the wealthy whose conspicuous jewellery deflected judgmental stares like Wonder Woman’s bracelets. These women looked like Priya, only with blow-waves and floaty silk chiffon dresses. She didn’t fit in with them either.
Her chest tightened and she realised she couldn’t spend another Saturday alone in Coogee, among the tanned and happy people who wore their swimsuits to lunch. She turned onto the main road and headed west.
When Priya reached Viv’s house they were making kinnathappam—steamed rice pudding—the way Viv and Priya used to with their mother.
The girls were far too young to help but Viv liked to envelope them in the ritual. Avani played with dough, sucking it until it melted all over her fingers in a sticky, viscous mess, while the twins watched from their highchairs. There was basmati rice everywhere.
Priya gave each of the girls a loving squeeze. With both her and Viv’s parents now dead, she worried that their heritage was retreating. Rajesh’s parents would arrive for dinner at Viv’s house with their arms full of dosas and homemade salted mango. Having married Nick, there was no one in Priya’s life to reinforce the traditions she’d spent her teen years trying to escape but now appreciated as a key part of her identity.
That was why she had sought an Indian donor, and why she had been deeply disappointed when Leroy told her that India had closed its doors to foreigners seeking surrogates. If India had been an option she would have travelled there without hesitation. She could have stayed for an extended visit, caring for her baby full-time and raising him in his ancestral land. She could have reached out to her mother’s extended family in Kerala. She very much liked the idea of being about to introduce Dyuti’s grandson to her cousins and aunts and uncles, to hear their stories about her and to tell them what she remembered of her mother. Priya helped her sister transfer the porridge-like mixture into the steamer, all the while avoiding eye contact.
‘What’s wrong?’ Viv finally said.
Priya bit her lip. ‘Do you think I made a mistake with Nick?’
‘Where is this coming from?’
Priya shrugged. ‘Darsh told me he’s not with that Megan woman. He’s single.’
Viv spoke gently. ‘You do remember that day at the Exeter?’
‘I’ve had two hundred days worse than that since then.’
‘Have you been talking to him?’
‘Just occasional messages about the dog.’
‘Do you want to work on it? Or do you just want a baby?’
Priya dumped the dirty bowl into the sink and blasted it with water. ‘You say “just want a baby” like it’s a small thing.’
Viv tilted her head. ‘You know what I mean. When Nick was messaging that woman you were so miserable. I don’t want you to have to go through that again.’
‘Viv,’ Priya said, ‘I want to be a mother.’
They looked at the twins, who had fallen asleep in their highchairs. They were a matching set, already inseparable. Viv and Priya had been like that once. Even after they both married, the intimate sorority remained intact. But once Avani came along, things changed. Even in the womb, the little tadpole squirmed between the two sisters and Viv began a journey that Priya didn’t—and perhaps couldn’t—follow. Priya had always thought they would raise their kids together, but Viv had entered motherhood alone, and things weren’t quite the same.
Priya looked at her nieces and thought that if she had a child of her own, she would never be alone again.
After the kinnathappam was cooked and eaten, Priya lingered in her sister’s company. They washed the dishes, then Priya helped with bath time.
‘Do you want to stay over? I’ll make up the couch,’ Viv said after the girls had been put to bed.
‘No, I’d better face the music, or rather, the silence,’ Priya said. ‘Besides, battling Sunday traffic to Coogee would take up most of the morning.’ She tiptoed into the girls’ room and kissed them both goodnight.
When she got home she propped her laptop up on her knees and opened the NSW Department of Family and Community Services webpage and searched for advice on adoption. It explained that each country had its own rules, and that prospective parents had to file individual applications, which was time-consuming and costly. You could not begin the adoption process while undergoing IVF, it warned. Priya’s shoulders sank. This rule meant she had to choose one or the other, and the wait on adoption meant if it fell through, it could be too late to give IVF another go. She scrolled through the fact sheets on the website, which announced the typical wait time for families who adopt a child from overseas was five years, ‘but it can be much longer’.
‘Five years,’ she whispered. All the options she had thought she had when she and Nick realised they were having trouble conceiving—IVF, surrogacy, adoption—suddenly didn’t seem realistic at all. She stared at the screen, watching her dream of a family begin to fade, and quietly began to sob.
Twenty-three
A tense silence hung over the kitchen, broken sporadically by the sounds of breakfast: the scrape of a butter knife on toast, the clatter of a cup on a saucer and the ping of a spoon following it. Sam was feeding, and the radio was off. It had been ten long minutes since Dan had announced he had made an appointment with a lawyer.
Grace still hadn’t responded. Their son was latched to her breast, and she was admiring the soft down on his cheeks as he suckled hungrily, making darling, perfect noises of contentment. His eyes were gently closed, his lashes fluttering ever so slightly. She stroked his cheek with her index finger, trying to hold back the tears gathering in her eyes.
‘Grace?’
She picked up her piece of toast and bit into it.
‘The lawyer sounded very good,’ Dan said, beseechingly. ‘He’s done a lot of work in the medical malpractice space. Remember the class action about the prosthetic knees that wouldn’t hold their shape? He was the lead guy on that.’
A tear rolled down Grace’s cheek. ‘Sam’s not a prosthetic,’ she said.
‘Grace.’
‘He’s not some foreign item that can be removed, readjusted, or sent back to its maker and replaced with a more natural-fitting mode
l.’ Her voice wobbled.
‘This lawyer said there shouldn’t be anything to worry about. Wouldn’t it help you sleep at night to know we’ve got a professional looking out for us?’
Grace looked up at him. Her glassy eyes sharpened. ‘You told him?’
‘I didn’t say anything specific. I asked some general questions about rightful parents. Donor laws, IVF and that sort of thing.’
Every word felt like he was prodding an open wound with a salted knife. The worst of it was that he’d done it without her say so. She was losing her teammate. He was supposed to be on her side, but he no longer considered her judgment sound. She watched him chewing his crust and felt the sting of betrayal.
Though perhaps he was right, she thought, scratching the back of her neck. There were moments, late at night, when she felt positively unhinged. She was so tired that her nightmares bled into her waking hours and she had trouble distinguishing them from reality. Sleep came to her in ragged snatches. When she had first started nursing Sam she dreamed her breasts were riddled with malignant lumps; the next day she had to keep pressing her palms to her chest to reassure herself the tumours weren’t real, and that she wasn’t pumping their boy full of poison. The only thing she could trust was her instinct to protect Sam. She found her voice: ‘What if they take him from us, Dan? What if they take away our son?’
‘That’s why I called a lawyer,’ Dan said, his voice cracking. ‘To guard against it if they try.’ He stood, sighed, rubbed his chin then his eyes, and went to the kettle to make another cup of coffee. It was his third day without shaving and he looked as strung-out as Grace felt. ‘I got an email from my aunt in Queensland.’
‘Oh?’ These days she spoke almost exclusively in a tone of detached melancholy.
‘She said Sam was very beautiful.’
‘He is. Aren’t you?’ Grace looked down at Sam, who had fallen asleep at her breast. Milk leaked onto her shirt. She dabbed it with her sleeve.
‘She saw his photo on Facebook. Grace, I thought we agreed on this. Can we just cool it with the social media until we know our rights?’
‘People will be suspicious if we don’t post photos. What kind of parents don’t post photos of their newborn?’
‘It’s too risky.’
‘It was black and white. Nobody would have been able to tell. I’m not stupid. It was just one picture. Everyone kept asking me why there are no photos. I did it to stop the questions.’
Tears began to roll down Grace’s cheeks. Dan filled a cup with hot chocolate and brought it over to her. He laid his hand across the back of her neck and gave it a reassuring squeeze.
‘I know. I know. It’s unfair.’
‘Maybe we should move away.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Move to Broome. Or New Zealand. Just get away. A fresh start where nobody knows us.’
‘Like fugitives? You’re talking like someone who thinks we have something to hide.’
‘I want to be able to show him to the world. We waited so long for our baby. But now it feels like we don’t really have him. Like he could be snatched away. And I’m just going crazy cooped up in this house all day with no visitors and there’s no end in sight. My girlfriends are mad at me. I’m too scared to go to mothers’ group. Where will it end, Dan? What’s going to happen?’
Twenty-four
The first thing Ashley did when she got to work on Monday was pull up the Ardens’ file. She didn’t know what she was looking for, but in any case, there was nothing to be found. Everything was in order. The baby had been born and nobody had made any comment about abnormalities. Only one thing was strange: the morula had been identified as female, but the Empona birth record showed that the baby was male. Grace had told her so herself. The lab must have made a mistake. Ashley made a note to raise this with Roger. Occasional clerical errors were inevitable but should be minimised where possible. In a way she was almost pleased. She’d been fighting for more staff for months, and this was a clear example of why they were needed.
Still. The mystery gnawed at her. No mother hid her child from the world. Maybe she really was tired. Maybe he really was sick. But that didn’t seem reason enough to be so secretive.
Ashley opened Grace’s Facebook page and stared at the one solitary black-and-white photo. She had half a mind to call Grace, but she had to know what she was dealing with first. She didn’t want to upset her former patient unnecessarily. She thought about the day at the market again and wondered, had there been a shadow of reproach in Grace’s conduct? Did Grace blame Ashley for whatever had happened?
‘Doctor Li,’ Doris buzzed her, ‘your eight am is here.’
‘Thank you, Doris.’
Doctor Li closed Grace Arden’s Facebook page and opened her first patient file for the day.
That night Ashley set her phone to private and called Roger’s home number. He was the only person she knew who maintained a landline. The ring sounded old-fashioned and far away. It was eight o’clock. The phone rang out. Ashley sighed. He wasn’t home. She turned on Midsomer Murders to kill time and then dialled again at nine.
‘Hello?’ he answered.
She hung up and raced out her front door. She drove towards Empona, the busy city streets fraying her nerves. The clinic had expanded and moved to larger, more modern premises, and she just wanted to get there, find what she needed and get out. She felt like a criminal.
Empona’s new home, a gothic Elizabeth Street building, was shrouded in darkness. Ashley swiped her security pass against the censor and was granted admission. The cavernous lobby was dark. She turned on the torch on her mobile phone and opened the door to the fire stairs. As Ashley climbed, her footsteps echoed loudly on the polished concrete steps. She was short of breath and sweating when she reached the fifth floor.
As she pushed open the heavy fire-exit door the familiar scent of pear and lilac hit her. All was dark and still. Machines hummed. Ashley went to Doris’s neat desk and, feeling like an intruder, began to paw through her neatly arranged paperwork. The various forms were in uniform stacks, like a paper city. The only personal item was a framed photo of Doris’s grandsons at Disneyland.
A noise made Ashley jump. The door to the stairwell swung open. The reception area filled with light.
It was their technician, Dale. ‘So,’ he said, ‘what are we looking for?’
Ashley had offered him two hundred dollars to come in and help her figure out what had gone wrong with Grace and Dan’s genetic test. They weren’t doing anything wrong, she had stressed, but she wanted him to keep their investigation a secret for now.
‘Honestly?’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’ She put her hands on her hips like a small-town cop with a mystery on her beat. She was acting on instinct.
‘Okay,’ said Dale. ‘Why are we looking?’ He flicked on a switch so the overhead lights came on. Ashley cowered under their glare.
‘You’ll look more suspicious if they catch you sneaking around here in the dark,’ he told her.
‘I’m just worried about a former patient,’ she said.
She took him through the story. While she spoke, Dale logged into Doris’s computer and examined the Ardens’ record.
‘I’ve stared at this a million times. The test went out and came back fine,’ she said.
‘But it says here the embryo is female,’ he said, looking at the documents.
‘I know. Someone ticked the wrong box somewhere.’
Dale opened the schedule on Doris’s computer, navigating back through the calendar to the previous August.
‘Let’s see who was working the day of the transfer … whoa, busy day.’
‘Every day is a busy day.’
‘Yeah, but this is one for the record books.’ The calendar was a chequerboard of tightly packed appointments.
‘It was right in the middle of that hellish flu season,’ Ashley said.
They leaned towards the screen. Then Ashley saw it. The appointment before the Arde
ns’: Archer.
A cold terror clawed at Ashley’s stomach as the germ of a horrifying theory formed. With a shaking hand, she grabbed the mouse and zoomed in on the entries. Two transfers, Archer and Arden, at 9.15am and 9.45am in the same surgery, with the same embryologist.
Arden. Archer. To speak the names, they sounded quite different. But written, the shape of them was very similar. Only a few pen strokes distinguished them and at a glance they looked interchangeable, particularly if the person reading them was in a hurry. Under stress. They were also near each other in the alphabet. If, say, two items were being stored alphabetically, as records and samples were at Empona, there was a high chance the Arden and Archer items would be near each other.
‘It can’t be,’ she said.
But she knew it could be. She had read about this before. In New York in 1999. In Leeds in 2002. And Singapore just a few years ago. There had been an Italian case too. And they were just the ones she knew off the top of her head.
She remembered the abstract from a risk-minimisation seminar she had attended on human error and the case of Baby K.
There is an error in approximately one in every 200,000 ART cases, it had read. The most extreme of these was when an embryo was implanted in the wrong mother.
It was only a hunch, but the pieces were clicking together. Grace’s evasiveness. The busy clinic. The overworked embryologist. The system with poor oversight. She recalled how easy it had been for her to alter the Crawfords’ records so they could have a second round of eggs from the World Egg Bank. Ashley’s hunch gained strength. At university, their lecturer had taken them through a cautionary case study of a woman from Michigan who had learned at thirty-two weeks that the baby she was carrying was the biological child of another couple, and that she would have to give it up once it was born. But what if the child had already been born? What was the statute of limitations on correcting a mistake like that? A week? A month? A year?
Cold sweat was pooling under Ashley’s arms. The answer lay in the storage freezer, but she was scared to look. Grace and Dan were her patients. If there had been a mix-up with the sperm, or the egg, or the embryo, it was her responsibility. Dale laid his hand on her shoulder.
The Mothers Page 18