I'll Be You(75)

I picked up the forms again and flipped through them until I found the name of Sam’s “donor liaison” at BioCal: Camilla Jackson. There was a phone number listed underneath her name and I dialed it.

A woman answered on the first ring. Before I could think better of what I was doing I heard my sister’s voice coming out of my throat.

“Hi, Camilla?” I said. “It’s Sam. Samantha Logan.”





25




CAMILLA JACKSON WAS MIDDLE-AGED but had undergone so much expensive plastic surgery that her skin was as smooth as the nape of a baby’s neck. Her makeup looked professionally applied, with lashes that were dense and black and couldn’t possibly be natural. Heavy gold jewelry weighed down her earlobes, her fingers, her wrists.

She wore a pristine white lab coat over her designer wrap dress, presumably to convey doctoral authority, despite the fact that there was no MD after the name embroidered in script on her lapel. Not even an RN. She was just a glorified broker, trying to coax viable eggs out of one person so she could sell them off to another.

Only an opportunist would take pleasure from this job, I thought as I stepped into her office: pairing up the broke and the childless, matching desperation with desperation.

Camilla Jackson stood up from her desk when she saw me come in, her eyes lighting up with recognition. She reached out and grasped both of my hands in hers, squeezed them, as a stack of gold bracelets jangled merrily against her wrists.

“It’s good to see you, Samantha,” she said, with a smile wide enough to reveal some equally expensive dental work. “How long has it been? Two years? Three?”

The BioCal Donation Center was in a neighborhood that wasn’t quite Beverly Hills, not quite Century City, not quite posh but close enough not to seem sleazy. Their offices commanded the entire top floor of a gold-mirrored medical building on a strip of Pico Boulevard that was otherwise populated by Jewish delis and wedding dress boutiques. From where she sat, Camilla Jackson had a clear view across the city to the Hollywood Hills.

Her desk was a modern expanse of pale blue glass, the kind that needed to be wiped free of prints at least once a day. Otherwise, the dominant feature of her office was the series of baby photos that hung on the wall behind her: six enormous black-and-white portraits of newborns, blissfully sleeping on top of knitted blankets and furry rugs and cupped palms. I wondered if BioCal was responsible for any of these babies. Then I wondered if any of them were Sam’s, and my heart made a funny hiccup.

Camilla noticed me staring at the photos. “They’re not BioCal babies,” she said briskly, a warning in her voice. “In case you’re wondering. The photos were taken by an art photographer in Seattle.”

I sat in a chair across from her, tried to settle my sister’s expression of nonchalance across my features. I tucked a leg underneath me at an angle that felt uncomfortable to me but always seemed to be second nature to Sam. But I was fifteen years out of practice, and my performance felt so effortful, so false; I couldn’t believe this woman didn’t immediately see through it. Would she notice that my arm tattoos had gone missing? But then, she hadn’t seen Sam in years.

Camilla was studying me, though, not as a stranger but as if I were a piece of meat in a butcher’s display. She took in the broken capillaries around my nose, the dark hollows under my eyes. I sneezed—that lingering cold was still wreaking havoc on my nasal cavities—and she flinched. I imagined her ticking off a box in her mind: Donor has weak immune system. Don’t put it in her bio. Then again, Sam’s history of addiction apparently hadn’t given her much pause.

On Camilla’s desk, next to a framed photograph of her own family (three teenage sons, a wall of pimples and braces), was a stack of medical file folders, each one dense with yellow and blue forms. I craned my neck, hoping to see Sam’s name on the top folder, but the angle was wrong.

“So are you here to discuss another round of donation?” She smiled. “Because we have several prospective recipients who will be very happy to hear it if you are. We never seem to have enough natural blond donors! And your former celebrity status has proven a real value-add for the families interested in an open donor situation. Though—” She frowned. “How old are you now? Over thirty? I hate to say it, but that might bring your market value down a bit, and you might not command the same compensation as before.”

“I’m not here to donate,” I jumped in. “I just have some questions about the donations I did in the past.”

“Oh?” She leaned back in her seat, her movements measured and deliberate. She pushed the gold bracelets up and down her wrist. “What kinds of questions?”

“I was wondering,” I began, ready to edge around my question, before remembering that Sam would just be blunt. “Am I allowed to look at my donor history file? The families that received my eggs, and all that?”

Camilla sat upright again, her chair back popping forward with an urgent snap. “Of course not.” She was still smiling, but her disapproval was palpable. “I’m sure we made that clear from your very first interview. Recipients are always anonymous. Donors can choose to be fully anonymous, or they can choose to reveal their identities to the family, or just the child when he or she turns eighteen. As you may remember, BioCal prides itself in being a more modern, flexible donor agency, and so we are able to help facilitate these decisions with additional monetary compensation. Regardless, it’s never ‘open’ in both directions, unless the recipient families decide otherwise. Which is rare.”