I'll Be You(76)

“Right. Of course. I remember.” I could smell myself sweating through the new T-shirt, a sickly jasmine deodorant scent. Panic rose and fluttered inside my chest, like a trapped butterfly. “What I meant to say was—I can’t recall if any of my donations were open. And I’ve been thinking a lot about whether my kid might hunt me down in sixteen years.”

Camilla’s smile was tight over her teeth. “Not your kid. Their child. And yes, that’s a possibility though it doesn’t always happen.”

“So I did have an open donation?”

Now she just looked annoyed. She glanced at the Cartier wristwatch on her left wrist. “I seem to recall that at least one of your recipients offered an additional financial incentive to you, in order to have full biographical details, name, photo, all that. But I couldn’t say for sure. It’s all in your paperwork, though.”

“See, that’s the problem. I lost my paperwork,” I said. I ruffled a hand through my hair, trying to look hapless and forgetful. “My basement flooded and all my files were ruined. And I just can’t remember the details of all the donations.”

Her face softened. “Oh! You should have told me. We could have just sent you copies.” She reached for the pile of folders on her desk and grabbed the one on top. Now I could see the label on the tab: Samantha Logan. The butterflies in my chest lifted and took flight. “But let me take a look.”



* * *



—

I am not a devious person by nature. I always feel like my lies are as obvious as a neon safety vest, visible from miles away. This was always my excuse for why I was such a stiff actress: I was just too honest. (Really, the only roles I ever felt comfortable playing were Sam and Elli.) So while I was sure Sam could have come up with at least a dozen tricks to pull off what I was about to do, I was able to conjure up only three—and even then, I still needed Iona to help talk me through them beforehand.

One: I would convince Camilla Jackson to hand me Sam’s file folder so I could go through it myself. This, obviously, hadn’t happened.

Two: I would get her to open Sam’s file folder in front of me, and take the opportunity to read it over Camilla’s shoulder. But now that this scenario was unfolding in front of me, I knew that it was impossible. The typeface on the forms that she was flipping through were far too small, and impossible to read upside down, especially with an expanse of desk between us. Plus, she was turning the pages so fast that I couldn’t catch which of the documents might list the recipient families.

Which left me with option three: somehow get this woman to leave me alone with the folder.

So as Camilla skimmed through the paperwork, her eyes rapidly scanning the forms, I tugged a dusty, crumpled tissue out of my jeans pocket. I lifted it to my damaged nose, sniffed loudly, and then blew as hard as I possibly could.

Blood erupted from my left nostril.

I let out a shriek of alarm and Camilla looked up and recoiled. “Oh my God.”

“I’m OK,” I said. I dabbed at the rivulet of blood trickling down my lip, and then sneezed, spreading a mist of red droplets across Camilla’s pristine glass desk. Camilla jumped out of her seat, alarmed. “No, I’m not OK, actually. Do you have any Kleenex? This one is falling apart.”

Camilla’s gaze swept across the surface of her desk, as if hoping that a box of tissues might materialize before her, but of course there was nothing there except her own pimply sons grinning back at her. “I’ll go get you one,” she said. She checked the front of her white lab coat for splatter, and then moved cautiously around the chair where I sat with blood dripping down my face.

“And some ice, maybe?” I added, hoping to prolong her absence.

She gave me a wide berth as she headed to her door. “I’ll see what I can do.”

I waited until the sound of her heels faded away and then I reached across the desk and grabbed the folder. The stack of documents inside it was thick, and I paged through them as fast as I could: psychological screenings (how had my sister passed those?) and interview notes (Donor expressed her honest desire to help a family in need) and ultrasound charts documenting the contents of my sister’s ovaries. I longed to read everything but instead I flipped past them all until I finally came to a photocopied document that read Recipient Consent Form across the top.

I scanned to the bottom of the page, past paragraphs of dense legalese, until I got to the signatures. The two names scrawled there were nearly illegible—Blackworth? Backwell?—but the address just beneath the signatures was written in clearly typed letters: 17344 Catalpa Way, Burbank, CA.

A yellow legal pad sat next to Camilla’s computer keyboard. I tore off a piece of paper and scribbled this address down. Then I kept flipping through the folder until I encountered another recipient consent form: 72 Buena Vista Ave, Laguna Beach, CA. Then another: 825 Joshua Tree Drive, Scottsdale, AZ.

I didn’t bother writing down the names of the people who had bought my sister’s eggs. I didn’t really want to know who they were. Why humanize the couples that had absconded with our DNA, taken advantage of my sister’s vulnerability? I just wanted to know where I should go to find the babies. I’m only going to look, to confront my loss, I rationalized, as blood dripped down my chin and left a chain of droplets across the lined yellow paper. The less I know about the families, the better.