I'll Be You(82)

The list of BioCal addresses was propped on the console between us, fluttering slightly in the blast of air from the vent. Iona had come up with a plan before we left my house: We would “witness” Burbank first, and then head to Laguna Beach next, and finally drive out to Arizona for the last address on the list. I was too exhausted to protest that this was too much for one day, and anyway I didn’t want to risk any more Sufferances.

Minutes turned into hours as we sat there. The sun beat through the windshield, making me drowsy. I drifted off into a stuporous doze, and dreamed of the child again. This time I was walking down a cracked sidewalk, on a suburban street just like this one, following a toddler who pulled a rolling caterpillar on a string. I thought I heard him cry out, “Mama?” and so I scooped him up and went to kiss his fat cheeks and it wasn’t until I got his face close to mine that I could see that his features were strange and distorted, not my child’s at all but something oozing and monstrous.

I woke with a start because Iona was slapping my leg.

“Look,” she said, and pointed.

A white Lexus SUV was pulling into the driveway in front of us. A woman—mid-forties, in leopard-print silk, hair long and streaked pale blond—climbed out of the driver’s seat. She walked around the car to the rear passenger door and opened it, leaning in to collect something. The SUV’s windows were tinted so I couldn’t see what she was retrieving, just the peek of pink lace underwear rising above her white jeans as she craned to get whatever was in the depths of the back seat.

When she came back out, she was holding a child.

A child. My heart seized.

The child was small, blond, wearing a pink sundress, a glittery headband, wispy hair tied up in cherubic pigtails. A girl, then. A girl. She was three years old, maybe four—it was hard to tell from where we were parked, fifty feet away. She squirmed and protested and her mother, wobbling in high sandals, gratefully plopped her on the ground and turned back to grab something else from the car. A giant plush bunny almost as big as the girl. The little girl grabbed the stuffed animal and waddled toward the front door, pressing her chin into its fur.

I’d stopped breathing.

But I was too far away to see her face, I realized with frustration. Did she look like me? Had the Logan DNA dominated, or did she look like the father who inseminated my sister’s egg? Did she have my voice, my facial expressions? I thought of the photos of myself at that age and remembered enormous eyes, deep dimples, hair so blond that it was almost white. Did the girl have dimples?

Maybe if I got closer to her, I’d feel some instinctive recognition—blood calling out to blood.

Before I realized what I was doing, I’d pushed open the door of Iona’s car and was climbing out, prepared to chase them down. I wasn’t thinking it through at all, just following a hot impulse.

Iona grabbed my wrist, yanking me back inside the car. “You can’t,” she whispered.

“I just want a better look.”

“No,” Iona said. “We don’t know the terms of the donation, if it was open or anonymous. What if she saw photos of your sister when they picked her as a donor? She might recognize you. That would only cause problems. We just watch.”

But there was nothing to watch anymore, because while we were arguing the mother had wedged the front door open with a foot, and the little girl had scurried under her arm and into the house. The door closed behind them both, and just like that they were gone. The whole encounter was over in ten seconds, before I’d even had a chance to process what I was seeing.

Was that it?

Iona reached out to cup my chin with her palm, then turned my head so that I was looking at her instead of at the house. “What do you feel now?” she asked softly. “Pain?”

“Disorientation.” I sent feelers out to test my heart, like pressing on a bruise to see if it hurt. It did, but it was the dull pang of missed opportunity, not the sharp agony of personal loss I’d expected. Maybe if I’d gotten closer to the little girl. Maybe if I’d really seen her face, I’d have more clarity. “It’s not what I imagined. I thought I’d feel a connection but instead I mostly feel confused.”

Iona turned the key in the ignition and the engine jumped to life. “That’s good. You’re already letting go of expectation, dropping the fantasies and facing your truth. Let’s go do it again, and see what we can turn this into.”

She did an abrupt U-turn in the middle of the street, and I turned in my seat to watch the McMansion disappear behind us. I hoped irrationally to get one last glimpse of a small face in a window but there was no sign of life at all, not even a fluttering curtain, just that wilting front garden and darkened windows that stared back at me, unblinking, as we slowly glided down the hill.



* * *



—

Sam’s second child was a little boy, slightly younger. We saw him right away, in the tiny front yard of his family’s Laguna Beach cottage, watering pots with a garden hose and the assistance of a much older sister. This time, we couldn’t stop to watch. The narrow street was too busy, clogged with cars on the hunt for a parking spot. Instead we had to drive right past the house and then circle back around the block.

On our second pass, Iona slowed so that I could get a better look. The boy’s hair was blond under his floppy sun hat, his fair skin was greased up with chalky white sunscreen, and he wore a striped sun shirt down to his wrists. He was chubby, more than my sister and I ever were at that age, with plump folds of skin at his wrists and knees. He laughed as he splashed his sister with the hose; I thought I glimpsed a familiar flash of dimple, and my heart lurched. There. But he was intent on his play and didn’t look up, not even when Iona’s car slowed to a stop across the street.