I'll Be You(88)

“You wanted a baby,” she said. “Now you have one. You took control.”

It sounded as if what I’d done was no worse than taking someone else’s lunch from the office fridge. “But I stole someone else’s child,” I explained. Did she not understand?

Dr. Cindy sat back in her chair. “Indeed you did. You did exactly what you wanted to do. You made it to the last step in the IAS Method—Self-Determination. And now you get to live with that choice.”

I didn’t think she intended this to sound like a punishment, but it did. Her steady gray eyes, fixed so tightly on mine, made me feel unsettled, uncertain about my own feelings. “I just feel a little lost,” I said quietly. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Don’t you think the path forward is quite clear? She’s yours now. Raise her! What else would you propose to do, take her back to Arizona? You’ll be arrested, you know.”

It felt like there was a vise around my lungs, slowly squeezing out the air. “But I might be arrested anyway. They’re going to be looking for her. They could track her here. Maybe they’ll be more forgiving if I bring her back.”

“But why would they look for her in Santa Barbara?” Dr. Cindy shook her head. “They have no reason to connect you with the child’s disappearance.”

“Sam,” I explained. “They might see a connection with Sam. Wouldn’t the egg donor be an automatic suspect?”

Dr. Cindy shrugged. “Even if they do look into her, they won’t find the baby, will they? She had nothing to do with it. And you and your sister are estranged, so the path will end there.” She hesitated, then looked at me sharply. “You haven’t been talking to Sam, have you?” I shook my head. “Good girl. Look: The grandmother was neglectful and left the baby alone. The child woke up and wandered off into the desert. That’s what authorities have assumed. Not that someone drove by and kidnapped her. You have nothing to worry about.”

I was silent for a long moment. “But…I hurt someone. A lot of people.”

Dr. Cindy made a dismissive gesture with her hand, as if swiping a bowl off a table. “Who? The parents? Why does that matter? You don’t know them, they’re just an abstract concept. People get hurt every day; they feel pain for lots of reasons. Your responsibility is to yourself. Don’t fall victim to that kind of weakness. See, this is what women do, this is why we don’t run the world yet—because we worry too much about other people’s feelings. Men just barrel ahead and assume they have the right to anything they want. You need to worry about your own needs.”

Looking back now, it’s obvious that the moral code of GenFem was that there was no moral code—just a personal drive toward self-fulfillment. And maybe this was the moment when things started to break for me, when the first doubts started to creep in. Because Dr. Cindy’s words didn’t sit well with me, as much as I wanted to let them reassure me. Worry about your own needs. Just a month or two earlier, Dr. Cindy’s dispensation had felt like a kind of freedom, after a lifetime of thinking too much about others; but now that I was claiming someone else’s child as my own, the sentiment made me undeniably queasy.

Maybe once I hit Level Ten it would all become easier, I told myself, but at that moment I felt more lost than ever.

“But Charlotte,” I persisted. “She’s not an abstract concept.”

“And she’s not hurt. She’s a baby. She’ll have no memory of this whatsoever. Babies that age lose their parents all the time and they don’t know the difference.” She adjusted her glasses. “Her parents were neglectful, yes? They left her in a situation where she was endangered. And you will never do that. Ergo, the child is in a better home now. You’ve improved the child’s life.”

I tried to let her logic spill over me, like a protective coat of lacquer that might keep the guilt from seeping out. She studied my face, seeing something in it that made her own features stiffen into a point.

“I can tell it’s still eating at you. So let’s do this: Write everything down, like a confession. Get it off your chest. Put it all on paper and then we can burn it and let it go.”

So I did. I wrote it down, the whole affair, from the day when I masqueraded as my sister to get access to her apartment to the moment that I drove away with Charlotte in the back seat of Iona’s car. I put it all down in my handwriting and then handed it to Dr. Cindy, who tucked it in a folder and smiled at me and told me that she was proud of me. Identification, Articulation, Self-Determination. Then I went to pick up Charlotte from my parents and I held her so tight that she squirmed in protest, and I felt a little better, though not much.

Dr. Cindy and I never actually burned the paper. And I didn’t really let it go. Dr. Cindy never mentioned the confession again, and neither did I, lest I get another Sufferance. The knowledge of the paper’s existence was just another thing that festered inside me: more evidence that I shouldn’t have left behind.

I brought this up with Iona when I cornered her in the parking lot one day. “Oh, I did that, too—gave Dr. Cindy a written confession after I burned down my ex-wife’s house,” she said. “It’s a sign of our trust in GenFem. Dr. Cindy holds all our secrets, she takes on that burden for us. Don’t you see? It allows us to let go of guilt, of any feelings of responsibility to others, and just live for ourselves.”