“We can’t keep this child!”
That’s what Marcus said. Standing over the little tub in the bathroom, the baby’s first bath, and he’s pointing at her back like she’s something diseased.
I dropped the towel I was holding. We’d waited four years for her. Two failed rounds, then the surrogate, then nine months of me staring at my phone every time it buzzed waiting for an update. And now he’s standing here saying we can’t keep her.
“What are you talking about,” I said. I came around the tub. She was crying, the way they do, that thin little wail, and I had my hands in the water already.
“Look. Look at it.” He grabbed her shoulder, turned her a little. I told him to be gentle, Jesus, she’s three days old.
There was a birthmark on her lower back. Brownish, the shape of a comma, maybe the size of a quarter.
“It’s a birthmark,” I said. “Babies have birthmarks. What is wrong with you.”
He didn’t move. He just kept staring at it. His face had gone gray, the kind of gray I’d only seen once before, when his brother called about their dad.
“My mother has that exact mark,” he said. “Same spot. Same shape. I’ve seen it my whole life.”
I laughed. I actually laughed, because it was such a stupid thing to be afraid of. “So she takes after your side. That’s good. That’s a good thing, Marcus.”
“We used a donor egg.” He said it slow, like I might not understand it. “We used a donor egg because of your blood thing. Remember? And my sperm. So how does she have my mother’s birthmark.”
I stopped. The water was running warm over my wrist and I forgot to turn it off.
“Coincidence,” I said. “Lots of people have birthmarks there.”
“In the exact same shape.” He pulled out his phone. His hands weren’t working right, he kept missing the screen. “I have a picture. From the lake last summer. Mom in the swimsuit. I’ll show you, I’ll show you it’s the same.”
“Put the phone down and help me wash our daughter.”
“It’s not a coincidence.” He looked up at me and there were tears in his eyes now. “I called the clinic this morning. Before any of this. I called them because the bill had the wrong donor number on it. A number I didn’t recognize.”
I lifted her out of the water. She was so small against my chest, still crying, and I wrapped her up and I held her and I said, “What did they tell you. Marcus. What did they say on the phone.”
He sat down on the edge of the tub. He had his mother’s picture pulled up now and he turned the screen toward me and I didn’t want to look but I looked.
“They said there were two families that morning,” he said. “Ours and another one. And the egg they used – “
The baby went quiet against me.
” – the donor wasn’t anonymous. The donor was someone in my family. And the woman downstairs, the surrogate, the one in our guest room right now – “
Someone knocked on the bathroom door.
The Knock
Three soft raps. Patient. The way Delia always knocked, like she was apologizing for existing.
I looked at Marcus. He was still sitting on the edge of the tub, phone face-down on his knee now, and he’d gone somewhere behind his eyes that I couldn’t follow.
“One second,” I called out. My voice came out steady. I don’t know how.
I finished wrapping the baby. She’d stopped crying and was just looking up at me with that unfocused newborn stare, the one that doesn’t actually see you but somehow still finds you. I pulled the towel corner over her head and pressed my lips to her forehead and she smelled like warm water and something underneath that, something specific and already hers.
Marcus hadn’t moved.
“You need to open that door,” I said.
“I can’t look at her right now.”
“Open the door, Marcus.”
He stood up. His legs seemed wrong, too stiff, and he crossed the three feet of bathroom tile like he was walking through something thicker than air. He put his hand on the knob. Stopped.
“She doesn’t know,” he said.
“What do you mean she doesn’t know?”
“The clinic. When I called, they said the – ” he stopped. Started again. “They said the family member wasn’t told. That whoever it was donated thinking it was going to a stranger. Standard anonymous protocol. They had no idea it would end up – ” He opened the door.
Delia stood in the hallway in her robe, the blue one with the fraying sleeve she’d had since before we knew her. She was thirty-one, round-faced, tired in the way new mothers are tired even when the baby isn’t theirs to keep up with. She’d delivered three days ago. She was supposed to go home Friday.
She looked at the baby in my arms and her face did the thing it always did, that complicated softness she never quite managed to hide, and she said, “I heard her crying. Wanted to make sure everything was okay.”
“Everything’s fine,” I said. “She’s fine.”
Delia nodded. Looked at Marcus. He was staring at a point somewhere past her left ear.
“Marcus?” she said.
“Hey, Delia.” Flat. Careful.
She looked between us. She wasn’t stupid. Nobody who’d done what she’d done for us for the past nine months was stupid. She’d read every email, asked every question, sat through every appointment with a legal pad and her own list of things she needed to understand before she’d sign anything. She knew when something was wrong in a room.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll be downstairs if you need anything.”
She turned and went back down the hall and Marcus and I stood there listening to her footsteps on the stairs.
What the Clinic Said
We sat on the edge of our bed, the baby between us on the mattress, and Marcus told me the rest of it.
He’d called Thursday morning. Early, before I was up, because the billing statement had come in the mail Wednesday and the donor ID on it was different from the one in our original paperwork. He’d thought it was an administrative error. Something to sort out before it became a bigger headache.
The woman he spoke to had put him on hold for eleven minutes. He’d timed it.
When she came back she’d asked if he could come in. He’d said no, just tell me on the phone. She’d asked again. He said no again.
The clinic had two egg retrieval procedures scheduled the same morning in September of last year. Ours and one other. A clerical error, somewhere between intake and the lab, had resulted in the wrong eggs being assigned to our file. The other family’s donor eggs, the ones that were supposed to go to us, had been used for the other couple’s procedure.
“So whose eggs did they use,” I said.
He picked at the edge of his thumbnail. He had a habit of doing that when he was working up to something.
“Marcus.”
“My sister,” he said.
I sat with that.
Gwen. Thirty-four, lived in Portland, taught middle school science. She and Marcus were close the way siblings are close when they’ve survived the same difficult parents, which is to say they talked every couple weeks and saw each other at holidays and would do almost anything for each other without ever having to say so out loud.
Gwen, who had donated eggs two years ago through a clinic she’d told us about at Christmas dinner, proud of herself, saying she wanted to help someone who couldn’t otherwise have a family. We’d smiled and said that was generous. Marcus had squeezed her hand across the table.
“She doesn’t know,” I said.
“No.”
“Does the other family know? The one who got – “
“I don’t know yet. The clinic is investigating. That’s what they said. Investigating.” He said the word like it tasted wrong.
The baby made a sound. Not crying, just a small noise, working something out in her sleep. Her hand opened and closed against the mattress.
What It Actually Meant
I need to explain something, because I’ve told this story to three people and all three of them asked the same question at this point.
They asked: so who is the baby’s biological mother?
And the answer is Gwen. Marcus’s sister.
Which made the baby Marcus’s biological daughter and also, in some technical sense that I couldn’t make my brain process cleanly, his niece. And it made Gwen her biological mother without Gwen knowing it. And it made the other family, whoever they were, the people raising a child made from eggs they’d never consented to use.
And it made me the woman who’d carried none of it, contributed none of it, and was sitting on a bed holding a child who was genetically related to everyone in this situation except her.
I’d known that going in. The donor egg piece, I mean. We’d talked about it for months before we agreed. Marcus had been careful with me about it, asking every few weeks if I was still okay, if I’d changed my mind, if I wanted to stop. I’d told him every time that I hadn’t. That I understood the difference between biology and motherhood. That I believed it.
I still believed it.
But the thing I’d agreed to was a stranger’s egg. Anonymous. Someone we’d never know, who’d never know us, whose existence in our daughter’s DNA would be a fact we’d someday explain to her with the help of some age-appropriate book about families.
Not Marcus’s sister. Not someone who would sit across from us at Christmas dinner. Not someone who might look at our daughter someday and see herself looking back.
I put my hand flat on the baby’s chest. Felt it rise and fall.
“We have to tell Gwen,” I said.
Marcus was quiet for a long time.
“I know,” he said.
Downstairs
Delia was in the kitchen when I came down. She’d made tea. She had a mug in front of her and another one across the table and she looked up when I walked in and nodded at the empty chair like she’d been expecting me.
I sat down.
“You don’t have to tell me anything,” she said.
“I know.”
She wrapped both hands around her mug. She’d had her own kids, two boys, seven and nine, who were staying with her mother while she recovered. She’d done this once before, surrogacy, for a couple in Connecticut she still got Christmas cards from. She’d explained to us in our first meeting that she didn’t do it for the money, not entirely, but that she also wasn’t going to pretend the money didn’t matter because she wasn’t stupid and she didn’t think we were either. We’d liked her immediately.
“Is the baby okay?” she asked.
“She’s fine. She’s asleep.”
“Is Marcus okay?”
I thought about how to answer that. “Not right now, no.”
She nodded. Drank her tea. Outside the kitchen window it was still February, gray and flat, the backyard looking like something that had given up.
“When I was pregnant,” she said, “I used to talk to her. When I was alone. Just – I’d tell her things. About the house, about my boys, about the weather.” She shrugged. “Probably sounds strange.”
“It doesn’t.”
“I told her she was going to a good place.” She looked at me. “I still think that.”
I didn’t say anything. My throat had done something complicated.
“Whatever’s happening up there,” Delia said, nodding toward the ceiling, toward the bedroom where Marcus was sitting with our daughter, “she’s still going to a good place. That part I’m sure of.”
I picked up the mug she’d poured for me. It was too hot but I held it anyway.
The Call to Portland
Marcus made the call to Gwen on a Sunday. Eight days after the bath. Eight days of phone calls with the clinic, with a lawyer a friend had recommended, with the clinic’s patient advocate, who kept using words like resolution and pathway forward and whom Marcus had finally told, in a tone I’d never heard from him before, to stop talking and start listening.
I sat beside him on the couch. He’d asked me to stay.
Gwen picked up on the second ring. She sounded bright, mid-morning bright, probably had coffee going, probably had papers to grade.
“Hey, what’s up?”
“I need to tell you something,” Marcus said. “And I need you to let me get through the whole thing before you say anything. Okay?”
A pause. “Okay.”
He got through the whole thing. It took about four minutes. His voice only broke once, near the end, and he pushed through it.
Gwen didn’t say anything for a long time after he stopped.
Then: “She’s okay? The baby’s okay?”
“She’s good. She’s really good.”
Another silence. “Can I see her?”
Marcus looked at me. I nodded.
“Yeah,” he said. “We want that.”
I don’t know what I expected from Gwen. Something messier, maybe. Anger at the clinic, which came later and was considerable. Panic about what it meant, which also came later and which we worked through slowly, over months, with a counselor who specialized in exactly this kind of situation because apparently this kind of situation happened more than anyone liked to admit.
But in that first moment, what she said was: can I see her.
And I think about that a lot.
What We Named Her
Ruth.
Marcus’s grandmother’s name. Gone twelve years. She’d been the one steady thing in a family that didn’t have many steady things, and Marcus had wanted to use her name since before we ever started any of this.
Ruth didn’t know yet what she was at the center of. She didn’t know about the clinic or the mix-up or the lawyer’s letters or the other family, somewhere out there, who we eventually learned had been told and were dealing with their own version of this. She didn’t know her Aunt Gwen would drive down from Portland the following Saturday and sit on our couch and hold her for two hours without saying much.
She just knew the weight of someone’s arms. The sound of a voice. Warm and held and fed.
That’s all she needed to know, for now.
Marcus and I had a long road still in front of us. The legal questions, the genetic questions, the question of what we’d tell Ruth when she was old enough to ask, and how, and whether Gwen would want a name for what she was to her. All of it still ahead.
But that Sunday night, after the call, after Gwen had cried and Marcus had cried and I’d sat between them on the phone like the only dry ground in the room, I went upstairs and picked Ruth up from the bassinet and she made that small noise, that working-it-out noise, and I sat in the chair by the window with her and the whole street outside was dark and quiet.
She put her fist against my collarbone.
I held on.
—
If this one got you, pass it on to someone who needed to read it today.
Dealing with difficult people can be tough, and if you’re looking for more true stories about shocking betrayals, you’ll want to read about the husband who found a florist charge that proved his wife didn’t forget Valentine’s Day or the stranger who changed a flat tire and left something behind. And for another story about a shocking experience at a pharmacy, check out the story about a technician who slid seizure medication back across the counter.
