“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.”
“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.