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.
But his big sister saw us. She was a teenager in a yellow crop top, just out of pubescence but already self-aware enough to notice that two strangers were staring at her just a few feet away. She shaded her face with her hand, trying to figure out who was behind the tinted windows of the idling Mercedes.
Behind us, a car full of teenagers honked in annoyance, making our gawking even more obvious. The sister put a protective hand on her brother and tucked him safely behind her. The dropped hose splattered a torrent of water across her thighs. She held up her other hand and extended her middle finger at us. Fuck you.
“Busted,” Iona whispered, and kept driving.
“Circle back,” I commanded. She shot me a look. “Please? I barely got a glimpse.”
She said nothing but obediently turned around the block one last time. When we arrived back at the house, three minutes later, the teenage girl was in the front yard with an older blond woman, and the little boy had disappeared from sight. When the sister saw us coming around again, she jumped up and pointed out our car to her mother. Their heads swiveled in unison as we pulled up in front of their house.
“Dammit,” Iona swore, and hit the accelerator. The Mercedes’s engine growled and the car leapt forward. In the rearview mirror I could see the mother running out into the street to watch us go, framing our car in her cellphone viewfinder.
“Do you think she saw us? Could she identify us?”
“Not unless she got my license plate number, and then what’s she going to do with that? Call the police? We weren’t doing anything wrong.”
Iona turned right and left, seemingly at random, until we ended up on a commercial street lined with boutiques and restaurants. She gave me a sideways look as we slowed to an idle in the traffic. “And?”
I was silent for a moment. “He had dimples,” I said dully. I didn’t realize that I’d started crying but when I touched my cheek my hand came away wet.
“There’s the pain you were looking for,” Iona said. “Embrace it. Confront it. What does it make you want? How can you channel that into something positive for yourself?”
I didn’t know how to answer this. The feelings I had weren’t positive at all. Instead, I looked out the window at the pastel-painted bungalows crowded one on top of another, the surfers thronging the sidewalk with sand-crusted boards under their arms. Convertibles cruised past, packed with teenagers in neon-bright beachwear, blasting pop music by sexy boy bands. The cerulean sky was pierced by an incandescent afternoon sun. Everything in a holiday mood. I blinked and shut my eyes against it all.
I wanted to turn the car around and drive back to those two children, to study their faces and run my hands over their sun-warmed skin and feel the texture of their blond hair. I wanted to hold them in my arms and see if they felt like mine. It was an impossibility, of course. A quixotic quest.
I wondered if Sam ever shared this longing. Was she ever curious about the children she created? Or was egg donation just like so many decisions she made: impulsive, haphazard, quickly forgotten? She’d always been so good at moving past the things she didn’t care to remember. Or blacking out so she wouldn’t have to remember. Another trait that we didn’t share. I supposed she was the lucky one, that way.
This whole endeavor was a terrible idea, I suddenly understood; a masochistic pursuit that was, inevitably, just making everything worse, manifesting my abstract longing for a baby into something frighteningly tangible and visceral. That baby. Our baby. My baby.
“Let’s go home,” I said to Iona. “I’m done.”