At seven in the morning Iona knocked on my hotel room door. We drove, in a sepulchral silence, to the final address on the list: 825 Joshua Tree Drive. We found ourselves at a modern home on the outskirts of town. Its stucco was painted pale pink, a color that mirrored the fading remnants of the sunrise. The curtains over the front windows were drawn, but through the gauzy fabric I could see silhouettes, people moving through rooms. A family, in shadows.
We arrived for our stakeout just as the neighborhood garages were emptying their occupants out into the day. Iona parked the Mercedes in a strategic position, across the street and fifty yards down, which kept us out of eyeshot of the house, which was unfenced, on a square of lawn that ended abruptly at the desert’s edge. From where we were parked, we could see the whole property. I worried that we might be conspicuous—two women in a giant gold Mercedes, just sitting there—but the homes were far enough apart, the traffic sparse enough, that we didn’t draw attention.
At 8:30 a.m., a small sports car pulled out of the garage, a middle-aged man behind the wheel. I caught a glimpse of dark hair, a business suit, the glint of a gold watch against the steering wheel. The man drove down the street in the opposite direction from where we were parked, the garage door zipped back down, and all was quiet again.
We kept waiting.
At ten-thirty, an Uber pulled up in front of the house. A heavyset older woman—hair gray and professionally puffed, pearls paired with a crisp button-down—heaved herself out of the back seat, burdened down with shopping bags from a gourmet food shop. She approached the door, extricated a key from her purse, let herself in.
We waited some more.
Fifteen minutes later, the garage door lifted again and disgorged another car, this one a new-model Volvo station wagon. The Volvo drove past us, close enough that I could glimpse yet another middle-aged blond woman behind the wheel. The mother. It dawned on me that all three of these women had chosen Sam as their egg donor because of her (our) vague resemblance to them: white, blond, skinny, pretty. A younger, more fertile version of themselves. A choice rooted in vanity, perhaps; or maybe they hoped to find some visual connection with the children that wouldn’t share their DNA. Maybe it was just a way to avoid uncomfortable questions about a visibly mismatched child.
If I was ever to consider egg donors, I wondered, would I do the same? Probably.
A low winter sun slowly rose over the homes on the street, chasing away the chill of the desert night. The temperature outside was in the low seventies but by hour three the car was getting stuffy and the air-conditioning was in danger of draining the battery.
Iona looked at her watch. “Maybe we take a break, go fill up the gas tank and get a bite, then come back this afternoon,” she offered.
But I wasn’t listening, because I’d finally caught sight of her. The last child on my list, the littlest of them all. The girl that would become my Charlotte.
The older woman had brought her out into the yard behind the house to play. The woman was obviously a grandparent, enlisted to help for the day while her daughter took a few hours for herself. It was something about the way the woman watched the little girl toddling ahead of her on the garden path: bemused, but a little bored; loving, but low-energy; attentive, but without the obsessive concern of someone whose salary depended on it. She had a cellphone in her hand, and she kept glancing down at it as her grandchild lurched across the grass in pursuit of a white butterfly.
The little girl, to my surprise, was a brunette. She was younger than the other children Iona and I had seen so far—almost two, I guessed. Walking, but with the drunken hitch of a child not yet at ease with her own mobility. She wore a pink cotton T-shirt and striped leggings, her curly hair tumbling across her forehead, held back by an ineffectual barrette.
The grandmother had a blanket and an armful of toys, and she spread these on the grass in the sun and then collapsed on the blanket, seemingly exhausted by this effort. The little girl zoomed back and forth across the yard like a wind-up toy that’s just been let go, dragging a mangy stuffed animal behind her. The grandmother’s cellphone rang and she answered it, talking animatedly, occasionally casting an eye about to make sure that her granddaughter was still within sight.
It felt like a secret show, just for us. I was riveted, barely breathing. Beside me, Iona studied the tableau in silence, her arms folded over the steering wheel, lost in thought.
Time passed—five minutes, ten, the grandmother still talking and the little girl still adventuring. As I watched, I simmered in a stew of emotions: rage at the haphazard grandmother, melancholic longing for the beautiful child, bitter envy for the whole mundane scenario that I might never be able to replicate myself. Eventually, the little girl staggered back to the blanket and climbed into her grandmother’s lap. Her grandmother, still talking on her phone, pressed a packet of pureed fruit into the little girl’s hand. The girl drained it, lay down on the blanket, and closed her eyes. The arms clutching the stuffed animal to her chest slackened, and the animal eventually slipped to the grass beside her.
Finally, the older woman hung up her phone. She leaned over the sleeping little girl, her brow puckered, frustration on her face. Then she heaved herself to her feet. She gazed at the house twenty feet away, measuring the distance between them, and then a wave of pain contorted her face. She pressed a hand to her stomach, glanced down at the child again, then turned to survey the empty landscape around them. She seemed to be making a calculation; she frowned again, hunched slightly, and then hurried to the house with a strange, abbreviated step.
The child, sleeping, didn’t notice her grandmother’s departure. A hushed silence seemed to descend over the yard, an oppressive stillness, the desert holding its breath.
“Jesus,” I whispered. “She just left the baby there alone? What if she wakes up? The garden’s not even fenced.”
“It’s an opportunity,” Iona said quietly. “Don’t question it.” She leaned across me and opened the car door. “This is your chance for a real Confrontation. Go. Quick. Get a proper look.”
I hesitated. “But what if the grandmother finds me there?”
“Judging by the way that woman was moving, you’ve got a few minutes,” Iona said. “And if she comes back out, you were passing by and saw the child all alone in the yard and were concerned. She won’t question that. You’re an affluent white woman, just like her. You get an automatic pass.”
She prodded me and I got out of the car, walked across the road, took a tentative step onto the lawn. I’ll just get a quick look up close, I told myself as I moved toward the sleeping child. One glance, and then I can let this go.
The grass was plush green underfoot, a rebuke to the harsh desert climate and a testament to the wealth of the family that could afford so much extravagant water. I took three steps, then ten, then twenty, and then I was on my knees on the grass, right next to the little girl, watching her as she slept.
Her chest rose and fell, her breathing so shallow that I worried that something was wrong, that she was overheating or hyperventilating or having a terrible nightmare. Or was that normal? I’d never examined a sleeping child that closely.
I leaned in closer. The noontime sun, directly overhead now, cast my shadow over the child’s sleeping form. I wondered if it would wake her up, but she didn’t stir. Now that I could study her up close, I could see that she didn’t obviously resemble me: her hair was curly and brown, for one, her skin tinged with olive where mine was pale, and she didn’t have visible dimples. If each of the three children we’d visited so far was half me and half stranger, in this particular case the stranger’s genes had clearly dominated.
But there was also something about the shape of her face—her wide-set eyes, the tight point of her chin, the upturned bud of her lip—that I recognized as Sam’s and mine. You had to look close for it, but it was there.