“Do they like having brothers and sisters?”
She thinks about that. “Anita hates her brother. He’s older and he snuck up behind her and put dirt in her pants.”
“That’s not very nice.”
“And Trisha says her little sister gets all the attention since she got born and she hopes she moves out.”
“I think that’s kind of unlikely.”
I hand Syd her stuffed moose. Milt. She wraps her arm around him and draws him close.
“If I had a sister, I wouldn’t hate her,” she says.
“Of course you wouldn’t,” I say.
“But I don’t think I want one,” she says, quickly reconsidering.
“Why’s that?”
“Because you and Mommy would run out of love,” she says. “There wouldn’t be enough.”
I lean in and kiss her on the forehead. “That wouldn’t be a problem. We’d just make up some more.”
She nods. I think she’s picturing the kitchen, that love is like brownies. You make up a batch whenever you feel like it.
“Okay, then,” she says. That’s good enough for her.
I SAT THERE, BREATHLESS FOR A MOMENT, in Carol Swain’s house before I said, “I’m sorry, what?”
“You’re Patty’s father,” Carol Swain repeated. She grinned. “You should see your face right now.” She added, “The part that’s not already red.”
“Mrs. Swain, we’ve never even met,” I said.
“Well, you had to know from the outset that that wasn’t exactly necessary, right?” she said, smirking.
I shook my head and got to my feet. The wooziness I’d felt after finding Kate was returning. I wavered slightly, put my hand on the wall to steady myself.
“Whoa,” said Carol. “Steady there, pardner.”
“I think I should go,” I said, pushing myself off the wall, willing the room to stop spinning. “We’re not making any sense here.”
“You pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, but I know you do.”
“No,” I said, feeling my pulse quicken again. “It’s not possible.”
Really? Is that what you honestly believe?
“What’s not possible? That you could be my daughter’s father, or that I could have found out it was you?”
I wanted to leave but felt rooted to the floor.
“You put all that information on the form,” she said. “Not your name, of course. But everything short of that. What would you like me to tell you about yourself?”
“You don’t have to—”
“Your father died at the age of sixty-seven—you were just nineteen at the time, that must have been rough—of lung cancer, but that was attributed to him being a heavy smoker, so it’s not like you necessarily had a genetic disposition, you know? Your mother at that time was sixty-four, reasonably healthy for that age, and no signs of heart disease even though there was some history of it in her family. How am I doing so far?”
“Pretty good,” I said.
“You were in good shape yourself, although how much of a history does someone have at twenty? That’s how old you were, right?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You’d had chicken pox and measles and all those other childhood diseases, and your tonsils removed when you were six. They don’t do that very much anymore, do they? I can’t remember the last time a kid had his tonsils out.”
I didn’t bother nodding, but she was right on all points.
“You were going to Bridgeport Business College, although that wasn’t actually on the forms. It was easy to figure out, since it was the closest school to the clinic. Just down the street. That was where a lot of their donors came from. Sometimes you wonder if they do that deliberately, set up close to a college where they know the boys are desperate for money. So, anyway, we started the search there, and it paid off.”
I breathed in and out, slowly, half a dozen times before sitting back down. Carol waited until she was sure I wasn’t going to keel over or anything.
“This is all very exciting,” she said, but then her smile turned downward. “At least it would be, under different circumstances.” She leaned forward on the couch. “I bet you could use that drink now.”
“No, it’s okay,” I said. “It was all supposed to be confidential.”
“And it was,” she said. “No one at the clinic ever told me you were the sperm donor. But when I was making a choice as to whose sperm I would pick, they provided all these forms that you had to fill out when you, you know, made a deposit. There was all that family history, ages, educational profile, race. You wrote down that you’d excelled in math in high school and college, which was another reason why we zeroed in on the business college.”
“‘We’?”
“Me, and the detective I hired.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “This would be about ten, twelve years ago?”