“That’s ridiculous,” Mom stated emphatically. “I’m your mother.”
“Not according to my DNA.”
As soon as Leah had answered her phone, she’d shut herself into her car inside her one-car garage so Dylan couldn’t overhear. In sharp constrast to Leah’s surroundings, her mother was currently in Guinea, working on an agroforestry project. On the other end of the call, Leah pictured orange earth, palm trees, and huts. Mom had likely clothed her sinewy body in safari khaki. Her curls, which matched Dylan’s, would be zigzagging from her head, and her close-set eyes and long face would be pinched with consternation.
As usual, contact with her mom submerged Leah in a complex mix of resentment, love, and resignation.
“Two weeks before your due date, I started bleeding,” Mom said. “My back hurt. My belly hurt. We rushed to the hospital, and they diagnosed me with placental abruption.”
This information was not revelatory. Leah had gone through a phase in elementary school when she’d been obsessed with her origin story and had peppered her parents with questions about her birth and herself as a baby. “The placenta had pulled away from your uterus,” Leah said.
“Right, which is dangerous. They worried that you might not be getting enough oxygen, so they put me under and performed an emergency C-section. I have the scar to prove it!”
“I’ve seen the scar.”
“Of course you have.”
“I’m trying to reconcile all of that with the only logical explanation for my DNA results, which is that you adopted me.”
“You can’t always trust logic.”
“On the contrary, the wonderful thing about logic is that youcanalways trust it. So I began to wonder... What if your babydidn’t survive the placental abruption? And, in your grief, you adopted me?”
“I most certainly did not adopt you, Leah. The emergency C-section saved you. They placed you in my arms shortly after I regained consciousness.”
Leah remained quiet.
“Why in the world would I have adopted a baby?” Mom demanded, gathering steam. “I was trying to finish college at the time that I had you. I wanted to see the world! I wanted to travel. I was not ready for children. You know this about me.”
“I do.”
“I did not adopt you.”
“And yet we’re not related by blood. How do you propose to explain this?”
“Clearly the lab made a mistake.”
“My DNA matches include people with surnames like Brookside and Donnell and May. Do you recognize any of those?”
“I don’t. Listen, humans are involved in the process of DNA testing. If humans are involved, there’s the possibility of human error. I’m guessing that your test tube was mistaken for someone else’s test tube. Will YourHeritage let you retest?”
“They will.”
“Good. Make sure they expedite your retest since this was their mistake.”
Leah swallowed a sigh. Her intuition did not think this was the lab’s mistake. “A new test kit is already en route to me. Once I send it in, I should hear back in less than two weeks.”
“Tell them to give us our money back for both tests. They owe us that after the trouble they’ve caused.” She didn’t wait for Leah to reply before saying,“I’m off!”
Mom’s words hung in Leah’s ear as the line went dead.
If Mom had not adopted her, then only one theory remained that honored both her mom’s version of events and the DNA test.
That theory: her mother’s biological child had been switched at birth with someone else’s baby.
CHAPTER TWO
Farmers markets were not his thing.
