Page 49

I’m not saying much. Preston’s not saying much either, which for Preston is a fever symptom. His knee is against mine, vibrating with nervous energy, his mind filled with possibilities and options and looking overwhelmed.

Here’s where my mind has gone.

These are women I’ll never meet. And one of them – one of these squinting kids in a decades-old summer – is going to give my child her grandmother’s laugh, or her mother’s cholesterol, or her exact way of holding a pencil. Some night in the brownstone the kid will look up from their homework with an expression that belongs to nobody at any table I’ll ever sit at, and I’ll think: there’s the donor mother.

I thought it would feel like a transaction. It doesn’t. It feels like being trusted with something by someone who’ll never know my name, or what they gave us with their donation.

“Luke, what do you think?” Preston says, quietly, under the sound of our mothers litigating the cello opportunities.

“4487,” I say. “The one with the brother.”

Elena flips back. Reads the three paragraphs again, all the way through this time, and I watch my sister read a stranger’s handwriting about a little brother she helped raise.

“Yeah,” she says finally. “She was already my top pick. Strong fundamentals. The brother thing is – whatever. The fundamentals are strong.”

“Absolutely, just the fundamentals,” Preston agrees.

Rosenthal looks at the page and nods slowly, and for the second time today the showman steps out and leaves the actual doctor at the desk. “Good choice. I remember her intake. You’d be surprised how few people pick for the essay.” He closes the binder. “The Vassar people never pick for the essay.”

“I heard that,” Catherine says.

“You were meant to, née Kensington.”

He walks us out past the waterfall, dispensing next steps, and at the elevator he shakes my hand last, holds it a second longer than the two-pump standard, and says, quietly, just to me: “The multiples question. You asked it because you’re careful. Stay careful. It’s the best thing in your chart.” Then the gold teeth come back out for the group. “Mazel tov, all of you. Go home. Eat something. The future has excellent odds.”

The elevator doors close on our reflection: two mothers, one sister, two fathers, one navy notebook, and a bag of Mamá’s snacks, one empanada lighter.

“I like him,” Elena says.

“He’s a lounge act with a licence,” I say.

“You like him too.”

I don’t answer, which everyone in the elevator correctly files as a yes.

That night, at the brownstone, I can’t sleep, so I stand in the doorway of the room across the hall. Bare floors. Streetlight in stripes. Morning light coming in eight hours, on schedule.

One transfer. One baby. One stroller.

He’s probably right. He’s done this for thirty years. The odds are the odds. But I’ve worked nights long enough to know how the odds behave when nobody’s watching. I’ve seen the one-per-cent complication walk through my doors twice in the same shift. Probability doesn’t owe anybody a smooth ride. It just runs the numbers and lets you find out.

Trust the process, Dr. Silva.

I go back to bed, where Preston has claimed his seventy per cent and left me my thirty percent like always, and his hand finds my chest without waking, and I lie there doing the thing I told Lopez not to do.

Thinking it instead of saying it.

What happens if I get this wrong?

Chapter 11

The Donation

PRESTON

There is no dignified way to describe where I am, so I will describe the chair.

The chair is leather, reclining, and – I have checked, twice, without wanting to – wipeable. It sits in a private room the clinic has furnished with the aggressive blandness of an airport hotel: a television firmly attached to the wall, a rickety side table, lighting that can only be described as forensic, and a stack of sticky old magazines I refuse to acknowledge. I know what they are. The clinic knows I know what they are. We have agreed, the magazines and I, to get through this morning as strangers and remain unacquainted.