nineteen

Dr. Grovit wore brown corduroys, a greenish wool sports jacket, and penny loafers. I had swapped out my Levi’s for cargo shorts in deference to a late-April warm spell, but I imagined in my senior years, I too, would lose my sense of temperature. Body heat modulation issues probably get sandwiched somewhere before incontinence and after hearing loss. I knew, however, that Dr. Grovit’s seasonally challenged attire had nothing to do with his mental acumen. My mother, of course, looked impossibly chic in a sleeveless silk shirtwaist dress and Ferragamo flats. If nothing else, a trip home had allowed her to raid her closets for new outfits.

I pulled up to the front entrance of the Sound View labs and rolled down the car window.

“Hey, Doc,” I said.

“I’ll get in, and you can drive us to the west campus,” Dr. Grovit replied as he hopped in the car. As usual, Dr. Grovit bypassed pleasantries in favor of progress, although he did take a second to kiss my mother before settling into the back seat.

“You look wonderful, Elizabeth,” Dr. Grovit complimented.

“Thank you for committing me,” she said. “Apparently, I owe everyone in this car at least one return favor.”

I spun the car around and drove past the main building, a barn-like structure with a modern aesthetic. With the water on our right, we had a panoramic view of the campus, which covered ten acres
of highly desirable real estate on a protected cove of the North Shore of Long Island. The compound housed at least thirty buildings that included labs, auditoriums, recreational areas, and a pretty swank restaurant. The outdoor grounds were worthy of a glossy magazine shoot with indigenous plants lining crooked paths down to the water. Science, it seemed, paid off.

Harbor House sat on the opposite side of the bay facing the labs. For the last year, it had been hard to wake up to a full-on view of the place where my brother had died. On the other hand, this picturesque area of Long Island had been my family’s stomping ground for decades. I had decided, after some random relocation attempts via Google search, that I couldn’t run away from my home. The whole point of family is to celebrate and suffer the passage of life. No matter how bizarre, this was my family and the town we’d helped build. I’d have accomplished nothing if I had run away. I also felt that Teddy knew our mother and I were here, on his campus.

I glanced at Dr. Grovit in the rearview mirror. He leaned forward and squeezed my mother’s shoulder.

“Where to?” I asked.

“Plant Biology,” Dr. Grovit instructed. “One of the lab assistants, now Dr. Jack Wilson, stayed on and runs the division,” Dr. Grovit said.

“What did you tell him?”

“The truth,” Dr. Grovit said. “And believe me, it worked.”

My mother laughed wryly. “Guilt is a wonderful motivator.”

Dr. Wilson was in the lobby when we arrived. I pegged him for about forty, maybe a few years younger. Other than his full head of dark red hair, there was nothing outwardly memorable about Dr. Wilson. He wore the requisite lab coat covering up a bland button-down and nondescript pants. Given my estimate of his current age, he would have been no more than in his early twenties when my procedure took place. Not so young that an adult decision would have been beyond his reach but young enough still to trust an authority, like my father. I wondered if Dr. Wilson was a follower or a leader. Or a challenger, like me.

I looked at his shoes—worn-out running sneakers. A nonconformist. Maybe I liked this guy.

My mother gave Dr. Wilson the once-over and shook her head in a quick no to me. She didn’t recognize him.

A conference room with a view of the lab’s greenhouses was available for our meeting. Despite the short notice, Dr. Wilson had a thickly stuffed manila folder in front of him. I wondered if he felt this meeting would provide a form of absolution for him. Maybe he had nothing important to impart, but the act itself would probably prove cathartic for him if he’d been at all suspicious of my father’s activities.

“I don’t want to waste your time,” Dr. Wilson said matter-of-factly.

That worked for me since I’d already been kept in the dark for more than a decade.

“Great,” I said. “Let’s get started.”

“I’m going to be blunt. We were testing sperm mobility when I started my fellowship in this very lab. There was nothing unusual about it at the time, and I wouldn’t have given it a second thought until Dr. Grovit called.”

I looked around the room. The entrance to the building had seemed familiar. The hall lined with photographs of prominent staff scientists rang a bell, and I guessed this was where my egg extraction took place.

“Many of the doctors and medical students donated sperm for the studies,” Dr. Wilson continued. “The natural progression was to test categories of sperm with categories of eggs. Medically, there was nothing wrong with our work. In fact, it was quite progressive.” Dr. Wilson paused, deep in his own thoughts of scientific breakthroughs. His face took on a glow, and I was reminded of Teddy’s passion for his medical studies. Within seconds, Dr. Wilson’s eager expression dissolved. “When we began to fertilize the eggs …” Dr. Wilson said. “Well, I guess you could say, we were creating life in a petri dish.”

I had a million questions, but Dr. Wilson’s confession, it seemed, couldn’t be contained. He continued before I could interject.

“I’m not sure what happened to the fertilized embryos,” he admitted, looking absolutely lost. “It’s the oversized elephant in the room.”

“Did you donate?” my mother asked.

“I sure did,” he replied. “And now, from what Dr. Grovit has told me about Lifely and what I could pull together in the last day”—he frowned at his bursting folder—“I may have hundreds of children out there.”

Oh my, I thought. And I was worried about having one child. Was it possible I had more? This poor guy may have fathered a small country of redheads. Then I thought about Teddy. There could be dozens of mini-Teddys running around. Frank’s Christmas list for his nieces and nephews could be miles long. My mouth felt dry, and I reached into my bag for my water bottle. My mother’s eyes started to glaze over, and I passed her the bottle. She waved it off, probably hoping for something stronger. Maybe I had overestimated my mother’s resiliency. And Dr. Grovit? I turned my head to him. He had finally started to sweat under his winter garb.

“Do you think I have multiple children?” I asked Dr. Grovit.

“I don’t. In fact, the chance of you having even one child is miniscule,” Dr. Grovit said.

Dr. Wilson nodded and then addressed my mother and me. “Do you remember getting a series of shots before the extraction?”

We both shook our heads no. “Would I have needed shots?”

“In a typical IVF case, the woman wants to increase her odds of pregnancy, so hormones are used to stimulate an overproduction
of eggs. The more eggs, the better the odds. If you didn’t have shots, which would be highly unusual before an extraction, then you could only provide one egg.”

“Which lowers the chance that this single egg even made it to a womb and survived,” I said as I thought about it. I turned to my mother. “I don’t remember shots.”

“I don’t either,” she said, and then turned to Dr. Grovit. “So we’re talking one egg. The odds were so slim. Why would William even make an attempt?”

“He thought he was God,” Dr. Grovit said as he shook his head. “As much as I hate to admit it, he had a knack for making scientific miracles happen. At the least, I think we can agree that if there is a baby, there is just one.” Dr. Grovit addressed Dr. Wilson, “What happened to the test vials of sperm?”

Dr. Wilson let out a groan. “We were under the assumption the vials were being discarded, but now I’m not so sure. I think we have to assume that some of these samples made it to Lifely.” His nose twitched as if he’d smelt something offensive. “Clearly, your father was interested in long-term DNA studies, and if there was one sample worth studying, despite the low odds, it was yours and your brother’s.”

I drained the last of my water. “Isn’t it possible my egg is sitting in a freezer somewhere?”

“No,” Dr. Wilson said. “Sperm sits in a freezer. Science is just now figuring out how to successfully freeze, unfreeze, and fertilize eggs. At that time, eggs had one purpose—fertilization followed by immediate insemination, typically within forty-eight hours.”

“Shit,” I said, and I meant it. “I don’t know why, but all this time I’ve been thinking this kid would be a toddler or small child. But if what you’re saying is true and my egg had to be used immediately, I may be the mother of a teenager.”

“Sixteen years old to be exact,” my mother chimed in. “Is there anyone else we can talk to? There had to be a lab assistant that facilitated the transfers to Lifely. My husband never touched administrative work.”

“I thought about that,” Dr. Wilson said as he opened his folder. “The lab turned over about every twelve months depending on who was headed to a fellowship or medical school. I wrote down everyone I could remember and researched the names online.” He passed over a sheet of paper with contact information.

Dr. Grovit’s glasses slid to the tip of his nose while he ran his finger down the list. It was faint, but his finger shook slightly. “Why is there a question mark by Liz James?”

“I didn’t try to locate her, because I don’t think she’d be of any help. She wasn’t a medical student.” Dr. Wilson smirked, seeming somewhat amused at the memory of Ms. James. “Lizzy was a bit loose and not much of a typist. She had a few flings with some of the younger guys. She was supposed to be managing medical supplies, but let’s just say not all the medications found their way to an assigned shelf or bottle.”

“I don’t remember her,” Dr. Grovit said.

“She didn’t last long,” Dr. Wilson replied. “She left when she was about four months pregnant.”

My mother’s brain synapses fired a millisecond ahead of mine. “This woman left because she was pregnant?” she asked.

Dr. Wilson nodded.

My mother rose unsteadily. She smoothed the folds of her dress and readjusted the belt accentuating her narrow waist. “I haven’t had a great run with doctors,” she said, and then smiled at Dr. Grovit. “Present company excluded. However, I can confirm that my husband surrounded himself with very intelligent people. If his lab
assistants knew how to make a baby in a petri dish, then I’m pretty sure they knew how to prevent conception the old-fashioned way. No one on this campus mistakenly impregnated Liz James. And, since I’m still receiving the exceedingly generous health benefits from this institution, I can’t imagine why a single woman on the company health plan would leave four months into a pregnancy.”

Hello, chutzpah. Thanks, Mom, I mouthed. Finally a lead—the name of a woman with a questionable background, working in close proximity to my father, in the same lab with my egg and my brother’s sperm, and most probably pregnant seventeen years ago.