My husband shook me awake a little after three in the morning, thirty-four weeks into the pregnancy we’d spent four years and every dollar we had fighting for, and set an opened envelope from our fertility clinic on the comforter. “You need to hear something about the baby,” he said. By eight I was calling a divorce lawyer.
Dylan and I had been through two retrievals, a hundred shots and a loan from his mother we still paid back at $310 a month.
Then the fourth transfer took.
He talked to my stomach every night after that.
He painted the spare room in our duplex in Kenosha a green the can called Pistachio Cream, which I hated and never told him.
By thirty-four weeks I couldn’t see my feet, my ribs ached, and she kicked hardest the second I lay down.
On a Thursday he asked if the guys could come over for the game.
“It’s game seven, Lainey. We’ll keep it down,” he said.
I made a face, and he leaned on the doorframe like he’d already won.
“Once she’s here, I’m done with nights like this anyway,” he said.
I was too wiped out to fight, so I took my pillow upstairs and was asleep by nine.
A hand on my shoulder dragged me back up.
Dylan was crouched beside the bed, still in his jersey, and downstairs the TV was off.
“What’s wrong?” I said, already reaching for my stomach.
The clock said 3:04.
He got up, walked to the window, came back, and kept rubbing his palms together.
Then he laid the envelope by my knee, slit along the top and gone soft at the folds, the way paper gets when it lives in a pocket.
“This came in March. It’s about the BABY,” he said.
My heart was going so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
He looked at the carpet, then back at me, and his face had gone completely flat.
“I’ve been sitting on it for seven months. YOU HAVE TO KNOW WHAT I DID,” he said.
He never finished.
I was shaking before he got near the end.
By eight that morning, I had a DIVORCE LAWYER on the phone. ⬇️
3:04
I didn’t pick the envelope up. I pulled the paper out with two fingers, like it might be hot, and tipped it toward the lamp.
One sheet. The clinic’s little blue tree at the top, the same tree they put on everything, even the parking stubs.
Dear Lainey and Dylan. A transfer summary. The date of the fourth transfer, March 14. The embryo, 2-B, from the retrieval of January 9. Then one line I had to read three times before the words would hold still.
Embryo inseminated with donor specimen #4417, per partner consent on file.
“What donor?” I said.
Dylan sat back on his heels. There was a wet ring on the front of his jersey where somebody’s beer had gone over.
“My sample was zero that day,” he said. “Zero, Lainey. They gave us two hours to decide. You were still under.”
“Who signed for it?”
His mouth opened and nothing came out of it. Whatever speech he’d been building on the stairs, that was where it ended.
The baby kicked under my right ribs, hard, the way she did when I lay flat. I wasn’t flat. She kicked anyway, and I put my hand over the spot like that would keep her from hearing.
At the bottom of the sheet, in tiny gray print under the clinic’s fax number, it said Page 1 of 2.
I turned the envelope over and shook it above the comforter. Nothing fell out.
“Where’s the second page?” I said.
He looked at the bedroom door, like somebody might come through it.
“Mom has it,” he said.
The green notebook
Gertrude Mullins lent us the money for the second retrieval the week before Christmas, at her kitchen table in Pleasant Prairie, with the good pen.
She wrote it down in a spiral notebook. Green, college-ruled, from Walgreens. On the very first page she wrote the total in the loopy blue hand she used on birthday cards, where every capital M had a little curl on top like a pig’s tail.
Loan to Dylan & Lainey. $25,050.
I asked her about the fifty once. “Clinic fees, honey,” she said, and patted my hand.
After that she never opened the notebook to the first page again in front of me. On the first Sunday of every month, after pot roast, I wrote her a check for $310. She flipped to the current page, wrote the line herself, Rec’d from Lainey, $310, and turned the book around so I could put my initials beside it.
Nineteen sets of my initials were in that book. She never once forgot the curl on an M.
She was generous in every way a person could see from the outside. She drove me to appointments Dylan couldn’t get off work for. She knitted a blanket for the crib before we had a heartbeat. She told her whole church we were trying, which I’d asked her not to do, and then she told them again when it took.
On January 9 she drove us both to the retrieval. She’d made ham sandwiches cut in triangles and packed them in a cooler, and nobody ate one, and they rode home with us and went in the trash on Tuesday.
I was sick from the trigger shot and half asleep in the waiting room. A nurse brought out a clipboard thick with forms, and Gertrude took it out of my hands.
“You’re in no shape, honey. I’ll do the boxes. You just sign where I point,” she said.
I remember signing things. I remember the IV going in. I woke up a little before noon with a paper cup of apple juice in my hand and Gertrude’s lipstick on the rim, because she’d tasted it first to make sure it was cold enough.
Everything went fine, she said. Everybody said that. Dr. Ito, the OB we went to after the transfer, said it at my thirty-two-week visit with her hand flat on my stomach.
“Textbook,” Dr. Ito said. “See you at thirty-six.”
Now it was 3:20, and Dylan was sitting on the carpet with his back against the dresser and his knees up.
“Why tonight?” I said.
“She said if I waited till the baby came, you’d never leave,” he said.
Downstairs, his phone started ringing on the coffee table.
It was twenty past three in the morning, and I knew who it was.
Natasha Voss, 7:59
He went down and answered it, and then he went out on the porch in his socks so I couldn’t hear. I didn’t go after him. I sat on the edge of the bed with the sheet of paper on my knee until the window went gray.
At seven I went down. The guys’ bottles were lined up on the counter by the sink, labels facing out, the way Dylan always lined them up so it looked like he’d cleaned. His truck was gone.
I found a lawyer the way you find anybody at seven in the morning. On my phone, sitting on the closed toilet with the fan on. Natasha Voss, family law, an office on Sheridan Road. Her voicemail said they opened at eight.
I called at 7:59 and she picked up herself.
I told it badly. Out of order, the donor number before the retrieval, the retrieval before the loan. She let me get all the way through before she said a word.
“Did you ever sign a consent for donor sperm?” Natasha said.
“No.”
“Did your husband?”
“I don’t know. I think so. He keeps saying he did what he did.”
“Then here’s the part you won’t like, and I’d rather you hear it from me today than from his lawyer in February. In Wisconsin, if a husband consents in writing, he’s the legal father. Whose sample it was doesn’t matter. If he signed his part, she’s his.”
I didn’t say anything. The fan kept going.
“If someone signed your part,” she said, “that’s a different conversation. Get me the consent form. It’s your medical record. The clinic has to give it to you. And I need to know whose hand that is.”
The clinic had a patient portal. I’d only ever used it to check my estradiol numbers. Under Documents there was a list I’d never scrolled to the bottom of, and at the bottom was a PDF dated January 9.
Consent to Use of Donor Gametes.
Three pages. Boxes checked. Dylan’s signature on the partner line, the big D and then a flat line, the way he signed for packages.
On the patient line, my name. Lainey Mullins.
I don’t write my M like that. I never have.
Below it, the witness line. Gertrude Mullins, in the same blue ink, the letters leaning the same way.
Both M’s had the little pig’s tail on top.
The porch in Pleasant Prairie
I drove out there at noon. I had to push the seat back as far as it went to fit behind the wheel.
Dylan’s truck was in her driveway. There was a box of Christmas lights on her porch swing, in October, and she was standing beside it in her church cardigan like she’d been waiting there since three.
She didn’t ask me in.
“I’m not going to have this conversation with you upset,” Gertrude said. “Your blood pressure. Think about the baby.”
I held up my phone with the consent form on it.
She didn’t look at it. She looked at me.
“Somebody had to make a decision in that room, Lainey, and you were drooling on a pillow. Dylan was crying in the men’s room. Two hours, they said. Two hours, or those eggs were for nothing. Twenty-four thousand dollars of my money for nothing. You’d have said no. I know you. You’d have said no on principle, and there wouldn’t be any baby to protect right now, would there?”
“I want the second page,” I said.
“It’s a form for the pediatrician.”
“Then give it to me.”
“It’s nothing for a woman at thirty-four weeks to be reading at her mother-in-law’s door. After she’s born, I’ll hand it to the doctor myself. That’s what it’s for. That’s who it’s for.”
Behind her, the screen door opened a few inches. Dylan was standing in the front hall in yesterday’s jeans.
“Mom,” he said. “Just give it to her.”
“Go inside, Dylan.”
He went inside. I stood there and watched the screen door ease shut on its own spring, and I swear he didn’t even close it himself.
“You’ll get it when you’ve calmed down,” Gertrude said. “Go home. Put your feet up.”
She went in after him, and she locked it. I heard the deadbolt.
In the car I sat with the engine running and called the number on the clinic’s blue-tree letterhead. A nurse named Thanh picked up. I gave her my birthday and my patient number and asked what else had gone out in that envelope in March.
The keyboard clicked for a while.
“There was an update on donor 4417,” Thanh said. “It went out with your transfer summary. I’ve got a note here from March 30, a callback. Your husband told us your OB already had it.”
The keyboard stopped.
“Did she not?” Thanh said.
Dr. Ito’s fax machine
Dr. Ito’s office squeezed me in at 2:15, because I told the girl at the front desk I’d sit in the waiting room until they did.
Dr. Ito pulled up my chart while I was still getting onto the table. She scrolled with one finger on the mouse wheel, slow, the whole way back.
“I have the clinic’s referral letter from April,” she said. “Your transfer date. Your bloodwork. That’s all I have from them.”
“There’s a second page.”
“Then let’s get it.”
I signed a release at the nurses’ station, my own M, plain, no curl. The nurse called the clinic and read them my number. Dr. Ito and I stood by the fax machine behind the desk like two people waiting on a vending machine.
It came through face down and warm. Dr. Ito turned it over and read it before she gave it to me. I let her. I couldn’t have read it first.
The blue tree at the top. Page 2 of 2.
Updated Donor Information. Donor #4417 has recently been identified as a carrier of a gene change associated with MCAD deficiency, a condition affecting how the body breaks down fat for energy. We recommend carrier screening for the recipient and that your obstetric provider be informed prior to delivery.
“Okay,” Dr. Ito said. “Here’s what that means in plain English.”
If I didn’t carry it, the baby couldn’t have it. If I did carry it, she had a one in four chance. A baby with it could get very sick if she went too long between feedings in the first days, before the newborn screen even came back. They’d want a plan from the first hour. The test for me was one tube of blood.
“I’d have drawn this at twenty weeks,” Dr. Ito said. “I’d have had the answer before you bought a car seat.”
She didn’t say anything about Dylan. She didn’t need to.
After she’s born, I’ll hand it to the doctor myself.
The hospital tests every newborn for MCAD anyway. Gertrude knew that. Somebody at that clinic must have told her it would come out on its own in a week, the baby’s results in an envelope, and nobody would ever have to say the word donor to me. The pediatrician would call it bad luck. The Mullins family would have a granddaughter with a condition, and a daughter-in-law who never asked where it came from.
For seven months they’d bet the first week of her life on my never asking.
“Who had this page?” Dr. Ito said.
“My mother-in-law.”
She wrote something in my chart. Then the nurse came in with the tourniquet and a tube with a purple top and said, “Make a fist for me.”
In the parking lot my phone buzzed on the seat.
It was a text from Gertrude. Dinner Sunday as usual. It’s the first. Bring the checkbook.
Sunday, the first
I went.
Natasha told me on the phone Saturday not to, and then she told me that if I was going anyway, to get whatever I could in writing. I printed the consent form at the library on Sheridan, all three pages, and put it in my purse beside the checkbook.
Dylan’s truck was in the driveway again. He’d been sleeping there.
Gertrude had the table set for three. Pot roast, the green notebook beside her plate, the good pen lying across it. She didn’t say anything about Friday. She passed me the carrots.
After she cleared the plates she flipped the notebook open to the current page and turned it toward me, the way she always did.
I turned it back to the first page.
She reached for it. I kept my hand flat on the paper.
The first page wasn’t just the total. Under it, in her blue hand, she’d itemized it, the way she itemized her church raffle money.
Retrieval #2, clinic, $24,000.
Donor specimen #4417, $1,050.
The fifty. And the thousand in front of it.
I took the consent form out of my purse and laid the patient page beside the notebook. Her M on the loan line. Her M on my name. Same curl, same lean, same blue.
Gertrude looked at both pages, and then she sat back and folded her hands on the tablecloth.
“Yes, I wrote it,” she said. “You’d signed fourteen forms that morning. What’s one more? You’d have signed it yourself if you’d been awake enough to understand what was at stake. I made the decision you would have made if you weren’t so stubborn. And I paid for it. I paid for that baby, Lainey, out of my own savings, and you’ve been paying me back for her at three hundred and ten dollars a month, and you were happy. You were happy every single Sunday at this table. You painted a nursery. Don’t you dare sit there like I took something from you.”
“The letter,” I said.
“What about it? A carrier. Do you know how many people are carriers? I looked it up. The hospital tests them all anyway. I told Dylan to tell those people your doctor had it, because what was the alternative? They test you, and then you ask why, and then you know. And then where would we be? Right here. That’s where. This is exactly what I was trying to keep from happening, and he couldn’t keep his mouth shut for six more weeks.”
Dylan was looking at the pot roast pan.
I pushed the good pen across the tablecloth until it touched his hand.
“Natasha needs to know who wrote my name,” I said.
Gertrude laughed. “He’s not going to put anything in writing against his own mother. Dylan. Look at me.”
He didn’t look at her. He picked up the pen, turned the consent form over to the blank back of the last page, and started writing.
“Dylan, put that down. You’ll lose everything. You’ll lose your daughter. Is that what you want? She’ll take that baby to her mother’s in Racine and you’ll see her on Christmas. Put it down.”
He kept writing. It took him a long time. He’d always written slowly, pressing hard, like the paper owed him money.
When he was done he turned it around for me.
My mother signed Lainey’s name on the donor consent on January 9. I watched her do it and I didn’t stop her. On March 30 I told the clinic Lainey’s doctor had the letter. That was a lie. I’m her father and I want to stay her father. Dylan Mullins.
“You’ll still pay me,” Gertrude said. Her voice had gone up high. “That loan is in both your names. Every penny.”
I wrote the check. $310, to Gertrude Mullins, the memo line blank. I wrote the line in the notebook myself, Paid by Lainey, $310, in my own plain hand, and I initialed it.
Then I folded Dylan’s page in half and put it in my purse.
“Where are you going with that?” Gertrude said.
“Natasha’s,” I said.
Pistachio Cream
My carrier test came back eight days later. Negative. Dr. Ito said it once on the phone, and then she said it again slower, because I’d asked her to.
The baby came at thirty-nine weeks. Seven pounds, two ounces. The hospital fed her on the clock anyway, every two hours, because Dr. Ito had written it in my chart in red, and I let them.
We live in a two-bedroom over a dentist’s office on 52nd Street now. Natasha says the duplex goes on the market in the spring.
Dylan comes on Saturdays. He’s her father on every piece of paper there is, the way Natasha said he would be. He holds her in the crook of one arm and talks to her the way he used to talk to my stomach, and I let him do that too.
I still mail his mother $310 on the first of every month. Dylan sends the other half of it. Natasha says we’ll be doing that until the spring after next.
I bought a quart of the green before we left the duplex. I painted one wall of her room with it, the wall her crib is against. I still hate it.
Last night she woke me a little after three. Nobody shook me. I fed her in the dark, and when she was down again I saw the mail on the dresser, an envelope from the state lab with her newborn screen in it.
I sat on the edge of the bed, slit it along the top with my thumb, and read both pages.
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who has ever signed a clipboard somebody else filled out.
For more late-night revelations and family secrets, read “My Fiancé Said His First Wife Died. She’s in Room 14 at Maple Ridge” and “The Man at the Bar Had My Daughter’s Chin”. And for another family gathering upended by a stranger, try “My Daughter’s Wedding Was Forty Minutes Old When a Stranger Asked for the Microphone”.
