Kristina Knight - The Daughter He Wanted

A low-slung convertible swerved around his truck, honking, and Alex shook himself. He pulled back onto the highway and started for Park Hills, and as usual took a right at the light rather than the left that would take him home. The wrought-iron gates were still open, the tree-lined lane shaded from the afternoon sun. Alex pulled through the gates and drove past the statue of the floating angel, turned at the mausoleum that always looked haunted. Stopped the truck before a gray headstone with Dee’s name and dates.

And didn’t open the door. He sat there for a long time with his hand on the door handle, unable to move. What was he going to say to her? Hey, honey, you know how I didn’t want to do IVF? Well, thanks to your insistence now I have a daughter. He could imagine the back-of-the-head slap Dee would give him with that one.

Don’t be so flip, she’d say and demand all the details. Not that he had that many. He had a meeting scheduled tomorrow with the head of the clinic, but for now he only knew what the lawyer had told him on the phone: his sample was mislabeled and used as donor sperm instead of being destroyed. She’d turned four in the spring, according to the picture on Paige’s windowsill, so Kaylie would have been conceived sometime in the three-month window between when they learned about the cancer and when they learned it was terminal. Before he sent in the paperwork to have his samples destroyed. And he definitely couldn’t tell Dee that for the first time in three years he felt alive and it was because of another woman.

No, he couldn’t tell her that, not any of it. Because he had a daughter, thanks to her, and he had a life, such as it was. All she had was nothing. No babies to hold. No more laughter when he burned the steaks on the grill. No more life to grab on to.

Alex restarted the truck and pulled past her marker, down the shaded lane and back onto the main road. He grabbed dinner at a drive-through window and continued to his big, empty house. The forest-green shutters needed to be repainted, he realized when he pulled into the drive, and this weekend he should probably do a final mowing of the grass. In the kitchen he opened the cupboard door but instead of picking up one of Dee’s fancy plates he dumped his food on a paper plate and grabbed a beer from the fridge.

The canned laugh track from the sitcom annoyed him so he flipped over to a sports channel rerunning a Cardinals game from several years back. He ate his dinner sitting on the sofa Dee had bought, surrounded by the plants she liked and with her picture still on the mantel.

He wished like hell she was sitting on the sofa with him—and kicked the coffee table when he realized the woman he was imagining was Paige.

* * *

“WHAT I REALLY want to know is how this happened at all.” It was just before noon on Thursday, the day after meeting Alex, and Paige was expected back at school in just over an hour. She should have taken the entire day off work rather than just this morning.

While they were in the waiting area, Alex asked why she kept checking her watch. One thing led to another and they waived their confidentiality rights to face the lab supervisor together. They both wanted the same answers: how and why did this happen?

Alex sat in the chair next to her, arms folded over his chest. The supervisor looked uncomfortable. The longer this meeting went on, the nicer it felt to have someone on her side. Not that he was on her side, not really.

Paige glanced at the watch on her wrist. The drive from the fertility clinic to Bonne Terre would take at least forty-five minutes. She did the math. If the paper-pusher across the heavy oak desk didn’t give them some answers in about ten minutes she would have to leave and come back.

Not going to happen. And she wasn’t going to be pushed into another phone conversation with the lawyer, either. During the first phone call, she’d been too numb to ask questions about what happened four years ago. The donor she’d picked was a college graduate, Caucasian, of average height and weight. All of which fit Alex, except Alex wasn’t a donor. He’d been an IVF candidate along with his wife.

Now he was in Paige’s life and she needed to know why. Why, when she had been so careful in her choices, when she had made so many changes in her life, did this have to happen now?

The lab supervisor seemed honestly upset on their behalf, but he was still a company employee.

“My wife and I were assured that samples were checked and double-checked. That there was no need to worry about—”

“Human error,” the man across the desk interrupted and pushed at the lock of hair he was trying to use to cover his bald spot. His blue eyes were faded and the crow’s-feet at their corners seemed to be growing new legs the longer he was in the room. His nameplate read Merle Nelson. “We vet our employees very well. They are all smart, efficient and well paid, but mistakes do happen. We do know it wasn’t a case of an employee intentionally replacing samples.”

“Intentional or not this is a little more than a ‘mistake,’ though, don’t you think?” Paige couldn’t believe the man was talking as if this happened every day.

Mr. Nelson folded his hands over the desk blotter, pressing his thumbs together so hard Paige thought they might snap right off his hands. “Yes, I do. I can assure you this kind of mistake has never happened in our facility before.”

“Well, that’s comforting,” Alex said sarcastically.

“What we can tell you is that there will be restitution made to your families and, with DNA testing of the remaining samples, we can tell you with authority if there were any other, uh, mislabelings.”

“Remaining samples?” Paige’s voice was a squeak.

“I might have— Son of a bitch.” Anger laced Alex’s voice and he stood to pace.

“We don’t believe there were. We have run initial tests on the other samples and all indications are they belong to the original donor and not to you.”

Paige felt sick. For the past half hour Nelson had danced around how sperm samples were stored and why vials were labeled with numbers rather than names and how those numbers referred to the names attached. He skipped over the part where Alex’s sample should have been in a different section of the storage facility than the donor sperm. Now there was the possibility that this could have happened to other families. It wasn’t right.

“What is it that we can do for you, Mr. Ryan?” His words snapped Paige out of her thoughts.

“You can tell me there aren’t more children out there with my DNA inside them, for starters.” Alex gripped the back of his chair and his knuckles turned white. Paige wanted to comfort him somehow, but what could she say?

“We sent the samples to a DNA lab for complete analysis. A mouth swab from you and from the child... It won’t tell us why this happened, but you will know definitively how to move forward.” He turned his focus from Alex to Paige. “Ms. Kenner?”

What could they do for her? They could go back in time and give her the sperm she’d chosen, that’s what they could do. Only...

Would Kaylie be the girl she was with different DNA inside her? Paige’s attention and mothering would be the same, but could she truly complain about the DNA that gave Kaylie her silly laugh or the curl in her hair? Or that made her so curious about the world around her? So eager to learn everything about it? She couldn’t.

He didn’t wait for her answer. “I’ve been authorized to offer a settlement to each of you. While our facility is focused on helping men and women create the families of their dreams, we do realize that our error may have caused you some mental anguish—”

Anguish? He thought reading Kaylie Dr. Seuss at night caused anguish? Sure, Paige could do without the nightly arguments over veggie consumption or the ten-minute monologues that helped Kaylie decide which princess movie they’d watch on a Friday night. But those things weren’t exactly anguish-inducing.