Meryl Sawyer - Death's Door

She flipped through the pages, not really reading them. Zeke. The name exploded off the page with a boom that echoed in her brain. She backtracked and read the entire response, which had supposedly been transcribed from her mother’s exact words.

Jessica Connelly: Zeke really wants a son. He says he doesn’t care about the sex but I know how much he wants a boy. Zeke had asthma as a child. His mother refused to allow him to participate in sports and his father went along with her decision. Zeke always felt he missed out on the father-son bond other boys enjoyed. He wants a son to share ball games and fishing. You know, guy stuff.

Madison sucked in a stabilizing breath. Zeke. No one called Zachary Connelly anything but Zach or Zachary except her mother. When they were dating, she nicknamed him Zeke. She didn’t do it in public for some reason, but at home, especially when she was joking, Jessica Connelly called him Zeke.

This transcript might possibly be authentic. How else would they have come up with the unique nickname? This reinforced an earlier assumption. Her mother had consulted doctors at the clinic. It still didn’t prove Jessica Connelly had been inseminated there.

She glanced up and met Paul’s eyes. Her doubts didn’t show, did they? Her instincts told her this man would exploit any weakness. “How much did the inseminations cost?”

“They ranged from five to seven thousand dollars per session.”

A loud gasp exploded out of her like a grenade. “That’s a lot of money today. It was even more back then. My parents never had that kind of money, even when I was in high school and my father was at the top of his career. I couldn’t have gone to MIT without a scholarship.”

“True, but women were desperate to conceive and wanted those Mensa credentials. Your mother could have gone to the clinic—”

“Wait! You said my mother, not my parents. Why?”

He responded with a smile she couldn’t quite decipher. What about this seemed so amusing? “Keep reading.”

With a growing sense of unease, Madison directed her attention to the next page. It was the last page of the transcript.

Nurse Avery: Mrs. Connelly, the clinic requires an interview with every applicant’s husband.

Jessica Connelly: Why? I’m the one having the baby.

Nurse Avery: True, but New Horizons needs to be certain the baby is wanted, by both parents.

Jessica Connelly: What if I were a single mother?

Nurse Avery: Well, that would be different.

Jessica Connelly: I don’t see how.

God! thought Madison. The challenging note so obvious on the page seemed exactly like her mother. Jessica Connelly—now Jessica Whitcomb—always confronted people, demanding they explain themselves. The words on the page hit an invisible target she hadn’t known existed, a hollow place in her heart. She forced herself to keep reading.

Nurse Avery: In those cases, it’s the mother’s decision alone…to have a child using artificial insemination. Since she would be the sole parent, the clinic doesn’t require—

Jessica Connelly: I understand what you mean, but my case is different. My husband would rather be childless than use a sperm donor. I don’t feel that way.

For a moment, Madison was torn by the urge to close her eyes and imagine her mother. Her parents had been close…yet so different. Her father openly loved Madison in a way most fathers reserved for their sons. Zach Connelly had never mentioned sports but he’d always encouraged Madison to participate. No, more than encouraged, now that she thought about it. He had playfully insisted. At some point in junior high school, Madison had realized this was how many fathers in her class behaved with their sons.

Madison had never cared for dolls or dress-up the way other little girls had. She’d been content to read books and experiment with her science kits. Buddy’s Bodies had been a favorite. It required the assembly of the human body from the internal organs outward. Another kit had been Living Chemistry, which involved many simple experiments.

Her father prodded Madison to get out of the house and “exercise.” She’d found that she enjoyed sports but she’d never been a real star. It took time and practice that she would rather devote to her kits. She’d earned a spot on her high school varsity tennis team. She wouldn’t have stuck with it except her father had assured her that a sport was a necessary component to be awarded an academic scholarship.

He’d been correct. Colleges these days required students to be “well-rounded” and those who qualified for a scholarship needed over-the-top grades, superior SAT scores and a slew of other commendations that would elevate them above the herd. She could thank her father for channeling her energy so that she set herself apart from other high school students across the nation.

From her earliest years, Madison had shown an aptitude for retaining obscure facts. They began playing the child’s edition of Trivial Pursuit when Madison was in the second grade. She still remembered her first correct answer. What animal has a day named for it? She could almost hear herself shouting out the answer as she jumped up and down. “A groundhog, Daddy. Groundhog Day.” The memory triggered a raw ache. This wonderful man had been her father, not some jerk who’d sold his sperm for cash.

Her mother hadn’t been good at arcane facts but Zach Connelly was a trove of information on far-flung subjects. In order to compete and win his approval, Madison had trained herself to remember facts so unimportant that they never registered with most people.

“Does it sound like your mother?” Paul asked in a low-pitched voice.

“A little,” she grudgingly conceded.

“What more proof do you need?” he asked.

“Proof?” Madison huffed her disgust. “This so-called transcript from a defunct clinic that everyone sued for all kinds of illegal things doesn’t prove anything.”

“No?”

“No!” she shot back in a tight, pinched voice. She’d never been a good liar. Evidently, he’d seen or sensed her reaction to several items in the transcript. The air in the room seemed to be charged the way the atmosphere heralds an approaching storm.

“No,” she asserted again in her most authoritative tone. “I don’t believe I’m related to that man.”

“A simple paternity test would prove it one way or the other.”

That stopped her. Madison couldn’t deny a test would be definitive. “I want to talk to my mother before I do anything.”

“Isn’t she in the South Pacific on a sailboat? It might be—” he shrugged “—weeks before she telephones you. Right?”

“She should call any day,” Madison said quickly. “I heard from her a few weeks ago. She’ll phone as soon as she gets to a port with a telephone she can use or when she meets someone with a yacht that has satellite service.”

What she said was true. She did expect to hear from her mother. Jessica had called every few weeks since she’d sailed from Fort Lauderdale with the stud-muffin she’d married. But Madison couldn’t honestly remember exactly when she’d last spoken to her mother. It could have been two weeks ago, maybe three. Madison had been so caught up with the business and looking for a new home that she hadn’t paid that much attention.

She needed to have a heart-to-heart talk with her mother now. It occurred to her that she and her mother had shared only one intimate, soul-baring talk. That had been the night her father had died. They’d discussed what a great man he was and how much he’d meant to both of them.

Her mother had been so agonizingly upset at losing the man she’d met in college and married the day after graduation that it came as a physical blow when she’d brought home a much younger man she’d met at a fund-raiser. It was even more upsetting when Jessica Connelly had married him less than a year after Madison’s father had died.