Hush

“You actually work there. At the Advanced Fertility Center?” Alexis said finally.

“Yes. I’m sorry I was reluctant to tell you before.”

“All right. I’ll speak to you again. When?”

“As soon as possible. I’m finishing up my work there, so if I’m going to try to get any proof, I have to act immediately.”

“All right-come now, then.”

Lake was in a cab in ten minutes. The whole way to the East Side, she warned herself to handle Alexis delicately, to resist pouncing. She couldn’t come away empty-handed this time.

Alexis was wearing another wrap dress, this one in pinks and browns. Her apartment looked exactly the way it had two days before, like unchanging scenery for a play.

“So you work at the clinic,” Alexis said coldly as they took the same seats in the living room they had on Tuesday. “What an interesting detail to have left out of our previous conversation.”

“I’m sorry. Like I said, I was afraid of making trouble…until I knew it might be justified.”

“Is business booming these days?” Alexis asked sarcastically. “I read the other day that the average age of marriage is increasing for women. That kind of news must make Levin and Sherman positively gleeful.”

“I know they want to build their business-that’s why they hired me. I’m a marketing consultant.”

“Marketing? So you’re not in the lab or anything like that? Do you have any medical expertise at all?”

“No. I’ve had other clients in the health-care field, but-”

“Damn.” Alexis shook her head hard to the left, as if she were flicking water from her hair. “I need someone in the lab.”

“Why?” Lake asked, surprised. “Is that where you think the problem is?”

“Look, I really don’t see how you can help me,” Alexis snapped.

Lake could feel her own anxiety starting to balloon. She couldn’t walk out of there without the truth.

“Please let me try,” she urged. “You can tell me exactly what to look for. If there’s something less than kosher going on, I want to help you expose it.”

“Less than kosher?” Alexis said. The testy tone was back, like a tiger that had suddenly slunk out of the bush. “Excuse my eyes from bulging out of my head, but considering what they did to me, that has to be the understatement of the year.”

“What do you mean?” Lake asked. “What did they do?”

“They stole my baby.”

Lake played the words back in her mind, trying to decipher them.

“Your baby?” she said. “But I thought you weren’t able to conceive?”

“I did conceive-in a petri dish. And when I was denied future access to my embryos, they gave them to someone else.”

Involuntarily Lake’s hand flew to her mouth.

“My God,” she said. “How-how did you find out?”

“I saw the baby with my own eyes.”

“At the clinic?” Lake asked.

“No. At a store on Madison Avenue. I’d been running errands and had gone into this little gourmet food store to grab a sandwich. They have a few tables in the back there where you can eat lunch. And then this woman- Melanie’s her name-came in with a toddler in a stroller. And the baby was the spitting image of Charlotte.”

Okay, Lake thought, so this is the nut-job part that Archer had mentioned.

Alexis smiled wickedly with her tiny pink lips.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” she said.

“No, it’s not that,” Lake said. “I’m just digesting what you said.”

At that, Alexis shot up and for a brief second Lake wondered if she was going to walk over to the couch and slap her. But she hurried out of the room, leaving Lake alone. When she returned a moment later, she was carrying a small piece of paper in her incongruously slim fingers. On her way back across the room, she picked up the silver- framed photograph of Charlotte.

“Here,” she said, thrusting both things toward Lake. Lake saw that the piece of paper was actually a slightly blurry photo of a toddler in a stroller, perhaps taken with a cell phone. The two toddlers looked almost identical.

“Are they…twins?” Lake asked, her voice catching.

“Interesting thought, isn’t it?” Alexis said, smirking. “But, no, you can’t produce identical twins with an IVF procedure. Brian and I look alike, though, and a sibling of Charlotte’s would look very much like her. Think of those Olson twins. They’re fraternal twins and yet people can barely tell them apart.”

“You took this photo of the child?”

“Yes. When I saw the baby, I changed tables to get closer and took some pictures when the woman was busy blabbing to someone on her cell phone.”

“Did you say something to her about it?”

“Good God, no,” Alexis said. “I may be crazed but I’m not stupid. If this woman had known what I’d just put together, she would have left skid marks on her way out the door.”

“How did you figure out her name, then?”

“She used a credit card to pay. After she left, I asked one of the clerks for her name-I said I thought I might have known her in college and wanted to double-check. I’m a regular there and the clerk didn’t think anything of it. I’m not sure what this woman was doing on the Upper East Side that day. She lives in Brooklyn. In that area they call Dumbo.”

She’d said the word disdainfully, as if it was synonymous with dung heap. But it was a hip, trendy part of Brooklyn-Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass-that Lake had visited several times with friends.

“How…?”

“How do I know where she lives?” Alexis asked, her voice edgy again. “She and her husband are listed… Oh wait, how do I know she’d been a patient at the Advanced Fertility Center? That was as easy to find out as her address. I called the girl at the front desk, pretending to be Melanie, saying I needed to review some of my dates for insurance reasons. She’d had two rounds of IVF, starting two months after I’d been told Brian wouldn’t release my embryos to me. I didn’t want the embryos destroyed, in case Brian changed his mind. But they knew I’d never be back. So they gave them to her.”

Lake let out a long breath. The story was horrific-and almost too crazy to believe.

“But why would Sherman have to resort to this?” Lake asked. “If this woman couldn’t conceive with her own eggs, why not use eggs from an actual donor? The clinic has even started its own donor program.”

“She probably didn’t want a donor,” Alexis said. “She looked like she was in her early forties and she was probably hoping she could still have her own child. And I’m sure Sherman encouraged her just like he did me. He and Levin like to tell women, ‘You will get pregnant,’ as if they’re the Baby Makers. When Sherman found her eggs were useless, he was stuck. So he just used my embryos-without ever telling her.”

Over the past few weeks Lake had read enough about in vitro fertilization to understand the challenges faced by patients over forty. As part of IVF, a woman underwent hormone therapy to encourage the ovaries to release multiple eggs. Those eggs were then collected and placed in a petri dish with sperm from the woman’s partner-or, for an additional fee, even injected with sperm to facilitate fertilization. But if the woman was close to forty, or older, like Melanie, the chances for successful fertilization were slim. By that point in a woman’s life, her eggs had not only declined rapidly in number but also in quality-in fact, by the time a woman was forty-three, only about ten percent of her eggs were viable. The older the woman, the poorer the chances of harvesting enough viable eggs to fertilize and transfer back to her body. That’s why some clinics didn’t even take women over forty.

“And you never signed any kind of permission allowing them to share your eggs?”

“Never.”

“Have you confronted Sherman about this?” Lake asked.