Prologue: One Vial

Dess

At seven in the morning, the waiting room of Lumen Family Cryobank looked like the lobby of a very expensive dentist who had decided to take up feng shui.

There was a wall of river stones with water sliding down it. There was a fiddle-leaf fig in a ceramic pot the size of a small bathtub, glossy and faintly smug. There were four armchairs the color of oatmeal, a low glass table, and a basket of magazines that nobody had touched since the invention of the smartphone: Parenting, Modern Fertility, Coastal Living, and, for reasons Dess could not begin to guess, a nine-month-old copy of Field & Stream. A white-noise machine hissed under the receptionist's desk with the determined cheer of a thing that has been told to make people feel better and is going to do it whether they like it or not.

Dess Rourke sat in the chair closest to the door with her purse on her knees and her hands folded over it, as though somebody might come along and try to take it.

She had gotten up at five. She had showered, dried her hair, put on the navy blouse that made her look like a competent person, and taken it off again because it also made her look like a person about to be audited. She had put on the green sweater instead. She had checked the bag she'd packed the night before (insurance card, photo ID, the folder with the consent forms, a banana she had no intention of eating) and then she had driven across the city in the gray light with the radio turned all the way down, because she had found that if she listened to the news she started to hear her mother's voice laid underneath it, narrating.

You're doing what, honey? By yourself?

Her phone buzzed against her thigh.

Joelle: you didn't eat the banana, did you

Dess: I'm eating it right now. It's delicious.

Joelle: I can see you from the parking lot. You're holding your purse like it owes you money.

Dess looked up. Through the plate-glass window, across a strip of damp asphalt and a row of sad little boxwoods, she could see the nose of Joelle's blue Subaru and a pale hand lifted over the dashboard in a fingers-crossed salute. Joelle had come straight off a twelve-hour night shift on the labor and delivery floor at St. Brendan's, and she was still in her scrubs, and she was going to sit in that car and wait for however long it took, because she had said, in the voice she used on residents and husbands and in one memorable instance a drunk man with a chicken, I'm not coming in because it's your thing, Dess, but I'm going to be right outside because it's also a little bit mine.

Dess typed with her thumbs.

Dess: Go home and sleep, you maniac.

Joelle: no

Joelle: also you can still back out. no shame. I'll drive. we'll get waffles.

Dess: I don't want to back out.

Joelle: I know. I'm just obligated to say it. it's in my contract as a best friend.

Joelle: you've got this. go be a mom.

Dess put the phone face down on her knee, and breathed in the smell of the place, which was something between eucalyptus and hospital soap, and told herself in her firm second-person voice, the one that had talked her through her first apartment lease and her father's non-appearance at her high school graduation and every one of the nine thousand early mornings at Narragansett Mutual: Odessa Rourke, you are a grown woman with a savings account and a plan. Sit up straight.

She sat up straight.

The fig plant did not react.

…

"Ms. Rourke?"

The woman who came out through the frosted-glass door was not the kind of person Dess had expected to run a place like this. She was in her late fifties, small and square, with a silver bob cut like a helmet, no makeup, a gray cardigan with a hole starting at one elbow, and a pair of reading glasses pushed up into her hair and apparently forgotten. She had a clipboard in one hand and a Styrofoam cup of coffee in the other, and the whole of her moved with a brisk, rumpled efficiency that suggested she had once been told to slow down and had not taken it personally.

"Dr. Teague," said Dess, rising.

"Rosalind. Please. Everybody in here calls me Rosalind except the plumber, who calls me ma'am, and the accountant, who calls me nothing at all, because he's afraid of me." She shook Dess's hand. Her grip was dry and surprisingly strong. "Come on back. I'm going to make you sit in my office for ten minutes and ask you the same questions I asked you on the phone, and then I'm going to hand you off to Philippa, who has the hands of an angel and the bedside manner of a pastry chef. You're going to like her. Do you want coffee? It's terrible."

"I'm all right."

"Wise. I'll drink yours too."

The office was at the end of a hallway lined with framed photographs: babies, mostly, hundreds of them, in knitted hats and sunsuits and little overalls, arranged in grids on the walls like postage stamps. Some were professional, with soft backgrounds; some were obviously taken at kitchen tables with a flash. Under every cluster a plaque gave a year. Dess caught herself reading them as she passed, and was embarrassed to find her eyes had gone hot.

Those are people, she thought. Those are the little people who used to be vials.

"They send them every Christmas," said Teague, without turning around. "I don't ask. It's a thing the families do. I used to think it was a little ghoulish, putting up photographs of other people's children. Now I think it's the only wall in the building that tells the truth." She pushed open a door at the end of the corridor. "Here we are. Sit wherever you like. Not that chair, the leg's loose. I keep meaning to have it fixed. I've been meaning to for six years."

The room was small and warm and cluttered, with a desk covered in files and a window facing a brick wall. A radiator knocked. On the sill, in a chipped mug, a spider plant trailed green fronds over the edge like a very patient waterfall. Dess took the chair by the bookshelf and put her purse on the floor between her feet.

Teague dropped into the chair behind the desk, set down her coffee, found her glasses in her hair with a grunt of surprise, and put them on. She turned a page on her clipboard and looked at Dess over the tops of the lenses.

"Odessa Rourke," she read. "Thirty. Single. Claims coordinator, Narragansett Mutual. No fertility diagnosis. No partner. No history of any of the things that make my insurers nervous. Second cycle. First cycle failed in August." She looked up. "That's an easy summary of a very hard summer. How are you?"

"I'm fine."

"Mm."

"I'm good, actually. I'm very good."

"Mm-hm."

"Why do you keep saying that?"

"Because 'fine' is what people say in this room when they've been awake since four and haven't decided whether they're allowed to cry. 'Good' is a thing they say when they have been told by somebody that they're meant to be positive." Teague took off her glasses and chewed one earpiece thoughtfully. "I'm not going to make you cry, Odessa. I'm a scientist. I leave that to the receptionist. But I've been doing this for twenty-three years, and I have a dreadful policy of asking, once, at the last possible moment, whether you're sure."

"I'm sure."

"All right."

"That's it?"

"That's the question. I ask it and then I listen. Most people don't answer it right away. They talk for a while about their mother, or their ex-boyfriend, or a promotion they didn't get." Teague gave a small shrug. "You said 'I'm sure' in under a second. I like that. It's very rare. Do you want to tell me why you're so certain, or would you rather I mind my own business?"

Dess had been prepared for the questions. She'd read the intake forms twice and looked up the statistics and made a spreadsheet, because she did not trust any decision she could not put in a spreadsheet. She had a speech. It was a good speech, balanced and mature, with a clean three-point structure. I have the financial stability. I have a strong support system. I've considered the emotional and practical challenges, and I'm making the decision from a place of readiness.

What came out of her mouth, instead, was: "I'm more certain about this than I've ever been about anyone I've dated."

Teague laughed.

It was a short bark, utterly unexpected, and it transformed her whole face, taking about fifteen years off it. "Oh, I like you," she said. "Say that again. I'm going to put it on a pillow."

"I don't mean it as a joke."

"I know you don't. That's why it's funny." Teague wiped one eye with the heel of her hand. "I'm sorry. It's early. Go on."

"I mean—" Dess ran a hand through her hair, and was relieved to find that her fingers were steady. "I'm thirty. I've dated a nice man who wanted me to quit my job to move with him to Charlotte. I've dated a not-so-nice man who wanted me to quit my job to pay his rent in Charlotte. I have friends who got married at twenty-six and are divorced at thirty and can't stop apologizing about it, as though it were their fault the whole system's rigged. I have a job I'm good at and a one-bedroom with a view of a parking garage and enough money to feed a small person for at least the first two years, provided they're not picky. I don't need a man to do any of the things I want. I know exactly what I want. I want a kid. Not a husband, not a wedding, not a fight about the dishwasher. A kid."

"Fair."

"My mother says that's selfish."

"Does she?"

"She says a child needs a father. She's had three and I'm here to tell you it isn't a guarantee." Dess pressed her lips together, and then, because Teague only waited, continued: "She loves me. She does. She loves me a lot. And she has never once in her life been able to be in a room with a man and a decision at the same time. She thinks you can't be a person without one. I'd like my kid to grow up knowing that you can."

For a moment the radiator was the loudest thing in the room.

"Thank you," said Teague, and meant it.

She made a small tick on the clipboard.

"Now," she said, in a different voice, crisp and brisk and bureaucratic. "The housekeeping. I'm required by the Rhode Island Department of Health, and by my own conscience, to remind you of a few things, so please indulge me. The donor you've selected has relinquished all parental rights and responsibilities in accordance with the state's assisted reproduction statute. You, as the recipient, are the sole legal parent. Nobody can come to you at your door in ten years and ask for a kidney or a Christmas card. The donor does not know your name. You do not know his. I am the only person in the building who has the key to both files, and I have never lost it, and I intend to die with it around my neck."

"That's reassuring."

"It's meant to be." A flicker of a smile. "Is there anything you want to ask me about your donor's profile? I know you've read it. I know you've read it, because I can always tell. People who read the profile once have a look. People who read it seven times have a different look."

Dess flushed. "I read it six."

"Six is adequate."

"It's just—" She picked at a thread on her sleeve. "I know there's not much. I know that's the point. But when I was choosing, I had it narrowed down to three. They all had the right numbers. Healthy. Tall enough. No family history of anything that sounds like a medical drama. But the other two, I couldn't hear them. Does that make sense? Their answers sounded like they were written by a committee. This one—"

"Four-four-one-seven."

"Four-four-one-seven. He sounded like a person."

Teague didn't say anything. She picked up her coffee, looked at it, put it down again.

"Would you read me the line?" she said, finally. "The one that made you pick him. I'm curious. I haven't looked at his questionnaire in a while."

Dess knew it by heart. She had known it by heart for three weeks, in the way that you know a song you hate because it's stuck in your head.

What would you want a child of yours to know?

She closed her eyes and said it softly.

"'That a wooden boat is just a tree that learned to float. And that it is always, always okay to be late for dinner if the water's good.'"

There was a silence.

When she opened her eyes, Dr. Teague was looking at the spider plant. Her face had gone very still, and for a moment she seemed to be somewhere else entirely, a long way off, standing on a very different shore.

"He was a lovely boy," she said.

"You remember him?"

"I remember them all, a little. It's a vice." Teague turned back to her with an effort. "I can't tell you anything, you understand. Not even that. I shouldn't have said it. Forget I did."

"I won't tell."

"I know you won't. That's why I said it." A small, crooked smile. "He's not here anymore, in the sense that his profile's been inactive for some years. You've got the last of him. Literally. The last vial in our inventory. Five went out into the world a long time ago, and nobody came back for a sixth. I was starting to think he'd go on the shelf for good."

Dess stared at her.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry, what?"

"The last vial." Teague seemed to hear herself. She flushed to the roots of the silver bob. "I'm so sorry. Of course. You'd have assumed there were more. I shouldn't have said that so lightly. Does it—is it a problem? You'd selected him for a fresh cycle, and I would have told you at the time, but the system—" She clicked her tongue. "Philippa should have flagged it on the intake. I'll have a word."

"It's not a problem."

"If you want, we can pause, and I can show you some other profiles—"

"Dr. Teague. Rosalind. It's not a problem." Dess found, to her surprise, that she was smiling. It started somewhere under her ribs and spread upward until she could feel it in her cheeks, a little wobbly and not entirely under her command. "I didn't plan on a second child. I'm thirty. I'm barely managing the first. I'm going to be so busy being tired I won't have time to want a sibling." She wiped the heel of her hand under her eye. "And honestly? It's kind of nice. That it's the last one. That it means something."

Teague looked at her for a long time.

"You're a rare bird, Odessa," she said.

"I get that a lot."

"I'll bet you do." Teague stood, collected her clipboard, tucked her pen behind her ear, and held out a hand to help Dess out of the chair, as though the girl were a great deal older and more fragile than she seemed. "Come on. Let's go and see Philippa. Don't let her talk you into the aromatherapy. It smells like a Christmas tree that has given up."

…

Philippa did not have the bedside manner of a pastry chef. She had the bedside manner of a retired ballet teacher: tall, spare, warm, with very fine posture, silver earrings, and a voice like a cello being played gently in the next room. She took Dess's blood pressure, asked her to confirm her date of birth, and explained the procedure in a low unhurried murmur, the way you'd talk a horse into a trailer.

It was shorter than Dess had expected.

She had braced for something clinical and mortifying. What she got was a darkened room with a paper-covered table, a warm blanket draped over her knees, and a small, quiet, practiced process that took, from first instruction to last, less than ten minutes. There were no stirrups, to her great relief; she'd had enough of stirrups to last her several lifetimes. There was only Philippa's low voice, and the whir of a machine somewhere, and the faint scent of lavender from a diffuser that Dess decided, on balance, to forgive.

"Count backward from ten for me, dear," said Philippa. "Not for anesthesia. It's a trick. It gives the mind something to do."

"Ten," said Dess. "Nine."

She counted down. She watched the ceiling, a plain white acoustic tile with a faint brown stain in the shape of Florida, and thought about the first time she'd ever seen the ocean.

She'd been six. Her mother had borrowed a car. They'd driven all the way to Narragansett Beach from Fall River with the windows down and Fleetwood Mac up so loud the speakers had buzzed. Colleen had been wearing a yellow sundress and a pair of cheap sunglasses, and she had been laughing about something, and she'd lifted Dess out of the passenger seat and spun her around in the sand until the horizon went over like a saucer and they both fell down. Colleen had lain on her back with her arms flung out and her hair full of sand and said, Look at that, baby. Look. It just goes and goes.

That was the summer of Mike.

Mike had a boat. Mike had a boat, and a house in Jamestown, and a dog named Skipper. They'd lived in Jamestown for seven months. In March, Mike had put two suitcases on the porch and said, with great embarrassment, that it just wasn't working, and Colleen had stood in the doorway in her slippers with one hand over her mouth, and Dess, aged seven, had gone upstairs and packed the other suitcase herself, because by then she'd learned that if you let her mother do it, it took all night.

Eight. Seven.

After Mike had been Gary, in Warwick; Gary had been in finance, and had hated children, and had been polite about it until the day he wasn't. After Gary had been a long, bad year in an apartment over a dry cleaner's, when Dess had been eleven and learned to cook rice. After that, Ray. Ray was still around. Ray had a truck, and a laugh like a slow leak, and a habit of saying Colleen, honey, we'll sort it out, which Colleen heard as a promise and Dess heard as a weather report.

Six. Five.

She'd never blamed her mother.

That was the part nobody understood. They thought, when she tried to explain it, that she must be furious, that she must be punishing Colleen by choosing to do it alone. But it wasn't that. It had never been that. Colleen had loved every one of those men with the same clean, total, undefended love she'd given her daughter, and she'd been left every time with her whole self wide open, bleeding quietly onto the carpet, while somebody else decided what came next. Dess had spent twenty years watching the person she loved most in the world hand a stranger the keys to her entire life, over and over, and say thank you when they handed them back dented.

I'll keep the keys, she'd decided at eleven. Whatever else happens. I'll keep my own keys.

Four. Three.

The machine hummed.

"There," said Philippa, softly. "That's the hard part done. You'll lie here for fifteen minutes, dear. Take your time. Do you want the light on or off?"

"Off," said Dess.

It went off.

In the dark, with the blanket over her knees and a faint blue glow from the monitor in the corner, she lay quite still and put one hand flat against her stomach, below the navel, where nothing was yet. She hadn't planned to do it. It was just that her hand had gone there on its own, the way a hand goes to a hot stove to check whether it's still hot, and she let it stay.

Okay, she thought. Okay. Hello. If you're in there. I'm Dess.

I'm going to be a mess. I want that on the record. I'm going to forget your shoes and burn the grilled cheese and mispronounce half of the words in every book. I'm going to cry at the pediatrician's. But I'm going to be here. Every day. Whatever else. I don't have a lot of rules, but that's one of them. I'm going to be here, and I'm going to be yours, and nobody's going to take that apart.

Two. One.

She lay there for a long time.

…

When she came out into the hall, the sun had come up properly.

It was a thin September sun, pale and slanting, and it fell through the glass front of the building onto the oatmeal chairs and the river-stone wall in long gold bars. The fiddle-leaf fig had caught the light on every leaf. The white-noise machine hissed on. A man with a briefcase was talking to the receptionist about parking. Everything was smaller and plainer and more ordinary than she had imagined. This was the place where her entire life had just changed, and there was a dispenser of hand sanitizer by the door and somebody had left a coffee cup on the radiator.

She found, to her mild surprise, that she was not crying.

She was not shaking, either. She felt light, and a little strange, and extraordinarily hungry. She stopped at the desk and signed three forms in her round, careful hand, and the receptionist, a gentle young man called Wade, with a lanyard and a sniffly cold, handed her a copy of everything in a manila folder and said, with a kind of exhausted sincerity, "Good luck, Ms. Rourke. I hope it works."

"Thank you, Wade."

"Hang in there. It's a long two weeks."

"I've been told."

"My sister did it three times," said Wade. "Third time was the charm. She named him after the nurse." He sniffed. "I mean, not after—you know what I mean."

"I know what you mean."

"Okay. Well. Good luck."

"You said that."

"I did. I'm going to keep saying it." He gave her a tired, hopeful, slightly desperate grin. She thought, poor kid, he looks like he hasn't slept in a week, and then, as she turned away, she forgot about him completely.

Joelle was out of the car before Dess had reached the pavement.

She crossed the lot in her scrubs and clogs at something close to a run, with her hands flapping and her braids bouncing against her shoulders and an expression of such total ferocious joy that a passing jogger actually swerved. She flung both arms around Dess in the middle of the sidewalk, squeezed until Dess's ribs creaked, and then leaned back, held her at arm's length, and inspected her from head to foot with a critical eye.

"Well?" she demanded.

"Well what?"

"Did it go okay? Did they do the thing? Was it weird? Was Philippa nice? Did you eat the banana?"

"It was fine. I mean, good. It was—" Dess started to laugh. It came up out of her in a rush, helpless and breathless, the first full laugh she had let out all morning. "Joelle. It was so anticlimactic. I don't know what I thought. Fireworks. A choir. It's like going for a flu shot with better lighting."

"Oh, honey."

"They have a fig plant. It's the size of a Buick."

"That sounds about right." Joelle pulled her in again, tighter. "I'm proud of you. I mean it. I've never been so proud of anybody who wasn't related to me. You are the bravest person I've ever met, and I say that as someone who's watched a woman deliver a baby in a Honda Civic."

"You're crying."

"I'm tired. This is a tired face."

"It's a very wet tired face."

"Shut up. Come on. I'm buying you waffles."

"I thought we weren't getting waffles. I thought that was the backout plan."

"The backout plan was waffles. The celebration plan is waffles with ice cream. Different category." Joelle slung an arm around her shoulders and steered her across the lot toward the blue Subaru. "Get in. We're going to the place on Wickenden with the good syrup. You're going to eat like a pregnant woman, which you might be, and I'm going to tell you all the horrible things that happen to your body, so you're fully informed."

"I don't want to be fully informed."

"Too bad. I love you."

"I love you too."

"You're going to be an amazing mother."

Dess got into the car. She put her seatbelt on, and set the manila folder carefully on her lap, and looked back at the glass front of the building where the morning sun lay in bars across the pavement. Through the doors, she could see the empty armchairs and the glossy fig, and at the very back, framed in a doorway, the small square silhouette of Dr. Teague with her coffee cup in her hand, watching them go.

Teague lifted the cup, a few inches, in a kind of toast.

Dess raised a hand.

"What was that?" said Joelle, starting the engine.

"Nothing. She told me something. At the end." Dess watched the building slide away in the side mirror. "She said I got the last one. The last vial of him. There weren't any more."

"Huh."

"I know. It's a weird thing to say."

"Is that, like, a bad thing? Does that matter?"

"No." Dess thought about it honestly, the way she thought about everything, turning it over to look at the underside. "No, I don't think so. It's just a technical detail. It means he's done. It means somebody's got to be the last, and it's me." She settled back against the seat. "It's kind of nice. If you think about it. That it's not a number. It's a person."

Joelle glanced at her sideways.

"You did eat the banana," she said.

"I did not."

"There's a peel in your bag. I can see it."

"I was hungry!"

"Liar."

They were both laughing as the Subaru pulled out of the lot and turned onto Weybosset Street, into the bright, ordinary, rattling traffic of a Monday morning, and neither of them looked back at the low brick building behind them, or at the window on the second floor, where a pale hand had just lifted the blind.

Neither of them knew that somewhere, on a hill above the sea in Newport, in a house full of clocks, a man in a dark suit was standing at a window. That he was looking out at the water. That his younger brother was at that very moment fifty feet away in the boathouse, whistling, with a plane in his hand and wood shavings on his shoulders and the whole bright length of a life ahead of him, as if time were something you could simply go and have.

Neither of them knew that the last of Donor 4417 was not a technical detail.

It was the beginning of everything.