Dad looks down at his hands, looks back at me and Kayla.
“Avery, you are absolutely my daughter and your mother’s daughter,” he says. “We never lied about that. You have her genes and mine. Period. That birth certificate is wrong. A nurse in the hospital filled out the original paperwork wrong, but we thought we’d cleared up the confusion. The birth certificate we have for you back home has the right parents’ names on it—Celeste Sterling and David Armisted. But it sounds like the state of California kept some electronic version of that original, incorrect birth certificate, and that’s what they sent by mistake.”
“So it was just random that my mom’s name is on that birth certificate,” Kayla squeaks. And there’s something weird in her tone, almost as if she expects Dad to lie to her. Or as if she’s picking holes in his story.
“No.” Dad winces. “It wasn’t random.” He shifts his gaze back to me. “Genetically, Avery, you belong one hundred percent to your mother and me. Legally, you belong one hundred percent to us. But . . . has your mother ever told you how much trouble she had getting and staying pregnant?”
It takes a moment to realize he expects an answer.
“No,” I whisper.
Mom would never talk to me about anything like that. She would never talk about anything she failed at.
Dad presses his lips together like he’s not surprised.
“We tried for six years to have a baby,” he says. “That was an awful time. We both wanted a baby so badly. We wanted you. You have to know that, to understand . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, how much you love me,” I burst out. I didn’t know about the six years of trying for a baby, but it almost feels like I did. I’m an only child; everyone expects only children to have overprotective parents. But Mom carried that to extremes. She used to treat me like I was made of glass. Like I was some fragile ornament to be kept on a shelf.
When did that stop?
“Of course we love you,” Dad says, and I see that that wasn’t what he’d planned to say next. He seems to be visibly shifting gears. “For many, many, many reasons. But back before you were born . . . we came to believe that your mother and I could never have a child together. She would never be able to give birth. Doctors told us that.”
“Well, obviously that was wrong,” I say. I’d been hugging my arms, holding myself together. But now I wave my hands in the air, waving away the silly opinions of those stupid doctors. I try to make myself forget that mistaken birth certificate. “Because here I am. Obviously, Mom gave birth to me.”
“No,” Dad says. His gaze is so steady on my face, I have to look away. I hope that will make him stop talking, but it doesn’t.
“No,” he repeats. “Your mother never was able to give birth. After six years, we hired a surrogate mother. So you are genetically ours. But . . . Kayla’s mom was the one who gave birth to you.”
Kayla, Too Stunned to Speak
Surrogate mother.
I don’t even know what that means.
Even when Avery’s dad adds the explanation, Kayla’s mom was the one who gave birth to you, my brain is still flailing about. How could Avery have her mother and father’s genes but come out of my mother’s body?
“So, I was, like, a test tube baby?” Avery wails. “Put in a stranger’s body?”
My mother is not a stranger! I want to yell at her. You know her! She gives you Christmas presents every year!
But it’s like I don’t even have a voice anymore. Nothing comes out.
And now my own thoughts haunt me: She gives you Christmas presents. . . .
It’s something I never questioned. Avery Armisted was just on Mom’s Christmas list every year. And Avery’s family kept giving us gifts too, even though they became less personal, like gift cards and fruit baskets. Why didn’t I think that was weird, when it was Avery’s nanny that Mom had been friends with, and we never saw Angelica again after she stopped taking care of Avery?
Was Mom actually ever friends with Angelica, or was that just an excuse for why we kept going to visit Avery? When Avery was really Mom’s . . . Mom’s . . .
I can’t come up with the right word to describe Avery’s relationship to Mom.
It’s not “daughter.” It can’t be.
“We made sure Kayla’s mom was someone we could trust—and that she could trust us—before we signed any paperwork,” Avery’s dad is saying. “It was an immensely generous gift she gave us, allowing us to have you, to have a family.”
“But if she was a surrogate mother . . . you paid her, right?” Avery asks. “So was it really a gift? Or a business transaction? It’s like you bought me!”
I flush, as if Avery is insulting me. Even staring at Avery’s birth certificate, I never really believed that Mom could have had an affair with Mr. Armisted. Not my mom. But it still feels like Avery thinks Mom did something dirty and disgusting. And I’m dirty and disgusting too, because I’m her daughter.
Her real daughter.
But Mom’s a saint, I think, automatically. Everyone knows I’m the daughter of a saint. A saint and a hero.
It’s like I can’t wrap my brain around anything Avery and her dad are saying. I think about the talk Mom gave me back in sixth grade when I had my first period, the talk that was a mix of You’re a woman now and it’s amazing what your body can do and You’re a woman now, and that means you can get pregnant. But it’s not good to get pregnant until after you’re married and you and your husband know you’re ready to have a baby.
There was nothing in that talk about having a baby for some other family.
For strangers. On purpose.
Who does that?
Cows, I think. Sheep. Pigs. Livestock.
It’s Grandpa’s fault I think of that. Sometimes, when he gets talking about his old days of farming, he forgets who he’s talking to. How many times have I heard him tell the story of how, right toward the end of his years as a farmer, one of his neighbors talked him into trying “that newfangled artificial insemination” on his small herd of cows?
To hear Grandpa tell it, it didn’t work very well.
But to the Armisteds, my mom was just like a cow. Good only for getting pregnant.
My face flames.
I’ve missed some of what Avery and Mr. Armisted are saying. They’re still sitting across from each other, but it’s like they’re moving in opposite directions: Mr. Armisted’s voice keeps getting softer and softer, calmer and calmer; Avery’s keeps getting louder and angrier.
“So you’re trying to make me believe I’m lucky to have one dad but two moms who made me? That is so weird, Dad,” she practically screeches. “This whole thing is just bizarre. And you’ve been lying to me about it my whole life?”
“We never lied,” Mr. Armisted says. He’s gripping the arm of his chair so tightly his knuckles are white. So maybe he’s having a hard time staying calm too. Or thinking. “We just didn’t . . . tell you every single detail about your birth. Your mother felt . . . I mean, we both agreed that not telling you was for the best. It seemed . . . logical. We were just in California for those few years, and then when we moved back to Ohio, you were so little, and nobody there knew, so . . .” He shoots me a quick glance. “I mean, nobody in Deskins knew . . .”
Of course Mom knew, I think. And she moved back to Ohio, too. But she wouldn’t tell either, because, because . . .
I can’t follow that thought.
“Anyhow,” Mr. Armisted says, focusing on Avery again, “do you think any kid knows every detail about his or her birth?”
“This is a pretty big detail not to tell me!” Avery fumes. She whips one hand toward me, pointing my way, and for an instant I actually think that she might yell that this is all really awful and bizarre for me, too.
But there’s no sympathy in the gesture. It’s more like she’s accusing me of some crime too.
“And then you had to go and make me bring Kayla on this trip?” she snarls. Her face goes a little white. She looks like
she might throw up. “Oh, no. Oh, no. Were you trying to make us feel like sisters? Are we sisters? Is Kayla Butts my sister?”
She makes it sound like this would be the worst part of finding out what her parents and my mother did. Worse than her mother not giving birth to her. Worse than my mother being paid. Worse than anyone lying to her.
She makes it sound like being my sister would be the worst thing in the world.
I can’t think. I don’t plan anything, but I find myself shoving back against the couch, shoving myself to my feet.
“I don’t want to be your sister either!” I scream at Avery.
“Kayla—” Mr. Armisted begins in that maddeningly calm, patient voice.
I can’t stand another minute of this. I fling myself toward the door. I can feel the pathetic awkwardness of my running—my fat belly swaying, my feet half tripping over the corner of the rug. I can feel Avery staring at me in disgust. But then I reach the door. I yank it open, dash through, and slam it behind me.
And then I am running down the stairs.
Avery, Jealous
Dad jumps up and runs after Kayla. He reaches the door just as she slams it in his face.
It takes him two tries to grasp the doorknob—his hands are shaking that bad. He whips the door open and steps out on the landing.
“Kayla?” he calls, leaning out over the railing.
Kayla is nowhere in sight. I can’t tell if I’m hearing the clattering of her feet on the stairs or just the creaky banging of the air-conditioning.
Dad gulps in air like he’s just run two miles. He whirls back toward me.
“You’ll have to go after her,” he says. “You’re faster.”
“What if I decide to run away too?” I snarl back at him.
He sags against the door and starts to pull it closed, as if now he’s decided he needs to trap me here.
“I have to keep both of you safe,” he huffs. “I promised both of your mothers—”
“You promised both our moms Madrid is a very safe city,” I remind him. “Kayla will be fine.”
I sound callous. I am callous. How can I care about Kayla when my whole world just turned upside down—and she’s part of that?
If my parents have been lying about this my whole life, what else have they lied about?
Dad glances back and forth between me and the half-closed door. He looks caught.
“I’ll call her,” he says. “I’ll let her know we understand that she needs a little time to herself, but I’m here for her any time she wants to call back. . . .”
He sounds like a Hallmark card. Numbly, I watch him pull out his phone.
From down the apartment hallway—from Kayla’s room—I hear the ascending and descending chords that Kayla, for some stupid reason, chose as her ringtone on the stupid burner phone Dad gave her.
“She didn’t take her phone,” I tell Dad, as if he can’t figure that out for himself.
Dad yanks the door back open and starts rushing down the stairs.
“Dad, you’re going to fall and break something, running like that,” I say. But I don’t say it very loudly. Do I think Dad deserves to fall and break something? Does he deserve to be punished?
I go out onto the landing and look down the dizzying spiral of the staircase. I see his hand on the railing one flight below. Two flights below. Three. Even from up here, I can hear his raspy panting, his breathing becoming more and more like gasping for air. I hear the click and thud that must mean he’s flung open the door out to the street.
And then—nothing. No click or bang of the door closing again, no footsteps of him coming back up the stairs to me. Has Dad left me behind to go in search of Kayla or not?
I start tiptoeing down the tricky stairs myself. I’m in slippery-soled TOMS again, and the steps seem slicker than ever; the worn-down grooves in the middle seem especially deceptive and diabolical. They’re optical illusions: The spots that look most inviting are actually the most dangerous.
My whole life is an illusion, I think. Ever since I was born. The most basic fact I thought I knew—who are my mommy and daddy?—that was always wrong.
I keep creeping down the tricky, twisty stairs. I keep listening for Dad.
Nothing. Unless—did he just whimper, “No . . .”?
Dad wouldn’t whimper. And he’s so far below me I can’t be sure he said anything. My ears aren’t working right. I’m probably just hearing the echo of my own footsteps.
Finally, I reach the last curve, the first moment when I can see the front door.
Dad is still standing in the open doorway, right on the threshold. It’s like he’s torn between running after Kayla and guarding me. He’s got one arm bent and pressed against the door, his forehead pressed against that arm, his phone clutched in his other hand, tight against his ear. While I watch, his hand and the phone slide down, down, down. . . . Did someone just call him? I don’t think even he would answer a work call right now. So was it Mom? Or Kayla?
Kayla doesn’t have her phone, I remind myself, as if my brain can’t hold on to even basic facts right now.
Dad’s shoulders tremble. They heave up and down.
He might be sobbing.
“There’s something else you’re not telling me,” I say, because it feels like this has to be true. It feels like Dad—my strong, capable, fix-everything Dad—would not sob over a secret he’s known for fourteen years. “Something about Kayla?”
Dad keeps his face pressed against his arm and the door, but he shakes his head.
“You can’t—,” he begins, but I’m not interested in can’ts.
“Then it’s . . . something about the credit card being denied, back at the Columbus airport,” I say. “Or maybe something about Mom getting so upset when we left home . . . Did she just call you back? What’s she got to say about lying to me all these years?”
Then Dad turns his face to me. His eyes are red and watery; tears stream down his cheeks. But it’s like he doesn’t even know they’re there.
I have never seen my father cry before.
“We’re getting divorced,” he says. “Your mother and I are getting divorced.”
Kayla, Seeking Comfort Where There Is None
I’m lost.
I’ve been running blindly for what feels like an eternity—turning corners at random, finding something new on every block that I have to get away from: Happy tourists. Ice cream shops. Stores labeled in Spanish.
I run away from all of it.
And now I am out of air and I stumble to a stop, but I don’t have the slightest idea where I am. There is not a single thing around me that looks familiar, a single indication that I have ever stood on this street before. Spain feels more foreign than ever, more incomprehensible. I can’t understand a single word I hear or see around me. People’s faces leer up toward me and pass by me, and they’re all distorted, unreal. It’s like when I was five and Grandpa took me into the fun house at the county fair, and it wasn’t fun at all. It was just scary, everything reflected back at me the wrong shape and the wrong size. I couldn’t recognize my own face in those fun-house mirrors. I couldn’t recognize my own grandfather.
I can’t recognize my own family now.
Do Grandma and Grandpa know what Mom did? I wonder. Were they keeping secrets too? Were they too ashamed to talk about it?
I think about how Grandma and Grandpa’s faces light up whenever someone says to them, Oh, I just admire your daughter so much! She’s so steadfast. The way she dealt with her husband’s accident, the way she works with those old people at the nursing home, the way she raised her little girl on her own. . . . Oh, there you are, Kayla. Aren’t you proud of your mommy?
I think about how Grandma and Grandpa have always bragged about Mom to me, always urged me to see her as a role model. She’s so loyal and faithful and true—you’ll understand this better when you’re a grown woman, when you have a husband of your own. But not every woman would stand by her husband like your mom did with yo
ur dad, after an accident like his. . . .
Grandma and Grandpa can’t have ever known what Mom did for the Armisteds. They couldn’t know and talk about her that way. They’re old-fashioned; they don’t like newfangled things or ideas. When they thought they could never have children, they accepted it as God’s will. Until God surprised them with their very own miracle: Mom.
Did surrogate mothers even exist way back when Grandma and Grandpa were trying to have children? I wonder. If artificial insemination existed for farm animals, then . . .
It makes me squeamish to think about things like that in connection with my own grandparents, my own mother.
But I force myself to turn dates over in my head. I can barely even add and subtract right now, but eventually I manage to count back from the date on Avery’s birth certificate. Avery was born in October, fourteen and a half years ago. Nine months before that was January. So Avery was . . . conceived . . . right after the last Christmas Mom and Dad and I had together when Dad was healthy. I wasn’t even two yet, so I don’t remember it, but I’ve heard about that Christmas: We stayed in California, because Dad didn’t have much time off, and anyhow, Mom and Dad couldn’t afford airplane tickets or gas for a cross-country trip. Mom and I were supposed to go home to Ohio for Easter that year, after Dad was deployed, but his accident changed everything. Instead, it was Mom’s friend Sonia Lopez who flew with me to Grandma and Grandpa’s, while Mom stayed with Dad at the hospital.
Avery was born during the year of my family’s life when everything changed—a year I’ve heard about in excruciating detail for as long as I can remember.
How could Mom have been pregnant with Avery then? How could I have never heard about that detail?
I can put it all together. I can kind of see how it might have worked: between that January and the October when Avery was born, Grandma and Grandpa never saw Mom in person. I don’t think Skype existed then—and even if it did, Mom and Grandma and Grandpa wouldn’t have known how to use it. So they never would have seen Mom pregnant.
She must have been so ashamed, if she kept everything secret.