What the Clinic Called About
She reached inside her coat and produced a letter.
It was folded, clinic stationery, the kind with the institutional logo at the top that I recognized because I had received twenty years of correspondence from Meridian Reproductive Medicine on exactly that paper.
She held it out to me.
I looked at Grace. Then I looked at the letter. Then I looked at the woman on my doorstep with her red eyes.
“I’m Susan,” she said. “Susan Rowe.”
I did not know a Susan Rowe.
“Please,” she said. “Can I come inside? I know this is strange. I know I’m a stranger. But the clinic called me and I’ve been—” She stopped. “I’ve been up all night.”
I had been up all night too.
I had been up all night for three days, the specific sleeplessness of a new parent that is different from every other kind of sleeplessness because it is both exhausting and the best thing that has ever happened to you.
I held the door open.
She came in.
She did not look at the house. She looked at Grace.
I sat on the sofa with Grace in my arms and she sat in the chair across from me, and for a moment we both just sat in the way of people who are preparing for something difficult.
“Tell me,” I said.
“I used the same clinic,” she said. “I did my egg retrieval ten years ago. I was thirty two. I had a marriage falling apart and I wasn’t ready to be a mother and I thought I would use them someday.” She looked at her hands. “I called the clinic last year when I was finally ready. They told me my eggs were unviable. That they hadn’t survived storage properly.”
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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