Part Seven: Dana
I got pregnant on the second try.
It was the happiest day of our lives. Mike cried in the parking lot of the clinic. He bought a tiny Kansas City Chiefs onesie on the way home. He started building a crib that same night in the garage.
When I was four months pregnant, the clinic invited me to a support group.
It met once a month in a conference room at the hospital. Women who’d conceived with donors. We’d sit in a circle and drink decaf coffee and talk about our fears. About telling our families. About what we’d tell our children someday.
That’s where I met Dana Callahan.
Dana was thirty-one, three years younger than me. She was a nurse in the ER at Saint Luke’s Hospital. She had curly red hair and a loud laugh and freckles across her nose.
She was single. She’d always wanted to be a mother. She’d gotten tired of waiting for the right man to show up.
“So I went shopping,” she said at our first meeting. “Picked a donor out of a catalog. Like ordering a sweater.”
The whole group laughed.
Dana and I became friends almost instantly.
We went to lunch after the meetings. We went shopping for maternity clothes together. She’d call me at eleven at night when she couldn’t sleep, and we’d talk about stretch marks and swollen ankles and whether we’d be good mothers.
We were due two weeks apart.
At our fifth meeting, the counselor asked everyone to share something about their donor.
Dana went first.
“Mine’s six-foot-two,” she said. “Dark brown hair. Gray-green eyes. Master’s in chemistry. Says he likes woodworking.”
She laughed.
“I figured if I couldn’t find a guy who could build me a bookshelf,” she said, “at least my kid might be able to.”
I sat there in my folding chair.
My heart stopped.
After the meeting, in the parking lot, I asked her.
“Dana,” I said. “What’s your donor number?”
She looked at me strangely.
“4127,” she said. “Why?”
We stood in that parking lot for a long time.
Two pregnant women. Holding each other’s hands. Crying and laughing at the same time.
“Our babies are going to be brothers,” Dana said. “Or sisters. Or one of each.”
“Half-siblings,” I said.
“Same thing,” Dana said.
Part Eight: The Decision
Luke was born on March 11.
Eight pounds, two ounces. Dark hair. Gray-green eyes.
Mike was the first person to hold him. He stood in the corner of the delivery room in his paper gown and his hairnet, holding our son against his chest, and he sobbed.
“Hi, buddy,” he whispered. “I’m your dad.”
Ben was born on March 24. Two weeks later.
Eight pounds, five ounces. Dark hair. Gray-green eyes.
Dana called me from the hospital. “He has your kid’s dimple,” she said. “Left cheek. I swear to God.”
Dana and I talked about it for months after the boys were born.
About whether to tell them. About when. About how.
The counselors at the support group said honesty was best. They said children should know their origins from an early age. They said secrets have a way of coming out eventually, and it’s always worse when they do.
But Mike was terrified.
“If we tell him,” Mike said one night, holding Luke in the rocking chair, “he’ll always know I’m not really his dad. He’ll look at me different. He’ll wonder about this other guy. This donor.”
He looked down at our sleeping son.
“I want to be his dad, Sarah,” he said. “Just his dad. Not his social father or his legal father or whatever the books call it. Just Dad.”
Dana had her own reasons.
“My mom’s Catholic,” she said. “Old-school Irish Catholic. She thinks Ben’s father was a guy I dated in nursing school who left me when I got pregnant. If she finds out I went to a sperm bank, she’ll never speak to me again.”
So we made a decision.
Together. The three of us. At Dana’s kitchen table, with two babies asleep in car seats on the floor.
We’d raise the boys as best friends. They’d grow up together. They’d know each other their whole lives. They’d be brothers in every way but the word.
And someday, when they were old enough, we’d tell them.
“When?” Dana asked.
“When they’re eighteen,” Mike said. “When they’re adults. When they can handle it.”
We all agreed.
The boys turned eighteen in March.
We didn’t tell them.
Part Nine: Graduation
“Ben’s mom gave him a DNA test for his birthday,” Luke said quietly. “In March. One of those ancestry kits. He’s always been curious about where his dad’s side came from. Because he never knew his dad.”
I closed my eyes.
Dana must have thought it would only show ancestry. Ireland. Germany. She must not have checked the box that hid the relatives list.
“The results came back in May,” Luke said. “Right before graduation. Ben opened them on his phone in the parking lot after a basketball banquet.”
He looked at the paper on the table.
“My name was at the top of the list,” he said. “Half-sibling.”
“Ben didn’t know I’d taken a test,” Luke said. “I hadn’t. But Grandma Whitman gave everybody in the family one for Christmas two years ago. Remember? She wanted to make a family tree.”
I remembered. Mike’s mother, Eileen. She’d handed out kits like party favors. I’d thrown mine in a drawer. I didn’t know Luke had done his.
“I sent mine in,” Luke said. “I never even looked at the results. I forgot about it.”
“Ben told me at graduation,” Luke said. “After the ceremony. Out by the football field, while everybody was taking pictures.”
He swallowed.
“He showed me on his phone,” he said. “And I laughed. I thought it was a mistake. Or a joke. I thought maybe the website mixed up the results because we’re always together.”
“But Ben wasn’t laughing,” Luke said.
He looked at me.
“He said, Luke, I asked my mom. She cried. She wouldn’t tell me anything. She just kept saying it wasn’t her secret to tell.”
“That’s when I knew,” Luke said. “Because Ben’s mom never cries. She works in the ER. She’s seen everything. She doesn’t cry.”
“So I came home,” Luke said. “And I looked at you and Dad at dinner that night. And you were laughing about something. Dad was telling that story about the client in Mission Hills with the six-foot dog.”
He shook his head.
“And I couldn’t say anything,” he said. “Because what if it was true? What if I asked, and it was true, and I ruined everything?”
