City of the Dead Page 13

  Then he just stalked off before Chastity could ask more.

  Dr. Petit shook her head. “Usually Eddie is very friendly.”

  “If Eddie is Faith’s friend,” Chastity said, “it’s doubtful he has a good opinion about me.”

  For a second, Dr. Petit just looked at her. Blinked. Probably fought a thousand questions. “Why don’t we go on back to my office where we’ll be comfortable?” she finally said.

  Dr. Petit led Chastity back toward the heavy oak door through which Eddie had disappeared. They stopped just before it, where a small elevator had been tucked into an alcove.

  “According to reports,” Chastity said, “my sister came here two weeks ago last Friday. But the receptionist didn’t recognize her when the police asked. Would you have been here on that day?”

  Just about to punch a button, Dr. Petit stopped. “I was. But I can promise I never got as far as the front desk. It’s a scheduled procedure day.”

  “Meaning?”

  Dr. Petit’s smile was patient. “We only perform procedures during a two-week period every month. The other two weeks we prepare the next clients and clean and check the surgical suites and laboratories. That Friday was dead center in the middle of the two-week procedure cycle. I never so much as saw my office, much less the front hall.”

  Chastity nodded. “I see.”

  “Would you like a tour?” Dr. Petit asked. “It might help you understand what Faith was involved with.”

  Chastity considered the offer, then nodded. “Yes. Thanks. We don’t get much call for fertility information where I work. If this was important to my sister, though, I need to know.”

  Dr. Petit turned toward the oak door. “Oh, it was. By the time Faith left us, the staff had taken to calling her Sister Mercy.”

  “So she was a regular?”

  Dr. Petit nodded again and ushered Chastity through the oak door into the more traditional medical environment beyond. Oh, there were carpets where staff manned desks and changing rooms that looked more like dens. But surgical tables were tucked behind glass partitions. Centrifuges and lab equipment took up one wall, and hospital doors had signs like Equipment Room and Laboratory.

  “Faith first came to us about three years ago,” Dr. Petit said. “A friend of hers couldn’t conceive. Had tried IVF—in vitro fertilization—without success. Her eggs simply weren’t viable material. Faith offered her own eggs, and her friend had a lovely set of twins. After that, Faith put herself on our registry for donors and she became very productive. We had ten successful pregnancies from her.”

  “Ten,” Chastity answered. “Isn’t that a lot?”

  “Yes. Usually a woman doesn’t donate more than four times or so. Our limit is twenty, to prevent commingling. But Faith really felt it was a mission and wanted to help as long as she could.”

  “And you felt she was healthy enough at her age to do it?”

  “Of course. She had a physical. A psychological interview…”

  “Really? How thorough?” Considering Faith’s background.

  “Well, it’s a phone interview,” Dr. Petit said. “But they’re very thorough.”

  Chastity stared. “Over the phone?”

  “It’s standard. And, of course, Faith had already proved that her eggs could produce a viable pregnancy That’s very desirable.”

  “Um, is that how you get most donors? Doing it for friends?”

  “Oh, no,” Dr. Petit said as she resumed the walk. “It’s just one way. Some women donate extra eggs after a successful IVF, or begin to donate for others. And we do a lot of advertising, much of it in college newspapers and magazines around the tri-state area. Our best candidates tend to be college students.”

  “Good heavens. Why?”

  Another smile as they stopped by the surgical suite. “They’re healthy and young. They’re interested in the money. Right now, a donated oocyte is worth about five thousand dollars, plus expenses, and takes only about two weeks out of a young woman’s schedule. Maybe ten doctor’s visits, one week of ultrasounds and blood tests to assess health and readiness. A couple of days completely out of commission. And you can do it safely every two months. That’s a pretty good return, don’t you think?”

  Chastity found herself staring. “Five thousand? That much?”

  And she’d blithely turned down all those offers from the other clinics she’d swung by.

  Dr. Petit smiled. “It’s a seller’s market, if you will. The demand is huge and rising. In fact, only recently, Louisiana became the last state to allow the auctioning of human eggs. Depending on the reliability of the donor, the physical and mental characteristics, a woman can name her own price. My heavens, if your sister were younger, she could have made a fortune. Not only is she beautiful, blond, and blue-eyed, but she scored thirty-three on her ACTs, had a perfect four-point-oh average in grad school, and was proficient in piano and tennis. Do you know how attractive that is?”

  Of course she did. Chastity had been compared to that standard her whole life. Well. The first sixteen years or so, anyway.

  “You don’t auction?” Chastity asked, trying to focus.

  “No,” Dr. Petit said. “We prefer not to go in that direction. We have a reputation for honesty, service, and accountability. A woman gets a partial refund of her fee if she doesn’t have a successful pregnancy. Women know they can rely on us. You can’t always say that about auctioned eggs.”

  Chastity shook her head, a bit stunned. “I’m totally unprepared for the future, aren’t I?”

  Dr. Petit smiled. “What did you score on your ACTs? I think you could do very well yourself.”

  Chastity laughed, not really surprised by the offer. “Sorry. Faith is the scholar in the family.”

  Faith also hadn’t been living on the streets when she’d taken her ACTs. Besides, the other talents Chastity could claim probably didn’t rate high on prospective parents’ wish lists. She couldn’t imagine anybody checking off the box that said Want my daughter to be able to tie a cherry stem into a knot -with her tongue.

  Dr. Petit shrugged. “You still have your sister’s beauty. It’s quite a draw.”

  “Thanks, but not today. I already have a pretty full plate.”

  Dr. Petit nodded, content, and scanned the corridor before her. “All right then. The tour. We here at Arlen are a full-service fertility clinic. IVF, sperm donation, to donation of both egg and sperm and implantation. We collect sperm in this room here….” Opening the door onto a comfortable little cubbyhole that contained a couch, sink, and stack of Playboy Magazine, she turned to Chastity and grinned. “We call it the Oval Office.

  “We harvest eggs over here in the procedure room”—the one with the surgical table and crash cart—“under minor sedation. Usually we can retrieve twenty to thirty mature eggs at a time. We never keep more than six. You see the window here into the laboratory next door? The eggs are passed through to Eddie and his staff, who thoroughly evaluate them for viability before performing the ICS1—intracytoplasmic sperm injection-—in which one sperm is immobilized microscopically and injected directly into the oocyte. Then, after letting the embryos mature for three days to the blastocyst stage to make sure they’re viable, Eddie loads two in a catheter, three if the patient is over thirty-two, and we do the implantation procedure, again here in the procedure room.”

  Without waiting for Chastity’s reaction, Dr. Petit stepped on down the hall, punched the security code in the lab door, and pushed it open.

  “Please don’t go in,” she said. “But here you can see the electron microscopes, the incubators, and the liquid nitrogen tanks in which we store the sperm and cryopreserved embryos.”

  Chastity looked. She’d seen labs before, even though this one was a marvel of efficiency in a small, tidy space. She’d seen incubators. She hadn’t, however, seen where frozen babies lived.

  She wasn’t sure what she’d expected. Wall units, maybe, like in the morgue. Something big and unmistakable and important-looking.
Something worth the contents.

  Instead, crouched beneath the lab counters, like big discarded soda cans, sat two squat metal canisters that looked like nothing so much as R2D2.

  “You’re kidding,” Chastity said. “That’s it?”

  Dr. Petit smiled. “They’re safe. So safe that once we verify viability and cryopreserve them, embryos have an eighty-five to ninety percent survival rate, once thawed. The rate of successful pregnancies is nearly the same as unfrozen.”

  “That being?”

  “Here? All told, we have a sixty percent success rate.”

  “Both tanks are babies?”

  “No. One is for sperm only.”

  “How many IVFs do you do a month?”

  “Right now about twenty. The demand is growing, though.”

  Chastity took a last look around the lab. “Don’t you worry about getting stuff mixed up?”

  Dr. Petit smiled. “Every minute. That’s why our procedures are so strict. Why we spend so much time preparing and organizing between schedules. We are very, very careful.”

  Chastity nodded slowly, her focus still on those unprepossessing little canisters. Suddenly she could understand how the guy out front could object. It seemed almost disdainful to put tiny humans in those cans, like sardines or tuna. She wanted to object herself, and she had no real problem with IVF.

  “How long do you keep them?”

  “We can keep them up to six to eight years. But, as I said, only six per client. And only if we’re sure they’re viable.”

  “But then you do destroy some.”

  “If the client wishes.”

  Chastity nodded. “And Faith had ten of the little devils.”

  Did she have more still here? Chastity wondered. Tiny fertilized babies left dreaming in the cold? Did it bother Faith to think of them there, waiting for nothing? To think that she’d made babies she’d never get to hold or nurse or dress?

  It would have bothered the hell out of Chastity.

  But then, it was something Chastity would never have to worry about. Another legacy from her formative years. Which was why, she realized suddenly, she was so jealous of her sister. Once again.

  Story of her life.

  “And Faith retired from the baby business because she’d reached the maximum age?” Chastity asked, her focus still on those cold white containers.

  “Well,” Dr. Petit demurred, “no. Come on to my office and we’ll talk about it.”

  That got Chastity’s attention. Dr. Petit closed the door and led Chastity back down the hall, past where Eddie was busy playing with his centrifuge, past the nurses in their lab coats and slacks, past the Oval Office, to the oak door.

  “Then why did she stop donating?” Chastity asked when she finally sat in a comfortable mauve armchair across from Dr. Petit’s desk.

  Chastity would have recognized the room anywhere as a GYN’s office. More Mary Cassatt and a three-dimensional model of the female reproductive system on the bookcase. One of Chastity’s instructors had called it the Moosehead. Perched up there like it was, it looked as if Dr. Petit had bagged it instead of studied it.

  Dr. Petit fiddled with the Cross pen in front of her. “As you can imagine, we have to give hormones to our clients, not only to stimulate the production of eggs, but to coordinate our donors’ and recipients’ cycles. This can, of course, cause symptoms not unlike PMS. But at Arlen we’ve never had anyone really react badly.

  “On rare occasions, though, the donor can develop ovarian cysts, or OHSS—ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome. It can produce a range of symptoms from exaggerated PMS to kidney damage. We monitor that kind of thing extremely closely. It was what Eddie was doing today. Testing hormone levels in our donors and recipients, not only to know when each is ready, but to screen for problems.”

  “And there were problems with Faith.”

  Dr. Petit shook her head, her attention again on her pen. “I’m not even convinced it was the hormones. Usually if we have problems with a client, it’s some outside stressor. Money, family, that kind of thing. And I knew her mother was very ill. But in the last few months here, Faith grew increasingly anxious. Her emotions became friable and her health seemed to suffer. Although we couldn’t find any diagnosable variation of hormone levels, and her donation was a success, we had to make a unilateral decision to stop. For her own good.” Another head shake, another frown. “That last month, she seemed frightened. Suspicious. It simply wasn’t like her.”

  Something else Max hadn’t mentioned. Had he even noticed? Or had Faith only betrayed her disintegration to these women?

  “Not that she wasn’t still our Sister Mercy,” Dr. Petit amended anxiously. “She was. It was why we were so worried about what happened to her. No one that kind should suffer.”

  “How did she react?” Chastity asked. “When you told her.”

  Dr. Petit sighed. “She tore my office apart.”

  Faith? Faith had done that? Chastity had never so much as heard her sister raise her voice.

  “Did she say anything to you that might have explained why she was so upset?”

  Dr. Petit turned back, already shaking her head. “We all tried our best to understand. We had several meetings on it. She just said she couldn’t stop, that we were being cruel to her.”

  “Did you talk to her husband?”

  “Yes. He believed it was the death of her mother that made her so fragile. We felt he was probably right. It was a terribly traumatic time in her life.”

  “So until those last few months, Faith didn’t seem to have any problems.”

  “No. I told you. And, as I said, we had quite a bit of background on her. The screening was extensive.”

  “Not extensive enough, evidently.”

  “Ms. Byrnes…”

  Chastity gave a quiet smile. No confrontation here. But the clinic hadn’t done enough to screen Faith, and they had to know it. “Dr. Petit, how old do you think my sister is?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Her age.”

  “Well, it was one of the things we did consider. She’s now thirty-four. We thought that reaching the end of her donor years might be affecting her.”

  Chastity kept her voice very calm. “She’s not thirty-four. She’s thirty-eight.”

  Dr. Petit all but stopped breathing. “Pardon?”

  “My sister is thirty-eight years old. She was born in 1967. I’m just surprised that you didn’t double-check that.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’ve known her longer than you.”

  Dr. Petit looked flummoxed. “Why would she lie?”

  Chastity shrugged. “If she wanted to do this so badly, why not?”

  “But we never had somebody lie before.”

  “How can you be sure? You know, with the rewards going up, you just might not be able to rely on honor anymore. You obviously don’t check out the data.”

  Dr. Petit actually sagged a bit in her seat. “No,” she admitted. “Not really. I mean the important thing is to screen for communicable disease and genetic history, and we test for the first and can for the second depending on the recipients’ wishes. And, like I said, your sister had already had a successful pregnancy. She was a dream candidate.”

  “But that was just her eggs.”

  “No, not the eggs. Her own pregnancy.”

  Chastity shook her head. “I’m sorry, Dr. Petit. You’re mistaken. Faith has never been pregnant. I’m afraid she lied about that, too.”

  It was Dr. Petit’s turn to look patient. “Ms. Byrnes, I’m an OB/GYN. I might not be able to tell if a woman’s lying about her age, but I can certainly tell if she’s lying about having delivered a baby. And your sister wasn’t lying. She has had a child.”

  Nine

  Chastity found herself sitting there openmouthed and numb.

  A baby. Faith had a baby?

  “No,” she said instinctively, “she couldn’t have. She only has stepchildren.”

  Dr. Petit shook
her head. “But she did. The impression I got was that it was before her marriage. That the baby was given up for adoption. Your sister did assure me that it was a full-term, healthy baby, though.”

  Chastity blinked. “You couldn’t be mistaken?”

  Dr. Petit allowed an eyebrow to raise. “Not about that. No.”

  “Yes. Yes, of course.”

  Chastity tried to assimilate the idea of Faith having and giving away a baby. Yet another thing she didn’t know about her sister.

  Good God, did Faith have a dorsal fin Chastity didn’t know about? A stigmata, or the power to bend spoons with her mind?

  Could that have been the real reason Faith and her mother had skipped from St. Louis like debtors outrunning a loan shark? Had Faith been pregnant? Could Chastity’s mother have heaved that load of guilt on Chastity when it hadn’t been her fault at all?

  Chastity knew she never should have set foot outside her safety perimeter. She never should have returned Max Stanton’s phone call. She’d been so certain of who she was back in St. Louis. She hadn’t liked it much, but she’d recognized it, had drawn it in strong colors and clear black lines. Now everything was melting and morphing, and the world just didn’t look familiar anymore. As if she were trying to focus through water.

  It took her breath, that thought. Because, of course, in a way, she really was trying to see through water.

  For a long moment Chastity just sat there staring at the mahogany grain on Dr. Petit’s desk. Trying like hell to play catch-up, when every time somebody opened their mouth she stumbled farther and farther behind. Sank deeper into the dark.

  “We really did try to help her,” Dr. Petit said gently. “But after that last month, she simply didn’t come back to see us.”

  Chastity physically pulled herself together. It took a couple of long breaths, a clearing of her throat, but she yanked herself back into the interview.

  “She must have been close to several of the people here.”

  Dr. Petit settled, as if relieved. “Well, Eddie, of course. A few other donors whom Faith recommended to us. And several of the women who had children because of her.”