Editor’s note: The Berkshire Edge has set out on a new adventure: we recruited eight published authors and they have created a serialized novel with a new chapter to appear every Sunday. Each installment of this novel will be written by a different author. Rachel Siegel started us off in Chapter One. Then Jess Bennett gave us Chapter Two. Now Sam Bittman continues the story in Chapter Three. Come back next week for Chapter Four.
“I’m Marion.” She surveyed them, slowly, one face then the next, her heart thudding in her chest. “You’re Kit,” she smiled and extended her hand to the pretty young woman across from her who smiled but was having some trouble making eye contact. “How are you, Kit?
“A little upside down,” she said, engaging now with Marion.
“I can imagine,” Marion said warmly to her.
“I’m Henry,” the lanky boy of seventeen said, pushing the hair from his eyes. She took his proffered hand, held it a moment as she looked at the boy’s half-accepting, half ‘so this is you, and you ain’t so fucken hot’ expression that she knew well from her own twelve-year-old. “And Charles,” she said quietly to the oldest of them, the tall, beautiful man of twenty-three and reaching her hand over the bud vase at the center of the table to take his. They were riveted on her as she gazed from one to the next smiling in bemused disbelief, scanning their faces again, pausing briefly and to her surprise, fondly, at each one, a little less afraid of presenting herself than earlier, her heart suddenly and unexpectedly more open to them than she’d imagined it would be. Frankly, happily, she was pleased to be there to meet them.
“Let’s sit,” she said. And studying them again: Kit, a gentle face with familiar worried eyes. Kit, author of the email that had sprung the news that had got this weird shebang rolling. And Henry treating her to an ambiguous once-over though his eyes were full of joking good humor. Her heart jumped when she looked at Charlie again, the pain in his eyes so obvious, the courage to let them be so remarkable. And his breathtaking good looks.
“I can’t believe this,” she said quietly. “I’m a bit of a wreck.”
“Join the club,” Kit said uncertainly.
“Thanks for coming,” Charlie said. “I haven’t given much thought to how this would be for you.”
“Why is that?” Marion said, surprised at herself.
“Why, you’re the adult in the club,” Henry said, in feigned indifference and then off-handedly said, “You know how to manage shit like this. How old are you anyway?”
“Old enough to be your mother,” Kit said, smirking.
“See? She’s very direct. And so are we all.”
“Really?” Kit dismissed him.
“What? I don’t talk?”
“Hey,” Charlie interrupted. “Today we have a meet and greet with … the origins of our existence.”
“With Marion Hellman, our genetic mother without whose donation there would be no today for us three,” Kit said. “I don’t know what to call you, how to think about you, how to be myself in your presence –”
“I’m asking myself the same questions,” Marion said hoping to comfort her. “We’ve all known about each other forever but being in the same room now, jeez, that’s another thing altogether, no?”
The siblings exchanged looks. “Actually,” Charlie said. “we didn’t know you existed until recently.”
Marion’s eyes widened in surprise. “Is that right? I’d imagined you’d have been told when you were kids.”
“No. It came down on us like a steel safe on Wiley Coyote’s head,” Kit said. “I didn’t mention everything in my email. So, here’s the laugh,” Kit said, “I send in a DNA sample to learn how far back I might be able to trace my family’s origins,” Kit said, “and lo and behold, turns out there’s some woman out there named Marion Hellman who is, genetically speaking, my mother.”
“Our progenitor,” said Henry. “Not Elizabeth, but Marion.” He screwed up his face in comic befuddlement.
“Shocked the hell out of all of us,” Charlie said. “We don’t know what to think. What we think this minute changes the next. Endless angles to ponder.”
“Until six weeks ago I thought I had a particular mother, but not so. I’ve told these guys,” Kit said, loosening restraint to make it clear to Marion, “I’ve always known something was off for me, something was never quite right. But to have it confirmed, finally, is a whole other beast.”
“Mommy dearest,” Charlie said,
“Oofa!” Henry said.
Marion cringed. Did he mean her, the evil mother? She looked up at him. His eyes were warm. “I didn’t mean you,” he smiled.
“But you knew about us,” Henry said, fiddling with a quarter.
“Almost nothing. Just from Sukie, who’s my cousin. From time to time, she’d share some detail about you.”
“Did you want to know more?” Charlie said. “About any of us?”
“No,” Marion said, looking at each of them. “I didn’t.”
“Never curious about how your eggs turned out,” Kit said.
“Cautiously curious,” Marion said, “But not beyond,” she said looking at her hands. “My life’s been plenty.”
A waiter came, took their orders for drinks, and left. They grew quiet. The clinking of glasses and silverware and the hum of conversation from around the café buzzed in their ears. She looked up at them. “But I’m here now and I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. And maybe I can ask about you, too, if that’s okay.”
Kit gazed sadly at her. “My life has been heaved up like a glacier went through,” she said, her eyes shiny. “Like, ‘wait a sec, who am I exactly?’ Am I still myself? Tell me, Henry, I’m still Kit, aren’t I?” And quietly she began to cry.
“The same pain in the neck you’ve always been,” said Henry, threading the quarter between the fingers of one hand and reaching over to touch his sister’s arm with the other. “Look at it this way, Kit. We lost a mother; Bam! We got us another!” He clapped his hands together. “Hot dang!”
“Henry’s high,” Kit said. “Don’t let him drink anything, alright?” she looked beseechingly at Charlie.
“You’re so wrong,” Henry said. “And why are you even talking about this in front of her.” He turned suddenly to Marion. “Listen. Despite imputations to the contrary, I am not a person with a substance problem. I do indulge in this or that from time to time. It’s my existential duty. But I know when to draw the line.”
“I’m sure you do,” she said easily. “Kit,” she said, and waited for her to look up. Kit blotted her eyes with a table napkin.
“Yes?” she said. “Am I being ridiculous?”
“I don’t think so. Do you want to say more about it? I might be able to understand better.”
Kit looked at Marion, “Not now,” she said.
Charlie cleared his throat. “I would, well, we’d all like to know about you.”
This was the moment she knew would come and she was surprised at how easy she felt it was going to be now, how centered she was. “You know from the DNA that I’m an Ashkenazi Jew. I’m lapsed but I still feel like a member of the tribe – a whole other subject. I grew up in Brighton, Mass., around Boston, I graduated from Yale with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in voice. Eventually I got married, had a kid, a boy, Carson. My husband and I divorced when Carson turned three, and I’ve raised him pretty much alone ever since with help from friends and family. The ex is totally out of the picture which, believe it or not, makes things simpler. I was a sous chef, now I make culinary stock that I sell to stores and restaurants. And recently I’ve wondered about teaching voice again.” She paused. They were looking intently at her, even Henry, the quarter resting in his palm. They were observing her changing expressions, her hand gestures, looking for themselves in her. “Any questions?” The waiter came to the table, served them drinks, and took their lunch orders.
“You notice the way she holds a glass?” Henry said to his siblings. “The way she smirks. That’s me and you, Kit,” he laughed. “This is fucking amazing.”
They sipped their drinks. Charlie said, “Money changed hands, for your eggs?”
“Yes.”
“A lot?” Henry asked.
“Yes, for me it was. Is.” Marion said, “It’s the way the game works. Same for sperm donors.”
“Did you, like, haggle over price?” Henry asked.
Here comes the tricky stuff, Marion thought. Do I tell them how much? “No,” she said at last. “They named a price, and I said yes.”
Kit asked, “How much are we worth?”
“A lot.”
“How many eggs did you deliver?” Kit asked.
“Fifteen. They used three. I don’t know what happened to the others.”
“Fifteen’s a lot of eggs,” Kit said, surprised. “At one time?”
“Yup. Some women donate many more.”
“I’ve read that an egg donor’s ovaries can blow up like a force-fed goose liver,” Kit said. “Did that happen to you?” she asked, looking at Marion more softly now. Marion’s heart sped up at the girl’s empathy. She took in a breath to quiet it all, the irreversible Now, in the face of this lovely young woman.
“Not too bad, really,” she said after a bit. “Though there was a moment – I forget exactly when in the process – that I thought, ‘nah, I’m not doing this!’ But one of the nurses I’d see regularly was sweet, she calmed me down, got me through.”
““How does it sit with you now?”?” Charlie asked. “That you’re the mother of three other children?”
“It’s confusing to me. That I’m having lunch with the results of something I did twenty-five years ago? Crazy. That I can’t stop saying to myself, ‘Holy shit, Marion, the three grown humans sitting with you at this table share your genes? Unbelievable. I ask myself, Are they really your kids? I answer, yes, they are your kids. But they’re someone else’s children, really, more than yours, I reply. And yet you can’t take your eyes off them, they’re so beautiful? Smart, funny, capable. Where’s that coming from? Kit’s mouth does the same thing mine does when I’m holding back a smile! And with all my monkey brain chatter running amok in my head, I’m trying my best to be here, present, in the moment, get a sense of who you are.” She said to Charlie, “Is that a satisfactory answer?”
“For now,” Charlie said, smiling. And Marion saw in the sweetness of this handsome young man’s pained eyes, the genuine affability and charm at his core, and felt instinctively drawn to him. Was this motherhood springing to life? I’m proud to have a son like you. Did I just say that to myself? “Agreed,” Marion said.
A gentler mood now settled over them. They studied her more openly. She was entranced by their faces, eyes, arms and fingers, the overall shape of them. What a miracle this is, she thought. And discovered then a delicious curiosity rising within her.
“Was keeping away from us part of the deal?” Henry broke the silence.
Marion turned to him. “Yes. I signed what they call a closed contract stipulating our obligations to one another, your parents and me, among them that I would never be in contact with you.”
“They never had any intention of telling us,” Charlie said, irritated.
“Fucking unspeakable!” Kit said, turning to Marion. “If your son had been the issue of a sperm donor–?”
“I hope I would have learned how to tell him in a way he could understand,” Marion said softly. She looked at them and breathed in deeply. “Your folks had personal reasons for following another path. Have you been discussing this with them?”
“Discussion?” Kit said, her anger warming. “Are you kidding? With Elizabeth? Here’s a discussion with Elizabeth: When I told her about the DNA results, she turned pale as a ghost. Then it was ‘Oh no, that’s impossible! There must be some mistake!’ For days and days, she kept at it like a madwoman, ‘Oh, that’s absolutely ridiculous!’ she would say or words to that effect, and even when Charlie’s and Henry’s samples came back with identical findings, she tried her best to dismiss them, and you could tell that she was warring with herself over how to admit that she wasn’t our mother, but Marion Hellman was.”
“No,” Marion said. “That’s not so. She’s your mother in every way” she said to ease Kit’s fear and anger. “It was her body that coaxed my eggs into gestation, that grew you into strong, healthy babyhood, raised you into fine adults. That’s the art of it. That’s big. And of course, the attachment and love she feels for you.”
“Maybe one day you’ll meet her and decide that for yourself,” Henry said, “By the way, tell me you don’t approve of our parents’ silence.”
Oh, brother, Marion thought. Here it comes: Triangulation. “It’s not my place. I’m a mother, so I know about getting tossed into decisions about your kid, what explanations he deserves from me about himself, about his father, his condition? Believe me, the field is littered with my fuckups.
“Fair enough,” Charlie said, taking a drink of his beer. “But the three of us are sitting on one big heap of a fuck-up that we’ve barely scratched the surface of, and our heads are spinning! We each have a story, but there’s overlap here and there, mostly the feeling of not fitting in. Maybe not Henry so much, but Kit and me, yes. You know something’s wrong, and it worries the bejeezus out of you, but you can’t find any reason for why that worry’s there, the fear bouts of unexplainable discomfort in you. That wore on us. For me, by my last year in college it was recurring dreams about looking over the edge of a cliff and wondering if I should jump.”
“Please don’t do that, Charlie.”
“I don’t think I will, Marion. Someone came to my rescue.”
Oh dear, somewhere in this exchange she’d crossed a line with him, wanted to soothe the young man with woe in his eyes. Her boy?
“You’re a singer?” Charlie said.
“Your parents told you that?”
Kit nodded. “I am a trained singer,” Marion said. “It was my dad’s obsession that I should be a musician, in my case an opera singer as I had no other musical talent. He, on the other hand, was a brilliant oboist for the Boston Symphony. “
“’A bad wind that nobody blows good,’” Charlie said out of the corner of his mouth, imitating Louis Armstrong.
“I’ve heard it said of all the winds,” she said
“True that for mine, tenor sax.”
“But you went another way, Marion. How’d that go?” Kit said.
“What you’d expect. He was furious that I wouldn’t listen to reason. We didn’t speak for years after that. I moved to New York and became a chef. A sous chef. I’ve always been interested in food. Then we had a kid, and my dad relented and came to visit, and we’ve been okay since. He’s fabulous with Carsey.”
They thought a moment about their half-brother, their new grandfather, the woman across from them.
“You a jazz player, sax man?” she said.
“He’s unbelievable,” Kit said. “Like Coltrane on “Kind of Blue.”
“Fucking genius!” Henry said.
“Not true!” Charles widened his eyes at Henry.
“Do you play out?” Marion asked.
“Open mics, piano and bass, friends of mine.”
“Maybe you’ll get to hear him,” Kit said.
And there it was. The question of a future with them and would there be one?
“If you invite me, yes.”
“You mean if we want to see you again?” Henry said.
“There’s that.” Marion blushed. “Legally, I couldn’t, shouldn’t initiate contact,”
Charlie said, “I can see whoever I want.”
“It’s too stupid, you know?” Henry said. “What did they imagine was gonna be the problem with us knowing? And mimicking his mother, he pursed up his mouth. “‘We just believed there was no good reason to tell you.’ How do you get anywhere with that, Marion?”
Kit picked up on Henry’s sarcasm. “She stuns you into silence and then dismisses you. I don’t know how to answer her on that, because beyond ‘It would have been nice to know so we weren’t gob-smacked,’ I can’t articulate anything. To which she’d say, ‘well, the gob-smacking wasn’t my fault.’
“She can’t even hear how stupid that is, you know!” Henry brought his fist down on the table, so the silverware jumped. “And one more thing,” he went on, a little lighter, “I think in my case there had to have been a sperm donor, because I don’t think I belong to either of them.”
Marion almost laughed.
“Not for my egg,” Charlie said. “That was dad. I’m his clone!”
“Over-parentified asshole.”
“Who, me?”
“Hey, did they do a background check on you?” Henry shifted direction.
“Yup,” Marion said. “And whatever else they wanted to know about me. I signed a release so they could check my medical records.”
“Good solid stock,” Henry said.
“A person of certain gifts and talents,” Kit said.
“That seemed important to them,” Marion smiled. “It would to me, I suppose.”
“And you stacked up,” Charlie added.
“No kidding around, okay, Marion? How much did they give you?” Henry said.
Had he really asked again? They wanted to know.
“They were extremely generous. It’s all in trust for Carson when he turns twenty-one.”
The siblings again lapsed into silence. Marion tried to imagine how hard it would be to have to absorb such world-shaking news as these kids have had to start living with. Kit was staring at her, trembling with rage and uncertainty. Marion said, “Listen, Kit. I only know about you what I’ve learned today, but if I’m a betting woman I put my money on you to work it out. All of you. I’m not kidding. You’re quite a trio.”
Food came and a new round of beers and iced teas, followed by long moments in the unfolding of napkins and fiddling with silverware from which they at last looked up and settled more comfortably together. They began eating. Another silence descended on them. After a while, between bites of a burger, Charlie asked, “What’s your dad like, our grandfather?”
“Smart, funny. You’d probably all like him. He tells jokes, sometimes terrible jokes!” she laughed. Kit and Charlie pointed at Henry as the source of their family’s pun-filled jokes. “His latest was, ‘I’m reading a book on anti-gravity. And I Just can’t put it down.’” They all stared dumbly at her a moment, finally understood the punchline, and groaned as one.
“Yeh, that’s me,” Henry said.
“And your mom? Our grandmother” Kit asked.
“My folks split up a while ago. Hannah, she lives near me in Brooklyn and helps with Carsey. She has health problems.”
“And do you think of us as your kids? I mean now that we’ve talked?” Kit asked.
“That’s a hard one, Kit. I’ve already shared with you the endlessly noisy thoughts playing in my head today, and over these past few weeks. But now that I’ve seen you, talked to you, we’ve made a connection that was never supposed to happen and that throws a new light on everything.”
“Does that mean you do think of us as your kids,” Kit said.
“Yes, but also in a way, not yet.”
“Do you want to?” Kit said.
“Oofa!” Henry said. “Go easy, sis.”
Motioning to Marion’s face, Charlie said “You’re not gonna have a choice. I see Henry and Kit in your eyes and cheeks, don’t you? I see myself in your nose and mouth and chin too, I think. It’s so weird”
“What do you see?” Henry said.
Marion did not answer right away. She had stopped resisting the wonder of a second family. “That you exist, that seeing you in the flesh, listening to you, discerning you just a bit one from the other, establishes a new tribe under a single tent of family. I see your exceptional uniqueness. And now we go on as we decide to go on, in a way that includes Elizabeth and Tom.”
The siblings looked at each other, they looked at Marion, Marion gazed back at them. The busser poured spring water into Kit’s glass which had gone empty.
Charlie raised his beer glass in a toast. ““To new discoveries,” he said. Marion, Kit and Henry held up their own glasses. “New discoveries!” they said together and the four clinked glasses and drank.
