you have to go back to work,” Nealie said with unhappy resignation.
“But for now, I’m here,” he said. “With you.”
Briana pulled into her driveway, pushed the button to open the garage door and drove in. “I guess we can leave your things in the back,” she said to Josh. “There’s no sense unloading them. You’ll be going to the motel.”
He said nothing. He gave her a look that clearly said, We’ll see about that.
THE MOMENT CAME that Briana had dreaded.
Josh came down the narrow stairs. “She’s asleep.”
Briana stood by the couch, nervously folding the afghan. Josh had been upstairs for almost an hour. He had promised to read Nealie to sleep.
He crossed the room and stopped, looking at Briana. She felt threatened in a dozen conflicting ways. She was glad they had the couch between them, like a barrier.
“It’s time,” he said. “Now we talk.”
She paused, biting the inside of her cheek. At last she said, “Let me pour us some wine. I think I’m going to need a drink for this.”
She moved toward the kitchen, and he moved with her. He said, “Now what’s all this about artificial insemination and healthy embryos?”
Why do you have to start with the hardest question?
She tried to keep her hands from shaking as she took the wine from the cabinet and poured two glasses. But she knew what she had to say. She’d rehearsed it enough. The words came to her lips almost as if someone else were saying them, and she was only mouthing them, a ventriloquist’s doll.
She explained about the Center for Reproductive Health in St. Louis. There specialists could fertilize a group of eggs in vitro, a test tube union. The fertilized eggs would grow and divide until they produced what was called a blastocyst or pre-embryo.
When the pre-embryos were three days old, geneticists would test to see whether they showed signs of Yates’s anemia. If a fertilized egg was healthy, it could be placed in the mother’s womb before the end of the week.
“So that’s it,” Briana finished. “It’s pretty simple, really.”
“It’s anything but simple,” Josh said.
She shrugged and moved to the living room, wineglass in hand. She sat in the easy chair so he would be forced to sit on the couch. She crossed her legs. “Should I explain it again? I—I have some brochures and magazine articles and things if you want—”
He cut her off with a sharp gesture of his free hand. “The science I understand. At least well enough. It’s the ethics that bother me.”
“What do you want? Your ethics or your daughter’s life?”
The coldness of her voice surprised her. But he didn’t flinch, and his eyes didn’t waver from hers.
“What about the baby?” he demanded. “We bring a child into the world for one reason. To save another child who’s sick. Not because we want him, but because we don’t want to lose the one we’ve got.”
She raised her chin. “I’d love him. You know I would. I love children. I always wanted a big family.”
Josh shook his head. “And what am I supposed to feel for him? I mean, we’re talking about a child who’s mine, too, you know.”
She wished he’d sit down, but he stood in front of her as if rooted in place. She was ready for his argument. She’d anticipated it.
“Your feelings are your own business. But I know you. You’d care for him. You know you would.”
He studied her as if she were a being from another planet. “But suppose, Briana, it doesn’t work.”
She turned her face away so she wouldn’t have to look at him, but he went on, his voice relentless. “Suppose we have this child, but the transplant doesn’t work, and we still lose Nealie. What then? Is it the baby’s fault? Would you still want him? Or every time you looked at him, would you wonder why he was there but Nealie was gone?”
“Don’t talk about her being gone, dammit!”
“And how would he feel? Knowing that he was born not because we wanted a child but we wanted a donor? And, unfortunately, he just didn’t work out.”
She clenched her fist on the arm of the chair until she felt her nails cutting into her palm. “I said I would love this child. That love is without condition. I would love him no matter what happened.”
“Would you love him if he had Yates’s anemia?”
Her head jerked up, and she glared at him. “I’m trying to make sure neither of them has it. That’s the point.”
He turned from her with a sound that was part sadness, part disgust. He walked to the mantel and struck it with the flat of his hand. He swore. “What if none of these hypothetical embryos is healthy? What if they all carry the disease? What do you do then? Flush them away and start over?”
“You can freeze them,” she said, setting her jaw.
“Freeze them,” he mocked. “That’s nice. Do you have any other children? Yes, but they’re in the freezer. They would have been flawed, so we didn’t let them get born.”
“Someday there may be another way to cure this disease.” She shot the words back. “A sure way. Then they could be born and grow up safe.”
“There may not be another cure for years. Decades. What then? We just keep the little nippers on ice for eternity?”
“Someone else could bring them into the world,” she argued. “Someone who couldn’t conceive on their own. It happens all the time.”
“You’ve got all the pie-in-the-sky answers, don’t you?” he said. “I’m not asking for just myself, you know. Other people are going to be raising the same questions.”
“I don’t care about other people,” she said with passion. “I care about my daughter.”
“And your other child, too, of course. The one you want for spare parts.”
She could have slapped his face. Instead she took a long drink of wine. It tasted bitter as gall.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was a cheap shot.”
“Yes. It was.”
“But people will say worse things. About us. To us. And to our children.”
“I said I don’t care about other people. And what’s more, they don’t have to know. It’s none of their business.”
He blinked. He set his untasted wine on the mantel. He stared at her in disbelief. “They wouldn’t have to know?”
Her chin shot up. “I mean
