TRUTH #4
I thought about Winston’s bitch ass. I thought about that clinic, the specimens sitting in some freezer with Landry names on them like inventory.
I thought about how easy it must have been for somebody—Winston, Dr. Beaumont, whoever—to look at two vials and think, why not both?
Like I was a science experiment. Like my body was just a place to test whether their bloodline could survive being split down the middle.
“I need a minute,” I said and put my face in my hands.
Dr. Broussard didn’t say anything else. She just sat there with her hand still resting lightly on my knee, letting me have the minute, and then another one after that, while I cried the ugly kind of cry, shoulders shaking, snot and all, no dignity left in me.
Because here’s what I understood, sitting on that table, that I hadn’t fully understood back at the clinic when Dr. Beaumont first told me two sperm donors had been used.
Back then, it was a possibility. A scandal.
A betrayal I could be furious about from a safe distance, something that happened to me because two brothers and their father were reckless with my body.
But this—this was permanent. This was a girl who would grow up looking like Amai.
A boy who would grow up looking like Kaisen.
Two separate men, forever, undeniably, biologically tied to two separate children inside the same set of twins, in the same delivery, in the same hospital room, on the same day.
There was no fixing this. There was no scenario where I got to decide the shape of my family without both Landry brothers standing in it permanently, whether I wanted them there or not.
And they hated the fuck out of each other!
I’d been telling myself a story—quiet, in the back of my mind, where I hadn’t even said it out loud to myself yet—that eventually this would resolve into something simple.
One father. One man. A clean line I could draw around my life.
And that story just died in this room, on this table, under this light.
“I know this is a lot,” Dr. Broussard finally said, once my breathing evened out some.
“I want to remind you, gently, that these results don’t give either man any legal claim to your medical decisions.
You are still the only person who decides what happens in this pregnancy, what happens during delivery, who is in the room, who gets information.
Your mother remains your listed medical contact. Nothing about that has changed.”
“I know,” I said, wiping my face with the back of my hand, my makeup probably a disaster now. “I know that. I just—” I laughed again, that same broken laugh. “I thought I was ready for this. I really thought I was ready to hear it.”
“Nobody’s ready for this,” she said simply.
“There’s no amount of preparing that makes this easy.
I’d like to give you some resources—there’s a therapist I refer patients to who specialize in exactly this kind of reproductive trauma, and I think it would help you to talk to someone who isn’t tangled up in the situation. ”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, okay. Send me her information.”
“And Truth—” she waited until I looked at her. “The records from today are sealed under your name only. Nothing goes to either father, nothing goes to anyone in that family, unless you personally authorize it in writing. That’s not a courtesy. That’s your right.”
“Thank you,” I said, and meant it, even though my voice came out small and wrecked.
I got dressed slowly, folded the paper gown up neat like it mattered, like being tidy about something small could keep me from falling apart about everything big.
Angela walked me out with the sealed envelope of results tucked into a folder, and I held it against my chest the whole way to the parking lot like it might try to get away from me.
The Mercedes was right where I left it, gleaming, beautiful, stupid in its beauty against how I felt walking toward it. My security nodded at me from his car, professional, unaware, and I gave him a small wave because I didn’t have the energy to explain why my face looked the way it looked.
I got in, closed the door, and just sat there for a long minute, the leather cool against my back, the folder heavy in my lap like it weighed more than paper had any right to weigh.
Outside the windshield, New Orleans kept moving the way it always did—somebody’s radio thumping two blocks over, an old man walking his dog past the oak trees, the sky doing that thing it does in the afternoon where it goes gold at the edges like it’s trying to apologize for something.
I thought about the woman who drove up here an hour ago, feeling herself, feeling powerful, thinking she’d finally stepped into a life built just for her.
That woman was still in here somewhere. She just had two more truths to carry now, and neither of them was going anywhere.
I started the car.
“Whatever this is,” I said out loud, to nobody, to myself, to the empty seat beside me, “it’s still mine to figure out. Ain’t nobody deciding that for me. Not today. Not ever.”
And I pulled out of that parking lot like I meant it, even though inside, I was still falling apart, piece by piece, all the way home.