NEW VOICES

A Short Story

by Abby Arnold

A Stranger's Child

SARAH PASSED ME THE ROASTING PAN and I dried it.

"That was easy," I said.

"Easy enough," she replied, "when there are only two."

She stared at me for a moment, her brown eyes locked onto mine. I can't usually read her thoughts anymore, but this one was easy: Will you do it, make the call, please Josh. I turned toward the refrigerator.

"I'm making another drink. Want one?" But she was out the door, running up the stairs. The bedroom door slammed.

I carried my vodka and tonic into the living room. The phone sits on an antique chest Sarah and I found the first year of our marriage. We'd been coming home from a weekend in the Blue Ridge Mountains on a bright May afternoon, one of those days when the sunlight doesn't only land on Earth but seems to come from here as well, light radiating out from every flowering tree, every blade of grass and every natural object edged in sharply brilliant silhouettes.

On our way home we passed one of those pre-Revolutionary War homes that are scattered through the Virginia countryside. This one had an Estate Sale sign in front.

"Let's stop," she said, taking her hand from my knee to point. "I love these old houses."

I remember we held hands as we walked through the house, faded floorboards creaking underneath our feet. We wandered from room to room, following the sunlight. The chest was in one of the bedrooms. I pulled her into the room, to kiss her in the middle of a patch of sun. She looked beautiful in the diffused light, the glow from the thick window glass shimmering through her hair.

We kissed until we heard footsteps. Then, laughing, we turned to examine the room. We both stopped at the same time in front of the chest. She said, "This will be perfect for baby clothes." I pulled her close again and kissed her, never minding if anyone else entered the room, and got out the checkbook.

Now the chest sits in the living room, video tapes inside, the phone on top. I set my drink on top of the chest, looked at the telephone and listened to Sarah crying in the room above me.

In college I needed a little extra money. Dad paid for most everything, but he didn't want me to have too much.

"Gotta make sure you keep your mind on your work, Josh," he'd say, while writing out the check that covered my basic expenses. "I know you -- you'll have all those girls calling you up, giving you excuses to put down the books. You'll never make anything of yourself if you don't study, so I'm just making sure you won't be able to go out more than you should. You're the next success in this family and I want you to stay that way. You're a real Barrett man, not like your brother."

My university was starting a fertility program, the largest in the state, and needed donors. I saw the ad in the school paper one day, and decided to go down and apply. The money was great -- $40 bucks a pop -- and I figured, why not get paid for doing something I already did for free. Sperm meant nothing to me then but a sticky mess and sometimes a stain to hide from my mom.

Aiming it into the cup was an adjustment and after the first six months or so I had to begin using magazines, first the battered Playboy the clinic kept in the room, then bringing in my own, more hard-core stuff the clinic didn't provide. But the sperm, the stuff, was nothing. I got paid for whacking off; funny, unusual, got me attention at parties. The product was meaningless to me. I didn't connect it with children, or me with children, or the agony of not having children with the person you love.

Altogether I made around $4000, so I must have done it over a hundred times before they cut me off, saying ten women had conceived with my sperm and I couldn't donate anymore. It was okay with me to quit, just as it had been okay to begin. I'd made enough to get by, even put a little in the bank.

It was time to graduate and I'd gotten a great job with the fastest growing commercial property development company in the South. Dad had gotten me the interview, but he told me later that his friend who'd hired me had said he'd been impressed with me, Josh Barrett, not Stan Barrett's son. That felt good. I'd made it and the last thing I thought about was those ten conceptions.

I never told my family, of course. In fact, I kind of liked the idea that there were all these little Barrett men growing up who never had to know they were Barrett men. They could be who they wanted, without worrying about any grand tradition. I kind of liked it that Dad never knew he had all those grandsons.

I did tell Sarah. It slipped out at a party we went to the first month we dated. We were sitting around, after dinner, about six of us, drinking wine and telling stories -- these were Sarah's friends, so I didn't know them very well. Everyone laughing, a little drunk, having a good time.

We started talking about college, the good old days before we had to start making money. Well, actually, some of Sarah's friends had to make money to stay in college and they were talking about it. I felt kind of bad because I didn't have to, so I told my story about selling sperm, making it sound like I needed the cash to survive.

So, anyway, I told the story and all the guys laughed. The girls were pretty quiet. Sarah laughed a little, but then wouldn't speak to me in the car on the way home. I didn't notice at first, I was drunk and singing along with Eric Clapton, but when I reached out to hold her hand and she pulled it away I figured out that something was wrong.

"Hey," I said, "What's up?"

"Nothing." Sarah actually hates confrontations, one of the things I love about her. She'll do almost anything to avoid a fight. It makes living with her so peaceful. But that night I pressed her. I was confused and couldn't see that I'd done anything wrong.

"Come on, what?"

"I just can't believe you could do that in college, and then laugh about it. What about the kids?"

She was really worked up; even though she was looking out the window I could tell she was about to cry.

"The kids?" I had to think about this for a few seconds before I figured out who she meant. "I know they'll have a good life, parents who really want them."

"How do you know that? Those are your kids."

"No, they're not."

Sarah shut up after that. She just wouldn't talk anymore, except for a terse "Take me home." Which I did, and then she jumped out of the car and shut the door quickly, before I could even suggest coming in with her.

I went home. She called me two days later and apologized. Said she'd over-reacted, which of course she had. I'd actually missed her in those two days, and was glad she'd gotten over her problem. We didn't talk about it again, not when we got married, not at family holidays the first few years when her mother or my father made noises about grandchildren, not for a long time.

I REMEMBER WHEN WE DECIDED we were ready to have children. We had moved back to Charlottesville, so Sarah could work on her Ph.D. in history, and I could make a killing in the real estate market, all those celebrities who wanted to get away to the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Things were going great; the money poured in, we were each working hard, we were happy together. Our life together was a success and Sarah said it was time to share it with children. I agreed. I loved the idea of a daughter who looked just like Sarah, but with a part of me in her too. I was a little more vague about what a son would be like, except that I wouldn't pressure him to be a perfect Barrett man. I imagined him as a natural, happy, smart boy with a small mischievous streak.

We threw away her birth control pills and for a time our lovemaking was magical -- not in technical skills or number of orgasms or the quality of my erections. Heightened, rather, graced with a presence of continuity and life and meaning. I thought of my father, conceiving me, and his father before him, and the unbroken line of men beyond them; I thought back to a time my mind couldn't follow but my body could, the seed from my body connected to the seed present at the beginning of time itself. During those moments I was one with Adam and Noah and Abraham, one with God Himself. I was a Barrett man, adding to our generations.

We tried for about six months before we realized something was wrong. I thought it was stress and wanted to just keep trying, but Sarah insisted we go to a specialist. Since I'd had those ten conceptions I knew the problem couldn't be with me, but the doctor said that the usual protocol was to check the man first, so we did that, just to get it out of the way. I felt sort of nostalgic, sitting in the musty examining room, jerking off into the cup, waiting for the positive results. Now it was time for my son.

I remember sitting relaxed in the doctor's office, complaining to Sarah about the inconsistencies of my current client when the doctor came in to tell us that I was infertile, that I was the reason my wife couldn't get pregnant. He said it was probably from the high fever I had the summer Sarah and I married but they didn't know for sure. Just a random accident.

I remembered that fever, my temperature 105 for two days with me lying in bed, mad with heat and sweat. Sarah eventually took me to the emergency room where they brought the fever down. Did she take me too late?

I looked at her in that doctor's office as she held my hand and told me we'd work things out. I wondered what was going on inside her. How would she love me if we didn't have children? They'd always been part of our plan, alive and real in our marriage even though they didn't exist in the world yet. What would happen to us, now that I had failed. Who could we even be?

I thought about how I'd comforted her in the past few months, when the baby didn't come and she'd been so sure it was her fault. I'd been so sure things would work out. They always had before.

I sat for a few minutes, slumped in the soft cushion of the seat, barely hearing her words or feeling her fingers stroking mine as I contemplated my life without her. I sat and despaired and then I remembered my sperm.

I never told her about my bad moment. What we talked about was how lucky that we were back in Charlottesville. After all, the hospital had my sperm. Too bad I was infertile, we agreed, but they could just inject Sarah and we'd have our baby.

Before that moment, I hadn't even connected the desire for children with Sarah with the sperm babies. They were totally separate: one was love and belonging and continuity; the other had nothing to do with me. Now I was glad I had those reserves.

We went to the fertility clinic the same week we found out that I was the reason she wasn't getting pregnant. Met with the clinic director, Dr. Franklin. I explained my situation to her, asked if I could get my sperm for myself.

"You were part of the first-year donor group?" she asked, a quiet voice, sounding the way my mother did when I was nine years old with chicken pox and she was telling me I couldn't pitch in my Little League finals.

"That's right. 1984 and '85."

"I would be happy to help you, Mr. Barrett, but I can't. As you know, the sperm is only identifiable by number. Originally, the records matching donor to number were kept in a file in my office. We computerized the records six years ago, but something went wrong when we transferred the data from the initial donor group. The identifying records got eaten up in a computer glitch and because of insurance regulations we had to destroy the sperm."

"Destroy?"

"Yes. Once we could no longer identify the donors we had to get rid of the product. I'm sorry, but we don't have your sperm any longer."

She was concerned, I could tell. She wanted to help us. She even volunteered to let us use the clinic for free, to look up statistics and genetic history, pick the father we wanted for our child and carry his frozen DNA home with us, to be defrosted and squirted into Sarah at our convenience.

I thanked her for her time, told her I'd have to think about it. As we stood to go, I looked past her to the door to the lab. Somewhere behind her, in a room filled with cold, silver machines and instruments, should have been my last chance at fatherhood. I wanted to bust through the doors, stand in that room and be led by instinct to that part of myself.

For one moment it seemed possible. Surely some part of me still existed, frozen in liquid nitrogen at -140 Fahrenheit, alive and waiting to create a life. For one moment I knew I still existed, that I could find what they had missed. Then Sarah put her arm around my shoulder and in her gesture of comfort and sorrow the dream vanished and I knew I was lost forever.

One night, about a week later, Sarah and I went grocery shopping. We'd gone in for vegetables and fresh fish. The mother and son were at the fruit counter. She was picking out apples and letting him help. He sat in the cart, with blond hair that curled at the back of his neck, just like my brother David's. He was probably six or seven years old, old enough. Sarah and I watched them move to the grapes, then on to the lettuce. The mother picked over her vegetables, I was glad to see; she cared about the quality of her son's food.

Without talking about it, Sarah and I followed them up and down every aisle, stopping when they stopped, putting beans and salad dressing we'd never use into our cart while further down the row we watched the mother patiently hand her son a can of corn or a bottle of soy sauce to place importantly in the cart. She let him pick out candy in the check-out line.

He smiled and it was my dad's smile, my smile. I know it was because Sarah gasped when he grinned at the M&Ms. We followed them into the check-out line, and then left the cart sitting there after the mother finished paying.

The clerk asked us something, I don't remember what. We just left the store and watched the mother struggle with the boy and the groceries till they were all shut in the car, blue Honda Civic licence plate GBA 407. Then we sat in our car for an hour, while I held Sarah as she cried. Later that night, we talked.

Sarah wanted to take a chance with the clinic's anonymous sperm. Even if it isn't biologically true, the baby will still be ours, she said. But I didn't think so. As far as I was concerned, it was Russian Roulette what you got, and anyway I for damn sure didn't want a child that wasn't my own, especially when I had ten children already. Unknown, perhaps never known, but out there, maybe even in this city going to the same Kroger that I did.

I didn't tell her this, of course. Instead, I told her that I didn't want to raise some stranger's child.

"But it won't be a stranger's child," she said. "It would be ours."

"I know how much you want a baby," I said, "but my child just has to be a Barrett."

That's when she'd thrown the big one at me.

"So, what about David?" she asked.

"David?"

"He's a Barrett, he's got two kids of his own. Why not ask him if we could use his sperm?"

I got kind of pissed. "You want to fuck my brother?" I asked, and slammed my hands against the kitchen table.

"Of course not. I mean get a sample from him, and I'd get injected with it. Then the baby would still have your genes."

She actually meant this. She sat there, looking at me as if this idea of hers made total sense, as if it was completely reasonable that we have David's kid and not my own.

How could she want to have David's kid? He's a loser -- I mean, I love him and all, but his life has been a mess. He went to a third-rate college, played for years in a rock band that went nowhere, never made any serious money. Even now his life is only average: a nice enough wife, though she's too bossy for me, a steady middle-level job with a recording company, and those two kids that Dad loves so much, even though they don't do more than scribble pictures. One of them still wets the bed, for God's sake. And Sarah wants more of these kids.

Dad wants us to have kids too. He keeps dropping hints, wondering when the grandchildren are coming. I feel like I'm letting him down by not providing any. David's scored big points in this area. I always thought it was up to me to provide the best of the next generation.

And the thing is, I have provided for a new generation, but I can't tell Dad. He'd flip. I also can't tell him that at the most primary level I'm impotent, incapable of making my wife pregnant, that I'm not what David is in the bedroom. That when it really counted, David won.

After she suggested using David, Sarah sat at the table watching me with that look in her eyes that I've learned means I better just shut up for a while because she's not being logical. I knew I couldn't reach her when she was in this kind of state, so I told her I'd think about it, and I did. I thought of everything I could to get out of it. Then I decided to find my own child.

I went back to the grocery store practically every night for two weeks, waiting for the woman and her son to come again. When they finally did I followed them home. They live in a nice neighborhood, Johnson Village, lots of families, children, three-bedroom brick houses on half-acre lots. Sarah's friends, David and Catherine, live two blocks over. We went to a party there last April.

The mother got out of the car, opened the back door, and grabbed a few bags of groceries.

David -- not David, I knew that, but they looked so much alike -- opened his door, walked into the house carrying a box of laundry detergent. She stayed inside a few minutes, hopefully making sure he was safe, and came back for the groceries. Then the front door shut.

The name on the mailbox was Easton. No first names. She walked back and forth past the open window a few times, once followed by David. About an hour and a half later, another car pulled into the driveway and a man got out. Somewhere in his thirties, blond hair, strong shoulders. He walked in and I watched them embrace through the window, then he walked in the direction David had gone. He walked past the window a few minutes later, holding David in his arms, up against his chest. I drove home.

I started following them the next week. She drove him to school every morning and picked him up every day at 2:30. No bus or car pool for our boy; she did it all herself, devoted.

I followed him inside the school one day, lost in the crowd of kids and other parents, to his first-grade classroom, Mrs. Thomas' class. He seemed popular, the other kids glad to see him. I watched as long as I could, until the bell rang and the hallway cleared and I became conspicuous. He looked at me once, through the glass on the door, and smiled. I'm sure he did.

After school, his mother often took him to the park. I usually sat in my car and watched them play, but after that day inside the school I decided to talk to them. After all, David had smiled at me, wanting to talk. I drove straight to the park at 2:30, without waiting to see if they were actually coming. I wanted to get set up, and figured that if they didn't come that day, I could use my time there as practice.

I brought a newspaper with me so I could watch them through it, and found a seat at the most central table in the playground. While I waited I watched a man playing basketball with two boys, teaching them to shoot. They all laughed together as he lifted the younger one on his shoulders to dunk the ball. The older one wanted to do the same, so he took turns with them, lifting them as high as Michael Jordan to slam the ball into the rim of the basket. Then my family appeared, David running toward the slide and climbing up the ladder. His mother walked over more slowly, and stood near me as she watched her son.

"Hello," I said to her, smiling. Not too strong, I'm just an average guy reading in the park. Maybe I'm waiting for my wife and children to show up.

She nodded. David screamed as he slid down.

"He sure is having fun."

"He loves the slide," she said.

David reached the bottom. "I want to go up this way," he said, climbing up the grey slide.

"O.K. Tommy."

"Tommy?"

She looked at me, frowning. I'd pushed too far. That's his name, Tommy.

"Mommy, I want the swings now."

He went down the slide once more and then ran to the swings, over to my right. I had positioned myself well, surrounded by his favorite activities. He climbed onto the lowest swing and the mother stood behind David -- Tommy -- pushing him. Not too high. I noticed how pretty the mother was. Really much prettier than Sarah.

"How old is he?"

She paused, cautious.

"I'm six and three quarters," he announced as his legs pumped to get him higher. "Next year I'm going to be in second grade. First grade is for babies."

"You sure are grown up. What do you like to do besides go to the park?"

"Ride my bike. I go without training wheels. Do you want to come over and see me do it? I just learned. My daddy taught me."

"Sure," I said, grinning, as his mother said "Tommy, this man has other things to do."

"No, I don't mind. I'd be happy to visit him." I put down my paper and got up to walk over to him.

"See mom, he wants to ... Daddy!" The boy's face lit up a thousand different ways and he flung himself off the swing. His mother put a hand on his shoulder, protecting him from the shock of his fall, but he ripped her arm off his shoulder and ran straight towards me.

I stood and waited for my son, knowing that he recognized me, that some part of him claimed me as his, just as I was ready to claim him as mine. I stood there, waiting for him and sure, even as he raced past me, throwing his arms out to the side just like David does when he runs, until he was lifted and thrown into the sky by the man standing behind me, the one who had just put coffee, juice and muffins on my bench.

Tommy laughed, yelling "Higher Daddy, higher." The man laughed with him, throwing him slightly higher as the mother came over to my bench, picked up the coffee and muffins, gave me a slight acknowledgment and carried the snack across the park to a picnic table.

The father and son followed, Tommy chatting about the slide and the swing set. I heard him say, "I just wanted to be with you all this afternoon, so I took an hour off." Tommy never looked back at me. He only looked at his father. I watched them for a while longer and then I left.

THAT WAS THIS AFTERNOON. Now I sit on the sofa, sipping my drink, and listen to Sarah crying upstairs. She's been crying a lot lately, except when she's been trying to get me to talk. She says I'm not home much, and I'm distracted. I certainly couldn't tell her what I've been doing, searching for my kids all over town. I knew she wouldn't understand that at all. She might have felt that I didn't want her children, only mine, and I didn't want to hurt her feelings. Now I thought about having only her children and never mine.

I pictured Tommy running for his dad. I guess I don't really know if he's my child or not, but Tommy knows who his father is, and his father seemed pretty clear on that point as well. Sarah is clear that any child we raise together will be mine as well as hers; my father is clear that Barrett men are superior to other people. David is happy in his mediocre life and I've been acting like a sociopath, stalking a nice family to prove that I have a son.

I listen to Sarah cry. From upstairs I hear small choking sounds, sniffling, silence and then more tears. I imagine her curled up in the bed, biting the pillow with her teeth as she tries to get some control, releasing it when the force of it all becomes too much and she has to let the tears out.

The sound of her anguish slices open my own skin, exposing my own twisted guts. I think about my father's expectations for me and how I moved from fighting them to being them. I think about the silences between him and my mother. I realize, maybe for the first time, that I love my wife.

I go upstairs and into the bedroom. She doesn't lift her head from the pillow to look at me. I lie on the bed and curl my body around her, my arms holding her in tight. One day I may tell her what happened today, what led me to this moment, but now is not the right time. Now, I lift my head again and speak.

"It's okay," I say. "Let's call the clinic. Let's have our child."

She turns to look at me. I smile at her, and kiss her forehead. I look straight back at her and nod my head. The smile on her face is bigger than anything I've ever seen. Any child who inherits that smile will be lucky.

[ Story copyright © 1999 by Abby Arnold. All rights reserved. ]

TW3 is a PICTOGRAPH.COM website.