later, she was carrying a small piece of paper in her incongruously slim fingers. On her way back across the room, she picked up the silver-framed photograph of Charlotte.
“Here,” she said, thrusting both things toward Lake. Lake saw that the piece of paper was actually a slightly blurry photo of a toddler in a stroller, perhaps taken with a cell phone. The two toddlers looked almost identical.
“Are they…twins?” Lake asked, her voice catching.
“Interesting thought, isn’t it?” Alexis said, smirking. “But, no, you can’t produce identical twins with an IVF procedure. Brian and I look alike, though, and a sibling of Charlotte’s would look very much like her. Think of those Olson twins. They’re fraternal twins and yet people can barely tell them apart.”
“You took this photo of the child?”
“Yes. When I saw the baby, I changed tables to get closer and took some pictures when the woman was busy blabbing to someone on her cell phone.”
“Did you say something to her about it?”
“Good God, no,” Alexis said. “I may be crazed but I’m not stupid. If this woman had known what I’d just put together, she would have left skid marks on her way out the door.”
“How did you figure out her name, then?”
“She used a credit card to pay. After she left, I asked one of the clerks for her name—I said I thought I might have known her in college and wanted to double-check. I’m a regular there and the clerk didn’t think anything of it. I’m not sure what this woman was doing on the Upper East Side that day. She lives in Brooklyn. In that area they call Dumbo.”
She’d said the word disdainfully, as if it was synonymous with dung heap. But it was a hip, trendy part of Brooklyn—Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass—that Lake had visited several times with friends.
“How…?”
“How do I know where she lives?” Alexis asked, her voice edgy again. “She and her husband are listed…. Oh wait, how do I know she’d been a patient at the Advanced Fertility Center? That was as easy to find out as her address. I called the girl at the front desk, pretending to be Melanie, saying I needed to review some of my dates for insurance reasons. She’d had two rounds of IVF, starting two months after I’d been told Brian wouldn’t release my embryos to me. I didn’t want the embryos destroyed, in case Brian changed his mind. But they knew I’d never be back. So they gave them to her.”
Lake let out a long breath. The story was horrific—and almost too crazy to believe.
“But why would Sherman have to resort to this?” Lake asked. “If this woman couldn’t conceive with her own eggs, why not use eggs from an actual donor? The clinic has even started its own donor program.”
“She probably didn’t want a donor,” Alexis said. “She looked like she was in her early forties and she was probably hoping she could still have her own child. And I’m sure Sherman encouraged her just like he did me. He and Levin like to tell women, ‘You will get pregnant,’ as if they’re the Baby Makers. When Sherman found her eggs were useless, he was stuck. So he just used my embryos—without ever telling her.”
Over the past few weeks Lake had read enough about in vitro fertilization to understand the challenges faced by patients over forty. As part of IVF, a woman underwent hormone therapy to encourage the ovaries to release multiple eggs. Those eggs were then collected and placed in a petri dish with sperm from the woman’s partner—or, for an additional fee, even injected with sperm to facilitate fertilization. But if the woman was close to forty, or older, like Melanie, the chances for successful fertilization were slim. By that point in a woman’s life, her eggs had not only declined rapidly in number but also in quality—in fact, by the time a woman was forty-three, only about ten percent of her eggs were viable. The older the woman, the poorer the chances of harvesting enough viable eggs to fertilize and transfer back to her body. That’s why some clinics didn’t even take women over forty.
“And you never signed any kind of permission allowing them to share your eggs?”
“Never.”
“Have you confronted Sherman about this?” Lake asked.
“Of course. I called him after I’d figured out Melanie was a patient. He was totally patronizing. He told me I should talk to a psychologist who specializes in—quote—‘women like you.’”