sperm donor pt. 1
“Is that her?”
Will wished he had glasses like so many of his fellow doctors did. He wanted to stare at the steely-eyed redhead with something lightening the strength of his stare, wanted to feign messing with them so that he could catch her at her humanity, pretend not to see so that he could see better. But ever since he was young, Will had had phenomenal eyesight – how else could he have caught the lines between the worlds – that didn’t deteriorate with age. Some called him lucky. Sometimes he wished he didn’t see so well. It gave him such terrible migraines now.
“Yes, yes, that’s her!” Luisa exclaimed, beaming. “That’s Rose. That’s my wife.” She grabbed his hand just as soon as he’d slipped his shoes off – it was an old habit from his time spent studying abroad, making sure to come back every year, just as he’d said he would – and pulled him into the living room.
Luisa wore the same bright smile she always did, except for when she didn’t. He’d been privy to a few of those moments. It was his surgeries, after all, that she’d burst into, saying something about Carla told me to help save you, and he’d been thrown back to Cittàgazze and the adults who could see spectres that he’d never been able to see. He’d thought he might see one, then, coming for Luisa the way he’d imagined they might have tried to come for his mom, when she was still alive, but there was nothing. After that, she hadn’t been as annoying as he’d once believed. Or, really, she had been, but he understood a little better.
Other than two of her three roommates, Will had been the only one to visit her. Maybe because everyone else in their line of work understood how closely to the line of their own mental breakdown they straddled and were afraid that in standing so near to someone confronting it they might catch it, or maybe because he understood what it meant to be losing your grip on reality and desperately needing someone else to be the touchstone of what that means (not because he’d ever had an issue with that but because he’d lived with his mother so long). And, in truth, Will had suddenly – and against his wishes – made that connection between Luisa and his own mother. It was impossible not to – holding her away from him with one hand on each of her arms, staring into eyes that seemed just as there and yet not, listening to a voice just as insistent on helping him as his mother had once been to touch all of the benches in the park or count each of the planks in them.
And just as surely as he had made that connection, he now made one between the redhead sitting on the sofa in front of him, one leg crossed over the other at her knee, with the terrible, horrible woman who had once borne (and once kidnapped) the love of his life.
(No matter how long it had been, there was no comparison to Lyra, and he wouldn’t even try. He had one love. Everyone else…was everyone else.)
“Rose,” Luisa said, stopping just in front of him the way a schoolgirl might, trying to introduce the boy they had a crush on to their mother or father, “this is Will Parry.”
Rose’s bright blue eyes met Will’s dark ones, and he felt something dark like lightning striking between them. Some people might consider that a good thing, but Will didn’t. Lightning was a plasma, it hurt, and it often changed people in strange ways. Some of them weren’t able to feel heat or cold anymore, but that didn’t mean their body didn’t stop reacting to it. Lightning was dangerous.
Rose stood, flattened the wrinkles in her knee-length white skirt, and then held out one hand (long, slender fingers – Luisa must have enjoyed that – but covered with freckles and wrinkles because, in his experience, hands were the hardest place to hide age, and even with his missing fingers and the age old scars, his, too, were beginning to grow old). He took her right hand with his left one, watched as her brows lifted at the sight of his marred hand.
Good. She had some humanity in her, then. Or perhaps this, too, was an act. The Coulter lady had been very good at acting.
“It’s a pleasure to finally be meeting you, Will.” Rose gave his hand a gentle squeeze, but she didn’t smile. Maybe she, too, understood him for what he was, in some small way. She wasn’t going to lie to him. Not like that.
Luisa curled up on the sofa next to Rose, tucking her legs up underneath her, and then patted the spot next to her as indication that Will should sit there. He didn’t, instead taking one of the plush chairs next to them. As relaxed as Luisa appeared to be, Rose didn’t, watching his movements the way a hawk watches its prey.
But Will didn’t act like prey. He relaxed, one arm on either one of the chair, leaning back with a sigh. “So tell me a little about the procedure, if I agree.”
Luisa nodded. “We take some of Rose’s eggs,” she said, glancing to Rose, who at the same moment reached over and took her hand in her own, “and some of your sperm. Everything’s started in test tubes, and then I carry them. We hope that one sticks.” She turned back to Will with a little smile. “More than one might. That’s the way this sort of thing goes.” Then she bit her lower lip.
“We only plan to do this once,” Rose continued as Luisa glanced down.
“The full pregnancy bit, not the—” Luisa interrupted, waving one hand up between them. She swallowed. “It’s just, my age, you know.”
“It wouldn’t be a good risk.” Rose turned to Luisa. “It isn’t a good risk.”
“Well, you can’t, and I’m fine with it! I’d go the artificial insemination route myself, if I hadn’t—” Luisa shook her head and looked back to Will. “You were there. You know.”
Will watched the two of them. They weren’t really arguing, even if it looked like they were. He leaned forward. “I know you didn’t want to risk having a child with your family’s history of mental health and took the necessary measures to make sure that you couldn’t.” His gaze didn’t glance to Rose, but out of the corner of his eye, he tried to gauge her response. There was nothing different. That wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good either. “But that is exactly the risk you’re taking if you use my sperm.” He still didn’t look at Rose. “You know my mother’s history.”
“Yes,” Rose answered. “We’ve talked about that.”
Will’s ears were not as good as his eyes or his hands were, and he couldn’t hear anything in her tone to suggest that she meant anything other than what she said. Perhaps a little displeased, but nothing more than that. There was nothing to indicate that displeasure was with him or with Luisa’s choice in him. There was something else. He didn’t know what.
“You’re the best choice,” Luisa said, and then she glanced down at her hands. “You’re my only choice. There’s no one else I would trust enough to ask.” She smiled, a little haphazard, a little sad. “After everything, most of my friends…we’re not really friends anymore. It’s hard to stay friends with people when they all think you’re—”
“Don’t say it,” Rose interrupted before the word could slip through Luisa’s lips, and she rubbed soothing circles on the back of Luisa’s hand. “You don’t have to say it.”
Luisa swallowed and then nodded once. “The friends I have left are, uh, useless for this sort of thing.” Then she looked up with that look and met Will’s eyes. “I wouldn’t want anyone else, anyway. You’re the one who visited me.”
Will nodded once – a short, pert thing. Then he leaned back in his chair and took a deep breath. He looked up at Rose and said, finally, “It looks like we all know each other, except I don’t know anything about you.” His head tilted to one side as he met her eyes once more. “Why don’t you tell me what I need to know?”
Convince me, he was really saying. Luisa had convinced him to come, to listen, to consider. But as soon as he saw this woman, he knew that she was the one who had to make him believe she wouldn’t ruin everything. He wasn’t afraid of her in the slightest.
He just had a feeling.
“That’s…a long story,” Luisa answered instead, and she turned to look at Rose. They had a way of communicating without speaking – of course, they did, and it didn’t surprise him in the slightest to see it happening and not understand much of it at all – and in the end, she nodded once. “I’ll go get us a drink. You’re going to want one.”
“You shouldn’t be drinking,” Will said, all at once.
Luisa grinned. “I’m not. But I want to see you spew water everywhere. You won’t believe what she tells you.”
Somehow, Will was certain that wouldn’t be the case.