My husband and I spent eight years and $46,000 trying for a baby. An hour after our twin boys were cut out of me, his chair was empty, his wedding ring was on my tray table, and his only text said, “Don’t call. Ask your doctor what I asked her.” So I asked her, and she pulled the curtain shut before she answered.
Eight years.
Four egg retrievals, two losses, and a shoebox under the sink full of tests I couldn’t make myself throw out.
Gavin did every injection himself.
He’d warm the vial between his palms first, because I’d read somewhere it hurt less, and he’d count down from three and go on two so I couldn’t tense up.
He named the red sharps bin Kevin. I have no idea why. It was just Kevin.
After the second loss I fell apart in the car, and he pulled into a Kwik Trip and sat with me for forty minutes with the engine running and never once said “next time.”
That was who I married.
Then the fourth transfer took.
I saw the result at 6:10 on a Thursday, perched on the edge of the tub, and Gavin drove to my sister Bianca’s house still in his socks to show her the stick.
At the eleven-week scan the tech went quiet, then turned the screen toward us.
“That’s one,” she said. “And that’s the other one.”
Two boys.
Gavin painted the nursery a green called Fernwood and built both cribs on the floor with the instructions spread out around him like a map.
He brought me lemon popsicles at midnight. He rubbed my feet during the news.
The only person who wasn’t thrilled was his mother.
Loretta came to the shower in Sioux Falls, sat in the corner with her purse on her knees, and asked me exactly one question the whole afternoon.
“Did the clinic use all his, or did they have to help?”
I laughed. Gavin went red to the ears and walked her out to the car early.
I should have asked him about that.
I didn’t.
At thirty-six weeks my pressure spiked, and they moved the section up to that same night.
Halfway through prep my numbers dropped, and the anesthesiologist said they’d have to put me all the way under.
Gavin was in the paper scrubs, gripping my fingers through the bed rail.
“You’ll open your eyes and they’ll both be here,” he said.
That’s the last thing he ever said to my face.
When I came to, the window was going gray and my mouth tasted like pennies.
A nurse named Marisol was fixing my IV line.
“Two boys,” she said. “Five pounds one and five pounds six. Loud. Both of them.”
She brought them in one at a time and laid them on my chest, and I counted twenty fingers twice.
Then she took them down for their checks and I turned toward Gavin’s chair.
Empty.
His gray hoodie was folded on the seat.
His wedding ring was on my tray table next to a cup of ice chips, standing straight up on its edge like he’d balanced it there on purpose.
I called him eleven times.
Voicemail. Every one.
Then a single text came through.
“Don’t call. Ask your doctor what I asked her.”
I held the phone out so Marisol could read it.
“Where is he?” I said. “Did he see them? Did he even SEE THEM?”
Her face changed. Only a little. Like somebody had handed her something she wasn’t supposed to carry in here.
“Let me find Dr. Nygaard,” she said.
The clock over the door said nineteen minutes before anyone came back.
I had the ring in my fist the whole time.
Dr. Ilse Nygaard did my last two transfers before she moved over to delivery. She knew my file better than I did.
She closed the curtain all the way around the bed before she said a word.
Then she sat on the edge of the mattress instead of the chair.
“He held them both,” she said. “For a long time. He was good with them.”
“Then WHERE IS HE?”
“He came and found me at four this morning. He asked me for something, and he paid for it at the desk himself.”
“Asked you for WHAT?”
She looked at my fist before she answered.
“A blood type on each of the boys,” she said. “And then one on himself.”
My stitches pulled when I sat up. I didn’t care.
“Why would he NEED that? He’s their FATHER.”
She didn’t answer that.
She asked me something instead.
“Tessa, at your fourth transfer, do you remember Gavin actually going into the collection room?”
I started to say of course.
Nothing came out.
Because I couldn’t picture it. Not once in eight years.
7:52 A.M.
“He never went in that room,” I said. “Not one time.”
Dr. Nygaard didn’t move.
“He did it at his mother’s,” I said. “Her house is ten minutes from the clinic. Ours is almost an hour. Your people said inside sixty minutes or it’s no good.”
“I know what we said.”
“He brought it in a brown lunch sack. Inside his coat. To keep it warm.”
I could see that part fine. The sack. The coat zipped up over it. Gavin coming down the hall in pre-op with his cheeks red from the cold.
I just couldn’t see the room. Because there wasn’t a room. There was Loretta’s kitchen.
Dr. Nygaard had a tablet face down on her knee. She turned it over and didn’t hand it to me yet.
“The boys are both B positive,” she said. “You’re O negative. I’ve known that since your first transfer.”
“So?”
“Gavin is O. I ran it twice. He watched me run it the second time.”
I didn’t know enough about blood to know what that meant. I knew enough about her face.
“Two O parents can’t make a B baby,” she said. “Not one. Not two.”
I uncurled my fingers. The ring had left a red circle in my palm.
“Then the lab is wrong.”
“He asked me that too. So I pulled the clinic’s intake log for your fourth retrieval. Every sample that comes in gets signed for at the window. Time and name.”
She turned the tablet around.
PARTNER SPECIMEN — HOME COLLECTION. RECEIVED 7:52 A.M.
There was a box under it that said DELIVERED BY.
The name in the box was his mother’s.
Loretta’s kitchen
Loretta Ricci lives on the west side of town in a split-level with plastic runners on the carpet.
She kept the thermostat at sixty-four and a dish of butterscotch candies nobody ever took.
On her fridge there were church bulletins, a coupon for oil changes, a magnet from the Corn Palace, and two old Red Cross donor cards from back when her boys gave blood together every Christmas Eve. Gavin’s said O POS. His brother’s said B POS. I’d stood in front of those cards every holiday for twelve years and never thought about them once.
That kitchen is where it happened, all four times.
Retrieval mornings went the same way. Gavin dropped me at the clinic at 5:45. I went in to change and get my IV. He drove ten minutes to his mother’s.
Loretta had the kitchen lights on and coffee going. She’d go sit in the car with the heater running so he had the house to himself.
Then he’d come back with the sack inside his coat, hand it in at the window, and find me in pre-op before they put me under.
I was always under for the part with the eggs. I was always in recovery when the sample got checked.
So I never saw any of it. I didn’t need to. Gavin was there.
The first two cycles, his numbers were low. The embryologist said “low but workable,” and Gavin made a joke about being an underachiever, and I loved him for making the joke.
We lost the first one at seven weeks. The second at nine. That was the Kwik Trip.
Third cycle, Dr. Nygaard took over our transfers. She called us in after the retrieval and sat us down in an office with a plant that needed water.
“I’m going to be honest with you,” she said. “We found two motile sperm in the whole sample. Two.”
Gavin laughed. Then he stopped.
We put back the one embryo we got. It didn’t take.
At the follow-up she slid a folder across the desk. It had a donor catalog in it.
“I’m not saying today,” she said. “I’m saying it’s time to talk about it.”
Gavin went white and pushed the folder back with two fingers. He didn’t say a word in the car.
At Easter, Loretta set a ham on the table and said, to nobody, “Nobody’s putting a stranger in this family. I’ll tell you that for free.”
I hadn’t told her about the folder. I figured Gavin had.
Loretta told the same story every Christmas. Gavin had the mumps at fourteen, missed his whole eighth-grade basketball season, and she sat up with him nine nights straight with a bag of frozen peas. She’d tell it and pat his knee and say, “My poor baby. Nine nights.”
Gavin would roll his eyes. Everybody laughed. It was a family story.
Then the fourth cycle.
That morning was different in one way. Gavin came into pre-op early. Seven-fifteen, before they’d even started my IV.
His hands were shaking. I held them both.
“Mom’s driving it in,” he said. “She said I’d put the truck in the ditch. She said go sit with your wife.”
I remember thinking that was the nicest thing Loretta had ever done for me.
That afternoon the embryologist called. Eleven eggs. Nine fertilized.
“His numbers were way up,” she said. “Whatever you two are doing, keep doing it.”
Gavin put the phone on speaker and yelled, “It’s Mom’s coffee.”
Loretta was at our kitchen table that night with her purse on her knees. She didn’t smile.
“Told you,” she said.
In my hospital bed, Dr. Nygaard was still holding the tablet.
“Did his mother ever bring a sample in before?” she said.
“No. Just that once.”
“That’s the one we used.”
One ring
I called Loretta.
I didn’t decide to. My thumb just went to her name.
She picked up on the first ring. She never picked up on the first ring for me in twelve years.
“Well,” she said.
“Where’s Gavin?”
“He’s here. He’s in my kitchen. He doesn’t want you on the phone.”
“Put him on, Loretta.”
“I will not.”
I could hear a chair scrape. I could hear her coffee maker gurgle, the old one with the cracked lid.
“Did you hand in his cup?” I said. “At the fourth retrieval?”
“I carried a lunch sack ten minutes because my son was shaking too hard to drive. That’s what I did. You want to make that into something, go ahead.”
“The boys are B. He’s O. Dr. Nygaard ran it twice.”
“Then you should ask your doctor what’s in your babies. Not me.”
“What does that mean?”
“Those were your eggs, weren’t they?” she said. “You were in that clinic all morning. I was in a parking lot.”
I had to put the phone down on the blanket for a second. My stitches felt like a zipper someone was pulling.
When I picked it back up she was still talking.
“Eight years he wore himself out for you. Needles every night. And now this. Now you call me on the morning I should be holding my grandsons, and you ask me what I did.”
“Are they your grandsons?”
That stopped her. Not long. Just a breath.
“Don’t you dare,” she said.
Dr. Nygaard was still on the edge of the bed. She’d heard all of it. She didn’t look away from me.
“Put my husband on,” I said.
“He’s heard enough from you.”
“He hasn’t heard ANYTHING from me. He left before I came to.”
“And whose fault is that?”
I didn’t have an answer that would fit through a phone.
Then I heard him. Far back. Like he was standing in the doorway to her living room.
“Mom. Who is it.”
“Nobody,” she said. “Sit down, honey.”
“Gavin,” I said, as loud as I could. “GAVIN.”
There was a sound like the phone got pressed against her chest.
When she came back her voice was flat.
“You leave him alone today. You hear me? You’ve done enough.”
She hung up.
Thirty seconds later my phone buzzed.
It was Gavin.
“Please don’t do this to my mother. She’s sixty-six.”
The margin
Bianca got there a little after eight, still in her work fleece, with a gas station coffee in each hand.
“Marisol called me,” she said. “She said you were asking for me in your sleep. Where’s Gavin?”
I told her.
I told her all of it, in the wrong order, and she put both coffees down on the windowsill and didn’t touch either one.
“His MOTHER carried it?”
“Just the fourth time.”
“The one that worked.”
“Yes.”
Bianca is three years younger than me. She has never once in her life waited to be asked.
“I’m going over there,” she said.
“He’s not going to come out for you.”
“Then I’ll go in.”
Dr. Nygaard had gone out for a while. She came back with a folder this time instead of the tablet. Paper. Old clinic letterhead.
“I want you to see something,” she said. “Because I should have said something two years ago.”
She opened it to the lab sheet from my fourth retrieval.
It listed Gavin’s name, the date, and a bunch of numbers I didn’t understand.
There was one I did. Next to “total motile,” somebody had written a number in the forties. Forty-something million.
“Third cycle he had two,” Dr. Nygaard said. “Two. Not two million.”
She put her finger on the margin.
There was her handwriting. Small, slanted, in blue pen.
Dramatic improvement?? Recheck partner next cycle.
“There wasn’t a next cycle,” she said. “You were pregnant. Nobody rechecks good news.”
“Could it happen? Could he just get better?”
“Men’s numbers move. From two to forty million in ten weeks, after the history he has? I’ve never seen it. I wrote that because I didn’t believe it.”
Bianca was reading over my shoulder.
“So whatever got signed in at the window,” she said, “it wasn’t what he filled.”
Dr. Nygaard didn’t nod. She didn’t say no either.
I closed my eyes and tried to see that week. The week of the fourth cycle.
I was on day nine of stims. Bloated, crying at commercials. Gavin’s father had died the winter before, and they set the headstone that Saturday, and I didn’t go to the cemetery because bending over was beyond me.
Gavin’s brother flew in from Phoenix for it. He hadn’t been home in three years. He slept on Loretta’s couch all week, under the afghan with the orange squares.
I’d brought over a pan of bars on the Friday. He’d been on that couch eating cereal out of the box.
I remembered that. I remembered the orange squares.
“Bianca,” I said. “Don’t go to Loretta’s.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s not there anymore. Gavin doesn’t stay where it’s bad. He goes and sits somewhere with the engine running.”
“Where?”
“The Kwik Trip on 41st. By the car wash. That’s where he took me after we lost the second one.”
Bianca already had her keys out.
Dr. Nygaard closed the folder. She left it on my tray, right next to the ice chips, where the ring had been.
There was a second sheet clipped behind the lab report. Third cycle. Her handwriting again.
Discussed donor. Partner declined. Partner’s mother called clinic 3/14 asking about “family donors.” Referred to counseling.
The Kwik Trip on 41st
Bianca called me from the parking lot forty minutes later.
“He’s here,” she said. “Gray truck, by the air pump. Engine’s on. He’s just sitting.”
“Is he okay?”
“He looks like hell, Tess. I’m walking over.”
I heard her boots on the lot. A car door. The radio inside the truck, low, a farm report.
Then Bianca’s voice, close to the phone.
“Your wife’s on the line. You can deal with her or you can deal with me. And I’m meaner.”
There was a long time where nothing happened. Then the phone moved hands.
“Tess.”
He sounded like he’d been yelling. He hadn’t. That’s just what his voice did when he’d been crying in a truck.
“Where are you going?” I said.
“No idea. Nobody tells you where you go after this.”
“You come back here.”
“They’re not mine.”
“They’re five pounds one and five pounds six and they’ve been asking for you all morning.”
“They’re babies. They don’t ask for anything.”
“You don’t know that. You left.”
He breathed for a while.
“I did my part,” he said. “That morning. I did it, in her bathroom, like always. I put the sack in her hand in the kitchen. I put it in her hand, Tess.”
“I know.”
“And she walked out to the car with it. I watched her back out of the driveway.”
“I know.”
“At five this morning I called her and asked her. I said Mom, did you hand in what I gave you. And she said yes. She swore on Dad.”
“Then what do you think happened?”
“The clinic. Somebody at the window. Somebody mixed up two bags.” His voice broke on bags. “Some guy’s. Some stranger’s. The exact thing I said no to.”
“Gavin.”
“I sat there holding them for an hour. I counted their fingers too. And I kept thinking I’m holding some other man’s kids and I didn’t even get to pick him.”
“Your mother called the clinic,” I said. “Before the fourth cycle. She asked them about family donors.”
Nothing.
The farm report kept going behind him. Soybeans, something about the price.
“Dr. Nygaard wrote it down,” I said. “March. It’s in my file. Your mother asked.”
“She wouldn’t.”
“It’s in my FILE, Gavin.”
“Don’t. She’s sixty-six. She sat up with me nine nights.”
“I’m not asking you to do anything to her,” I said. “I’m asking you to come back and look at me.”
“I can’t look at them.”
“Then don’t. Look at me.”
I heard Bianca say something I couldn’t make out. Then Gavin said, “Okay.” Just that.
The truck door shut.
Bianca came back on the line.
“I’m following him,” she said. “He’s driving. He’s coming.”
B positive
He came in at 10:40 with his keys still in his hand.
His Red Cross pin was on the ring, the one for a gallon, the little red drop. He’d been giving blood since high school.
He stood just inside the curtain like he wasn’t sure he was allowed in.
Bianca came in behind him and stood by the window and didn’t say a word, which for Bianca is a medical event.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
He looked at the recliner. His hoodie was still folded on it.
He didn’t sit.
Marisol pushed the curtain back with her elbow. She had both boys in one rolling bassinet, end to end, two lumps in striped blankets.
“Your guys are done with their checks,” she said. “Both perfect.”
Then she saw his face and stopped.
“I can take them back down,” she said.
“No,” I said. “Leave them.”
She parked the bassinet by my bed and went to the foot of it with her clipboard. She stayed.
Each boy had a card taped to the foot of the bassinet. Blue cards. Weight, length, time of birth.
And at the bottom, in the same nurse handwriting, BLOOD TYPE: B POS. Twice.
Gavin looked at the cards. He’d seen them at four in the morning. That was how this started.
He looked at them for a long time.
“I’m O,” he said. “I’ve been O my whole life. I’ve got a pin.”
“I know.”
“Two O’s don’t make a B. She told me. I looked it up in the hallway to make sure she wasn’t wrong.”
“I know, honey.”
The bigger one started to fuss. Five pounds six. He had a voice already.
Gavin’s hand went to the side of the bassinet. Not to the baby. Just to the plastic.
“Gavin,” I said. “Who’s the B on your mother’s fridge?”
He said nothing.
“The two cards. Under the Corn Palace magnet. Yours says O. Who’s the other one?”
He knew. I could see him know.
He put his keys down on my tray table, next to the folder and the ice chips. He did it slow, like they were heavy.
“Dad was B,” he said. “Mom always said one of us got Dad’s blood and one of us got hers.”
“And?”
“And she said the one who got Dad’s was the one who’d go far.”
“Gavin. Who was on her couch that week?”
He sat down in the recliner then. Right on top of his hoodie.
He put his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, and he talked into his hands.
“He came up for the stone,” he said. “He slept on her couch. He was there that morning. He was asleep on the couch when I got there and he was asleep on the couch when I left.”
Marisol looked down at her clipboard.
“Was he asleep,” Bianca said from the window, “when your mother got in the car?”
Gavin took his hands off his face.
“No idea,” he said. “I didn’t look back.”
The purse on her knees
I called Loretta again.
“Your grandsons are awake,” I said. “Gavin’s here. Come now, or don’t come.”
She was there in thirty-five minutes. Ten minutes from the clinic is fifteen from the hospital. She’d taken her time on purpose.
She came in with her good coat on and her purse held in front of her. She didn’t look at me.
She looked at the bassinet.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, look at them.”
Gavin stood up out of the recliner. She went right past him.
“Can I?” she said, to Marisol, not to me.
I nodded at Marisol before she could look at me for permission.
Marisol put the bigger one in Loretta’s arms. Loretta sat in the chair by the window with him, set her purse on her knees, and put the baby on top of the purse like it was a table.
She ran a finger down his face.
“There,” she said. “Look at that chin. That’s the Ricci chin.”
“Which Ricci?” I said.
She kept her finger on his chin.
“Don’t start,” she said.
“Which one, Loretta?”
“They’re Ricci boys. They’re Ricci through and through. Every drop of them. That’s all anybody in this room needs to know.”
“Mom,” Gavin said.
“Every DROP, Gavin. Do you understand me? Not some college boy’s out of a catalog. Not some stranger off a list. Your own blood. I made sure of that.”
Nobody said anything.
She heard it after it was out. You could see her hear it.
She didn’t take it back. She lifted her chin instead.
“You want to know?” she said. “Fine. Here it is. I poured yours down my sink. There was nothing in it, honey. There was never going to be anything in it.”
“How do you know that?” Gavin said.
“Because I sat up with you nine nights when you were fourteen, that’s how. Because the doctor out in Brandon sat me down in his office after and told me what mumps does to a boy that age when it goes down. He said likely never. He said those words to me. Likely never.”
Gavin’s mouth opened. Nothing came out of it.
“I never told you because you were fourteen,” she said. “And then you were twenty. And then you married her and the two of you were glowing, and what was I supposed to say? Sorry, honey, you’re broke down there, I’ve known for years?”
“You let us,” he said. “Eight years.”
“I let you TRY. You wanted to be the one. I let you be the one as long as I could.”
“Forty-six thousand dollars, Mom.”
“I didn’t spend a dime of it. You did. You did that yourself.”
She bounced the baby once on the purse. He stopped fussing. That was the worst part.
“Then that doctor,” she said, and pointed her chin at Dr. Nygaard, who had come in quiet and was standing by the curtain, “puts a book in front of you with men’s pictures in it. Like ordering lunch. A stranger. In my family. Your father would have come out of the ground.”
“So you called them,” I said.
“I called and asked about family. They said I’d need consent forms from everybody and a counselor. Forms.” She said it like a swear. “So I didn’t bother them with forms.”
“Did he know?” Gavin said. “Did HE know?”
Loretta looked at the baby instead of her son.
“I told your brother you asked me to ask him. That you were too proud to ask him yourself. He said he’d do it for you. He said don’t ever tell him I said yes. He did it for YOU.”
“You told him I ASKED?”
“I told him what he needed to hear to help his brother. He’s a good boy. He did a good thing.”
“He thinks I asked him,” Gavin said. To me, not her. “Two years. He thinks I know.”
Loretta stood up with the baby. She held him out toward Gavin like a present.
“Take him,” she said. “Take your son. Nobody ever has to know any of this. Not one person. The blood’s the same, Gavin, it’s the same blood.”
Gavin didn’t move.
I put my arms out.
“Give him to me,” I said.
She looked at my arms. Then at Gavin. Then at Marisol at the foot of the bed.
She gave him to me. She had to. There was nobody else in the room who would take him from her.
He was warm from the purse. I put him on my chest next to the IV line.
“Marisol,” I said. “Is there a visitor list for this room?”
“There is.”
“Take her off it.”
“You can’t,” Loretta said. “Gavin. Tell her she can’t.”
Gavin looked at his mother for a long time.
“She can,” he said.
“I’m their GRANDMOTHER.”
“You’re their grandmother,” I said. “You’re just not going to be in this room.”
Her face went a color I’d never seen on it.
“Then I’ll tell everybody,” she said. “Every person at St. Lambert’s. Your sister’s whole office. I’ll tell everybody whose they are and you’ll never get to say it different.”
“Tell them,” I said.
That stopped her. She had her mouth open to keep going and there was no road left.
Marisol walked to the curtain and held it open with one arm. She didn’t say anything. She just held it.
Loretta picked her purse up off the chair. She looked at Gavin one more time.
He didn’t walk her to the car this time.
When the curtain fell shut behind her, he was still standing in the middle of the room with his hands open, like he’d dropped something.
The ring was in my fist again. I didn’t remember picking it up.
I held my other hand out to him.
“Come here,” I said.
He came. He knelt down by the bed rail so his face was level with the baby’s.
I took his left hand. It was shaking, worse than that morning in pre-op.
“Three,” I said.
I slid it on at two.
Fernwood
It’s six weeks later now. Three in the morning.
The nursery is still that green. The paint can is still in the closet with FERNWOOD on the lid in his handwriting, in case we ever scuff it.
Gavin has the smaller one on his shoulder. Five pounds one is nine pounds now. They’re both B positive. They both scream like they’re owed money.
He called his brother the second week. He stood out by the mailbox for an hour, in the cold, in his socks. When he came in he said his brother cried, and then he said his brother thought he’d known the whole time, and then he didn’t say anything else that night.
Loretta has called forty-one times. I counted. It started eleven on the first day and it’s down to about one a week.
I don’t answer. Gavin doesn’t either.
She sent a card for their six-week birthday with two twenty-dollar bills inside and “From your Nonna” on the envelope. Gavin put it in the shoebox under the sink, with the tests. He didn’t open the money.
Bianca’s office knows. St. Lambert’s knows. Somebody at the Hy-Vee asked me in the checkout line last Tuesday if it was true, and I said yes, and I bought my diapers.
Before he does their bath, Gavin takes his ring off so it won’t scratch them. He stands it up on the edge of the changing table, straight up, the way he left it on my tray.
Every night, when they’re dried off and down, he puts it back on.
Tonight he’s got a bottle going in the warmer, and he takes it out and holds it between his palms anyway, the way he used to hold the vials.
He tests a drop on his wrist. The baby on his shoulder roots around for it.
“Okay, buddy,” he says. “Three.”
He goes on two.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who spent years in a waiting room hoping.
For more family betrayals and the truths that surface afterward, read the story of a rent check signed for nine years without a second glance and the apology handed over in a husband’s name. And for a different kind of family crisis, there’s the niece who was the last woman to get out of that Tahoe.
