J.I. flashed her a weary smile. “I didn’t come down here to visit and tell you all this to make you feel bad, or to scare you. I tell it so you’ll understand a rule I have, one that applies to you now. See, what caused Lenny’s condition was a mutation in a single X chromosome. The one bad rivet which made the temple of his body an uninhabitable ruin. Mandy and I had no idea that such a terrible thing could happen to a child of ours, that our love could create such tragedy. Our first child, our daughter Hannah, was just fine.”
He drained his coffee cup. “It’s the shouldadones that keep you awake at night, Alicia. We could have had a genescan done on Lenny before he was born, and they probably would have spotted that bad gene. The gene replacement therapy available back then was maybe good enough to have fixed the problem, and if not, preventing his birth would have been a mercy. It was an inconvenient, expensive option, and we never took it. Like now I wouldn’t spend every cent I have to make Lenny right. Anyway, for our third, Benjamin, you can believe we had it done.”
He put his cup aside, a sad but determined look on his face. “So this is why I ask that you go for the tests we never had done for Lenny. If there is a problem with the child you carry, it can be found and fixed before another life is ruined. Not doing everything I can to prevent another Lenny would kill me. Such work is still expensive, but GADA will pick up the tab. You can make the appointment for during work hours, even go in the company limo if you want.”
Alicia swallowed hard. “You said ask, but I don’t think you’re really asking.”
J.I. nodded soberly. “I’m not. All this was covered by a clause in the contract you signed when I hired you. I do not like forcing anyone to do anything against their will, but because of my Lenny I can give no leeway in this. I’m sorry, but this is a matter of conscience for me. Do you understand?”
She nodded slowly. “I guess I do.”
“Will you make me happy and do this for me? For your baby?”
Right then it didn’t seem like such a big deal. “Sure. Why not?”
J.I. hugged her, so relieved he cried. Even apart from needing the job and the money, not to mention the bennies, how could she have said no to a man and an argument like that?
“So what do you do for a living?” the woman asked, her crochet hook going back into high gear once more.
“I take care of the computer equipment at Goldman Architectural.”
Her green eyes widened. “Hey, they’re really famous! I’ve been to that museum they designed over Thirteenth. Modern art doesn’t do much for me, but I keep going back because that building is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. Do you like working there?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“That’s nice. What about the father?”
Alicia frowned. “What about him?”
“What’s he do for a living?”
“He—” She hesitated, not wanting to get into all of that with a perfect stranger. “He’s a mailman.”
The woman must have picked up something from her tone of voice. She stopped crocheting, cocked her head and said, “You make it sound like he’s out of the picture. Are you all by yourself in this?”
Alicia grimaced. “I guess you could say that.”
Dave was going to be out of the picture for some time. He was a hospitalized mailman with a fractured skull, three broken ribs, ruptured spleen, bruised kidneys, and both arms and one leg in a cast. The Davey Express wouldn’t be making any rounds for quite some time to come. Maybe never, considering how badly his leg— not to mention the rest of him—was messed up.
They had never caught the guys who had done it. His was just one out of a couple of dozen cases handled by one overworked detective. If it had happened while he had been on duty that might have been another story. But no, he had just been out walking his dog the evening he had been jumped.
They had killed Zippy, literally stomping the poor dachshund to death, and had damn near done the same thing to Dave. About all the information the detective had was that there had been four of them. That had been learned by simply counting the sets of bloody bootprints leading away.
“But the father wasn’t really your partner, was he?”
Alicia frowned. “What makes you say that?”
The woman smiled. “I can tell zese zings,” she intoned in a hokey accent, then winked, her eyes sparkling with merriment. “An old feminist like me was marching for the rights of gay women before you were even bom. I have a gay younger sister, and two gay nephews. Like the old saying goes, some of my best friends are straight. It’s not that hard to tell.”
Alicia wasn’t really that surprised or particularly put off. Being gay wasn’t something she tried to hide. And although she didn’t flaunt it—or at least she didn’t think she did—she knew that a combination of something about the way she looked and some sort of vibe she gave off made it obvious to a lot of people. Not ten minutes into her first interview with J.I. he’d asked if she was in a steady relationship or been, as he had so nicely put it, “between lady friends.”
“No,” she said in answer to the woman’s question. “Dave is just a real good friend who acted as sperm donor.” She let out a sad chuckle. “Becka and I used to tease him about being bisexual.”
“Becka was your partner?”
“Yeah. Was. We’d been together in a monoger for almost two years. We’d bought a house together. We decided to have kids together. So we did what a lot of gay women do. We got a male friend—Dave—to donate sperm. It was all supposed to be so romantic. We’d be pregnant together, have our babies together, grow old together raising them.”
“But something changed all that.”
Alicia nodded grimly. “Sure as hell did. I caught, she didn’t. Come to find out, she couldn’t. Becka went completely off the deep end. She even demanded that I have an abortion, saying that since she couldn’t have a baby I was betraying her by having one.”
Hardly aware of what she was doing, she cradled her belly protectively. “I refused. She trashed the place and left—and left me holding the mortgage and everything else.” She shrugged. “Don’t you just hate it when your life turns into something from a trashy soap opera?”
“You’ll meet someone else,” the woman offered gently.
Alicia snorted. “I always do. My problem is keeping them.”
Before Becka had been Donna, and before her Mariel. Each and every one of them had seemed like The One, Becka most of all.
Their almost two years together had turned out to be just one more thrilling episode of Alicia’s Post-Millennial Lesbian Love Follies. There were times finding someone to love and be loved by was like being in some sort of cruel lottery where you got the prize first, only to have it later taken away when your ticket proved to be yet another loser.
Alone again, her hopes and plans in ruins, and now pregnant to boot, she had briefly considered the abortion Becka had demanded.
But she was in her downhill thirties, and that old biological clock was ticking so loudly she almost had to wear earplugs when she looked in the mirror and counted those sags and wrinkles and gray hairs, which made her look more like her own mother than a potential mother with every passing day.
Especially when she frowned.
“What about your family?”
“My dad’s been dead over ten years now. When he died my mom took Jesus into her heart as her personal savior, and her version of him doesn’t leave any room for my kind.”
“She doesn’t accept your being gay.”
A bitter laugh. “She prays for me when she isn’t telling me I’m going to be microwaved in hell for all eternity because I’m an abomination in the eyes of God.”