Part Ten: The Risks
He explained the risks.
Slowly. Carefully. The way I explain things to frightened parents at the hospital.
When two parents are closely related, he said, their child has a higher chance of inheriting two copies of the same rare recessive gene. One from each parent.
Most of the time, that’s harmless.
Sometimes, it causes a genetic condition.
“For children of unrelated parents,” Dr. Harrison said, “the background risk of a serious birth defect or genetic disorder is about three to four percent.”
He paused.
“For children of half-siblings,” he said, “it’s higher. Studies vary. Maybe six to nine percent.”
“So there’s a ninety percent chance they’re fine,” Emily said.
“Roughly,” Dr. Harrison said. “Yes.”
He looked at her.
“But I can’t tell you which group your baby is in,” he said. “Not yet. Not without more testing.”
He recommended an amniocentesis. For both of us. And whole-exome sequencing. A test that looks at every gene in the baby’s DNA.
It would take three weeks to get the results.
He also recommended something else.
“You need to talk to your mothers,” he said.
Part Eleven: The Drive Home
We sat in my car in the parking garage for an hour.
Neither of us said anything for a long time.
Then Emily laughed.
A strange, broken laugh.
“Same nose,” she said. “Same stubborn chin.”
She put her face in her hands.
“Our mothers used to joke about it,” she said. “Every single week.”
“And then they’d stop laughing,” I said quietly.
Emily looked at me.
“You noticed that too?” she said.
“Every time,” I said.
“Sarah,” she said. “What if it’s true?”
I looked out the windshield at the concrete wall of the parking garage.
“Then we’ve been sisters for twenty-five years,” I said. “And didn’t know it.”
Emily reached over and took my hand.
“We always knew it,” she said.
Part Twelve: Two Mothers
We went to see our mothers that night.
Together.
My mother, Marie, still lives in the yellow house on Sycamore Lane. She’s sixty-five. My dad, Erik, died of a stroke six years ago.
Emily’s mother, Barbara, still lives in the blue house next door. She’s sixty-four. Emily’s dad, Mike, is sixty-seven. Retired from the post office. Still alive. Still fixing things in his garage.
We knocked on my mother’s door at seven o’clock.
She opened it in her apron. She’d been baking. She saw our faces.
She stopped smiling.
“Mom,” I said. “Can you call Barbara? We need to talk to both of you.”
My mother looked at me for a long time.
Then she looked at Emily.
Then she took off her apron.
“I’ll call her,” she said quietly.
Barbara came through the hedge. The same gap our fathers never fixed. The same dirt path Emily and I wore down when we were little.
She came into my mother’s kitchen. She sat down at the table.
The two of them sat side by side. Two women in their sixties who’d been next-door neighbors for thirty-two years.
I set the genetics reports on the kitchen table.
“Dr. Harrison asked us a question today,” I said. “At the genetics clinic.”
My voice was shaking.
“He asked if Emily and I are biologically related,” I said.
My mother put her hand over her mouth.
Barbara closed her eyes.
Neither of them said That’s ridiculous.
Neither of them said Of course not.
They looked at each other.
Part Thirteen: 1993
It was Barbara who spoke first.
“Your father couldn’t have children,” she said to Emily.
Emily stared at her.
“Mike had the mumps,” Barbara said. “When he was nineteen. It made him sterile. We didn’t find out until we’d been trying for three years.”
She looked at her hands.
“He was so ashamed,” she said. “He made me promise never to tell anyone. Not his family. Not you.”
Then my mother spoke.
“Your father had a low sperm count,” she said to me. “Almost none. The doctors said we’d never conceive naturally.”
She looked at me.
“Erik was devastated,” she said. “He was so proud. He made me swear the same thing.”
“So we went to a fertility clinic,” Barbara said.
“In Columbus,” my mother said.
They looked at each other.
“Dr. Gerald Whitcomb,” Barbara said quietly. “The Whitcomb Fertility Clinic. On High Street.”
“He was the best,” my mother said. “Everybody said so. He’d helped hundreds of women.”
“He told us he used donor sperm from medical students,” Barbara said. “Anonymous. Screened. Healthy. Young men from Ohio State.”
“He said the donors were matched to our husbands,” my mother said. “Same coloring. Same build. So no one would ever know.”
“I went in March of 1993,” Barbara said. “Emily was born in December.”
“I went in April of 1992,” my mother said. “Sarah was born in January of 1993.”
Emily and I looked at each other.
“We didn’t know,” my mother said. “We didn’t know about each other.”
She looked at Barbara.
“We’d just moved here,” she said. “Erik got a job at the Honda plant in Marysville. We bought the yellow house in 1992.”
“We moved in next door in 1993,” Barbara said. “Mike got transferred to the Westbrook post office.”
“It was years before we figured it out,” Barbara said
