If you have further questions, please contact our clinic manager, Rhonda Bixby, and she would be happy to assist.
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Respectfully,
Dr. Wickham and Team
Wickham Fertility Clinic
Chicago, IL
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“Carina,” I call to my sister in the next room. A second later, she appears in the doorway of my home office, my nine-month-old daughter, Lucia, on her shoulder. “Read this.”
I hand her the letter. Her nose wrinkles and she squints. “What’s this mean?”
“Why would they send that to me?”
“Clerical error.”
“Clearly.” I take the letter back and scan it once more. “Why does that name sound familiar? Fabian Catalano. I swear I’ve heard that before.”
“Wait.” Hoisting the baby on her other hip, she slides her phone out from her back jeans pocket and impressively uses her thumb to tap his name into Google. “Oh my god.”
“What? What?”
Flipping the screen toward me, she all but shoves it in my face. “Fabian Catalano—the tennis player. He beat Rafael Nadal last year in the Spanish Open, remember? And then they got into some kind of fist fight after their match in Paris?”
“I literally don’t watch tennis. You know that,” I remind her before feasting my eyes on the muscled Adonis in the images before me. He’s a beautiful man, I will admit. His thick black hair is shoved back carelessly with a Nike sweatband, his shirtless torso glints with sweat, and his generous hands are wrapped tight around the base of a neon-yellow tennis racket. Sports—or anything involving competition—has never been my thing, but I’m sure I’ve heard his name in passing before. Maybe in a news clip or on a billboard somewhere.
“What if he’s your donor?” she asks, covering my daughter’s ears despite the fact that she’s still very much a baby and wouldn’t be able to comprehend any of this. “Remember his donor name? Ambitious Athlete? And he was half Italian. Isn’t Catalano an Italian surname?”
“There’s no way.” This kind of thing doesn’t happen. For starters, it’d be a careless and expensive move on the clinic’s part. And one as advanced as Wickham surely has a system in place to prevent this kind of privacy breach.
I steal her phone and scroll through the images again.
Lucia came out with a head of thick black hair when she was born—a far cry from my God-given chocolate-dirt locks. My dad called her Priscilla Presley the first week and thought it was the funniest thing in the world.
But lots of people have black hair. It’s not like it’s rare or anything.
“Did you save the sheet?” she asks.
“What sheet?”
“The Ambitious Athlete one? With his donor number and description?” Carina points to my filing cabinet. She knows damn well I save everything. I’m an informational pack rat.
Rising from my desk, I head over to the cabinet where I keep all of Lucia’s medical records—and every piece of paper the fertility clinic ever sent me home with. Bloodwork. Test results. Appointment confirmations. Follow up schedules. Sliding the drawer out, I pluck out Lucia’s file and flip to the pack, where I kept the original sheet describing Ambitious Athlete.
“Let me see.” Carina reaches for it, but I swipe it away.
“If it is him,” I say, “and it isn’t. It’s not going to change anything.”
She bounces Lucia on her hip, eyes wide and impatient. “Come on. Let’s see.”
“I don’t know if I want to know though.” I chew my bottom lip. “The whole point of this was for it to be anonymous. And then what, when Lucia gets older, I’ll have to make the decision of either telling her who he is and explaining that even though we know who he is, he’ll never be a part of her life—or lying to her and acting like I don’t know. I don’t want to be put in that position.”
“Don’t you think the cat’s already out of the bag?” she asks. “Either it’s Fabian Catalano or it’s not. From here on out, you’re going to hear his name and think of this moment. This question. It’s going to haunt you and you know it. Don’t you want to put your mind at rest? It’s not like it’ll change anything. He’s not going to suddenly have parental rights or be a part of her life. Your day-to-day isn’t going to change. You’re still going to be a single mama doing your thing with the most beautiful baby girl this world has ever seen. Whether or not you know the name of her father won’t change that.”
I place the sheet of paper next to my laptop and fold into my chair, tugging fistfuls of hair and exhaling.
“I’m happy to compare the numbers for you … I could keep that information safe until you decide you want it someday,” she says. It’s not unlike the gender reveal we did last year. Carina accompanied me to my twenty-week scan and the technician wrote the baby’s gender in an envelope, sealing it and giving it to my sister for safekeeping until we could reveal at a small friends and family gathering at my parents’ house.