Between Friends by Kristy Kiernan Page A

adopted by the rich woman up the road, that my mother had been an alcoholic killed by her own boyfriend.
    She had always had the most perfect, appropriate responses to my secrets.
    I came home for a visit on my twenty-seventh birthday, and as we leisurely walked down the same beach that had seen us race down it as children, she told me that she wouldn’t be having her own children. That she’d gotten bad eggs in the big supermarket of life, and they wouldn’t ever create a child, not with Benny, not with anyone.
    But there was hope, she’d said. IVF, in vitro fertilization, a procedure still new enough that it wasn’t on every news anchor’s teleprompter yet. She’d done her homework on the specifics, and it sounded viable to me.
    “So do it,” I’d encouraged, and she laughed.
    “I don’t know,” she’d said. “It’s so expensive, and it’s so uncertain, you know? I don’t produce viable eggs, so you have to use donor eggs, of course, and who knows what you get there, right?”
    “God, here,” I said, turning toward her and thrusting my hands at her from my hips. “Take mine! I’ll never use them.”
    And we both laughed, the soft, salt-heavy wind twining strands of hair across our faces. And then I stopped laughing.
    “Hey,” I said. “Why not?”
    “What?”
    “I’m serious. Why not? Why couldn’t you use my eggs? I’d be willing to bet they’re the most ripe, fertilizable things in the world just because I don’t want them. Why couldn’t I be the donor?”
    She looked almost confused. I think that, until then, the idea had been a fantasy, and here I was, offering it to her on a platter as if it were just that simple. It must have seemed incredibly frivolous to her, for me to be so free with the one thing she felt so abjectly inadequate in producing herself. As if I were offering her hard candies from a never-ending bowl.
    “I couldn’t ask you to do that,” she said slowly, obviously thinking about how she might, indeed, do just that.
    I never had a second’s hesitation. If there’d been a speculum and petri dish on the beach, I’d have done it right then. Of course, I learned that it wasn’t quite so simple.
    I moved back home for a year, injecting myself with hormones, enduring procedures only slightly less personal than giving birth myself in order to make my ovaries overproduce and sync my and Ali’s cycles. There were failures to implant, and two miscarriages, and I grieved with her, and with Benny, as if they had been my own. I helped plant the magnolia trees in their backyard in honor of those tiny babies.
    And I felt horribly guilty, too. When the embryo didn’t implant or she miscarried, I couldn’t help but wonder if the flaw lay within my eggs. Though of course, I wasn’t the only genetic material in there. Technically, they were mine and Benny’s. That little irony, considering the fact that neither of us could be less attracted to each other, never escaped me, and perhaps that was part of why they never made it; perhaps even at our cellular level we didn’t play well together.
    I would often catch her looking at Benny and me in turn, with a Madonna smile on her face, and I knew she was putting an ideal child together in her mind out of our individual parts.
    “God, I hope the kid gets your teeth,” she said fervently once, and remembering Benny in middle school with his mouth full of metal, we’d laughed. That had been early on. The humor turned black after the second miscarriage. After the fifth try we called a halt to it.
    But it was the magic cycle, because then there was Letty, Letitia, named for Benny’s grandmother. I’d been graced with the honor of choosing her middle name, and while I’d considered Barbara, I finally settled on Makani, Hawaiian for “the wind.” Of course she grew up to hate both of them.
    But what joy she brought my friend. What gratitude and satisfaction and fulfillment. The craziness of the press coverage—generated by the PR