The packet had a cover page with a stock photo of a woman holding an infant in a field of soft-focus light. Twenty-two pages behind it, stapled at an angle someone had given up straightening. My husband was reading about a granola bar four states away in his phone. The nurse had a smile that had been waiting at the door since before we arrived, patient as a piece of furniture. I signed where the yellow tabs were, and there were so many yellow tabs.
She held the card out with two hands, like a restaurant check. Six circles in a row - each one a different shade of pencil-gray, and she'd drawn tiny stars next to three of them with a blue pen. "These are your best ones," she said, and tapped the stars with her fingernail. I put it in my coat pocket, next to a receipt from the parking garage. It rode there all the way home - stiff against my ribs, while I watched the highway.
The counselor's pen was one of those four-color ones, the kind with a little dial on top, and she'd clicked it to red without seeming to notice. She read the line twice, the same line - then set the paper flat on the desk and said, "Has your mother had any genetic screening? " There was a second form under the first one, a different color, and she pulled it out from the stack with two fingers the way you'd pull a card from a deck. I could hear the ventilation system. I thought about my mother's kitchen drawer, the rubber bands - the dead batteries she couldn't throw away, and the fact that she was sixty-one years old and had never once been asked that question, and wasn't in this room.
The Card in the Coat Pocket
The phone rang four times and then my mother picked up and I could hear the television behind her, some kind of game show, the bright urgent music of it. I said the letters - B-R-C-A, standing between two concrete pillars, and she said, "Is that the one they advertise? The swab? " A pigeon landed on the hood of the car in front of me and just stood there. I said it wasn't exactly the same and she said, "Well - do I need to do anything," and the game show behind her hit a bell sound, the kind that means someone won something, and I stood there with the parking ticket still in my hand and said, "I don't know yet.
The invoice had a bar code at the top and a due date in red - and below that a form with four small squares, each one with a word or two printed beside it in a font so thin it was almost not there. Donate to research. Donate to another family. Compassionate transfer. Discard.
The card had gone soft at one corner where the laminate had started to lift. I pressed it flat with my thumb, the way I used to press the corner back on the contact paper in the kitchen cabinet, that same useless reflex. Three of the stars were still there in blue pen, a little faded - and the circles still ran in their row - pencil-gray, smaller than I remembered, smaller than anything should be for what they were. I slid it back into the pocket without looking at the stars again and hung the coat on the hook and stood there with my hand still on the wool for a second longer than I needed to. Then I reached back in and turned off the light.
The form came back in an envelope with our return address on it, our own handwriting, the self-addressed one they'd given us eight months before. The word *Discard* had been circled in a different pen than the one I'd used - someone else's hand, efficient, no pressure behind it. I put it in the drawer under the sink, behind the extra soap, and my husband walked past the bathroom twice while I was doing it and neither of us said anything. The soap was still in its box. I don't know why I remember that.
The Invoice That Stayed on the Table
My sister called on a Tuesday and said the doctor had used the word *prophylactic* and asked where I'd gotten my testing done. I was holding a dish towel. I said the name of the clinic and heard her write it down - the pen moving across something, and then she said, "So you knew," and I said, "I didn't know anything for certain -" which was true and also not true, and the dish towel had a small grease stain on it I'd been meaning to treat for three weeks. She didn't call again for eleven days and when she did she talked about the weather in her city, which was different from the weather in mine, and I stood at the kitchen window and watched a squirrel work at something in the yard and said yes and yes and yes. The testing authorization form was still in the accordion folder on the shelf above the dryer, page fourteen - under a tab labeled *Consent*, and I didn't go look at it, but I knew it was there, the way you know where a bruise is even when you're not touching it.
The folder was still on the shelf above the dryer when I pulled it down in March, looking for the car insurance card - and page fourteen slipped out and landed face-up on the laundry room floor. I picked it up and my own signature was at the bottom, the looping one I only use when I'm not paying attention, next to a date in November that I remembered as a Tuesday but might have been a Wednesday. There was a line above the signature I hadn't seen before, or hadn't read, that said *including third-party family members* in the same thin font as the four small squares on the invoice. I stood there in my socks on the cold floor and read it twice and then a third time. I put it back under the tab labeled *Consent* and went to find the car insurance card - which was in my coat pocket the whole time, stiff against my ribs.
The embryology report arrived as a PDF, which my husband printed without telling me, and I found it on the kitchen counter next to the pepper grinder, face-up - the header a shade of blue I associated with utility bills. At the bottom there was a field labeled *Final Disposition* and inside it someone had typed *Per patient request* in a font that made it look like a serial number. I had made that request. I knew that I had made it, the way I knew my own phone number, automatically, without being able to say where I'd learned it, and I stood there touching the corner of the paper while the coffee finished behind me and made its last sounds. My husband came in and poured his cup and said it was cold out and I said yes and folded the paper once - along a crease that was already there, and slid it under the fruit bowl, where there was one lemon that had been there long enough to go soft on the bottom side.
Disclaimer
This article is for general informational purposes only and doesn't constitute professional, financial, medical, or legal advice. Consult a qualified professional about your specific situation.
