“It was a blizzard,” Louise explained since Jillian was losing ground. “The flour was snow.”
“What you did was very dangerous.” Their father fell back to truth number three: stating the obvious.
“We had no idea—” Louise started
Jillian kicked her and gave her a look that said that it was the wrong thing to do. Jillian was much better at lying, so Louise shut up. “We have no idea what happened. Why did our playhouse blow up?”
“Flour can explode when it fills up the air like that,” their father explained patiently. “Don’t ever play with flour like that again.”
Their mother knew them better. “Or anything like flour. Baby powder. Corn starch. Sawdust.”
“Where would they get sawdust?” their father asked. He might not know them, but he knew their neighborhood. Sawdust had proved impossible to find within an easy walk of their house.
“Non-dairy creamer. Baking soda. Sugar.” Obviously their mother had spent time researching dust explosions before this conversation. “Anything like flour. Understand?”
They nodded meekly while Jillian bit down on a “darn it.”
“Mom.” Louise held out her wrist with the plastic bracelet on it. “Why are we AB positive when both you and Dad are O? Isn’t that impossible?”
Both of their parents flinched as if struck.
“Baby, that’s very complicated,” their father started.
“If we don’t tell them,” their mother murmured, “they’ll only guess — and they’ll probably guess wrong.”
Their parents gazed at each other as if having a long, silent discussion. Finally their father sighed. “Okay, we’ll tell them. Babies, we wanted to have children very, very much, but no matter how hard we tried, for a long time, we couldn’t. We started to look into adoption when I was offered my position at Cryobank. It’s an embryo bank — umm — where — where people who — umm. .”
“It’s like an adoption service.” Their mother took up the explanation. “But instead of babies that have already been born, it’s babies that haven’t been born yet.”
They frowned at their parents until their father added, “It’s like Easter, but instead of chicken eggs in your basket, you get — umm — fertilized human eggs.”
Their mother covered her face, which meant they weren’t to listen to anything their father said. It also meant that they probably weren’t going to get a better explanation.
“Soooo, Mommy put these Easter eggs into her tummy and had us,” Louise said.
“But they weren’t Mommy’s Easter eggs. They were someone else’s,” Jillian said.
“Yes, exactly,” their father said.
“Close enough,” their mother mumbled into her hands still covering her face.
Louise sighed. They were going to have to research this when they got home.
The seventh life lesson of the day was that when you’re nine years old (minus one week) and you blow up your playhouse while you’re in it, every adult in the world thinks a night at the hospital is a good idea. Thus they weren’t able to investigate their conception until the next morning.
“Embryo bank” turned out to be the keywords. Apparently, when couples went through in vitro fertilization, multiple embryos were created but not used. It came from the fact that they were working at the cellular level with human reproductive systems already not operating properly. More eggs than needed were released, and then flooded with sperm. Because the failure rate was high, it made sense to invite everyone to the party and hope for the best.
While the information answered one question — that of their blood type — it raised dozens of others. They took a carton of chicken eggs out of the refrigerator and set it on the counter. There were eight eggs in the package, as their mother had made four soft-boiled eggs yesterday morning.
“We’re the leftovers.” Jillian poked at the remaining eggs.
So far they hadn’t been able to determine how many eggs were fertilized at once, only that normally up to four were recommended per each implantation.
Louise took out a marker and put eyes and mouth on one egg and then the letter L underneath. “L for Louise. J for Jillian.” She went to draw on a second egg, but Jillian snatched the pen out of her hand.
“I want to do mine.” Jillian cradled the egg in her hand and carefully wrote out her name and not only did a face but hair.
“According to Wikipedia, they do four embryos per implantation because they expect a high failure rate.” Louise found another marker and put Xs for eyes and a squiggle mouth on two of the eggs to indicate that they were failed embryos. “That means there’s another four embryos.”
“Do you really think they made twelve just like a carton of chicken eggs?”
“Well. . they keep them in freezers just like chicken eggs.”
Jillian put the Jillian-egg back into the carton beside the Louise-egg. “That proves nothing.” She tapped the remaining eggs. “These eggs might have never existed. These ones, though. .” She pointed at the empty cups. “Those eggs existed and were used and were successful — otherwise we wouldn’t be leftovers.”
Louise rolled the idea around in her head. Their “genetic parents” created a random number of fertilized eggs because they wanted babies. Once they had one or two babies, they didn’t want more, so they gave the rest to someone that did: their real parents. Jillian was right; for them to be leftovers, their genetic parents got the babies that they wanted.
“We have sisters,” Louise whispered. The possibilities were breathtaking. Two more Louise and Jillian? Did the other Jillian want to create epic movies? Did the other Louise love animals as much as she did? Did she have pets?
“Or brothers,” Jillian said. “They could be boys. It’s not like we’ve been cloned.”
That was true. Brothers wouldn’t be bad; just different. She and Jillian were often mistaken for identical twins because their hair was the same shade of brown and had been the same length prior to the explosion. The fire had singed Louise’s ponytail to a short brittle stump that their mother had trimmed even shorter to get rid of the burnt ends. She looked like a boy now.
Louise peered at her reflection in the mirrored side of the toaster. Would their brothers look like her? Were they nine years old, too? Or ten?
“How long to you think we sat in the fridge?” Jillian said. “We are leftovers, after all.”
“I don’t know.” There were reports of pregnancies of embryos that had been stored up to sixteen years. Their sisters could have been teenagers before she and Jillian were born. They could be really old by now — like twenty-one or twenty-two!
Louise decided she liked thinking that their siblings were two girls, exactly their age. What of the other leftovers? Louise took out an egg, pure white, perfectly formed, and considered the possibilities. The others would probably be younger. “I think I would want at least one brother. A baby brother, just learning to talk.”
“That would be boring.” Jillian picked up one of the unmarked eggs. “I’d rather have a baby sister but one that could talk and walk and act.”
Assuming that any other leftovers had actually been used. Louise eyed the egg with slight unease. She knew that she couldn’t remember that time between conception and implantation. Despite that, it seemed awful somehow to be stuck frozen at the brink of being alive.
“Do you think they’re still in the fridge?” Jillian marked closed eyes on the egg as if it were asleep. A chain of little Zs came from a tiny slack mouth. “Still-unused leftovers?”
“Maybe.” How many people wanted other people’s Easter eggs, left in the grass after the hunt? Would they stay lost in the darkness, forgotten, until they spoiled?