Beverly said, "I guess you never know for sure...Will you see her?"
"No."
"I'll tell her," Beverly said. She dropped her voice to a whisper. "But we don't want her making a scene in front of the patients. She seems like she might be a little, uh, unstable. And if she's not your daughter, maybe you should set her straight in private."
Bennett nodded slowly. He dropped back into his chair. "Okay," he said. "Show her in."
"Big surprise, huh?"The woman standing in the doorway, bouncing a child in her arms, was an unattractive blonde of medium height, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, grunge clothes. Her baby's face was dirty, dripping snot. "Sorry I didn't dress for the occasion, but you know how it is."
Bennett stood behind his desk. "Please come in, Miss, uh..."
"Murphy. Elizabeth Murphy." She nodded to the baby. "This is Bess."
"I'm Dr. Bennett." He waved her to the seat on the other side of the desk. He looked at her closely as she sat down. He saw no resemblance at all, not the slightest. He, himself, was dark-haired, fair-skinned, slightly overweight. She was olive-complexioned, rail-thin, brittle, tense.
"Yeah, I know," she said. "You're thinking I don't look anything like you. But with my natural hair color, and more weight, you can see the family thing."
"I'm sorry," Bennett said, sitting down, "but to be frank, I don't see it."
"That's okay," she said, shrugging. "I figure it must be a shock to you. My showing up at your office like this."
"It's certainly a surprise."
"I wanted to call ahead and warn you, but then I decided I should just come. In case you refused to see me."
"I see. Miss Murphy, what makes you believe you are my daughter?"
"Oh, I'm yours, all right. There's no question about it." She was speaking with an uncanny confidence.
Bennett said, "Your mother says she knows me?"
"No."
"Ever met me?"
"God, no."
He gave a sigh of relief. "Then I'm afraid I don't understand - "
"I'll come right to the point. You did your residency in Dallas. At Southern Memorial."
He frowned. "Yes..."
"All the residents had their blood typed, in case they were needed as emergency blood donors."
"That was a long time ago." He was thinking back. About thirty years, now.
"Yeah, well. They kept the blood, Dad."
Again, he heard that conviction in her voice. "Meaning what?"
She shifted in her seat. "You want to hold your granddaughter?"
"Not at the moment, thank you."
She gave a crooked smile. "You're not what I expected. I thought a doctor would be more...sympathetic. They've got more sympathetic people at the methadone clinic in Bellevue."
"Miss Murphy," he said, "let me - "
"But when I got off the drugs, and I had this beautiful daughter, I wanted to make sense of my life. I wanted my baby to know her grandparents. And I wanted to finally meet you."
It was time, Bennett decided, to cut this short. He stood up. "Miss Murphy, you realize that I can have genetic testing done, and it will show - "
"Yes," she said. "I realize that." She tossed a folded sheet of paper onto his desk. He opened it slowly. It was a report from a genetic laboratory in Dallas. He scanned the paragraphs. He felt dizzy.
"It says you are definitely my father," she said. "One chance in four billion that you are not. They tested my genetic material against your stored blood."
"This is crazy," he said, dropping back in his chair.
"I thought you would congratulate me," she said. "It wasn't easy to figure it out. My mom was living in St. Louis twenty-eight years ago; she was married at the time..."
Bennett had gone to medical school in St. Louis. "But she doesn't know me?"
"She had artificial insemination from an anonymous donor. Which was you."
Bennett felt dizzy.
"I figured the donor must have been a medical student," she continued, "because she went to the clinic at the medical school. And they had their own sperm bank. Medical students donated sperm for money back then, right?"
"Yes. Twenty-five dollars."
"There you go. Good pocket money in those days. And you could do it, what, once a week? Go in there and pop off?"
"Something like that."
"The clinic burned down fifteen years ago, and all the records were lost. But I got the student yearbooks and searched them. Each year the class was a hundred and twenty students, half female. That means sixty males. Eliminate Asians and other minorities, you have about thirty-five a year. Back then sperm didn't keep for more than a year or so. I ended up with about a hundred and forty names to check. It went faster than I thought."
Bennett slumped down in his chair.
"But you want to know the truth? When I saw your picture in the medical yearbook, I knew immediately. Something about your hair, your eyebrows..." She shrugged. "Anyway, here I am."
"But this was never supposed to happen," Bennett said. "We were all anonymous donors. Untraceable. No one would ever know whether we had children or not. And back then, our anonymity was a given."
"Yeah, well. Those days are over."
"But I never agreed to be your parent. That's my point."
She shrugged. "What can I say?"
"I wasn't having a child. I was helping infertile couples so they could have a child."