Wood Sprites(2)

“The flour and the sifter and the fan?” their mother asked.

“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—um…”

“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—ummm—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 to be the key word. According to the Internet, when couples went through in vitro fertilization, multiple embryos were created but not used. It came from the fact that they were working at 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 “X” 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.”