Ava, p.2
Ava, page 2
“Wow! I’m impressed. You really have your life all thought out.”
“Career goals, absolutely. Other than that, I’m still figuring things out. But what about you? Now that I’ve told you everything about what I’m studying, what’s your major? It must be different since we’ve not had any classes together.” She motioned to his calculator. “Are you an engineering major?”
“Oh, no. I’m a math major with a minor in business management, but my plan is to get my master’s and be an actuary.”
“You actually want to be an actuary?”
He chortled. “Yes, why?”
“I’m just kidding. I don’t even know what that is. I just like saying ‘actually’ and ‘actuary.’”
Spencer laughed. “Got it. Most people don’t know what I’m doing, either. Actuarial science is the study of the financial impact of uncertain future events. I’ll be studying how to quantify and manage risk, primarily in the fields of life and health insurance, pensions, employee benefits, and investment.”
Larkin started fluttering her eyelids, then she pretended to hit her head on her laptop.
“Very funny, Larkin. It’s actually very interesting to me. It involves a lot of mathematical calculations, which I enjoy, and making a best guess on risk. It’s like being a fortune teller, but using probability and statistics instead of a crystal ball.” He paused and leaned back in his chair. “And it is a good-paying career, but the credentialing and exam process is pretty rigorous. The exams are as hard as the medical boards for doctors or passing the bar for lawyers, which is intimidating. And not that getting paid well in life is everything, but I hope to be rewarded for hard work. After graduation next year, I’m hoping to start in the master’s program here.”
That afternoon in the library, they talked for hours about their lives and interests. Both shared a love of Americana music as well as ’70s and ’80s rock. They also enjoyed hiking, kayaking, and searching for the best street taco food truck. Both were introverts but never feared speaking out when they felt strongly about something. They believed in finding work that you love but having friends and hobbies that you loved more. Each wanted to live outside of a city and have a small amount of land. Spencer wanted to have his own vegetable garden, and Larkin wanted to raise chickens someday. They disagreed about pets—she was strongly pro-cat, but Spencer was solidly pro-dog. And they both wanted to have children someday, but not until their thirties.
It was starting to get late, and they decided they really needed to study. When Spencer was occupied with entering data into his calculator, Larkin picked up her phone, pretending to be checking her hair. She snapped a picture the moment Spencer glanced up. Unfortunately, her phone wasn’t on silent like she thought it was. It made the telltale shutter noise, exposing Larkin’s ruse. Spencer smiled broadly when he heard it. Larkin immediately looked down as her long, light brown hair fell around her face to cover the red flush rising in her cheeks. She turned her phone to silent.
Once her phone was hidden under the table, she sent her best friend the photo with the caption “future husband.”
CHAPTER 3
It’s estimated that between 10 to 20 in 100 known pregnancies (10 to 20 percent) end in miscarriage. Most miscarriages—8 out of 10 (80 percent)—happen in the first trimester before the 12th week of pregnancy.
—March of Dimes
Spencer and Larkin married in late summer the year after they met, just months after their graduation. It was a small ceremony at his parents’ home in East Tennessee, with just a few friends and family members present. They used the money their parents had offered them for a larger wedding to make a down payment on a small ranch house on two acres of land a thirty-minute drive from Larkin’s new job.
When they got back from their honeymoon in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Spencer immediately started graduate school. He would study on the same sprawling university campus where they’d met and where Larkin would work in the lab as a research assistant. She wanted to pursue her doctorate someday but planned to work for a few years while she paid down her undergraduate loans and Spencer completed his degree.
During her first day on the job, she went to the Human Resources department to get her identification badge, which listed her title as “Research Assistant I.” After completing the direct deposit forms and paperwork for health insurance, vision, and dental, she walked across campus to the lab. She hadn’t been there since interviewing a year earlier and was looking forward to seeing her supervisor again.
She would be trained by Susan, a Research Associate III. Susan greeted Larkin wearing a traditional white lab coat, its top pocket stuffed with pens and a pair of reading glasses. Susan had worked with Dr. Davis for more than fifteen years and had coauthored more than thirty articles relating to embryonic growth and development. She’d helped him submit multiple grants for their research and coordinated the projects for visiting international graduate students. She told Larkin she was relieved to finally have help.
Susan showed Larkin to her desk and lab station. She would have her own cubicle and computer in the middle of the lab. Several windows brought soft sunlight into the room, and throughout the lab were multiple workstations for performing experiments. Larkin would have her own workspace as well, but the team shared microscopes and photography equipment. The space was clean and quiet, with others diligently working.
Susan introduced Larkin to the international graduate students who would be there for the next year, working on their individual research projects. Abdullah, from Iran, stopped pipetting a light pink substance onto a microscope slide to turn and greet Larkin. Alondra, who was from Spain, was using a microscope with an attached camera to photograph her work. Kai came from China, and he was in his cubicle typing up an abstract for publication. They all gave her a friendly welcome. All three of them hoped to have something to publish at the end of the year.
Smiling and pointing to Larkin, Susan warned them not to use the “newbie” for their own work. She had seen it happen before with students who had struggled to make their research deadlines.
“Larkin works for Dr. Davis, not you,” she reminded them. They all smiled, nodded, and promised with a little salute. Larkin was impressed that Susan had trained them so well.
After the tour, Susan took Larkin to lunch at the university food court. When they sat down to share hummus and dolmas and eat pita sandwiches, Larkin asked Susan if she had always wanted to do basic science research.
“Actually, no,” Susan began. “I was in medical school and had planned to be a radiologist, but I had three miscarriages. One at nine weeks, one at thirteen weeks, and one at twelve weeks in the first three years of school. No reason to explain it medically. I was poked and prodded and tested, and no one could tell us why. My husband and I decided it might be the stress of medical school, so I quit.”
“Oh. I am so sorry. That must have been awful.”
“It was. And then I had to figure out what to do with the rest of my life with a biology degree. I looked into food inspection, but after a tour of a fast-food plant to see how the hamburger was processed . . . just, ugh. I’ll never eat fast-food burgers again,” she said, scrunching her face in disgust.
“And then I looked into research and found this job. Dr. Davis is amazing. Great mentor. Smart man. And here I am. He’s very laid-back but expects professionalism and quality work. I never feel pressured by him, though. I always want to do a good job because disappointing him would feel like disappointing my father. He would never tell me if I let him down, but I would never want to feel I had. It would kill me, ya know?”
Larkin nodded as she wiped tzatziki from her mouth.
“And then, during my first year of working, I had another miscarriage. Again at thirteen weeks.”
“Oh, no!” Larkin gasped.
“Yep. It’s okay. That’s how I found out it wasn’t the stress of medical school. It was me. Or us. Or just wasn’t meant to be. But I didn’t want to go back. I enjoy what I do, and I’m happy now. My husband’s happy. And we have three spoiled fur babies that we love and keep us busy.”
Susan opened her phone and showed Larkin pictures of three well-fed cats lounging lazily on a couch with Susan’s husband. She pointed to each of the tabby cats. “That’s Flynn and that’s Oscar, the two black-and-gray tabbies. And that’s Cindi, the orange one. They’re all strays we found on our walks in the neighborhood. My husband is scared to walk with me anymore because I keep bringing them home.” She let out a guffaw.
“He’s right,” Susan continued. “If I find another one, it’s coming home with me. My dream would be finding a kindle of kittens. My husband would pretend to be upset, but he’d let me keep them. He’s terrible at saying no. Fortunately, I just want cats and not expensive jewelry or elaborate vacations.”
“Absolutely! He should be thanking you,” Larkin agreed.
“You need to figure out one thing you can’t live without, and don’t let Spencer tell you no. Later, make sure you tell him that you learned some sound marriage advice today for you newlyweds.” Susan wagged a finger motherly at Larkin as she spoke.
Larkin promised. “Oh, I will definitely do that. I guess I need to figure out what I really want first.”
After lunch, they went to a smaller room near the lab and Susan started teaching Larkin what she would be doing daily. On the table sat a contraption that made a soft humming noise and had a temperature probe on the outside. Susan opened the front door and showed Larkin the two dozen or so chicken eggs that were slowly turning inside, as if they were on a small carnival ride.
“These are all white leghorn chicken eggs, which we get shipped to us every few weeks. We label them with the dates they arrive. We keep the eggs at 37.5 degrees Celsius with about 50 percent humidity. This incubator has got to be at least fifty years old, but Dr. Davis likes it, and it works, so we’ve never replaced it.” She shrugged. “At two to three days, we check for viability. They are all sold to us fertilized, but some will be duds,” Susan said as she washed her hands in the small sink. “Eggshells are porous, so you always want to handle them with clean hands. We don’t want to transfer bacteria to the embryo.”
She removed one of the eggs, dated three days ago, and took what looked like a flashlight from the table. She explained, “This is a candling lamp that we use to check on the growth of the embryo. Years ago, farmers used an actual candle to check for viable eggs, but now you can buy these gadgets online for twenty bucks.”
Susan asked Larkin to turn out the lights. She held the egg above the lamp, which she turned on. The egg glowed an amber color, and veins coursed through it, leading to a darker spot in the middle.
“See that?” Susan asked, pointing to the spot. “That’s our developing embryo. This one goes back to the incubator.”
Susan took out several more that were healthy. But two had no vessels, and the only thing visible was the yolk floating in the albumen. “These are duds, but we call them breakfast. You can take them home if you’d like. They are some of the freshest, most delicious eggs you’ll ever eat.”
Then Susan candled another egg. “Now this one,” she said. “This one started to develop but died.”
She showed Larkin a black ring that went through the egg’s inner circumference. It was called a blood ring. “These need to be disposed of or they will continue to rot. This is the avian equivalent of a miscarriage.” Susan paused and asked Larkin to turn the lights back on. Susan turned her back to Larkin and set down the candling lamp. She stood quietly by the sink for a moment and then washed her hands again. She used the paper towel to wipe her nose and eyes. When she turned back to Larkin, she gave her a quick smile.
“Well, that’s enough for your first day. Why don’t we call it a day for you, and I’ll see you back in the morning, okay?”
“Yes, of course. Thank you for everything today. I’m really looking forward to tomorrow.”
Spencer picked up Larkin at the front of her building. He’d had a great first day in his master’s program, but he only wanted to know about Larkin’s day. She excitedly told him about her office, her workstation, her coworkers, and Susan. She told him about the chicken eggs and all the omelets and quiches they were probably going to be eating.
“It’s been a long but good day for both of us,” he said. “I want you to tell me more about this tonight. I just want to relax and hear your voice, okay? It will be the perfect end to the day.”
Larkin and Susan started the next day in the small room with the incubator. They collected eggs from the incubator that Susan had checked a couple of days ago since they were now five days old. Back at Larkin’s workstation, which included a glass hood with a door that folded up, Susan flipped a switch on the side. The fan over the hood came on. Then she grabbed a book from a nearby shelf, Hamburger and Hamilton’s Staging Series, written in 1951. Susan and Larkin took seats on rolling stools in front of the workstation. “Okay,” Susan said as she opened the book and flipped through the pages. “This is the ultimate resource for chicken embryo staging. Drs. Hamburger and Hamilton compiled photographs and drawings from forty-six chronological stages of the approximately twenty-one-day incubation period of the eggs. They wrote very detailed descriptions to accompany the illustrations, so we can make sure we are appropriately staging our samples.”
She stopped on a dog-eared page and used her pen to tap an image of a chicken embryo. “We sacrifice these chicks at around five days of incubation because that is the time when the facial features we’re interested in are forming, and we can compare it to the developing human embryo. We can make hypotheses on cleft lip and palate formation and the processes involved based on our experiments and observations.”
After putting on a pair of gloves, she cracked an egg into a petri dish under the hood. The yolk and white spread in the dish, revealing an almost translucent embryo curled in the shape of the letter C, less than an inch in size. Dark gray eyes were developing along with tiny limb buds and a red spot that would later become the heart. Susan showed Larkin how to compare the embryo to the photos and descriptions. The first one perfectly matched the book’s reference image for the desired stage. She then opened a box of scalpel blades and cut off the head.
She glanced at Larkin, who frowned and furrowed her brow. Susan set down the scalpel. “Larkin,” she said. “Do you eat chicken?”
“Yes, I love chicken.”
“It comes nicely packaged in plastic wrap at the grocery store, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. I know what you’re going to say.”
“Maybe you think I’m a hypocrite, but I couldn’t work in a lab that did experiments on mice or rats or rabbits. But I do eat chicken, and I’m not the one working in a plant tasked with killing chickens. My experience is completely sterilized for me by people who work a very hard job.” Susan smiled kindly. “So, I’m not vegetarian or vegan, and I personally believe chickens and eggs provide an excellent source of nutrition. And these embryos provide a lot of useful information for us to better understand human development and find answers to why birth defects occur so that, hopefully, we can help prevent them. It’s not my favorite part of the job, but it’s for the greater good. Will you be okay with that?”
“Yes, I will. I guess I thought the embryo samples we study would come to us already processed and ready, like going to the store. That’s my own ignorance. I get it. It’s totally okay.”
“Great. Let’s let you try this now.”
Susan had Larkin crack and stage the remaining embryos. They placed the dissected heads in small plastic cylinders and covered them in a thick, viscous substance. They used small forceps to move the heads very gently into the correct position for the later steps. Susan put on thicker gloves and used long tongs to grab the edge of the cylinders, then dipped them in a container of liquid nitrogen to flash freeze them. After labeling them and wrapping them in aluminum foil, they placed them into the lab freezer.
“Great job, Larkin. Why don’t you take a lunch break and we’ll meet here again in the afternoon?”
Larkin grabbed her purse and the lunch she’d packed and headed for the break room. As she dug through her purse to find money for a drink from the decades-old vending machine, she found her birth control pack. She looked at it and noticed she was on the last day of her placebo week. She suddenly realized she hadn’t started her period yet—normally, she started on the first or second day of taking placebos. She had been so busy with coming back from the honeymoon and starting her new job that it had slipped her mind.
She left her lunch on the table, grabbed her purse, and ran down the stairs.
CHAPTER 4
Larkin walked at a fast clip to the closest pharmacy. Her head was swimming with thoughts as she tried futilely to calm down.
I’m on the pill. It’s 99 percent effective when taken correctly. It’s always worked before. I did miss a couple of days when I was preparing for the wedding and the honeymoon, but I always doubled up the next day like the package insert instructed. Spencer did stop using condoms a few months before we got married. But I was still on the pill! Maybe I’ve just been under stress with graduation and the wedding and the new job, and I’ve just skipped a period. Maybe that’s all it is.
At the pharmacy, she grabbed a pregnancy test off the shelf, used the self-checkout, and was out of the store in under two minutes.
On the way back to the lab, as she walked with the same sense of urgency, her mind continued racing. Oh, my God. How will Spencer react? We want kids but hadn’t planned on having them this soon. He’s in graduate school! My income alone can’t support a child! And what is Dr. Davis going to say? I just started this job, and now I might have to tell him I’m going to have a baby?
She ran up the stairs to the lab’s fourth floor and locked herself in the bathroom. Breathing heavily from the trip upstairs, she ripped open the package, and its contents spilled onto the floor. Grabbing the foil wrapper that contained the test, she tore open one end and removed the purple cap from the plastic test stick and went into the accessible stall. With shaking hands, she held the stick between her legs as she squatted over the toilet and started to urinate. When she was done, she replaced the cap and jerked up her pants. She threw open the stall door, banging it loudly against the wall. She then made her way to the bathroom counter and laid the test down.
