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Chapter 6 - They More Than Knew Each Other.
The girls were up way past lights-out that night, doing their best to find out more about the mysterious Lizette. Unfortunately, they didn’t get very far. The problem was that they just didn’t have very much information; only a maiden name, the fact she was once an aspiring artist, and a vague description that she had blond hair and hazel eyes. It wasn’t much to go on.
Searching for ‘Lizette Artist’ got them nowhere. There were tens of thousands of women with the name Lizette and there was no way they were going to wade through that list. Searching Lizette Richards - the surrogate’s maiden name - whittled the list down to a couple dozen, but none of the names that came up sounded like their mother. It probably wasn’t the fifty-five year old nurse from Maine, or the hispanic pro-golfer from Miami, or the twenty year old actress from London. There were a couple of maybes though - there was a LinkedIn profile they found for a Lizette Richards who was a lawyer in a prestigious DC firm, but she was only thirty years old and that would make her on the young side for someone who’d had a baby twelve years before. There was also a Lizette who designed and sold jewelry through an Etsy account - which would fit nicely for someone who was once an artist - but they couldn’t find anything more about the woman so it was a tenuous connection at best.
By the time they gave up and crashed, they didn’t feel like they were any closer to finding their missing mother than they had been when they’d started.
They were still unhappily mulling over the problem the next morning when their friend, Stella, sat her breakfast tray down at the table across from them.
“We just don’t have enough information about her. It’s hopeless,” Qianna complained as she picked at her bagel sandwich.
“What’s hopeless?” Stella asked sympathetically.
The girls brought their friend up to speed on what they’d learned from talking with Justin the night before. They even detailed their Lizette search efforts so far, explaining how frustrated they were. Stella, who’d been one of the most enthusiastic of their supporters from the beginning, clearly appreciated the girls’ dilemma.
“I’m pretty good at researching stuff,” Stella offered, pushing aside her breakfast tray and setting up her laptop in its place. “Let me try and see if I can’t find something for you about this missing surrogate.”
Stella’s offer to help reinvigorated the girls to some extent, and they returned to their own breakfasts with more interest while their friend tapped away at her computer. It only took about five minutes before Stella seemed to find something that interested her. With a muttered ‘oh!’ she sat up straighter and smiled down at whatever her efforts had uncovered.
“Wow! QiQi, you didn’t tell me your dad was THAT Justin Taylor. He’s famous,” Stella raved, sounding like the perfect fangirl.
“Yeah, sorta.” Qianna shrugged, having heard similar accolades too many times to let it go to her head. “Why are you looking up my dad, though? He’s not the one we’re trying to find.”
“Well, I thought that maybe, if I linked the name ‘Lizette’ with your father’s name, that might turn up some hits and limit the number of ‘Lizette’s we needed to look through. I didn’t get any hits on her though. Just a lot of stuff about your dad,” Stella explained! “Sweet! I didn’t know he won an Oscar!”
“Yep. That WAS pretty neat. He and a friend did this short animated film called ‘Sunbeam’ when I was little. It was sorta about me and how, he said, sunshine used to follow me around wherever I went. It’s one of my favorites of his. And they won the Oscar for Best Animated Short that year.”
“Neat? You had a movie made about you? That’s more than neat, girl - that’s epic!” Quinne praised her sister. “In fact, I think I know that film. It’s one of my brother, Gus’, favorites. He’ll flip when I tell him it was actually about you.”
Stella, who’d only been listening to the conversation with half an ear while she continued to scroll through pages of information on Justin, finally stopped on one with another exclamation of “Wow!” The girls looked over at her expectantly. “Your dad is hot, QiQi. You sure he’s gay?”
Qianna laughed out loud. “Sorry, Stella, he’s soooooo gay. You’d never have a chance even if you were old enough. Trust me.”
“He looks pretty young, though. If he weren’t gay, I’d be happy to ask him to wait for me,” Stella asserted with a chuckle. “Here, take a look. There’s no way this guy looks old enough to have a teenage daughter.”
Stella turned her computer around so that the two girls sitting on the opposite side of the table could see the picture she’d been ogling. It showed a debonair-looking Justin standing in front of a banner like the kind you’d see at some type of Broadway screening event. He was wearing a pair of light brown, horn-rimmed glasses that made him look quasi-intellectual. His casual jacket, unbuttoned shirt, and gelled hair added to the hipness factor. He truly was a handsome man.
“Wait! THAT’S your father?” Quinne interrupted right as Qianna was about to explain the circumstances behind the picture. “OMG! OMG! OMG!” Quinne picked up her bag and rifled through it until she found her phone, tapping at the screen like crazy. “Hang on a sec. OMG! Where is it? Where . . . Finally. Look!”
Quinne turned the phone around so they could all see what it was that had her so excited. There on the tiny screen was a black and white photo showing two men - one blond, the other a slightly older brunet - looking at each other with naked adoration. Since there was nothing else in the picture other than the two men, you couldn’t tell how old it was, but if the blond was Qianna’s father, it had to have been taken quite a while ago.
“Is this your father?” Quinne demanded.
“He’s looking away from the the camera, so it’s hard to tell . . . And he’s so young here . . . But, yeah, I think that’s my dad,” Qianna confirmed with wonder. “How did you get a picture of my father? And who’s the other guy?”
“That’s MY father. Brian Kinney!”
“Our fathers knew each other?” Qianna reached the same conclusion a second later. “But how? Where’d you get this picture?”
“I found it hidden in an old book of poetry my dad had that I borrowed one time. I think he’d probably forgotten it was there,” Quinne explained. “I loved it so much I scanned it and keep it on my phone. It’s one of the only pictures I have of my dad smiling. Usually, when he smiles, it’s in a joking or sarcastic way. You hardly ever see him smiling like that - looking truly happy. It’s always been one of my favorite pictures of him. But I never thought to ask about the other guy in the picture. He’s never once mentioned anything about your dad - I would have remembered since Gus is such a fan - but it’s pretty clear they did know each other at one time.”
“They more than knew each other,” Stella insisted, reaching out to point at the photo again. “See how they’re looking at each other. That look . . . They were in love.”
All of them could see the plain evidence of Stella’s assertion. The glint in Brian’s eyes and the joyous smile. And the way Justin was leaning towards the taller man with that confidential smile on his lips. It was clear that there was something more to their glance than mere acquaintanceship. But that only brought up even more questions for the two sisters that had been kept apart their whole lives and only inadvertently found each other. The implications were so overwhelming, that both Qianna and Quinne had fallen silent while they tried to corral their spinning thoughts.
Stella, though, had returned to her computer where she’d only been typing and clicking away for about sixty seconds before announcing another discovery. “Aha! I thought so . . . When you search both your fathers’ names together you get dozens of new hits . . . Uh oh . . . Damn. Qianna, did you know about THIS?”
She once more turned the laptop around displaying a newspaper article she’d found showing pictures of both men under the headline, ‘Local Teen Attacked at Prom in Critical Condition’. Underneath, the subheading read, ‘Witnesses Say Accused Attacker Incited by Flagrant Homosexual Display’. All three girls quickly scanned through the article which detailed how Justin Taylor, a senior at St. James Academy, was attacked after attending his high school prom where he’d been joined and danced with one Brian Kinney. The paper referred to Brian as Justin’s ‘older, male lover’. The attacker, Christopher Mark Hobbs, was said to have been in police custody, while Taylor’s condition was uncertain at the time the article was published.
“I had no idea . . .” Qianna muttered, looking devastated by this unexpected news. “My dad never said . . .”
Quinne put her arm around Qianna’s shoulder and hugged her tightly. “I can’t believe this kind of shit still happens, let alone to OUR fathers. This is . . .” As she continued to read her expression became more and more disgusted. “This is just . . . horrible.”
When they’d all finished reading through the article, Stella briefly took back her computer, copied the link to the page and texted it to both girls in case they wanted to read it again later. Then she returned to her prior search - the one that had turned up the bashing article in the first place - and clicked through several other references to the prom incident. There had been a few follow up pieces; one that elaborated on the events at the prom, another that followed along with Justin’s progress and announced his release from the hospital, and a final one that detailed the outcome of Chris Hobbs’ trial and the outrage that lenient sentence engendered from LGBTQ+ activists around the country. It was all fascinating reading. But this news left the girls just as confused as before.
“My dad complains all the time about his hand - it gives out on him if he overworks it sometimes - but he never explained any of THIS,” Qianna pointed to the computer. “All he ever told me was that he’d had ‘an accident’ when he was younger. He actually said it was probably a good thing, because it pushed him into a career in computer animation instead of spending a lifetime as an unknown and starving painter.”
“I’m glad he recovered, and that he’s been successful despite this shit, but it must have been so hard,” Quinne voiced what they all were thinking. “The thing I can’t get over, though, is that my Pops has never said anything about it either. I mean, this is big. Really big. And NOBODY in my family has ever said word one about ANY of it. Which makes no sense at all. My family can’t keep a secret about anything - but they’ve all kept THIS quiet for twelve years? Why? It’s not like I would have been upset by this or anything. My dad wasn’t hurt by the attacker and I didn’t even know your dad, so why the secrecy? Something just isn’t right here.”
They spent the next fifteen minutes or so discussing their discovery while Stella pulled up more and more information on the Prom Bashing story for them. Everyone agreed that it was tragic, but it was clear that the bashing itself wasn’t the whole story. And how the bashing related to their mother, Lizette, and the fact that they were split up as infants, was likewise unclear. It felt like the girls were being deliberately kept in the dark about something - something even bigger than the bashing. For the two girls who had both grown up thinking they had especially close relationships with their dads, it was a real blow. They felt lied to, even if it was only a lie of omission.
“Time to get to class, ladies,” Pooh Bear interrupted the discussion as she rounded up all the students still lingering in the cafeteria. “You’ve got two minutes to gather at the front of the building before we head over to the Biology classroom.”
“I don’t know about you, Q,” Qianna stated as she followed the others to drop off her dirty tray at the kitchen, “but I’m almost glad I haven’t had a chance to explain what’s going on to my father. I want to know a lot more about all this before I reveal that I’ve found you. I don’t know what reason my dad might have had for keeping his past a secret, but whatever it is, he shouldn’t have kept you and your dad a secret too. I’m not sure I can forgive him for that.”
“I agree,” Quinne replied as they all walked over to join the group milling around by the front door. “I’m pretty pissed off at my Pops right now, to be honest. Maybe he had what HE thinks is a good excuse for hiding all this, but I don’t see what it could be. And, no matter what happens, I’m not giving you up for anything, Sis. Now that we’ve finally found each other, there’s no way they can keep us apart.”
“Agreed,” Qianna declared with a resolute nod of her head. “So, we keep quiet about the two of us for now?” Quinne nodded back. “Good. And in the meantime we can keep digging for answers. With the two of us working together, I doubt they’ll be able to keep their secrets for long.”
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Despite the fact that the girls generally found their biology lectures fascinating, they were both having trouble concentrating that morning. It was hard to get past the suspicion that the fathers they’d loved and trusted all their lives might have been responsible for something as reprehensible as keeping twin sisters separated. Even more troubling though, was how two twelve year old girls were going to fix this huge and very obvious wrong.
Such heavy thoughts weighed on the girls all through their morning lectures, a quiet lunch, and even as they made their way towards the lab later that afternoon. It wasn’t until they got caught up in the elaborate protocols for that afternoon’s experiment that they started to regain their equilibrium. The lab they were doing that afternoon was both complicated and fun, though, and the curious younglings were soon so caught up that they momentarily forgot their problems.
That day’s lab involved working with the DNA obtained from the saliva samples they’d taken earlier in the week - after it had been chemically amplified and ‘cut’ into microscopic pieces with enzymes - and using a process known as Gel Electrophoresis to analyze the results. The resulting strands of DNA could be dyed and thus seen as they sorted themselves into distinctive bands. This created a sort of DNA fingerprint that could be used to differentiate between various individuals. It wasn’t as precise as a full blown DNA analysis, but was sufficient for the students’ purposes - namely, the task of determining which set of parents the two babies in their hypothetical lab experiment were related to. And since the students were using their own DNA samples as controls, they also got to see their personal DNA fingerprints.
The lab took several hours to finish, so there were significant blocks of downtime in between processes. During one of these gaps, while the gel was running, Quinne logged onto her tablet to look up some references for the lab write up and immediately got pinged with an incoming text message. Since the text was from Stella, Quinne couldn’t resist looking at it.
“Look what else I found!” The text read and then, below, there was a screenshot of another item the girl had found in her research about Brian and Justin.
The article Stella had sent was from a newspaper called ‘Pittsburgh Out’ and dated more than thirteen years earlier. At the top of the small block of text were the names ‘Kinney - Taylor’ in large, bold print. Underneath that title was a larger, color version, of the picture that Quinne had shown the others just that morning. But it was the words written in the body of the clip that were the most surprising.
“They were MARRIED!” Quinne shouted so loudly that everyone in the lab was startled into looking up. “Sorry,” she immediately apologized, holding up a hand in a stop gesture and cringing a little, before shoving her tablet sideways so Qianna could see what had caused the uproar.
“What the hell . . .” Qianna managed not to yell, but was still visibly upset by the revelation. “I can’t believe our dads were MARRIED and never told us about it!”
Quinne, who had re-read the article over her sister’s shoulder, was still just as shocked. “Well, probably not married, because same sex marriage wasn’t legal back then, but they at least had a commitment ceremony, so it’s as good as . . . And they kept it secret from us all these years!”
Just then Ammar, one of the other students in their lab group, announced that their gel was done, and diverted the girls’ attention back to the work at hand. They still had to do some work to see the results, but the additional process of staining the gel and then taking pictures under ultraviolet light to see the fluorescing bands, was fairly straightforward. When they were done, they had a graphic image showing the DNA patterns of all their subjects. And, since they had set the lab up as recommended by the TA - with a ladder in the first and last lanes to help measure the bands, followed by Baby #1, Baby #2, Control #1, Control #2, Parent #1, and Parent #2 - it was clear as day that there was something odd about the results. Both the Controls - in this case the DNA samples from Quinne and Qianna - were nearly identical.
“Aren’t the Controls supposed to show differently?” Ammar asked, looking over the photo of the gel as he worked to complete his lab journal for the day. “It says in the protocol that if your Controls don’t work then the whole thing is a bust.”
The TA was called over and the oddity examined, along with a brief explanation from the girls about their special circumstances. The TA looked through the rest of their notes and determined that they’d done the gel correctly. She advised them to go ahead and write it all up, including the unusual results, but otherwise it looked fine.
“As if we needed more proof we’re sisters,” Quinne grumbled as she used her phone to take an extra picture of the gel results. “I can’t believe our dads split us up. I’m so furious I could scream.”
Quinne continued to quietly fume as they cleaned up their lab station and gathered together their belongings. Meanwhile, Qianna was just as quiet, but from her expression you could see she was pensive rather than angry. Something just didn’t add up here and Qianna was becoming more and more determined to figure it out.
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