Oh, What a Tangled Web

At forty-six Melody thought she was a tad young to be entering the change-of-life but how else could she explain why she hadn’t had a period for seven weeks? As much as she dreaded the thought, it was a far more acceptable explanation than the diagnosis her doctor and best friend Dr. Sharon Cohn had just given her.

    “It can’t be! I haven’t been with a man in months!”

    “Sorry Melody but there’s absolutely no doubt, you’re pregnant.”

    “No!”

    “I reviewed the test three times. Get a second opinion if you like. Get ten.”

Melody’s face went blank. “How could this happen?”

The two had been friends since middle school. They didn’t lie or keep secrets from each other. Sharon couldn’t understand why Melody was doing it now.

   “Look Mel, if you don’t want to tell me who it was, fine.”

The accused rolled her eyes, “Damn it Sharon, I’m not lying!”

   “Mel, people don’t just get pregnant!  It’s not like the flu.”

Frustrated, Melody tried again to convince her friend of the medical impossibility.   

   “For heaven’s sake Sharon, if I’d been with a guy why wouldn’t I tell you?”

   “I don’t know.”

   “Two years ago, when I did it with Bob, I told you, right?”

   “Yeah.”

   “And he was your husband!”

   “Ex-husband!” Sharon corrected, “And I’m still not sure if I’ve forgiven you for it.”

   “Still, I told you, right?” Sharon threw her arms up.

   “Okay, so there was no man. It’s an immaculate conception!  Congratulations Mrs. Cunningham, it’s a boy, a seven-pound, four-ounce Messiah.”

   “Sharon, I came here thinking you’d tell me to expect hot flashes and wet pillowcases, not that I was carrying the second coming.”

   “Mel, I’m an OBGYN. There can be no second coming unless there’s been a first.”

Melody buried her eyes in her hands.

   “I can’t believe this is happening. I always wanted to have a kid but not some mystery baby who came out of nowhere! And it couldn’t have happened at a worse time. Three of my biggest clients have ghosted me. They won’t return my calls. I can barely afford to feed myself!”

    “Have you gone on any out of town trips or had reason to stay at a hotel?”

    “No, but why would that matter?”

    “I’ve heard sometimes linens on beds in hotels and motels can still have…”

    “Oh come on Sharon! That’s bullshit.”

    “Sit on any strange toilet seats lately?”

    “This isn’t funny!”

While certain it would be rejected, Doctor Cohn felt obligated to offer a suggestion.

   “Um, the closest state where it’s still legal is New York.”

   “Abortion! Are you serious? You know how I feel about that.”

   “Sorry. Okay, I know a good lawyer who handles adoptions.”

   “That’s a thought, but I’d still need to find out how this happened.”

Sharon shared a more plausible possibility.

   “Ever hear of a drug called Rohypnol?” It was a notion Melody instantly rejected.

   “Nobody slipped me a roofie! I haven’t been drinking with strange men or woke up in any strange beds wondering where I was. How many times do I have to say it? Grrrr!”

   “Okay! Okay! There was no man! I get it!”

   “You do? Well, I don’t, and you still don’t believe me, do you?”

   “Uh, no?”

After the briefest of ponders, Sharon had another idea.

   “I want you to come back tomorrow for an amniocentesis.”

   “A what?”

   “I’ll extract amniotic fluid and send it to the lab for DNA.”

   “What good would that do?”

   “It could lead us to whoever the father might be.”

   Melody remained adamant, “There - is – no - father.”

   “It only takes a few minutes, doesn’t hurt and won’t harm you or the baby. On the house, okay? Why not? Heck, it’s a start.”

   “Okay, but none of this ‘on the house’ crap. I’ll pay for it.”

   “I tell you what, if we find daddy DNA you buy dinner at the Fish House.”

   “And if we don’t?”

   “I’ll eat your bra.”

   “It’s a bet!”

   “Tomorrow at three, see you then. Now go home.  Promise you’ll get some rest.”

   “Promise.”

Melody went home but the get some rest part proved a tougher promise to keep. She tossed and turned, rubbed her belly, cried and struggled to find sleep. When she arrived the next day for the test, she looked to Sharon as if she’d aged ten years.

   “Damn, girl. You don’t need me. You need a week with Mary Kay.”

   “I feel like shit.”

   “Want to wait and do this another time?”

   “No. Let’s get this done. I have to know what’s going on.”

   “Okay, take your shirt off and lie down.”

As advertised, the procedure was quick, simple and painless. Sharon gave Melody a prenatal safe sedative to help her sleep. She’d need it. The results wouldn’t come back for three days and Sharon dreaded to think what Mel would be like without sleep for that long. One morning, during the wait, Sharon took Melody out for breakfast.

    “The lab called.”

    “Do they have the results?”

    “Um, no, not yet, they wanted another sample.”

    “What for?”

    “There was some kind of complication.”

    “Complication?  No shit! ‘Here y’go fellas, check out some baby juice with no daddy in it and make it snappy’. What a joke.”

    “It’s probably just some kind of technology thing.”

    “Technology? Sure, that’ll work. Maybe I was knocked-up by some frisky A.I. bot or one of those cute little avatars.”

Sharon wasn’t being completely honest with Melody. She knew a tech-glitch didn’t cause the delay. The head lab-tech from was as serious as a heart attack when he called. There was something about the sample that made no sense. Not only did it confirm Melody’s story of sperm-free pregnancy, there was something else. The technician didn’t want to say what it was until after examining a second sample to confirm.

When the final result landed on Sharon’s desk, she looked at it with more dread than if it were a registered letter from the IRS. After an exhausting sigh, Sharon read it. Her heart sunk. No practitioner of medicine, from the days of Hippocrates to today had ever seen or would ever expect to see something like this. It forced Sharon to do a thing no other doctor had done in decades, make a house call.

When Melody opened the door Sharon saw in her friend face an unexpected sense of peace.

    “Hey Sharon, what’s up?”

    “I got the results.”

    “Great, come on it.”

Sharon entered, holding a Manila folder.

    “You seem oddly happy today.”

    “That’s because I’ve decided to keep the baby.”

Melody sat next to Sharon on the sofa.

    “Why the sudden change of heart?”

    “At the end of the day, father or no father, it’s still mine. It’s something I’ve always wanted. As far as all the other stuff goes, we’ll find a way to work it out.”

    “We?”

    “Me, and my child. My family.”

    “Oh, well, that’s good but there’s still something I think you should know.”

    “Okay doc! What is it?”

Sharon opened the folder, pulled out a document with a chart on it and pretended to read.

    “Well, it has your DNA.”

Melody shrugged, “Big surprise. What about dear old dad?”

Sharon sighed, “No dad.”  Mel clapped her hands at being right.

    “Aha! I told you! Now how would you like that bra, baked, broiled or southern fried?”

Sharon silence told Melody, there was more.

    “What? What is it? Is something wrong?”

    “The baby’s DNA is more than a biological match to yours.”

    “What other kind of match is there?”

Sharon released a lung’s worth of air before answering.

    “Identical.”

Melody’s eyes bounced like ping pong balls from the chart to Sharon, to the chart, back to Sharon. “What does that mean?”

    “It means the baby, is your twin.”

The sinews holding Melody together weakened. Color drained from her face; gravity took hold of her jaw. Shock and disbelief occupied every corner of her mind.

    “My twin?”

    “The only way two people can share identical DNA is if they’re identical twins. Fingerprints, eye and hair color, voice, everything about her will be a mirror image of you.” 

Mel fell into a clinical state of emotional shock.

    “It’s a girl?”

    “Melody, I’d like your permission to share this with…”

    “Share it? No! Noooo fucking way!”

    “We have to figure out how this happened.”

    “I won't let my daughter’s life be turned into some kind of social media freak show! Have you any idea what would happen if the world found out about this?”

    “Okay, what if we don’t use your name. You’ll be Jane Doe.”

    “Are you serious? DNA can be traced to whoever it belongs too. What’s to stop some greedy fame-seeking lab tech from figuring out who I am and selling the story with my name, address and shoe size to some TV network or podcast?” 

    “Melody please, you have to trust me.”

    “I trust you, not the rest of the world. You’re my friend, my doctor. I trust you’ll handle everything including delivery. Sharon, I need you. You know how important this is to me.”      

    “I’ll need nurses, an assistant, an anesthesiologist and…”

    “Fine, fine. Just tell them I’m some bimbo who got herself knocked up, okay? No one else has to know about this twin business.”

    “What do we tell Lucia, Jamie, Gina and the others, you know, our friends when you start to show?” Melody bowed her head sadly.

    “I’ll tell them I’m a bimbo who got herself knocked up. too.”

    “You expect me to go along with that story?”

    “Please Sharon, I’d rather people think that, than know this.”

They concocted a story of how Melody met a guy at a bar, got drunk and went to his hotel room for a good old-fashioned one-night stand. He said his name was Ray or Jay or something like that. She wasn’t sure of the room number or even the floor it was on.

As expected, the friends had a hard time believing it. They knew Melody wasn’t the bimbo who’d get herself knocked-up type. Jamie, the friend who watched a lot of cop shows, knew about Rohypnol and believed Mel made up the story as a half-truth denial of what actually happened. She’d been drugged and raped. Jamie shared Melody’s story and her suspicions with the police.

Melody was equal parts surprised and distressed when an investigator from the sex crimes unit asked her to come to the station to answer questions. Sharon went with her. The detective wasn’t anything like the cops in the cop shows. By the looks of him, the only sit-ups he ever did were to sit up from a recliner to fetch more guacamole between innings. There was a mustard stain on his tie and fragrance of fried onions on his breath.  He was professional, respectful and served coffee and Danish. Sharon suspected it was just an excuse for him to eat pastry.

   “Okay Melody, according to the report, you met a man at the bar in the Botsford Hotel?”

   “Sergeant, I wasn’t raped! I don’t know who told you all this but...”

   “You went to this man’s room with the intention of having sex, is that right?”

Melody rubbed at her temples.

   “Please sergeant, is all this really necessary?”

   “If we got some guy out there slipping roofies to women at bars, uh, yeah, it is.”

   “But that didn’t happen to me!”

   “I’m just doing my job, okay? Now, tell me what you remember, after the sex.”

   “It was dark when I left, and he was still sleeping. Oh, he had reddish brown hair, and he was white, I remember that much.”

   “You can’t remember the room number or the floor?”

   “It’s not about remembering! I just didn’t think about it. I was loaded!”

   “Did you call an Uber or a taxi? You couldn’t have driven home in your condition.”

Convinced the detective still wasn’t, Melody launched into an utterly non-sensible ramble.

   “Yes, that’s what I did! I drove home. I don’t know how I did it but I did. There wasn’t any traffic, I ran lights but, yeah, I drove. I’m sorry. I know that was wrong.”

As a testimonial to his enduring skepticism, the detective’s eyebrows raised.

   “I’m not buyin’ what you’re sellin’. There’s something hinky going on here and if I have to get a court order to get to the bottom of it, I will. Melody, you won’t tell me who this guy is, the DNA from the fetus, will.”  Melody panicked.

   “I don’t want anything to do with this! I didn’t make a complaint or file a police report!”

   “Your story has more holes than a golf course and every word is going into my report. If we find out you’ve been lying to protect a rapist, you’ll be in a lot of trouble.”

Melody turned to Sharon with desperation in her eyes. Her best friend had to think fast.

   “Okay detective, I’ll give it to you straight.”

   “Thank you doctor, I appreciate it.”

   “There was no bar, or getting drunk, or hotel room, none of that.”

   “Well, color me shocked,” the detective joked.

   “Melody slept with one of our friends husbands.”

   “Oh?” Finally, a story any cop could believe.

   “Afterwards they both knew it was a mistake. Melody missed her period and came to me. I determined she was pregnant. She kept saying there was no man involved but I knew that dog wouldn’t hunt.” Melody liked the new lie and added a personal touch.

   “I didn’t want to get the guy in trouble and ruin a family, so we came up with that story.”

The detective gave Sharon a look of surprise.

   “You helped concoct that hotel room story?”

   “She was a wreck. We had to think of something.”

Finding the new lie far more acceptable than the other, the detective put his pen and notebook away then folded his hands on the table.

   “When I was a little boy my mama used to say, ‘oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.’ Either of you ever hear that one?” Mel and Sharon both nodded.   

The detective gathered his coffee and remnant of Danish, “My daddy would say, ‘the truth might set you free but bullshit will bury you alive, every time’, same kind of thing.”

   “That’s a new one on me,” Sharon said. 

   “Yeah, I always liked what my mama said better too.”

   “I’m sorry if I caused you trouble sergeant,” Melody said.

   “I’ve got real crimes to solve, leave anytime you like.” The detective left. 

After a sigh of relief, Melody felt a pain. Not like a kick in the womb, more like something squeezing on her lungs. She found it hard to breathe.

    “Sharon, something’s wrong.” 

Sharon was weeping uncontrollably.

    “Good bye Melody, I’ll miss you.”

The room filled with a shrill, piercing tone. Melody pressed hands over her ears.

    “What the hell? Sharon!”

    Sharon wailed, “Oh God, no!” then slowly faded away.

Melody stumbled to the one-way mirror and was stopped by what she saw looking back. It was a reflection of a younger, fresher looking her. No darkened stress circles under the eyes, no mouth twisted in a frenzied search for answers and with every hair in place. The reflection smiled in such a way, it heightened Melody’s terror.

    “Help! Someone, help me!”

She pounded at the mirror with a fist. The tone amplified.  She pounded again. Whether it was because of the pounding, the tone or both, the mirror shattered into millions of small pieces. On the other side there was nothing, nothing, but pure, empty, nothing. Melody stood in the midst of an abyss so deep, so dark she couldn’t see her legs.  What she could see was, the baby bump was gone.  No child, no twin and then, no Melody.

There was nothing left to see but dark empty nothing and nothing left to hear but the mind-numbing monotonous tone.

~

The instruments monitoring vital signs had gone flat. Sharon flicked a switch to put an end to the tone of the heart monitor. With tubes and wires attached to her nose and arms, Melody lay dead on a bed in the hospital ICU. Alerted by the lack of monitor signals, a young nurse rushed in.

    “Doctor, should I call for a Code Blue?”

Sharon looked at her watch,

   “No, she’s gone. Put in the report Sharon Cunningham, age forty-six, died at 11:43 am on this date of pneumonia due to complications of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.”

   “Did she ever regain consciousness?”

   “No.” Sharon stroked Melody’s face, “Mel was my best friend.”  She then tenderly wiped Melody’s forehead with a tissue, “Mel always wanted to have kids.  What a shame. She would’ve been a wonderful mother.”

   “I’m sure she would have.”

Sharon unglued her focus from Melody. When she looked at the nurse, her heart skipped, and eyes widened in horror. The nurse was Mel’s perfectly precise identical twin! She was the baby who caused so much angst in the comatose fantasy. Hers was - the face in the mirror!  Sharon needed the bed to help steady her legs.  

Noticing but disregarding the reaction, the nurse cocked her head to examine the bloodless porcelain white face. As she touched Mel’s cold hand the nurse’s mouth twisted into an eerily knowing smile.

   “I suppose it was her wish to be cremated?”

Still visibly shaken, Sharon replied.

  “Yes, how’d you know?”

Looking Sharon square in the eye, the nurse casually shrugged and answered matter-of-factly.

   “Well, that’s what I’d want to do.”

As Sharon turned to look at her dead best friend for the last time, she saw something she knew wasn’t there before, a barely discernible curl at the corners of Melody’s lips.