Morgan's Child

by Pamela Browning

  "Says you," was the shouted comment.

  "Oh, Gump, don't fuss," Kate said.

  "You get fool ideas," was all he said, and Kate wondered what Gump, her friend and protector since childhood, would say about her latest.

  After she disembarked at the landing on Yaupon Island, Kate ran through the first spattering of raindrops to the lighthouse. It was a place that had seen much history, having been built before the War Between the States. In 1898, when Yaupon Light had been superseded by larger lighthouses, the federal government, which owned the bluff where it stood, had ceded the lighthouse and keeper's quarters to Kate's great-great-grandfather, and it had been in her family ever since.

  Kate had always loved the island, but she especially loved the weathered brick lighthouse in whose quarters she had lived from the time that she was a small child. It was going to be a terrible wrench to leave, but leave she must. In the meantime she intended to enjoy every minute on the island, even if it meant butting heads with Willadeen from time to time.

  Once inside the keeper's quarters, she caught a glimpse of herself in the cloudy full-length mirror on the old wardrobe in the hall. She spread her long fingers across her abdomen, feeling the sharp jutting of her hipbones on each side of the soft round place where the baby would grow.

  Oysters almost always attached themselves where other oysters were already established. They congregated because togetherness increased their chances for reproduction. Kate had not congregated, and she'd thought she had no chance to experience what must be a woman's most exalted condition.

  Now, as the result of a casual conversation, she might bear a baby. From an empty life which lately had seemed to have no purpose, she could progress to nine months filled with hope and the satisfaction of doing something special for someone else.

  After the strain of the past couple of years, after losing her father and everything else that was important to her, she longed to be needed by something or someone again. The time of her pregnancy would be a time of gathering the world to herself once more, of reclaiming some of what she had lost. It was a way of making a statement: I'm my own person, and I choose life.

  * * *

  Choosing life meant that Kate paid several visits to the fertility center in the fall.

  However, what Kate expected to be an entirely natural procedure turned out to be unnatural in the extreme. Fortunately it was not a protracted process. In October Kate stoically endured the indignities of implantation and went home to the lighthouse to wait happily for the first confirmation of pregnancy.

  The island was the perfect place to wait. Kate went for long solitary walks, absorbing the serenity of sea, sky and marsh. She knew she was pregnant, knew that in the warm recesses of her body a new life was taking hold and settling in. She was determined that the first sounds that this baby would hear would be the murmur of the waves upon the shore—it seemed so basic, so elemental.

  She felt protective of the baby. For the time that they would be together, she was bound not only to shield this child from all harm but to nurture it as any mother would do.

  She knew scientifically that the tiny creature inside her was Courtney's baby, not hers. But until she turned it over to Courtney, it was her child, no child of her body but a child of the heart, for sentimentally she knew that it grew there as strongly as it did in that more practical organ, her uterus.

  When she received confirmation of her pregnancy, she whirled around the kitchen of the keeper's quarters a few times and wished there were someone with whom she could share such welcome tidings. But who would understand? Penelope, her friend in Maine, who had not heard from Kate in over a year? Certainly not Willadeen or any of the women she knew from the mainland. Surrogate motherhood, Kate suspected, was still not considered a polite topic among the gentry of Ashepoo County.

  Of course, she had to tell Gump, who could not be expected to react favorably to the news. She put off the task as long as possible and finally told him one day at the Merry Lulu Tavern after she'd been to a rummage sale on the mainland.

  "Thought you were taking stuff to the rummage sale, not buying it," Gump said when she appeared with two bags full of her purchases.

  "I unloaded a lot of things that I'm cleaning out of the quarters closets," Kate told him, hiking herself up on the bar stool beside his.

  "Then what's in the bags?"

  Kate hesitated. "I bought clothes," she said at last. "Maternity clothes." She waited for his wrath to fall.

  Gump stared at her openmouthed. "Now who might they be for?" he asked finally.

  "For me," she said meekly. Gump was the only person who could still make her feel like a shy, knock-kneed little girl.

  He was speechless. At last he raised the beer mug to his lips and drained it.

  "There's somebody in your life I don't know about. How did you manage it?" he said.

  "The somebody is the baby, Gump, and I managed it through in-vitro fertilization." Quickly she filled him in on the embryo implantation process, and when she was through, he was shaking his head in disbelief.

  "This is the most damn-fool thing I ever heard of," he muttered.

  "I wanted to do it," Kate insisted, following him out of the bar as he stumped along. Gump had a limp as the result of an old war injury, and she often suspected that he overemphasized it when he was upset.

  "Gump? Is that all you're going to say about it?" she asked him after she followed him into the wheelhouse.

  He didn't reply, and he didn't speak to her all the way back to the island.

  Finally, one day when she went down to the ferry dock on the island to pick up her mail, Gump came off the ferry, leaned against a piling and worked his jaw a few times. After a minute he said, "Well, Kate, I can't say I approve. But you can count on me. Heck, you can come stay with me if you want. You have no business living on this island in your condition."

  "I like it here. I won't leave before next September," she said. To that his only reply was an outraged "Harrumph!"

  Soon winter arrived in full force, and by January no tourists nosed around the island knocking on Kate's door or lining up to take pictures of the lighthouse, which was a local landmark. Kate had the place to herself. The baby was now a little fish inside her, or maybe an oyster, and Kate was the protective shell.

  Sometimes at night Kate took off all her clothes and studied her body in the mirror with the dispassionate eye of a scientist. She found it was hard to be objective when she was so fascinated with the changes she was experiencing.

  When she pressed her fingers tentatively into the small lump in her lower abdomen, it was hard, not soft as she had expected. Her breasts, which had always been ordinary, took on a new look, rounding into lush globes, pink-tipped and exquisitely sensitive.

  Because her breasts felt hot and fevered and uncomfortable, Kate blithely took to going braless for the first time in her adult life, enjoying the sensation of her full breasts swinging free beneath loose clothes. Sometimes during cold snaps when harsh winds swept off the sea, her chilly hands stole under her sweatshirt to cup her breasts, cooling the gently rounded contours and making her cheeks flush with pleasure that she quickly identified as sexual.

  But there was no man in Kate's life, and she dismissed the vivid dreams she began having as a strange fluke of hormones. She often dreamed of a man beside her, inside her, of tumbling together between fluffy warm blankets—dreams she did not welcome, and she never saw the man's face. She did see that of the baby she began to dream about—a sweet round face atop a blanket-wrapped body shaped like her burgeoning belly.

  The baby's growing bulk pressed uncomfortably against the zipper of her jeans and stretched them to the limit. It pushed upward against her diaphragm until she found it increasingly difficult to breathe when she climbed the circular lighthouse staircase to the platform outside where she liked to stand to dry her hair in the sun.

  The baby seemed like a miracle so special that Kate wanted to hug it to herself and did, whe
n she was lying alone in bed at night with the wind whipping around the lighthouse.

  She liked to curl her body protectively around the child within her, listening to her blood pulsing in her ears and knowing that it was her blood that nourished the baby, her heart that comforted it, and her voice that it heard when it was awake. She began to talk to it, too, crooning the words that mothers have always spoken to their babies. She told it how happy it would be when at last it was held in the arms of its biological mother, Courtney Rhett.

  And then Courtney came to visit, and nothing afterward was the same.

  * * *

  The keeper's quarters at Yaupon Light had no telephone, which was the way Kate liked it. There was no cell phone service on the island and no Internet, either. Kate and Courtney communicated only by mail, which was left by Gump in a metal box on the ferry dock if Kate didn't meet him to pick it up.

  Courtney's letters were actually from her attorney and included twice-monthly checks and, once, a contract that Kate barely read before scrawling her signature at the bottom. Kate's letters to Courtney usually consisted of a hasty "Everything is okay, thanks for the money."

  During Kate's fifth month of pregnancy, no letters arrived, which also meant no checks. Kate asked Gump almost daily, "Anything from Courtney today?" and he would shake his head, pursing his lips in silent disapproval.

  Then, one morning in April, Courtney arrived in a white motor launch that idled at the dock. She was accompanied by a man whom Kate had never seen before. Kate peered curiously through the kitchen window, taking in the determined way that Courtney planted one foot in front of the other as she made her way up the path to the lighthouse.

  Kate met them at the door. When she saw Courtney in her white blazer with the spiffy navy-and-white polka-dot handkerchief draped artistically from the chest pocket, she became even more aware of her own decidedly unfashionable outfit, which consisted today of a limp rummage-sale maternity blouse and a chopped-off pair of gray sweatpants with a drawstring waist that accommodated her swollen stomach.

  Kate smiled and opened the door. "Hi, Courtney," she said. "It's good to see you. Come in."

  Courtney swept past, followed by her male companion, whose shirt was flung open almost to his waist, revealing a gold horn on a chain winking out from a curly patch of chest hair.

  "Won't you sit down?" Kate said, sweeping a pile of scientific journals from one of the kitchen chairs and tossing them indifferently onto a heap beside the stove.

  "It's not a social visit," Courtney said with a hint of discomfort. She didn't sit.

  "Oh?" Kate said, beginning to feel a chill despite the warm wind blowing from the sea.

  "It's about the baby, Katie. We've—Damien and I—we've just gotten married."

  "And?" Kate prompted, beginning to get the idea that she wasn't going to like what she was about to hear.

  "And Damien doesn't want the baby," Courtney said.

  Kate's eyes darted from Courtney's face to Damien's and back again. "Doesn't want," she repeated, her breath stopping short of her lungs.

  "That's right," Damien said. "It's no kid of mine. Courtney and me—we've got places we want to go, things we want to do. We don't need a kid."

  "I see," Kate said, although she didn't see at all.

  "I'm sorry, Katie. I'll still pay your medical expenses, of course," Courtney said glibly.

  "Of course." Kate caught hold of the table and lowered herself heavily onto the chair. She felt the baby lurch uncomfortably against her bladder.

  "My lawyer will stay in touch," Courtney said, turning to go.

  "But—" Kate said, and stopped. She couldn't believe this.

  Courtney turned, and for a moment Kate thought she saw a flicker of doubt in her expression. But no, she must have been mistaken, because Courtney's eyes had turned as hard as stone.

  "Courtney's lawyer can help you place the baby for adoption," Damien said. "It's in the contract you signed, in the small print. Come along, Courtney."

  He took Courtney's arm and pushed her toward the door. Behind them the sea, blue and shimmering, gently rocked their waiting motor launch, and gulls swooped and spiraled overhead.

  Courtney and Damien were already halfway down the path when Kate appeared in the doorway.

  "You have to take this baby," Kate screamed like a banshee in full voice. "You have to!"

  Courtney refused to look back, although Kate knew she must have heard.

  "And I hate to be called Katie!" Kate shouted after them, but her words were carried away on the wind along with the insignificant cries of the gulls.

  Chapter 2

  Morgan Rhett leaned over his desk in his elegant office at Morgan Rhett & Company in the historic district of Charleston, South Carolina, and studied his ex-wife's picture on the society page of the local paper.

  Looking at the grainy newspaper photo brought back all the misery of their marriage. He'd never marry again after that experience, he was sure of it, even though his decision precluded any hope of a normal family life. At the moment he couldn't imagine why he'd ever married Courtney. She was so smug, so overbearing and so full of herself.

  So Courtney tied the knot again, he mused, reading the account of the wedding. She had married Damien Cobb, the plumbing contractor who'd cheated all those folks who were rebuilding after the last hurricane by installing inferior fixtures he'd bought at a bargain-basement sale.

  People said that Damien Cobb was flush, but then, so were his customers. Morgan had heard that sewage from some of the houses had flushed everywhere but into the sewers and septic tanks, leaving the homeowners wallowing in filth. Which, come to think of it, was exactly what Courtney was doing by marrying the guy.

  He walked with measured steps to the dart board on the wall and taped his ex-wife's picture to it. He was taking aim when the door of his office opened.

  Quickly he adopted a neutral expression and slid the dart into his pants pocket, hoping that his head would hide the telltale picture.

  "Mr. Rhett, I hate to bother you, but there seems to be some kind of emergency in the waiting room," his personal assistant, Lavinia, said, her usually dulcet tones overlaid with a patina of concern.

  "Emergency? What kind of emergency?"

  "A woman. She's determined to see you, but she doesn't have an appointment."

  "What's her business?" he asked sharply.

  "She won't say. And frankly, Mr. Rhett, I'm not sure you should see her. She's obviously distraught. And—and she's expecting." Lavinia looked worried.

  "Expecting what?"

  "A baby, Mr. Rhett. She looks—unwell."

  Morgan lifted his eyebrows. "You don't mean she's going to deliver the baby in my waiting room, do you?" Long ago he'd realized that his assistant was one of those people who could not say that someone had died; he had passed away. No one was ever pregnant; she was expecting. Queen of euphemisms, that was Lavinia. She was, however, a fine assistant. She protected him from people like this woman.

  "I'd tell her to go, but she's deposited herself on the love seat and says she's not leaving until she sees you. She could be mentally unbalanced."

  "Does she look dangerous?" Morgan asked in alarm.

  Lavinia considered. "Not dangerous. Determined."

  Morgan sighed. So many people tried to convince him to invest in dubious real-estate schemes that he sometimes thought he needed a bouncer, not a personal assistant. He doubted, however, that he'd find a bouncer who baked coconut cakes as good as Lavinia's.

  "I'll come to the waiting room and see what this is all about," he said. He wanted Lavinia to leave so he could remove Courtney's picture from the dart board. He didn't want to give her and the other women in his office fodder for gossip.

  "I don't know if you should meet her," Lavinia said. "That might not be wise."

  Morgan's impatience finally got the best of him. "If you can't get rid of her, what are we going to do? Let her pregnate until she gives birth? I'll be there in a minute,"
he said, dismissing Lavinia with a wave of his hand.

  Lavinia looked embarrassed. Morgan had no idea if there was such a word as pregnate, but it was worth inventing it just to see the shocked look on Lavinia's face.

  "Very well, Mr. Rhett," Lavinia replied. She cloaked herself in self-righteousness, mistakenly thinking it was dignity, but Morgan Rhett was not fooled. He knew dignity when he saw it, which wasn't often. There was so little dignity left in the world today.

  He reached for the piece of newspaper with Courtney's picture on it and crumpled it before tossing it in the wastebasket. He thought that with any luck the pregnant woman would be gone, but when he walked through the door into the waiting room, there she was, spread out across the love seat and taking up enough space for two people. Which she was, strictly speaking.

  "I'm Morgan Rhett," he said smoothly. "How can I help you?"

  She glared up at him. "You can talk to me. Privately," she said.

  Morgan was acutely aware of Lavinia and the two other women who worked in the office hovering nervously in the doorway.

  "Maybe if you can give me some idea about your business," he said, for once his self-confidence starting to waver. This woman looked angry. She looked worried. And she looked very, very serious.

  "It's personal," she said, and then she unmistakably lowered her eyes to her huge belly and lifted them back to his. He stared at her, dumbfounded. She was implying—she must mean—

  He wheeled and shot Lavinia and the other two women a meaningful look so that they beat a hasty retreat.

  After he forced himself to put on a courteous expression, he turned back to the woman, who had stood up. Now that she was on his eye level, he saw the panic behind her eyes. He still wasn't sure if she was dangerous or not.

  "My office is this way," he said, wondering what was going on here. He'd never seen this woman before, and he had an idea that she was going to be trouble, big trouble.

  He ushered her into his office with its deep-piled Persian carpet, its mammoth desk and its blue-on-blue view of the harbor with Fort Sumter in the distance.