The Christmas Surprise

by R. R. Banks

  Having a contract baby wasn’t exactly on my bucket list. It wasn’t climb a mountain, jump out of a plane, write an epic rap battle retelling of the Iliad and the Odyssey, act as a human petri dish to carry and bear the offspring of a complete stranger. It all started because I needed to go to the dentist. That was it.

  I didn’t like my dentist. That was the issue that brought all this about. Just an innocent situation of not liking the dentist that I had and wanting to go in for a little bit of a de-gunk, shine, and polish, and that was what I had every intention of doing that day. I had been complaining about my dentist for months, bemoaning his massive hands and hairy wrists and bad breath. What kind of dentist roams around his office with bad breath? That is simply poor professional form. So, I had been whining about my upcoming checkup and finally Christopher decided that he couldn’t take it anymore. He told me that if I would stop fussing, I could borrow his dentist for an appointment.

  This was a momentous moment. Christopher held the identity of his dentist close to his chest in the same way that he protected the secret of his own homemade ranch dressing that somehow reached beyond the deep-seated hatred that I had always held for ranch dressing and burrowed right into my heart. We always heard him speak of this mythically magnificent dentist as he led up to an appointment and then after he emerged all pearly and clean. He anticipated these appointments with great reverence and a level of excitement that bordered on frightening sometimes. According to him, though, this devotion was completely warranted. This dentist was kind and gentle, always wore appropriately sized gloves over his appropriately sized hands, had only a moderate amount of body hair that in no way hindered his ability to perform dentistry, and his breath was always fresh. Sparkly, minty freshness was something that I was very much looking forward to as I tried to follow the somewhat cryptic directions for how to get to the office.

  Christopher wouldn’t even let me call the office to make my own appointment. Instead, he called, made the appointment, and then waited until the morning of my appointment to send me a PDF of his instructions for how to get there. If I hadn’t known Christopher for as long as I had and didn’t have extensive knowledge of his personality and his character, I might have been slightly concerned that all of this pomp and circumstance was actually designed to lead me to certain doom. As it was, I was just convinced that he had way too much time on his hands and needed something more to occupy his brilliant, albeit scattered, mind.

  That brilliant mind, however, sent me wandering through the city and dipping into areas that I didn’t love being seen in. I was coming out of one of those areas at a fairly fast clip when I must have missed a turn because I soon found myself standing in front of a massive office building that didn’t look like it was included in the directions. I re-read them and consulted the map that was missing small sections like a jigsaw puzzle that didn’t have all of the pieces.

  Dammit, Christopher. Why can’t you just be a normal person and send me a map link on my phone?

  I looked at the building again and then back at the map and then at the building again. I suppose it was possible that this was the large building in the corner of the map. The sketched one appeared shorter and slightly more square, but Christopher wasn’t known for his tremendous artistic skill, so I was more and more convinced that I had found the right place. After all, this was the fanciest building that I had come across as of yet, and if there was anything that he would look for in a dental practice before he even met the dentist would be the fanciness of the building.

  Tucking all of the materials into my purse, I stepped inside the building. There was a decided nip in the autumn air that I had been wandering through for the better part of the morning and the rush of warm air I felt when I got inside was a welcome relief. I was still in the phase that I reached at this point of the season every year when I was still trying to get accustomed to the idea of truly cold weather. Every summer I would bitch ceaselessly about the heat, taking on my very best delicate magnolia blossom persona as though I had never been exposed to such temperatures, even though I knew and those closest to me knew damn well that I had barely actually gone inside during the summers of my childhood. Then the fall weather would come and bring a break in the steaminess. I would hope for cooler and cooler temperatures, wanting to wear a sweater by Halloween, which rarely actually happened. The cold always seemed to hit all at once. It snuck up on me while I was scouring the Halloween clearance racks and talking Tessie down from the teetering pile of volunteer positions she accepted during the holidays.

  The first couple of weeks of cold weather usually witnessed a curious reversal in me. The same person who would put on a gaudy glow-in-the-dark sweatshirt in October even if the temperatures were still creeping up far too high just because I felt like it was appropriate, would completely flip and start trying to wear tank tops on days that were clearly so chilly my nipples stood at attention from the time I got out of bed until I curled desperately back in at night. I was just getting over that phase now, donning weather-appropriate clothing and starting to get that warm and fuzzy Thanksgiving feeling in my belly, when I stepped through the reflective glass doors into the lobby of the huge building and looked around, hoping for a massive plastic tooth or something that would direct me to the dentist office.

  I hadn’t seen any such indication and was starting back across the lobby ready to call Christopher and shout things that would attest to my holler raising until he told me where the damn dentist was or came and got me to deliver me for my appointment when I heard someone clear their throat behind me. I took a few more steps and heard it again, louder this time. It was that loud clearing that meant that the person was either trying very hard to get your attention while being discreet or dying. I turned slowly and saw a wiry man in a pinstripe suit standing a few feet away. He clutched a clipboard like it held all of the secrets of life and peered at me down a thin nose through tiny round spectacles.

  “Were you sent here?” he asked.

  I didn’t know if it was meant as an actual question or in an effort to make me admit to some kind of wrongdoing. I suddenly felt like I was back in middle school being brought up in front of the principal for the note that I passed to Mary Sue Griswold during math.

  Are you supposed to be passing notes in class?

  Do you really think it’s nice to write things like that about your teacher?

  While my mind was churning through all the reasons this man might think that I had been mysteriously sent to the building, it suddenly occurred to me that I was. I withdrew the map and instructions that Christopher had sent me out of my purse and tried to hand it to him.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m so glad that I finally got here. I didn’t think that I was going to make it.”

  The man made a sound of acknowledgement in his throat, but I saw that his eyes were scanning up and down my body. There was a distinct lack of sex in that glare. Instead, it was sharp with disappointment and scrutiny as he took in my baggy grey sweat suit, pink high tops, and hair knotted onto my head.

  Oh, yes. This was definitely who Christopher sent me to see. Judgement was his favorite accompaniment to breakfast, lunch, dinner, and coffee.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, brushing something imaginary off of my shirt in an effort to look more presentable. “Is there a dress code? He didn’t tell me that I needed to wear anything specific.”

  The man shook his head, though the expression on his face suggested to me that it was physically and psychologically painful for him to admit it.

  “No,” he said dryly. “No dress code. Though I would think that someone in your position might seek to present herself a tad bit more elegantly.”

  Elegant? For a dentist?

  “I’m sorry,” I said again, even though I was starting to really dislike this man and the compulsion I had to apologize for and defend myself. “I just wanted to be comfortable.”

  He nodded slowly as if that had been the most ridiculous and incomprehensible th
ing that he had ever heard.

  “Comfortable,” he repeated. “Lovely. Anyway, you may follow me. Several others are already waiting.” He took a breath. “We wouldn’t want you to miss your turn.”

  I wasn’t aware that there was a dentist Hunger Games going on.

  I followed the as-yet nameless man back through the lobby and beyond two sets of glass doors before he directed me into a waiting room. Several other women were sitting, the customary Empty Chairs of Derision between them telling me that none of these women came together for an oral health girl’s day. I looked around and noticed that not only were there several women, but there were only women, and those women there were oddly similar. We were all roughly the same age, height, and weight, though I was a little rougher from that standpoint than some of the others.

  Dammit, Christopher. You didn’t tell me that your dentist did profiling.

  Putting on an expression that I hoped would tell the women around me that I was fully confident in myself even though I looked like I had just tumbled out of bed, I sat down in the nearest chair and reached for the nearest magazine. That’s when things took a turn.

  I had been sitting in the waiting room for only a few minutes when a nurse came around handing registration forms to everyone. I started filling out the questions without reading the entire form.

  Name…Normal

  Birthdate…Yep

  Height…OK

  Weight…Hmmmm

  Last Menstrual Period…What?

  Why would a dentist need to know that?

  Have you ever been pregnant?

  Do you have a history of miscarriage?

  Does your family have a history of early labor or other birth complications?

  Does your family have a history of any genetic diseases?

  What the hell kind of dentist is this?

  At this point I could have just gotten up and walked out of the waiting room. Had someone else told me that they were in this situation I would have questioned their intellect for not getting up and leaving right then and dealing with Hairy Wrists. Yet something kept me sitting in that chair. Something made me fill out the invasive questions and turn in the form.

  A few minutes after we had all passed in our forms like a well-behaved little class turning in our pop quiz, the nurse started showing up at the door on the far side of the waiting room. She would call a name in a solemn monotone, then disappear into the back with one of the women in tow. Several minutes would pass, then another name would be called. An hour and five names had passed by the time that she called me. I gave a totally unwarranted smug look to the women still waiting and swept through the door. The nurse directed me to a small room that looked like a doctor’s examination room and I noticed the distinct lack of a dentist chair. Nevertheless, I sat up on the crinkly white paper and waited. Another nurse came in and took my vitals, scribbling the results on a piece of paper, and then left without saying anything. The first returned a moment later and escorted me out of the examination room and into what looked like an office.

  Well, this is efficient.

  I sat in one of the dark wood chairs in front of a heavy desk and waited. And waited. Then waited a little bit more. I was starting to feel like they had forgotten about me when the door finally opened and the man who had found me in the lobby came in. He looked delighted to see me as he sat down in the chair across the desk and proceeded to stare at me for several long, increasingly awkward seconds. Finally, he glanced over the papers he had placed in front of him that I assumed were my registration form and the information that the nurse had gathered, and then looked back up at me.

  “So, tell me. Why do you want to be a surrogate?”

  Chapter Three

  Richard

  The look on the woman’s face was enough to catch my attention and make me want to hear what she had to say. The look of her clothing was enough to make Flora not need to see or hear a single other thing and be ready to walk out of the office.

  “Honestly, Richie, is there anything that that woman could say that would make her wretched appearance any more forgivable?”

  I tried not to cringe. I hated when she called me ‘Richie’. I really didn’t know when she had decided that that was the term of endearment that she was going to bestow on me. No one else in my life, including my parents and my grandparents, had ever called me Richie and I had always detested the sound of it when it was applied to anyone else, beseeching anyone who I met not to shorten my name.

  Yet…there it was. Richie.

  The only thing that made the sound of the name less disagreeable was that it was tucked right there in the middle of another of Flora’s strings of arrogance. I don’t remember when she picked it up, but somewhere between finishing school and graduating from the university she started speaking in a stilted, unevenly formal way that made her sound like she was trying to sound like a casual British person and came off as her sounding like a horribly pretentious American.

  She was already standing, slipping her arm into the sleeve of her jacket, but I hadn’t gotten up from the sofa where I had been sitting, watching the hidden camera stream of the string of prospective applicants come into the office next door. These women had no idea that we were watching them. That was the intention. Choosing an applicant to carry our child was the most important decision that Flora and I would ever make, and it was essential that we made the right decision. I wanted to know everything that I possibly could about the woman who would bring my dream of being a father into a reality, and that wasn’t something that I could achieve just having an interview or two. I was trusting Ellery to handle this first stage of the screening process and sitting in the next room over to watch as he went over the women’s initial medical examination and information sheets with them. This wasn’t really in an effort to learn about their medical health or to even find out much about their history. Instead it was a chance for me to start evaluating their character and personalities in a way that was purely compulsive.

  Flora hated the idea. She much preferred the thought of just sending the women to the doctor, weeding out the ones who weren’t healthy enough or who had undesirable genetics, then hold interviews and choose the most qualified candidate from there. I didn’t see that as a viable way to go through the process. Of course, her health was going to be an extremely important element of choosing the right woman, but beyond that, the characteristics that were going to make her the right one was something that I didn’t think could be deciphered just by sitting across the desk from her and asking a series of questions. I had spent enough time in business to know that the person you met when you did an interview was very rarely the actual person that you were interviewing.

  People put on a mask when they sat down to interview. They presented themselves in the way that they thought you wanted them to and spewed out carefully prepared, rehearsed answers to virtually anything that you could ask them in an effort to sound exactly like the person you’re looking for. Even if inside, they are completely on the other end of the spectrum. I would never forget walking down the hall in one of my office buildings and hearing a voice coming from the one of the conference rooms that was supposed to be empty. When I peeked in I found a girl who was dressed like she was fifty and looked like she was fifteen pacing around the table, deeply engrossed in the speech that she planned to give when she came into the interview we had planned for ten minutes later. She was preparing herself for all of the spontaneous and charming answers she was going to give, right down to a few perfectly timed Freudian slips and girlish giggles.

  I slipped out of the conference room before she saw me and was fully prepared for her when she got into the office for our interview. As soon as she perched herself on the edge of the seat, pressing her breasts forward toward me and crossing her legs so that just enough of her skirt lifted up to make it seem incidental when I knew very well it wasn’t because I had already seen it three times that morning, I started asking her questions.

  “ What i
s your favorite planet and why?”

  “If you were an ice cream sundae topping, which would you be?”

  “How many roller coasters have you ridden in your life and did you keep your hands up the entire time?”

  “Don’t you know that that’s dangerous?”

  “A cat and three dogs walk down an alley and see a bowl of food. What color collar was the animal that got the food wearing?”

  After watching her squirm through a few minutes of this, I dismissed her, returning her resume and application to her before she walked out of the office. I hadn’t had any intention of giving her a real interview. Anyone who snuck into a conference room that she wasn’t supposed to be in and spent that much time polishing herself up for what was supposed to be an honest conversation wasn’t someone who I wanted working for me. I hoped that the barrage of questions and my deadpan reactions to whatever nonsensical answers she could spin as I asked them were enough to convince her to be a little more authentic next time she was meeting someone. If she was to get anything out of this interview, I wanted it to be that I was hiring an employee, not a Barbie. I didn’t want to look at her thighs and then pull a string and listen to her scripted spiel.

  That experience had completely changed the way I saw every other hiring process that I encountered, and as cold and impersonal as it sounded, that was what this was. I was hiring a woman to do something that I couldn’t do on my own and that Flora had learned only months ago that she couldn’t, either. It was a job like any other that I hired for, but with responsibilities far more pressing and valuable than anything that had ever happened in any of my businesses. Choosing the wrong candidate wasn’t just an inconvenience or a frustration and amending that mistake wasn’t so simple as firing the person and starting the process over again. If we went through with this and found a few months down the line that the woman we chose was awful in some way, there was really nothing that we could do about it. We had to be sure that we chose a woman we would be able to not only entrust with our child in its most delicate form for the months before it was born, but also who we would be able to tolerate throughout those months as well.