Risking It All

by Nina Darnton

  This was the one outcome they had never considered. They had worried that Eve would change her mind when the babies were born. They had fretted over how Danny would react. Would he think the twins were his siblings and be angry that his mother was giving them away? But it had never occurred to them that Eve might die. They had never heard of that. Surely that was something that didn’t happen anymore, Marcia thought. Not today. Not in America. Not in a big modern hospital in Los Angeles. And yet the unthinkable had occurred. They had a new baby and, it suddenly hit her with new force, Eve’s son had lost his mother.

  “We have to adopt him,” Marcia blurted.

  Jeff blanched. “What? Who?”

  “Danny,” she answered impatiently, walking to the mini-fridge to get a bottle of cold water. “Who else? Eve’s son.”

  “Wait a minute,” Jeff said sharply, responding quickly, intuitively. He knew he had snapped at her and he knew he shouldn’t have, but he couldn’t help it. “We can’t do that, Marcia.”

  She whipped around to face him.

  “What are you saying? We have no choice. His father died years ago. Eve was his only family. She’s gone because of us. We have an obligation here to try to set things right.”

  “She had an embolism, Marcia. That wasn’t our fault. This is shock, like the doctor said, blaming yourself, us.”

  “That’s ridiculous. She wouldn’t have had that embolism if she wasn’t trying to deliver our twins.”

  “You don’t know that. People die suddenly, they have aneurysms and embolisms they never suspected, it might have happened without us.”

  “But it didn’t.”

  He took her hand in his and lowered his voice. “Honey, listen, we can find out more about Danny’s family. Maybe there are grandparents. Maybe there’s an aunt or an uncle. We can send money every month. He’ll be better off with his own family.”

  Marcia pulled her hand away. She made a point of checking her watch. It was 2:00 P.M. She spoke slowly.

  “I wish he had his own family. I wish to God he did. But he doesn’t. All he has is us.”

  “We’ll help him. I agree, we owe him. But we are not his family, Marcia. That was the agreement. No contact after the birth.”

  “That was before. That was if he still had his mother. Everything is different now.”

  “We need some time to think of a solution,” Jeff said.

  “All I know is that he’ll get off the school bus in about an hour. He’ll let himself into his apartment and wait to hear how his mom is and when she’ll be home. Someone has to meet him and tell him that his mother is dead.”

  Jeff stood and began pacing. She turned her face up to him. He saw how red and swollen her eyes were. “So maybe you should be the one to do that, Jeff. You seem so sure of what’s right.”

  Jeff took a deep breath. “I need to get some air. I won’t be long.”

  When he was gone, Marcia sat on the bed, staring at the wall. Her mind raced through the series of events that had brought them here, to this hotel room, to this awful moment. She remembered their fears that this surrogacy was a kind of exploitation, the feeling that they were benefiting from Eve’s poverty. But she remembered that Eve herself had talked them out of that. She had said that this would help her as much as it would them, that her only concern was Danny, whom she loved more than anything in the world. After all, Eve maintained, she was a single mother. She had no family, no one to help her. She wanted to give things to Danny that her salary as an aide in a nursing home would never provide. The $45,000 this surrogacy would pay was more than she could imagine saving in any other way. She was determined to put it away for Danny. Maybe even for college, she’d say shyly. They allowed themselves to be convinced this was as good for her as it was for them because they wanted it so much, Marcia thought. Or she did, she acknowledged.

  She couldn’t believe this had happened. She had done everything right. The papers were signed. The check had been written. The handover was set to happen as soon as the babies were born. She went over their most recent conversations in her mind. Eve had reaffirmed that she didn’t even want to see the twins and though Marcia had been a tiny bit hurt, she knew it was what they had initially agreed upon. And she knew too that Jeff had been relieved. He had worried repeatedly that Marcia and Eve would insist on entering into a lifelong relationship—photographs, updates, holidays together, God forbid, he’d said. Marcia had always denied that would happen, but the two women had bonded so much during the pregnancy, he didn’t really believe her. She remembered with a flash of resentment how Jeff had tried to discourage their friendship, emphasizing that they had nothing in common other than the twins. She knew he was wrong. She had found, to her surprise, that she and Eve had a lot in common, but it didn’t change things, at least for Eve. She was adamant about what she wanted. No strings. No entitlement. No future relationship. The babies would belong to Jeff and Marcia. Eve and Danny would go on with their lives, just a little bit more financially secure.

  Well, now everything was different.

  She checked her watch. It was almost time for Danny to come home. Jeff had disappeared. She would have to tell Danny herself. She went into the bathroom. She looked in the mirror and saw her grief-ravaged face. She ached for her dead baby. Who did she look like? What would she have been like? She splashed cold water on her face and toweled it dry. She rubbed so hard it irritated her skin and that felt good, somehow. When she emerged, Jeff had returned and was sitting on the bed. He got up quickly and stood in front of her. His manner was firm but seemingly rational.

  “I’m sorry, babe. I really am. I can’t see it your way. I’m looking into the future and seeing the ways that adopting a ten year-old boy whom we hardly even know and is probably a pretty screwed up kid will fuck up our lives. I just never signed on for this.”

  “Eleven years old,” she said softly.

  “What?”

  “He’s eleven now.” She paused. “Eve never signed on for this either.” Her voice softened further. “She was my friend, Jeff. I really cared about her. She loved him so much. I know this won’t be easy, but we will never feel right if we abandon him.”

  “We won’t do that, of course. We’ll try to find family and if that isn’t possible, we’ll find good foster parents. We’ll send money, we’ll subsidize him. If he wants to go to college someday, we could even help him pay for it.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “We’d keep in touch,” he continued, trying to come up with a suggestion that would convince her. “Maybe he could even come for a summer sometime.”

  Marcia shook her head sadly. “It isn’t enough, Jeff. Money alone can’t solve this. Look, things don’t always work out the way we want. People adopt kids who turn out badly, but they can’t give them back. They give birth to babies with such serious problems that they spend their whole lives trying to take care of them and worrying about what will happen when they die.” She put her arms around him and buried her head in his chest. “Or their baby dies at birth, like ours just did. They go on. We will go on. But it can’t be by leaving this boy behind. Not Eve’s son. I can’t do it. I just can’t.”

  He held her, awkwardly caressing her. “Look, maybe we’re both in shock. We’ve had a terrible blow. We can’t make any reasonable decisions now. So maybe we don’t need to talk about adoption yet, but if they let us, I suppose we could take him home until we find a better solution.”

  She hugged him tighter. “Yes. Thank you. Yes.” She tried to stop herself from crying, and sniffled a few times, reaching into her bag for a tissue. “But what do you mean if they let us? I don’t think there’s anyone who cares enough to stop us.”

  “The authorities. Child Services. You can’t just take a child who is not related to you out of state.”

  “I think Eve made a will. She was always worried about what would become of Danny if anything ever happened to her and she asked if we’d be his guardians. I know we should have talked to you about it, but it
was so far-fetched I just said yes.”

  He stiffened. “Did you sign anything?”

  She bit her lip. “No, but I gave her my word. I promised.”

  “Jesus, Marcia.” He shook his head in exasperation.

  “I’m sorry, Jeff. I never in a million years thought anything like this could happen.” She looked at her watch and stood up. “But we’ve got to go. I don’t know how we’re going to do this, but we have to tell Danny what happened.”

  Jeff followed her out the door. “And our son?” he said suddenly. “How do you think this will affect him?”

  She was at the door and she turned to face him. “I think he will grow up knowing his parents did the right thing and didn’t run away from their obligations. I think he’ll be proud.” She paused. “And he’ll have a big brother. Maybe they’ll grow up to love each other.”

  “I never said they’d grow up together, Marcia. This is just temporary.”

  She nodded. “Day by day,” she said. “For now, we have to get Danny. Will you come with me?”

  “Of course. We’ll go together. We’ll need to consult with someone when we get home,” he said, almost to himself. “Maybe a psychologist to help you get rid of some of the guilt you’re carrying.”

  She stopped short. “To help me?” She hid her indignation as best she could. “Yes. I will definitely need help dealing with this grief for our baby and for Eve, we both will. But we’ll also need some help for Danny, that’s for sure. And some guidance about how to deal with a grieving child.” They walked together to the taxi stand outside the hotel. “We should have gone in,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “To the preemie ward. We should have insisted on holding him.”

  “We can’t take any chances, Marcia. We have to listen to what the doctors say. We’ll go back right after this.”

  She thought of her little son, alone in an incubator when, if things had gone as expected, they would have been with both of their babies, cuddling them and happily making the final choice of names. She looked at Jeff. His face was set and taut and his eyes as sad as her own. She took his hand.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked tenderly.

  “I’m thinking of our son. He doesn’t even have a name.”

  “Our poor little boy!” she said. “His world is already filled with so much sorrow. None of the names we thought of sound right now. I don’t know what to call him.”

  “Don’t worry, Marcia. We can’t settle everything at once. One thing at a time.”

  They hailed a cab and climbed in.

  “Maybe we should call him Job,” Marcia said.

  Jeff frowned. “No. That’s not a great role model. That would mean this tragedy is only the first.”

  “Job was tested, but he was loved by God.”

  “God had a strange way of showing it. I’d rather He just ignored us from here on out.”

  “Okay, then how about Griffin?”

  “Griffin? Where did that come from?”

  “I found it in a baby book.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means ‘strong.’”

  “Griffin,” Jeff repeated, trying it out. “Strong. Yeah. I like that. He’ll need to be.”

  11

  THREE MONTHS LATER

  It was much harder than she thought it would be. Of course she didn’t expect things to be easy. Everyone told her that having a baby changes your life, but those are just words until one day you realize you and your husband and your relationship, that thing that is not you and not him but something else that you have worked hard to create, is not what it was before. The sudden flood of responsibilities, the lack of sleep, the need, the constant need that you have to fill—no one really explained it all, or maybe she just never thought about how totally selfless you have to be, at least at the beginning. She never said she minded. She wanted this. She was ready for it. But for the first two months, she learned, you are giving, giving, just giving, and the baby doesn’t give back. He doesn’t even smile in response to you yet, but later—she knew because everyone told her—when he does, it is very gratifying. She was aware that some people claim their babies smiled at them when they were two weeks old, but they were just imagining it, she was sure. Sometimes you see a little movement of the baby’s lips that looks just like a smile, she admitted, but it doesn’t seem to be connecting to you, not a social smile, just a response to something inside the baby itself. “I don’t know,” she said to Jeff. “Maybe it’s gas.” She told him that she made that comment to one of the other mothers at the pediatrician’s office and the woman looked at her pityingly. “Either she thought my baby had something wrong with him, or that I did and I didn’t measure up as a mother,” she said, laughing. “That woman was just so sure her baby was smiling directly at her. But I’m just as sure that baby wasn’t and I don’t think Griffin has yet either and no mother could love her baby as much as I love Griffin.”

  And she did love Griffin. She held his naked body next to her breast after she fed him sometimes, skin to skin, as she had read helped build bonding, and couldn’t imagine loving him more. She had heard that if she took hormones and pumped her breasts she could actually stimulate them to produce milk even though she hadn’t given birth, and she had briefly considered doing this. But in the end she decided not to. Jeff, who always objected when she suggested anything that wasn’t natural, had already come pretty far by going along with the surrogacy and, especially after everything that had happened, she didn’t want to push him further. She also worried both about what effect the extra hormones would have on her health long-term and whether she would ever produce enough to satisfy Griffin’s growing need. Once she made the decision, she wondered if without nursing and especially without the experience of giving birth, it might take longer for her to bond, but from the first moment she held him in her arms and gave him the bottle, she knew she didn’t have to worry. He’d lock his eyes onto hers as he fed, making little groaning, gurgling noises, and she was hooked.

  But after the first few days, he sometimes squirmed and pulled away sharply while she fed him, starting to cry and then frantically rooting around until she put the nipple back in his mouth. It soon became clear that crying would not be an unusual occurrence. Griffin seemed to cry most of the time. He had colic, the doctor said. His little body seemed wracked with pain. It was tempting to think that maybe he was crying for his dead sister, that he was lonely for the companion he’d had in the womb. But she didn’t really believe that and she didn’t want to think that way. The doctors said it was his stomach or an immature nervous system and she concentrated on that. He woke every two hours to eat and then cried almost nonstop until the next feeding. He’d fall asleep about half an hour before it was time to feed him again and then he’d wake with a short sharp cry that grew louder and more insistent until she offered him the bottle. When he finished, she would try every way she had read or heard of to burp and comfort him, and sometimes she would be successful. But as soon as she lowered him into his crib, he started to cry. She couldn’t bear to hear his cry—he was so tiny, so helpless. So she’d pick him up and rock him and try to find a way to soothe him. But nothing helped for long. She sat in the glider holding him, hearing his screams, feeling inadequate, a baby book open to “Why does the baby cry?” She never found out. The only thing that worked at all was movement. If she’d put him in the baby carriage and rock it hard, he sometimes quieted. But the best solution was the car. This wasn’t too bad during the day, but it soon developed that his worst episodes would occur in the middle of the night.

  “It would be three in the morning,” she’d tell friends when they came to visit, and they would listen open-mouthed, “and I’d bundle him up and walk across the street to the garage, put him in the car seat and drive around till he fell asleep. The guys who worked there got used to me—this crazy lady and her screaming baby. But it was amazing. As soon as I turned the key and the engine turned over, he’d stop crying
. I knew this really was nuts in a way, but the thing is, it stopped that incessant screaming and as soon as it stopped I felt better. Sometimes, after driving randomly for a while, after he was asleep, I’d pull over in front of the garage and try to get up the nerve to take him home without waking him. But often, as soon as I stopped the car, he’d start crying again. Finally, I’d come home, exhausted. Maybe by then he’d really fall asleep for a few hours, if I was lucky. The next time he needed to eat, I’d feed him and then wake Jeff and ask him to rock him until he fell asleep.”

  “I was wondering when you’d mention Jeff,” Grace had said. She and Grace had become close since that fateful dinner in Woodstock when Grace had suggested surrogacy. “Why isn’t he helping you more?”

  “He wanted to help. He’d have done more if I’d asked him, but he didn’t have paternity leave. I had a few months off.”

  “Have you considered letting him cry for a while? Some people think that’s the only way to beat this. It’s sleep training.”

  “Did you do that with Stephie?”

  Grace laughed. “What do you think?”

  “I think you didn’t.”

  “Yeah. Well, you’re right.”

  “Even if I ever do decide to do that, it wouldn’t be now, when he’s so little and clearly suffering from colic. That’s inhuman.”

  Julie came to visit several times, filling her in on office gossip and asking for instructions and advice. Marcia enjoyed her visits and regaled her with the by now stock stories of her motherhood trials, which she had polished practically to performance art. “You’re not encouraging me to have a baby,” Julie said with a nervous laugh. Marcia smiled. “I know, I’m sorry. But it’s not an issue right now, right? By the time it is, you’ll be ready for it.” She took out a box of homemade chocolate chip cookies one of her friends had brought and offered it to her. Julie took one.