by Banks, R. R.
“You will?” I asked.
The relief that had drained away rushed back now, heightened with hope. Rue looked at me and nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “I will. I told you that I would do anything that I could to help you and that I was in this for the long haul. I meant that. Just because things aren’t working out exactly the way that you had them planned doesn’t mean that you should give up or that you can’t ever have a child. If the doctor won’t be able to harvest any of Flora’s eggs to use and the doctor and the lawyer both think that it is a realistic plan to use mine, then I am willing to do it.”
****
Rue
What in the living-fucking-flipping-hell did I just agree to?
I had told them that they were more than welcome to use my eggs before I even had a chance to think it all the way through. It was like my mind was still in the process of going through it all and the words just jumped out without authorization. Richard had looked so sad, though, that I hadn’t given myself time to really contemplate what I was agreeing to and just how much that single agreement was going to change everything about the journey that I had in front of me.
One gorgeous man looks sad and suddenly I’m like an all-night grocery store near Easter. Eggs up for grabs all over the place.
I could feel everyone in the room staring at me and I was wishing that this had been a slightly more private meeting, or at least that I had given a token ‘I’ll think about it’ and then discussed my willingness with Richard when it could be just the two of us.
My willingness?
When it came to Richard it seemed to me that my willingness was bordering much closer to wanting to conceive this baby the good old-fashioned way than it was to offering him my egg because his girlfriend wasn’t able to conceive or carry a child. Something struck me as strange about that. This woman was young and healthy. At least she looked it. I knew that things like this happened, but I had a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that someone like her was never going to be able to have her own child. If she wanted any more than the one we were discussing now, she would have to go through all of this again.
Suddenly I was struck with the strange thought that if that happened, I hoped they would call me again. Not that I had the particular urge to go through another pregnancy that wouldn’t be mine, but that so the child that they would have from this pregnancy would be the full sibling of any future children that they had. I didn’t know why that mattered to me, but somehow it did.
“Thank you so much, Rue,” Richard said. “You have no idea what this means to me.”
“Yes,” Flora said, her voice somewhat flatter now. “No idea.”
I don’t see too many hugs in my future.
“Of course, all care after today will be performed at the new facility,” Richard said. “I want Rue to have the best attention throughout the entire process, including leading up to the insemination.”
“New facility?” I asked.
Richard looked at me as if I had somehow missed something that I should already know. I wondered briefly if there had been an orientation packet that I hadn’t read through. Ellery stepped up beside me and thrust a sheaf of papers into my hand.
Well, shit, there’s an orientation packet that I haven’t read through.
The first page of the packet was a crisp cover sheet with our names and the year printed on it. I suddenly felt like I was in some sort of corporate conference. I was just waiting for them to call a break and start bringing in boxed lunches. They didn’t, though, and I opened up the packet to find a sketch of a small, but impressive, building.
“What is this?” I asked.
“I’ve designed a medical facility to handle your needs throughout the pregnancy and during the delivery,” Richard said.
“You have?” I asked, shocked by the casualness of the statement.
“I did extensive research before starting the search for the right woman to carry our child and I realized that the medical facilities in this area are woefully lacking when it comes to their maternity departments.” He glanced at the doctor. “I apologize.”
“It’s alright,” Dr. Morgan said. “I know that you have discerning tastes.”
Were we talking about restaurants or hospitals here?
“I wanted to make sure that whoever I chose to carry my child would be in the very best hands from the beginning of the process. The facility that I have designed will be ready within a matter of days and will feature cutting edge technology, a dedicated staff of doctors, midwives, doulas, and nurses, as well as chefs, massage therapists, yoga instructors, nutritionists, therapists, and other professionals, and accommodations designed to be more comfortable than clinical. Throughout your pregnancy and until the baby is born and has reached six weeks old, you will be the only patient at the facility. After that it will be endowed as an exclusive private maternity center.”
I blinked a few times, trying to give my brain the chance to absorb what he had just told me.
“You built a new medical center just for this baby?” I asked.
“Yes,” Richard said. “It is very important to me that my child get only the best and I intend for that to apply from the moment that it exists.”
How wealthy was this man?
The rest of my time with the doctors went by in a bit of a blur of intense conversations, whispering between Flora and Richard, cold instruments, unflattering hospital robes, and endless reminders of everything that my body would go through during this process. When I felt like my brain had stopped spinning I was sitting back on the couch at my apartment with Christopher and Tessie on either side of me.
“You did what?” Christopher asked.
“I told them that they could use my egg,” I said, still somewhat surprised myself to hear the words coming out of my mouth.
“So, it will be your baby?” Tessie asked.
I shook my head.
“No,” I said. “It will still be their baby. The lawyer was there throughout the whole thing to make sure that I understood what was happening, and we signed the contracts. Essentially whatever egg they use won’t belong to me. The baby is theirs. They get to dictate how I take care of myself during the pregnancy so that they know that I’m taking care of the baby properly. As soon as the baby is born, I hand it over to them. They’ll provide for post-natal care up until my six-week checkup and then we go our separate ways.”
“And you don’t have anything to do with the baby?” Christopher asked.
“Nope,” I said. “It isn’t an adoption. This is their baby.”
I told them about the medical facility that Richard had designed.
“This man has some serious money,” Tessie said. “No wonder the fee he’s offering is higher than average.”
“It is?” I asked.
Christopher nodded.
“We’ve been doing some research,” he said. “We wanted to make sure that we were up on the news.”
I felt tears coming into my eyes and I reached out to grab both of their hands.
“Are you alright?” Christopher asked. “Is this baby hormones?”
I laughed as the first few tears slipped out of my eyes.
“I’m not even pregnant yet,” I said.
“Then what’s wrong?” Tessie asked.
I shook my head.
“I’m not sure.”
It was the complete truth. I wasn’t sure what emotions were rushing through me. The reality of it all had settled in and I was starting to feel overwhelmed. In the back of my mind, though, my dream was still bright and vibrant, the tender, grateful smile on Richard’s lips superimposed on it making my heart shiver in my chest.
Chapter Ten
Richard
“How could you do that?”
I had barely gotten the door to our house closed when Flora whipped around to glare at me and took an angry step in my direction.
“Do what?” I asked, unbuttoning my jacket and handing it to the butler to
hang it for me.
He walked past Flora without pausing to ask for her coat. To say that they didn’t get along would be a tremendous understatement and I tended to look the other way when he avoided interacting with her if she seemed to be in a particularly bad mood, which it was obvious in that moment that she was. Her face was reddened with anger and her mouth was pursed so hard her lips were barely visible anymore. Like usual in situations like this, I would take Flora’s jacket and put it aside somewhere. It would be gone the next time that I walked through the room, only to reappear the next time that we were leaving the house.
“I can’t believe that you asked Rue to let us use her egg.”
“I didn’t ask,” I said. “She offered.”
“And you accepted.”
“Of course, I did. You heard what Dr. Morgan said. If your doctor said that your eggs aren’t viable, then that’s it. They can’t be used for the surrogacy.”
“And you were just so willing to jump on using her egg.”
I crossed the foyer toward her and she promptly turned and stalked away from me. I followed her into the living room where she tossed herself into one of the plush sofas. If I wasn’t mistaken, in less than five minutes one of the housekeepers would arrive with a tray of tea and the tasteless, boring diet cookies that Flora insisted were delicious but I knew from personal experience tasted like cardboard dipped in old advent calendar chocolate. I couldn’t remember which of Flora’s meltdowns had started that tradition, but it was now common practice of the staff to try to release some of her tension and soothe her back from the brink. I would show my appreciation with an extra little tip at the end of the week. It was one of those things that defined the pattern of our lives and while it was one of the less pleasant of the habits that we had built, I was so accustomed to it by now that it barely fazed me when it happened. I just needed to figure out what it was that she was furious about, let her steam for a little bit, then figure out a way to fix it or just ride it out until she was over it or had moved on to something else that would hold her attention for a while.
I knew that things were going to be different when the baby came. Being a mother would calm her down. It would give her something to focus on and to fulfill her. When she had our baby to take care of, she wouldn’t be so frustrated and put out by the little things that happened in life because we would be too busy taking care of our little one. The three of us would settle into life together and Flora and I would finally be the family that I always envisioned having.
Though I would normally barely even notice Flora’s fit, somehow this time I couldn’t shake it. Reminding myself that things were going to get better soon, that when our baby was born we would have the life that we both wanted, didn’t take away the frustration that I was starting to feel. I walked into the living room and stared down at her where she sat.
“I don’t understand why you’re acting like this,” I said.
“ Acting like this?” Flora said, her voice low as though I had said something incredibly offensive. “What is that crack supposed to mean?”
“You are so angry that I agreed to let Rue contribute an egg so that we can have our baby. It doesn’t make sense. You agreed to surrogacy when you found out that you can’t carry children. What’s changed.”
“I agreed when I thought that maybe somehow I would be able to use my own eggs,” she said. “I didn’t think that I was going to be completely separated from this whole experience. That you were going to find some other woman to go through the experience with and that I was just going to be on the sidelines.”
“You aren’t on the sidelines,” I told her, sitting on the couch beside her. “You are going to be just as involved every step of the way as I will be, and then when the baby comes, you will be so in love with it that you won’t even think about any of this. It will be our baby. Nothing else will matter. We’ll be a family and spend the rest of our lives happily together.”
I tried to smile at her, but Flora didn’t look convinced.
“What if you don’t see me when you look at the baby?” she asked.
“Of course, I’ll see you. You will be the baby’s mother and you will be wonderful at it.”
“Maybe it’s time for us to talk about adoption,” she said.
“Adoption?” I asked.
I felt a flicker of discomfort in my stomach. When we first started talking about having a child and learned that Flora wouldn’t be able to carry it herself, adoption was something that I was more than willing to consider. Now, though, the thought made my heart sink a little. It was different now. Something had changed.
“Yes,” Flora said. “Don’t you think that we could be great parents to a child even if it wasn’t yours biologically? You’re asking me to raise a child that belongs to someone else, but you aren’t willing to do the same?”
She was spiraling into anger again and I wanted to stop the progression. The door opened, and the housekeeper scuttled in, lowered the tea tray to the table in front of Flora, and then left without saying a word. I met her eyes as she turned to shut the door, hoping that she could see the gratitude in my face. Flora paused to take a sip of her tea and eat a cookie. It seemed to bring her back to the still-elevated but at least controlled mental place and I took the opportunity to respond to her.
“I’m not asking you to do anything that you don’t want to do,” I said. “If you want to consider adoption, we’ll talk about it. But it could take years for us to get a baby. I thought that it was important to you to be able to raise our child from its first day. I know that there are children out there who need families, and maybe one day we will open our home to one, or even a few, but we talked about this. You said, and I agreed, that at least for our first child we wanted to go through the pregnancy experience and raise a newborn.”
I could see Flora’s eyes flickering slightly back and forth as if she was thinking hard about something. The color in her cheeks had faded and the tension in her muscles was responding to the calming properties of the tea. Finally, she set the cup on the tray again and looked into my eyes.
“If this is so important to you, then I will go along with it,” she said. “We’ll move forward with the surrogacy.”
Relief flooded through me and I threw my arms around Flora, pulling her close to me for a hug. Her hands touched my back and I felt her pat me cordially. I wished, not for the first time, that there was more warmth in the way that she touched me, or even in the way that I touched her. I hoped that it would come, that the experience of bringing a new life into the world and raising it together would help us to rediscover, or possibly discover for the first time, the depth of love that I saw in others but often felt that we had never really had.
****
“I can’t ask you to do that.”
“Of course, you can.”
“No. I really can’t.”
“If she says that she can’t, she can’t.”
I looked at Flora, who stood with her arms crossed over her chest. She had taken to not even sitting down at the meetings and as much as I thought that I should, I realized that I didn’t even care. Since we agreed to move forward with the plan, she had seemed distanced and I had had to come to the decision that I wasn’t going to let her force me into the same response. I wanted to be as invested and committed to this as I possibly could, even if that meant that I had to ignore how difficult she was being. She would get over it eventually and I couldn’t waste any step of this process waiting for her.
“There’s no reason that I can’t help her.”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with the contract,” Rue insisted. “You can’t be responsible for my personal expenses.”
“Part of the agreement was that I would provide for your expenses throughout the agreement period, and that includes housing.”
“Yes, housing. Like covering rent payments. That doesn’t count moving me. That’s something that I decided to do on my own.”
“I don’t want you h
aving to be stressed about anything,” I said. “I don’t want you to worry about having to pack and load a truck and do all of that before the procedure and especially not after.”
“I wouldn’t be doing it on my own,” Rue insisted. “I have friends that would come help me.”
“This is something that I am happy to do for you,” I said. “I can make sure that the whole thing is over and done with in one day. That way you can get settled in, relax, and get ready for next week. Please say you’ll accept.”
Rue seemed to think about my offer for a few moments and then nodded.
“I will,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Good. Just pack a bag with anything you might want for the first night that you are in your new home and then the crew will be there to handle the rest for you.”
“Oh, it’s not a new home,” she said.
I looked at her questioningly.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s actually my grandmother’s house,” she said. “I’m just going home.”
I smiled. That sounded wonderful.
Two days later I arrived at Rue’s apartment to check in on the progress of her move. I carried a to-go cup of coffee to cut the chill that had settled firmly into the air and a box of pastries. Rue was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, staring at the door to her apartment in stunned silence. I walked up to her side and she jumped slightly at my sudden presence. I held out one of the cups of coffee and she looked at it for a moment before taking it.
“Thank you,” she said.
I was about to offer her some of the cream and sugar that I had in a small bag, but she took a long swig of the strong brew black and I smiled.
My kind of woman.
I shook my head slightly. That wasn’t a thought that I should be having.
I opened the box of pastries and held it out to her. She peered inside and then lifted her eyes to me.