• • •
My train pulled into Thirtieth Street Station at seven-forty-five. I changed my clothes in the bathroom, but I still thought my day’s adventures would show. Not on my breath, because I’d chewed an entire pack of Tyler mints on the bus ride from the train station back home. Not on my face, because I’d scrubbed away the makeup and shoved my hair back into a bun . . . but somewhere. When I got home at just after eight-thirty, the house smelled like the chili that was bubbling away on the stove. Bright blue and gold pottery bowls filled with chopped avocados, sour cream, and grated cheese sat on the table, along with a place mat and napkin for me. I found my parents in the office, huddled in front of the computer, which my mom snapped shut as she pushed her chair back from the desk and spun around to face me. “How was your day?” she asked.
“Did you and Tamsin get a lot done?” my father prompted. I felt the urge to laugh surging inside of me. It tasted like peaches. I opened my mouth and a wall-rattling burp emerged.
“Nice!” said my mother. Her fingers were drumming on top of the laptop, like she couldn’t wait to flip it open again. She got like that sometimes when she was writing, but that didn’t explain what my father was doing beside her. Usually, when she and Lyla Dare were on the plains of Saidith Khai or wherever, he left her by herself.
It took me too long to realize that my father wasn’t even looking at her. He was staring at me. “Joy, are you feeling all right?”
Uh-oh. “I think I might have a stomach bug,” I mumbled, and went upstairs, where I locked myself in the bathroom and sat on the toilet with my head cradled in my hands. A few minutes later, there was a knock at the door.
“I’m indisposed!” I called.
“It’s just me.” My father’s voice was very deep and soothing.
“One second,” I called. I swished a gulp of Listerine around my mouth and opened the door. My dad was standing there, tall and familiar in his jeans and blue sweatshirt, with a bottle of Tylenol and a glass of grape-flavored Gatorade in his hands. I remembered being sick a dozen different times, with earaches or fevers or bronchitis, and how he’d take care of me, brewing his special tea (chamomile plus secret ingredients), bringing me extra pillows in crisp pillowcases, and soft scrambled eggs and toast, sitting with me while I watched TV.
I gulped back tears and another burp, feeling wretched with regret and shame. I should have invited him to the blended-family bar mitzvah thing, not Bruce. I should have looked like him, with his dark hair and dark eyes, instead of Bruce, who didn’t even want me. Bruce, who I embarrassed.
“Try to sip it,” my dad said, handing me the purple drink. I guzzled half the glass, then burped once more and slumped onto the fuzzy pink bath mat. He pulled a towel off the rack and folded it behind my shoulders. “I’m going to assume,” he said in his low, slow voice, “that you’ve learned an important lesson and that there’s no need to tell your mother about what you may or may not have been drinking, because you won’t be doing this again.”
I nodded, not even trying to come up with a lie about bad cheese or sushi. There was a lump swelling in my throat. I wanted to have him hug me or take me to a matinee or an Eagles game. I wanted to be a little girl again, a girl who loved ice cream and the color pink and always wore her hearing aids, a girl who didn’t lie or steal or sneak around. I opened my mouth, not sure what would come out of it: whether it would be about peach schnapps, or Bruce and Emily, or where I’d gone and where I’d been all day long. “Amber Gross has a boyfriend,” I croaked.
My father considered this. “Do you want a boyfriend?”
I laughed. I could just picture my mom and dad spreading a big net full of video games and buffalo wings across South Street, waiting patiently until a boy who looked right wandered into their clutches. I laughed even harder as I imagined them rolling up the net and dragging it back home. Honey, we’ve got a live one! my mother would say. Or Throw him back, he’s not a keeper!
“Am I in trouble?” I asked.
My father shook his head, then pulled off his glasses and polished them on the tail of his shirt. Behind them, his eyes looked soft and tired, with lavender pouches underneath. “Let’s not let this happen again,” he said. I made myself smile, even though I felt like crying. “You think you could manage some toast?” he asked, and I told him that maybe I could.
NINETEEN
“I don’t know,” I told Peter, fidgeting on the chair beside him. “This feels weird. Immoral. It’s like we’re picking out a prostitute or something. Ooh, she’s cute!”
Joy had sipped a cup of chicken broth and nibbled a piece of toast, then gone to her bedroom at nine-thirty. Ten minutes later, Peter and I had put a pot of coffee and shortbread cookies on a tray and tiptoed into my office. I’d gathered up my latest StarGirl outline while Peter had logged on, and we’d spent the next hour huddled together in front of my laptop, scrolling through the classified ads at the Open Hearts website, which I’d insisted on calling Moms.com. We’d been conditionally approved by the agency, which had sent us an access code so we could browse the pictures and biographies of the surrogates while we waited for our home visit, and we’d been looking at the profiles with a mixture of horror (mostly mine) and interest (largely his).
“Check her out,” I said, feeling vaguely pimplike as I pointed to a picture of a sweet-faced brunette posing on a porch with two beaming little boys. She was squinting into the sunshine, a hand on one of her son’s shoulders, the other hand brushing her bangs out of her eyes. “She even kind of looks like me.”
Peter studied the picture. “I don’t see the resemblance.”
“We both have brown hair,” I said. His eyebrow went higher. “And we’re both female.” Peter gave me an indulgent smile.
“Oh, c’mon,” I said. “You would totally hit that.”
“Is that how we’re talking now?”
“Well, isn’t that kind of the point?” I replied. “If we’re looking for a woman who’s going to carry our child, shouldn’t she be, you know, someone you’d theoretically want to sleep with?”
“I guess.” Peter, agreeable as ever, stretched his long legs out in front of him. “But because it’s my sperm and your egg, shouldn’t it be someone you’d want to sleep with, too?”
“Huh.” I looked at the surrogate’s picture. “That does put things in a different light.”
The creases bracketing his lips deepened as he smiled. “Hey. Cannie. Are we really doing this?”
I felt as reckless as if I’d drunk a dozen espressos, jittery and excited and deeply disconcerted. “It seems that we are.” My fingers flew over the keyboard. Dozens of women’s faces and screen names zipped by. I stopped and laughed at one posed in a T-shirt that read WILL BREED FOR FOOD. Then I scrolled back to the first woman I’d picked. “Twenty-nine years old, brown hair, brown eyes, and she’s done this before.” I scrolled down through the ad and read out loud. “‘My first surrogate experience was fantastic! I gave birth to a beautiful, healthy nine-pound, two-ounce baby boy without complications or pain meds . . .’” I pushed my chair away from the computer so my husband wouldn’t see how the words “beautiful” and “healthy” and “no complications” had pierced me. He did see, of course, and he put his fingers under my chin, turning my face toward his.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine!” I said. I must have sounded convincing, because Peter rested his elbows on my desk and peered at the screen.
“She says she’ll travel for the transfer.”
I shuddered. “God. Is that what they call it? The transfer? It sounds like we’d be picking up a package or something. Hang on.” I located the glossary. “That’s the transfer of the fertilized egg. Oh,” I said, scrolling down the page to the next ad. “Oh dear.” HELLO I AM A TWENTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD WHITE FEMALE. THAT LIVES IN DENVER, MOTHER OF TWO. I HAVE BLOND HAIR AND BLUE EYES AND BOTH OF MY CHILDREN HAVE BIG BLUE EYES AFTER ME. DO NOT SMOKE OR DRINK AND HAVE NO DESIRE TO DO SO. WHILE I AM NO LONGER
WITH THE FATHERS OF MY CHILDREN, I DO LEAD A STABLE LIFE STYLE AND AM VERY EAGER TO HELP ANOTHER FAMILY BRING A NEW LIFE INTO THE WORLD.
“Sheera,” I read. “Her name is Sheera. Don’t women named Sheera automatically have to be strippers?”
“I guess not,” my husband said.
I got to my feet and walked over to my bookshelves, studying the framed pictures: me and Peter at our wedding, Nifkin and Peter and Joy on the beach, Nifkin with a miniature Frisbee in his mouth, Joy with a stripe of sunblock on her nose. “I don’t know. It’s just too weird! Paying some woman, some stranger, someone who doesn’t have as much money as we do—it’d feel like we were, I don’t know, hiring a maid or something. And it shouldn’t be that way. Having a baby isn’t just doing the laundry or the dishes. I know.” I wiped at my eyes, not even trying to pretend that I wasn’t on the verge of losing it. “I remember.”
Peter got up and put his hands on my shoulders. I turned away from him, toward the window, and stared out into the darkness. “And who’s to say she wouldn’t change her mind?” I plopped myself back down in front of the computer, reading out loud. “This one says she’d let the IPs make a decision about termination if the quad screen or the amnio looked bad. ‘It would bother me but it is the IPs’ decision and not mine.’ What’s an IP?”
Peter clicked one link, then another. “IP,” he said in his low, rumbling voice. “Intended parents.”
“Intended parents,” I repeated, and pressed my hands together in my lap. I imagined being twenty-three in Colorado, with two blue-eyed babies, working and going to college while my mother took care of my kids, and getting a call or an e-mail from a much wealthier, older couple two thousand miles away, seeking to rent out my body the same way they’d lease a unit in one of those U-Stor-It places they advertise on billboards on I-95. Would I love the baby I was carrying? Would I resent the couple I was carrying it for? I straightened up in the chair. “Whoever we pick, whatever they’re asking, I think we should double it.”
Peter looked at me cautiously. “Why?”
“Because they’re not asking enough!” I swept my arm toward the screen. “None of them are! For what they’re doing, it isn’t enough! To give up a child—”
“But it would be our child. Biologically,” he said.
“Biologically.” The word didn’t signify. A baby was a baby, and I couldn’t believe that a woman could carry a baby for nine months and feel like it wasn’t hers. I shook my head, remembering, in spite of myself. The doctor who’d come to my room to tell me that I was now minus a uterus had worn a white lab coat with a coffee stain on the sleeve, and he’d had kind, tired eyes. We’re sorry, he’d said. We did everything we could. I’d stared up at him from my hospital bed, still foggy from the drugs and feeling like my insides had been scooped out by God’s own melon baller. No more babies? I’d asked in a faint voice. We’re sorry, he’d said again. I hadn’t realized how much I’d wanted to be a mother until the minute I’d learned that I wouldn’t be able to do it ever again.
“And what if she has complications? Like I did?” My voice cracked. “How do you compensate someone for never being able to have another baby?”
Peter reached over my shoulder and shut the laptop. “Let’s take a break.”
I sighed and folded my hands on the laptop, thinking about time and how little of it we had left for this.
“Cannie, it’s all right,” Peter said. “We don’t have to decide anything tonight. Maybe your sister will change her mind. Maybe . . .”
I nodded in all the right places and let myself imagine Sheera in Colorado. I put her in an apartment like my old one, on the leafy, tree-lined street around the corner: two bedrooms, one for her and one for her boys. I added music—the Annie sound track, which Joy had always loved—the sounds of the washer and dryer eternally running, the smells of diaper cream and apple juice and macaroni and cheese. That had been Joy’s favorite when she was a little girl. She’d had a little china dish with a gold rim and a pink bunny painted on the bottom, and a stepstool with her name carved into the top, a gift from Grandma Audrey. I’d let her stand beside me on her step-stool and dump the cheese powder into the noodles. The stepstool and the bunny dish were still in the basement, along with boxes of Joy’s nursery-school finger paintings, the clothes she’d outgrown, her tricycle and training wheels, the things I couldn’t make myself let go.
The words of the first ad I’d looked at surfaced in my mind like a bright banner snapping in the wind under a cloudless blue sky. A beautiful, healthy nine-pound, two-ounce baby boy . . .
Peter studied my face. I did my best to make it look normal as I pushed myself away from the desk. “I’m just going to clean up a little. Not tired yet.”
“Okay,” he said. “See you upstairs.”
I did the dishes and wiped off the kitchen counters, listening for his feet on the stairs and the sound of the water running. After half an hour, I tiptoed back into the study. The desk lamp was still on, and the laptop flared into life when I tapped the keypad. I hit sort surrogates, grabbed a notebook and a pen, and started scrolling through the names and faces and cities, searching for the woman who could make our dreams come true.
• • •
“Stand, huntress,” hissed the voice that came from the darkness. My fingers flew over the keyboard. I leaned forward, mouth slightly open, teeth unbrushed, hair uncombed, sprinting down the homestretch of Lyla’s latest adventure, happily lost in her world.
Lyla bit back a groan as she staggered to her feet and ran her hands along her sides. Ribs bruised, maybe broken, a front tooth snapped to a jagged edge. Her whole body sobbed with pain, but she made herself stand tall, shoulders back, feet planted, like a soldier, the way she’d been trained.
The voice in the darkness laughed at her. “Such a brave girl,” it said. “Foolish but brave.”
Lyla bent as if seized by a sudden cramp. Her boots were still on her feet. The knife was still in her boot, the blade warmed by her skin. She fumbled it free, imagining she could see the steel flash in the darkness, as the voice said—
The telephone rang, startling me out of my space traveler’s trance. “Shit,” I said, sighing, and saved my document. I usually remembered to turn off the ringer when I was working. I glanced at the caller ID before lifting the receiver. “Hi, Sam,” I said. “Aren’t you out with a Jew? Who may or may not be for you?”
“I am indeed,” my friend said faintly. “We’re at Lacroix. The walls are a lovely shade of pumpkin.”
“Be right there,” I said, snatching my car keys off the desk. “Pumpkin” was our safe word, the one we’d agreed on when I was single, too, the word that meant “Rescue me.” I’d used it only once, when the guy I’d met in line at the video store had asked me out for dinner, then, over appetizers, asked whether I was into swinging. I’d smiled politely, run to the restroom, called Sam, and said the magic word. Ten minutes later, she’d arrived at the restaurant in a taxi with its engine running and a story about a death in the family.
I drove to the Rittenhouse Hotel as fast as I could and pulled up beside the fountain, tossed the keys to the valet, hurried through the doors, and almost smacked into Samantha, who was waiting by the elevator bank, looking unhappy.
“Cannie!” She grabbed my arm and held on to it like the last life jacket on the Titanic. “Oh, thank God you’re here, you’re not even going to believe—”
“Hey!” We turned around. The elevator doors had parted to reveal a furious-looking gray-haired man in a white nylon windbreaker with a to-go bag looped over his wrist. He walked over to Sam, who turned to face him, the epitome of regal disdain. Toe to toe, he was eye level with her nipples. He squinted up at her furiously, waving what appeared to be a check in the air. “Thirty-four ninety-five!” he said.
I watched as my friend extracted two twenty-dollar bills from her wallet and held them out to him, pinched between her fingertips. “Keep the change.”
The man snatched the money. Th
ere were flecks of white stuff crusted in the corners of his mouth. “You know,” he hissed, as I wondered whether the white crud was toothpaste, food, or something indescribably worse, “it’s an actionable offense to misrepresent yourself on the Internet.”
My heart sank as I realized that I was witnessing the moment I’d long feared: a blind date calling Sam on her failure to be Brooke Shields.
“Oh, really?” Sam said coolly. “That would be an interesting lawsuit from a man who claimed to be five-eight in his profile.”
“I am five-eight!” the man insisted. Sam raised her eyebrows and looked at me. I made the universal face of not getting into it, even though if that guy was five-eight, I was a size two.
He glared at Samantha for what felt like an eternity before snorting and stomping past us, with his doggie bag in one hand and Sam’s forty bucks in the other. Sam sank onto one of the hotel’s plush tasseled couches, almost displacing a display of lilac and hydrangeas on her descent.
I sat down beside her. “Do you want to talk about it?”
She shook her head.
“Was it worse than Foreskin Man?”
She grimaced, remembering the date she’d been on long ago with a man who’d launched into an impassioned speech about how he’d been psychologically scarred by his circumcision some thirty-eight years previously.
“Or the guy with one eye?”
The guy with one eye had been mine, and technically he’d had two eyes, but one of them had wandered. One of them had focused on me while I went through my first-date patter; the other one had stayed locked on our waitress’s ass.
Sam sighed. “What’s to say? He seemed completely normal on the Internet.”
“Don’t they all.”
“Divorced. Two kids. Works as a corporate litigator.”
I stared out the doors, watching the man’s back get smaller as he stomped across the park. “Does he represent the Lollipop Guild?”
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