The Photographer

by Mary Dixie Carter

  Fritz crossed to the fridge for another beer.

  Amelia picked up a bottle of Fernando Pensato olive oil and studied the label, again looking for an expiration date. She poured the bottle of expensive olive oil into the sink. It splashed onto her blouse, but she seemed oblivious to it. She smelled the opening of the empty bottle and wrinkled her nose, confirming to herself that she’d been right in pouring it out.

  “You have no compassion,” she said to Fritz. “You have no empathy.”

  I stood and clasped my hands together. “Can I try to help you both? I want to help you have a child.”

  Amelia startled at the sound of my voice. She turned to me with a bewildered expression. She had the glassy eyes and blotchy cheeks of someone with a high fever. “What are you going to do?”

  “Whatever you want me to do.” In order to achieve my dream, I needed to believe that this was true—that I was willing to do anything in order to help their family.

  “What are you talking about?” She put her head in her hands and looked to the heavens in a dramatic gesture.

  “Carrying the baby?” Fritz’s eyes locked on mine, and then he turned to Amelia. “I think she means carrying the baby.”

  I heard faint bells in the distance. “I mean anything.”

  “Carrying the child. Surrogacy.” Amelia steadied herself with one hand, her fingers clutching the kitchen island so hard, they turned white.

  “Yes, surrogacy.” I didn’t have enough saliva in my mouth to swallow easily. “Or anything else.”

  I looked for answers in Amelia but just saw confusion and rigidity.

  “I don’t even understand what surrogacy means,” Natalie said, swiveling on her chair.

  Amelia furrowed her brow. I could tell she wasn’t in the mood for explanations.

  “Well,” Fritz began tentatively, “a surrogate is a woman who helps people have a baby.”

  “How?” Natalie asked.

  “She carries the baby for someone who can’t,” he said.

  “In her stomach?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s weird,” Natalie said. “Like she’s a mom but she’s not a mom.”

  “Shut up, Natalie!” Amelia said.

  I couldn’t bear to hear Amelia speak harshly to her daughter. I walked over to where Natalie was seated and stood behind her protectively. Her frame looked so vulnerable from behind. I could practically feel Amelia’s words penetrating her.

  “Delta, I need to understand.” Amelia’s hand wandered through her hair like a butterfly, without any real direction. “Are you offering to be a surrogate for our family?”

  “I love your family so much.” Everything I wanted was in front of me, but I sensed that one mistake could undermine all of it.

  Amelia held me by my forearms, her fingers covered in olive oil. “If you’re offering to be a surrogate for our family”—she looked into my eyes—“my answer is yes and my gratitude knows no bounds.”

  A current of air lifted me up off the ground.

  I didn’t respond to her. I feared that my voice would give away my excitement. If I were able to see myself in a mirror, I would have looked sixteen, the effects of gravity on my body having been reversed. I was weightless.

  Tears fell from Amelia’s eyes. She spoke through her sobs. “But you can’t betray us, betray our trust. I can’t survive with this kind of pain again.”

  “I don’t know.” Fritz frowned and looked down. “This … It feels like too much to ask.” His voice shook. He didn’t seem completely comfortable with the idea, but neither did he have the energy to challenge Amelia directly.

  “We want you to be our surrogate,” Amelia sobbed, then bit her lip and swallowed. “Of course, we’d figure out a way to compensate you.”

  “I wouldn’t accept money.”

  “Some kind of compensation,” she said. “It wouldn’t be right otherwise.” I could hear underlying panic in her voice. It was the fear that I might say no. Or that I might say yes and then change my mind. Amelia was desperate and her desperation made her vulnerable.

  “Money isn’t…”

  “We would be eternally grateful,” Amelia said.

  “Of course,” Fritz said, “we’d be grateful.”

  “Why would Delta want to?” Natalie chewed on her nails.

  I placed my hand on Natalie’s shoulder. “The joy of bringing a life into the world.”

  Her shoulder blades trembled. “I don’t believe that.”

  “Natalie!” Amelia snapped.

  “Don’t pretend that it’s any kind of favor to me.” Natalie stood and backed away from us.

  “Stop it,” Amelia said to Natalie. “I apologize for Natalie’s behavior.” Amelia bowed her head. “You can’t know what a huge gift you’re giving us.”

  “I want to be in a different family,” Natalie said.

  Fritz held both hands up. “Enough.”

  “Last week, Mom slapped me,” Natalie said loudly.

  “Go to your room!” Amelia said.

  Natalie ran to the stairs. We listened to the sound of her feet climbing two flights of stairs.

  “Did you hit her?” Fritz said quietly.

  “How dare you?” Amelia’s fury filled the room like smoke.

  “I just don’t understand.…” he said.

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “Everyone’s nerves are frayed,” I said. “It’s so hard on all of you. Is it OK with you if I talk to her?” I looked at each of them, one at a time, waiting for a response. I took their silence as acquiescence.

  * * *

  Natalie’s door was ajar. I knocked softly.

  “Come in.” She was lying on her bed, on top of the purple unicorn comforter.

  I closed the door behind me.

  “I hate this house,” Natalie said. “I want to live someplace else.” She lifted her legs up in the air, then alternated kicking them one at a time. “My mom didn’t actually slap me.”

  “Of course she didn’t.” I was relieved, but at the same time I experienced a slight letdown. I wanted Natalie to need me. I wanted to be essential.

  “My mom just wants a baby.” She rolled over onto her side so she could see me.

  “I know.”

  “She wants a baby so much more than she wants me. It’s ridiculous.” She made her mouth into a small O and blew out a tunnel of air. “I’m not that interesting.”

  “Natalie…”

  She sat up on her bed and hugged her knees into her chest. “She says she’s the only one in the family who carries her weight.”

  “You’re a child.”

  “She has to take care of everything.” She removed her bracelet. “Dad doesn’t work as hard as she does.” She pulled both ends of the elastic out, then let them snap back in. “My mom says she’s drowning.” She snapped the bracelet again. “She wishes I were more helpful.”

  “Your mom is feeling bad lately, but it has absolutely nothing to do with you.” I studied the framed photograph of Natalie and her father on her desk. He was pushing her on a swing at a playground.

  “I’m not making her happy.” She snapped the bracelet again and this time I was sure it would break. “She probably thought that I would at first.”

  “Honey, you can’t expect to fix everything.” Natalie couldn’t, but I could. Astonishingly. I was in a position to make Amelia happy. The feeling of weightlessness from earlier returned.

  Natalie held my gaze. “Sometimes I think some relative died and my mom and dad had to take me in. My mom acts like I ought to be someone else’s responsibility.”

  She stood and walked to the window. Her third-floor bedroom, with its two large windows, faced a quiet street. In and among tree branches, it felt like a tree house.

  She leaned her hands on the panes and pressed her face up to the glass. “I want to live with you,” she said.

  “Natalie…” My pulse quickened. My shirt was damp with perspiration. I needed my relationship with Natalie to
work alongside the surrogacy, not in competition. I thought about the most appropriate way to respond to her. She might repeat what I said to her parents. “I would do anything for you.”

  “Let me stay with you,” she said.

  “I’d love for you to stay with me. For a night or a weekend or even longer.”

  “I mean live with you.”

  “You don’t really want that. You … you just need time to process everything.”

  “I’ve had a whole life with them,” she said. “I don’t need time.”

  “Honey, it’s a rough patch,” I said. “Things will get better.”

  “Please don’t be a surrogate,” she said. “You were my friend. And now they’ve taken you for themselves.”

  I had increasing anxiety, recognizing that Natalie wasn’t going to accept the surrogacy easily. I needed to find a way to appease her. For my own peace of mind. I didn’t realize how much her unhappiness would weigh on me.

  “Whether or not I’m a surrogate, it doesn’t change our friendship.”

  She stared out the window. She was quiet for a few minutes.

  My eyes landed on her green science folder. “How’s your science project going?”

  She crossed to the desk, opened the science folder, and looked over her completed pages of work.

  Natalie had spent time explaining each unicorn in her room to me, but hadn’t ever mentioned the large black unicorn lamp on her desk, and I hadn’t noticed it, perhaps because it was an abstract sculpture. Unless you were up close, you wouldn’t necessarily identify the lamp as a unicorn, but once you did, it was mildly unsettling.

  She flipped through several pages and then stopped. “This is wrong.” She sat down and took a pencil, eraser, and sharpener from her desk drawer. She erased several formulas.

  “All of this is hard for you,” I said.

  “I want them to give it up.” She started over, writing several formulas in a column.

  “I understand how you feel.”

  Through the window, a bright red cardinal, perched on a nearby branch, was calling out to its mate.

  “How come you don’t visit your son?” She erased her work again, and this time she erased so hard that she tore a small hole in the paper. “Goddamn it.” She threw the eraser at the window in an apparent attempt to startle the cardinal. But the bird just fluttered its wings. “Everyone’s talking about a baby that doesn’t even exist.”

  “I miss my son.” I did. I missed Jasper from the bottom of my heart. I ached to hold him in my arms. I’d worked hard to create memories, and over time my child had grown so clear to me. I could hold on to the notion that I would be reunited with Jasper. I thought about the work I could do in my studio, creating even more memories that would provide me with hours of happiness. The pain I was experiencing was the pain of a mother, an artist, a creator. Jasper was my creation, but eventually I would have to release him. With love comes loss.

  “I long for Jasper,” I said. “We FaceTime every day.”

  “Can I FaceTime with him?”

  “He’s shy.”

  Natalie looked down at her homework. “What does he like?”

  “Surfing. He lives near the beach in Venice.”

  She drew spirals on the side of the page.

  “He has an imaginary friend named Spiro,” I said.

  She smiled for the first time since I’d arrived at their house that day. “Jasper could visit you. You could visit him.”

  “I’m visiting him next week.”

  “Oh.” Her spirals grew larger.

  “I know it’s probably hard for you to understand the surrogacy. I care about you and your mom and your dad. I love all of you.”

  “You haven’t known us that long.”

  “I feel as if I’ve known you forever.” That was true. From the moment I’d met Amelia, I felt like she knew me, and I knew her.

  Natalie shifted from spirals to a vortex.

  I paused, trying to find the right words: “I don’t think your mom is going to give up on the idea of a baby.”

  She continued drawing a vortex that appeared to be spinning around a black hole. “I just want to get out of here,” she said.

  My pulse quickened again. I took her hand in mine. “I think that as soon as your mom has a baby, she’ll act the way you want her to act.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  The cardinal landed on a branch that was even closer to Natalie’s window.

  “What do you think would make you feel better?” I asked.

  “I want my parents to die.”

  Her bedroom felt warm and close. I had a strong urge to open the window.

  “I want my mom to be my mom,” she said. “Just because she cries, doesn’t mean that she’s a good person. My mom wants people to pay attention to her. That’s why she cries.”

  She turned her eyes to look out the window. I followed her gaze. The bird appeared to be staring at us.

  “I never cry anymore,” she said.

  I understood why. Amelia had taken the role of the person who cries.

  Natalie stood and walked to the window. “Why is it looking at us?” The bird didn’t move. “My mom wasn’t like this before she was obsessed by a baby. She didn’t cry all the time. She just worked.”

  She collapsed her body onto the large beanbag in the middle of the room. “Sometimes people came to take a tour of the house. Mom was happy because they’d say it was beautiful.”

  She leaned back on the beanbag and pulled her knees tightly into her chest. “And then sometimes, on those days, me and Mom went to the bookstore and got ice cream sundaes.”

  “You’ll do those things again.”

  I heard a loud noise and turned in time to see the bird crashing head-on into the window. Natalie screamed. The cardinal dropped toward the ground.

  Natalie leapt to the far side of the room, away from the windows. “Help!”

  “It’s OK.” I walked to the window and looked down.

  A minute later Fritz appeared in the bedroom doorway. “What’s wrong?”

  “That bird tried to break into the house!” Natalie cried.

  “A cardinal sometimes attacks its reflection in the glass,” Fritz said. “It thinks it sees another bird.”

  Natalie was still breathing heavily. “Is he dead?” she asked me.

  “I think so,” I said.

  She chewed on her nails in an agitated manner. She seemed to feel complicit in the bird’s death because she’d witnessed it. “It’s such a stupid bird.” She approached the window. “Why couldn’t he tell it was a reflection?” She gestured toward her own barely visible image in the glass. “It doesn’t look real. It doesn’t look like anything.”

  I put my arm around her shoulders.

  “Let’s go downstairs for a drink,” Fritz said, “to take the edge off.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Downstairs I found Amelia frenetically cleaning the kitchen counters, though they appeared clean already. She was rubbing one spot repeatedly, as if it were stained. She looked up when I entered.

  “I think we should celebrate,” she said. “I think we should draw up a legal document.” She was speaking fast, and her eyes were bouncing around the room.

  Natalie turned on the television in the media room. Fritz sat at the dining table with a bourbon and soda to sort a stack of mail. Amelia and Fritz were acting as if they’d forgotten about their plans to go out.

  “You two should leave whenever you need to,” I said.

  “Amelia,” Fritz said, “we’ve gotta make an appearance.” He pushed the stack of mail aside and disappeared upstairs with his bourbon and soda.

  “The last two years,” she said to me, “it’s been a heartbreaking time for me. I can’t keep track of all the disappointments.” Her syllables came out on top of one another, blurring her speech.

  “I understand.”

  “Delta, I can’t have my hopes dashed again. I can’t survive if that happens again. I
need to know that you will see this through.”

  The sound of bells returned and grew slightly louder than before. “I’m honored that you’ve asked me to be your surrogate.” It was an effort to stay in the room with Amelia, because I couldn’t resist watching the scene unfold—watching my dreams come to fruition.

  Amelia looked at me in earnest. “Would you like to see my doctor? My OB?” she asked hopefully.

  “I have an amazing doctor,” I said. “A brilliant woman.” I tried to conjure up the image of the physician I saw recently at the walk-in urgent care facility I frequented.

  “That’s terrific.” Amelia’s expression turned serious. “I want you to know that if you’d like to participate in the child’s life, I would be a hundred percent on board with that.”

  I felt warmth in my core. My life was changing. My life was changing.

  Amelia stiffened. Something had occurred to her. “What will Ian say?”

  I didn’t believe Amelia cared how Ian felt, but I suppose she thought that she ought to care. She wanted me to see her as a selfless person who kept everyone else’s needs top of mind. Or perhaps she was scared he’d interfere.

  “He knows where my heart is,” I said. “I hope to have a baby with Ian. One day. He understands that. I dream of Jasper coming back to Brooklyn and living with me and Ian and our baby. Those are the happy thoughts that put me to sleep at night.” I had never even considered living with Ian, and I had no desire to have a baby with him. But I had a sense that the narrative might satisfy Amelia’s desire to understand me and my priorities. In any case, it wouldn’t serve her to delve too deep. She wanted to believe what she wanted to believe.

  “And Jasper?” she asked. “How will he feel?”

  I felt a burning sensation in my throat, similar to acid reflux. “Jasper knows I love him.” In my mind, I could see Jasper building a sandcastle on the beach, his damp hair clinging to the base of his neck.

  Amelia put her arms around me and rested her head on my shoulder. “I am so grateful, Delta.” Moisture from her tears landed on my shoulder. She lifted her head. With no makeup, her colorless lips had disappeared. “Help me explain things to Natalie. She trusts you.” She whispered loudly, inadvertently spitting in my ear. “I know it’s hard for her, but she has to recognize that I have needs too.”