The Surrogate Mother, Page 3

  The landline next to the couch starts ringing. I don’t even know why we have the damn thing, because all important calls come on our cell phones. All we get on the landline are telemarketers. Then again, I wouldn’t mind yelling at a telemarketer right now. It might make me feel better.

  I walk across the living room to answer the phone, but before I can make it, I trip on something and bash my knee on the coffee table. Our coffee table is one of those heavy marble tables with zero give, and damn, that hurts. I rub my reddening knee, searching for the object that tripped me up.

  It’s a bassinet. The one that arrived this morning.

  Of course.

  I yank the receiver off the hook, ready to scream at the voice that comes on the line. AT&T? Verizon? Progressive Auto Insurance? I’m not picky—I’ll yell at anyone right now.

  Except the voice on the other line doesn’t sound like a telemarketer. It’s a young, female voice, slightly hesitant. “Hello?”

  “Yes?” I say impatiently. My knee is starting to really throb. I should probably get an ice pack from the freezer to keep it from swelling too much—that is, if I can walk. “What is it?”

  “Is this… Dr. Sam Adler’s residence?”

  I frown. “Yes…”

  “Oh, great,” the girl says. She lets out a giggle. “Um, my name is April and I’m in Dr. Adler’s calculus class, and I had some questions about the exam on Friday. Is he… available?”

  I shouldn’t be surprised. A few years ago, we made our number unlisted because this would happen. Girls in Sam’s classes would track down the phone number of their handsome professor and call him, hoping for… well, I don’t know what they were hoping for exactly. He wears a wedding ring, so I guess they were hoping for a little something on the side. But then again, if that’s what they wanted, why would they call him at home? College girls are dumb.

  If the calls he gets here are any indication, I hate to think what goes on when he’s on campus. Good thing I trust my husband.

  “No, he’s not available,” I say tightly.

  “Oh, too bad…” She giggles again. “Well, I could meet him somewhere to talk more. Like, maybe on Saturday night…”

  Is this girl kidding me? This is far from the first time I’ve fielded a call from lovestruck coed, and usually, it’s funny. Sam and I laugh about it. But right now, I don’t feel like laughing.

  “Listen, April,” I hiss into the phone. “This is Dr. Adler’s wife and I would appreciate you not calling him at his home ever again.”

  “Oh.” The girl’s playful tone disappears. “Sorry, I didn’t realize—”

  The lock turns in the front door. Sam finally managed to park the damn car.

  “And,” I add, before he can come inside and stop me, “you are never, ever to bother Dr. Adler again. If I hear you have contacted him—either here or on campus—I will make sure you’re reported to the dean for harassment. Understand?”

  Sam walks into the apartment in the middle of that sentence. I’m not sure how much of my little tirade he heard, but his brown eyes go wide. Enough, I guess.

  “Okay,” the girl says softly. “I’m sorry.”

  “Good,” I say. And then I slam down the receiver.

  That’s the best part about having a landline. You can slam it down. You don’t get the joy of slamming a phone down when you’re on a cell phone. What can you do—press “end call” really angrily?

  Sam runs a hand through his hair, but does the thing he always does where he stops midway through his scalp so that his hair stands up straight. “Uh, who was that?”

  “One of your students.”

  His mouth falls open. “You talked that way to my student?”

  “Yep.”

  I stare at him, daring him to scold me further. I don’t want to fight with Sam right now, but I will. It would be only too easy.

  But he doesn’t take the bait. Instead, he crosses the room and plops down next to me on the sofa. He reaches for my hand, and just like that, all the anger drains out of me. And all that’s left is sadness. And emptiness.

  I can’t believe we’re not going to have our baby. I wanted it so badly. More than words can express.

  Ironically, it was Sam who initially pushed for us to have a child while I resisted. Not that I didn’t want children—I definitely did, but not until I was at least thirty-four, when my career was on solid footing. Denise had ranted long and hard about what motherhood would do to my prospects at Stewart, and it had left an imprint. I wanted to wait. Thirty-five, I told Sam when we got married. Maybe thirty-four, depending on how things are going.

  Sam felt differently about it. His own father had been forty when he was born and then died suddenly of a heart attack when he was in high school. His dad never got to see him graduate high school or college, never got to see him become a professor, never got to be at his wedding. Although he’s in much better physical condition than his father ever was, Sam was terrified of being an “old dad” and missing out on large chunks of his children’s lives.

  “I don’t want to die when my kids are still in school,” he said, his voice breaking.

  So right after we got married, he started gently pushing for us to try for a baby. I was only twenty-seven at the time and it felt inconceivable. But when Sam hit thirty, his pleas became more insistent. And then Shelley and Rick decided to start trying, so I finally gave in.

  When I first stopped my birth control pills, I was some combination of nervous and excited. I joked with Sam that I hoped it took more than a month or two to conceive. Still, I was surprised when my first pregnancy test was negative. As a healthy twenty-nine-year-old woman, I had always assumed that the second I missed even a single pill, I’d be instantly knocked up. It was a reprieve though—one extra month without worrying about the responsibility of impending motherhood. Sam and I laughed it off, saying this way we got to have more fun trying.

  After six months, we weren’t laughing anymore.

  Sam went to get his sperm checked. His boys were perfectly fine, and due to our relatively young age, my OB/GYN encouraged us to keep trying for another six months before we got too worried. Those six months went by, Shelley gave birth to her first child, and I still didn’t have a positive pregnancy test. It was time to investigate further.

  And that’s when it all went downhill.

  My doctor told me I probably had suffered some sort of infection that left deep scarring in my uterus and especially my fallopian tubes. Natural conception, she told me, would be impossible. We went straight for IVF, even though I was warned even that had a low chance of success given my “inhospitable uterus.” Sam gave me hormone injections at home to stimulate egg production, but when they retrieved my eggs, those too were deemed to be “poor quality.”

  I felt like an absolute failure as a woman. My uterus was damaged, my eggs were poor quality, and all our attempts at IVF were expensive disasters. I was wracked with guilt that my “normal” husband couldn’t have the child he wanted all thanks to me, even though he swore again and again that he didn’t blame me. Meanwhile, my boss Denise was utterly unsympathetic about my need to rush out to appointments with the fertility specialist, or about the meeting I had to reschedule when my single successful pregnancy aborted itself after three short weeks.

  For a time, I was obsessed with trying to conceive. I dove into it with the same intensity that had made me so successful at my job. I went vegan for a while. I drank something called “fertility tea” that tasted like the dust from our coffee table. I visited every infertility forum in the country and became well-versed in the lingo: TTC meant “trying to conceive” as in “I’ve been TTC for three years with no luck.” AF meant “Aunt Flo”—the dreaded monthly blood that meant another failure. DPT meant “days past transfer” after an embryo was transferred into my uterus—a countdown until the next time I could POAS (“pee on a stick”).

  And then every time a woman on the board would announce her pregnancy, we’d all congratul
ate her, but I’d get a sick feeling it would never be me.

  If it were up to me, I might have kept going with IVF until we were destitute, but it was Sam who brought up the idea of adoption. It will still be our child, he said. I resisted, having heard horror stories from other women on the forums about adoptions gone wrong, but Sam again pushed until I gave in. He was right—we wanted to be parents and this was our only option.

  Once we became immersed in the adoption process, I grew cautiously optimistic. I had wanted a child for what felt like forever now—it was a dream come true that it would soon be a reality. Unfortunately, nothing in the adoption process was quick. After carefully deciding on an agency, we had to complete a homestudy, which was the full body cavity search of the adoption process—the agency’s social worker visited us repeatedly, requesting every legal document that had ever been issued to us in our lifetime. I didn’t understand how they couldn’t just look at me and Sam and realize we’d be good parents, but I guess there are guidelines.

  After our approval, the search began for a child to match us with. Sam was open to older children, but I was adamant about wanting a newborn. During all those years of trying to conceive, I had dreamed of a tiny little infant, and I couldn’t let go of that. Sometimes I felt guilty about it, because I knew there were older children who needed homes, so we agreed our second adoption (and possibly third, if we got to that point) would be an older child. But I wanted to experience having a newborn. Just once. And it cost us a year of being rejected by multiple pregnant women until Janelle finally made our dreams come true.

  Well, almost.

  And now, after having it all for a very short time, we have nothing again.

  “What now?” I whisper to my husband.

  Sam drops his head back against the sofa, staring up at the ceiling, his eyes glazed. Sometimes I get so caught up in my own misery that I forget it means just as much to him as it does to me. He wanted a child even before I did. This is killing him—I can see it in his eyes.

  “I think we should look into adopting an older child,” he finally says.

  I suck in a breath. “Sam…”

  “I know,” he says tightly. “I know you were hoping for a newborn. I know. But Abby, there are so many young kids out there who need a home.”

  I look over at the tiny bassinet that nearly broke my knee. It’s trimmed in yellow ribbon with little pink flowers on it. Yesterday, when we still believed we were going to be parents, I had laid out a little outfit inside the bassinet. A blue onesie barely the size of my hand, paired with tiny yellow socks. I remember putting one of those little socks in my palm, marveling at how tiny it was. How could a human being have a foot tiny enough to fit into that little sock? I kissed the sock gently, knowing it would soon warm the tiny foot of my infant son.

  I know it sounds silly, but I had my heart set on a newborn. I don’t feel ready to let go of my dream of holding an infant in my arms—of sliding a tiny foot into that little sock.

  “We bought all newborn stuff,” I point out. “The clothes… the crib… the bassinet… the car seat.”

  “So?” He rolls his head to look at me. “We can buy all new stuff. It’s just stuff, Abby.”

  Yes, it’s just stuff. And it isn’t the stuff that’s made me hesitant to do this.

  “Everyone wants newborns,” he says. “But the kids in the orphanages… they need parents so badly. I want to do that, Abby. I’m sick of waiting for a newborn. I just want for us to be parents to a child who needs us.”

  He’s right, of course. I’ve got to let go of my stupid fantasies from my days of TTC. It also doesn’t escape me that if Sam wanted kids so badly, he could dump me for someone like April. His sperm is normal. I’m the problem.

  But he’d never do that.

  “Okay,” I say. “Let’s do it.”

  Chapter 4

  The worst thing about going to work the next morning is seeing other people. If I could be magically transported into my office and not have to speak to anyone, I’d be much happier.

  It’s a two-minute walk from the subway station to the office building, and during that time, I pass roughly five-thousand women pushing baby carriages. I don’t know what they’re all doing out and about at this early hour. I try not to look, but it’s hard not to. One of the babies can’t be more than a month or two old—she still has that fetal look to her, with her tiny eyes squeezed shut and her miniscule hands squeezed into red fists. Her hat has fallen off her head, and I want to reach over and put it back on. If it were my baby, I would never allow her hat to fall off or her little head to be cold for even an instant. I would never neglect my hat duties.

  Why would the universe take my baby away from me?

  When I walk into the office, the entire room goes deathly silent. If there were music playing, it would have come to a screeching halt. All eyes are on me as I attempt to sprint to my office. It’s enough to make me wish I had taken that personal day after all.

  I’ve almost made it to safety when I practically collide with Shelley. She’s standing with two other women from the office. I’ve attended baby showers for all three of them within the last five years, none of which ended abruptly in tragedy.

  “Are you okay, Abby?” Shelley asks me.

  “Fine.” I force a smile. “I’m fine. Really.”

  And I mean it. Well, I’m partially fine. Sam and I contacted the social worker at the agency last night and we told them we wanted to broaden our options for adoption. Sam figured there was no point in sitting around, feeling sorry for ourselves—we’d feel better if we got started on the process of finding another child to adopt. While he was saying it, it sounded stupid, but it turned out he was right.

  Not that I feel all better, but that stabbing pain in my heart feels more like a dull ache.

  Even so, Shelley hugs me, as do the other two women, even though I barely know either of them.

  “You’re going to get your baby someday,” Shelley promises me.

  I avoid her eyes. I’m not in the mood for patronizing pep talks. “Yep.”

  “Honestly, you should consider yourself lucky,” a woman named Jan says to me. “Kids are nothing but work. I mean, right now, you can go out to dinner any time you want and you don’t even have to think about getting a babysitter.”

  “And you never sleep when you have a baby,” the other woman, Sidney, says. “You walk around for a year feeling like a zombie. Actually, make that five years!”

  “Make that eighteen!” Jan laughs.

  Sidney winks at me. “You can have my kids if you want them, Abby.”

  I look at Shelley, who can tell how much these comments are getting to me. God knows how long these well-meaning women would have kept me there, telling me how fortunate I am to have the adoption yanked out from under me, if Denise Holt herself hadn’t shown up. The heels of her Christian Louboutin pumps tap loudly against the ground with each step.

  Denise Holt walks right up to us, not a trace of sympathy in her blue eyes. I wonder if she’s glad the adoption fell through for me. But in a way, I’m grateful for her stony gaze. At least one person is treating me the same as always.

  “Abigail,” she says sharply, folding her slim arms across her chest. “I informed you that you were welcome to take a personal day. But if you are going to be at work, please don’t disrupt the entire staff.”

  “Abby’s upset!” Jan says. “We were trying to cheer her up.”

  “Actually, there’s no need,” I say quickly. “I’m completely fine. Sorry, Denise. I’ll just… be in my office.”

  Thanks to Denise, I’m able to escape without any more sympathetic gazes or hugs. I slip into my office, slamming the door shut behind me. Finally, I’m in my safe haven.

  Except the entire corner of my office is littered with presents from the baby shower.

  At least they had the good sense not to give me the diaper cake. But why would they think I want to look at this giant stack of gifts, each one covered in a
different shade of pastel wrapping paper? I don’t have to open them to know they’re filled with tiny clothes and bibs and rattles. For a baby we won’t be getting.

  I pick up the present from the top of the pile. It’s wrapped in blue paper, which has little teddy bears, baseball bats, and basketballs on it, interspersed with the words “IT’S A BOY.” I glance at the card and see that it’s from my ex-assistant Gertie, who couldn’t make the shower yesterday because she was having a second surgery on her broken hip. I’m sure the box contains something tiny and cute that will break my heart.

  At the time, I thought it was so sweet of her to send a gift—now I wish she hadn’t bothered. I wish none of them had bothered.

  And now I have to figure out how to sell diapers. Wonderful.

  I settle into my ergonomic leather armchair. I was so thrilled the day I got my own office—the luxurious chair was just icing on the cake. Now? It doesn’t matter. I’d give it all up if only Janelle would change her mind back.

  I try to put those thoughts aside as I check the messages on my phone. My mother called my office line last night, after I sent her call on my cell phone to voicemail. She always calls on Wednesday nights—it’s between her book club night and her ballroom dancing night. But I couldn’t bear to talk to her. My mother is not the comforting type, and she was never in favor of adoption. It was her opinion that if Sam and I couldn’t conceive, we were better off childless. Someone else’s child—someone else’s problems. I didn’t want her to tell me about how I was better off.

  I’ve finished sorting through most of my messages and am feeling closer to some semblance of normal when Monica inches into the office with a cup of coffee for me. She’s wearing that same deep crease between her eyebrows that everyone else has. They must think I’m five minutes away from a psych admission.

  “How are you doing?” she asks as she carefully places the coffee mug down on my desk.

  “I’m okay,” I say. “But, um, could you get all these presents out of my office?”

  “Oh!” She whirls around to look at the stack of gifts. “Sorry about that! I wasn’t sure what to do with them. Nobody wanted to take their present back, so I just…”