Judith Wall - The Surrogate

“I’m feeling better,” Jamie said, covering her breasts with her arms. “Thank you so much for all you have done to help me get through this, but I need to have my privacy back.”

The woman stood there for a time, glowering. “You don’t even have a bath mat on the floor. You could slip and fall.”

Jamie took the bath mat hanging on the side of the tub and dropped it to the floor. “Thank you,” she repeated. “I know this has been difficult for you, but I’m fine now. Really I am. I would appreciate it if you closed the bathroom door when you leave. It’s rather drafty with it open.”

With a huff, the housekeeper turned heel and left. She did not close the bathroom door.

Jamie leaned back in the tub, planning to luxuriate a while longer in the hot water, but the draft from the open door chilled her shoulders. With a sigh, she carefully got herself out of the tub. She was going to start locking the door to her apartment, she decided. Of course, Miss Montgomery had a key, but locking the door would send a message.

After she had dried off, she looked at herself in the mirror on the back of the door and hardly recognized herself. “You look like hell,” she told her emaciated self.

She put on a robe and made two phone calls. The first was to the security office. “This is Jamie Long,” she said. “I need for you to bring my dog back. As soon as possible, please.”

Then she called the kitchen. “I’d like some hot tea and toast,” she said when Anita answered.

Ralph arrived just as she was finishing her second cup of tea. His joy was boundless. Jamie wept as she buried her face against his neck.

She took him out into the backyard. While he raced around, she sat on the steps of the gazebo and lifted her face to the sun. Fall was in the air, she realized, with leaves just beginning to turn on the trees. It would be spring before she could leave here. Before she could have her life back.

Ralph came to sit beside her, and she put her arm around his shoulders. “I wish I could get us back to the starting line and withdraw from the race, but that’s not going to happen.”

Ralph thumped his tail on the step and licked her chin. Jamie hugged her dog and sighed. There was no going back.

“We’ll get through this,” she promised, planting a kiss on the top of Ralph’s scruffy head. “Less than seven months from now, we’ll be on our way back to Austin. I’ll find us a little house with a backyard near the campus where we’ll be safe and happy and never have to think of Hartmann Ranch ever again.”

But no matter how much she wanted to forget this time in her life, she knew she never would. And sometimes she would pause to think of this other time and place and the child she had borne here.

Not wanting to push her luck, Jamie had only a bowl of soup for lunch, after which Lester came to drive her to Freda’s clinic.

“Montgomery says that you’ve made a miraculous recovery,” Freda said. “Climb up on the table, and let me give you and the baby a once-over. I told you the nausea would pass, didn’t I? I told Montgomery that a big, strong, healthy girl like you would bounce back just fine. Matter of fact, I was more worried about Montgomery worrying herself into a nervous breakdown or a stroke than I was about you.”

When she was finished with her examination, Freda pronounced Jamie “fit as a fiddle.”

“I’ll call Montgomery and let her know,” she said. “And Amanda. She’s been worried sick about you.”

“Where is Amanda?” Jamie asked.

“In Virginia right now. She travels a lot, you know, speaking at revivals and political rallies. She’s a very important woman,” Freda said with pride in her voice. “Some folks say the only reason our dear president got himself elected was because Amanda Hartmann raised all that money and let righteous people know that it was their Christian duty to vote for him. You should hear the woman speak. You can just feel her love for the Lord. It fills up the room and fills up people’s hearts. It gives me goose bumps just thinking about it,” Freda said, rubbing her arms. “Course she’ll start tapering off now that…” Freda’s voice trailed off and she turned her attention to making an entry on Jamie’s chart. “Leave a specimen on the way out,” she said, nodding in the direction of the bathroom.

When Jamie came out of the clinic, Lester was dozing behind the wheel. He awoke and stretched when she got in the truck.

Back at the ranch house, instead of climbing the stairs to her apartment, Jamie walked to the end of the first-floor hallway and stopped in front of the door to Ann Montgomery’s apartment. She paused a minute, getting up her courage, then tapped on the door.

“Can I help you?” the housekeeper’s voice asked from behind her.

Startled, Jamie turned around. Miss Montgomery was wearing her usual navy blue-today’s attire was a double-breasted dress with white buttons. “I want to ask you a question,” Jamie explained.

“Well, what is it?”

“If Amanda Hartmann is expecting a baby, do she and her husband still plan to raise the one I am carrying?”

“Who told you that she was expecting a baby?” Miss Montgomery asked, a frown deepening the creases in her forehead.

“Freda sort of indicated that she was.”

Miss Montgomery digested this information, then forced a smile and patted Jamie’s arm. “You need not concern yourself with what is going on in Amanda’s life,” she said, her tone firm but pleasant. “All you need to know is that the child you are carrying is destined to be her child. And Mister Toby’s, too, of course. They want this child very much, more than you could ever know.”

Ann Montgomery watched as Jamie headed down the hall and started up the stairs. Under other circumstances she might actually have allowed herself to like the girl. As it was, all she felt was wariness.

Ann unlocked the door and went inside her spacious apartment with its handsome rugs, custom-made drapes, and elegant furnishings. It was a beautiful room that usually gave her great pleasure every time she opened the door and stepped inside. Her pleasure was muted, however, by what Jamie Long had just told her.

Amanda claiming to be pregnant?

She went into her bedroom, which was austere compared with the living room. Her father had made the sturdy bedroom furniture for his only daughter.

She sat on the bed that she had first slept in as a girl, the same bed that she had shared with Buck Hartmann for more than twenty years. She and Buck had made love under this same quilt.

She looked at her ugly old face in the speckled old mirror that hung above the dresser. She had been beautiful back then. Buck would call her his “raven-haired beauty.” But the years had not been kind to her. Her once willowy body was now thick and buxom, her once smooth skin crisscrossed with a maze of wrinkles.

After Buck’s son, Jason, married, Mary Millicent came into Ann’s life and immediately began transforming the ranch house and making it her own. That was when the guests started coming. So many guests-mostly wealthy men and powerful politicians who came to hunt and play poker into the night.

Mary Millicent was often dismissive of Ann and never sought her advice, allowing both her personal maid and her secretary to usurp Ann’s authority at the ranch. But Ann was a faithful listener of Mary Millicent’s Sunday morning radio show. On her knees, she would pray along with Mary Millicent and ask the Lord to forgive her for welcoming a married man into her bed. She wondered if serving a woman of God would help balance out the transgressions in her life. And as the years went by, Mary Millicent came to rely on Ann more and more to look after things at the ranch and care for her children.