Judith Wall - The Surrogate

“More like an obsession, I’d say,” Lenora said.

“But if the whole insemination deal is off,” Bentley pondered, “it does seem strange that Amanda didn’t let us know and request that we find another girl. Maybe she and her husband have changed their minds.”

Bentley thought of Gus and Amanda’s impatience during the search for a surrogate. Which had made him nervous. The Hartmanns’ annual retainer accounted for more than half of Bentley’s income. Pleasing them was a condition of his life.

“I saw Amanda the other night on television,” Lenora said. “She really is remarkable. There were moments when I got tears in my eyes and other times when I wanted to jump up and down and yell ‘Hallelujah.’ Amanda Tutt Hartmann is either the genuine article or the world’s greatest con artist.”

“I think she is sincere,” Bentley said. “Gus Hartmann is more pragmatic.”

And more ruthless, he thought. Back in the days when Bentley was dealing with angry landowners who claimed Gus or his grandfather before him had swindled them out of their mineral rights, lawsuits would quietly be dropped for no apparent reason. Bentley had always wondered what sort of intimidation had been used.

He also had wondered if Gus had something to do with the death of Amanda’s ex-husband. Bentley had tried to persuade the man that it was in his best interest to accept the Hartmanns’ generous offer and get the hell out of Amanda and Sonny’s life, but Lenny Bradford joined AA, swore off gambling, hired a lawyer of his own, and sued for shared custody. Both sides were gearing up for a huge court battle when Bradford was shot while coming out of a restaurant by a still unidentified assailant.

And more recently, Bentley had been bothered by Gus’s determination to find someone to blame for Sonny’s tragic accident. The company that manufactured the all-terrain vehicle Sonny had been driving claimed that the rollover had caused a wheel to come off. Gus hired one of the best trial lawyers in the country to prove that just the opposite was true-that the wheel coming off was the cause of the accident. When the manufacturer offered a huge settlement, Gus turned it down. The next day the CEO was found hanging from the rafters of his horse barn. His death was ruled a suicide. At first his family had refuted that finding but soon withdrew their protest.

Not that Gus would harm Jamie Long, even if she tried to back out of her contract. The Hartmanns were powerful people and not to be trifled with, but they could always hire another surrogate mother.

Probably Jamie had miscarried or the insemination procedure had never worked in the first place and she had been dismissed.

Yes, something like that must have happened, Bentley assured himself. They had given her some money and sent her on her way. Any day now Gus probably would be calling to demand that he find another young woman to replace her.

IT HAD BEEN CHILLY when Jamie and Ralph began their walk, but now it was downright cold with a biting wind that cut right through her. And grayness had settled over the land, robbing it of beauty and making it seem inhospitable and cruel.

When she opened the door to her apartment, there were two boxes waiting for her-one of them quite large. True to her word, Amanda had sent her maternity clothes-jeans, knit shirts, sweaters, underwear, and two flannel nightgowns. In the smaller box was a pair of binoculars.

She went to a window and focused the binoculars on a lone red-tailed hawk circling near the road and watched with fascination as it suddenly dove with breathtaking speed. Just when it seemed as though it would crash into the ground, the bird swooped upward with a small creature-a field mouse, probably-firmly held in a grasping foot. The powerful do prey on the weak, she thought philosophically. She wondered if the field mouse struggled or simply accepted its inevitable fate.

She put away the clothing and wrote a thank-you note to Amanda and slipped it under Miss Montgomery’s door. Then, more out of boredom than fatigue, she decided to take a nap. “Just an hour or so,” she told Ralph, who curled up beside her on the sofa.

She dozed until her dinner tray arrived-at straight-up six o’clock, like always. She fed Ralph then turned on the television and decided which anchorperson she would have for a dinner companion. Other than Lester and Ralph, television people were her only friends. And Mary Millicent. Except that Amanda’s mother hadn’t made a middle-of-the-night visit since their songfest more than a month ago.

Jamie selected an Amarillo station, more to hear a weather report than from any desire to know what was going on in the Panhandle’s largest city, and removed the domed cover from her dinner plate. Tonight’s entrée was a baked chicken breast served with green beans and scalloped potatoes. Tonight’s weather, according to a perky brunette weatherperson, was scattered showers and intermittent sleet. Jamie didn’t mind her solitary breakfasts and lunches, but dinner was a meal she associated with companionship. At her grandmother’s house, dinnertime meant a cloth on the table, a blank screen on the television set, and a reporting of one’s day. In Austin, she usually had dinner in the residential-center cafeteria with one or more of her dorm mates.

After she’d put the dinner tray in the hall for pickup, Jamie curled up in bed to watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She’d seen the 1960s movie before but was charmed all over again as she watched Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard fall in love. How lovely that would be, she thought, to fall in love with someone and have that someone love her in return. She didn’t even have anyone to daydream about. Except Joe Brammer. And he was probably married by now. He would have finished law school and most likely was ready to settle down and have a family.

When the film ended, Jamie turned out the light. But her mind refused to settle down.

Finally, she got up and paced up and down the living room, much to Ralph’s bewilderment. When the dog finally got so upset over her strange behavior that he began to whine, she stopped pacing and heated a cup of milk in the microwave. She had just taken the first sip when she heard a key in the lock. Ralph heard it, too. His crooked tail began to wag in expectation.

Mary Millicent had on the same black lace nightgown as before with a tattered quilt around her shoulders and men’s argyle socks on her feet. “You’re not in bed,” she noted.

“No, I’m having trouble sleeping,” Jamie explained.

“You’re pregnant, aren’t you?”

“What makes you ask?”

“I hear and see things,” Mary Millicent said with a girlish giggle. “The witch and the nurse talk in front of me sometimes. They think I’m just a crazy old woman and don’t pay me any mind. I always had trouble sleeping when I was pregnant. It gets your whole body out of whack.”

Mary Millicent placed a hand on Jamie’s abdomen. “Yep. Between four and five months, I’d say. Felt any quickening yet?”

“No,” Jamie said, moving away from the woman’s touch. Quickening. The nurse had asked her the same thing and then explained that the term meant a woman had reached the stage in pregnancy when she could feel the fetus move. Jamie had no choice but to talk to Nurse Freda about such things, but she didn’t have to discuss it with other people.

Or even to think about it.

“It’s time you met Sonny,” Mary Millicent declared, wrapping the quilt more tightly around her emaciated body.

“Sonny? I thought he was dead.”

“Might as well be,” Mary Millicent said.

“Where is he?” Jamie asked.

Mary Millicent shook her head and put a finger to her lips. Then she grabbed Jamie’s hand and pulled her along as she tiptoed across the room and carefully opened the door. Jamie closed the door behind them.