Judith Wall - The Surrogate

Hand in hand they walked down the long, silent corridor. When they reached the entrance to the tiny chapel, Mary Millicent pulled Jamie inside. For an instant, Jamie thought Mary Millicent was going to kneel in front of the softly lit altar. Instead the old woman pushed on one side of it.

Jamie watched in amazement as the altar and the wall behind it swung inward. Mary Millicent stepped inside and switched on a light, revealing a bare wooden staircase. She waved Jamie through the opening, pushed the hidden door back in place, and started up the stairs.

Jamie followed as Mary Millicent slowly climbed, pausing on each step. At the top of the staircase she found herself in an octagon-shaped room that smelled of disinfectant. Half of the room was cordoned off with heavy curtains, like those used in hospital rooms. This side of the room held a large reclining chair, a small table with a lamp, and a second flight of stairs that disappeared into an opening above.

Jamie held back, not sure she wanted to see what was behind the curtain, but Mary Millicent pulled it back, revealing a metal bed with railings. On the bed, lying on his back, was the slight form of a person with longish blond hair.

“Come meet Sonny,” Mary Millicent said.

Slowly Jamie approached the bed.

She stared down at the wasted body on the bed. His eyes were closed, his cheeks sunken, his chin covered with stubble, but his hair looked as though it had just been brushed. “Is he conscious?” she whispered.

“Sometimes he mumbles and moves his arms and legs,” Mary Millicent said, “and every once in a while he opens his eyes and looks at me, but I’m not sure he sees me.”

The man was little more than a skeleton. Like Mary Millicent. Fluids were dripping into a vein in his arm, and his urine was being drained into a large plastic bag that hung from the side of the bed.

Jamie thought of the pictures of the glorious young man with the unruly blond hair and wonderful smile that she’d seen on the wall of the library and felt overwhelming sadness that he was now reduced to such a state.

“Who takes care of him?”

“The nurse and the witch-and one of the Mexican men helps out some. They feed him through a tube, but he’s nothing but skin and bones. Once he was the most beautiful boy I’d ever seen. When he smiled at me, I felt like I had been given a wonderful gift. I loved this boy more than I’ve ever loved anyone in my entire life. More than I loved God. My heart loved him and my eyes and my ears and my fingertips and my soul.”

Jamie realized the old woman’s cheeks were awash with tears and put a comforting arm around her bony shoulders. “It must be wonderful to love someone like that,” she said.

“No, it’s not. It makes you weak when you love. It gives God a way to punish you,” Mary Millicent said, pulling away from Jamie’s embrace. “After the accident, Amanda brought Sonny here and spent weeks and weeks doing nothing but praying to God to save her son. Even Gus came and prayed, and I tried to. I really did. But all I could do was curse. Do you think that’s why God won’t let Sonny wake up-because I cursed at Him for not doing a better job watching over my darling boy?”

Mary Millicent picked up Sonny’s hand and kissed it. “He was a holy being from the moment he was born,” she continued, laying her cheek against her grandson’s hand. “We all knew it. And felt it. You could see it in his eyes. In his smile. He was a holy being, and I knew that he was going to save more souls than my daddy or me or Amanda ever even thought about. But he never got the chance. God isn’t ever going to let him wake up,” she wailed, “and it’s time to let the poor boy go. I thought since you were going to have his baby that Amanda would have let him go by now. The last time she was here, I thought that was why she came. She spent hours and hours sitting here by the bed and holding Sonny’s hand and kissing him and washing his body and talking to him.”

“What does my pregnancy have to do with Sonny?” Jamie asked, backing away from the bed, not sure if she really wanted to hear Mary Millicent’s answer.

The anguish vanished from Mary Millicent’s face and she emitted a lewd-sounding cackle. “He’s your lover,” she said and used her hands to mimic intercourse.

“I don’t have a lover,” Jamie said.

“Honey, you don’t have to pretend with me. I live right up there,” Mary Millicent said, pointing toward the ceiling. They think I don’t know what goes on down here, but I do. I heard Amanda tell Sonny that he was going to be a father. She said the mother of the baby was a pretty girl with blond hair and blue eyes, just like him. And she was tall and smart, just like him. And a good Christian, just like him.”

Jamie took another step back. She shouldn’t have come here. She didn’t want to know about this poor shell of a man who was more dead than alive. And she didn’t want to hear nonsense coming from the mouth of an addle-brained old woman.

“You want to go upstairs and see where I live?” Mary Millicent asked.

Jamie shook her head as she turned and walked shakily toward the stairs.

“Don’t you want to kiss him good night?” Mary Millicent asked.

“No,” Jamie said, grabbing hold of the banister and hurrying down the stairs. She could hear Mary Millicent singing in her quavering old-lady voice,

Sleep, my child, and peace attend thee,

All through the night;

Guardian angels God will lend thee,

All through the night…

Frantically Jamie pulled open the door and crept into the chapel then pulled the altar back in place and, with a pounding heart, looked up and down the corridor, half expecting to see Miss Montgomery or Amanda Hartmann waiting to accost her.

But she had done nothing wrong. All she had done was befriend a lonely old woman. It wasn’t as though she had set out to discover what was apparently a carefully guarded secret, a secret being kept by an incredibly wealthy family that practiced power and subterfuge along with religion.

But maybe they kept Sonny hidden away because they didn’t want reporters to hover around like vultures. Maybe that was why Amanda and her brother were so security-conscious.

Back in her apartment, Jamie sank onto the sofa and buried her face against Ralph’s neck, who was pathetically glad to see her. Not that she had been gone long, but he was unaccustomed to being left alone in the middle of the night.

Jamie willed her heart to stop racing and took several deep breaths in an attempt to slow it and to control the troubling avalanche of thoughts tumbling through her mind. She placed a hand on her stomach in a rare acknowledgment of the pregnancy that was changing the contours of her body. Had Mary Millicent really overheard Amanda saying that Sonny was the father of this baby?

Jamie shook her head in denial. She wasn’t going to believe the raving of a crazy old woman. Toby Travis was the father of the baby. She had signed a contract agreeing to have a baby for him and Amanda. The nice fertility doctor in Austin had used Toby Travis’s semen to inseminate her.

Could someone have taken semen from poor Sonny Hartmann and had the doctor use it instead?

Jamie remembered reading about an Aberdeen-Angus bull in Canada that was thought to have fathered more offspring than any other bull ever. His semen was packed in dry ice and shipped all over the world. Which meant that human semen could surely be transported from Marshall County to Austin.

Did a man have to give his consent before his semen was used to conceive a child, she wondered. Of course, men became unwilling fathers all the time, but at least they had realized that was a possibility when they had unprotected sex with a woman.

Jamie recalled an old movie that she had watched late one night after her grandmother had gone to bed. The World According to Garp. An army nurse had crawled into a bed with an unconscious soldier and gotten herself pregnant.