Judith Wall - The Surrogate

No book is created in isolation. Special thanks go to my brilliant editor, Amanda Murray, who did a terrific job helping me turn a rambling, overly long manuscript into a publishable book, and to my fantastic agent, Philippa Brophy, for hanging in there with me for all these many years.

I also am grateful for the assistance, expertise, and encouragement I received from JoAnna Wall, Joan Atterbury, Dr. Jim Wall, Lanella Gray, and certified midwife Michelle Robidoux.

And I want to express my gratitude to all those unheralded, knowledgeable, and diligent copy editors who, over the years, have cleaned up my manuscripts.

THE BABY WAS GONE.

Only a blanket and a pacifier remained in the crib. Jamie stood there, clutching her own baby to her chest, trying to make sense of what she was seeing, thoughts racing frantically through her mind. She was aware that she had only seconds to convince herself that what she was seeing was true and to act on that knowledge.

She reached down and pushed the blanket aside-just to make sure.

It was like the morning that she found her grandmother dead. Jamie had felt as though there must be some other explanation for her grandmother’s lifeless body. Anything but death. Jamie had even tried to lift Granny’s head and place a pill between her lips. Then to shake her awake. To make it not be so.

That was how she felt now. She wanted to do something that could reverse the reality of what she was seeing.

Sounds came through the open window-a distant siren, a train whistle, the slam of a door. Normal sounds that belied that reality.

If her neighbor’s baby was truly gone, it would mean that once again her life had been irreversibly changed.

But was there some other explanation? Had Lynette come in the night to take her baby home? Jamie looked at the door-her apartment’s only door. The security chain was still engaged.

Even though her neighbor’s baby was only two months old and could not climb, could not walk, could not even crawl, Jamie-still holding Billy in her arms-dropped to her knees and, with a fervent, whispered prayer, looked under the baby bed.

She scrambled back to her feet and, laying her cheek against the top of Billy’s head, took a deep breath and willed her pounding heart to slow down. Perhaps there was a logical explanation. She was overlooking something. Sometimes her keys weren’t in her purse, and she would look everywhere for them only to realize they had been in the purse all along.

She ran her hands over the baby bed and shook the blanket.

The bed was definitely empty.

She forced herself to look out the open window, half expecting to see a small broken body on the ground three floors below.

Nothing was lying there.

She looked up and down the alley. Everything seemed so normal. It was just an ordinary-but-somewhat-seedy neighborhood near downtown Oklahoma City where she had come to put hundreds of miles between her and a ranch in the Texas Panhandle. To start over.

Jamie thought of all the other nights when her Billy had been the baby sleeping in the bed near the open window. How could it have been done? She doubted if an ordinary ladder could reach the third-floor window. Had someone lowered himself from the roof? Or crawled along the ledge? But still disbelief clouded her senses. Perhaps she had only dreamed that Lynette dropped her baby by last night. Just as she sometimes dreamed that her grandmother was still alive.

But Lynette’s polka-dotted diaper bag was still on the coffee table.

A sob escaped from Jamie’s throat. She closed her eyes and begged God to protect Lynette’s baby.

Billy was whimpering. She needed to change him. Needed to nurse him.

She pressed her lips to Billy’s forehead. They were one creature, she and her baby. There was no line between where she ended and he began. Love for him coursed through her veins. She would do anything to keep him. She would rather die than lose him.

Whoever had taken Lynette’s baby had made a terrible mistake. The baby that person meant to take was Billy.

“Oh, God, Lynette, I am so sorry,” Jamie whispered, imagining the anguish that Lynette would go through. “So sorry,” she said again.

She looked around the two-room apartment she had called home for more than a month now. If her neighbor’s baby was truly gone, she and Billy were no longer safe here.

Maybe they had never been safe here. Maybe it had only been a matter of time until they were found.

She would have to leave. Now. Everything had changed. Everything!

JAMIE’S EARLIEST MEMORY was of flying, of looking out the window of her daddy’s airplane and seeing the whole of Galveston Island, which from the ground seemed a world unto itself.

Her father was a flight instructor and sometimes took her and her mother on Sunday afternoon flights.

Jamie preferred flying through clear blue skies with only occasional puffs of pretty white clouds floating by. She didn’t like being surrounded by clouds. She was afraid they would get lost in them and never find their way home.

Sometimes her daddy flew so low over the ocean Jamie thought they were going to crash into the waves, and her mother would squeal for him to stop. Jamie realized it was a game that her parents were playing.

Perhaps they had died playing that game.

It was her parents’ tenth anniversary. They planned to fly to Cozumel, an island off the coast of Mexico, and spend a week in a big hotel. But first they flew north to leave Jamie with her grandmother. Granny met them at the Mesquite airpark. Jamie held Granny’s hand while they watched the plane take off. Jamie waved until it was only a tiny speck in a blue, cloudless sky.

The plane never arrived in Cozumel. There was an investigation, and eventually her parents were declared dead.

Sometimes Jamie imagined that the airplane had had engine trouble and her daddy had been forced to land on some uncharted island like the castaways on Gilligan’s Island, and someday they would be rescued and come back to her. Every time a small plane flew overhead on its way to the Mesquite airpark, Jamie wondered if it was her parents coming back to get her. Long after she could not imagine living anyplace other than her grandmother’s small white house, she would dream of her mother and father opening the front gate, coming up the walk, and knocking on the door.

In her parents’ will, Jamie’s half-sister Ginger had been named her guardian. Their mother’s child from an earlier, unhappy marriage, Ginger was sixteen years older than Jamie, married, and not at all interested in raising her.

Ginger had never had warm, cozy feelings for her half-sister. She had wanted to be royally pissed when her mother married and they moved to Galveston. But thanks to her stepfather’s generosity, Ginger was able to attend Southern Methodist University and pledge a sorority instead of living at home and attending a community college. Ginger was totally mortified when she learned that her mother was expecting a baby at age forty-three, but when the baby was born, she did a pretty good job pretending to be enchanted by her little sister. When Ginger met Mr. Right, her stepfather coughed up enough money for her to have a storybook wedding, but Ginger found it very difficult to live on her husband’s salary as a stockbroker at Merrill Lynch. She had thought stockbrokers made a lot of money and felt cheated when she realized that was not so.