Mixed Blessings

by Danielle Steel

  “Look, kid,” Mark tried to explain one night, as they were leaving work, “you’re not thinking straight. You’d probably be the best father in the world, because you understand what a kid needs, because you never had it. You picked the wrong girl, that’s all, it’s as simple as that. She was a nice kid, but she wanted the bright lights and the big time. You want to cook and stay home and raise a family. So … you find the right girl eventually, you settle down, and you all live happily ever after. Stop thinking your life is over, Charlie, because it isn’t. Just give it some time. The wounds are still fresh, you’re still bleeding.” He was, and what Mark said was true, but Charlie didn’t want to hear it.

  “I don’t want to find someone else. And I don’t want to get married. Hell, I’m not even divorced yet.”

  “Oh … so that’s why you won’t go bowling anymore … why we can’t go out for a beer and a pizza. What do you think, I’m asking for a date? Listen, you’re cute, but you’re just not my type, and little Gina might get pretty upset, you know …” Charlie started to laugh then, and Mark gave him a friendly shove. “Just take it easy on yourself, will ya?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ll try …” he said, smiling for the first time in ages.

  He went out for dinner with Mark a few days after that, and the following weekend, he even went bowling. It was a long, slow process, but he had finally begun to heal. It still hurt terribly when he thought of her, and he still couldn’t believe what she’d done to end their marriage, but little by little he came out of his shell again. And he started playing baseball on weekends with a bunch of twelve-year-old orphans.

  Pilar spent the month after her miscarriage in a crushing depression. She took time off from work, refused to talk to anyone, and stayed home, in her nightgown, brooding. Brad tried to urge her to see friends, but it even took Marina several attempts to see her.

  She came with an armful of books, about grief, about the loss of pregnancy, about mourning. She always thought information was the best tool, but Pilar didn’t want to hear it.

  “I don’t want to know how miserable I am, or how miserable I should be,” she said, glaring at her friend, rejecting her and the books she’d brought her.

  “But maybe you’d like to know how to make yourself feel better, and when you can expect your life to get back to normal,” Marina said gently.

  “How normal will it ever be? I’m a middle-aged woman who made a lot of stupid decisions in her life, and as a result will never have children.”

  “My, my, aren’t we feeling sorry for ourselves,” she chided with a smile.

  “I have a right to.”

  “Yes, you do, but not as a lifestyle. Think of Brad, think of how hard this is for him.” It was Brad who had begged Marina to come by and see her. Pilar wouldn’t even answer the phone, or take her calls when he did.

  “He has children of his own. He doesn’t know anything about it.”

  “No, but other people do. There are groups for things like this. Other women lose pregnancies too. You’re not alone, Pilar, even though you think you are. It may feel like it now, but you’re not. Other women lose babies, have stillbirths, lose children they’ve known and loved for several years. It must be the worst blow there is,” she said sadly, feeling for her friend, as Pilar started to cry again.

  “It is,” she admitted, with tears streaming down her face, “and I feel so stupid. I know this must seem ridiculous to everyone, but I feel as though I lost a baby I knew … a little person I already loved … and now he’s dead and I’ll never know him.”

  “No, but you may have another child. It won’t change this, but it might help.”

  “I think that’s the only thing that would,” Pilar said honestly. “I just want to be pregnant again.” She blew her nose in a mass of tissues as she said it, and Marina smiled sympathetically.

  “Maybe you will.” She never liked to offer false hope, and there was no way of knowing if Pilar would get pregnant.

  “Yeah, and maybe I won’t. And then what?”

  “Then you go on again. You have to. Your life was fine before, it will be again. Babies are not everything, you know.” But as she said that, she remembered an incident years before, and she shared it with Pilar. “You know, I’d almost forgotten, until just now. My mother lost her ninth child, I think she must have been about two months pregnant. Maybe a little more. And with eight children, you’d think it was no big deal, but you would have thought her oldest child had died. She completely fell apart, and went into serious mourning. My father didn’t know what to do with her. She stayed in bed and cried, and the other seven kids went wild, except when I was around to keep them in line, but my poor mother was a mess. She was depressed for months, and then, of course, she got pregnant. She had two more kids after the one she lost, but you know, she talked about it right up until she died, about how terrible it had been, how sad, how much she had missed that baby. She had friends who had actually lost a child, but I think this was actually just as bad for her, and she always talked about the baby who died as though she knew him.”

  “That’s how I feel,” Pilar said, finally feeling as though someone understood her. She felt a sudden bond with Marina’s mother and what she had felt for her lost baby.

  “It must be one of those mysteries of life that no one really understands, unless you go through it.”

  “Maybe,” Pilar said, looking gloomy again. “It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me,” she said, and meant it. She felt as though her heart were going to break each time she thought of it, and there was not a moment of the day when she didn’t.

  “Well, just think of my mother. She had two more kids after that, as I said. I think she was about forty-seven when she lost that baby.”

  “You give me hope.” Marina was the first person who had, a godsend as usual, unlike Pilar’s mother, whom she never called. She had never told her about the baby in the first place. And she would have just reminded Pilar that she had warned her that she was too old. And now she certainly felt it.

  She stayed in deep mourning for several weeks after that, much to Brad’s despair. Alice and Bruce were handling her cases at work, court dates had to be changed, and her clients were being told that she was ill, and everyone was seriously worried.

  Nancy even came by to try to cheer her up, but when she came, she brought the baby, and that only made things worse. Pilar was almost in hysterics by the time Brad came home, and she told him she never wanted to see another baby, and she didn’t want Adam in the house again, until he was older.

  “Pilar, you have to stop,” he said, feeling agonized and helpless. “You can’t do this to yourself.”

  “Why not?” She didn’t eat, she didn’t sleep. She had lost ten pounds, and looked five years older.

  “It’s not healthy. And next month we want to try again. Come on, sweetheart. You have to try to pull yourself together.” But the truth was, she just couldn’t. From the time she woke up until the time she went to bed, she felt as though she were carrying a crushing weight on her heart. There were times when she didn’t even want to go on living. “Please … sweetheart, please.” Finally, hoping to cheer her up, he took her to San Francisco for a weekend, but as luck would have it, it was the week she got her period. All he could do to cheer her was remind her that in two weeks they’d be back at Dr. Ward’s with the turkey baster and the dirty movies.

  “Oh, God.” She made a face, and in spite of herself, she laughed. “Don’t remind me.”

  “Then you’d better enjoy it now.” He teased her for the rest of the trip that he was going to take her to Broadway to buy “marital aids” to add to the doctor’s collection.

  “You’re a pervert, Bradford Coleman. If anyone suspected what a filthy mind you have, while sitting on the bench, they’d disbar you.” She smiled, looking like herself again for the first time in weeks.

  “Good. Then I could stay home and make love to you all day.” But even that didn’t hold much appeal
these days. She had tried explaining it to her therapist and to Brad. She felt that the miscarriage was her ultimate failure as a woman. “I lost the baby … It’s like leaving it on a bus somewhere, or forgetting it in the park … or eating it.… I lost the baby,” she had said with tears running down her face, which made her the ultimate failure as a mother.

  It was difficult reasoning with her. What she felt didn’t come from her mind. It came from her heart. Her mind knew she might have another chance, and Brad had told her again and again that they’d continue trying. But her heart knew nothing except what it had lost. The baby she had wanted so badly. And each time she let herself think of that, the sorrow she felt made her chest ache.

  Diana was cautious when she and Andy returned from their holiday. She didn’t want to push her luck. Things had been wonderful for them in Hawaii, and they had come home renewed, not like the people they had once been, but in some ways maybe better. But knowing how rocky the road had been, she didn’t want to add any pressure. She had decided not to see her family for a while, and not to address any of their questions. It was almost two months since she’d seen or talked to Sam, but she just couldn’t deal with the impending reality of her baby. For Diana, it was just too painful.

  The name of the game for them these days was to avoid pain. And Diana would have gone to any lengths to do that. She was invited to two baby showers at work, and declined both. And she and Andy had agreed that for a while at least they were not going to discuss alternate solutions to having a baby. They were both in therapy, separately, and it seemed to be helping.

  Her job was going well, and she was enjoying it again. She enjoyed chatting with Eloise from time to time, but their friendship seemed to have cooled. Eloise was thinking of moving on, and Diana was still all wrapped up in saving her life and her marriage. For the first week after their trip, Diana enjoyed coming home every night more than anything. She was anxious to see Andy and spend time with him. And he had taken to calling her three or four times a day from his office, just to say hello and see how she was doing. She felt closer to him than to anyone else, and their life was still pretty quiet. Diana didn’t feel ready to see friends again, and Andy didn’t press it. And neither did their friends. Bill and Denise hadn’t called in months. Andy had finally explained to Bill that seeing them was too difficult for Diana, because Denise was pregnant. He seemed to understand, and the two men still played tennis when they could, which wasn’t often. They both had other responsibilities now, and other pressures.

  Diana rarely even bothered to check the phone machine when she got home anymore. No one called them anymore, except her mother from time to time, or Andy’s brothers.

  But in mid-January, when she got home early one night, she flicked it on, and listened to the messages while she turned on the oven and started dinner. Predictably, her mother had called, which made her smile, and some woman selling magazines, and there were three messages for Andy, one from Bill about a tennis tournament at the club, one from his brother, Nick, and the third from a woman. She had a sensuous voice, and all she said was that the message was for Andy, and he would know why she’d called him. And then, in a deep, smoky voice, “… just have him call me.” She left her number and her name, Wanda Williams. Diana raised an eyebrow and laughed. Even in their worst moments in the past year, she hadn’t suspected him of cheating. She knew that some men did, in the face of those kinds of tensions, but she didn’t think he had. And she also didn’t think he was dumb enough to have his girlfriends leave him messages at home. She wasn’t worried about it, but more amused, and she teased him about it that night at dinner. She figured it was an actress from one of the shows he handled at the network.

  “So, who’s the woman with the sexy voice who called you today?”

  “What?” He frowned and reached for another piece of bread, looking distracted.

  “You heard me. Who is she?” Diana was smiling. She loved teasing him, and usually he was a good sport, but this time he clearly didn’t like it.

  “What’s that supposed to mean? She’s one of my brother’s friends, I think she’s out here for a while, and she wanted me to help her buy a car, or something.”

  “A car?” Diana laughed openly at him. “That’s the worst crock I’ve ever heard. Come on, Andrew … who is she? Who is Wanda Williams?” She imitated her voice when she asked, but Andy did not find her amusing.

  “I don’t know who she is. Okay? She’s just a name. I’ve never met her.”

  “She sounds like Dial-a-Date,” Diana said, imitating the husky voice on the phone again. “Call me …”

  “Okay, okay, I get it.” By then he had eaten three pieces of bread, and he was actually looking nervous, which startled Diana.

  “So are you going to call her?… about the car, I mean.” She was riding him, and he was starting to look really angry.

  “Maybe. I’ll see.”

  “You’re not.” She was starting to look upset, there was something about his story that didn’t jell, and she didn’t like it. “Andy, what is this?”

  “Look, it’s something I’m doing on my own, okay? Am I entitled to a little privacy?”

  “Yes.” Diana looked at him hesitantly. “Maybe. But not with women.”

  “I’m not screwing around. Okay? I swear.”

  “Then what are you doing?” she asked softly. She couldn’t understand why he was so secretive about this girl. What in God’s name was he hiding?

  “She’s a friend of a friend of mine. She knows one of the lawyers I work with, and he wants me to talk to her about a project.” He didn’t want to tell her that she was one of Bill Bennington’s old girlfriends, and he had suggested Andy call her.

  “Then why did you lie to me and tell me she was a friend of your brother’s?”

  “Look, Diana, don’t. Okay? Just don’t push me.”

  “Why, for chrissake?” She jumped up from the table then, suspicious of him. Maybe he was screwing around and she didn’t know it. “What are you doing?”

  “Look, dammit …” He had done everything he could not to tell her, but now he saw he had to. “I didn’t want to talk about this now. I just wanted to talk to her first, and see what I thought of her when I met her.”

  “Great … what is this? Are you dating?”

  “She had a child for someone last year. She’s a surrogate. And she’d like to do it again. I thought I’d check it out and talk to her, and then I was going to ask you what you thought about it.” He said it very quietly, trying to brace himself for his wife’s explosion.

  “What? You’re going to Miss Rent-a-Womb to check her out, and you weren’t even going to tell me? What are you going to do, sleep with her to see if it takes? For God’s sake, Andy, how could you do this?”

  “I was just going to talk to her, for God’s sake. It would be done by artificial insemination if we went ahead with it, and you know that.”

  “Why? Why are you doing this? I thought we agreed to not even discuss it for the next few months.”

  “I know. But this thing came up last week, and people like that aren’t easy to find. And by the time you’re ready to talk, she might be having someone else’s baby.”

  “Who is she?”

  “She’s an actress of sorts. She doesn’t believe in abortion, and she says she gets pregnant very easily, and she thinks she’s doing something nice for people by offering this service.”

  “How kind of her. And how much does she charge?”

  “Twenty-five thousand.”

  “And what if she keeps the baby?”

  “She can’t. You get an ironclad contract. And she didn’t make any trouble for the guy last year. I talked to him myself. And they’re thrilled. They have a little girl, and they’re crazy about her. Baby, please … at least let me talk to her.”

  “No. What if she uses drugs, what if she has a disease? What if she doesn’t give up the child? What if … oh, God … don’t ask me to do this.…” She lay her head down on t
he table and sobbed. She wanted to scream at him. Why was he putting her through this again? They had just barely made a first step back into their marriage, and she wasn’t ready for this now.

  “Baby, you’re the one who said you wanted ‘my’ baby, that it wasn’t fair for me not to have ‘my’ child. I thought this would be better than adoption, at least the baby would be half ours. You didn’t want to hear about a donor egg transplant when the doctor suggested it, and this seems like a viable alternative solution.”

  “What is this? A scientific experiment, for God’s sake?” She looked at him then, her eyes filled with hatred. “I hate you, Andrew Douglas. How dare you put me through this?”

  “I have a right to a child too. We both do. And I know how badly you want one.”

  “Not like this. Do you know the stress we’d be under until it would be all over? And I don’t want your sperm in some other woman. What if she falls in love with you and the baby?”

  “Di, she’s married.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake. You’re all crazy, you, her, and her husband.”

  “And you’re the only sane one among us?” he said angrily.

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, kid, you sure don’t look it.” She looked deranged and anguished to the point of breaking. “Look, I’m going to go talk to her sometime this week. That’s all. I just want to know what the terms are, what she’s like, what would happen. I want to know what our options are, if we want to do this now, or anytime. And Diana, I’d like you to come with me.”

  “I don’t want anything to do with this. I can’t. It’ll push me right over the edge.” And she had just barely gotten back on her feet again. She didn’t want to risk it.

  “I think you’re stronger than that,” he said calmly. He wanted to do this. He had thought about it a lot in the last few months. And he wanted a baby. He wanted Diana, but he wanted a family, too, and if he could have a child of his own conception, all the better.

  “I think you’re a sonofabitch,” she spat at him, and then locked herself in the bathroom. And when she came out again, Andy had already called Wanda Williams and they had an appointment for the next afternoon at The Ivy. It seemed an odd place to choose, but it was what Wanda wanted.