by R. R. Banks
By the time that I reached the office building I had a greater appreciation for why ballerinas wore legwarmers. I hadn’t gotten my coat on the way out and the weather had decided that it was very determined in its downward slope, leaving me shivering as I walked into the lobby. I felt like my heels were skittering across the floor as I walked across the gleaming lobby, and the sudden appearance of Ellery from the week before did nothing to help me feel calmer or more at ease. I was hoping that I wasn’t going to have to deal with him anymore. I got bad feelings from him and really didn’t want to think that he was going to be extensively involved with this process.
As I crossed to him, he met my eyes and by his expression I could tell that he was just as happy to see my return as I was to see his.
At least we’re on the same page. Equal opportunity disdain going on here.
I pasted on as big and bright a smile as I could and walked right toward him.
“Ellery!” I gushed. “So lovely to see you this morning.”
“Rue,” he said by way of super-abbreviated greeting. “Are you nervous?”
I was briefly confused by the question then realized that he probably saw my shivering.
“No,” I said. “I’m cold. It’s cold out there.”
“Oh,” he said, apparently disappointed that I wasn’t quaking in my boots to be facing him again.
No boots. No quaking.
“Am I late again today?” I asked.
He glanced down at his watch. It still took me aback a little when I saw someone wearing and actually using a watch.
“Three minutes,” he said dryly.
“Getting better,” I said, still forcing my smile so hard it hurt in my cheeks.
“This way,” he said, and we started our path through the lobby, through the glass doors, and into the waiting room.
There was a far smaller group of women in the waiting room this time and I settled into the same seat that I had the first time. We went through the same basic process as we had before, filling out questionnaires with even more invasive questions, waiting for our names, getting whisked back into the examination room. The same nurse as the week before came in and took my vitals. I wasn’t sure why she was doing it, but I figured if the couple chose me I would be undergoing a far more extensive selection of pokes, prods, and tests, so I was going to see this as my warmup.
When I got out of the examination room I was ushered back to the waiting room.
Hmmm. Plot twist.
I sat back in my chair. No point in breaking the streak. There seemed to be fewer women now, even after the last one came back out of the door and settled into a seat. I didn’t know where the others could have gone and had a brief sense of doom, wondering not for the first time if I had somehow wandered into an episode of the Twilight Zone and wasn’t going to be the contract mother, but zapped down to embryo size and turned into a contract baby.
I really needed to stop the late-night TV marathons with Christopher.
Nearly half an hour passed before the door opened again. This time it wasn’t the nurse who peered out with her clipboard. Instead, it was Ellery. He looked out at the waiting room and scanned the remaining women. He called a name and the woman across from me hopped up and scurried toward him like she had been called to spin the big wheel. This went on for the next half an hour, with each of the women returning and leaving before the next was called back. Finally, everyone had left but me and I sat waiting, wondering if I had either been forgotten or if someone else had already been chosen and they decided that there wasn’t any real point in even talking to me. That must be it. One of those other women who had sat here in this room with me, none speaking a single word to each other, had somehow caught the attention of the couple and was going to be the one that was going to carry their baby for them.
I thought of the letter that I had written the night before and felt an unexpected flutter of sadness. Which one was it?
The one with the thicker hair?
The bigger boobs?
The smaller waist?
The one who hummed the entire time that she walked into the back and then out of the room as if there was some sort of mechanical mechanism inside of her that was powering her along?
I was about to just go ahead and leave, save myself the misery of seeing the look on Ellery’s face when he dismissed me, when the door opened and his face poked out. The sour expression in his eyes and his pursed lips told me that maybe I wasn’t done after all.
“You can come with me,” he said, not even bothering with the formality of saying my name.
I stood and crossed the waiting room to him with a touch of swagger.
“Saved the best for last, did you, Ellery?” I asked as I swept past him.
Despite my bravado and sass, my stomach did a few turns of nervousness as we made our way toward the office where we had had our interview the week before. I was about to meet the people who could very well change my life, and whose lives I could change even more. Ellery opened the door and I took a breath, stepping inside. I lifted my head from where I had been focusing on the carpet a few feet in front of me and felt my smile melt when I saw the desk.
Instead of a smiling young couple sitting there, I saw a stern-looking man looking through papers spread across the surface of the desk in front of him.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello. Please, come sit.”
It was one of those times when saying ‘please’ actually made what the person was asking sound less polite. Ellery left the office and closed the door behind him without saying anything. I crossed the room and sat down in the same chair that I had before.
“Good morning,” I said, not really knowing what else I could say to ease the stuffy feeling in the office.
“Good morning. I’m Mr. Lawrence. I’ll be interviewing you today.”
I cocked my head at him, confused by the introduction.
“I thought that I was here to meet the couple who is looking for a surrogate,” I said.
Mr. Lawrence shook his head.
“No,” he said. “I am a family lawyer specializing in surrogacy law. My client is a prominent figure and does not want others, including the media, to know about his surrogacy plans until he is prepared to release such information. To protect his privacy and the privacy of his girlfriend, he has asked that I handle this stage of the interview process and provide legal information and details to those who have been shortlisted.”
“Girlfriend?” I asked, slightly surprised by the word.
The bulbous lawyer looked at me over the rim of his glasses.
“Yes,” he said. “My client is not yet married. Do you have some sort of moral objection to that?”
His pen was poised above the pad of paper in front of him, ready to jot down anything that I said and, likely, to eliminate me as the proper choice because I had a problem with their lifestyle choices.
“No,” I said. “No moral objection. I’m just surprised. Don’t most people get married before they start thinking about children and go through all of this to have one?”
I probably shouldn’t have asked that. It wasn’t really any of my business and the last thing that I needed was for the lawyer, who was probably actually some sort of mole hidden in the process to evaluate me, to think that I was difficult.
“My client has an extremely high pressure, tightly scheduled business and personal life. He must make arrangements for any and all pursuits in his life, including his desire to have a child, according to the time that he has available. A recent business success has ensured that he has time now to begin this process.” He looked at me again, his eyes sharp as though he wanted to make sure that I was listening very carefully to every word that was coming out of his mouth. “But I assure you, he has every intention of marrying his longtime partner in the near future.”
What the hell was that supposed to mean? What did he think I was, some sort of gestational homewrecker?
Chapter Six
> Richard
His longtime partner. Was Flora really my “partner”? My girlfriend, yes. The woman who had been essentially chosen for me to marry when I was just a child to complete some social Circle of Life that I had no idea about at the time, yes. My partner? I’m not so sure. We were great at doubles tennis.
I was still stuck on that phrase as I listened to the lawyer I had chosen go over all of the legal details about the arrangement. I had heard the spiel a few times already that day. He was pretty amazing at being able to repeat the same information in exactly the same words and tone six times. The sheer volume of that information had had the effect that I both expected and wanted in most of the women who had come into the room. They seemed perky and enthusiastic when they first came in, took a moment to process that it wasn’t the couple they thought they were going to meet waiting for them in the office, and then listened as Mr. Lawrence started outlining the expectations and responsibilities of the arrangement, the fees and financial support being offered, the guidelines we had, and the legal protections being put into place to guard both sides.
Most of the women fared pretty well through the first few paragraphs that he delivered. They would listen with what looked like rapt attention, nodding politely and making those sounds that self-help gurus and life coaches tell people to make so that the person speaking will know that they are being heard and acknowledged. After a few more minutes, right about when he started talking about medical expectations and lifestyle guidelines, the smiles on their faces started getting a little plastic, their eyes became glassy, and the noises that they were making no longer coordinated with anything in particular that the lawyer was saying. One of them stood up in the middle of the speech, announced that her dog needed to be brought to the groomer and that she was so sorry but would have to withdraw her interest because she just remembered how much time it took to take care of him. Another let him finish, but walked out of the office without saying another word. The other three made it through and tried to ask questions about all of the information with varying degrees of understanding and sense.
Then there was Rue. I had barely recognized her when she walked into the office and I saw her appear on the computer screen. Gone were sweat pants and sweat shirt, replaced by tasteful clothes that accentuated a body with incredible curves that had been all but hidden by the loungewear. Her hair had been brushed and even though it was coiled on the back of her head again, it was smooth and shiny, looking deliberately styled rather than just thrown into place to get it out of her way. The makeup she wore was distinctive, with bold eyeliner making her almost golden eyes stand out and the slick of bright red lipstick just contrasting enough with the pink of her shirt that it looked deliberate. She had been beautiful even when I first saw her, but being put together this way made her stunning in another way.
I’m honestly not sure which one I prefer.
Rue listened all the way through the explanation from the lawyer and I noticed that she didn’t seem intimidated or overwhelmed by him or the flow of information. She even interjected her own questions and comments throughout the way, some of which made the lawyer cringe but brought a smile to my lips. This woman seemed unfazed by anything that was thrown at her. She didn’t seem fragile like the other women, as though if a single thing was to go wrong in the process she would fall apart, but also didn’t seem cold or distant. She was unwaveringly present in the moment, right there, listening to the lawyer and involving herself as much in the conversation as she could.
“What do you think of her now?” I asked Flora.
She was reluctantly sitting beside me, examining her nail polish more than she was paying attention to the screen and what was happening in the next office over. I saw her give a cursory glance and then she shrugged.
“I guess she’s alright,” she said.
“You do realize that she’s the woman you said was so horrible when you saw her last week? You were completely offended by her clothes and thought that she had no business even showing interest in this – but you thought that I was showing more than enough interest?”
Flora made a face at me and I was struck, as I so frequently was, by how much she reminded me of a spoiled little girl in the shell of a grown-up woman. Part of me hated that that was the way that I perceived her. I wanted to feel what I knew I should be feeling for her, at least what I thought -I should be feeling. I wanted to look at her the way that I saw other couples look at each other when we went to events together and saw them holding hands, walking with their arms around each other’s waists, and leaning in to whisper to one another, smiling and giggling at what each other said. Flora and I weren’t like that. We walked around the events together, of course, and we looked fantastic doing it. She was a gorgeous woman, primped and perfected, and she looked wonderful draped on my arm wherever we went. But there was none of that warmth between us. We didn’t exist in our own secret little world the way that the other couples seemed to. Sometimes I longed for that kind of connection, wishing that we had the sizzle of passion and tenderness of such obvious love. There were other times, though, when I wondered if what I was seeing in them was no more valid than what we had, only fresher and newer.
Many of the couples had only been together a short time and were still riding that high that came with discovering the spark of new love. Flora and I had been together for so long, or guided into a pseudo-relationship in convenient situations that our parents thought that we wouldn’t recognize for what they were, that it was almost impossible for me to think of a time when she wasn’t around. Perhaps we had just been a part of each other’s lives for so long that there wasn’t room left for those kinds of feelings.
****
Rue
“Alright, so we know that he lives around here because the lawyer was so adamant about him needing to protect his privacy, and that wouldn’t be a big deal if he lived somewhere else.”
“Not necessarily,” Tessie said.
“What do you mean?”
“The lawyer said that this guy is a prominent businessman. Powerful men like that can be pretty well-known all over, not just where they live.”
“I don’t know.”
“You know who Bill Gates is and he doesn’t live around here,” Christopher pointed out.
“I don’t think that Bill Gates is considering hiring someone to carry his child,” I said. “Besides, he’s married. The lawyer was very particular to point out that this man has a girlfriend he’s planning on marrying.”
“Probably for the best,” Christopher said. “If it was Bill Gates he would be seriously cheaping out with that surrogacy fee.”
I nodded solemnly and opened the first website on the results that had popped up from my search.
“What do you think?” I asked, gesturing at the screen. “He’s the right age. It looks like he has several businesses.”
“Married,” Tessie said, pointing out a line on the About Us page.
“Dammit.”
I went back and opened another page.
“OK, how about this one. Not married. Successful.”
“Gorgeous,” Tessie said.
“That wasn’t specified in the description from the lawyer,” I said. I looked at the screen again and nodded. “But you are not wrong.”
The man smiling from the screen had a chiseled face and thick, sandy hair that accentuated piercing blue eyes.
Wow.
“So, when are you supposed to meet him?”
“Well,” I said, still staring at the image of the man who could possibly be the father of the child that I would soon be pregnant with. That was an interesting thought. “Since the last time that I thought that I was going to meet him I ended up sitting with a lawyer while he tried to confuse and scare me into giving up, so I’m not really sure. In theory, though, I meet them tomorrow.”
“They aren’t waiting around, are they?”
“What are you going to wear?” Christopher asked.
I sighed deeply a
nd shook my head.
“I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it all day. It took me hours to figure out that one outfit. I’m not prepared for another.”
The next morning, I strode across the lobby and was passing through the first set of glass doors when Ellery crossed through the second toward me. I smiled, pleased with myself for getting the jump on him.
“Not late today,” I said.
He looked at his watch.
“One minute.”
“Dammit.” I winced. “I mean darn it.”
“This way,” he said, giving me the same type of glare that the Sunday school teacher gave every time I came in with muddy shoes because I ran through the yard before going in. “They’re waiting for you.”
“Already?” I asked. “I’m only one minute late.”
“Their time is very important,” Ellery said. “They don’t have the option of just waiting around for people.”
“And yet, they are waiting for me,” I said, walking through the waiting room toward the door. “I must be pretty special.”
I got to the office and stopped outside of the closed door. All of the nervousness that I had had the day before came rushing back, augmented now by the extra day that I had had to sit around and worry about meeting them. Ellery came up beside me and stared at the door for a few moments. He pointed to the doorknob with the end of his pen.
“You can just use that right there,” he said.
I swung my head to look at him.
“You didn’t get many hugs as a child, did you?” I asked.
He glared at me and opened the door. I stepped into the office and felt my heart flutter slightly when I saw the man from my computer screen smiling back at me from behind the desk.
