The Unsung Hero

by Samantha James

  "I hope Neil and I are as happy as you and Dad have been all these years," she said suddenly, last night's argument with Neil abruptly jumping into her thoughts. Her parents had been married for forty-five years, and she couldn't help but wonder—would her own marriage last that long?

  There was a hint of wistfulness in her tone, and Marie looked at her in surprise. "I'm sure you will be," she said softly, moving to sit across from her daughter. "Dad and I were happy and content before you came to us, but there was something missing. I'll never forget how you looked the first time we ever saw you. You were so tall and straight, and you tried to look so brave—" She shook her head in remembrance. "But I could sense how lost and alone you were." Her eyes lifted to Jenna's and a soft smile lighted her face. "And I knew then how much joy you'd bring into our lives."

  Jenna's thoughts drifted fleetingly backward. When she was four years old, her parents had been killed in a collision with a train. Miraculously she had emerged with barely a scratch. With no family other than an eighty-year-old great-aunt in Maine who was too old to be burdened with a small child, custody had been given over to the state. Her memories of that time were few: stark white walls, hard narrow cots, being shuffled from foster home to foster home for over a year. She had been too young to understand the whispered excuses...too quiet, too withdrawn...but old enough to understand the loss of warmth, the absence of love from her young life. Two people whom she had loved and depended on had been wrenched from her, and there was no one to replace them. No one who willingly gave what her tender four-year-old self craved so desperately: a warm pair of arms to hold her, the solid strength of a shoulder to lay her head upon.

  Not until Jerry and Marie Bradford had entered her life.

  She smiled across at Marie, her heart filled with tender emotion for this unselfish woman who had given her so much. She reached across the table and squeezed her mother's hand. "And you brought love back into mine," she said softly. Their eyes met and held, but suddenly a troubled light entered Jenna's.

  "Mom—" She traced an idle pattern on the tablecloth, trying to find the right words. "What you said before... were you trying to say that children have a way of bringing people together?"

  Marie shrugged. "I suppose so. Some people—the right people." She paused. "Not that I think it's a way to cure a troubled marriage, but I know that my own marriage to your father wouldn't have been nearly as meaningful without you."

  Jenna took a deep breath. "I suppose a lot of people feel that way. People like—like Megan and Ward Garrison." Her fingers closed tightly around her coffee cup.

  Marie regarded her steadily. "There's nothing wrong with that, Jenna."

  "I never said there was," Jenna said quickly. She hesitated, then blurted out, "Neil... he—he'd like to have a baby right away."

  For a long moment her mother's eyes remained riveted on Jenna's carefully controlled features before drifting to the white-knuckled grip of her hands around her cup. After all these years, there was still so much that Jenna held inside—Marie offered a quiet statement, "And that bothers you."

  There was a tight little silence. "Yes and no," she finally admitted, her tone carefully neutral. Fingers that weren't entirely steady traced the rim of her coffee cup. "We—Neil and I had decided to wait a while before we had a baby, but now he's changed his mind." She hesitated. "And nothing would make me happier...eventually. But right now...right now it brings back so many memories, and I can't help but think of—" She broke off, stung to the core by her suppressed pain.

  "Robbie," her mother finished for her softly. Again her hand reached out to cover Jenna's.

  She nodded slowly, drawing both strength and comfort from the touch of her mother's hand. "Tomorrow I'm going to Plains City to see him, Mom," she said quietly. "Even if they won't let me touch him or hold him." Her eyes seemed two huge pools of longing in her pale face. "I have to do this, Mom. I have to." She looked across at her mother, somehow not surprised to see a kind of gentle comprehension reflected "in the soft, brown depths. Instantly the years fell away—

  ***

  It was a newspaper article that had first caught Jenna's eye nearly five years earlier, "childless couple seeks surrogate mother" was how the headline in the Houston newspaper had read. Since her adoptive mother had been unable to have children, Jenna was intrigued by the unique approach to the problem of infertility. On reading the story, she discovered that Megan and Ward Garrison, a couple who lived in northern Texas, were actively searching for a woman to bear Ward's child. Married for fifteen years and puzzled by Megan's inability to have a child in all that time, both had undergone a battery of tests several years earlier, only to find that Megan's fallopian tubes were blocked by scar tissue and she could never become pregnant.

  Jenna was working as an office nurse for a physician with a family practice in Texas City at the time, and both the receptionist and the bookkeeper could talk about little else.

  "You wouldn't catch me offering to have this guy's baby," Vera, the bookkeeper, declared later that morning. She flicked a disdainful finger at the newspaper. "My sister was sick for weeks on end when she was pregnant—and she looked like a cow from the time she was two months along!"

  Marsha, the mother of a ten and a six-year-old and infinitely more mature than Vera, held a different viewpoint. "Your sister also had twins," she pointed out. "And some women love being pregnant—"

  "Not me!" snorted Vera.

  Marsha had simply smiled and shaken her head. "Wait until you're married," she said with a smile. "You might feel fat and ugly and you might be so sick you feel like you could never hold your head up again, but the minute you hold that tiny bundle of life in your arms, it's all but forgotten."

  Vera cast a wary eye at the older woman. "That might be," she sniffed a little indignantly, again waving a hand at the newspaper, "but if you ask me, this is a little weird. I'd say that any woman who volunteers for this is doing it strictly for the money!"

  "I'm not sure," Marsha said thoughtfully. Her eyes skimmed over the article. "It says here that the man is an engineer, and I doubt if they make all that much money. And though it says all hospital and legal expenses will be taken care of, it doesn't specify how much the fee is."

  "It would have to be one heck of a lot before I'd do it," Vera snorted.

  Jenna and Marsha exchanged a glance that seemed to indicate Vera needn't worry about the possibility. Marsha glanced down again at the newspaper. "It also says that any woman applying will be tested physically and psychologically." She frowned, then said slowly, "I guess that makes sense. I suppose that they would want to make sure she really knew what she was getting into, and after all—" she shrugged "—if a person went to all that trouble and expense, I guess they'd want the mother to be reasonably intelligent."

  "Good Lord." Vera looked disgusted. "Imagine having to apply to have a baby—just like applying for a job!"

  "It wouldn't be easy giving up a baby," Jenna put in pensively. "I suppose if you looked at it in terms of a job right from the start, it might make it a little less traumatic when the time came to hand over the baby."

  "And that's not all," Marsha added. "It says here that single women are preferred. Apparently both the couple and their lawyer seem to think a woman who's never had a baby wouldn't be as likely to have second thoughts about giving it up."

  "Well, they can count me out!" Vera's voice rang out loudly. "I might be single, healthy and intelligent, but there's no way I'd get involved in anything like this!"

  There was a pause, and then two pairs of eyes simultaneously turned to Jenna.

  "Don't look at me!" She held up her hands and laughed. "I tend to agree with Vera. It's a little too bizarre for me." The plight of these two people was rather sad; she felt a small stab of pity that they were so desperate for a child of their own, and the fact that they were willing to go to such lengths even made her admire them to a degree.

  But beyond these thoughts, the realization of the hearta
che these two people were going through didn't hit home until several days later, when she walked in on her mother watching a local talk show that featured this same couple. More out of courtesy for her mother than any vested interest, she sat down to watch.

  Seeing the actual faces of those two, instead of merely reading names in a newspaper, made the situation all the more real and all the more heartrending. Her first impression of Megan Garrison was that of a woman in intense pain. She was very blond, and small-boned and fragile-looking. Her husband, Ward, was as dark as she was fair, good-looking in a rough sort of way. There was something in the quiet tautness of his tone that caught Jenna's attention as they pleaded their cause, but it was his wife she responded to. She listened as they related how a previous attempt at locating a surrogate had ended in heartbreak: after carrying the baby to term, the woman had changed her mind at the last minute. And adoption was all but ruled out; the waiting list was seven years long at the least—they had been waiting years already.

  Jenna's heart turned over in her chest as she heard the woman say, "I die a little inside with every day that goes by, and I see the hope that someday I may hold a child in my arms grow dimmer and dimmer. And hope is all I have—" Her voice broke tearfully, and long painful seconds ticked by before she was able to speak again. "Hope is all I may ever have."

  The desperation, the fear, the despair, the realization that the woman had only this one small thread to cling to, touched something deep inside Jenna's soul. She longed to reach out and comfort Megan as her husband was doing, to wrap her arms around her and tell her that it was only a matter of time before her hope became a reality.

  When it was over Jenna turned to her mother with a murmur of sympathy on her lips, only to find her doe-soft eyes swimming with unshed tears.

  Jenna rushed to her side. "Mom, what is it?" Her tone was anxious as she pressed a handkerchief into her hand.

  Marie attempted a watery smile. "I'm all right." She dabbed at her overflowing eyes and leaned her head back tiredly. Concerned, Jenna sat on the arm of the chair and searched her mother's face.

  "I'm fine, really," Marie said again. She set aside the handkerchief and turned to Jenna with a sigh. "It's just that seeing that couple brought back so many memories." She lapsed into silence, but again her eyes grew red.

  Jenna sat very still. She knew that she had been adopted because of her mother's fierce desire for a child, but for a moment she was almost stunned at her mother's heartfelt reaction to the plight of two people who were, after all, strangers. Instinctively she said, "You know exactly how that woman feels, don't you?"

  "Oh, yes—exactly." Marie dashed at her eyes, and Jenna patiently handed the handkerchief back to her. "I wanted a child so badly I could taste it. Everywhere I looked—the grocery store, the drugstore, the doctor's office—there were mothers with children, mothers about to have a baby. And there I was, helpless, frustrated, hating myself for being jealous and wanting what they seemed to take for granted." A pained expression flitted across her face. "No one knows how worthless the inability to have a baby can make a woman feel—except perhaps a woman who's been through it herself." A pensive smile curved her lips as she looked up at Jenna. "But your father was wonderful through it all. He was the one who suggested adoption." She reached up a hand to cradle Jenna's cheek in her palm. "You'll never know how much of a blessing you were. Like a day of sunshine after a storm."

  Jenna's throat felt raw. She tried to speak, but the sound refused to pass through her throat. She could only grip her mother's hand more tightly. Her eyes turned toward the television screen, where a newscaster's voice now droned on and on. She chastised herself for being the most insensitive clod ever to have been born And yet these two people weren't the only ones involved.

  "I hate to say this..." She hesitated. "But finding someone to bear a child for them seems so—so drastic." She slipped onto the carpet in front of the chair, laced her arms around her legs and rested her chin on her knees. "Another woman is going to have to give up nine months of her life for these people. How many women would be willing to do that?"

  "Oh, Jenna." The raw emotion in Marie's tone brought Jenna's eyes to her mother's in a flash, and they were held there by a depth of intensity she'd never glimpsed before. "What are nine months compared to a lifetime of loneliness? Some women can go through life without a husband or child, but there are others who can never be fulfilled unless they can share their love with a husband and family. Women like Megan Garrison—and me." She paused, her eyes now shining luminously. "It would take a very special woman," she said softly. "A woman who isn't afraid to give all of herself." She shook her head, a wistful smile on her lips. "I can't imagine being able to give anything more precious than the gift of life."

  The gift of life. Almost with a sense of awe Jenna absorbed the words. Her parents had taken her into their home and their hearts, freely bestowing all the warmth and love they were capable of giving. She knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that their love for her was no different from what they might have felt for a natural child, had they been able to have one. And during the past few minutes, somehow all the long lonely years her mother had struggled through were poignantly brought to life inside Jenna. She could feel the same intense longing, the empty ache inside, that both her mother and Megan Garrison lived with day after day. But there was one difference.

  She rushed to find a pencil and pad. Her fingers shook as she scribbled down the name of the Garrisons' Dallas attorney. It might be too late, or they might not want her, but by heaven, she was going to try. Her heart fluttered almost painfully in her chest as she looked up at her mother with shining eyes, her heart nearly bursting with emotion.

  She, Jenna Bradford, was determined to have the child these two people wanted so desperately. For herself, for Megan Garrison—and for the woman before her, who had given her own life so much meaning. The woman who had taught her how precious love really was.

  ***

  "Jenna." A gentle voice prodded her back to the present. "I understand what you're going through, but I have to ask this. How are the Garrisons going to feel about this? Have you talked to them yet?"

  "No." She shook her head quickly, stilling the sudden pitter-patter of her heart that the words evoked. "I know we all agreed to make a clean break," she said quietly, looking straight at her mother. "But I think Megan will come around fairly quickly."

  "And Ward?"

  Jenna frowned. She took a sip of her coffee, grimacing at the cold, bitter taste. Carrying the cup to the sink, she emptied the contents, pondering the question while she poured a fresh cup. She had sympathized with Megan even before they had chosen her for a surrogate, but it had come as a surprise to find how much she really liked her when they had finally met face-to-face. Ward, on the other hand, was a different story. He was sweet, warm and tender with his wife, and though he was gracious enough the few times the three of them had been together, he wasn't nearly as easy to read as Megan, who was much more vocal. In fact, one of the last times she had seen him had left her feeling rather shaken.

  She'd been in her sixth month of pregnancy at the time. Ward was in Houston on business, and Megan had come along with him. She'd met with them briefly at their hotel, and Megan was absolutely delighted at feeling the baby's vigorous movements inside her.

  "Come and feel this!" she'd beckoned to Ward. Wasting no time, she snatched one large hand in hers and guided it to Jenna's protruding tummy. "He's doing somersaults in there!"

  Jenna had laughed a little self-consciously, but at the sight of that dark hand lying so intimately on her belly, she'd felt an odd tightening in her chest. It really brought home the fact that it was this man's child she was nurturing inside her, but before she had time to analyze the feeling, the baby moved. Ward's hazel eyes flitted to hers in surprise before an oddly shuttered expression came over them, and then he abruptly snatched away his hand. The incident had hurt for some unknown reason, and she was left feeling just a little bit w
ary.

  She turned to face her mother. "I'm not sure how Ward will feel," she admitted. "I didn't do it for him, you know. I did it for Megan." She mulled a moment longer. "But I think if Megan agrees, he will, too."

  Marie nodded, then smiled. "I already know what your father will say."

  Jenna resumed her place at the table and shook her head fondly. "He'll boom and bluster the way he did when I told him what I was up to in the first place, and then he'll say in that gruff way he has—" she drew her brows together over her nose and stuck out her lower lip wrathfully "'—you'll do what you want, anyway!"'

  They both ended up laughing at a time when they very much needed the release. "You obviously see through him just as I do." Marie laughed one last time, then looked at her daughter. "How long do you plan on staying?"

  Jenna's smile drooped a little, but she kept it firmly in place. Surely Megan and Ward couldn't deny her if she was practically camped on their doorstep. She refused to think beyond that.

  "As long as it takes, Mom," she responded with false lightness. "As long as it takes."

  "Then that leaves just one person to contend with, doesn't it?"

  Her mother's voice was so quiet Jenna almost suspected she knew. Her fingers tensed in her lap. She took a deep breath. "It's his problem if he doesn't understand, Mom. Because I'm going to do it, anyway."

  Marie darted her a surprised look. "That doesn't sound like you, Jenna. Surely you and Neil aren't having problems already? Heavens, you're not even married yet!"

  Jenna could tell the laugh she gave was forced. Suddenly her thoughts darted back to the time when she was a lanky thirteen-year-old and had just discovered that their neighbor, Darren Phillips—the boy who threw stones at her and boasted he was the better baseball player simply by virtue of his sex—wasn't such a disgusting creature, after all. A ghost of a smile tipped her lips. Intent on proving him wrong, she'd spent many an evening with her father pitching a ball to her and giving her tips on her stance and swing. She'd broken the kitchen window twice with some very nifty line drives. And then the day came when Darren had given her her first kiss and she'd decided it was time to shelve her ball and bat. She had breezed in from outside, dropped herself at the kitchen table and promptly asked her mother how a woman knew when she was in love.