by Angela Hunt
“It’s me,” I called, remembering that Jenna now had her own key. “I’m filling in for Amelia today.”
Jenna went to the bakery counter to stash her purse, then strolled toward me, tying on her apron as she came. “Let me give you a hand with the tostadas. You buttered the bread yet?”
I shook my head, nauseated by the thought of butter. So . . . oily.
“I’ll do it. If I have time, I might make some croquetas today. They went over real well the last time I made them on a weekday.”
I swallowed hard. “Don’t you make those every day?”
“Only on weekends. But hey, it’s Friday, so we’re nearly there.” She wound an elastic band around her long hair, then pulled a tub of butter from the small fridge beneath the counter. “The expats love the croquetas. One of them told me he hadn’t had anything so good since he ate lunch at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba.”
“Oh.” I always felt a bit lost when the old folks talked about Castro and the revolution, but I was grateful Jenna had taken charge of the breakfast bar. “I’ll leave you to it, then. I need to unlock the safe and get some cash—” I stopped, covering my mouth as my stomach lurched.
Jenna peered at me. “You okay? You look a little green.”
I nodded without speaking, drew a deep breath, and waited for my stomach to stop flip-flopping.
Truthfully, I loved being pregnant. I loved feeling new life inside me, I loved the stretchiness of maternity pants, and I loved flashing other pregnant women a “Me too” smile. I loved the condition of my hair and nails and the way my skin glowed from the life-giving hormones. I loved having older men offer me their seats in church, and seeing Gideon’s conservative father blush whenever anyone patted my expanding tummy. Without a doubt, being pregnant was one of my most rewarding life experiences.
But morning sickness—which cast a dull shadow over months one through three—was the rat turd in my sugar bowl of happiness.
“I’m okay,” I finally told Jenna, wiping sweat from my hairline. “Just an upset stomach.”
“Better hurry up with the cash, then. A couple of guys are already waiting outside. And they look hungry.”
I glanced out the glass doors. The brightening day revealed two older men in Guayabera shirts and Panama hats—two of the expats who came to the grocery to mingle, eat, and talk about the glory of Cuba before Castro.
I hurried into the office and knelt to open the safe behind Mama Isa’s desk. Keeping one eye on the clock, I took out some change and a hundred dollars in small bills. Being on my knees reminded me of Amelia’s desperation, so I whispered a quick prayer for her and Mario. I didn’t think they’d have any problems with their home visit, but Amelia sounded panicked when we talked.
Once I unlocked the front door, the morning passed in a blur. I stayed behind the register and noticed that several of the bakery tickets included charges for Jenna’s croquetas as well as the usual tostadas. For a gringa, Jenna certainly knew her customers.
I was feeling better when Mario and Amelia breezed in, her face lit by a smile as wide as Texas. “We did it,” she said, leaning on the checkout stand. “We got through the interview and showed the house without a single disaster.”
I crossed my arms and laughed. “I knew you’d do fine.”
Amelia glanced left and right, then leaned closer. “I thought Helen would pull on a white glove and run her finger over my bookshelves, but she didn’t do anything like that. She just looked around to get a general idea about the house. Then she asked where we would keep the baby, so I showed her the room that’ll be a nursery when—if—we get the call. Mario had to move a few boxes and the treadmill in order for her to see the space, but she seemed to think it would work.”
“Of course she did.” I leaned back against the counter, confident in my cousin’s ability to impress a social worker. “Your home is perfect for children.”
“By the way”—Amelia’s eyes narrowed and focused on my belly—“how are you feeling these days? Everything okay?”
I understood the reason for her question. IVF recipients tended to have a higher miscarriage rate than natural pregnancies, so I might still lose this baby. But I not only felt pregnant, I sensed that this little one was determined to stick around.
“I’m good,” I told her, meeting her gaze.
She must have seen something in my face, because her eyes softened. “Were you sick this morning?”
“Just a little queasy, so I managed.”
“Then I really appreciate you coming in to open for me.” The corner of her mouth twisted. “You know, you said we could both be expecting at the same time.”
“Looks like I was right.”
“It hardly seems fair, though. Getting pregnant for you is as easy as robbing a blind man.”
My temper sparked. “It wasn’t easy. I had to take shots and hormones for two months.”
“How awful.” Amelia slapped her cheek in pretend horror. “I’m surprised you survived the ordeal.”
I knew she had good reasons for being sarcastic, but I wasn’t trying to hurt her. “Can we move past this subject and get back to work?”
She arched a brow, then her gaze shifted and thawed slightly. “Have you told anyone outside the family yet?”
“Only the Amblours and the woman from the Surrogacy Center. I haven’t mentioned anything to my neighbors because so much can go wrong in the first trimester. And at this point I’m not sure I want to answer a lot of questions about who the parents are.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t say anything to the customers.”
I nodded. “I appreciate it.”
“And I’m sorry for being difficult. You can’t help being Fertile Myrtle.”
I squeezed her hand. “But I’m glad we’re cousins.”
I thought everything was okay between us, but as I stepped out of the checkout stand to walk to the ladies’ room, Amelia called after me: “By the way, what are you going to say when people ask why you didn’t offer to help me and Mario?”
I pivoted on the ball of my foot, disturbed by something I heard in her voice. “What?”
“Someone’s bound to ask why you didn’t volunteer to carry a baby for us. How are you going to answer?”
I drew a breath, saw the searing anguish in her eyes, and slowly turned away, my gaze drifting toward safer territory. I knew the answer; of course I did.
But I couldn’t bring myself to say it aloud.
* * *
On a beautiful Saturday morning, Marilee woke me by yelling in my ear. “Mommy, wake up! Is it Easter today?”
I struggled to lift my heavy eyelids, but couldn’t manage it—bizarre dreams had awakened me several times during the night and left me exhausted. I groaned. “I don’t think it’s morning yet.”
“Uh-huh. The sun’s up.”
Was it? I lifted a single eyelid, glimpsed daylight around the window blinds, and squinched my eyes shut. “Ask Daddy to get you some breakfast.”
“Did the Easter bunny come again?”
“No, sweetheart.” Gideon rolled over and leaned on my shoulder as he answered Marilee. “Easter was two weeks ago. We have to wait another year before Easter comes again.”
“Oh.” Disappointment filled Marilee’s voice. “Then what are we gonna do today?”
“We’re gonna let Mommy sleep late.” The bed frame groaned as Gideon stood and reached for his robe. “And while Mommy sleeps, you and I can eat breakfast. Come on, little bug, let’s go in the kitchen and make some pancakes.”
I smiled, grateful for Gideon’s consideration, but though I wanted to sleep, the sight of daylight had flipped a switch in my head. I was fully awake and needed to pee in the worst way.
Sighing, I flipped off the covers and lowered my feet to the floor, then staggered to the bathroom. Sitting on the toilet, I stared blankly at the wall, and grabbed a handful of tissue to finish up.
Then I saw blood.
I closed my eyes, hoping I’d imagined it
. I was seeing things, my eyes were blurry, it was a trick of the light. I wasn’t bleeding, I couldn’t be.
I opened my eyes, grabbed another wad of tissue, and saw another bloody streak. Enough to make me wonder if I was about to miscarry the baby or babies inside me. I looked at my underwear and saw spots of blood there, too.
No wonder I’d had horrifying dreams.
I stared at the bright stains, overcome by a sense of loss beyond tears. I’d invested so much and been so careful. I had done everything Dr. Forrester told me to do.
And Simone would be devastated if I lost this child.
“Gideon!” Since he was in the kitchen, I raised my voice. “Gid!”
He came running into the bathroom, an apron around his waist and his eyes wide. “What? What’s wrong?”
“I’m . . . I’m bleeding.”
“Oh, baby.” He sank onto the edge of the bathtub and pressed his hand to the back of my head. “I’m so sorry. What can I do?”
“It may be nothing,” I said, clinging to hope. “After all, I bled a little when I was pregnant with Marilee. That turned out to be nothing.”
“You should call your doctor. I don’t want you taking any chances.” Gideon stood, then bent to kiss my hairline. “Call the doctor and take the day off. Don’t clean anything. Don’t go to Mama Isa’s. I’ll bring you something for dinner. You stay in bed, prop your feet up, and take it easy.”
I nodded, weakly agreeing with his suggestions.
I grabbed my cell phone, then fell back against my pillows. Call a doctor—which doctor? I hadn’t yet met with my OB, so the only doctor familiar with my case was the reproductive endocrinologist.
So I called Dr. Forrester’s answering service. Tracking him down on a Saturday wasn’t easy, but I finally reached him and explained my concerns. “I’m not too worried, because I experienced some spotting with my first baby,” I told him. “So this could be completely normal, right?”
“It could be,” he said, his comment accompanied by a chorus of birdsong. Apparently I’d interrupted him on the golf course. “But be sure to call again if the bleeding gets heavier. If it does, I want you to head to the ER for an ultrasound so we can see what’s going on.”
I spent the rest of the day in bed, just as Gideon suggested, yet the bleeding persisted—a few drops here, a smear there. I pulled an old box of sanitary napkins from beneath the bathroom sink and stuck one to my underwear, then lay back down and forced myself to watch TV. I refused to look at the pad any more than once an hour, and every time I went into the bathroom I prayed that the stain hadn’t grown.
At three o’clock I decided to call Gideon if things were worse by four. But the bleeding had slowed by that time, and by six it had stopped completely.
So . . . the baby—or babies—should be fine. They had to be fine.
Later that night, when I received a newsy email from Simone, I decided not to tell her about the bleeding. Why should I worry the woman about something that couldn’t be helped?
I would simply do my best to take care of myself and the littlest Amblour.
* * *
My obstetrician, Dr. Rita Hawthorn, had scheduled me for an exam and ultrasound exactly one month after the embryo transfer, but the morning of my appointment I received a phone call from her receptionist—a car had struck a telephone pole near her office and a transformer had blown, leaving the medical building without power.
“Dr. Hawthorn is only seeing emergency patients, and she’s seeing them at the hospital,” the receptionist explained. “Are you having an emergency?”
I sat hard on a kitchen stool and thought about the bleeding I’d experienced nearly two weeks before. Since that day, I’d had no problems at all. “No,” I told her. “I’m fine.”
“Then you’ll understand if I reschedule you.” The receptionist’s tone warned me not to protest. “Dr. Hawthorn’s next available appointment is in three weeks.”
I grimaced. “Are you sure you can’t squeeze me in sooner? My IPs are eager to know if I’m carrying twins.”
“Excuse me?”
“Intended parents. My chart should say I’m a gestational carrier.”
The telephone line hummed for a moment, then the nurse cleared her throat. “All right, then, I’ll put you on a waiting list. But if Tampa Electric takes a couple of days to get out here, we’ll see you May eighth at nine thirty.”
I thought about asking for a referral—after all, other doctors had ultrasound machines, and I could probably make another appointment with Dr. Forrester if I needed to—but if I insisted on an ultrasound from a different doctor, wouldn’t I alarm Simone and Damien? They had gone through so much with their previous surrogates and I didn’t want to give them any reason to worry.
Besides, I wasn’t a first-time mother and I knew what to expect. In approximately seven months I would give birth whether or not I had an ultrasound that afternoon.
I would see my OB/GYN as soon as I could get an appointment.
Chapter Nine
As April showers paved the way for blooming plumeria and the fragrant jasmine vining around Mama Isa’s wrought-iron fence, I checked my jeans and noticed that they weren’t as tight as I expected them to be. Shouldn’t my belly be bigger?
Maybe my perceptions were skewed. I hadn’t realized I was pregnant with Marilee until well into my second month, so I seemed to balloon all at once. This time, I’d known about the pregnancy from the first minute. No wonder this first trimester seemed so long.
On the first Monday in May, Gideon announced that Mama Isa had invited the entire family over for supper. We always gathered at her home on Saturday nights, but what had sparked this invitation for a Monday? Gideon didn’t know.
The entire clan had arrived by the time we did, the men huddling on the front porch to smoke cigars. The women were undoubtedly inside, congregating around the fragrant dishes in the kitchen.
I took Marilee’s hand and led her through the cigar smoke and into the company of the women. “Hola,” I called, stopping to hug Yanela and Yaritza, who sat in matching rockers near the window. “¿Cómo están?”
The others called greetings, but Amelia leapt up from the table and grabbed my hand, pulling me into the narrow hallway that led to the bedrooms. “Come here, I have something to show you,” she said, drawing me into the pristine guest room.
I widened my eyes. “Your mom is going to kill you if we mess up her guest room.”
“We’re not going to mess it up. Even if we did, Mama wouldn’t mind because we’re celebrating.”
“What are we celebrating?”
“You’ll see.”
Amelia dropped onto the guest bed and I sat next to her, wondering why her eyes glittered like dark sequins. Had Mama Isa decided to retire and turn the store over to Amelia and Mario? Or was this about something else?
I realized the source of Amelia’s excitement when she unfurled the magazine she’d rolled up in her hand. “It’s for adoptive parents.” She smiled as if she’d recently been initiated into a secret club and these pages unlocked the entrance. “Our social worker gave it to us.”
“You had a home study interview today?”
“Our last. We’re done. We’re going on the list as soon as Helen gets our file uploaded to her network. But I wanted to show you this.”
She riffled through pages until she reached the back of the publication, then she pointed to a section titled “Some Children Wait.” More than a dozen grainy photos filled the page, most of older children. A caption beneath each picture listed the child’s name, age, and a fact or two: Johnny is six and likes to paint rainbows. He’s waiting for his forever home.
A lump rose to my throat. “Good grief, how can you stand to read those bios?”
“I know, aren’t they heartbreaking? I asked why people aren’t beating down doors to adopt these kids, and Helen said the situation isn’t as simple as you might think. These kids might be angels, but some of them come with real baggage,
and you can’t just stick them in a home and hope for the best. Plus, most young couples are like us—they want kids, but they want to start with a baby or a toddler. It’s hard to find people who have what it takes to adopt one of these older kids.”
I pressed my hand to my stomach as I studied the pictures. I knew hundreds of kids languished in the foster care system because their parents either couldn’t or wouldn’t take care of them, but I couldn’t help wondering why people like the Amblours wanted to go through all the trouble and expense of finding a gestational carrier when so many kids needed homes. France had to have waiting kids, too. I could understand if Simone and Damien wanted genetic offspring, but they had to use an egg donor, so the child inside me would be genetically related only to Damien. Why not consider an already-born child who needed a home?
I looked up at Amelia, who was gazing at the grainy black-and-white photos as if she’d open her arms to every kid on the page. If I showed the same magazine to Damien Amblour, I didn’t think he’d react in the same way.
Still, who was I to judge his motives? Amelia and Mario had been comfortable with adoption, but not every couple would be. Gideon and I never had to make that decision, so maybe I had no right to say what someone else should do.
I tilted my head. “I know you didn’t want to try IVF because it’s expensive, but why did you write it off so quickly? Wouldn’t Mario love to have a son who was a chip off the ol’ block?”
The light in Amelia’s eyes dimmed a degree. “I did some reading on IVF before we decided to go with adoption. I read that doctors create lots of embryos and then freeze some, knowing that half the frozen babies aren’t going to survive the defrosting. That felt wrong to me. Why freeze a lot of babies knowing that something you’ll set in motion is going to kill half of them?”
My stomach twisted. “I didn’t realize. I . . . hadn’t thought about it.”
Maybe I didn’t want to think about it.
