Chapter Ten

Richard

“How could you do that?”

I had barely gotten the door to our house closed when Flora whipped around to glare at me and took an angry step in my direction.

“Do what?” I asked, unbuttoning my jacket and handing it to the butler to hang it for me.

He walked past Flora without pausing to ask for her coat. To say that they didn’t get along would be a tremendous understatement and I tended to look the other way when he avoided interacting with her if she seemed to be in a particularly bad mood, which it was obvious in that moment that she was. Her face was reddened with anger and her mouth was pursed so hard her lips were barely visible anymore. Like usual in situations like this, I would take Flora’s jacket and put it aside somewhere. It would be gone the next time that I walked through the room, only to reappear the next time that we were leaving the house.

“I can’t believe that you asked Rue to let us use her egg.”

“I didn’t ask,” I said. “She offered.”

“And you accepted.”

“Of course, I did. You heard what Dr. Morgan said. If your doctor said that your eggs aren’t viable, then that’s it. They can’t be used for the surrogacy.”

“And you were just so willing to jump on using her egg.”

I crossed the foyer toward her and she promptly turned and stalked away from me. I followed her into the living room where she tossed herself into one of the plush sofas. If I wasn’t mistaken, in less than five minutes one of the housekeepers would arrive with a tray of tea and the tasteless, boring diet cookies that Flora insisted were delicious but I knew from personal experience tasted like cardboard dipped in old advent calendar chocolate. I couldn’t remember which of Flora’s meltdowns had started that tradition, but it was now common practice of the staff to try to release some of her tension and soothe her back from the brink. I would show my appreciation with an extra little tip at the end of the week. It was one of those things that defined the pattern of our lives and while it was one of the less pleasant of the habits that we had built, I was so accustomed to it by now that it barely fazed me when it happened. I just needed to figure out what it was that she was furious about, let her steam for a little bit, then figure out a way to fix it or just ride it out until she was over it or had moved on to something else that would hold her attention for a while.

I knew that things were going to be different when the baby came. Being a mother would calm her down. It would give her something to focus on and to fulfill her. When she had our baby to take care of, she wouldn’t be so frustrated and put out by the little things that happened in life because we would be too busy taking care of our little one. The three of us would settle into life together and Flora and I would finally be the family that I always envisioned having.

Though I would normally barely even notice Flora’s fit, somehow this time I couldn’t shake it. Reminding myself that things were going to get better soon, that when our baby was born we would have the life that we both wanted, didn’t take away the frustration that I was starting to feel. I walked into the living room and stared down at her where she sat.

“I don’t understand why you’re acting like this,” I said.

“Acting like this?” Flora said, her voice low as though I had said something incredibly offensive. “What is that crack supposed to mean?”

“You are so angry that I agreed to let Rue contribute an egg so that we can have our baby. It doesn’t make sense. You agreed to surrogacy when you found out that you can’t carry children. What’s changed.”

“I agreed when I thought that maybe somehow I would be able to use my own eggs,” she said. “I didn’t think that I was going to be completely separated from this whole experience. That you were going to find some other woman to go through the experience with and that I was just going to be on the sidelines.”

“You aren’t on the sidelines,” I told her, sitting on the couch beside her. “You are going to be just as involved every step of the way as I will be, and then when the baby comes, you will be so in love with it that you won’t even think about any of this. It will be our baby. Nothing else will matter. We’ll be a family and spend the rest of our lives happily together.”

I tried to smile at her, but Flora didn’t look convinced.

“What if you don’t see me when you look at the baby?” she asked.

“Of course, I’ll see you. You will be the baby’s mother and you will be wonderful at it.”

“Maybe it’s time for us to talk about adoption,” she said.

“Adoption?” I asked.

I felt a flicker of discomfort in my stomach. When we first started talking about having a child and learned that Flora wouldn’t be able to carry it herself, adoption was something that I was more than willing to consider. Now, though, the thought made my heart sink a little. It was different now. Something had changed.

“Yes,” Flora said. “Don’t you think that we could be great parents to a child even if it wasn’t yours biologically? You’re asking me to raise a child that belongs to someone else, but you aren’t willing to do the same?”

She was spiraling into anger again and I wanted to stop the progression. The door opened, and the housekeeper scuttled in, lowered the tea tray to the table in front of Flora, and then left without saying a word. I met her eyes as she turned to shut the door, hoping that she could see the gratitude in my face. Flora paused to take a sip of her tea and eat a cookie. It seemed to bring her back to the still-elevated but at least controlled mental place and I took the opportunity to respond to her.

“I’m not asking you to do anything that you don’t want to do,” I said. “If you want to consider adoption, we’ll talk about it. But it could take years for us to get a baby. I thought that it was important to you to be able to raise our child from its first day. I know that there are children out there who need families, and maybe one day we will open our home to one, or even a few, but we talked about this. You said, and I agreed, that at least for our first child we wanted to go through the pregnancy experience and raise a newborn.”

I could see Flora’s eyes flickering slightly back and forth as if she was thinking hard about something. The color in her cheeks had faded and the tension in her muscles was responding to the calming properties of the tea. Finally, she set the cup on the tray again and looked into my eyes.

“If this is so important to you, then I will go along with it,” she said. “We’ll move forward with the surrogacy.”

Relief flooded through me and I threw my arms around Flora, pulling her close to me for a hug. Her hands touched my back and I felt her pat me cordially. I wished, not for the first time, that there was more warmth in the way that she touched me, or even in the way that I touched her. I hoped that it would come, that the experience of bringing a new life into the world and raising it together would help us to rediscover, or possibly discover for the first time, the depth of love that I saw in others but often felt that we had never really had.

****

“I can’t ask you to do that.”

“Of course, you can.”

“No. I really can’t.”

“If she says that she can’t, she can’t.”

I looked at Flora, who stood with her arms crossed over her chest. She had taken to not even sitting down at the meetings and as much as I thought that I should, I realized that I didn’t even care. Since we agreed to move forward with the plan, she had seemed distanced and I had had to come to the decision that I wasn’t going to let her force me into the same response. I wanted to be as invested and committed to this as I possibly could, even if that meant that I had to ignore how difficult she was being. She would get over it eventually and I couldn’t waste any step of this process waiting for her.

“There’s no reason that I can’t help her.”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with the contract,” Rue insisted. “You can’t be responsible for my personal expenses.”

“Part of the agreement was that I would provide for your expenses throughout the agreement period, and that includes housing.”

“Yes, housing. Like covering rent payments. That doesn’t count moving me. That’s something that I decided to do on my own.”

“I don’t want you having to be stressed about anything,” I said. “I don’t want you to worry about having to pack and load a truck and do all of that before the procedure and especially not after.”

“I wouldn’t be doing it on my own,” Rue insisted. “I have friends that would come help me.”

“This is something that I am happy to do for you,” I said. “I can make sure that the whole thing is over and done with in one day. That way you can get settled in, relax, and get ready for next week. Please say you’ll accept.”

Rue seemed to think about my offer for a few moments and then nodded.

“I will,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Good. Just pack a bag with anything you might want for the first night that you are in your new home and then the crew will be there to handle the rest for you.”

“Oh, it’s not a new home,” she said.

I looked at her questioningly.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s actually my grandmother’s house,” she said. “I’m just going home.”

I smiled. That sounded wonderful.

Two days later I arrived at Rue’s apartment to check in on the progress of her move. I carried a to-go cup of coffee to cut the chill that had settled firmly into the air and a box of pastries. Rue was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, staring at the door to her apartment in stunned silence. I walked up to her side and she jumped slightly at my sudden presence. I held out one of the cups of coffee and she looked at it for a moment before taking it.

“Thank you,” she said.

I was about to offer her some of the cream and sugar that I had in a small bag, but she took a long swig of the strong brew black and I smiled.

My kind of woman.

I shook my head slightly. That wasn’t a thought that I should be having.

I opened the box of pastries and held it out to her. She peered inside and then lifted her eyes to me.

“I thought that I was supposed to be on a strict diet,” she said.

There was a hint of suspicion in her voice as if she thought that I was perhaps testing her. I laughed and leaned forward slightly so I could speak to her in a conspiratorial whisper.

“It’ll be our little secret,” I said. “That diet is mostly Flora’s doing, anyway.” I straightened and took a long sip of my own coffee, sighing happily as the heat slid down my throat and started to ease the tension in my muscles that the cold had put into them. “We’ll call the coffee a farewell. No more caffeine after next week.”

She looked at the cup in her hand and then back at me.

“To getting through nine months on only the high of life,” she said, lifting the cup as if in a toast.

“Almost ten months, technically,” I said.

“I’m going to need at least two pastries,” she said, lifting her cup a little higher.

I lifted my cup with a laugh and we both took deep sips before she selected her first pastry.

“How is the move going?” I asked.

Rue nodded as she chewed.

“Unbelievably fast,” she said. “In fact, I think that they’re almost finished. I was all geared up to sleep here tonight, but I don’t have a bed anymore.”

“I told you it would be finished in one day,” I said.

“I was just planning on staying so that I could take care of the cleaning and stuff. I’ve heard that this landlord is a beast when it comes to security deposits, and I’m determined to be the one who cracks her.”

I laughed.

“Well, I already have a cleaning crew on call, ready for when the moving crew has emptied out the apartment. I can assure you that they will leave it cleaner than when you came in. And if there are any damages, I can get somebody in to fix those the next day.”

Rue looked back at her apartment with a contemplative expression.

“There is that spot on the ceiling where Christopher tried to make popcorn and the broken French door from Tessie’s Tai Chi phase.”

“Those shouldn’t be a problem,” I said, even though in the back of my mind I was really in need of a bit more information about these two people and the tragedies that had apparently befallen Rue’s apartment.

She turned back to me and held up her cup again.

“Here’s to getting security deposits back.”

“Here’s to getting security deposits back.”

I tapped the rim of my cup against hers and smiled as we both took sips again and watched as the moving crew carried the last few boxes out of her apartment and piled them into the moving trucks lined up along the road. When they were finished, I turned to Rue.

“Would it be presumptuous to ask to come along with you to your new place and make sure you get settled in alright?” I asked.

Rue looked uncomfortable, her eyes sliding toward her apartment as she hemmed-and-hawed for a few moments.

“Well,” she said, her voice trailing out as though she were trying to take as much time as she could so that she could come up with something to say. “It’s just that…I was planning on meeting up with Christopher and Tessie later.”

I could tell that she didn’t want me to go along with her, and though that made me want to even more, I knew that I couldn’t force her to let me accompany her. I nodded.

“That’s alright,” I said. “Maybe some other time. Could I at least interest you in a warm car and the rest of our coffee and pastries?”

She smiled, her eyes lighting up with relief, and nodded.

“I’d like that.”