SURROGATE, by Janet Fox

Originally published in Fears. Copyright © 1980 by Janet Fox.

Steve was repainting the walls of what had been the guest bedroom when he heard the doorbell. “Diane,” he shouted, and certain that he’d done his duty, turned back to rolling a pale yellow swath onto the wall. The new crib, bureau and bassinet that Diane had bought lay under protecting sheets and there were several unopened boxes bearing a toystore logo. His own attitude was as chaotic and half-formed as this room. Earlier he’d given up all hope of being a father, and it took a certain effort of will to resurrect that hope. He was trying, mostly for Diane’s sake, but turning this room into a nursery still seemed a kind of fantasy.

The bell resounded through the house again, an impatient sound, and he shouted again, this time with less confidence. He put down the roller and listened but heard no footsteps. “Damn, she must have gone out.” He wiped his hands and hurried toward the door just as the bell sounded again. Through the screen he saw a young woman very visibly pregnant under a cheap dress whose pink-and-yellow print was very nearly phosphorescent. Her eyelids drooped under a layer of blue eyeshadow, and lipstick more nearly black than red glistened on her lips. Her jaw worked a wad of gum.

“Mr. Winston?”

“Yes, I’m Steven Winston.”

He felt a hand on his shoulder and realized that Diane was behind him.

“I’m Kelsy Adams,” she said, thrusting out a small hand. Several plastic bracelets clacked together on her wrist.

Confusedly he clasped hands with her. “I’m sorry—” he began.

She patted her stomach. “I’m your surrogate mother.” He heard Diane’s indrawn breath, felt her hand clutch his arm. The moment with its tension lengthened until it threatened to pull reality apart, yet here she was on their doorstep in a splash of sunlight. He’d never seen her before, yet it was his child she carried. Thrown badly off balance, he could feel only anger.

“You had no right to come here,” he said. “According to the terms of our agreement—”

“Invite her in,” whispered Diane.

“No. No, you’ll have to go. This isn’t right.”

“The neighbors…invite her in.”

Reluctantly he opened the screen. “All right, we’ll talk,” he said. “But only for a few minutes.”

Diane moved newspapers off the divan with a nervous motion. She wore what Steve called her white look—shocked but still functioning. It turned her normal fragile prettiness harsh somehow, masklike, hollow.

“Maybe I should’ve called,” said Kelsy, settling herself on the cushions with the air of a cat getting comfortable.”

“How did you find us? The terms of our contract stated that we were to have no contact.”

“I got the information from a…friend who works in the office.”

“Well, I’m calling Doctor Joshua,” Steve said. “I think something is very wrong here.”

As he moved toward the phone, a dribble of mascara melted down Kelsy’s cheek. “I had to go somewhere. I got kicked out of my apartment. Those old biddies said I had…bad…morals.” Diane moved to stand beside her, looking down helplessly. “I didn’t know people would think I—” began Kelsy, the rest lost in the tissue that Diane handed her.

Diane made a warning gesture as Steve reached for the phone. “Calling the doctor isn’t going to change the fact that she’s here. She’s not just on paper; she’s real.”

“But this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. It can cause terrible complications. It must nullify the agreement.”

“I’m causing trouble. I’ll go. I’ll go and you’ll never have to see me again.” Kelsy wiped her face, smudging streaks of blackness across her cheek, a strangely vulnerable gesture.

“How can anything be nullified” Diane said. “Look at her. It’s your—our baby. What does it matter about your agreements and pieces of paper?”

“I didn’t mean to bother you; I just didn’t know where else to go, but I see I can’t stay here.” For all of her protests Kelsy wasn’t making any moves to leave the comfort of the cushions.

“Don’t go. Not just yet. I’ll fix us some coffee, no, some juice, that’d be better.” A tentative smile appeared amid the ruined makeup. A simpleminded girl, Steve thought. That was all she was. This agreement might be the only stable relationship in her life. But even as he lectured himself, trying to find some compassion, he was wondering how a simpleminded girl could so easily break the security of a doctor’s private files.

After Kelsy had downed her second glass of juice, Diane directed her to the bathroom so she could, as she put it, put on a new face. “I wonder if we shouldn’t call the doctor,” Steve said. “He shouldn’t be so careless with confidential information.”

“But what if he cancels the agreement? Did we wait this long for it to be like the other time, when I—” Her voice fell to a murmur. “Lost the baby.” Her skin seemed translucent, stretched taut over the fine bones of her face, and he was afraid to say anything as if the sound of his voice would shatter her.

“Here I am, back to normal.” The greasy layers of makeup had been replaced, making strangely harsh the youthful contours of her face. “And I’m ready to go. You’ve been really nice. I’m glad I could meet you even if it was only for a few minutes.”

Steve followed her toward the door, amazed that this whole soap-opera episode was to be so easily concluded. “I’m glad I met you, too,” said Diane. Kelsy was going out the door, smiling back toward Diane. Steve shouted a warning as he saw her foot in its flimsy high-heeled shoe miss the step. Too late to catch her; he caught Diane, who was screaming and bolting forward. Kelsy had fallen full length on the sidewalk and for the moment she hadn’t moved. Diane knelt beside her to cradle her head. “Maybe we ought to get an ambulance,” Steve said, but Kelsy was already stirring, trying to rise.

“No, she’s all right, but we’d better get her inside.” Steve helped her to stand but she didn’t seem too steady on her feet, so he picked her up. She seemed small somehow, and lighter than she should have been. He put her on the couch.

Diane was carrying a cheap plastic suitcase. “This was left out by the curb. Her things must be in it.”

“But she can’t stay here.”

“Only for the night. In the morning I’ll see that she gets to the doctor’s office for a checkup.”

“This is crazy.” Diane came closer and put her arms around him. “It isn’t crazy, is it, for me to want your baby—no matter how it comes about.”

* * * *

Still half-asleep, Steve lurched across the living room on his way to the kitchen to make coffee. On the couch, Kelsy, covered to the neck with a wrinkled sheet, looked like something in a cocoon. Her face devoid of the makeup was youthful. She could be hardly out of her teens, he supposed, and as he looked at her, he speculated on the kind of life that would make a woman agree to the surrogate arrangement. He supposed he should feel pity and responsibility, yet as he stood there he was feeling a kind of anxiety, the feeling that at any moment she would awaken and blink and stare at him with eyes gone ferally red in reflected light. Stupid. He turned away.

As he was drinking the coffee, Diane joined him, her slim elegance enveloped in one of his old blanket-cloth robes. “It’s been over a week,” he said in a tentative voice. “Don’t you think it’s time she left to get a place of her own?”

“I hate to think of her being alone.”

“But this situation, it’s impossible. I can just imagine what the Cartons—or the Pendletons—are thinking.”

“I told Midge Pendleton that she’s my baby sister,” said Diane with a pleased, wicked grin that was uncharacteristic of her.

“But her clothes, her appearance—”

“I’ve been meaning to take her shopping—get her some nicer things. We can afford it.”

“But what about the money, the fee she got for the baby?”

“I’m afraid she has no head for money, poor thing, and, well, who cares about that. It’s not as if we ever thought we could buy a child.”

He paused. He guessed he had thought so, when the agreement was made. It had all seemed so clear, so businesslike.

“Don’t you feel the least bit responsible?”

“Of course I do,” he said, “but there’s something wrong about this. It’s—” He couldn’t explain. He could talk about the social and moral viewpoints, but that wouldn’t begin to touch it. The wrongness was the kind that made hair bristle at the back of the neck and brought an undefined sound of warning up from the throat.

* * * *

“What are you trying to pull?” he had burst into the living room, startling Kelsy, who was sitting on the floor putting together a jigsaw puzzle. “I happened to run into Doctor Joshua today,” he said, feeling as if he were playing the part of an irate father in a play. Kelsy’s condition wasn’t nearly so noticeable in the simple cotton smocks that Diane had bought for her, and with the makeup toned down, she looked like a teenager. “He told me that our surrogate mother had missed her last two appointments and that he couldn’t locate her at her old address.”

“What are you shouting about?” Diane stood in the kitchen doorway.

“I thought the reason for her being here was to care for her health.”

As jigsaw pieces scattered, Kelsy scrambled to her feet and hurried to stand beside Diane. He couldn’t tell if he were imagining it but her stomach seemed smaller under the loose blouse. It was smaller. Or did it only seem so?

“He doesn’t like me,” said Kelsy.

“She’s afraid of Doctor Joshua,” explained Diane, putting an arm around Kelsy’s shoulders. “We were going to find another doctor, one with more understanding, but we’ve been so busy shopping and—”

“We can’t have her living here—sleeping on the couch, taking up all your time.”

“The couch, I’ve been meaning to mention it to you. I think it’d be a good idea if we set the guest bed up again in the smaller bedroom.”

“But that’s the nursery. It’s all fixed up.”

“Of course it is—it will be. But it’s important for Kelsy to be comfortable.”

He felt that he stood at a crossroads of sorts, yet how could he be certain that the bulge under Kelsy’s smock was really diminished? And if it was, how did one explain it without sprawling over into the kinds of ideas that only crazy people believed in? He only knew that under the murky surface of doing one’s duty and living up to one’s responsibility to one’s fellow man, he hated her, with all the hatred of one species for another.

* * * *

The nursery was a pale yellow with large decals of teddy bears in various costumes. Huddled in a shadowy corner was the baby furniture. A mobile of glittering plastic animals hung over the bed and Kelsy was reaching up to touch it with a languid motion. As it spun, a music box tinkled out a tinny melody. She sat against the pillow with knees up, the posture easy for her now that her stomach had flattened. The absorption had been a gradual process which Diane had never mentioned, but Steve had watched each change with fascination, feeling a vague sense of loss. The process had given Kelsy an additional layer of fat so that the drawn-up knees were dimpled and her breasts were scarcely noticeable under the pink shift with its print of clowns and balloons. Her face had grown rounder, fuller, and there was never any makeup on it now. She was smiling an odd, secretive smile, thinking, he supposed, that she’d won. He stepped closer to the doorway; a board squeaked; she saw him.

“You scared me,” she said with a little pout. He could almost be charmed by it; he could see how Diane might be.

“You scared me,” he said with a smile that was only an ironic twist of the lips. “What are you, really?”

She looked at him out of large shining brown eyes and was silent. Maybe she didn’t know herself. Maybe this usurpation was as natural to her as the cuckoo laying its eggs in another bird’s nest.

It seemed equally instinctual when he reached for her, locking his hands around the chubby throat. There was a moment of self-loathing, of unreality before he began to squeeze.

He felt a blow from behind, at first unlocalized until a pain spread through his chest. He fell to the floor, his scrabbling hand confirming the double-looped shape of the handles of Diane’s sewing shears. Warm liquid flooded into his nose and mouth and he felt that he was drowning in lukewarm water, but the substance that dribbled out over his hand was red. His fading consciousness supplied a kind of glowing haze to the figures seated on the bed.

Diane’s expression was both fierce and gentle at once as she looked down on Kelsy’s tousled head cradled against her breast. Somewhere in the background the music box was endlessly droning its mechanical lullaby.