The Baby Gift

“Would you love him if he had Yates’s anemia?”

Her head jerked up, and she glared at him. “I’m trying to make sure neither of them has it. That’s the point.”

He turned from her with a sound that was part sadness, part disgust. He walked to the mantel and struck it with the flat of his hand. He swore. “What if none of these hypothetical embryos is healthy? What if they all carry the disease? What do you do then? Flush them away and start over?”

“You can freeze them,” she said, setting her jaw.

“Freeze them,” he mocked. “That’s nice. Do you have any other children? Yes, but they’re in the freezer. They would have been flawed, so we didn’t let them get born.”

“Someday there may be another way to cure this disease.” She shot the words back. “A sure way. Then they could be born and grow up safe.”

“There may not be another cure for years. Decades. What then? We just keep the little nippers on ice for eternity?”

“Someone else could bring them into the world,” she argued. “Someone who couldn’t conceive on their own. It happens all the time.”

“You’ve got all the pie-in-the-sky answers, don’t you?” he said. “I’m not asking for just myself, you know. Other people are going to be raising the same questions.”

“I don’t care about other people,” she said with passion. “I care about my daughter.”

“And your other child, too, of course. The one you want for spare parts.”

She could have slapped his face. Instead she took a long drink of wine. It tasted bitter as gall.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was a cheap shot.”

“Yes. It was.”

“But people will say worse things. About us. To us. And to our children.”

“I said I don’t care about other people. And what’s more, they don’t have to know. It’s none of their business.”

He blinked. He set his untasted wine on the mantel. He stared at her in disbelief. “They wouldn’t have to know?”

Her chin shot up. “I mean it. Why would they have to know?”

“Sweetheart, if you’re pregnant and you have a baby, somebody’s going to notice, I’ll guarantee you.”

“They don’t have to know how we did it. The center has a confidentiality agreement. Nobody else ever has to know.”

“And how do you explain this baby? Say we had a wild fling? And then we decided it wouldn’t work, but there’s a baby on the way, so what the hell, you’ll just go ahead and have it?”

“Why not?” she challenged. “People try to reconcile all the time, and it doesn’t work out. One of us got careless, I got pregnant. I wanted another child, so I had it.”

“Good Lord,” he said from between his teeth. “You’re something, you know that?”

“Isn’t it better?” she asked. “It’s a white lie, it’s not meant for an evil purpose. It’s just to protect us—all of us, the whole family.”

He picked up his glass and took a deep drink. “You should have been a lawyer. Your powers of equivocation are wasted on tomatoes.”

She ignored the gibe. “If the truth got out, it’d be a media circus. Other people have done this. They ended up being national news stories. Do you want that? Do you want it for Nealie? Or the baby?”

Suddenly he looked older, and more tired than she’d ever seen him. He rubbed his forehead. “The baby. You talk about this kid like he’s real.”

“He could be a she,” she said.

“Don’t change the subject.” He turned his back to her. He put his elbow on the mantel and leaned his forehead on his hand. “Look,” he said. “I don’t know if I can go through with this.”

Panic flooded her. “But you said—”

“I was in shock. I’m still in shock. None of this seems real.”

“Oh, Josh,” she said, her throat tight. “It’s too real. You’ve seen her. How little she is. How frail.”

He made no answer.

She said, “We have two choices. We can do nothing for her. Or we can do—this.”

He swore.

Desperate, she said, “It’s hard to accept, I know. It’s taken me two months to come to terms with it.”

She knew immediately she’d said the wrong thing. She saw the tension seize his body. For a moment he was as immobile as if turned to stone.

Then he dropped his hand from his eyes, straightened and turned to face her. “You’ve known about this for two months?”

“I—I guess I was—in denial.”

“Oh, please,” he said with contempt, “spare me the psychobabble.”

“If that’s the wrong word, I don’t know the right one.”

“My child’s seriously ill and you waited two months to tell me?”

“I couldn’t face it. I couldn’t talk about it. I couldn’t believe it. I had to think about what to do.”

He glared at her. She knew she deserved it. Tears welled in her eyes.

“I’m sorry. Be as angry as you want. But take it out on me. Not her.”

He put his hand to his forehead again. “Look, I’m still on Moscow time. I’ve got jet lag. Denial’s a lousy word. But I understand what you mean. Maybe I can’t forgive, yet. But I understand.”

She knew what he felt—grief, fright, anger and a terrible sense of isolation. He was full of the same roiling welter of emotions that had overwhelmed her when she’d first learned. And he was clearly exhausted, as well.

“Oh, Josh,” she said. “you need rest. Let me give you the keys to the truck.”

He said nothing, just stood there with his eyes covered.

She rose from the chair, then stood behind it, clasping its back, unsure what to do. “I’d drive you, but I can’t leave Nealie alone. I—I could call Poppa. It’s still early. You could just walk over there.”