“Oh good, there you are,” he says. “Avery and I went out and got pizza. We brought some back for you.”
Avery made fun of my grilled cheese, and he rewarded her by getting pizza instead? Really?
“I’m not hungry,” I mumble.
“Well, it’s here if you want it later,” he says. “And I’m having food delivered tomorrow. I promise, the rest of the summer won’t be like this weekend. We’ll . . . pull ourselves back together.”
“Okay,” I say. I resist the urge to add, Whatever.
I start to head down the hallway, then turn back.
“I figured out what was wrong with the washer,” I say. “We don’t need a repairman.”
“You did?” Mr. Armisted says. “You’re amazing!”
Now I can’t tell him it just needed to be plugged in.
“Thank you,” Mr. Armisted says. “Thank you for agreeing to stay the rest of the summer, and thank you for trying with the grilled cheese sandwiches earlier, and . . . thank you for being the stable one.”
Stable? Stable? Can’t he see that I’m not stable either?
I speed down the hallway before I start yelling at him.
But I don’t make it all the way to my room. I pass Avery’s door—closed tight—and somehow just the sight of it makes me madder than ever. Before I can stop myself, I knock.
There’s a long silence, and then a grumpy, “Go away.”
“No,” I say.
I turn the knob and shove my way in. Avery is sprawled facedown on her bed.
I’m not going to feel sorry for her.
I go over and crouch close to her ear.
“Tomorrow,” I say, “when your dad thinks we’re both going to Spanish class together . . . I’m not going to cover for you anymore. If you don’t go, I’m not going to pretend that you did. Do you understand?”
I hate myself for adding that last part. Do you understand? is what the principal of Crawfordsville High School, Mr. Ockston, always says at assemblies when kids get rowdy. Everyone ignores him. Even the teachers think he’s an idiot.
“No—you know what?” I tell Avery. “I don’t even care if you understand or not. That’s how it’s going to be.”
I stand up. I haven’t yelled at her. I haven’t slapped her. I haven’t even used swear words.
But I feel self-righteous and vindicated and strong.
I’m not even mad about the grilled cheese anymore.
Avery at Midnight
I tiptoe out of my room. I’ve been planning this for hours. I peer down the hall at the other bedroom doors, and both of them are shut tight, surrounded by darkness. Both Dad and Kayla have got to be asleep by now.
Silently, I creep toward the living room and kitchen. I don’t turn on a light, but grope along the couches and tables. There. Dad’s iPad is on the coffee table, right where Kayla always leaves it after she’s done with it every night.
So . . . is Kayla as stupid as I think she is? I wonder. Dumb enough to leave herself logged in on someone else’s device?
I flip open the iPad cover and sit down on the couch. The screen glows at me. A twinge of guilt hits me.
Think about how mean Kayla was, threatening to tattle if I don’t go to Spanish class tomorrow, I tell myself. Think about how unfair everything is.
Think about how she won’t talk to her mother, when my mother won’t talk to me.
I go to Gmail, and, yes, Kayla is stupid. A whole string of e-mail pops up. The sender of each one is listed as Stacy Butts. Kayla’s mom.
You don’t have anyone else who wants to talk to you, huh, Kayla? I think, as if she’s around to taunt. Do you have any friends?
This is silly, because how many teenagers communicate with their friends by e-mail?
It does seem possible that someone like Kayla might.
I click on the top e-mail, the newest one. It opens up:
Oh, Kayla, I was so glad to hear from you today, and so glad you say you’re doing fine. But what did you do all day? Where did you go? Please please please let me call you . . .
The woman’s pathetic. My mother would never beg like that.
My mother won’t even call. . . .
I click out of the e-mail because it’s not the one I want. I scroll back to one that’s date-stamped Thursday night.
Kayla, my sweet, sweet Kayla, this was never the way I wanted you to find this out. I never imagined things could happen this way. It feels like you’re a million miles away. No matter what time of day or night you’re reading this, CALL ME! I’d rather talk about all of this. You know writing’s not my thing.
I never thought the Armisteds would breathe a word about this. They were the ones who wanted to keep this secret, not me. I was proud of being a surrogate mother. The plan in the beginning was that I would tell you, I would tell Grandma and Grandpa . . . Even Avery was supposed to know, her whole life.
I frown. Is this true? What changed?
I keep reading.
You know some of the things that were different fourteen, fifteen years ago. But it’s hard even for me to remember. . . . What was it? The hope? The optimism? The faith that I had?
The blindness?
You only know your daddy the way he is now. And from the stories your grandparents and I have told you, I guess. But he was a force of nature. When he said he was going off to Afghanistan to kick some Osama bin Laden butt, I believed him. I thought your daddy could single-handedly finish off Al-Qaeda.
But . . . that meant killing people, you know? I couldn’t quite get my head around that. Sure, he’d be killing bad people, the enemy. But innocent civilians were dying in the war too. Women and children.
Like me and you.
Your daddy would leave for training and I’d be standing there changing your diaper and you’d coo up at me, and all I could think about was the Afghan women on the other side of the world who were probably changing their kids’ diapers too. They probably loved their children the same way I loved you. And THEY hadn’t done anything, but they were going to be killed. By good American soldiers and marines like your daddy.
I have to look away for a minute. War—people die in war. Everybody knows that.
What I can’t help wondering is, Did my mother actually ever change one of my diapers when I was a baby? Or did she always make the nanny do it?
Would Celeste Sterling Armisted even touch a baby’s diaper?
Did Kayla’s mom ever wonder about that too?
The unkind way to look at what I decided is that I was trying to bargain with God. That’s what some of my friends said, the ones who tried to talk me out of being a surrogate mother. I would bring new life into the world as a gift for some other family; God would keep your daddy safe in the war, and even make it so he didn’t have to kill anyone but bad guys. But I didn’t think of it as bargaining. It was more like . . . trying for some balance. I wasn’t looking for any guarantees or promises. I knew that wasn’t possible. There was terrible, terrible evil in the world that meant your daddy was going to have to go off to war and kill people. I accepted that. But I didn’t want to sit home doing nothing while he was away. I wanted to do something good, something BIG and good. As big as war and killing, except on the opposite side. Giving someone life, not death.
You know your grandma and grandpa had trouble having children. The whole time I was growing up, I heard about how sad they were, all the years before I was born. Grandma told me once it almost drove them to divorce—and you know how much they don’t like divorce. You know how much they belong together.
I grip the iPad so tightly I accidentally hit the X at the top of the screen and the e-mail disappears. Why do some couples belong together and others don’t?
Why do my parents have to be the unlucky ones, a bad couple, people who can do nothing but fight?
If having a kid was what kept Kayla’s grandparents together, why didn’t that work for my parents?
I can’t answer any of those questions, and I don’t like th
inking about them. I bring the e-mail back, but I skim down a ways.
I found out when I was pregnant with you, Kayla, that I’m one of those lucky women who don’t have any problems with it. I was never sick with either you or Avery. I never made a big deal about this with you—because it’s not really something to emphasize with a teenager—but I LOVED being pregnant. I don’t know that I looked like I glowed, like people always say, but I felt that way. Your dad and I wanted more kids after you, but we knew we’d have to wait until he was back from the war, until we had a little bit more money saved. So I thought, why not get pregnant for someone else in between?
Just to be clear: Even though we didn’t have much money, I DIDN’T become a surrogate mother because of the payment. There are rules about that. And, really, if I was only looking at making money, I could have started babysitting and practically made the same. This is not complaining about what the Armisteds paid me—I wouldn’t have wanted the money to be my reason. They were just paying for my medical care and my time and . . . the risk. That was fair. Don’t let anyone tell you different.
I want to talk back to Kayla’s mom.
Oh, so if you just say it wasn’t like my parents bought me, does that keep it from being baby buying?
Didn’t she read any of the websites I read the other day, about why so many countries make it illegal to pay surrogate mothers?
I guess she wouldn’t have read them before she got pregnant. Because they wouldn’t have existed fourteen years ago.
Didn’t she know about Baby M or any of the other babies that came from surrogate mothers, who became legal hot potatoes, when surrogate mothers or the parents who’d paid surrogate mothers changed their minds about keeping or giving away or even wanting the babies?
Was she crazy, that she just did this thing—having a baby that wasn’t hers—without seeing all the ways it could go wrong?
The agency I worked with gave me a lot of profiles to look at. Picking the right family seemed like a sacred duty. The Armisteds stood out because they were from Ohio originally, just like I was, and I was a little homesick. And they planned to move back to Ohio eventually, just like your dad and I did. And Mr. Armisted had a farm connection, just like we did. And they seemed . . . golden. They were both so smart and so talented, and they wanted a baby so badly. . . . I knew they would take good care of any child they had. And that child would have so many advantages; surely she’d grow up to do great things for the whole world. . . .
Well. You see how idealistic I was.
What does that mean? Doesn’t Kayla’s mom still think I could do great things for the world?
The timing worked out that I got pregnant—with the very first implantation, which I thought was a good sign—just as your dad was preparing to deploy. He thought the surrogacy was a good thing too, because it would give me something happy to focus on while he was away.
Of course, you know that he never deployed, because of the accident.
Wait—what? Does “deploy” not mean what I think it means? Didn’t Kayla’s dad go off to war, and wasn’t that where he got hurt?
I try to remember why I thought that, what I’d ever heard about Kayla’s dad. But even when Kayla and I were pretty much besties, back when we were little, I’d never really paid attention to anything I heard about either of her parents. They were adults—who cared?
Probably, Angelica was the one who told me Kayla’s dad was a war hero. She always was good with the fanciful stories.
She also assured me every single day that my parents loved me.
Blinking hard, I go back to the e-mail.
But I’ve never told you the whole story of the night of the accident. Your dad and I went to a good-bye party. My friend Sonia said you could spend the night with her—her husband wasn’t being deployed. I’ve never wanted you to be mad at Lester, the friend who was driving the car that night. I think now that the whole unit was terrified of going off to war, but they were too tough to let it show. I think that’s what their problem was. But I also don’t want you to be mad at your dad when I tell you how things happened. We were at this party, and I was pregnant, so I had to be careful about everything. And I was at the stage of pregnancy where it’s like my body was saying, Sleep . . . All I want to do is sleep. . . . So I kept yawning. And that upset your dad. He said something like, “I’m leaving tomorrow and you can’t even stay awake?” I said we should both just go home, and he said no, and that made me mad. I understand now—I know if we’d gone home, we would have talked about how scared I was for him, and maybe even how scared he was. And he didn’t want to talk about any of that. But that night I was nothing but mad, and I said, “Fine, I’ll take a cab.” And he said, “Go ahead.”
If I’d known that was going to be the last conversation your dad and I would ever have where it was both of us talking, of course I’d have turned around. If he’d called out, Wait! I would have turned around anyhow. But we were both just twenty-one, and I don’t think you can understand how impossibly young that is. I regretted everything the minute I was in the cab, but it felt like that was already too late.
The thing is, if I hadn’t been pregnant, if we hadn’t had that fight, we would have stuck with the original plan, which was for Lester to drive both of us home. That would have happened no matter how much he’d had to drink. You could never tell by looking at Lester how drunk he was. I saw pictures of his smashed-up car; I know where I would have been sitting. And you may think I’m making too much of this, but I know this as well as I know anything else about that year: If I hadn’t been pregnant with Avery, I would have died that night. You would have lost me and, for all practical purposes, your father, all at once.
Being a surrogate mother saved my life.
It saved me later on too, because it was so hard those first few months after your dad’s accident. The only reason I bothered to eat was because Avery had to stay healthy. You were with Grandma and Grandpa by then; I knew you were in good hands. But just then, I was the only one who could take care of Avery. So I had to take care of myself, too.
I sink deeper into the couch cushions. So there—I did something great before I was even born. I saved Kayla’s mother’s life.
I’m not sure I buy her spin. She could also argue that if she hadn’t been pregnant, she would have been there with Kayla’s dad when it was time to go home. She could have stopped that drunk guy from driving. She could have saved everyone.
Or maybe not. It seems like marines would take orders only from other marines.
I like thinking I saved somebody’s life.
I went into labor with Avery the same day the doctors told me your dad was never going to get any better. This lady—a social worker, I guess—was saying, “You know the VA will always take care of his medical expenses,” and I said, “You think THAT’S what I’m concerned about?” and that was when I felt the first contraction. Maybe it was the shock that sent me into labor. When I got pregnant with Avery, I never dreamed she would be the last baby I’d ever give birth to. But that day, when I went from standing beside your father’s hospital bed to lying in one of my own . . . I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. But I never knew how hard everything was going to be. For me, it felt like an end, not a beginning. It was an end.
Mr. and Mrs. Armisted were really kind. I wasn’t one of those surrogate mothers who had second thoughts. Not quite. I never wanted to keep Avery. At that point, I wasn’t even able to take care of YOU. But Mrs. Armisted and I both changed our minds about one part of what we’d agreed to in the beginning. She held Avery in her arms for the first time and said, “We can’t ever let her know she’s anything but one hundred percent OURS.” And I looked at Avery in her parents’ arms and thought, This can’t be the last time I ever see that child. I didn’t want to raise her—I COULDN’T raise her. But I had to know that she would be all right, from more than pictures and letters and e-mails that could say anything.
I think Mr. Armisted would have agreed to any
thing, just to keep everyone happy. Because he loved that little baby so much.
When you hold a newborn baby, it’s really hard to throw your imagination ten, fifteen, twenty years into the future. It feels like a miracle that the child even exists, let alone that she’s going to grow up someday, that she’s going to have thoughts and feelings and rights of her own. The agency advised us not to change anything in our agreement; they said we’d change our minds again. They warned us. But after Avery was born, we did change things. We agreed to keep the surrogacy secret from everyone who didn’t already know, and in exchange I would get to see Avery every now and then, as long as I never told. I was just relieved that everything worked out.
It was only later that I thought how much I was like someone in a fairy tale, not seeing how a wish could backfire.
I’ve wanted to tell you for years, but it didn’t seem fair to tell you and not have Avery know. And I’d promised. And I had no right to tell Avery. Only her parents have that right. So I was stuck keeping a secret I wanted desperately to tell. Stuck having to act like I’m ashamed of having been a surrogate mother. When, really, it was one of the two best things I ever did.
Of course, having you was the very best.
Would my mother have ever said that about me? That I was the best thing that happened to her?
No? Yes? Once upon a time, but not now?
I feel like I understand Kayla’s mother right now better than I understand my own. And that’s not right.
I click out of the e-mail and shove the iPad away. It slides across the couch cushions.
I shouldn’t have read this. It doesn’t belong to me.
I can never let Kayla know what I did.
Kayla, Headed Back to Spanish Class
In the morning, I’m not sure what’s going to happen. Will Avery actually go to Spanish class with me? And if she doesn’t, will I actually have the nerve to tell Mr. Armisted?
Or will I chicken out?
Who’s more likely to back down, Avery or me?
Me, I think, still lying in bed. Definitely me.