way someone might welcome a long-lost close and loved relative, but I was still a stranger, someone feeling more like I was imposing on their grief instead of sharing it.
When I closed my eyes again, I started to think about my parents and Julia. The Davenport family was seriously diminished; mine was in a state of limbo. Tomorrow, when the time difference permitted it, I would have to call. If my father answered, I would plead with him not to immediately hang up. If Julia or my mother answered, I would tell the “good lie” and say I had a role in a regional theater show. Hopefully, they would believe me, and I could call them periodically until I had delivered the Davenports’ baby and returned to New York.
With so much money, I could afford a quick trip back to England and try to win back my father’s affection and convince him to approve of my efforts to develop my career. Time can heal. Despite how angry he was, it surely had cooled to the point where he might regret being so furious as to cut me out of his and my mother’s lives. My absence hopefully kept him awake at night, too. If people who were meant to love each other couldn’t forgive each other, who could?
I fell back to sleep and slept so deeply that Samantha indeed had to wake me in the morning. I felt her shake my shoulder and opened my eyes to see her standing there in the exact same silk robe I had.
“Harrison said I should wake you. After breakfast, we’re going right to the hospital to get your blood tests and… let me remember… something called an EKG and a chest X-ray. Then we’ll go to Dr. Bliskin’s offices for the important tests a candidate for surrogate mother must take.” She recited it all like something she had just memorized.
I sat up and looked at the clock. I might be able to reach my mother, I thought.
“I have to call home. They might try to reach me in New York and not understand why I’m never there now.”
“Oh. Of course. Call them. I’ll come back in an hour,” she said.
“How is your mother-in-law this morning?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Harrison didn’t say before he left, and she’s shut up in her room.”
Her relationship with her mother-in-law must have been cool even before this, I thought. Why wouldn’t she want to offer her sympathy and companionship?
She opened the closet. “You should probably wear something like this.” She reached in and took out a short-sleeved multicolored T-shirt dress. “It’s easy to get in and out of when you’re at the hospital and the doctor’s office. I’ll wear one just like it. These sandals are perfect, too.”
She laid the dress over a chair and the sandals at the foot of it even though I didn’t say I would wear it. Then she started out, pausing at the door before opening it.
“I don’t like talking about it too much. I don’t want to think my baby will be any different from any other, but Dr. Bliskin had prescribed a fertility drug for me so I could produce more eggs, and I did. Don’t you hate thinking of it as eggs inside you? I haven’t eaten any since.
“Anyway, just like normally, Harrison’s sperm has to fertilize successfully. If all goes well with you this morning, the embryo will be transferred to your uterus as soon as five days after we get your results, maybe even three. We can declare you’re pregnant with our baby soon after that. I’m sure you want to get it all started as soon as possible, right?”
“Yes,” I said. I was thinking, however, that even after all the tests I took, I still had to make the final decision. Dr. Davenport had left that possibility open. Samantha would be devastated if I backed out. She wasn’t even going to consider the possibility.
“Harrison was going to find time to explain this timetable to you before we left for the hospital, but I told him it would be more comfortable for you if I did. He’s too… scientific when he talks to people. I told Dr. Bliskin that, and do you know what he said? He said that’s Harrison’s way of avoiding being too emotional. He can be very emotional, despite the act he’s putting on for you and the act he puts on for his patients,” she said. “Late last night, he returned to my