relented. The four of us and Dr. Bliskin’s nurse, Mrs. Topper, witnessed the procedure.
Afterward, I was left to rest for a while. Samantha wouldn’t leave my side. She sat there, holding my hand. I had no pain of any sort, but I had a strange, ethereal feeling. It was as if I had decided to leave my body until it was all completed. I knew Samantha was holding my hand, but I didn’t feel hers. I didn’t feel anything.
Despite all the tests, all the medications, and all the descriptions Dr. Bliskin had given me, I did not believe what was happening or would happen. It still hadn’t settled in my reality.
But I knew that it would. There were months and months ahead of me when I would wake up every day and have it re-announced. Perhaps the first thought I would have the moment I awoke was Someone else’s baby is living inside you. You won’t need to look in a mirror to see the evidence as you begin to show. You will be feeling it throughout your very being.
And one thing was definite: not a waking moment would pass when I was in Samantha’s company when I wouldn’t be reminded—whether through what she said, how she treated me, or what I saw in her eyes—that I was carrying her child, her future. I felt confident that more than once, in different ways, perhaps, she would also remind me that nothing of myself would be in the child I would deliver.
How would that make me feel? Relieved that there would be no evidence I was there? Or even emptier, less significant, practically like an invisible person, and very much like the ghosts that Elizabeth Davenport told Samantha still haunted the darkest corners of Wyndemere?
Samantha left me to use the bathroom, and Dr. Bliskin came in.
“How are you doing?”
“I guess all right. I don’t feel…”
“Not yet,” he said, smiling. “But someday soon you’ll know it. I’m confident this implanting is going to work. You’re a fertile garden.”
“Never thought of myself in those terms,” I said, and he laughed. “How many of these have you done?”
“A number of them, lately more than ever.” He looked at me differently, I thought, or was that again my wild imagination at work? “You’re a very pretty young woman, Emma, and I’m not just referring to your good looks. There’s something beautiful in you that some man is going to see and be so consumed by that he won’t be able to breathe unless he has you beside him.”
I widened my eyes. I had never heard a doctor speak poetry, and until now, he was comforting and gentle, but I thought he was that way with all his patients… just a doctor with a good bedside manner.
“Thank you,” I said.
“I’m going to be with you through all this, and not only because Harrison is my best friend.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“The day will come when I’ll deliver the baby forming inside you,” he said. “You’ll have lived with it for so long that it won’t be unusual for you to feel something, some tie to him or her emotionally. When I lift the child and place it in Samantha’s waiting hands, you’re going to feel like you’re giving it up. But don’t.”
“How should I feel?”
He smiled. “Like you’re giving it back,” he said.
And so it began.
THIRTEEN
Most of the girls I knew who were my age didn’t foresee themselves as pregnant. Some swore they would never have children, but most admitted to at least having to deal with the possibility when they had sex. They all agreed that it was unromantic, even unrealistic, to carry on about protection while in the throes of passion. Even though I was a virgin, no one seemed to mind my being there when they talked about their sexual affairs. If anything, they believed they were superior because they had experience. I could see them thinking that I should be grateful they cared to share their wisdom with me.
But they were always talking about pregnancy as if it was a sickness, almost a fatal illness, caused by failure to protect themselves or their boyfriends who failed to wear condoms. It angered them that girls were always blamed for being so stupid as to not insist that they did. A few honestly admitted they would blame themselves for losing control when things got too hot and heavy. They referred to it as a game of Russian roulette with sperm instead of a