The Baby Merchant Read online

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  One - The Provider

  i. - First

  1.

  2.

  ii.

  3. - Tom Starbird

  4.

  iii.

  5. - Tom Starbird

  6.

  7. - Tom Starbird

  8.

  Two - The Subject

  9. - Starbird

  10.

  11. - Starbird

  12.

  Three - The Pickup

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  21.

  22.

  23.

  24.

  25.

  26.

  Four - The Transaction

  iv.

  27.

  28.

  29.

  30.

  31.

  32.

  33.

  34.

  35.

  36.

  37.

  Titles by Kit Reed from Tom Doherty Associates

  Praise

  Copyright Page

  For Katy

  for many reasons

  One

  The Provider

  i.

  First

  Change always comes as a surprise. Stricken, you look up. What just happened? a You never saw it coming. It is that gradual, unless it hurtles down on you, screeching. You scream, what. What? One day you wake up with the dry swallows, thinking: I want that. You won’t know whether this crashing need for a child is visceral or cosmic, whether it’s embedded in human DNA or if there really is a star out there with your name on it. You only know that you are forever changed. You want.

  You can’t know that wanting is just that. That’s all it is. What should be natural isn’t always easy. It may be impossible.

  You don’t really want to know what Tom Starbird does. You don’t care what he does, as long as he can help you.

  You never guessed it would come to this. The change in you was sudden, and suddenly deceptive. While you weren’t looking the birth rate dropped: radiation, herbicides, preservatives, something you don’t know about. You said, “That’s interesting,” because you were still so young that you both were scared of her getting pregnant.

  Then Ebola, AIDS, avian flu leveled cities and you said, “Thank God that’s half a world away.”

  You barely noticed when Homeland Security locked down Immigration—to keep out disease and terrorists, they said, when in fact it was to keep out everybody but us. Doors clanged shut before you grasped the implications. You felt sorry for couples stopped at the border with their third-world babies but their stories were just sad, the way something happening to somebody else is sad. Being childless was, after all, their problem, not yours. You said, “Why didn’t they adopt American?” You never thought it could happen to you. Not me. Was it your prayer or your incantation? Not me.

  Now it’s all you think about.

  By the time you go looking for Tom Starbird you have started down the same sad trail. You’re used to getting what you want but this time, your bodies failed you. You’ve been through every known medical procedure. Adoption wait lists are endless, and if you thought you and he could buy a baby, forget it. In this time of limited supply, a baby is a treasure. Like high end pets, every newborn is chipped with a tracking device because like forests, babies are natural resources. You think it’s so nobody will steal your treasure, but, look. It also tracks your baby’s development for your government. If you’re lucky enough to get a baby. You and your mate exchange looks drenched with blame; is it his fault? Hers?

  Starbird is your last hope. You hear about him from a friend of a friend. Cautiously, you make contact. Hard as it is for you to admit failure, consider yourself lucky. The man is, after all, in an extremely sensitive business. Thank your stars that you come highly recommended. It’s the only reason he agreed to meet. Be glad your salaries are in the high six figures. Cheap at the price, you think, because by this time need rips through you like a forest fire. What is it you really want here? Love, or perpetual life?

  What are you afraid of? Loneliness? The empty table at Thanksgiving? That at the end there will be nobody left to cry?

  Tom Starbird can help you. He’s the kind of man it’s a pleasure doing business with, although, God! you never guessed this need would become a business matter.

  You like his sweet, irregular grin, the chipped front tooth. Beginning crows’ feet. Black-Irish coloring, with blue eyes and brows like brushstrokes on rice paper. The coarse dark hair is cut close by a high end barber whose work you know. The Hugo Boss suit and pale shirt are just right— nothing too showy, nothing too matchy. Only a dot in the left earlobe where the stud came out hints at a life beyond the business of this meeting. He’s half your age. Why are you afraid? Because this is by no means a done deal, and you know it. It won’t matter how rich you are if you don’t fit his parameters. It won’t matter how much you have to offer. If you are a bad fit your man Starbird may like you, he may even be sorry for you, but nothing you can do or say will make him help you.

  If you pass, he sets a second meeting. Your place this time, because you have survived the interview and aced the psychological tests. Remember, Tom Starbird is as thorough as he is selective. This is the crucial onsite visit. Not an inspection, exactly, but you’ve spent days preparing. You don’t know what he expects of you but you think it had better be perfect. You spent a long time dressing for this encounter, practicing faces. He’s brushed the dog and sprayed the plants to make them look glossy and well cared for. She put a pie in the oven because you want Starbird to walk into a bright, sweet place where dogs frolic and children will be happy.

  These are all tricks realtors devised for homeowners who are selling, but in this case you are selling yourselves.

  Everything hinges on this meeting. What comes next? Is he supposed to begin? Are you?

  The smile is nice but my God, the eyes bore all the way in to the center of you. Still smiling, he begins. “Tell me one more time why you think you want a baby.”

  1.

  Waking up on the worst day of your life so far you won’t know why you are uneasy, only that everything looks OK, but something is not right. Sun’s up, coffee’s good; Sasha Egan is in pretty good shape, considering. Nothing wrong, exactly, but she can’t quite shake the feeling.

  “Go away,” she says to no one. “Just go away.”

  About the obvious: Sasha is nothing like the sweet little hicks murmuring in the solarium, but here she is, trapped with a gaggle of betrayed prom queens and unwitting cheerleaders, castoff girlfriends and beaming fundamentalist kids bobbing in the sunlight like so many giant chrysanthemums. The regulation pastel scrubs, the Lite Rock piped into every room, the resolutely cheery decor, even the potted trees in the hallways make her despair, but she made an informed decision. Now she is here. It’s not that she’s pro-life, exactly, although she is at some deep level still a Catholic. She’s here because she’s pro this life.

&
nbsp; Luellen Squiers tugs on her arm, wheedling. Nice kid, has the room next to hers. “Party in the solarium, Sashie, are you coming? Cookies from Mom.”

  “Great,” she says.

  “So come on. Come on, Sashie, aren’t you coming?”

  “Soon, OK?” She’d rather die, but usually she manages. Why do these kids look up to her anyway? Maybe because she is older. She smiles until Luellen lets go.

  “Why not now?” At the end of the hall, pregnant teenagers lounge on flowered sofas striped with sunlight, giggling over their morning milk and disintegrating brownies packed in wax paper by mothers who don’t have a clue. Whatever their anxieties before they moved into the sunny dormitory at Newlife, whatever their second thoughts, the moment is past. They’re happy to sink back into the arms of Newlife, which is the trendy new name the agency has given the Agatha Pilcher Home for Unwed Mothers, which is what they are.

  It is— face it— what Sasha has become.

  The timing couldn’t be worse. In real life she is an M.F.A. student, a printmaker whose soul blisters the surface of her work. She spends all her work time chasing a vision she hasn’t quite caught. The year she and Danny Gray lived together in Santa Barbara, she almost broke through. It wasn’t breakthrough work but it did get her into the Massachusetts College of Art. When she’s working sometimes she forgets to eat; she’ll pass a window on her way out of the print shop and suddenly discover that she forgot to comb her hair. The work means more to her than Danny or any other man, and this baby … God, what was she thinking? This just can’t happen. Not now, not now! Until the test strip turned pink, her mentor at MassArt was grooming her for a fellowship in graphic arts in, oh God, Venice. A year in Italy, apprenticed to a printmaker she respects. Instead she’s in the third-trimester wing at Newlife, stalking the halls like an outsider, which is also what she is.

  Too bummed to be nice right now, she tells Luellen, “I can’t.”

  The pregnant child’s voice trails after her. “Oh-kaaaaay.”

  She ought to go down there and mingle but right now she isn’t feeling strong enough to look into their bright, hopeful faces or deal with their emotional demands.

  Poor kids, they’re all here for the usual reasons: he hit like lightning— first love or date rape, how do you draw the line— or they never want to see him again— a relative, sometimes, those are the worst cases, or it was some boy they thought they loved and learned to hate. Unless they’re here because they’re still in love but he wants her and her only, but not this, as in, as soon as she told him, he ran.

  Some of these girls checked in because embarrassed moms made them, or because they love being pregnant but are just too young to keep it, and others because their beliefs preclude the alternative. Some were in denial for so long that by the time they got around to facing facts it was too late, and the rest? Their folks kicked them out or they came because they don’t have anywhere else to go. It’s odd, how even these times of great shortages and eager single mothers, the old social order still prevails in certain circles. As though time and change will never completely erase the stigma.

  The others are here for the usual reasons, and Sasha?

  It was the fumes.

  The inks and solvents she and the other artists use in the university print shop just aren’t safe. She knows printmakers whose fingertips are dissolving and a couple with patches on their lungs and one woman whose hair is coming out in patches, and she personally turned out to be allergic to the ground she mixes to prepare the copper plates for her prints; the compound gives her headaches in spite of the rubber gloves.

  Is that anything you’d expose a fetus to?

  Why she’s hosting said fetus is another question, and the answers are so many and so complex that Sasha can’t unpack them; she can still feel the surge that knifed up into her when she found out she was pregnant, that strong, sexual twist. At the time she put it down to fear. Now she knows it was wild joy. The rush. Without even trying, she had done this amazing thing. Shaking, she laid the pregnancy test strip on the windowsill in the women’s bathroom in the Fine Arts building and went back to the print shop and packed up her stuff and left. She won’t go back until this is over.

  Just because you love a thing doesn’t mean that you have to keep it, which is the real reason Sasha is here.

  Her baby, she thinks, is like a firefly; you have to let it out of the jar so it can fly away and light up its scrap of sky. The issue is autonomy. Without it, how can he soar? She plans to have this baby, put her thumbprint on his forehead and say goodbye, but whoever the new parents— and in spite of institutional prodding Sasha is taking her damn sweet time culling the Newlife folders— whoever the new parents and wherever he goes afterward, this baby will still be hers. A unique print stamped with her mark.

  After she has this baby, after she sifts through the sad stories of the parent-wannabes and picks out exactly the right ones from the welter of moving letters and heartfelt videos; after she’s observed the finalists through the one-way mirror in the dayroom and questioned them at length; after she rips off these people’s scalps and looks into their pulsing brains to make certain, she can put her baby into the right parents’ arms with a clear conscience and walk free.

  Eventually Sasha will meet the man she wants to love forever and wake up next to every morning for the rest of her life; by then she may even want children, but Gary Cargill was never that man. An OK guy, pleasant expression but not anybody you want to see a lot of. Face it, she hardly knows him! He was, she thinks, just a comfort fuck in the depths of a hard New England winter, like that pint of Rocky Road you accidentally scarf because you’re lonesome and depressed. Sasha’s hopes are not tied up in him. She has her work to think about, which is why she left Cambridge without telling Gary. If she does this right she may get back in time to take the Venice fellowship, and nobody has to know. She didn’t tell her family; Grandmother is the last person Sasha would tell and believe her, she has reasons. She didn’t phone Danny in Santa Barbara, even though they are best friends. It’s her secret— safe in the heart of the former Agatha Pilcher home.

  Like most artists, Sasha is a control freak. She chose Newlife because the agency promises complete confidentiality. Nobody has to know. Unless the birth mother opts for disclosure, even the adoptive parents will never know. See, if you’re the only person who knows a thing, you can absorb it. You can adjust and move on. Do this pregnancy right and it can’t hurt her; do it right and there will be no change in the fabric of her life, no interruption in the pattern, no unsightly holes. As far as the world knows, this baby never happened. In a funny way, Sasha was never pregnant and none of this ever came down. As long as nobody outside Pilcher finds out that she is here.

  After she wrapped her half-finished copper plates and her engraving tools and took them out of the print shop, she went to the dean. She thanks her stars that the university is so big that the dean of the art school didn’t have the foggiest who she was. She pleaded artistic difficulties and arranged for an academic leave. It took her a few weeks to plan her next step.

  She started with phone calls. Then she let her fingers do the walking on the Web. The Newlife Web pages are thick with the confessions of happy adoptive parents and digital photos of other women’s badly timed, OK, unwelcome babies beaming in adoptive mothers’ arms. One phone call and Newlife sent the paperwork and a set of psychological tests. She aced the onsite interview. Sasha packed and gave away the cat and got out of town weeks before she started to show. Good timing, good management. Perfect control.

  Then why is she on edge? Tense and brooding, as though in the middle distance, beyond her range of vision and just out of earshot, events are spinning out of control?

  She doesn’t know. Unlike Sasha, the girls in the solarium murmur along happily. They have surrendered to process. Relieved of responsibility, the accidental moms slap leaf-patterned cushions on the bamboo sofas and drowse in the sunlight without a care for what happens next. Let the ins
titution do the heavy lifting while the world spins on however, without input from them. After all, their babies will have the very best. Newlife moms send their babies home with people who can afford the very best because this is, after all, a seller’s market. They will grow up with advantages that their teenaged moms never had and live well-furnished lives that these girls can’t hope to touch. These girls have the great good luck to be pregnant in a time of unprecedented shortages. How lucky they are that thousands of women who grew up scared of getting pregnant— can’t. When did it change? How did it happen anyway, was it the march of technology that did it or two-career families or zeitgeist or hormones in our food? Is it the toxins we breathe or something in the water that caused the shortages, or just too many women waiting until Too Soon turned into Too Late? The heartbroken childless couples who come to Newlife are many. The ones who rise to the top of the placement list are the best. The world is running out of babies. There just aren’t enough babies to go around.

  So what the hell is wrong with Sasha today? Nothing, she tells herself uneasily, it’s nothing, just pregnant nerves.

  Her belly is out to here. The Pilcher obstetrician tells her the baby’s dropped. The ideal parents are out there somewhere; they’re waiting, all she has to do is pick them out. She has to do it soon! The responsibility is tremendous. What if she makes a mistake? Her ankles are swelling and she can’t wear contacts because her eyes have changed; she’s breaking out and she looks awful all the time. The local water smells like sulfur and comes out of the tap brown, so her dark hair stands out from her face like a frizzy cartoon of a bad hair day. Today’s scrubs are bright yellow, splattered with orchids in a car crash of colors; it’s a good thing nobody she cares about has to see her this way. She doesn’t even want the girls in the solarium to see her this way. Even though Sasha keeps her distance the poor kids seek her out, like, she’s older, so she must know what to do. Usually she listens and gives advice like a no-fault big sister or a kindly surrogate mom, but she can’t be that person today, even though little Suzy begged her to come.