The Paternity Test (11 page)

Debora herself had run—had
sprinted
—from her past, but now seemed to be her world’s still point: the gravity that held Paula close.

Jesus Christ.
Paula
. Where was she?

I whipped around but didn’t see her. Shit. My knees went soggy. Scanning left, then right—still nothing. And so I turned, with terrible cold logic, to the water, looking for some sign of aftermath.

That’s when I heard, “Hey.
Hey!
Get away from me.”

I traced the words to Paula, who crouched beneath a table, guarding something (crumbs?) from a seagull.

“Stop!” I yelled, and stomped, charging at the bird, happy to blame something but myself. The gull wryly flapped away, and I grabbed hold of Paula, not sure if I’d rather stroke or shake her.

“I thought,” she said. “I thought . . . I wanted to feed him.”

Her voice brimmed with fear and disillusion: why would any creature she’d been helping turn against her? I felt for her, for any child who sees its faith dethroned.

“Stupid, mean old bird,” I said. “Let’s go feed the ducks. They’re nicer, ’kay? Not scary. I promise.”

“Ducks?” she said, grasping at a lifeline.

“When I was little, my sisters and I would each choose ducks,” I told her. “A contest: whose could catch the most crumbs.”

Together, on our knees, we gathered up her bait, inching our way over to the railing. And there we sat, tossing fried batter to stubby birds (whose yips sounded much the same as Paula’s), when Debora came bursting through the door.

“What are you two doing? You think I can’t see?”

Quickly I cleared my fists, and stripped Paula’s too, as if empty hands would acquit us. “Sorry,” I said. “Don’t worry, we’ll wash up.”

Debora ignored me. “I see,” she said. “I see! You are
trolling
.” Now her voice was jovial. A smile snuck up her cheeks. “Well, not exactly—a fishing line, you need. But didn’t I say? I said you wouldn’t have to.”

“Trolling?” I said. “But I thought . . . now, wait. You
know
that word?”

Debora knelt and hugged her beaming daughter from behind. She took a piece of batter from the handful I had dropped, and flung it to a happy, wagging duck.

“Look, Mãinha—look!” Paula cheered. “It says thank you.”

“Yes,
minha filha
. Like I say thanks for you.” Then to me, playfully: “You think I’m dumb? My English? But Pat,
you
use the Internet.
I
can use it too.
Dictionary.com
—I looked it up.”

I chuckled, basking in a coursing, clean relief. I was humming with Debora’s words—
Internetchy, tchoo
—the weird, rousing cadence of her accent, thinking of a lucky child within her womb, who’d hear it. Life would seem a splendid lilt. A song.

A doctor poked at Debora, her blood was drawn and tested, she suffered a psychologist’s questions. A private investigator snooped through old records for signs of a criminal background.

Fine, everyone said. Full speed ahead.

Stu was also tested, his sperm count and motility. Nothing off the charts, but good enough.

Through it all, we took to phoning Debora every night, giddily gleaning knowledge of her life. She loathed milk but loved milk shakes; sunlight made her sneezy;
Cinderella
’s ending always left her partly sad (“Why nobody talks about the mice and rats and lizards, who have to be again the things they were?”). We spoke with Danny, too, when he was the one who answered, and sometimes he indulged our little quizzes: What’s the thing you’re proudest of ? “Never raised a hand to anyone.” Most ashamed of ? “How often I still want to.”

By the time we convened to endorse the legal papers, our friendship, we assured ourselves, didn’t feel like business—which made it both less and more awkward when the lawyer reviewed each clause about what, precisely, Stu and I would pay for. Above the twenty thousand bucks for Debora’s basic fee, we would foot for life insurance, medical visits, maternity clothes, maid service if she were put on bed rest. For pregnancy-related trips Debora made in her own car: forty-three and a half cents per mile. Lost wages for Danny if he missed work for the birth. If Debora’s tubes got damaged? Five thousand.

Down the list the lawyer went—this, that, the other—adding to the sum we’d keep in escrow. The word sounded enough like
escargot
that I saw snails: nautili with endless extra chambers.

The lawyer wore a suit that sat queerly on her frame; her neck puffed soufflé-like from her collar. I sensed she would rather have been shagging outfield flies, chugging Bud, cheered on by her wife. (Well, not now, of course, not in January.) But here she was, all trussed up to fit in with her office, whose furniture was elegant but fussily unpretentious, every table expensively defaced with little dings. I liked her, though: the way she said, “Call me Kris—or, hell, K.C.”; and how, when she thought we wouldn’t notice, she kicked her pumps off.

Danny was the one who seemed unsure of how to take her. Walking in, he’d faltered when she rose to shake his hand, and then, on recovering, shook it overeagerly, clapping her arm, as though she were a frat boy. Since then he’d maybe said ten words.

My condescending, descended-from-Pilgrims mind read things this way: a simple tradesman humbled in the face of Mighty Law. Mustn’t that explain, I thought, his self-protective hunch? He clicked and unclicked a ballpoint pen.

“Relax,” I whispered, recalling how he’d calmed me at the Pancake King. “Lawyers are just like us but overpaid. She won’t bite.”

K.C., who I hadn’t thought could hear, said, “Yeah? Bite
this
,” then let rip with a mischief-maker’s laugh. Using the collective slack-jawed silence she had bought herself, she said, “So, then: mind if I continue with the contract? Next we come to all of Debora’s can’ts.”

Can’t smoke, drink, take drugs.

Can’t play unsafe sports.

Can’t expose yourself to radiation.

“Wait,” I said, taking inspiration from K.C.’s irreverence. “How about ‘can’t expose yourself ’—full stop?”

“Patrick,” said Stu. “For crying out—”

“Oh, now. Grow a funny bone.”

His eyes, like two rifle bores, took aim.

I should have said “I’m sorry,” or kept my big mouth shut, but I could have the tendency, when nervous, to entrench. “Doesn’t this seem, to say the least, a little nuts?” I said.

Danny spun his pen, a compass in a storm. Debora looked demurely toward the ground.

“Didn’t we say,” I added, “—just now, earlier, didn’t we?—how nice it was this didn’t feel like business?”

“Oh,” said K.C., “but it
is
, Pat. For everyone’s sake, it has to be. You have to think of the worst—that’s what
I’m
for.”

Stu smiled a snappy little smile of vindication; the lawyer had just summarized his worldview.

“So,” said K.C., “moving right along . . . I know the guys have told you of their hope you’ll stay involved, as long as you want, after the baby’s born. But I must point out, contractually, you’ll have no
legal
claim . . .”

Debora nodded, and nodded again, as serious as a girl playing grownup. It dawned on me that she had said the least during this meeting—even less, I thought, than clammed-up Danny. Cold feet? Displeasure with the contract? Or maybe Danny’s jitters had a dampening effect. Where was the jocular Debora who at Baxter’s had so wowed us?

“. . . and no rights of custody,” K.C. added.

“Fine,” said Danny, after which he left an edgy pause, his eyes like small skittery creatures, caged. “But what about financial responsibility?”

“I think we mostly addressed that, didn’t we?” said K.C. “Any expense related to the pregnancy, they’ll cover; plus we’ve got the what-if fees, for injury or for—”

“No,” he said. “Us, is what I meant. Are we responsible? I mean, let’s say—think of the worst, right?—let’s say something awful happens to them, but the baby lives. We wouldn’t be responsible, then, would we? You know, financially?”

“Oh, gosh, no. Pat and Stu will make their own contingencies. None of the rights or the responsibilities of parenting will be yours.”

“Oh!” said Danny. “Okay, then”—and
flash
, his mood changed hue. “Truly sorry, guys,” he said.

“Sorry?” said Stu. “For what?”

“Well, for, you know, picturing your doom.”

“Ha!” I said. “Don’t you think I’m used to that, from Stu?”

At last I got some laughs, even if just polite ones.

Danny promised, from here on out, his thoughts would all be sunny.

“Actually, Danny, to go back to your worries,” said K.C., “
you
don’t really have much of a legal role at all. The contract is between them and Debora.”

“Obviously, though,” Stu rushed to say, “we want you to approve of it. We can’t do this unless you’re both onboard.”

“It’s not as if it doesn’t affect you,” I said.

“Who, me?” said Danny.

“But seriously,” I went on. “You’ve read the fine print?” I figured he would know the worst clause.

Danny laid his big hands, like offerings, on the contract. His hands that could rip the thing in two.

Mention surrogacy and most people said, “My God, why do they do it?”—the
they
being the women who got pregnant. The closer we came to the process, though, the
they
who vexed me even more were the husbands. After all, agree or not with the reasons surros gave, they did have reasons, clearly stated, that followed a certain logic. Like Debora, when she’d told us we were giving her a gift:
The gift of being who I’m supposed to.
The husbands, though—what did they get? Nothing, as far as I saw. Sure, there was the money, which might be viewed as gravy, since men did none of the procreative work. But Danny had said it wasn’t that, and I didn’t disbelieve him; he never got that
ka-ching
in his smile you see with greedy people.

And really, the money was paltry when you thought of the disruptions, most of which affected the husband, too. Say the surro had morning sickness. Who’d mop the puke? The husband. And who, when the surro was too tired to handle stairs, would have to haul the trash out and fold the loads of laundry? Who would bathe the child they had already?

On top of it all, the biggest hitch, the fine print I had cited: the mate’s loss of rights to, well,
mate
. The contract said that Debora couldn’t sleep with any man—including Danny—till after the surrogate pregnancy was confirmed. Nor could she “engage in any action” (went the legalese) that might “introduce semen into her body.”

As I said, if Danny had to miss a day of work, we’d agreed to make up for his pay. But how would we ever compensate for weeks and months of what I’d come to think of as his “marital lost wages”?

Who was I to question why a man would let his sex life slump in deference to his spouse’s separate yearnings? How many hours had I stayed home alone while Stu had fun?

Perhaps that comparison was a little bit Swiss cheesy. Still, I couldn’t help but think that Danny and I were similar. Was that why I so badly wanted to
solve
him?

The week before, I’d e-mailed Zack and asked for his experience: had his and Glenn’s surro’s husband made
his
motives clear?
Shelly’s husband was squeamish at first
, wrote Zack.
He’s Special Forces. Thought it “unmanly” to let his wife have someone else’s baby. But then he got called up, to go and get bin Laden, and, weirdly, that made everything go smoother. “Here I’m heading off,” he said, “to do this risky job, asking Shelly to sacrifice without me. Least I can do, I guess, is support her.” Maybe your surro’s husband has a similar kind of reason. Learn to accept sincerity from strange sources!

But Danny, if he felt obliged to sacrifice for Debora, didn’t feel obliged to share the reason. Sitting there, in the lawyer’s office, hands atop the contract, this was how he finally talked of forfeiting his sex life: “Hell,” he said. “You guys have been together, what, ten years?”

“Twelve next fall,” said Stu. “Knock on wood.”

“Then you know how things are. Let’s just say it’s not as, well . . . as frequent an issue, these days.”

Danny tried to leaven the jab by poking Debora’s ribs—an affable little nudge, all in jest—but Debora bolted upright in her chair.

And here I went, entrenching myself again to fight off tension, spewing forth a hammy-humor smoke screen. “Hold on—whoa! You’re saying that
straights
are prone to lesbian bed death? Oops—no offense,” I added, addressing K.C. directly.

The lawyer rolled her eyes. “Forget it. None taken. How does that old saying go? We’re all the same except for what we do
outside
the bedroom?”

“Well,” said Danny, “that’s a bit of . . . I don’t know about
that
.”

Debora grabbed the contract from beneath his splayed hands. She looked less hurt or angry than
resolved
. This was how she’d looked when she was eighteen, I supposed: boarding the bus, her mother calling “Crazy!” at her back.

“Here?” said Debora. “Or here?” She tapped two different blanks. “Show me where’s the place to write my name.”

I saw Debora a few more times, always during the day—just “us wives,” plus Paula, since Danny and Stu were working. Mostly we did errands, whatever was on her list: Reebok outlet, Job Lot, Staples, Sears. For lunch we’d stop at Friendly’s, for hot dogs on grilled buns. I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt so wholesome.

Working as a freelancer, making my own hours, I could’ve mixed routinely with my fellow non-nine-to-fivers. Actually, though, I tended to take “work at home” quite literally, and almost never ventured into town ahead of dusk, when no one much seemed to be about. How strange, then, to see the place aswarm with moms and kids. (I thought of sixth-grade science, the shock of seeing a drop of water beneath a microscope: all those bubbly, zipping protozoa.)

I found this moms’ world mesmerizing and wanted to decode it. Debora and the other women beamed at one another, trading grins that waterfalled with mutual understanding, but I could rarely tell if they were personally acquainted or simply bonding based on common lots. Occasionally a man, a one-line movie walk-on, would join the scene and, just as quickly, vanish. A stockroom clerk, a road-crew lackey sent to get the doughnuts. But mostly, in the guy department, I was the attraction: a family man (or so thought countless strangers)
doing my part
; I grew accustomed to looks of commendation. Debora also got her share of looks, bleary with envy, from solo moms attempting to corral their rowdy offspring, while also holding a pocketbook, a diaper bag, a basket . . .