“I realize that,” Mom says. “I mean, what if you did this, let’s say you wanted to for Elodie, and then you fell in love with the baby. It’s a big danger. You know, like Baby M.”
“Baby M?”
“Baby M—the Mary Beth Whitehead case. Have you never heard about it?”
I shake my head.
“It was a court case that took place in the mid-eighties. About the rights of a surrogate. The woman who agreed to be a surrogate fell in love with the baby, called ‘Baby M.’ She didn’t want this baby to go with the parents who had hired her. It was tragic; people saw both sides of the story. She felt it was her baby.”
“What happened?”
“The court ruled that the surrogate, Mary Beth Whitehead, was the legal mother, the contract didn’t hold up. Then there was the ‘best interests of the child’ application and the father—his name was William Stern, I think—got custody and Whitehead got visitation.”
“Jesus. Okay. You see how loaded this is.”
“Oh, I do, I do. It’s too much to ask.” Mom shifts her position on the bench, as if she’s stiff from sitting there too long.
I pull my hair out of the scrunchie, pause to let it fly around in the wind before I tie it back neatly. I look down at my lime green Converse sneakers, my yoga pants. I’m neither a twenty-four-year-old babe nor a forty-year-old woman. What is it like for Elodie, with her mansion-to-be and her poetry series, her shoes—she has a collection, a museum of shoes. In Palm Beach it means something. She’s interviewed four interior designers, including Kimberly Shawn, and decided on Griselda Derrick. Elodie is written up in the Daily Sheet at least once a week for her programs, fund-raisers. She and James, a young Veronica and Simon Show, go everywhere. In theory it is already a fine life.
“It’s strange. We’re sisters; that’s why she likes it. The DNA thing. James totally cares about that part.”
“We know that Elodie has had a hardship. She wants a baby,” Mom says, “and hasn’t gotten it. That’s the other side of the situation.”
A loneliness blankets me, a kind of hollow feeling that I’ve known at low points in my life. Except this is coiled with my sister’s loneliness.
“You’ve never been married, never wanted a child. I can’t tell you what to do, Aubrey,” my mother says in a tone I’ve not heard since I decided to attend Bard instead of Cornell. Filled with opinions that go unspoken.
“Mom, what are you saying, that I’m the solution? The only remedy?”
She comes closer on the bench; suddenly we are more fine-spun than usual, our faces close enough that we skip the whispering. Talking softly works.
“Aubrey, I’m an only child. I never had to share with anyone. I raised you and your sister to be there for each other, to do anything for each other.”
Our mother is out of her league, too. She is searching herself. She says in a studied voice, “Aubrey, you know, possibly, I’m not sure, but possibly, you could do this.”
A cool breeze circles around us—and no one else on the Lake Trail. The air temperature has dropped, as if a private storm is moving up the coast. Now my mother needs to save Elodie, not me? She starts searching in her tote for the foldable sweatshirt she carries.
She holds up her hand. “Of course, I know how complicated it would be. The entire thing, the result of this favor.”
Life has become loaded with requests from the people I love most—those who ordinarily expect little from me. Before this, Dad would simply ask me to show up at a family dinner, to recommend a joint birthday gift for our mother, to choose either Chez Jean Pierre or Café Boulud, then drive north for the occasion.
The Southern Boulevard Bridge is being raised and cars are stopped while boats line up beneath. It must be fifteen after, since the bridge lifts every quarter of an hour. We haven’t been together enough time for our conversation to weigh so much.
“Until Elodie asked me this hugest favor, I liked being younger,” I say.
“I believe you, Aubrey. Then again, to be asked, to be chosen. Maybe you could at least think about it. How it is about being the sister, the one. It isn’t James alone, Aubrey. Elodie has been through so much, without a result. When I look at the children—at the Breakers Beach Club, the Harbor Club, those Sunday-night family barbecues—I realize how much I want to be a grandmother. It’s been so long since you girls were small. Dad wants to be a grandfather.”
“Does he?” I ask.
“We do. He and I do.”
A flipper—she’s flipping. Similar to a friend or a boyfriend who cannot be trusted. My mother’s take on it is confusing, surprising. If I wait, maybe she’ll flip back, consider my side once more, and stop believing that being a conduit is simple, without consequences.
Taking my hands in hers, she glances toward a Hatteras yacht moving slowly along the Intracoastal. Like she’s imagining someplace beyond my sister or me.
CHAPTER 8
AUBREY
Until today, my father has never invited me out for breakfast, alone together at a table. Yet this morning he is meeting me at Java, in the Setai South Beach. Another early-morning plan after yesterday on the Lake Trail. At least my parents are both beauty seekers; neither would waste time in an ordinary space. The courtyard facing the ocean is dreamlike. The breeze lifts the hem of my tie-dyed midi skirt. I tug at the strap of my camisole and walk with purpose toward the maître d’. Beyond him my father is already seated, sipping black coffee, on his iPhone. My father is allegedly in Miami for his new building west of the beaches. Yet it’s rare that he personally checks a property; someone else from his office usually does it.
“Aubrey!”
He stands up, “a gentleman with fine features,” Mom always says. His hair is salt-and-pepper, thick in front, with that patch of scalp that men get at the crown. Still, he’s a father who has broad shoulders, no stomach. When I was at Bard, my roommates called him “an affairable father”—it was over ten years ago, he was even more dashing then. I was upset—I wanted a paunchy father who took you to dinner in Red Hook, while Elodie laughed it off. “He’s ‘a Palm Beach father,’” she said. “They look good, they work at it.”
“Dad, what are you doing in South Beach on a golf day?” I ask.
Today he does a sort of airbrushed half hug and kiss. Probably my father has always been like this and I haven’t been in enough therapy to figure it out. Mom would comment he can be “far off.” Beyond that, only air-kisses are allowed in public. He’s always on my side, and I love that. No matter what I do or don’t do. While Elodie and my mother are judging, my father is steady, loyal when I dip in and out of work and responsibility. He says nothing when I drop out of courses, freelance assignments, full-time employment. Although I might want to finish my master’s in musicology, I’ve started other master’s programs. One for social work right after college, and three years later I left an MFA program in photography and art when I was midway through.
“I don’t remember the last time I was in Miami,” my father says.
“Wow, quite something to have you visit,” I say.