Wilde Lake(45)

“How much longer are you going to stall?” she asks him now.

“Stall?”

“I thought you had something to discuss with me. Are you concerned about Dad?” The second she says that, she realizes that she is a little concerned. A line from Wordsworth comes to her: Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. So much getting. So much spending. There’s a hint of mania to their father these past few years, and now she wonders if that means there was a depressive phase she missed. No one expects a man widowered at a young age to be the life of the party, but Lu has begun to suspect her father’s quiet, contained ways were part of something larger, sadder still.

“Should I be? He seems pretty hale. And sharp as ever. If anything, I’m surprised by how little he changes, and I don’t see him day in, day out as you do, so I would be more prone to notice. No, I wanted to talk to you about, um, kids.”

“Kids?”

“Having them.”

“Well, it all begins when two people love each other very much—”

“No, seriously, Lu. I want to talk to you about surrogacy.”

“Oh.” She looks into her lap, startled by how personal this feels.

Penelope and Justin were born by gestational surrogacy, a concept that they still don’t quite grasp, although she tried to explain it to them on their last birthday. They are bewildered by the fact that the dead parent is the one to whom they are genetically connected, while the living one has no blood relation to them. They have met the woman who carried them, but have little information about the eggs that made them, which is because Lu has almost no information about those purchased ova. A doctor slapped some photos on a desk, accompanied by heartfelt, handwritten essays from women who were willing to “donate” their eggs. “I’ve chosen ones that look like you,” he said. “Why?” she asked. Lu tried not to be sentimental or defensive about her infertility. At the age of twenty-nine, she had to have a hysterectomy for fibroids. It was unfortunate, but it was what it was. What did the doctor think she was going to do, walk around for nine months with a series of larger and larger pillows under her lawyer clothes? She ignored the essays and chose the tallest one.

“Lauranne’s still pretty young,” Lu says.

“I’m not.”

“So what?”

“You’ve seen the articles, I’m sure. The suggestion that older sperm might be connected to all sorts of things, like autism.”

“If it’s sperm you’re worried about, you don’t need a surrogate. A sperm bank will do nicely. And be a lot cheaper.”

AJ can no longer meet her gaze. “Lauranne’s willing to be a mother. But she’s terrified of carrying a child.” His words start tumbling out, as if he can hear Lu’s unvoiced skepticism, her immediate inference that Lauranne doesn’t want to sacrifice her body to pregnancy. “She’s genuinely phobic about this. She knows herself well and while she understands that this should be the most natural thing in the world, she believes she’ll have problems. Being pregnant. That it will feel as if something alien has taken over her body. Especially if we’re not using my sperm. But we might be able to use her eggs.”

“Maybe. But the odds of success will be much, much higher with donor eggs. So you’ll have donor eggs and donor sperm and a uterus on loan.”

“You had two of the three.”

“I’m not criticizing. Just thinking out loud. Seriously, AJ, if she doesn’t want to be pregnant, are you sure she wants to be a mother? Who initiated this?”

“It was mutual.”

“Like, one morning, you just both looked at each other and said, ‘Let’s have a kid!’ And then Lauranne says, ‘Only I don’t want to be pregnant!’ And you say, ‘And my sperm’s too old!’ What about adoption?”

“Foreign adoption has gotten much more difficult than most people realize. And with the countries that are still open, I have ethical concerns. I don’t want to be accused of buying a baby. Meanwhile, here, most public agencies won’t accept us because of my age. Private adoption—I’m sorry, but that’s just a way for people with money to leverage their power.”

“You know people will say the same thing about surrogacy. It’s getting more and more controversial. There are very real health risks for both the surrogates and the donors. There are people lobbying to ban it outright.”

“Says the woman with eight-year-old twins born by surrogacy.”

It’s as if AJ wants her to say the sanctimonious thing, to remind him of the hysterectomy. About which she does carry some resentment. At the time, her father and brother seemed cavalier in a way that she can’t imagine her mother would have been. Lu had no choice—with her fibroids, she would never be able to get pregnant—but it was a difficult thing to endure early in her marriage.

Then again, few fathers or brothers would want to have long heart-to-hearts about a woman’s sexual organs. Her father didn’t even tell her the facts of life, delegating Teensy to do it when Lu was eleven and had already figured most of it out.

“I’m sorry. I’m being lawyerly, outlining all the positions. It’s not often I get to advise you. I want you to know what you’re getting into. People can be cruel about it. And when they’re not cruel, they’re ignorant, which is worse. Are those your kids? Do they look like their father because they sure don’t look like you?”