Moonlight Road (Virgin River #11)(54)

“A good option for women who can’t have babies on their own, I guess,” Jack said.

“Really, it is,” John answered. “We don’t have many patients in the valley who are looking for help in that area. It’s expensive, for one thing. Insurance won’t cover it. But, Jack, if you’ve got all the stuff—the eggs, the sperm—and all you need is a womb…Think about it. Couples who couldn’t have children with their own DNA twenty years ago are doing it now for not much more than the cost of adoption.”

“Just a regular, standard, typical day at the office?” Jack asked with a big grin. “Tell me how that worked.”

“Well,” John said, leaning back. “We had our own surgi-center. We could harvest a woman’s eggs there and use a very high-tech lab to freeze them and store them. We sent them the father’s sperm….”

“You sent it?”

John chuckled. “We collected it and sent it. We had a very private, nice little bathroom stocked with reading material—the staff called it the masturbatorium.”

Jack burst out laughing. “You are shitting me!”

“I am not lying.”

“And if a guy wanted to stay in there all day…?”

“We could go a long way toward the respect of a man’s privacy,” John said with a little chuckle. “I mean, who knows if it’s hard for him to get in the mood or if he’s trying to beat his record, no pun intended. A little vial of sperm went lickety-split to the lab to join the eggs. The mother or, if the mother didn’t have a viable womb, the surrogate, came to the clinic and we could either inseminate or implant. We had a very good success rate.”

“And how many surrogates did this for a new house or a boat?”

“That wasn’t my department. That’s between the surrogate and the parents, and it’s the legal department’s job to make sure all the laws—strict laws—are followed, which is why we refer from the Grace Valley Clinic. I can recommend some very good clinics not too far from—”

Jack leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. He clasped his hands and hung his head. The small office fell silent. Finally he looked up at John. “This isn’t the thing to do,” he said quietly. “John, this isn’t the thing to do.”

John leaned toward Jack. “What are you doing here? You said you wanted to talk about it. Mel led me to believe—”

“I know. Mel led you to believe I was on board with this and wanted to know the particulars. Listen, John—that’s not how it is. I told her I didn’t like the idea. That we didn’t need more children. I told her if she wanted to adopt a kid that otherwise wouldn’t have a family, I could probably be talked into that, but…” He shook his head.

“What part of this bothers you? Because it’s a reasonable alternative for a woman who can’t physically give birth to her own offspring.”

“What puts me off is my wife—all excited about another baby, and she’s not even having it! She wasn’t this excited or upbeat when she got caught with our own. It’s weird, John, and I’m worried about her. We were fine with what happened with the hysterectomy—disappointed, but fine with it. ” Jack rubbed a hand across the back of his neck. “I don’t know what it is, John. I’d do anything Mel asked me if it meant a lot to her, especially if we hadn’t been able to have children of our own. I’d fill up your little cup in the masturbatorium. I’d probably want to pass on watching some woman I don’t know give birth to my child, but for Mel I’d go through with the thing, but this isn’t what we need. Something’s wrong, John. And I don’t know what it is.”

John was leaning back in his chair. He picked up a pen and fiddled with it. He leaned farther back and frowned more as he listened to Jack talk. Finally he asked, “Has she had a hard time accepting her hysterectomy?”

“Like how?”

John shrugged. “Crying? Anger? Just plain complaining that her gut feels empty? Loss of libido? Anything?”

Jack shook his head. “Nothing at all. She breezed right through it. I hadn’t heard a word about it until she came to the bar one afternoon and announced we were having another baby. And that we were going to do it in a very innovative thirty-thousand-dollar way with a stranger. It was like she took on a whole new, all-hyped-up personality. Not herself. Not at all.”

“Oh, brother,” John said, hanging his head. “Jack, I’m sorry. I think I might have gotten caught up in the whole thing right along with Mel. Try to understand—it made me feel so good to provide this option to couples.”

“Am I overreacting? Am I just some wimp who won’t do what has to be done? Because I don’t think I’m that kind of husband. Something about this and the way Mel is all worked up about it just doesn’t feel right. I want her to be happy, but I want her to be normally happy.”

“And it just doesn’t seem like that’s the case?”

He shook his head. “She’s all over this thing. She’s already asked Brie to look into the legalities so she can be in charge of the negotiating and the contract. It’s a puzzle to me and I keep looking for the missing pieces….”

“Missing pieces?” John asked.

“You know—if we’d talked about a much larger family before the hysterectomy I could understand this—but I always thought she was okay with our two. She’s a busy midwife and shuffling kids between the two of us is complicated sometimes. Or—maybe if she’d brought it up as a suggestion and wanted to talk about it, think about it, but that didn’t happen, either. She’d made up her mind before she came to me with the idea. What don’t I get here?”