Goodnight, Beautiful: A Novel (27 page)

“I hadn’t thought of that,” he admitted.

“If she starts to think of this baby as anything other than something she’s growing, then she won’t want to give him or her up,” I said.

“You make it sound like she’s growing a yeast infection and has to get rid of it at the end of it.”

“No, she’s made it that way. I don’t know how anyone could do what she’s doing. I think it’s wonderful and I’ll never be able to thank her enough, but I could never give up a baby.”

A momentary look, a flitting-through thought, crossed Mal’s face. The thought of the one I’d left behind, the baby that never was.

“That was so different to this, Mal,” I said, drawing my knees to my chest. One of the books toppled off the bed, landing with a loud thump on the rug. “I didn’t even know who the father was. It could have been one of three men and I don’t even remember it happening.” I spoke quickly, loud and defensive, trying to remind him of the futility of my situation. “I was
fifteen
and ill. I wasn’t healthy and fit and capable of looking after a child. And I had no choice. They made me do it.”

“I know,” he said, reaching for me.

I moved out of reach, not wanting him to think for one moment that he had appeased me when he had just thought what he did. “No, you don’t,” I replied. “You just thought I’d given up a baby. Like it’s the same as this. But it wasn’t.”

“Yes, I know, I’m sorry, I didn’t really think you’d given up a baby, I just … I had a momentary fuckwit thought. I’m sorry.”

“I could never do what Nova is doing. I’m in awe of her, honestly. I’m in awe of any woman who could do that for someone else, but I’m not one of them.”

He nodded, rubbed at a spot behind his right ear. He was troubled. Worrying about Nova, worrying about what this would do to her. She wasn’t one of those people who could shut off from something like that, either.

My eyes ran slowly over my husband’s gorgeous, concerned face, each line a reminder of how and why I loved him. This hadn’t occurred to him. Not even when he’d made her be our friend again, he hadn’t thought that this could permanently damage her. While I, I had always known her love for Mal would destroy her.

“We’ve got to look after her,” I told Mal. “That’s why I take her things. We have to make sure that she’s OK. Not just for the health of the baby, but for her. So that she’ll be all right with this. And we have to make sure she doesn’t start to think of herself as the mother, because that will destroy her.”

I snuggled into him, let him put his arms around me now. I was suddenly scared that he might change his mind about all of this, that he might decide that Nova was more important than having the baby. Even though she was already pregnant, he might give her the opportunity to change her mind.

“She seems OK now, though,” I said.

“Yeah, she does,” he agreed.

“Blooming, apart from the sickness.”

“Yeah,” he breathed. “It’s bizarre that despite how sick she’s being she still looks like she’s doing really well.”

“And we can help her stay that way.”

“Yeah.”

“OK, so, as I was saying, Stephanie for a girl, Angelo for a boy …”

Mal smiled, and I ignored the flutter that him saying she looked like she was doing well caused me. It wasn’t the words, it was the slightly wistful look in his eye when he said it.

I
lay on the sofa listening to Mal move around my kitchen, making me dinner. He’d taken to doing that on his way home from work.

Stephanie had dropped by earlier, and stayed for a little while. She always called first to check if it was OK to drop round; Mal only ever called to check I was in—just like before I got pregnant with their baby. Stephanie would bring flowers, chocolate, a book or some essential oils she thought I might like. She would ask if she could put her hand on my stomach, and I would see the happiness soften her face, illuminate her smile as she obviously felt what she was feeling for.

Mal would kiss my cheek when I opened the door, and his hand would immediately move to my abdomen, as he said hello twice—once to me, once to the baby. He’d then spend the rest of the night with his hand almost permanently on my abdomen.

I didn’t know what they felt, because I avoided touching my stomach. My natural instinct was always to reach down and place my hand there, to see if the skin was firmer—it looked firmer—or warmer because my body temperature seemed to have gone up. I was often hot, rarely needed that extra sweater I usually put on, my jeans were tight and my breasts … I’d bought six new bras in the last month. I had gone up three cup sizes and was flirting around an H cup. My back size hadn’t gone up, just
my breasts. I always resisted touching my stomach, instead lacing my fingers together under my head whenever the urge took me. I couldn’t touch my abdomen; even when I was moisturizing my skin in the morning, I whisked over that area, not wanting to linger.

I couldn’t engage with what I was doing. I always had to remind myself that I was growing this for someone else. If I allowed myself to think about it, even for one second … I wasn’t sure I could do it.

Almost everything I had seen and read said that women who became surrogates should have had children already; should have “finished” with children, should feel their families were complete. Your first child being one that you’re having for someone else could cause problems: you might have separation anxiety, go through the bereavement process in a severe way. Have problems giving the baby to the intended parents. And, of course, what if something went wrong and you were unable to have more children afterwards? That could destroy you.

I couldn’t imagine
not
going through all those separation feelings, whether my family was “complete” or not, but I was doing this for two important people and I had to focus on that.

To do it, I had to stay detached. Removed. Uninvolved. Not do things like touch my stomach, nor give in to the temptation to stand in front of the full-length mirror in my bedroom inspecting every new development with my body. Even when Stephanie had held my hand during the twelve-week dating scan and she’d gasped when the image had appeared on the screen, I hadn’t looked. I’d stared up at the ceiling, biting my lower lip, willing myself not to look as the sonographer pointed out the baby’s head, the spine, the legs, the arms, which were waving, the heart. She’d asked me if I was OK because I wasn’t looking,
and I’d mumbled something about having to concentrate on not releasing the contents of my extremely full bladder, which was why I’d brought my friend, who would remember every detail. Stephanie had been so overjoyed with it all she had hugged me for three or four minutes after I’d been to the loo. She asked if I wanted to see the photo, but I had said no, it was all hers. I couldn’t bear to see him, it would be a connection that I couldn’t afford—mentally and emotionally—to make.

The moment I indulged myself like that in any way, I’d be lost. I’d be tumbling into this fantasy world where I was going to be handed a baby at the end of the nine months. Where I would be living happily ever after with the father. Where I would have the things I had hoped for in life happening to me a few years early.

During the past three weeks, I had noticed, Mal had become incredibly attentive. Making me dinner, cups of tea, forcing me to lie down when I was sitting. He’d done things like that before, but something had changed in him, I could tell. I wasn’t sure what it was, but he seemed to be even more concerned than normal.

I had started to wonder if he’d guessed that I planned to go away for at least a year once the baby was born. The only way I knew I could do this would be to leave afterwards, to get on a plane and see as much of the world as I could. I would need space—a lot of it—and that space lay out there, in the great beyond. When I returned, hopefully I would be able to look at the child as theirs and theirs alone, and would have found a way to put aside the fact I’d had a role in its introduction to the world. I wondered if Mal had guessed and didn’t want me to go. Hence the cooking, the constant reiterating his gratitude, and reminding me how much I meant to him.

After he had watched me eat the feast of steamed broccoli, beans on toast topped with cheese, boiled new potatoes drizzled with olive oil, and a white nectarine with natural yogurt, he asked if he could listen to the baby.

“Sure,” I said and he climbed on all fours on the sofa, balancing himself between my legs, lifted my white T-shirt and pressed his ear against my skin.

I watched the top of his head, the blond curls that lay in a circular pattern. I had the urge to reach down and run my fingers through them. To gently stroke his hair like I wanted to do all those years I was in love with him. I wanted him to look up and our gazes to meet, for us to hold each other in a visual embrace. I longed for him to move up until we were face-to-face, for his fingers to start peeling off my clothes. I craved to start taking off his clothes. I wanted …

I threw my head back, started to take deep breaths to help veer my thoughts away from this. The hormones had done this. They’d made me incredibly horny. And, as I’d feared, they had unlocked and let loose in the world the feelings I’d shut away for so long. They hadn’t died, those feelings, they were just incarcerated in a deep dungeon in my heart because whatever I felt was—at the time they started—one-sided, and now moot, because we had both made choices we were happy with. Admittedly, Keith had left me because I’d agreed to have this baby for someone else, but before that I’d been happy with him. Mal was happy with the love of his life, too.

I inhaled again, holding the oxygen in my lungs to help it purge my impure feelings. I brought Stephanie to mind. My friend. His wife. The woman I was doing this for. The woman who would do anything to be able to do this. I could not betray her by allowing myself to fall back in love with her husband.

Thinking of her, putting her in the picture, would usually be enough to stop my emotions and physical urges running away with me. Mal took his head away and I thought it safe to look up. He smiled at my abdomen as though the baby had been telling him something wonderfully insightful. I loved the way his smiles softened his face and sparkled his eyes.
Will the baby have his smile, his eyes, his nose?
I wondered before I could stop myself.

“Love you, baby,” Mal whispered before he lowered his head again and gently crushed his lips below my belly button.

My heart stopped, it actually stopped beating. Everything around us seemed to stop at the same time, suspended in my disbelief.

Stephanie often talked to the baby, said to it that she loved it, but she had never kissed my belly. She never would, I hoped. I never wanted to be that intimate with her. Mal had never done that before, either—and I did not want to be that intimate with him. It was difficult enough protecting my heart at the moment, I could not do that if he was determined to create more intimacy between us. I could always remind myself that I was having a baby for someone else, I would always be able to cope because I was doing it for someone special. There were only two people in the world I would ever even think of doing this for—Cordy and Mal. No one else. But I could not do this if Mal would not remain a friend. I was constantly fighting my feelings for him, consigning them to hormones—if he was going to act like this, I would go mad. I would start to believe that maybe, possibly … and once that thought started to grow inside me I would be driven insane.

I started to breathe, slow and steady, trying to ignore the pain my heart, which had started beating again, was causing me by
speeding in my chest. I had to find a way to tell him that he couldn’t do things like that to me, without revealing that it was emotionally difficult for me. I did not want him to say something to Stephanie and for her to take it the wrong way, for her to begin watching me from the corner of her eye, again; being suspicious of my every move and thinking I was in any way a rival. When she was like that before, she did not seem to understand that I had never been in her way, that he had come alive when he met her and I knew he would never love me or anyone else like he loved her.

Still staring at my stomach, Mal said, “You know what I wish sometimes?”

“No, Mal, I do not know what you wish sometimes, but I am sure you are going to tell me,” I said, wondering how soon I could ask him to get off me. He was far too close, and I couldn’t take much more of it, he was suffocating me just by being around me. I could feel myself slipping steadily down the slope of closeness into this moment with its quiet, soothing chat, this intimate pose, and if I did not change things, get him to leave, I would fall in, and lie back at the bottom of the slope and allow the feelings to consume me. I would forget about Stephanie, I would forget about telling him not to do this, I would start to indulge myself in him and I was scared of where that might lead. Not only with me starting to want Mal, but me not being able to distance myself from the baby.

He looked up at me, our gazes met as they often did in my hormone-induced fantasies, and he smiled, his mouth a crescent of wistful happiness.

“What?” I asked. “What are you looking at me like that for? And what do you wish sometimes?”

“That this was our baby, and we were doing this for real.”

I felt the physical punch as my heart exploded. I pushed my hand over my chest to ease the pain as the blood in my body ran cold in horror.

Mal immediately realized what he had done and scrambled back onto his haunches, cowering at the end of my sofa like a frightened, wide-eyed gargoyle on the edge of a church roof. “I didn’t mean that how it might have sounded. I, erm … You can never tell Steph that. Ever.” He spoke quickly, real fear in his voice, his hands raised in total surrender. “It’s really nothing to do with her. I promise. It’s just … It’s just, at one point I thought we’d be having a baby together, that’s all, and I shouldn’t have said it, I know. But there’s no one else on earth I could say it to. I’m sorry. Pretend I didn’t say anything.”

Slowly and carefully, I swung my feet onto the floor, just as precisely I stood up, having to take a few seconds to check I was steady before I turned to him.