Hope House (31 page)

“Doctor Tad is dying? Doctor Boucher?”

She nodded and Kurt could see in her eyes that this girl was in awe of Gloria and possibly in love with  Dr. Tad. She was heartbroken that he was dying and Kurt felt guilty for being happy about it.

“He wrote that he was sorry. I do not know a lot of English so could not translate the rest. But after that part he recorded the births of all your children. He said you cannot have them but you can. I have seen them. I have birthed them myself. I will give you the journal to read. It is for you, I am sure. I am Martine. Martine Jean-Baptiste. I am a nurse here. And once a breeder.”

Kurt felt like someone had punched him in the gut. Martine said she was a breeder as matter-of-factly as someone would announce they were a grocery clerk.

Gloria shook her hand.

“This is Boris Jean-Baptiste. He is my brother. Boris, you keep your gun down now.” The man slung his gun back around his shoulder and resumed his post.

“Will you take me to see Doctor Tad?” Gloria asked.

“Yes, but there is a baby coming and I do not know what to do. Anni is screaming and the baby will not come out.  She is getting weak and cannot push anymore.”

“Where is Doctor Tad?” Gloria asked as she walked toward the gate, holding Kurt’s hand firmly. “Can he help you?”

Martine answered as they walked through the gate. Boris shut it behind them, and Kurt looked over the shoulder to see that the cabbie was offering Boris a cigarette.

“Dr. Tad is in the room but is not much help now.” Martine wiped at her eyes.

Inside the compound lanterns hung from poles secured on the dirt ground. There was a small brick building, which Kurt guessed to be the medical unit, the true birthing center that Hope House had purported to be. Beyond that, cozy cottages in bright colors were strewn throughout what looked like a small village.  The high fence surrounded it all, as far Kurt could see. They both knew the fence and the armed guard were there not just to keep visitors out, but to keep the surrogates in.

As they walked into the medical building, which looked like any other modern U.S. clinic on the inside, Kurt turned to Gloria. “Do you know how to deliver a baby or are you just pretending to be able to help?”

“I edited a book written by a midwife so I might be able to be of some use.”

“What do you think about what Martine said, about all the babies being yours?”

“I don’t know what to think but right now we’ve got a baby to deliver.”

Kurt froze. “I got no problem watching that stuff on the Discovery Channel but actually being in the room with—”

“Well, you’re going to get a crash course. Come on.”

She yanked his hand and dragged him to follow Martine to the room where some young surrogate waited to have another baby for Mick to sell.

Kurt knew one thing. Mick Puglisi was not getting this baby or any other ones from this center ever. Even if Kurt had to smuggle the kid away himself.

Chapter Ten

1.

Maison D’Espoir, Haiti, Monday February 13
th
Midnight

Gloria rushed into the examination room but stopped short when she reached the patient, a pregnant girl named Anni. She was moaning and covered in a thick sheen of sweat. Her eyes looked hopeless and afraid. She cried something to Martine in Creole.
“Eske mwen Mouri?”

“No. You are not dying. You will be all right now. Help has come.” Martine turned to Gloria and said, “She is not ready yet to deliver. A little while longer. Look over here. Come see Doctor Tad.”

Gloria turned around and gasped when she saw the illustrious Dr. Tad Boucher, the man who had taken her baby and had altered her life forever.

He was lying in a hospital bed, with the same dead look in his gaze as Anni. Martine lifted the sheet. He wore a sweat-soaked johnny but beyond that Gloria spied the exposed collarbone and arm.

“What’s wrong with him?” she asked. His arm was swollen and black. “Blood poisoning?”

“Flesh eating bacteria,” Martine said. “Doctor Tad said it is like strep throat but inside your skin.”

“I thought that was an urban myth. Something the tabloids made up,” Kurt said, while keeping his distance from both patients.

Martine looked confused. No doubt terms like urban myth were foreign to her, Gloria thought.

“A tabloid is a magazine that stretches the truth to make their stories interesting. An urban myth is a tale, a pretend tale that gets told so many times that people believe it’s true,” Gloria explained.

“I wish this was an urban myth but this is true. You see for yourself his arm is real,” Martine said.

“Yes,” Gloria said as she stepped closer.

Dr. Tad was taking quick shallow breaths and she could feel the heat radiating off of him.  Gloria set aside her anger for the time being to try to help him. She needed him alive to get answers.

When he met her eyes, she recognized him as her OB/GYN.

“I know you,” he said.

“You destroyed my life.”

He nodded his head. “But from before that. From school. Don’t you remember me?”

“No. I’m sorry, I—”

“
Glass Menagerie
,” he explained through shallow breath.

As Gloria looked closer she saw something else.
Someone
else. In Dr. Tad’s weakened state, she suddenly remembered him from college from the Tennessee Williams elective. He was the man a few years ahead of her, always staring and following her around. At the time she’d thought he was just a geek with a crush and hadn’t really paid attention to him.

He closed his eyes and clenched his jaw. Gloria could see he was in agony. The IV was nearly empty.

“Can you give him some more painkillers?” she asked Martine.

“It might kill him,” she replied.

“I’m all right. Later. I can have some more later. I have to stay awake to help with the baby.”

Gloria slid a stool over and sat bedside him with  Kurt and Martine watching silently from a few feet away.

“Please. Tell me what’s going on. What do I have to do with this place?” Gloria swept her arm around the room. “Martine said she found a journal and these babies are mine. But they can’t be mine. I can’t have children.”

When he merely nodded and spewed forth a stuttering, “Sorry,” Gloria shouted, “Whose babies are they, and how are they related to me? Why did you take my baby?” She was shaking now and was at the end of her tether.

“You are beautiful, Gloria. Always were,” he said quietly, preserving the little strength he had. “So pretty and smart. Miss Bradfield.” He met her eyes again and she nodded. The last thing she needed now was validation for a stupid local pageant she’d won before she was even old enough to drink.  “I always adored you. Everyone did. I knew I didn’t have a chance. You didn’t even know my name but it was enough just to watch you. To admire you from afar. And you never even knew I existed until Tommy brought you to me in that hospital in New York. You thought it was the first time we’d seen each other, but—”

“I don’t care about that. What about my baby? Is that why you took her?”

“It wasn’t my idea. Mick Puglisi’s family took me in and raised me. I owed them and they never let me forget it. Mick called me one day and said there was a new medical procedure he’d heard about. A scientist was going to let the family in on something big,” He blinked and looked to her, licking his lips with his dry tongue. “Groundbreaking technology. Mick said I needed to get a fetus. A female fetus. I didn’t like the idea but couldn’t say no to Mick. He was like a brother.”

Gloria was silent. She needed to focus on what he was saying, not let herself get caught up in her emotions.

“Mick used to buy his test answers from your husband, Tommy, so he knew how  smart Tommy Carpenter was. He was handsome too, so he fit our needs. Between you and Tommy, you were going to produce an attractive and intelligent child. When Mick asked for the fetus, you were the best candidate. My patient, one I moved around to obtain, right there for the taking.”

Gloria was too stunned to answer.

“So Mick made your husband Tommy an offer—”

“The law firm in Miami,” Gloria said.

Tad nodded. “Mick promised him a partnership in exchange for your fetus.”

“She wasn’t just a fetus. She was my daughter.” Tears overflowed Gloria’s eyes. She felt Kurt’s strong hand on her shoulder and it gave her strength.

“Is my daughter Alison Gander? Are all of these children related to me?”

“She’s not your daughter. She’s your
granddaughter.”

“What?” she asked.

Martine and Kurt leaned in closer, fear of contagion of Dr. Tad’s illness be damned.

“Granddaughter? How can that be?” Kurt asked. “Oh my God. Did you raise Gloria’s little girl and then impregnate her?”

Kurt lunged forward and grabbed Tad by his gown. He lifted him forward and snarled in his face. “Tell me you didn’t use her baby as some kind of surrogate. If you value your life, you’d better tell me that.”

“I don’t value my life anymore,” Tad said, barely above a whisper. “I’ve failed as a human and caused irreparable harm to so many. But to answer you, no, I would never do that to a child.”

Kurt set him down and backed off.

“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Gloria said. “I don’t have any other children. Thanks to you.”

“Your daughter was never born. She was never more than a fetus. Mick got a hold of a man from Israel who told us about a way to solve the infertility crisis. A cheaper way to provide infertile women with eggs. That was the intent at least.”

“What do you mean?”

“All females are born with all the eggs they’ll ever have. All immature follicles are there from the time they’re born. But actually, the follicles are there before they’re born. We took your unborn daughter out of you and harvested her egg follicles. Thousands and thousands of them. And many, too many, I’m afraid, became viable eggs. We used the Puglisi family money and some from investors. Then we opened this place, implanted the eggs with donor sperm from a bank and voila. A compound full of clean healthy virgins giving birth to your grandchildren.”

“Oh my God.” Gloria didn’t know what else to say. They had taken her fetus. Slaughtered her and used her for parts. And then turned those parts into children to sell out. Like pedigree dogs, the cabbie had said, and he wasn’t far off.

My grandchildren. All over the United States. Alison Gander was—is—my granddaughter.

As sick as this was, the thought of life brought from a child she t
hought so long dead was somehow strangely comforting. So many children out there were related to her. It hadn’t been a wasted life, even if it was taken too soon.

“How could you?” she asked, leaning back against Kurt for strength.

Tad leaned into his pillow to absorb another wave of pain. “It was a good thing. Hundreds and hundreds of babies from one death.”

“But it was my daughter. My daughter’s death.”

“I’m sorry. I knew it was wrong but I was young and stupid. I’ve wanted to walk away for years but I couldn’t. You don’t know how the Puglisis are. You don’t know the power they wield over life and death.”

“I don’t care. You have to stop this and you have to give all the records to the authorities. The parents have to be contacted. They have to know the adoptive parents on their records don’t exist.”

“No.”

“What?” Gloria asked.

“I will stop it. All the existing embryos from your line are in the back in a tank. Destroy that and it will be the end. But I can’t turn over the records.”

“You have to tell the families.”

“How would you feel if a loving family adopted you and when you turned eighteen you sought out your birth mother? You’d spent your life dreaming of how she’d be, what she’d look like. And then you find out that your mother was never born at all, but scraped in pieces out of your grandmother. Do you have any idea what that kind of knowledge could do to a child?”

“But they deserve the truth.”

“No one deserves that kind of sick truth. For their sakes, just destroy the eggs and let it go. Live your life. Let the children and the people who adopted them live with their fantasies.”

Tad winced and then sunk into his pillow. His eyes closed.

“Is he dead?” Kurt asked.

Martine shook her head. “He fainted from the pain. Or else he is tired. I do not know. I
need to clean his arm. I do not know if it will help but I have to try something.” She shot something into his IV. “I am sorry. I did not know where the babies came from or that they had to kill your daughter to get them. I do not know where the babies go when they leave here but I pray they go to people who love them.”

“They do. I’ve seen some of them. They’re healthy happy children with good parents,” Gloria explained in monotone, too shocked to speak normally but wanted to give Martine some solace. Knowing the truth repulsed her but she could see Martine was a victim as well, and cared for the lives of the children she carried. 

“Well that is some relief,” Martine said.

“Not much,” Gloria replied.

“The Doctor Tad who took your daughter and the one you see here, they are not the same. He is a kind man. He was going to marry me and run away from Maison D’Espoir. We were going to start a new life and he was going to tell the girls they could keep all the babies inside of them and take whatever they wanted from the compound.” 

“He’s the same man,” Kurt said, his hand firmly holding Gloria’s shoulder. “He was weak then and he’s weak now. A strong man could have said no to Mick’
s sick-ass plans. A strong man, any decent man, wouldn’t keep implanting a woman he says he loves with someone else’s babies and then sell them out from under her.”

“Dr. Tad only stayed to protect me.” Martine told them of the awful threats Mick Puglisi made against the girls, and his murder of Boni and her child. “He left for them for the boars to eat.”

Kurt and Gloria were stunned and speechless.

She continued with, “Dr. Tad could do nothing against a man like
that. A monster.” She wiped tears from her eyes. “Dr. Tad was going to take me away. We were leaving all this. But he cut his hand on the gate and now he is dying. It is a cruel trick God has played.”

“Why didn’t you take him to a real hospital?” Gloria asked.

“Because Anni needs to deliver her baby. Once she has it we will go. Boris will drive us to the airport and we will fly to Belize. Mr. Puglisi will not find us there and they will have a good hospital.”

Gloria pitied the girl in her belief of the plan. Martine knew as well as Gloria that Tad wasn’t going to last another couple of hours much less a long car ride and a flight to Belize with whatever connections they’d have to make. She tried to convince them so she could convince herself, but they all knew he wasn’t going to make it.

Anni moaned loudly from the other bed.

“I think we have waited long enough. It is time for the baby to come. There is a sink to wash yourselves over there, and scrubs are in that closet.”

Gloria stood up and looked to Kurt.

He bit his lip. “Are you okay? I mean, after what Tad just told you?” he asked.

“My feelings don’t matter right now. That girl is going to give birth to my grandchild, as hard as that is to accept. That baby has my blood flowing through it. I don’t care if I have to cut it out of her, I’m delivering that baby. Come on, let’s wash up.”

2.

Tropical backroads of Haiti, predawn

“Angie?”

“
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Mickey. Where the hell are you?”

“I’m sorry. Are the kids okay?”

“
Of course they’re okay. Whataya think? They’re with their Auntie. I’ve got Luke sound asleep next to me and Donnie in the bassinet next to the bed
.”