Mixed Blessings (7 page)

"Just forget about it for a while, sweetheart. It'll happen, give it time. Now, when are you coming home?"

"Tomorrow night, I hope, if these people don't drive me nuts first."

She sighed. Suddenly, the prospect of dealing with all of them the next day depressed her even further. Losing hope again when she got her period deflated everything she did. Each month, it was a terrible loss, an emptiness she couldn't describe to anyone, not even Andy. It seemed absurd, but it was incredible how much she was affected by it each month, and then tried to overcome it, began hoping all over again . . . only to have her hopes dashed again a month later.

"I'll be waiting for you when you get home. Get a good night's sleep tonight and you'll feel better in the morning." It was so simple for him, the pat answers, the encouragement. In an odd way, she wanted him to be worried too. She wanted him to share her fears and her grief, but maybe it was better he didn't. "I love you, Di."

"I love you, too, sweetheart. I really miss you."

"I miss you too. See you tomorrow night." After she hung up, her soup arrived, but she never bothered to eat it. She turned off the lights eventually, and just lay there in the dark, thinking of the baby she wanted so much, and the bright red stain that had ended all hope of that again, for this month. But as she drifted off to sleep that night, she hoped that next month would be different.

Pilar Graham, as she still called herself professionally, sat in her office, staring intensely at a file on her desk, making notes to herself, when her secretary buzzed her on the intercom, and she answered it quickly.

"The Robinsons are here."

"Thanks. Send them in." Pilar stood up, clearly expecting them, as her secretary ushered in a serious-looking couple. The woman was somewhere in her late thirties, with neat midlength dark hair, the man was tall and spare, not expensively dressed, and slightly older.

They'd been referred by another attorney, and she'd been studying their case all morning before she met them.

"Hello, I'm Pilar Graham." She shook their hands, and invited them to sit down, and they both declined tea or coffee.

They looked nervous and seemed anxious to get down to business.

"I've been reading your files all morning," Pilar said quietly.

She looked serious and mature and intelligent, the kind of person they could have confidence in. But they knew her reputation, too, which was why they had come to see her. She was reputed to be a killer in the courtroom.

"Do you think there's anything you can do?" Emily Robinson looked at Pilar unhappily, and the attorney could see all the anguish lurking there, and she wondered if she could help her.

"I hope I can help, but to be honest, I'm not sure yet. I have to study it more. I want to talk to some colleagues about this case, in confidence, of course. I'm afraid this is the first time I've ever dealt with a surrogate situation. The laws are a little gray in some areas, and they vary incredibly from state to state. It certainly isn't an easy situation, as you know, and I just don't have the answers." Lloyd Robinson had made an arrangement with a seventeen-year-old girl, who lived in the mountains near Riverside, to have his baby. She had already had two illegitimate children before, and she was more than willing to have this one. He knew of her through a school where he'd worked, but no longer did. Everything had been handled by artificial insemination through a local doctor. He had paid her five thousand dollars for it, enough to move to Riverside the following year, live decently and go to college, which was what she said she wanted. Without the money he had paid, she had no hope of that, and she'd be stuck in the mountains forever.

It had been a foolish thing to do, they knew now-she was young, unstable, and her parents had raised hell with the local authorities when they finally found out. Lloyd had faced criminal charges, all of which were dropped. But the court had taken a dim view of his choice of a mother. For a while there had been a vague possibility of charges of statutory rape, but Lloyd had been able to prove that there had never actually been sexual contact. But in any case, in the end the girl, Michelle, had refused to give up the baby. By the time it was born, she had married a local boy, and he was adamant too.

And by the time Pilar was talking to the Robinsons, Michelle was pregnant again, with her husband's child. Lloyd Robinson's child was a year old by then, and the courts hadn't even allowed him visitation.

They had explained that, as a "donor," he had no rights. They felt that he had had undue influence on a minor, and they had placed a restraining order on him in lieu of further action. The Robinsons were distraught about it.

They acted as though it were a child they knew and loved who had been stolen from them. The baby was a little girl and they kept calling her Jeanne Marie. They had named her after both their mothers, although Michelle called her something entirely different and as Pilar looked at them, she had the feeling that the Robinsons lived in a dream world.

"Wouldn't it have been easier to adopt a child, even in a private adoption?"

"It might have been," Emily said sadly, "but we wanted his child. I'm the one who can't have babies, Miss Graham." She confessed it like a terrible crime, and Pilar felt sorry for her, although she had to admit she found the case fascinating and strange, but what kept coming across to her was their irreversible compulsion to have a baby. "We're too old to adopt legaIly," Eriily explained. "I'm forty-one, and Lloyd is almost fifty. We tried for years, our income wasn't big enough, Lloyd hurt his back and he was out of work for a long time. Now we're doing fine. We sold our car, and we both held down two jobs for a year to save the money to pay Michelle to have the baby. The rest of what we made went on legal fees. We don't have much left," she told Pilar honestly, but Pilar didn't really care. She was intrigued by the case.

The court had had a social worker's report on them, and even though they were certainly unusual, they had no apparent vices and they both appeared to be decent people, according to those who knew them. They just couldn't have kids and they were desperate to have a baby.

Desperation made people do strange things, and they had, in Pilar's opinion.

"Would you settle for visitation rights?" Pilar asked calmly.

Emily sighed and nodded. "We might, if that's all we could get. But it doesn't seem fair, Michelle gave up two babies when she was barely more than a little girl herself, now she's having another one with the boy she married. She's going to have that baby, why does she have to keep Lloyd's?" Emily asked plaintively, but there was more to it than that, as they all knew.

"It's her baby too," Pilar said gently.

"Do you think all we'll ever get is the right to visit?" Lloyd asked finally, and Pilar hesitated before she answered.

"It's possible. Given the court's position now, that might be a step forward. And in time, if Michelle doesn't behave properly toward the child, or if there's a problem with her husband, then you may be able to get custody, but I can't promise you that, and it could take a very long time, maybe years." Pilar was always honest with her clients.

"The last lawyer we saw said he might be able to get Jeanne Marie back to us in six months," Emily said accusingly, and Pilar didn't want to remind her that it wasn't a question of "back to them" since the baby had never been with them in the first place.

"I don't think he was being honest with you, Mrs. Robinson."

And neither did they apparently, or they'd still be there with him.

The couple nodded and looked at each other in despair.

There was a kind of desperate hunger and loneliness about them that ate at one's heart just to see them.

Pilar and Brad had had friends who were desperate to adopt, and some had even gone to Honduras and Korea and Romania, but none had done anything as foolish as this, or looked quite as forlorn as these people. The Robinsons had taken a chance and lost, and they knew it.

Pilar talked to them for a while, and told them she would be happy to work on it if they wanted her to. She could research precedents throughout the state, and let them know. But they said they'd like her to wait and they'd call her. They wanted to think it over first. But when they left the office, Pilar knew they wouldn't be calling her again. They were looking for someone to promise them the moon, and she
 
just wouldn't do it. After they left, she sat thinking about them for a few minutes. The Robinsons had seemed so lost and so desperate, and so hungry for their unknown baby. They had never even laid eyes on her since her birth, and yet to them she was Jeanne Marie, someone they thought they knew and loved. It seemed odd to Pilar, but she was still sorry she couldn't help them. The case intrigued her and she was staring pensively out the window when her associate, Alice Jackson, poked her head in her office door with a grin, and then an intrigued expression.

"Uh oh, counselor . . . looks like a tough one. I haven't seen you look like that since the P.D."s office, whenever you got a defendant charged with murder one. Who did this one kill?"

"No one." Pilar smiled at the memory of their days as public defenders. Their other partner, Bruce Hemmings, had worked at the public defender's office too. He and Alice had gotten married years before, and they had two children. Pilar and Alice had always been good friends, although Pilar didn't confide in her as extensively as she did in Marina. But for the past ten years she had been wonderful to work with. "This isn't a murder beef," Pilar said with a pensive smile, beckoning her to come in and sit down. "It's just so damn strange." She briefly explained the case to her as Alice shook her head in wonder.

"Don't even try to make new law on this. I can tell you right now, the best you'll get from any judge is visitation. Don't you remember? Ted Murphy had a case like this last year, the surrogate refused to turn over the child at the last minute. It went all the way to the State Supreme Court, and the father still only got technical joint custody, the mother got physical, and he got visitation."

"I remember it, but these people were so . . ." She hated to say it, but they had been pathetic.

"The only case I've read about where the judge wasn't sympathetic to the surrogate was when she was implanted with a donor egg from the potentially adopting mother. In that case, I can't remember where it was, but I could look it up for you," she said seriously, "the judge ruled that there was no blood relation to the surrogate, that the sperm and the egg were donated by the adopting parents. And she gave the kid to them. But in this case, you don't have those circumstances going for you, and the guy was a real fool to make a deal with a minor."

"I know. But sometimes people do crazy stuff when they're desperate to have kids."

"Tell me about it." Alice sat back in the chair and groaned.

"For two years I took hormones that I thought were going to kill me. They made me so damn sick, I felt like I was having chemotherapy instead of hormones to have a baby." Then she smiled up at her associate, looking young as she shrugged her shoulders. "But I got two great kids out of it, so I guess it was worth it." And the Robinsons had gotten nothing. A baby they pretended to call Jeanne Marie, whom they had never seen, and maybe never would.

"Why do people go to those lengths, Ah? Sometimes you can't help but wonder. I know, your boys are great . . . but if you hadn't had kids, would that have been so awful?"

"Yeah"-she said softly-"to me . . . and to Bruce too. We knew we wanted a family." She threw a leg over the arm of the chair as she looked earnestly at her longtime friend. "Most people aren't as brave as you are," Alice said quietly. She had always admired Pilar for her certainty and her convictions.

"I'm not brave. . . . How can you say a thing like that?"

"Yes, you are. You knew you didn't want kids, so you built your life in a way that worked for you, and you never had them. Most people would be too afraid that that wasn't the right' thing to do, so they'd have them anyway, and secretly hate them. You have no idea how many mothers I meet at boy scouts, at karate classes, at school, who really don't like their kids and never should have had them."

"My parents were like that. I guess that's what's always made me so sure. I never wanted a child of mine to go through what I did. I always felt like an outsider, an intruder, a terrible imposition on two people who had more important things to do than talk to a little girl, or maybe even love her." It was heavy stuff, but she had talked about it before. It wasn't a startling revelation, but it saddened Alice anyway. And it made her sad, too, to know that Pilar had intentionally deprived herself of children, which Alice felt was one of the few things in life that really mattered.

"You'd never have been that kind of parent, Pilar. Maybe now that you've married Brad, you should rethink your options."

"Oh, please . . . at my age?" Pilar looked amused. Why was everyone so anxious to know if she and Brad were going to have a baby?

"The world of hormones could be yours too," Alice teased as she stood up and looked across the desk at her. They were good friends, and both women knew that they always would be.

"Actually, with your luck, you'd probably get pregnant the first time you tried. And don't give me that shit about age." You're only forty-two. I'm not impressed, Grandma Coleman."

"Thanks. But I think I'll spare myself that little headache anyway. Poor Brad . . . he'd be stunned . . . and so would I." She grinned at her law partner and stood up as she glanced at her watch. She had a lunch date with her stepdaughter, and she was going to be late if she didn't hurry.

"Do you want me to do some digging about surrogates?"

Alice was always a good sport about doing research. "I've got some time this afternoon and tomorrow morning."

"Thanks, but I wouldn't spend the time on it. I don't think they'll call back. I'm not even sure they're going to press for visitation. I think they want the whole shot or nothing. I could be wrong, but I think they're going to find someone cheaper than we are who'll promise them the moon, and wind up offering them visitation, if they're lucky."