Morgan's Child (3 page)

After the strain of the past couple of years, after losing her father and everything else that was important to her, she longed to be needed by something or someone again. The time of her pregnancy would be a time of gathering the world to herself once more, of reclaiming some of what she had lost. It was a way of making a statement:
I'm my own person, and I choose life.

* * *

Choosing life meant that Kate paid several visits to the fertility center in the fall.

However, what Kate expected to be an entirely natural procedure turned out to be unnatural in the extreme. Fortunately it was not a protracted process. In October Kate stoically endured the indignities of implantation and went home to the lighthouse to wait happily for the first confirmation of pregnancy.

The island was the perfect place to wait. Kate went for long solitary walks, absorbing the serenity of sea, sky and marsh. She knew she was pregnant, knew that in the warm recesses of her body a new life was taking hold and settling in. She was determined that the first sounds that this baby would hear would be the murmur of the waves upon the shore—it seemed so basic, so elemental.

She felt protective of the baby. For the time that they would be together, she was bound not only to shield this child from all harm but to nurture it as any mother would do.

She knew scientifically that the tiny creature inside her was Courtney's baby, not hers. But until she turned it over to Courtney, it was her child, no child of her body but a child of the heart, for sentimentally she knew that it grew there as strongly as it did in that more practical organ, her uterus.

When she received confirmation of her pregnancy, she whirled around the kitchen of the keeper's quarters a few times and wished there were someone with whom she could share such welcome tidings. But who would understand? Penelope, her friend in Maine, who had not heard from Kate in over a year? Certainly not Willadeen or any of the women she knew from the mainland. Surrogate motherhood, Kate suspected, was still not considered a polite topic among the gentry of Ashepoo County.

Of course, she had to tell Gump, who could not be expected to react favorably to the news. She put off the task as long as possible and finally told him one day at the Merry Lulu Tavern after she'd been to a rummage sale on the mainland.

"Thought you were
taking
stuff to the rummage sale, not
buying
it," Gump said when she appeared with two bags full of her purchases.

"I unloaded a lot of things that I'm cleaning out of the quarters closets," Kate told him, hiking herself up on the bar stool beside his.

"Then what's in the bags?"

Kate hesitated. "I bought clothes," she said at last. "Maternity clothes." She waited for his wrath to fall.

Gump stared at her openmouthed. "Now who might they be for?" he asked finally.

"For me," she said meekly. Gump was the only person who could still make her feel like a shy, knock-kneed little girl.

He was speechless. At last he raised the beer mug to his lips and drained it.

"There's somebody in your life I don't know about. How did you manage it?" he said.

"The somebody is the baby, Gump, and I managed it through in-vitro fertilization." Quickly she filled him in on the embryo implantation process, and when she was through, he was shaking his head in disbelief.

"This is the most damn-fool thing I ever heard of," he muttered.

"I wanted to do it," Kate insisted, following him out of the bar as he stumped along. Gump had a limp as the result of an old war injury, and she often suspected that he overemphasized it when he was upset.

"Gump? Is that all you're going to say about it?" she asked him after she followed him into the wheelhouse.

He didn't reply, and he didn't speak to her all the way back to the island.

Finally, one day when she went down to the ferry dock on the island to pick up her mail, Gump came off the ferry, leaned against a piling and worked his jaw a few times. After a minute he said, "Well, Kate, I can't say I approve. But you can count on me. Heck, you can come stay with me if you want. You have no business living on this island in your condition."

"I like it here. I won't leave before next September," she said. To that his only reply was an outraged "Harrumph!"

Soon winter arrived in full force, and by January no tourists nosed around the island knocking on Kate's door or lining up to take pictures of the lighthouse, which was a local landmark. Kate had the place to herself. The baby was now a little fish inside her, or maybe an oyster, and Kate was the protective shell.

Sometimes at night Kate took off all her clothes and studied her body in the mirror with the dispassionate eye of a scientist. She found it was hard to be objective when she was so fascinated with the changes she was experiencing.

When she pressed her fingers tentatively into the small lump in her lower abdomen, it was hard, not soft as she had expected. Her breasts, which had always been ordinary, took on a new look, rounding into lush globes, pink-tipped and exquisitely sensitive.

Because her breasts felt hot and fevered and uncomfortable, Kate blithely took to going braless for the first time in her adult life, enjoying the sensation of her full breasts swinging free beneath loose clothes. Sometimes during cold snaps when harsh winds swept off the sea, her chilly hands stole under her sweatshirt to cup her breasts, cooling the gently rounded contours and making her cheeks flush with pleasure that she quickly identified as sexual.

But there was no man in Kate's life, and she dismissed the vivid dreams she began having as a strange fluke of hormones. She often dreamed of a man beside her, inside her, of tumbling together between fluffy warm blankets—dreams she did not welcome, and she never saw the man's face. She did see that of the baby she began to dream about—a sweet round face atop a blanket-wrapped body shaped like her burgeoning belly.

The baby's growing bulk pressed uncomfortably against the zipper of her jeans and stretched them to the limit. It pushed upward against her diaphragm until she found it increasingly difficult to breathe when she climbed the circular lighthouse staircase to the platform outside where she liked to stand to dry her hair in the sun.

The baby seemed like a miracle so special that Kate wanted to hug it to herself and did, when she was lying alone in bed at night with the wind whipping around the lighthouse.

She liked to curl her body protectively around the child within her, listening to her blood pulsing in her ears and knowing that it was her blood that nourished the baby, her heart that comforted it, and her voice that it heard when it was awake. She began to talk to it, too, crooning the words that mothers have always spoken to their babies. She told it how happy it would be when at last it was held in the arms of its biological mother, Courtney Rhett.

And then Courtney came to visit, and nothing afterward was the same.

* * *

The keeper's quarters at Yaupon Light had no telephone, which was the way Kate liked it. There was no cell phone service on the island and no Internet, either. Kate and Courtney communicated only by mail, which was left by Gump in a metal box on the ferry dock if Kate didn't meet him to pick it up.

Courtney's letters were actually from her attorney and included twice-monthly checks and, once, a contract that Kate barely read before scrawling her signature at the bottom. Kate's letters to Courtney usually consisted of a hasty "Everything is okay, thanks for the money."

During Kate's fifth month of pregnancy, no letters arrived, which also meant no checks. Kate asked Gump almost daily, "Anything from Courtney today?" and he would shake his head, pursing his lips in silent disapproval.

Then, one morning in April, Courtney arrived in a white motor launch that idled at the dock. She was accompanied by a man whom Kate had never seen before. Kate peered curiously through the kitchen window, taking in the determined way that Courtney planted one foot in front of the other as she made her way up the path to the lighthouse.

Kate met them at the door. When she saw Courtney in her white blazer with the spiffy navy-and-white polka-dot handkerchief draped artistically from the chest pocket, she became even more aware of her own decidedly unfashionable outfit, which consisted today of a limp rummage-sale maternity blouse and a chopped-off pair of gray sweatpants with a drawstring waist that accommodated her swollen stomach.

Kate smiled and opened the door. "Hi, Courtney," she said. "It's good to see you. Come in."

Courtney swept past, followed by her male companion, whose shirt was flung open almost to his waist, revealing a gold horn on a chain winking out from a curly patch of chest hair.

"Won't you sit down?" Kate said, sweeping a pile of scientific journals from one of the kitchen chairs and tossing them indifferently onto a heap beside the stove.

"It's not a social visit," Courtney said with a hint of discomfort. She didn't sit.

"Oh?" Kate said, beginning to feel a chill despite the warm wind blowing from the sea.

"It's about the baby, Katie. We've—Damien and I—we've just gotten married."

"And?" Kate prompted, beginning to get the idea that she wasn't going to like what she was about to hear.

"And Damien doesn't want the baby," Courtney said.

Kate's eyes darted from Courtney's face to Damien's and back again. "Doesn't want," she repeated, her breath stopping short of her lungs.

"That's right," Damien said. "It's no kid of mine. Courtney and me—we've got places we want to go, things we want to do. We don't need a kid."

"I see," Kate said, although she didn't see at all.

"I'm sorry, Katie. I'll still pay your medical expenses, of course," Courtney said glibly.

"Of course." Kate caught hold of the table and lowered herself heavily onto the chair. She felt the baby lurch uncomfortably against her bladder.

"My lawyer will stay in touch," Courtney said, turning to go.

"But—" Kate said, and stopped. She couldn't believe this.

Courtney turned, and for a moment Kate thought she saw a flicker of doubt in her expression. But no, she must have been mistaken, because Courtney's eyes had turned as hard as stone.

"Courtney's lawyer can help you place the baby for adoption," Damien said. "It's in the contract you signed, in the small print. Come along, Courtney."

He took Courtney's arm and pushed her toward the door. Behind them the sea, blue and shimmering, gently rocked their waiting motor launch, and gulls swooped and spiraled overhead.

Courtney and Damien were already halfway down the path when Kate appeared in the doorway.

"You have to take this baby,"
Kate screamed like a banshee in full voice.
"You have to!"

Courtney refused to look back, although Kate knew she must have heard.

"And I
hate
to be called Katie!" Kate shouted after them, but her words were carried away on the wind along with the insignificant cries of the gulls.

Chapter 2

Morgan Rhett leaned over his desk in his elegant office at Morgan Rhett & Company in the historic district of Charleston, South Carolina, and studied his ex-wife's picture on the society page of the local paper.

Looking at the grainy newspaper photo brought back all the misery of their marriage. He'd never marry again after that experience, he was sure of it, even though his decision precluded any hope of a normal family life. At the moment he couldn't imagine why he'd ever married Courtney. She was so smug, so overbearing and so full of herself.

So Courtney tied the knot again,
he mused, reading the account of the wedding. She had married Damien Cobb, the plumbing contractor who'd cheated all those folks who were rebuilding after the last hurricane by installing inferior fixtures he'd bought at a bargain-basement sale.

People said that Damien Cobb was flush, but then, so were his customers. Morgan had heard that sewage from some of the houses had flushed everywhere but into the sewers and septic tanks, leaving the homeowners wallowing in filth. Which, come to think of it, was exactly what Courtney was doing by marrying the guy.

He walked with measured steps to the dart board on the wall and taped his ex-wife's picture to it. He was taking aim when the door of his office opened.