Authors: Pamela Browning
"Grandma Robillard is in a nursing home and no longer attends teas. Lucky Grandma. How do you manage to swallow those awful little sardine things? I'd rather eat road kill myself."
Kate smothered a smile. "I'm hungry. This was meant to be lunch. And since you mentioned it, I rank historical-society affairs right up there with trips to the dentist for a root canal. I'm only here because Willadeen felt obligated to invite me and I felt obligated to attend."
Kate left a lot unsaid. In the past month she'd had to realize that she was totally unable to untangle the legalities of her grandfather's will, which had bequeathed the deactivated Yaupon Light to the historical society after her father's death, and that had made the gulf between Willadeen and herself grow even wider.
"So you're the Katie everyone is saying has been stonewalling the society and keeping them from converting Yaupon Light into their museum," Courtney said, favoring Kate with a long appraising look.
"According to the terms of my grandfather's will, I don't have to leave the keeper's quarters until next September. My father only died a month ago," Kate said.
"I heard Willadeen clucking about how you refuse to leave one minute earlier than the will specifies," Courtney said.
"She and some of the others are pushing me to get out of the keeper's quarters as soon as possible, but I don't have anywhere else to go. So for the next fifteen months, I'm staying put. It
is
my right." Kate didn't add that the reason she didn't have any place to go was her dispute with the Northeast Marine Institute and the resulting congressional investigation. It was clear that Courtney Rhett would have no interest in behind-the-scenes skullduggery in the scientific community.
"Oh, I wasn't on the side of the historical society," Courtney hastened to assure her. "Willadeen's talk about museum display cases and new rest rooms bores me—a cardinal sin as far as I'm concerned. Say, would you like a little more punch in your punch? I brought some white lightning along for emergencies." Courtney bent over and produced a flask from under her skirt.
Kate stared openmouthed at the little silver bottle. "Thanks, but no," she said firmly, but Courtney sipped quickly and delicately from the flask, licked her lips and with remarkable sleight of hand returned the flask to its place of origin.
"Frankly, Katie, I didn't expect you to be as dull as the rest of these women," Courtney said, focusing a pair of wide violet eyes on Kate's face.
"I don't drink and I don't smoke, and I don't apologize," Kate said, her gaze beginning to wander the room in search of an escape route.
"Well, don't get all het up about it," Courtney said. "I wish I could say the same thing. If I didn't drink and I didn't smoke, I'd go ahead and have those frozen embryos implanted and
zap!
in nine months I'd be a mommy. But as it is, I don't want to give up my bad habits. I played a pregnant woman on the stage during my brief career in the theater, and I must say that I didn't like it one bit."
Kate's attention homed in on what Courtney was saying; she made little sense out of this new direction in the conversation.
"What?"
she said.
"The
embryos,"
Courtney said as if explaining to an idiot. "The story about my court battle with my ex-husband has been in all the papers."
"Yaupon Island is not on the paperboy's route," Kate reminded her.
"Oh. Well, my ex-husband and I went to court to fight for the embryos we produced in our marriage. What I mean to say is, I had the eggs and he had the sperm, but when we—well, let's just say that we tried to have a baby and we couldn't, so we let the doctors mix the eggs and sperms together in a Petri dish, and the sperms fertilized the eggs and became embryos—you know, little bitty babies."
"You're talking about in-vitro fertilization," Kate said in amazement.
"Sure, and I was going to have the embryos implanted in my uterus, but then Morgan and I divorced. So the embryos became part of the divorce settlement, and I won custody."
"Custody—as if these embryos were actual born children?" Kate asked, becoming interested.
"Yup. And I was going to have a baby after the divorce, I honestly intended to do it. Against my ex's wishes, of course, but by that time I didn't care what Morgan thought. You know what they say about him around Charleston? 'Morgan Rhett gets what he wants.' Well, this time he didn't." Courtney's eyes lit with triumph, which made Kate think that her pursuit of the embryos hadn't only been about having kids.
She wanted to keep Courtney on topic, however. "So you were going to bear a child but now you've changed your mind?"
Courtney shrugged. "I got scared is more like it. I mean, here I have these embryos and all, and I've been having these migraine headaches so bad, and I'm afraid to go ahead with a pregnancy. I have to take all this aspirin, which isn't good for a baby, and what am I supposed to do—go around with this awful headache and my stomach out to
here?"
"Good point," Kate agreed. She saw Willadeen Pribble heading their way. Courtney pulled Kate into a curtained alcove behind the piano and sank down on the window seat, patting the space beside her.
Kate sat, too, gazing hungrily at the table through the chink between the curtains and wondering if anyone was going to bring out more sandwiches. Ham would taste good, or maybe chicken salad.
Courtney hung her cigarette out the window and went on talking as if her tongue was wound up and had to run until it stopped.
"If I could only find
someone
to bear the baby for me! I'd be a good mother, I know I would. I'd love dressing a baby up in frilly white hats and taking it for walks along the Battery in its pram, and there's a trust fund set up by my grandmother so I have no financial problems, and Disney World would be so much more fun with a kid along."
"Yes," Kate said thoughtfully. "I suppose you're right."
"But where would I find any woman in her right mind who would carry a child for me?" Courtney asked.
Kate stopped thinking about how hungry she was and started considering, really considering, what Courtney was saying.
"I mean, that's nine months of someone's life down the drain! Who'd willingly do that for another person?" Courtney took another drag on her cigarette.
Kate cleared her throat. "I might," she said. She was glad that Willadeen Pribble wasn't anywhere around to hear her say it.
Courtney exhaled a cloud of smoke and stared at Kate as if seeing her for the first time. "Really?" she asked.
"I
might,"
Kate repeated. She'd always wanted to be caught up in other people's pregnancies. She was fascinated with the way their stomachs rose up out of their clothes day by day and month by month, astonished at the way the mother's skin could shape itself to embrace the baby, and she was curious about the mysteries of giving birth.
Besides, Kate was thirty years old, and she never wanted to be in love again, which made marriage highly unlikely.
"Why would you do it? For money?" Courtney asked.
"Because—because pregnancy intrigues me," Kate said. "Because I've never had an opportunity to be pregnant, and my future is so unstable that I can't bring up a child properly. Single motherhood is out of the question. And because I was responsible for caregiving my father until he died, and during that time I had no choice but to think about death. I want to think about life for a change. Also, I—I've always longed for the experience of giving birth."
"Are you for real?" Courtney asked incredulously. "You mean you'd consider it?"
"Oh, I'd consider it, all right," Kate said.
"Either you're a crazy woman, or—but I don't think you're the least bit crazy. I like you," Courtney said.
"Do you really want a baby?" Kate asked.
"I'd love to be a mother. I just don't want to be pregnant," Courtney said.
"Then—"
"Will you? Honestly?"
"I'd like to. I would," Kate said impulsively. She envisioned her pregnant self stepping cranelike through intertidal mud flats as she moved from one oyster bed to another. She would be the picture of beauty and grace, and she would give birth effortlessly, steeped in joy and sensitivity toward the new life she was bringing into the world.
Courtney smiled, a gleeful smile that nevertheless lit up her beautiful features, and that made Kate feel even better. She didn't know anything about Courtney's ex-husband's looks, but if the baby would look like Courtney, with her reddish-gold hair and violet eyes, it would be a beautiful baby indeed.
"You're exactly the kind of woman I'd want to bear my baby," Courtney said. "You're decent, intelligent, educated—don't you have some advanced degrees?"
"I have a Ph.D. in marine biology," Kate said.
"So you're actually
Dr.
Sinclair?"
"I don't use the title socially."
"No matter. Of course, if you decided to do this, you'd have to go to the fertility clinic. There'd be tests and you'd need to take hormones to make the embryos attach to the lining of your uterus and so on."
"I don't mind," Kate said. Such talk made her feel very comfortable; oyster larvae had to attach to a suitable surface in order to become adult oysters. Human embryos had to "set" to become babies, too. What could be more natural?
"I'd pay your medical expenses, of course. What's your fee?"
"I—well, whatever's fair. I don't know how such things are done." Kate still couldn't quite believe that this conversation was taking place.
"I'll have my lawyer draw up some papers," Courtney said, and she named a sum of money that seemed exorbitant to Kate.
"I can't accept that much," Kate said. "Maybe just my living expenses."
"Good enough," said Courtney. "Shall we shake on it?"
Kate extended her hand, and Courtney's fingers gripped hers.
"Done," Courtney said. She stood up. "I'd better get back to the group, or Grandma might find out I'm shirking my duties. My lawyer will be in touch. We'll need a contract, and he'll attend to it."
"I see that they're putting out more sandwiches," Kate said.
"Enjoy," Courtney said, and with a little wave she disappeared among the weaving clumps of pink and blue cabbage roses.
"Kate, dear, I do hope you're having a good time," said Willadeen, whose ample bosom materialized at Kate's elbow just as Courtney took her leave.
"Lovely," Kate said as she scooped several sandwiches onto her plate, spared a nod for Willadeen, and walked away as a jolt of thunder rattled the windowpanes.
Several of the ladies oohed and ahhed and shot nervous glances out the windows. A few of them broke off from their groups and left, and, still munching, Kate took advantage of the commotion surrounding their departures to slip out a side door and head for the dock.
After a hurried side trip into the Merry Lulu Tavern, where Gump, the ferry captain, was engaged in emphatic conversation with an assortment of cronies, she persuaded him to head back toward the island.
Gump's white beard and mustache bristled in irritation as he cast the ferry off from the dock. He spared a dubious look at the clouds overhead. "Get struck by lightning, don't blame me," he grumbled as he coaxed the ferry's engine to life from the wheelhouse.
"We're way ahead of the storm," Kate called up to him as she clung to the lurching railing.
"Says you," was the shouted comment.
"Oh, Gump, don't fuss," Kate said.
"You get fool ideas," was all he said, and Kate wondered what Gump, her friend and protector since childhood, would say about her latest.
After she disembarked at the landing on Yaupon Island, Kate ran through the first spattering of raindrops to the lighthouse. It was a place that had seen much history, having been built before the War Between the States. In 1898, when Yaupon Light had been superseded by larger lighthouses, the federal government, which owned the bluff where it stood, had ceded the lighthouse and keeper's quarters to Kate's great-great-grandfather, and it had been in her family ever since.
Kate had always loved the island, but she especially loved the weathered brick lighthouse in whose quarters she had lived from the time that she was a small child. It was going to be a terrible wrench to leave, but leave she must. In the meantime she intended to enjoy every minute on the island, even if it meant butting heads with Willadeen from time to time.
Once inside the keeper's quarters, she caught a glimpse of herself in the cloudy full-length mirror on the old wardrobe in the hall. She spread her long fingers across her abdomen, feeling the sharp jutting of her hipbones on each side of the soft round place where the baby would grow.
Oysters almost always attached themselves where other oysters were already established. They congregated because togetherness increased their chances for reproduction. Kate had not congregated, and she'd thought she had no chance to experience what must be a woman's most exalted condition.
Now, as the result of a casual conversation, she might bear a baby. From an empty life which lately had seemed to have no purpose, she could progress to nine months filled with hope and the satisfaction of doing something special for someone else.