Cradled by His Enemy

I was not supposed to hold him. Page nineteen of the contract said so. Clause four. The surrogate will not touch the child after birth. The surrogate will hand him over within ninety seconds. The surrogate will not look at him too long. The surrogate will not cry. I had signed it in green ink because the lawyer's black pen had run out. Ninety seconds. That is not long when a nurse pulls a screaming eight pound baby out of your body and lays him on your bare chest because there is nobody else in the room to take him. Nobody. The two leather chairs by the window were empty. One was for the mother. One was for the father. There was a bottle of water on the small table for her. A bottle of champagne for him. The seals were not broken. "Where are they?" I said. The nurse did not answer. "Where is the family." She put a warm towel on the baby's back and would not look at me. "Where is Mrs. Ainsworth." "Honey," she said, "you need to rest now." "Tell me where she is." She did not. The baby was wet and warm and his hair was dark and stuck to his head and he stopped crying when he heard my heartbeat. Just stopped. His tiny mouth opened against my collarbone. His eyes opened. They were grey. Mine were grey too. Half the world had grey eyes. I told myself the same thing four times. "Ma'am," the nurse said, "I have to take him to the warmer." "One more second." "Ma'am." "Please. One." She gave me four. I put my mouth against the soft spot on the top of his head and I whispered the name I was not allowed to say. "Atticus. Hi, Atticus." He blinked at me. Then the door opened without a knock. Nobody opens a door in a maternity ward without knocking. There are rules. There are signs. The door opened anyway, and a man walked in who I had only ever seen in a magazine in a laundry room two summers ago. Caspian Thorne Ainsworth. Black coat. Black suit. His hair was wet. There was a cut on his jaw that had not stopped bleeding right. He looked at the nurse. He looked at the baby on my chest. He looked at me. He stopped. He stopped the way a man stops when he walks into a room and finds something he buried twenty years ago sitting at the table. "You," he said. One word. His voice broke on it. I pulled the sheet up over my chest with the hand that was not holding the baby. "I am sorry. I know the contract. She just put him here. I did not ask." He did not hear me. The nurse stepped forward. "Mr. Ainsworth, we should take the baby to the warmer." "Leave him." "Sir, protocol." "Leave him." He had not raised his voice. The nurse picked up her clipboard and walked out and closed the door behind her, and I was alone with him, half naked, bleeding, holding his son. He crossed the room in four steps. He did not go to the baby. He came to the bed. He stood over me. He put one hand on the metal rail. He was not steady on his feet. There were grey shadows under his eyes. "What is your name," he said. "You know my name. It is on the contract." "Tell me anyway." "Wren Solivane." "Your full name." "Wren Marisole Solivane." Something went out of his face. "Mr. Ainsworth." "Wren." "Where is your wife. She was supposed to be here. Where is she." He did not answer. "Mr. Ainsworth." He sat down. Not in the chair. On the edge of the bed. On the small bit of mattress beside my hip. I should have pulled away from him. I did not. His weight was the only thing keeping him up. "Seraphine died," he said. "Eleven weeks ago." The room got very small. "What." "Pancreatic cancer." "That is not possible. The doula. The check ins. The vitamins were still coming." "Yes." "Until eleven weeks ago." "Yes." I had told myself she was too sick to coordinate. I had told myself she was resting. I had been singing to a dead woman's baby in the bath for eleven weeks. "Why didn't anyone tell me," I said. "My lawyer advised against contact." "Your lawyer." "He was worried you would change your mind." "I would not have." He looked at me. "I would not have. I needed the money. For my sister. I would not have." He kept looking at me. "Why are you looking at me like that." "Like what." "Like you know me." He was quiet. Then he said, "What was your mother's name." I should not have answered. I had just been told the woman I had grown a baby for had been dead for eleven weeks and I was holding the baby anyway and the father of the baby was sitting on my hospital bed asking me about my dead mother. Nothing in my life had prepared me for this conversation. "Why." "Wren. What was her name." "She died when I was eight." "What was her name." "Ilse." He closed his eyes. "Her maiden name." "Why are you asking me this." "Please." That word. He said it like it cost him something. "Vossberg," I said. "Ilse Vossberg." He stood up. He walked to the window. He stood with his back to me for ten seconds. He turned around. "Your grandmother. Her name was Agnese." I sat up. The baby made a sound against my chest. "How do you know my grandmother's name." "She lived in Hellebore. On the coast. Yellow house. There was a fig tree." "How." "There was a sugar bowl with blue birds on it." "How." "You had a stuffed rabbit. The ear was sewn back on with green thread." I had a stuffed rabbit. I still had it. In a box. The ear was sewn back on with green thread because my mother had not had any white thread the day the dog ripped it. I had never told anyone about the rabbit. "Who are you," I whispered. He came back to the bed. He did not sit this time. "Twenty years ago," he said, "my father went to your grandmother's house with a ring." I could not breathe. "He had a son. She had a granddaughter. They had an understanding. The wedding was to happen when you turned twenty two." "Mr. Ainsworth." "He came back six months later and took the ring back. He never told me. He told me only last year. On his deathbed. He thought it was a funny story. He thought I would laugh." He stopped. "I did not laugh." I could not speak. "I came to the hospital this morning to take my son home. I walked into this room and I saw the woman holding him and I knew. Before you told me your name. I knew." "Knew what." "That you were the girl on the kitchen floor." The baby made a small sound. I looked down at him. His grey eyes were closing. His tiny hand had wrapped around my finger. "I have to go," I said. "Wren." "I have to leave. Take him. Take your son." "Wren. Listen." "No." "There is a car coming for you tomorrow morning at six." "No." "My driver. Aldo. He will bring you to the estate." "I am not going to your estate." "Your sister's next round of chemotherapy is Thursday." I froze. "Saint Ambrose. Ward seven. Bed three. Linnet. The protocol she is on has a sixty one percent response rate. There is one at Whitlock Cantor with ninety four. It costs four hundred and twelve thousand dollars. I have paid for it." I stared at him. "I paid for it last night. Before I came here. Before I knew your name. I would have paid for it anyway." "Why." "Because I owed you something. I did not know what. I do now." He took an envelope out of his coat pocket. He put it on the table beside the bed. He walked to the door. He stopped with his hand on the handle. "His name is Atticus," he said. I made a sound. "I heard you," he said. "When I opened the door. I heard you name him." He left. I cried so hard the nurse came running back. "Honey, honey, what did he say to you." I could not answer. I had carried a stranger's baby to save my sister. The stranger was not a stranger. The stranger was the boy my grandmother had promised me to before I could walk. And his wife had been dead for eleven weeks. And the wife had a sister. I did not know about the sister yet. The sister was on a plane. The envelope on the table had a key in it. Brass. Old. No tag. And a folded piece of paper. “The chapel on the estate. Eleven o'clock tomorrow morning. The priest is coming at ten. You do not have to say anything except yes. After a year, if you want to leave, I will let you leave and you will never see me again and the boy will have a mother on his birth certificate and you will have a name on yours. That is all I am asking. One year.” “Caspian.” I read it three times. I put it back in the envelope. I got out of the bed on legs that did not work. I packed the duffel bag. I walked out of Mount Cedars Private at eleven at night in a hospital gown and a thrift store coat. I took the service elevator because the main one had cameras. I walked four blocks in the rain to my sister's hospital. Linnet was asleep with her bald head on a pillow that had foxes on it because she said the adult pillowcases smelled like soup. I sat in the chair beside her bed. I bled through the pad and through my jeans into the green vinyl seat. I did not move. At five fifty in the morning my phone buzzed. “The car is outside.” I deleted it. At six oh four. “The car is still outside. Aldo will wait. He will wait all day if he has to. Please.” I deleted it. At six nineteen. “Whatever you decide, Linnet's treatment is paid. That part is not a trade. But Wren, the boy slept for forty minutes and then he woke up and he will not stop crying. The nurse said babies sometimes do that when they cannot smell the person they were inside of. He is in a bassinet next to me. He has not stopped. Please come. Just for a day. Just so he can sleep.” I read it three times. I went down to the car. Aldo was sixty something. He did not say a word. He opened the back door and handed me a wool blanket and a thermos and closed the door and drove. The thermos had hot chocolate in it. With cinnamon. My mother had made hot chocolate with cinnamon. It was the only thing she had ever known how to make. She had died when I was eight and I had never told anyone, not Linnet, not anyone. Somebody had told him. I drank it. I did not cry. I watched the city go by through tinted glass and I held the thermos in both hands because they were shaking, and somewhere between the bridge and the long road through the pines I understood, without being told, that I was not going to a meeting. I was going to a wedding. My wedding. I did not know yet that twenty years ago, in a yellow house on the coast, an old man had stood in my grandmother's kitchen with a velvet box in his hand. I did not know yet that the boy had been twenty one. That I had been four. I did not know that in three weeks a woman in a black dress would walk into the dining room of the house I was driving to, with the same face as the dead wife, because the dead wife had a twin sister nobody had mentioned. I did not know any of it. I knew only this. The baby in the back of that chapel was mine. He had never not been mine. And I was about to marry his father.