Alan Brennert by Cradle

Author:Cradle [Cradle]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-01-26T11:49:32+00:00

womb for hire, a shell. But then (she told herself) that’s all she’d wanted to be, wasn’t it?

One night well into the ninth month, Marguerite awoke to find Sondra missing

—

having missed dinner, and apparently given the household help the proverbial slip. Frantic, Marguerite searched the house in a panic, then raced onto the grounds. There were a good fifteen acres of land surrounding the house, a labyrinth of hedges and gardens, and it was here that Marguerite, with vast relief, discovered her— skipping flat stones across the surface of the koi pond. Marguerite was brought up short: Sondra suddenly looked nothing like the crass nymphet selected for that very crassness land so less likely to contest the baby’s custody) but like a lonely little girl.

She heard Marguerite behind her; turned. “Hi.”

Marguerite took a step toward her. “You … had us worried. Maria said you didn’t show up for dinner.”

Sondra shrugged. “Wasn’t hungry.” She turned back, skipped the last stone across

the pond. “Had another anemia spell this afternoon. Still feeling kind of woozy.”

Marguerite moved a bit closer. “I’m sorry. We never expected this to be so painful for you.”

Sondra smiled lopsidedly. “Yeah, well … you want to hear something really weird?” She shook her head in bemusement. “As shitty as this pregnancy has been

… I’m actually kind of … glad …I’m pregnant. Is that certifiable, or

what?”

Marguerite felt a little chill, and it wasn’t the night air. Was Sondra bonding

with the unborn child, after all? “Glad? How so?”

Sondra shrugged. “I look around at your house … at these grounds … I think about all the money you must have —”

Damn, Marguerite thought. A renegotiation ploy? Is that —

“And I think …” Sondra hesitated; Marguerite steeled herself. “I think about

how lucky this kid is going to be,” Sondra said quietly. “How much you’ll be able to do for him. And it makes me feel …proud, I guess … that I’m helping him have a better life than I’ve had. You know what I mean?”

Marguerite stood there, surprised by Sondra’s response, and more than a little ashamed at her own.

She put a hand, gently, on Sondra’s arm.

“Yes,” she said, at length. “I know exactly what you mean.”

Sondra’s contractions began at two o’clock Wednesday afternoon, exactly two hundred and seventy days after the in vitro fertilization. The first one lasted

about forty seconds, though Sondra swore it felt more like a minute and a half;

the second came twenty minutes later. Within the hour Chernow had arrived to whisk Sondra, behind the UV-tinted windows of the Mercedes, to the private clinic in Santa Monica, where the contractions began coming fast and thick. It was three-thirty in the afternoon.

“Where’s Marguerite?” Sondra gasped, a nurse sopping her forehead, and Chernow fell back on the if-necessary, pre-arranged lie that she was in San Diego on business, but would be here just as soon as she could. He hoped that Sondra’s labor would, like most first-time mothers, last at least thirteen or fourteen hours — placing the actual birth well after sundown.

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