Then Came You (31 page)

I believed her. Who could have even imagined a situation like this one? My father, the biological father of the baby, was dead. My stepmother, the legal mother (technically, she would become the mother as soon as she signed the baby’s birth certificate), had disappeared without bothering even to make an appearance at her beloved’s funeral or to return for her child’s birth. Which meant that, according to a document the two of them had signed that I’d never known about, I was, now that I’d consented, the guardian of my newborn half-sibling. I would be responsible for raising it. Her. Whatever. It was astonishing. One day I’d been a regular twenty-four-year-old, living in my first apartment, working at my first job, waking up, getting dressed, swiping my card through the subway turnstile, standing on a train with the swaying, iPodded worker bees, thinking about whether the guy I’d been spending all my weekends with was my boyfriend if I’d only kissed him once . . . then the phone rings and there’s someone I’d never met on the other end of the line, saying that I was a mother.

It had taken me a while to realize that India was actually gone. The first clue came two days after my father’s death, when the funeral home called to tell me that no one had brought them clothes for him to wear in his coffin. “Have you heard from his wife?” I’d asked, and the receptionist said that, regrettably, they had been unable to reach her. I took the subway to their apartment. “Hey, Ricky,” I said to the day doorman, a man I’d known since I’d learned to walk in the lobby. “Have you seen Mrs. Croft around?” It still cut to call her Mrs. Croft—that was, after all, my mother’s name—but it was better than “my stepmother” or “Dad’s new sidepiece.”

“Not since the day your father passed,” he said.

I filed that away and took the elevator upstairs. The apartment
was as spotless as always. The chef was wiping down the counters in the kitchen; one maid was dusting in the living room and the other was ironing sheets in the laundry room. But there was no sign of India.

In my father’s dressing room, I picked out a navy-blue suit and a red-and-gold tie, then added a white button-down shirt with his initials monogrammed at the cuff; boxer shorts and an undershirt; socks and a pair of glossy black loafers, and zipped everything into a garment bag. I had already found the picture I wanted, a shot of the five of us when Trey and Tommy and I were little and my mother was still around, posing in front of the Grand Canyon. I would tuck it in the pocket of his suit jacket, so it would be with him, wherever he was going.

I tried to find India. I called and called, leaving voice mails, sending e-mails, pestering her assistant right up until the morning of the service, at which point it was too obvious to ignore: she was gone. The minister didn’t mention it, delivering a pleasant and generic eulogy that mentioned my father’s loved ones without naming them. I sat in the front row of the church, against the hard-backed pew. Where had she gone? What was she planning? And what would happen if she didn’t come back before the baby was born?

After the service—small, just for the family—everyone came back to the apartment. Someone, probably Paul, had arranged for food and a waitstaff, strangers in white shirts and black pants or skirts discretely moving through the room holding platters or picking up empty plates and glasses. I stood by the front door, next to a girl who’d been hired to hang coats on the rolling wire coat racks my mother had bought for occasions like these—well, not like this exactly, but any time we hosted more than a few dozen people—accepting condolences and answering questions.
No, we haven’t seen her. No, we’ve been unable to reach her. No, I have no idea where she went.

After enduring an hour of this, I’d gotten Tommy to take my place. Telling myself that I wasn’t snooping but investigating, I slipped into their bedroom and, then, to India’s dressing room. India had kept the dove-gray walls and the ivory carpets and crown moldings, but she’d reupholstered my mother’s zebra-print chair in pink toile and had replaced the antique gold-framed mirror with something high-tech and fancy, circled by pink-tinted bulbs.
The better to see your Botox in,
I thought, which was a little unfair because before she’d espoused the principles of spirituality and a vegan diet, my mom had shot her share of fillers.

I trailed my finger along the sleeves of India’s blouses, the tweeds and cottons of her skirts, the silk and wool of her sweaters. I considered the sequined and beaded evening gowns, each in its own zippered plastic bag. It would be impossible to figure out whether anything was missing. She could have packed for a long weekend or a week away or a three-week cruise that would take her from Alaska to the tropics, and I’d never be able to tell from the contents of her closet. There was simply too much stuff. Her laptop, which I found in the media room, was what told the story.

At first I’d tried to open her inbox, but it was locked and password protected, and, after it rejected
MARCUS
as a password, I’d quit trying. But her Internet browser opened with a single click, and she hadn’t erased her history.

“Oh my God.” I hurried back into the living room, dodging a few well-meaning aunts and cousins and my father’s assistants weeping in the corner, and found Darren, who was eating cocktail shrimp and staring out the window, down at the park.

He perked up when he saw me. “Hey, Bettina.”

“I need to show you something,” I told him, and took his hand and led him to the media room, where I’d left her laptop open.

“She bought tickets to Mexico . . . and Los Angeles . . . and the Bahamas . . . and Vancouver . . . and Paris . . . and Kentucky. All the flights left four days ago.”

He cut and pasted the information and e-mailed it to himself. “I can call the airlines, ask if she made the flights.”

“So we’ll know where she went.”

“But not where she is. I mean, say she went to Topeka. She could have bought a ticket in the airport from there to Los Angeles. Or Paris. Or Cancun. She could be . . .”

“... anywhere by now,” I said. The house phone rang. A minute later, the housekeeper, looking apologetic, was at my side.

“Missy Bettina? Sorry to interrupt, but this lady’s been calling for Mrs. Croft. She says it’s important.”

I lifted the phone to my ear. “Yes?”

That was when I first spoke to Leslie Stalling of the Princeton Fertility Clinic. She apologized for bothering me during such a difficult time. She told me she was sorry to be adding to my worry and stress. Then she said it was imperative that she get in touch with India Croft.

“You and me both, sister,” I said. Leslie Stalling sucked in her breath. “I’m sorry,” I said. “We haven’t seen or heard from her in days, and now I’m here at my father’s house, and I think . . . it’s kind of unbelievable, really, but it’s looking like she left town.”

“Oh, dear,” Leslie Stallings said. “That’s what I was afraid of.” She paused, a little three-second break to serve as a transition between life as I’d known it, ending forever, and life with a baby beginning. Then she’d told me about the arrangements my father and India had made.

Three weeks later, Rory was born.

I’d met Annie, the surrogate, in the hospital in Pennsylvania, and was shocked that she was so young. Annie was exactly my age, although that was where the similarities ended. Annie wore a wedding ring, but when I arrived there was no husband
or kids in the hospital room, just a skinny woman with a sour look on her face standing beside the bed. “I’ll give you two some privacy,” she’d said, and shut the door harder than she had to, leaving me and Annie alone.

“My sister,” said Annie. Her light-brown hair was pulled back from her face in a ponytail, and her voice got higher and higher as she asked me questions. “You haven’t heard from India?” she’d asked, looking so hopeful that I felt sick when I shook my head
no.
The baby was in her arms, wrapped in a pink-and-blue blanket with a knitted cap pulled down over her forehead. I’d come, as Leslie had instructed, with a diaper bag packed with wipes and diapers, bottles of formula, and a brand-new car seat. “Are you going to be all right?” Annie had asked.

“I’ll be fine,” I said firmly, with much more confidence than I felt. At least I’d been around a baby somewhat recently, my niece, Violet, but the truth was that because my brother and sister-in-law had been so determined to chronicle every moment of their great adventure, setting up a Flickr account and a Facebook page, blogging about the pregnancy and the labor and, God help us all, live-Tweeting the birth, I’d ended up ignoring as much of her infancy as I could, because paying attention meant, according to Tommy, being bombarded with close-up shots of my sister-in-law’s nipples. (“Can’t I just sign up to see the baby pictures?” I’d asked, and Tommy had shaken his head and said, “Slippery slope, man.”)

“She’s a sweetheart,” said Annie, and turned her face toward the window. I could hear her sniffling. It made me feel wretched. She hadn’t done anything except what she’d been paid to do, and I couldn’t imagine how she was feeling, thinking she’d been making a baby for a happily married trophy wife and instead handing it over to the trophy wife’s twenty-four-year-old stepdaughter, who’d never had so much as a pet goldfish and who killed every plant she’d ever owned (although I hoped no one
had told her that part). I put the car seat down and put one hand awkwardly on her forearm, the one that didn’t have an IV needle stuck in it.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “This was all a bit of a shock, but I’ve got plenty of resources. I’ve hired a doula, and India left all kinds of things for the baby.”

This, at least, was true. Even I had to admit that the nursery was exquisite, with a crib and an antique rocker and a rug with a pattern of flowers around its border. The dresser and the closet were both loaded with everything a very fashionable baby could possibly need. There were clothes in sizes newborn, zero to three months, and three to six months. India had arranged for a diaper service and had bought about a thousand scented aloe vera baby wipes and a wipe warmer. The white wicker toy chest was filled with stuffed animals, lambs and bears and kittens, and the bookcase was filled with fairy tales, books by Maurice Sendak, Sandra Boynton, and Dr. Seuss. There were two business cards stuck to the refrigerator, one from a pediatrician and one from a doula, both of whom, it turned out, were on standby, just waiting to be notified about the baby’s arrival. The doula turned out to be a kind of hippie-fied, glorified baby nurse, a woman from Park Slope with a wild tangle of curls and a calm, earth-mother presence who’d been hired to be on duty for the first twelve weeks of the baby’s life. The pediatrician was the woman three blocks away who’d taken care of me and my brothers when we were little.

Standing in front of the refrigerator, looking at the shopping list written out in India’s neat hand: greens and lean meats, ground turkey and fish and fresh fruit—I thought about how I’d told India I would ruin her. I didn’t know what she’d done versus what she’d paid other people to do to get ready for Rory’s arrival, but she’d done a lot, and, certainly, her preparations didn’t hint that she’d planned on bolting, or that she was using the baby as
a prop, or a means to an end. But she’d left . . . and no matter how pretty the nursery’s flowered curtains, how cunning the crib bumpers and the embroidered pillow reading
dream time
that hung from a pink-and-green ribbon on the door, no matter that she’d arranged for a doctor and a doula, the fact was, she was gone, and I was stuck.

There were a million things for me to do and read and buy and figure out. I’d need more formula . . . and baby food . . . and a high chair, and one of those crazy little vibrating bouncy seats that had always made Violet look like she was being electrocuted. I’d also have to find other babies for Rory to be friends with. There was, I knew, at least one woman in my dad’s building with a smallish-looking baby. We’d exchanged hellos in the elevator a few times, and while it was true that I hadn’t noticed whether her baby was a boy or a girl, I would make a point of asking the next time I saw them.

Annie wiped her eyes while I signed the papers. “You know how to work the car seat?” she asked. “Are you sure you’ll be okay?” I told her I’d be fine with the car seat and that I was positive I’d be fine. I was almost out the door with the baby in my arms when she said, “Oh! My milk!”

“Pardon?”

She pointed to a scary-looking machine next to her bed. Clear tubes ran into funnel-shaped suction cups that were screwed into bottles with ounce markings on their sides. “I was going to overnight India my breast milk for the first month. Should I still do that?”

“That would be very nice.” The baby was getting heavy. I shifted her from my left arm to my right. Her head flopped back alarmingly, and I adjusted it fast, hoping Annie hadn’t seen. “Do I pay you by the bottle, or how does it work?”

She shook her head. “You don’t have to pay me anything. India set it all up. I’ve got a FedEx account. They’ll stop by in the
morning with the dry-ice packs and the boxes, and you should have it every day by noon.” She reached onto the bedside table, where she had two of the little bottles, each one full and labeled with a strip of tape indicating, I supposed, the time she’d pumped it. “Here. This will get you started.”

What do you say to a woman who’s just handed you four ounces of her breast milk? One of the bottles was still warm. I shifted the baby again, trying not to cringe as I put the milk into the diaper bag. “Thank you. We’ll be in touch.”

“Send pictures,” she said. I could tell that she was getting ready to cry again, so I quickly set the baby into the car seat, fumbled the buckles shut, and hurried to the exit, where Manuel was waiting.

That had been seven days ago, and the baby seemed to be doing well, so far. If she sensed that she was at the center of a storm, being cared for by people who were not her biological parents, she gave no indication. “She’s good-natured,” Tia the doula told me, pointing out that Rory cried only when she was hungry or wanted to be held or rocked. That might have been true . . . but if it was, she was hungry or lonely for most of the time she was awake. Worse, she wasn’t cute. To my eyes, not only did she not resemble anyone in my family, but she didn’t look like she was completely through being formed. Her eyebrows were so faint they were almost invisible. She had stubby lashes, mottled pink skin, and an unfortunate case of acne . . . but she was filling out a bit, losing some of her scrawniness and starting to look a little more like the plump pink babies I’d grown familiar with from diaper commercials.