‘Marisa,’ Kate says, and she tries to be as clear and concise as possible. ‘Jake’s my partner. We’ve been together for six years. We couldn’t conceive. We asked you to be our surrogate and move in with us. You’re carrying our baby. Ours. Not yours.’
Marisa doesn’t say anything for a while. She turns away, huddling into herself and Kate can see her picking at the ragged cuticles of her right hand. They sit in silence for several minutes before Marisa opens her mouth to speak.
‘The thing is, Kate—’
She is interrupted by the sound of a key turning in a lock. The front door opens. Jake is home.
Then
19
They couldn’t believe it at first.No one could. Carol said that it took some couples years to find a suitable surrogate. It was very rare to match with someone on your first social event. But Kate and Jake had both felt an immediate affinity with Marisa. Looking back later, Kate would wonder whether it was their desperation that made them want to find this affinity where there was none.
And yet, the three of them chatted easily that night about both the oddness (and the comic potential) of the setting they found themselves in. Marisa had asked a bit about their fertility journey because everyone called it a journey, like some bad 1980s rock anthem, but her questions had not been intrusive or prurient. She listened, and nodded, and seemed genuinely empathetic. She told them that she had always wanted children, but wasn’t ready for her own quite yet. She said she knew first-hand from older friends and from her own mother how difficult infertility struggles could be.
‘There’s seven years between me and my sister,’ Marisa explained. ‘My mother had a string of miscarriages in that time. It was awful for her.’
Kate looked at her, and wondered if infertility could be genetically inherited. Marisa, as if reading her thoughts, said: ‘But I’ve had everything checked out and it all seems good, and I guess I thought this was something I could do for someone else, while I was still young, in the way no one was able to do for my mother, you know?’
She had that millennial way of speaking, littered with likes and unnecessary question marks that left sentences trailing upwards.
‘If it’s not an impertinent question, how old are you?’ Jake asked. He’d had four vodkas by then and was feeling looser than usual.
‘I’m twenty-eight.’
She spoke with such openness, such a complete lack of guile, that Kate was charmed. She was so used to dealing with cynical media types, their outlook on the world dulled after years of living in a big city where being cool carried a higher premium than being enthusiastic, and Marisa came across as untouched, like a doll who had only just been removed from her cellophane wrapping. She had grown up in the countryside, she said, and to Kate, Marisa still seemed a touch old-fashioned, like a heroine plucked from the pages of a Thomas Hardy novel, with healthy bones and tawny hair and a glowing smile and a sense of oneness with her surroundings. There was a purity to her. Kate could quite easily imagine her with a baby.
Marisa left the party before they did, saying that she had to be up early the next morning, and Kate liked this about her too: the fact that she was sensible and comfortable enough in her own skin to go when the party was just hitting its stride.
‘I’d love to keep in touch with you guys,’ Marisa said. ‘If you felt it was appropriate, of course. No pressure!’
Jake glanced at Kate, who gave a tiny nod.
‘We’d like that too,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you could take my number?’
‘Sure,’ Marisa said, and she fished out an old iPhone model with a cracked screen.
‘Wow,’ Jake said. ‘You must have dropped this from a great height.’
Marisa laughed.
‘I’ve been meaning to get it replaced, but you know how it is.’
Jake typed in his number and passed the phone back to Marisa.
‘It’s been lovely meeting you both,’ she said. She didn’t make a move to kiss them on the cheek, and Kate was relieved. If this were going to go any further, the boundaries would have to be clear from the start.
‘It’s been so great meeting you too,’ Kate said, and she meant it. For the first time in four years, she felt a small bubbling of hope.
Carol told them not to get carried away.
‘There’s a long, long road ahead,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to get to know each other now, to check that you’re really compatible and that you cantrust each other with this incredibly precious thing. And Marisa is unusual, let’s not forget.’
‘In what way?’ Kate asked.
‘Well, she’s younger than most surrogates we get and she hasn’t previously had a baby herself, which we do tend to prefer. It’s not a deal-breaker, obviously, but it’s something to be aware of. She’s also single, so won’t have the support of a partner. You need to be confident that she’ll have a good support network going through this.’
‘But isn’t her relative youth a bonus?’ Jake asked. ‘Fertility-wise, I mean.’
