“Just don’t tell Mom and Dad,” Mia said again.
“I won’t,” Warren said at last. “But I’ll tell you this. I’m the baby’s uncle, and I don’t like it.” There was an anger in his voice she had never heard before, at least not directed at her.
After that, she and Warren didn’t speak for a while. Every week, when she thought about calling him, she decided not to. Why call and argue again, she reasoned. In a few months the baby would be born, she would go back to her old life, and things would be as they had been. “Don’t get attached,” she said to her belly when the baby nudged her with a foot. It was never clear to her, even then, whether she was speaking to the baby, or to her belly, or to herself.
She and Warren were still not speaking when her mother called, very early in the morning, to tell her about the accident.
It had been snowy, this much she knew. He and Tommy Flaherty had been coming home late at night—where they’d been, her mother hadn’t said—and they’d taken a turn too fast and Tommy’s Buick had skidded and then overturned. Mia would not remember the details: that the roof of the car had been crushed in, that the emergency workers had had to cut the Buick open like a tin can, that neither Warren nor Tommy had been wearing their seat belts. She would not remember, at least for a while, about Tommy Flaherty in his hospital bed, with a punctured lung, a concussion, and seven broken bones, even though he’d grown up just up the hill from them, even though he and Warren had been friends for years, even though he’d once had a crush on her. She would remember only that Warren had been driving, and that now he was dead.
A plane ticket was expensive, but she couldn’t bear the thought of waiting, even an extra few hours. She wanted to be swallowed up by the house where she and Warren had grown up and played and argued and planned, where he no longer waited for her, which he would never enter again. She wanted to sink to her knees at the spot on the cold roadside where he had died. She wanted to see her parents, to not have to sit alone with the terrible numbness that threatened to swallow her up.
But when she stepped out of the taxi from the airport and came in the front door, her parents froze, staring at the bulge in her belly, which had grown too big for her to zip her coat. Mia’s hand drifted down to her waist, as if one palm could hide what was growing there.
“Mom,” she said. “Dad. It’s not what you think.”
A long silence unspooled in the kitchen, like gray ribbon. Hours and hours, it felt to Mia.
“Tell me,” her mother said at last. “Tell us what we think.”
“I mean.” Mia looked down at her belly, as if she herself were bewildered to find it there. “It isn’t my baby.” Inside, the baby gave a fierce kick.
“What do you mean, it isn’t your baby?” her mother said. “How can it not be your baby?”
“I’m a surrogate. I’m carrying it for this couple.” Mia found herself trying to explain: about the Ryans, about how kind they were, how much they wanted a baby, how happy they would be. She tried to focus on how much she was helping them, as if this were a charitable deed, purely altruistic: like volunteering at a soup kitchen, or adopting a dog from a shelter. But her mother understood immediately.
“These Ryans,” she said. “I suppose you’re doing this for them just out of the goodness of your heart?”
“No,” Mia admitted. “They’re paying me. When the baby is born.” She realized suddenly that she was still wearing her scarf and hat. A thin gray sludge trickled from her boot treads onto the cream-colored linoleum.
Her mother turned and headed for the doorway. “I can’t cope with this now,” she said, her voice fading as she stepped into the living room. “Not now.” At the foot of the staircase she stopped and hissed, with a venom that shocked Mia: “Your brother is dead—dead, you realize that?—and you come home like this?” Footsteps pounded up the steps.
Mia glanced at her father. She felt exactly as she had as a child, when she’d broken something or ruined something or spent on film the money that her mother had meant for clothes: in those moments her mother would rage and scream and run to her room, leaving Mia with her father, who would squeeze her hand and let the quiet lap over them like milk, then say quietly, “Buy a new one,” or “Give her an hour, and go apologize,” or sometimes, simply, “Fix it.” This was how they’d always fought. But this time her father did not take her hand. He did not say to her, Fix it. Instead he looked at her belly, as if he couldn’t bear to look at her face. His eyes were wet and his jaw clenched.
“Dad?” she said at last. She would have preferred shouting to this protracted, knife-sharp silence.
“I can’t believe you’d sell your own child,” he said, and then he, too, left the room.
They didn’t tell her to leave, but even after she hung her coat in the hall closet, set her bag down in her old bedroom, they didn’t speak to her. At dinner she sat at her old place at the table and her mother set a plate and fork in front of her and her father passed the casserole that one of their neighbors had brought, but they said nothing to her, and when she asked questions—When was the funeral going to be? Had they seen Warren?—they answered as briefly as possible. Mia gave up eventually and wound noodles and tuna around her fork. There was a whole stack of casseroles in the fridge, a leaning tower of Pyrex baking dishes crimped in foil. As if no one knew what to do in the face of such tragedy except to make the heaviest, heartiest, most prosaic dish they could, to give the bereaved something solid to hold on to. None of them mentioned, or looked at, Warren’s empty place by the window.