She flipped through several pages and then stopped. “This is wrong.” She sat down and took a pencil, eraser, and sharpener from her desk drawer. She erased several formulas.
“All of this is hard for you,” I said.
“I want them to give it up.” She started over, writing several formulas in a column.
“I understand how you feel.”
Through the window, a bright red cardinal, perched on a nearby branch, was calling out to its mate.
“How come you don’t visit your son?” She erased her work again, and this time she erased so hard that she tore a small hole in the paper. “Goddamn it.” She threw the eraser at the window in an apparent attempt to startle the cardinal. But the bird just fluttered its wings. “Everyone’s talking about a baby that doesn’t even exist.”
“I miss my son.” I did. I missed Jasper from the bottom of my heart. I ached to hold him in my arms. I’d worked hard to create memories, and over time my child had grown so clear to me. I could hold on to the notion that I would be reunited with Jasper. I thought about the work I could do in my studio, creating even more memories that would provide me with hours of happiness. The pain I was experiencing was the pain of a mother, an artist, a creator. Jasper was my creation, but eventually I would have to release him. With love comes loss.
“I long for Jasper,” I said. “We FaceTime every day.”
“Can I FaceTime with him?”
“He’s shy.”
Natalie looked down at her homework. “What does he like?”
“Surfing. He lives near the beach in Venice.”
She drew spirals on the side of the page.
“He has an imaginary friend named Spiro,” I said.
She smiled for the first time since I’d arrived at their house that day. “Jasper could visit you. You could visit him.”
“I’m visiting him next week.”
“Oh.” Her spirals grew larger.
“I know it’s probably hard for you to understand the surrogacy. I care about you and your mom and your dad. I love all of you.”
“You haven’t known us that long.”
“I feel as if I’ve known you forever.” That was true. From the moment I’d met Amelia, I felt like she knew me, and I knew her.
Natalie shifted from spirals to a vortex.
I paused, trying to find the right words: “I don’t think your mom is going to give up on the idea of a baby.”
She continued drawing a vortex that appeared to be spinning around a black hole. “I just want to get out of here,” she said.
My pulse quickened again. I took her hand in mine. “I think that as soon as your mom has a baby, she’ll act the way you want her to act.”
“You’re wrong.”
The cardinal landed on a branch that was even closer to Natalie’s window.
“What do you think would make you feel better?” I asked.
“I want my parents to die.”
Her bedroom felt warm and close. I had a strong urge to open the window.
“I want my mom to be my mom,” she said. “Just because she cries, doesn’t mean that she’s a good person. My mom wants people to pay attention to her. That’s why she cries.”
She turned her eyes to look out the window. I followed her gaze. The bird appeared to be staring at us.
“I never cry anymore,” she said.
I understood why. Amelia had taken the role of the person who cries.
Natalie stood and walked to the window. “Why is it looking at us?” The bird didn’t move. “My mom wasn’t like this before she was obsessed by a baby. She didn’t cry all the time. She just worked.”
She collapsed her body onto the large beanbag in the middle of the room. “Sometimes people came to take a tour of the house. Mom was happy because they’d say it was beautiful.”
She leaned back on the beanbag and pulled her knees tightly into her chest. “And then sometimes, on those days, me and Mom went to the bookstore and got ice cream sundaes.”
“You’ll do those things again.”
I heard a loud noise and turned in time to see the bird crashing head-on into the window. Natalie screamed. The cardinal dropped toward the ground.
Natalie leapt to the far side of the room, away from the windows. “Help!”
“It’s OK.” I walked to the window and looked down.
A minute later Fritz appeared in the bedroom doorway. “What’s wrong?”
“That bird tried to break into the house!” Natalie cried.
“A cardinal sometimes attacks its reflection in the glass,” Fritz said. “It thinks it sees another bird.”
Natalie was still breathing heavily. “Is he dead?” she asked me.
“I think so,” I said.
She chewed on her nails in an agitated manner. She seemed to feel complicit in the bird’s death because she’d witnessed it. “It’s such a stupid bird.” She approached the window. “Why couldn’t he tell it was a reflection?” She gestured toward her own barely visible image in the glass. “It doesn’t look real. It doesn’t look like anything.”
I put my arm around her shoulders.
“Let’s go downstairs for a drink,” Fritz said, “to take the edge off.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Downstairs I found Amelia frenetically cleaning the kitchen counters, though they appeared clean already. She was rubbing one spot repeatedly, as if it were stained. She looked up when I entered.
“I think we should celebrate,” she said. “I think we should draw up a legal document.” She was speaking fast, and her eyes were bouncing around the room.
Natalie turned on the television in the media room. Fritz sat at the dining table with a bourbon and soda to sort a stack of mail. Amelia and Fritz were acting as if they’d forgotten about their plans to go out.
“You two should leave whenever you need to,” I said.
“Amelia,” Fritz said, “we’ve gotta make an appearance.” He pushed the stack of mail aside and disappeared upstairs with his bourbon and soda.
“The last two years,” she said to
