The Baby Merchant - Softcover

Reed, Kit

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0765315572 ISBN 13: 9780765315571

Verlag: Tor Books, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Pregnant and relegated to a home for unwed mothers on a world where healthy babies are rare commodities, Sasha Egan finds herself on a collision course with a famous broadcast journalist whose mentally unstable, barren attorney wife has demanded that he obtain a baby for her. By the author of Thinner Than Thou. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Kit Reed is the author of the Alex Award-winning Thinner Than Thou. Reed has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award and collections of her short fiction have been finalists for the James W. Tiptree Award. She lives in Middletown, CT, and teaches at Wesleyan University.

Kit Reed is the author of the Alex Award-winning Thinner Than Thou. Reed has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award and collections of her short fiction have been finalists for the James W. Tiptree Award. She lives in Middletown, CT, and teaches at Wesleyan University.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

BABY MERCHANT

One

The Provider

1.

Waking up on the worst day of your life so far you won't know why you are uneasy, only that everything looks OK, but something is not right. Sun's up, coffee's good; Sasha Egan is in pretty good shape, considering. Nothing wrong, exactly, but she can't quite shake the feeling.

"Go away," she says to no one. "Just go away."

About the obvious: Sasha is nothing like the sweet little hicks murmuring in the solarium, but here she is, trapped with a gaggle of betrayed prom queens and unwitting cheerleaders, castoff girlfriends and beaming fundamentalist kids bobbing in the sunlight like so many giant chrysanthemums. The regulation pastel scrubs, the Lite Rock piped into every room, the resolutely cheery decor, even the potted trees in the hallways make her despair, but she made an informed decision. Now she is here. It's not that she's pro-life, exactly, although she is at some deep level still a Catholic. She's here because she's pro this life.

Luellen Squiers tugs on her arm, wheedling. Nice kid, has the room next to hers. "Party in the solarium, Sashie, are you coming? Cookies from Mom."

"Great," she says.

"So come on. Come on, Sashie, aren't you coming?"

"Soon, OK?" She'd rather die, but usually she manages. Why dothese kids look up to her anyway? Maybe because she is older. She smiles until Luellen lets go.

"Why not now?" At the end of the hall, pregnant teenagers lounge on flowered sofas striped with sunlight, giggling over their morning milk and disintegrating brownies packed in wax paper by mothers who don't have a clue. Whatever their anxieties before they moved into the sunny dormitory at Newlife, whatever their second thoughts, the moment is past. They're happy to sink back into the arms of Newlife, which is the trendy new name the agency has given the Agatha Pilcher Home for Unwed Mothers, which is what they are.

It is-- face it-- what Sasha has become.

The timing couldn't be worse. In real life she is an M.F.A. student, a printmaker whose soul blisters the surface of her work. She spends all her work time chasing a vision she hasn't quite caught. The year she and Danny Gray lived together in Santa Barbara, she almost broke through. It wasn't breakthrough work but it did get her into the Massachusetts College of Art. When she's working sometimes she forgets to eat; she'll pass a window on her way out of the print shop and suddenly discover that she forgot to comb her hair. The work means more to her than Danny or any other man, and this baby ... God, what was she thinking? This just can't happen. Not now, not now! Until the test strip turned pink, her mentor at MassArt was grooming her for a fellowship in graphic arts in, oh God, Venice. A year in Italy, apprenticed to a printmaker she respects. Instead she's in the third-trimester wing at Newlife, stalking the halls like an outsider, which is also what she is.

Too bummed to be nice right now, she tells Luellen, "I can't."

The pregnant child's voice trails after her. "Oh-kaaaaay."

She ought to go down there and mingle but right now she isn't feeling strong enough to look into their bright, hopeful faces or deal with their emotional demands.

Poor kids, they're all here for the usual reasons: he hit like lightning-- first love or date rape, how do you draw the line-- or they never want to see him again-- a relative, sometimes, those arethe worst cases, or it was some boy they thought they loved and learned to hate. Unless they're here because they're still in love but he wants her and her only, but not this, as in, as soon as she told him, he ran.

Some of these girls checked in because embarrassed moms made them, or because they love being pregnant but are just too young to keep it, and others because their beliefs preclude the alternative. Some were in denial for so long that by the time they got around to facing facts it was too late, and the rest? Their folks kicked them out or they came because they don't have anywhere else to go. It's odd, how even these times of great shortages and eager single mothers, the old social order still prevails in certain circles. As though time and change will never completely erase the stigma.

The others are here for the usual reasons, and Sasha?

It was the fumes.

The inks and solvents she and the other artists use in the university print shop just aren't safe. She knows printmakers whose fingertips are dissolving and a couple with patches on their lungs and one woman whose hair is coming out in patches, and she personally turned out to be allergic to the ground she mixes to prepare the copper plates for her prints; the compound gives her headaches in spite of the rubber gloves.

Is that anything you'd expose a fetus to?

Why she's hosting said fetus is another question, and the answers are so many and so complex that Sasha can't unpack them; she can still feel the surge that knifed up into her when she found out she was pregnant, that strong, sexual twist. At the time she put it down to fear. Now she knows it was wild joy. The rush. Without even trying, she had done this amazing thing. Shaking, she laid the pregnancy test strip on the windowsill in the women's bathroom in the Fine Arts building and went back to the print shop and packed up her stuff and left. She won't go back until this is over.

Just because you love a thing doesn't mean that you have to keep it, which is the real reason Sasha is here.

Her baby, she thinks, is like a firefly; you have to let it out of the jar so it can fly away and light up its scrap of sky. The issue is autonomy. Without it, how can he soar? She plans to have this baby, put her thumbprint on his forehead and say goodbye, but whoever the new parents-- and in spite of institutional prodding Sasha is taking her damn sweet time culling the Newlife folders-- whoever the new parents and wherever he goes afterward, this baby will still be hers. A unique print stamped with her mark.

After she has this baby, after she sifts through the sad stories of the parent-wannabes and picks out exactly the right ones from the welter of moving letters and heartfelt videos; after she's observed the finalists through the one-way mirror in the dayroom and questioned them at length; after she rips off these people's scalps and looks into their pulsing brains to make certain, she can put her baby into the right parents' arms with a clear conscience and walk free.

Eventually Sasha will meet the man she wants to love forever and wake up next to every morning for the rest of her life; by then she may even want children, but Gary Cargill was never that man. An OK guy, pleasant expression but not anybody you want to see a lot of. Face it, she hardly knows him! He was, she thinks, just a comfort fuck in the depths of a hard New England winter, like that pint of Rocky Road you accidentally scarf because you're lonesome and depressed. Sasha's hopes are not tied up in him. She has her work to think about, which is why she left Cambridge without telling Gary. If she does this right she may get back in time to take the Venice fellowship, and nobody has to know. She didn't tell her family; Grandmother is the last person Sasha would tell and believe her, she has reasons. She didn't phone Danny in Santa Barbara, even though they are best friends. It's her secret-- safe in the heart of the former Agatha Pilcher home.

Like most artists, Sasha is a control freak. She chose Newlife because the agency promises complete confidentiality. Nobody has to know. Unless the birth mother opts for disclosure, even the adoptive parents will never know. See, if you're the only person who knows a thing, you can absorb it. You can...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Tor Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0765315572
• ISBN 13: 9780765315571
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: PILOT CORPORATION OF EUROPE; https://www.pilotpen.de/; ; PAE DE LA CAILLE; ALLONZIER LA CAILLE; Frankreich