“Go to hell, Diana! Sometimes I’m right. Sometimes we do what I say!”
“Richard,” Sara said, her voice calmer than the others. “Logan’s right. We all know you’re doing your best to help me. I love you more for that than I can ever express. But Logan’s not the problem here.” She pointed out the front window at some imaginary point in the distance. “She is. Logan’s involved in this now whether you want him to be or not. Which means he needs to know the truth. Please. Keep driving.”
A whole minute passed, then two, as if the air in the car needed to calm first before anyone spoke. Then Sara started talking.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
“Diana and Richard had it harder than me,” Sara said.
Diana shook her head. “That’s not true.”
“It is. We all had the same mother, but Diana and Richard had a different father than me. Didn’t really matter, though. Their dad, my dad, neither of them stuck around. Mom was…not picky, you know what I mean? There were different men all the time.”
“Until Jerry,” Diana said.
“Yeah,” Sara agreed.
When neither of them said anything more, Logan asked, “What happened?”
“Richard and I came home from school one day,” Diana said, picking up the story. “Sara was four at the time, and was sitting in the living room watching TV. That usually meant Mom was busy with one of her boyfriends in back, but when I went to my room, I noticed her door was open, and she was stretched across the bed. There was something odd on her pillow, so I tiptoed in to see it, thinking she was asleep.” Diana paused. “It was blood, and there was more on the sheets. Her face was bruised and swollen. Turned out Jerry beat her into a coma at some point during the day, then gave Sara a sandwich, put her in front of the TV, and left. They caught him a week later. Mom never came out of the coma. She lasted three months before she died, and six weeks after that Jerry went to prison.”
Sara said, “We were sent to live with our aunt and uncle in Iowa. Unfortunately, they weren’t particularly big fans of our mom. They tolerated us at best. Diana and Aunt Jill didn’t see eye to eye at all, so Diana left when she was a junior in high school. Richard and I both made it through our senior years before we got out.”
“I knew they weren’t going to help me out when I left,” Diana said, “but I thought they’d give Richard or at least Sara a hand. But no, once they were out of high school, it was out the door, have a good life. Which meant the only thing we had was the only thing we’d always had-each other.
“I was bartending before I could even legally drink. My bosses didn’t know that, but a job’s a job. When Richard moved out, I’d get him work bussing tables, sometimes security, that kind of thing. I did the same for Sara-waitress, hostess, whatever. It always killed me, though. Sara’s the smartest of us. She should have gone to college. Of the three of us, she’s the one who could make something of her life.”
“She’s giving me too much credit,” Sara said. “Diana’s the smart one. I always wanted to be like her.”
Diana reached out and squeezed her sister’s hand. “Shut up,” she said, smiling.
“It’s true.”
“Anyway,” Diana said. “I kept looking for ways for Sara to get a better life. I was constantly checking online for something that might get her on the right track. My dream was finding her a job that might even pay for her education at some point. Anything better than where she was would have been great, you know?”
Logan nodded, sympathizing with Diana’s desire to help her sister.
“Three years ago I spotted something that I thought would be perfect. It wasn’t a job, per se, but the money she could have gotten would have paid for college. The ad said accepted applicants could earn up to fifty thousand dollars and continue working at their current job. All Sara had to do was…”
“Get pregnant,” Logan said, already knowing the answer.
Diana nodded.
“I didn’t want to do it at first,” Sara told him. “A child growing in my body? How was I supposed to give that up? I was told the baby wouldn’t be related to me, that I’d just be a surrogate, but it just seemed wrong.”
“I talked her into applying anyway,” Diana jumped in. “I told her she could back out whenever she wanted, but to at least hear what they had to say, and find out how much she could make. I even took her to the interview.”
“From the moment we walked in,” Sara explained, “the nurses and the staff were so nice, so concerned about…me. Even when Dr. Paskota came in, she seemed-”
“Hold on,” Logan said. “Dr. Paskota?”
Sara looked at him. “It’s her, isn’t it? In the other car? The woman?”
“Yes.”
She closed her eyes and looked like she was fighting off a wave of pain.
“Are you sure?” Diana asked him.
“It’s what the others called her. When I did, too, she didn’t correct me.”
“I knew it,” Sara said, her eyes still closed.
“Maybe…maybe this isn’t a good idea,” Diana said.
“No,” Sara said, looking at her sister now. “It was going to happen at some point.”
“We could still run.”
“But Emily…”
“We get her, then disappear. We’ve done it before. We can do it again.”
“I can’t keep running.”
For several seconds, there was only the sound of the tires on the road.
Sara turned back to Logan. “We ended up spending four hours at the clinic that first day. When we were done, the doctor had answered most of my concerns, and had actually made me feel good about the process. I mean, I was possibly going to help a couple who couldn’t have kids on their own become parents. That was actually pretty cool. While I was there, they ran a few tests, and told me they’d call me later to let me know how much I would be paid if I chose to sign up.”
“I assume they called,” Logan said.
She nodded. “That evening. They said I was in particularly good health, and that I fit a specific profile one of their clients had been looking for. The offer was for sixty-five thousand dollars. A month or two prep before the pregnancy, the pregnancy itself, and the birth. That was it. Sixty-five thousand dollars for maybe eleven months total, and I could still work.”
“I couldn’t believe it,” Diana said in a low voice, as if she were caught in the memory. “It was more than we could have hoped for. Sara could use that money to go to school and get a degree. She was going to do something better. Exactly what I’d wanted.”
“Something obviously wasn’t right, or we wouldn’t be here,” Logan said.
“Everything went fine until the fifth month,” Sara explained. “I was visiting Dr. Paskota. She told me an irregularity had popped up on one of the tests. Nothing to be worried about, but she wanted to do an amniocentesis as a precaution.”
Diana said, “Sara was worried about the baby, but I was worried about the money. She’d only get a small portion if something happened with the pregnancy. I don’t mean that to sound cold-blooded, but Sara was my concern.”
“It was several days before I got the call,” Sara said. “I was a wreck by then, worried that the baby was having problems I could do nothing about. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t mine. I cared about her. So much. The caller wasn’t Dr. Paskota, but a woman who said she was one of her nurses. She told me the doctor wanted her to call as soon as they got the results back. She said that everything was fine. I’ve never felt so relieved in my life. But then she told me something else. ‘I didn’t realize you were also the egg donor.’ I thought I misheard her so I asked her to repeat what she said. That’s when I found out that I wasn’t just a surrogate. I was the actual mother. When it became clear to her that I had no idea, she said, ‘That’s what I thought. We need to talk.’ I was confused and scared, but I agreed to meet a few hours later, and took Diana with me.”
“The woman told us to call her Brenda. When I said I didn’t remember seeing her at the doctor’s office, she said that was because she didn’t really work there. We almost left right then, thinking she was just some crazy person trying to scare us. But Brenda said enough for us to hear her out.” Sara paused. “She said she worked in the lab that handled the tests, and took it on herself to run a DNA match between the baby and myself. I was definitely the mother.”