Page 54 of The Deepest Lake

I hesitate, forgetting again—it’s not just the month we’re talking about. It’s my new name. “Oh. Yes.”

“And you were planning to leave when?”

I clear my throat. “On the seventh.”

“Oh, that can’t be right,” Eva says, sounding playful. “So soon?”

On the tuk-tuk ride back to the house from the spa I’m not sure I’ve heard correctly. Eva’s in the front, next to the driver. I’m in the back.

“Sir what?”

“Surrogacy,” Eva shouts over the loud tuk-tuk motor and the crunch of wheels over gravel.

“You’d be perfect.” She laughs. “We’d be perfect.”

“Perfect for . . . ?”

“Making a baby. You didn’t think I stopped wanting a baby, did you? I thought you were my closest reader.”

“I thought you’d . . . given up.”

The wind is whipping her ash blond hair into a cotton candy cloud around her head. She claws loose strands away from her mouth, then looks back at me. “Since when do I ever give up?”

I shake my head, confused.

“I’m asking a real question. You know everything about me, May. When do I give up?”

I shrug, and she scoffs and then mumbles something that’s stolen by the wind, though her scowl can’t be missed. I’m ‘perfect,’ but I disappoint her. We seem locked into that dance. Maybe we really are becoming like family.

“You seem surprised.”

“Yes,” I say, trying to buy time.

“Well then . . . ?”

I’m shocked and I’m not—the same way I felt when Rudy, my college newspaper faculty mentor, said he’d write me a grad school rec letter if we could go out to a bar and discuss the details, first.

Part of me thought, Hey, he’s just asking.

The rest of me recognized I’d been demoted. From student and writer, a whole person, to a mere body. A physical, female body.

Rudy never did write that letter, by the way. He wasn’t “just asking.”

“Ten thousand dollars,” Eva says. “Plus room and board for a year. I’d choose the father, obviously. You’d spend the year in Guatemala.”

Her reasoning is that I have enough in common with her—coloring, smarts, interest in writing. Given that her eggs have proven to be too old, this is her best, last shot at making a baby that could pass as her own.

“You should be flattered,” Eva says.

I nod. It’s the best I can do. This is so sudden. So seemingly random. Eva isn’t just sharing a daydream, she seems to want an immediate answer.

“You said you interned at a women’s reproductive clinic,” she continues. “I assume that means you’re in support of a woman’s right to choose.”

“Absolutely.”

“Well?”

“Wow,” I say, waiting as I drop the bucket into the well of my flustered thoughts, waiting for the splash. “Is this why you hired me as a personal assistant?”