Sing You Home: A Novel Read online

  Wade Preston reaches into the pocket inside his suit jacket and pulls out his card. “Why don’t we meet next week?” he suggests. “We have a lot to discuss to get this ball rolling.” As Pastor Clive leads him away to meet some of the other congregants, he flashes that million-dollar smile at me again.

  I have six doughnuts on my plate, and I don’t even want to eat one anymore. I feel sick, actually.

  Because the truth is: the ball’s been set in motion.

  It’s halfway down the hill already.

  The night before I am supposed to meet Wade Preston at Pastor Clive’s office—he thought we might appreciate the privacy—I have a dream. Liddy is pregnant already, and, instead of just Reid being in the delivery room, there are dozens of people, all wearing hospital scrubs and blue masks. You can’t make out who anyone is, except for their eyes.

  Pastor Clive is sitting between Liddy’s legs and acting as the doctor. He reaches down to catch the baby. “You’re doing great,” he tells her as she screams, pushing this bloody mess of baby into the world.

  A nurse takes the baby and swaddles it, and when she does she gasps. She calls over Pastor Clive, who looks into the folds of the blue blanket and says, “Sweet Jesus.”

  “What’s wrong?” I ask, pushing through the crowd. “What’s the matter?”

  But they don’t hear me. “Maybe she won’t notice,” the nurse whispers, and she hands Liddy the baby. “Here’s your son,” she coos.

  Liddy lifts up the corner of the blanket draping the newborn and starts to shriek. She nearly drops the baby, and I rush forward to pick him up.

  That’s when I see it: he has no face.

  Instead there’s just a mottled oval of lumps and boils, a seam where a mouth should have been.

  “I don’t want it!” Liddy cries. “He’s not really mine!”

  One of the masked observers steps forward. She takes the baby from me and begins to pinch the flesh into false features—a hill of a nose, two thumbprint eyes—as if the baby is made of clay. She gazes down as if it is the most beautiful thing she has ever seen. “There,” she says. She pulls off her mask and smiles, and that’s when I see it is Zoe.

  I’m sweating when I walk into Pastor Clive’s office to meet with Wade, so much that I’ve nearly soaked through my shirt, and I’m figuring he’ll think either I’m a freak or I have some weird metabolic disorder, when in fact I’m just a little scared to tell him what I’ve been thinking all morning.

  Namely, that I may be making a mistake. Sure, I want to help Liddy and Reid . . . but I don’t want to hurt Zoe.

  Wade’s wearing another perfectly tailored suit, this one with a faint silver shine to it that makes him look the way Jesus always does in paintings—glowing, a little brighter than everyone else around Him.

  “It’s good to see you, Max,” Wade says, pumping my hand up and down. “I gotta tell you, since I talked with you on Sunday, you’ve been at the forefront of my mind.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Well.”

  “Now, we’ve got a lot of background to cover, so I’m just going to ask you questions, and you do your best to answer them.”

  “Can I ask you one first?” I say.

  He looks up, nods. “Absolutely.”

  “It’s not so much of a question, really. It’s more of a statement. I mean, I know I have a right to decide what happens to these embryos. But Zoe does, too.”

  Wade sits down on the edge of Pastor Clive’s desk. “You are a hundred percent right, at least when you look at this issue superficially. You and Zoe both have an equal gametic claim to these embryos. But let me ask you this: Did you intend to raise these pre-born children in a heterosexual relationship with your ex-wife?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yet, unfortunately, your marriage didn’t last.”

  “That’s exactly it,” I burst out. “Nothing worked out the way we planned. And finally, she seems to be happy. It may not be what I’d do, or what you’d do, but why should I ruin that for her? I always believed she’d be a good mom. And she’s said that I don’t have to pay child support—”

  “Whoa.” Wade holds up a hand. “Let’s unpack this a bit. First of all, if you did give Zoe the pre-born children, you’re still the father. These little people, they already exist, Max. You can’t remove your biological responsibility to them. So even if they’re raised in this lesbian household, you’re going to be on the hook for child support. And even if your ex-wife doesn’t ask for it now, at any point in that child’s life he can come back to you saying he needs financial or emotional support. Zoe may say you don’t have to have a relationship with this baby, but that’s not her decision to make.” He folds his arms. “Now you say your ex-wife would make a good parent—and I have no doubt that’s true. What about your brother and sister-in-law?”

  I look at Pastor Clive. “They’d be the best parents I could ever imagine.”

  “And what about your wife’s lesbian lover?”

  “I don’t know very much about her—”

  “Except for the fact that she wants to take your children away from you,” Wade points out.

  Here’s all I know about Vanessa: I had a wife, a wife who loved me and made love with me, and now all of a sudden she’s sleeping with some woman who seduced her.

  Pastor Clive walks toward an oversize Bible on a lectern and starts reading aloud:

  “Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.

  “That’s what God has to say about homosexuals in Romans 1:26–27,” the pastor says. “Homosexuality—it’s a perversion. Something to be punished for.”

  “What if that pre-born child is a little boy, Max?” Wade asks. “You realize he has an overwhelming chance of becoming homosexual himself if you let him be raised by two lesbians. Frankly, even if Zoe is the Mother of the Year, who’s going to be the daddy in that household? How’s your son going to learn how to be a man?”

  I shake my head. I don’t have an answer for that. If the baby goes to Reid and Liddy, he’ll have a great father figure. The same one I’ve looked up to my whole life.

  “The best parental decision you can make,” Wade says, “even if it’s the only parental decision you make—is to ask yourself what’s really best for your child.”

  I close my eyes.

  “I understand from Pastor Clive that you and Zoe lost a number of babies while you were trying to get pregnant,” Wade says. “Including one that was nearly at term.”

  I can feel my throat tighten. “Yes.”

  “How did you feel when he died?”

  I press my thumbs into the corners of my eyes. I don’t want to cry. I don’t want them to see me crying. “It hurt like hell.”

  “If you felt that way about losing one child,” Wade asks, “how are you going to feel about losing three more?”

  I’m sorry, I think, and I don’t even know who I’m apologizing to anymore. “Okay,” I mutter.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Okay,” I repeat, looking up at Wade. “What do we do next?”

  Liddy is in the kitchen when I come home from my meeting. She’s baking a blueberry pie, even though blueberries are totally out of season. It’s my favorite.

  She’s making her own crust, too. Zoe never made her own crust. She said it was pointless, when Pillsbury had already put all that hard work into it.

  “It’s called pro hac vice,” I explain. “It means that Wade Preston is an out-of-state attorney who’s allowed to represent me because of the experience he has in the field.”

  “So you have two lawyers?” Liddy asks.

  “I guess. I haven’t met this Ben Benjamin guy yet, but Wade says he knows the judges in the state and can help come up with the best strategy.