Surrogate (eBook)

A Novel

Judith Henry Wall (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2006 | 1. Auflage
352 Seiten
Simon & Schuster (Verlag)
978-0-7432-8922-1 (ISBN)

Infos

To a penniless twenty-year-old like Jamie Long, surrogate motherhood seemed both an act of altruism and a financial opportunity. But once pregnant and under contract to Amanda Hartmann, the head of a famous evangelical family, Jamie realizes that she's getting more than she bargained for. Whisked away to the vast, isolated family ranch, she's closely supervised and carefully cut off from the outside world. She learns the family's dark secrets -- and sees the enormity of their ruthlessness. When Jamie hears Amanda's plan to claim the baby as her natural-born child, she begins to suspect that her own life is in danger and resolves to flee.

Alone with a tiny newborn, she calls on the one man in the world she can trust -- her high school crush, Joe Brammer. Their love unites them in a struggle to escape, and soon enough their flight becomes a fight for their lives.

Brilliantly weaving some of today's most controversial social issues into a captivating page-turner, The Surrogate is Judith Henry Wall's greatest triumph to date.

Textauszug

Chapter One

Jamie's earliest memory was of flying, of looking out the window of her daddy's airplane and seeing the whole of Galveston Island, which from the ground seemed a world unto itself.

Her father was a flight instructor and sometimes took her and her mother on Sunday afternoon flights.

Jamie preferred flying through clear blue skies with only occasional puffs of pretty white clouds floating by. She didn't like being surrounded by clouds. She was afraid they would get lost in them and never find their way home.

Sometimes her daddy flew so low over the ocean Jamie thought they were going to crash into the waves, and her mother would squeal for him to stop. Jamie realized it was a game that her parents were playing.

Perhaps they had died playing that game.

It was her parents' tenth anniversary. They planned to fly to Cozumel, an island off the coast of Mexico, and spend a week in a big hotel. But first they flew north to leave Jamie with her grandmother. Granny met them at the Mesquite airpark. Jamie held Granny's hand while they watched the plane take off. Jamie waved until it was only a tiny speck in a blue, cloudless sky.

The plane never arrived in Cozumel. There was an investigation, and eventually her parents were declared dead.

Sometimes Jamie imagined that the airplane had had engine trouble and her daddy had been forced to land on some uncharted island like the castaways on Gilligan's Island, and someday they would be rescued and come back to her. Every time a small plane flew overhead on its way to the Mesquite airpark, Jamie wondered if it was her parents coming back to get her. Long after she could not imagine living anyplace other than her grandmother's small white house, she would dream of her mother and father opening the front gate, coming up the walk, and knocking on the door.

In her parents' will, Jamie's half-sister Ginger had been named her guardian. Their mother's child from an earlier, unhappy marriage, Ginger was sixteen years older than Jamie, married, and not at all interested in raising her.

Ginger had never had warm, cozy feelings for her half-sister. She had wanted to be royally pissed when her mother married and they moved to Galveston. But thanks to her stepfather's generosity, Ginger was able to attend Southern Methodist University and pledge a sorority instead of living at home and attending a community college. Ginger was totally mortified when she learned that her mother was expecting a baby at age forty-three, but when the baby was born, she did a pretty good job pretending to be enchanted by her little sister. When Ginger met Mr. Right, her stepfather coughed up enough money for her to have a storybook wedding, but Ginger found it very difficult to live on her husband's salary as a stockbroker at Merrill Lynch. She had thought stockbrokers made a lot of money and felt cheated when she realized that was not so.

Except for a ten-thousand-dollar bequest to Ginger, six-year-old Jamie was the sole recipient of her father's estate, and it didn't take Ginger long to realize that being named her sister's guardian was an answer to her prayers. She sold her stepfather's interest in the flight school and his family home on Galveston Island, and -- so that little Jamie could have a room of her own -- bought a brand-new house with a swimming pool in north Dallas and promised herself that she would do right by the kid.

Ginger tried to love the little girl. Or at least like her. But she became pregnant with twins and, what with feeling so damned tired all the time and decorating her new home, she just didn't have the energy. Sometimes she forgot to pick Jamie up at school,...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 2.5.2006
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-10: 0-7432-8922-6 / 0743289226
• ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-8922-1 / 9780743289221