Fortunate Monsters: Illustrated Edition

By Nancy Fulton

Rosyln and Jacob Kent, members of Hollywood's jet set, have every luxury money can buy, except the ability to conceive a baby on their own. So they've turned to the elite Kakoa Fertility clinic, and the mysterious Doctor Moore, who has promised to give them a perfect child. It's shocking how fast dreams can become nightmares...

Nancy Fulton is a writer/producer living in Los Angeles California. With actor Judd Nelson she is author of The Nine of Diamonds, The Gig, and Water Music, among other works. You can learn more about her on nobetterfriend.com.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nancy Fulton
• Release date: Mar 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311381996

Nancy Fulton

Nancy Fulton is a writer/producer working in Hollywood. She currently supports more than 10,000 writers, screenwriters, actors, and filmmakers through online and face to face events. She's produced a wide variety of face-to-face and media events, written a fairly large number of books under various names, and writes screenplays and many other things with Actor/Producer Judd Nelson. For more information about her and her work visit www.NoBetterFriend.com.

Book preview

FORTUNATE MONSTERS

All characters, enterprises, and organizations appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, enterprises, or organizations, past or present, is purely coincidental.

Text: © 2015 Nancy Fulton

Images Licensed from Pond5.com

All rights reserved.

www.NoBetterFriend.com

Table of Contents

Beginning

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter One

Charles Darwin spoke about hopeful monsters.

Most mutations in a species result in offspring that die before they can reproduce. An infinitesimally small number result in offspring that are much better prepared to survive and reproduce than contemporaneous competitors. These lucky few, over time, often make survival impossible for their less fortunate brethren.

All new species undergo a monster phase.

Roslyn Kemp irritably swiped her way through picture after picture on the silver tablet, desperately looking for someone she knew she wouldn’t find. This whole experience was like going to a party hoping to meet the love of your life, only to encounter a lot of drunk and demanding strangers.

And the biggest stranger of all was the guy sitting next to her. Why on earth had she married Jacob, and how had her wedding vows translated into this command performance as his petri dish? Her husband, dressed to impress in the linen shirt and fawn trousers she’d selected for him a week ago, took the sleek digital device away, saying, We’ve already decided, haven’t we, love?

Roslyn looked up into blue eyes clownishly magnified by gold-rimmed, circular spectacles. Sometimes she hated that he wore whatever she gave him. Either she was his costumer or he was her kid. What she wanted today was a partner. This was serious business. This was life and death.

And why had she dressed like the movie star she used to be for this creepy Colonel Sanders of a doctor exiled to a pinprick of an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?

She knew, Jacob knew, and surely this fast-food fertility specialist knew, if he were a real doctor, he’d be at Cedars or UCLA. Doctor Moore did not deserve the thirteen-hundred-dollar ivory gauze jumpsuit she was wearing, and she didn’t like how his eyes lingered on the long slits cut to show her strong, smooth limbs. He was a doctor, for Christ’s sake. She’d chosen this outfit to prove she was young, healthy, and sexy enough to be a good wife and mother. But now she knew it simply said very desperate to please.

Jacob swiped back to ERIC87, and Roslyn felt like she was trapped in a restaurant that listed a thousand things on the menu but only wanted to serve you one dish.

There he was again, the blond-haired, blue-eyed boy of a hundred places. He was a toddler reading a book, playing a piano, and holding up a photocopied Math Award with a six-year-old’s missing teeth.

Jacob handed the pad to Doctor Moore, who waited for the answer he wanted from his perch on a cream-colored leather armchair.

You can’t kid a kidder, Roslyn thought, as she looked at the old man. She’d been on a hundred stages, and she knew this was one of them.

This clinic of a resort married having a baby to having a vacation, and this champagne-colored room said we have money to burn. Solid but elegant English furniture said trust us, books and diplomas on shelves said we’re smart, and pastel paintings of softly drawn children playing on an infinite beach promised we can give you what you want.

And the doctor himself, a grandfatherly sixty-something three inches taller than her husband and dressed in impeccable black slacks, Italian wing tips, a white shirt, a black tie, and a crisp white lab coat, conjured compassionate competence right down to the gold pen in his breast pocket and the steel stethoscope on his desk.

ERIC87, the doctor said in his warm, deep voice. I think that’s an excellent choice. IQ—one-sixty plus. Significant mathematical and musical aptitudes. A projected height of six feet one inch.

Roslyn stood up and looked down at the doctor. She was tired of playing her role in this scene. How can you possibly know that? she demanded.

It’s a projection, Roslyn, said Jacob.

She looked at him. "Our baby hasn’t even been conceived yet. How can the doctor know how tall he’ll be?"

Doctor Moore swiped to an image of a growth chart and offered her the tablet. I guess that isn’t very clear, is it, he said. But if you measure a child’s height at three, you get a pretty good idea of how tall they will be.

Roslyn left Doctor Moore holding the tablet and walked to the picture window. From three stories up, she could see five miles of white sand and two exclusive hotels that catered to the very few people on earth rich enough to know where this island was. How many tiny volcanic islands were hidden in the vast Pacific, she wondered, each just big enough to give a few rich folks another place to run?

We came here to have our own baby, not buy one off a shelf, she said.

Jacob rose, came to embrace her, and portrayed the loving husband as best he was able. He wanted her to shut up. He wanted her to sit down. He was ready to have a family, and he wanted her to give him one. "This will be our baby, Roslyn," he said.

Roslyn turned to look at Doctor Moore, now standing, who looked at them with courtly concern. I’m forty, she said. Lots of women have children at forty. I see them everywhere. I’ve always taken very good care of myself. I eat right, and I exercise. So why can’t Jacob and I make a baby just like everyone else?

She’d asked that question a lot in the last three years, and none of the answers she’d been given had satisfied her. Maybe she wasn’t a teenager, but how many of her friends were forty with toddlers? How many had given birth in just the last year? Two? Three?

Doctor Moore gestured at the seat she’d just abandoned. Please, Mrs. Kemp, sit with us. I know it’s confusing. But I assure you that the result of this process will be a child who’s entirely your own.

Roslyn remained standing. Then why are we picking a boy out of a catalog? She looked out the window again. "I am not too old to have a baby of my own."

That’s entirely true, Doctor Moore said. You are perfectly capable of carrying a child to term. Every test we’ve conducted indicates that your body is an extremely hospitable home for a baby to grow within.

So why do my babies keep dying? Roslyn asked. Doctors were always so full of excuses. Why did their inability to help her always turn out to be her fault?

My dear, we all know some people get their first gray hair in their teens. It’s not fair, but it happens. And some people have a head of white hair by thirty.

Roslyn said nothing.

"Well, every woman’s eggs, the component she contributes to conceiving a child, age at an entirely unique rate. Some women, a very few, have ova that are easy to fertilize until their forties. Most are not so fortunate."

I waited too long.

Worldwide, women over the age of thirty-five have less than a one percent chance of conceiving naturally in any given month, and since successful women frequently wait longer to have children…well, as you’ve heard from other doctors, your ova, from a genetic standpoint, just aren’t viable. At some point in development, the embryos you conceive encounter a genetic flaw, and your body spontaneously aborts. We can assist some women—

But not me, she said bitterly. She’d won every genetic lottery except this one it seemed, and ultimately it was the only one that mattered. She simply could not reproduce.

Doctor Moore shrugged. That’s correct, I’m very sorry to say. And given your husband’s situation—

His cancer, she said.

Decades ago, Jacob’s father had died of a heart attack and his mother of ovarian cancer. At forty-two, Jacob had been diagnosed with colon cancer. Now, at forty-nine, her husband was completely sterile. Pity he hadn’t mentioned his inability to conceive naturally when they’d first met six years ago. She likely wouldn’t have married him, and they both wouldn’t be standing here now. Of course, that’s why he hadn’t told her.

Roslyn, the other doctors have explained all this more than once, said Jacob. He had returned to sit on the couch and sat there, looking weary, disheartened, and old. He wanted this whole thing to be over now. He wanted this part of their lives to be done.

Jacob, it has to be possible for one of us to have some biological connection to our child, she told him.

Medically speaking, said Doctor Moore,