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In one hallway, the twins-that-almost-never-were gaze down from rows of portraits, annual freeze-frames affirming what some — their parents, for sure — would call a miracle.

That’s Jake on the left, Jesse on the right. Always. Except for one year when a mall photographer coaxed them into a different pose before their mother realized the mistake.

Lorraine Drewes admits that the break in tradition still drives her a little nuts. But she can hardly sweat the small things when she gazes in wonder at the real thing racing through the modest Longmont ranch-style house — two perfect children she never could have brought to term.

Ten years ago, Sharon Abuso volunteered to carry Lorraine and Ralph Drewes’ test-tube embryos as a gestational surrogate.

With one rocky but successful pregnancy, she ended years of frustration, bordering on despair, for her then-sister- and brother-in-law.

A decade later, they remain entwined in a forever bond of love and faith.

“Me and Sharon were close before this,” Lorraine, 49, says of her brother’s now ex-wife. “So having the twins only enhanced it. I owe her a lot. She keeps telling me, ‘No, you don’t,’ but I tell her that I wouldn’t have all this if not for her.”

Parenthood couldn’t have been more agreeable.

The babies slept in convenient four-hour shifts. They began their day at the relatively civilized hour of 6 a.m., ate well, grew fast and thrived.

There were the usual blips. Both got the flu at age 2 — their only stretch of simultaneous illness. They took the occasional spill on the playground. Jesse has to have his tonsils out.

But for the most part, the haze of euphoria that settled over their lives on Dec. 13, 1998, has never lifted.

“This is what I waited for,” says Lorraine. “When they used to wake up in the middle of the night, I’d get them back to sleep and just stare at them. I still do it, when I go into their room at night to shut off the radio.”

Ralph and Lorraine still can scarcely contain their gratitude. And Sharon still doesn’t understand what all the fuss was about.

“Everybody says it was a sacrifice,” she says, “but it was a pregnancy. It’s a wonderful thing that happened, and I’m proud that I did it. But I can’t take the credit.”

10 years of trying

For more than a decade, Ralph and Lorraine tried, with ever-increasing urgency, to conceive a child.

They employed everything, from fertility drugs to reproductive technology to outright superstition. They bought a ramshackle HUD property in hopes that investment in wholesale renovation would magically yield a baby dividend.

And the house did fill up — with seven children for whom Lorraine provided day care to augment Ralph’s earnings as a cabinet-maker. But nothing, not even the sturdy oak furniture Ralph crafted in the garage, could dent the emptiness.

She and Ralph broached the possibility of adoption. But for them, genetics mattered.

In 1996, Lorraine’s doctor referred her to a specialist, Richard Worley of the Conceptions clinic in Littleton.

Artificial insemination eventually followed — seven cycles of all-too-familiar heartache. That’s when Worley suggested the possibility of a surrogate.

Sharon volunteered.

“I’d had two,” Sharon says, referring to Scott, now 18, and Adam, 14. “I didn’t want any more. The doctor said I had the hips for having babies. It wasn’t really a decision for me — it was more on their part.”

Worley counseled them on the standard concerns, but everyone involved had so thoroughly explored every aspect that he felt his counsel almost unnecessary.

“I remember several times witnessing this enormous faith and family integrity and feeling great pressure on me,” Worley said at the time. “I felt the appropriateness of success was so high, that I’d feel terrible if it didn’t work.”

He implanted four embryos into Sharon’s uterus. They waited.

When the news arrived — failure — Lorraine nearly gave up. But the family regrouped and tried again, this time with six embryos. In May 1998, Sharon presented Lorraine the positive results of her home pregnancy test.

And her first Mother’s Day card.

But all this came with a sobering proviso: If more than two of the embryos continued to develop, selective reduction — abortion — might become necessary to avoid medical complications.

This part Sharon took on faith.

“I prayed all the time,” she recalls. “I prayed really hard about having just two babies, because of the talk of reduction. I couldn’t do that — and I don’t think Lorraine could have done that, either. I prayed not to let it happen.”

At the first ultrasound, two shadowy forms danced on the monitor.

Everyone exhaled.

An early need for names

They named the boys about halfway into the pregnancy, mainly because Sharon wanted to address them by name when she admonished them to stop kicking her.

And so one became Jesse Georg, without the “e” in the German tradition, after his paternal grandfather. The other became Jake Anthony, the middle name honoring his maternal grandfather.

Ralph and Lorraine had no way of knowing how perfectly the names would capture their sons, even though she remarked when the boys were barely out of Sharon’s womb that Jesse favored his father while Jake’s features were all Abuso.

As fraternal twins, they could scarcely have been more different.

Jesse lean and angular. Jake plump and round. Jesse the risk-taker. Jake the cautious one. Jesse the shy, quiet type. Jake the chatterbox.

Jesse the baseball fanatic and helper in Ralph’s garage wood shop. Jake the academic sponge and tireless knowledge-seeker.

Their features and mannerisms still align with the parent they favored at birth. Jesse says relatively little on most topics, largely because Jake likes to finish his brother’s sentences. The exception would be the Colorado Rockies, a subject on which only Jesse maintains encyclopedic knowledge.

At meals, Jesse invariably eats his meat first — perhaps, Ralph says, because his grandfather was a butcher.

While brotherhood hasn’t become a competition, there are moments of friendly needling.

“In baseball, he’s really good at hitting,” Jesse says of his brother. “Last game of last year, he hit a ball all the way to the fences . . .”

“Out of the fences,” Jake interrupts.

“And he’s good at catching,” Jesse continues. “But he doesn’t know much about the Rockies.”

“Jesse’s a really strong hitter, too,” Jake adds. “Must be all the meat in there.”

Ralph and Lorraine slipped comfortably, immediately, into parenthood and never looked back, except to note that the time passes much too quickly. Ralph coached the boys in T-ball. Lorraine followed them to preschool as a volunteer, and then to elementary school, where she landed a paid position as an aide.

“I have to let them out of my bubble,” she admits, laughing. “That’s what Ralph tells me.”

“I was just the oven”

Everyone asks her the same question: How could you give them up?

“They weren’t my children,” Sharon says today, with the same matter-of-fact certainty she exuded 10 years ago. “I am attached to them — but as their aunt. I didn’t have to totally give them up.”

She and her now-ex-husband Louie Abuso, who is Lorraine’s brother, had gone to court with Ralph and Lorraine so Sharon could relinquish any legal claim while she was still carrying the twins.

No twinges. No ambivalence.

“I guess it’s a mental thing,” Sharon says. “I don’t know if I could have done it with people I didn’t know. But I knew Rainy and Ralph would make great parents. I was just the oven. God allowed me to be the vehicle for them to be born.”

In her current job with Weld County Social Services, Sharon hears shocking cases of parental abuse or neglect — a constant reminder that she did the right thing delivering two kids to loving parents.

Living in Greeley, she has kept up with the boys as often as possible — watching their baseball games, celebrating their birthdays.

When the twins were little, she’d grab them by their legs and turn them upside down. Another long-standing ritual, one that she says may be on the wane, mirrors something she did when her own sons were younger.

She points to her eye, then places both hands over her heart. She points to the boys. Then she opens her arms wide.

Translation: I. . .love. . .you. . .this much!

Ralph and Lorraine long ago explained to the boys, in rudimentary terms, how Aunt Sharon helped them make their way into the world.

Now the boys pass this on to friends curious about the special relationship with their aunt. But even for precocious Jake, the circumstances of his birth remain a mixture of myth and medical science.

“I can’t remember what was wrong with my mom’s stomach,” he says, “but they took an embryo and put it in Aunt Sharon’s belly.”

He goes on to tie his chubbiness as an infant to his in utero recognition of Sharon’s consumption of chocolate — something she finds puzzling because she didn’t find chocolate at all appealing during her pregnancy.

“When she ate it,” Jake insists, “I ate it before Jesse could get it. That’s why I was plump and he was skinny.”

Even amid the unbridled joy of raising two boys, Lorraine wrestled with another urge percolating just below the surface. Sharon called one evening and pulled it out into the open.

“OK, Rainy,” she said. “Do you want to try it again?”

“Can you guarantee me a girl?” Lorraine asked.

“That’s in God’s hands,” Sharon replied.

The possibility of another child — a daughter — had hovered over Lorraine for some time. But even wishing for it in the wake of such improbable good fortune with the twins prompted pangs of guilt.

It wasn’t that Sharon craved another pregnancy. She was 48. The twins had given her a rough ride. But she felt her window of opportunity sliding shut.

“I just wanted to let them know they had the option — before I turned 50,” Sharon says.

Perhaps, if the first surrogacy had yielded one child, the urge for a second would have been overpowering for Lorraine and Ralph. But now, the house is full, and so are their lives.

Two is enough.

Says Ralph, with typical understatement: “We’re happy with what we’ve got.”

Kevin Simpson: 303-954-1739 or ksimpson@denverpost.com