Dawn gave me the idea for this book. A year or so ago, we were driving past a brilliantly yellow field of mustard in flower. “Look, honey, it’s a field of mustard in bloom.” She glanced searchingly at the bright yellow field and asked me where the ketchup grows.
I have painted several fields of tomatoes but haven’t yet been able to convert this into a field of ketchup fit for four-year-olds. I need time to finish the book. Since Dawn too loves to paint – and I now have my idea for the concluding illustrations – I should be able to finish and send off the book before school starts. Ketchup starts as tomatoes, but it ‘grows’ in the kitchen. I will make that happen.
In ten days she will start kindergarten in Grass Valley, at the same school where I will teach art to the older students. I wish we were both back in Nevada City, but I can’t afford to move back now. She and I are each excited about her starting school.
When I registered Dawn for kindergarten in Grass Valley, I asked if the school might have an opening for an art teacher. With luck, I find myself with an art teaching assignment for grades two through five, three days a week. I will have a small, predictable salary within a month, and my workday will end only a short time after her school day, with free day care for her. She and I shop for school clothes at the second-hand children’s store in Nevada City, and she picks out her own boldly colored array of leggings, skirts and tops. She dresses herself these days, with a combination of patterns and colors that Patty would never have permitted. Even I try to tell her some combinations clash, but she insists on her own choices.
I worry about finding friends for her, since Megan’s daughter Sam and Jenny’s sons are much older than Dawn, but they adopt each other, and I rationalize that with school starting soon, she will find new friends her own age. She asks about Ian several times, but I am vague about when she might see him again.
12
KAREN
People say that fear crouches in the pit of one’s stomach. Not so for me. Fear clenches my chest, so tightly that I have to steal tiny, shallow breaths from it.
I smelled smoke from the moment I awoke this morning. A pink haze coats the view outside my window. The treetops have a vague outline and the rising sun is a brilliant orange. From the local radio station I hear there are fires on the eastern slopes of the San Juan Ridge, not twenty miles from here. The fire updates are so frequent that music creates the intervals rather than the other way around. The air is hazardous from particulate smoke; children and seniors are to be kept inside. The radio is periodically drowned out by the over-flight of firefighting planes, which sound like WWII movie planes to me. There is no wind. That’s good from a firefighting perspective, but we will have to live with this thick, gauzy air for a while.
Jenny lives up on the Ridge, not where the fires are, but still closer than we are. It’s only eight by my watch, but I call her to invite her and the boys to spend the day with us down here. School has been canceled for today at least. She is already up and eager to leave. “The air here is nasty,” she reports.
Dawn awakes with a different reaction. She’s never seen pink air before and it’s cotton candy to her. She is all delight, her nose pressing the window. It’s been two months since I fetched her from Patty, and her hair has recovered its curl.
“Can I taste it?” she asks eagerly.
“Yes, just once so you know what it is, and then we need to stay inside. You won’t like the taste.”
We walk out to the moon house. “Ick!”
Breathing the air outside is like eating a mohair sweater in campfire smoke. I explain that there is a forest fire far away, that it will not come here but the air is very dirty and we need to stay inside. Jenny and the boys will come. We’ll have an inside picnic.
After breakfast we paint. I have an assignment and Dawn loves to work, as she calls it. She has her own small easel. “Make it flat,” she tells me as I set it up, “so the colors don’t run.” She already knows this about watercolors, and she knows how to mix her colors. She fetches her own bowl of water while I adjust her easel.
“How do you make pink?”
“Add water to the red.”
When I hear the car door shut and the doorbell ring, I call out for Jenny to just come in, but it rings a second time.
A man I have never seen before stands at the door. My first thought is that he has been sent to tell us to evacuate because of the fire. But he is just a man in jeans with a manila envelope in his hand.
“Are you Karen Haskins?”
“Yes…” Before I can ask him anything, he thrusts the envelope at me. A rattlesnake tattoo coils around the arm with the envelope. He turns and leaves without another word.
I look down stupidly. The envelope is addressed to me, and it bears the logo of a Sacramento law firm. From working in high school at my dad’s old law office, I guess that I have just been served with some legal papers. But I am afraid to find out what lies inside. I put the envelope on my bed.
When Dawn asks who it was, I tell her it was the mailman.
I sit down in front of my own easel. I can see my own sketches from the other day of the little boy on a big rock, leaning over the water. But I cannot paint. I feel as if I have just touched the wrong wire when I changed the ceiling light.
Dawn, on the other hand, is busy. She has created a pink wash over the entire sheet of paper.
“Can I paint on it while it’s wet?”
“Sure, but everything will be fuzzy.” That seems to please her, and she lays down bold strokes of brown tree trunks.
When the doorbell rings again, I jump, even as Jenny, Jonas and Gulliver stream into the room. Gulliver, who also likes to paint, immediately inspects Dawn’s painting. “Cool!” Jonas carries a loaded grocery bag. “For our indoor picnic.” And Jenny thrusts an iced coffee into my hand before giving me a hug.
After we get the children set up and the groceries put away, I pull Jenny into my bedroom.
“So what’s up?” She knows me. I push the envelope toward her and tell her I think it’s from Patty, but I’m afraid to look. I ask her to read it for me.
She stays in my bedroom while I go back out to the children. Jonas has set up a huge puzzle that looks too difficult for him, but he lets me join him and we look together for edge pieces. After what feels like a long time, I go back and check on Jenny, who sits on the bed with an odd expression on her face. She doesn’t want to tell me whatever it is.
“Don’t react when I tell you.” I start to laugh, that insane kind of laugh that takes over at just the wrong moment.
I sit down next to her. She takes my left hand with hers.
“I don’t understand all the legalese, but Patty is asking to be Dawn’s mother.”
Jenny doesn’t mince words.
“That can’t be,” I say as I reach for the papers, but she puts them behind her back.
“If it’s that bad, I’d better read it now while you’re here.” She hands them to me and leaves the room.
I think that from my one summer working in my dad’s law office I know how to read legal papers, but what I read so stuns me that I almost can’t see. Patty alleges that she is a second mother to Dawn based on her egg donation. That’s what’s in the petition, but there is also a request for order form seeking a hearing on custody – in one month! – and a declaration in Patty’s own words that recites Dawn’s genetic history, that I have no biological connection to this child, that I was hospitalized for depression and she had to care for Dawn for nearly two years, and, finally, that Dawn is not safe with me. I want to scream, but there are three children in the next room, and I must hold it together.
Jenny gives me a searching look as I return to the main room. I take her hand, and she wraps me into a hug. I cave in to the solace of her empathy, which wrings the anger out of me, but now I want to cry. I can’t run outside because I have told the children we can�
��t go out today, so I stand here trying to squelch my emotion.
Gulliver wants help with his painting, so Jenny releases me to see to him. “Call Analee,” she whispers.
Still fortified by Jenny’s hug, I go back into the bedroom and dial Analee from my cell phone. She had trounced Patty in that one short hearing, and I need her to tell me she can do it again. Only to learn from Gerta that Analee is in San Francisco for a five-day holiday, not to return until next Tuesday. I tell Gerta what I have received, and she responds that she has received a ‘courtesy copy’ of the same document this afternoon. She will tell Analee about it as soon as possible. Even she sounds abashed, as if someone had thrown a rock through the front window of her office. I ask how soon I can get an appointment with Analee, and she gives me a time on Wednesday morning when Dawn will be in school. Today is only Thursday, I don’t know how I can wait. I ask if she can have Analee give me a call before Wednesday. She promises she will try. Then, she adds in a strong but caring voice (and I am stunned because she was so stern when I first met her) that this must be very hard, and she will try to get Analee to call me as soon as she can.
In the most peculiar of coincidences, KVMR is playing “Bridge Over Troubled Water” as I come back to the main room, and Jenny sings the refrain to me, “I will ease your mind.”
Dawn’s brown trees have bled into the pink background as predicted, but she has created an effect not unlike our day, when everything is seen through a thick haze. “It looks like today,” I tell her, and she agrees, satisfied with herself. Gulliver has taken an entirely different approach, keeping his paper dry and creating a colorful bird with a long tail in precise brushstrokes.
13
ANALEE
I was just toasting Adam with a glass of sauvignon blanc, thinking this will be the perfect San Francisco getaway long weekend. We had dropped off the boys with Adam’s parents this morning and got to the City in time for an extravagant lunch at Boulevard. In front of each of us sits a wide shallow bowl with seared scallops at the center. Our waiter is in the process of pouring lemon grass cucumber soup into Adam’s bowl when my cell phone rings. The waiter casts me a dark look and Adam also glances at me quizzically, as if asking whether I can allow myself to be on vacation.
“It’s from Gerta. She wouldn’t call if it weren’t important.” Adam shrugs. The waiter looks down at me and asks me to take my call outside. Leaving my seat, I autodial Gerta as I move toward the front of the restaurant. “What’s up?”
I can’t hear her voice until I stand outside, facing the water across the Embarcadero. “Say it again.”
“I wouldn’t call you if it wasn’t urgent, but Karen was just served with a parentage action from Patty, and she’s come unglued. I think you need to talk to her.”
“A parentage action?” I can’t believe it. “Have you seen it?”
“Yes, we received our own copy from her lawyer. Patty claims that she is Dawn’s genetic mother and seeks custody as Dawn’s second mother.”
“Oh, no.” I start to rub my forehead with my one free hand.
“And she’s hired a new lawyer, too – Stephen Petrakis.”
“Huh. At least someone I can work with. But I can’t believe she’d do this. I’m stunned. Can you fax the pleadings to me at the hotel? I don’t have my computer with me.”
“Sure. I’m sorry to ruin your weekend. But I’m glad you’re going to call her. She needs to talk to you.”
“Thanks, Gerta, for being on top of this. You did the right thing.”
Adam hasn’t touched his soup. “I saw you from the window. What’s wrong?”
“You remember the woman I visited in Rough and Ready? The guardianship termination?”
“Yeah, I thought that was over.”
“It was. But now her sister filed a parentage action, claiming she is the little girl’s second mom. Because of the ovum donation, the little girl is her genetic child.”
“I thought that only happened with same-sex couples.”
“So far, that’s been true.”
“Taste this; it’s out of this world.” Adam tries to distract me. “It’s amazing. I wonder what’s in here besides lemon grass and cucumber.”
“Do you think you could replicate this?” I ask him.
“I’m going to ask for the recipe, if our waiter is still on speaking terms with us. But I’m curious about this lawsuit. If the other woman wins, is her husband the child’s father? Will the child have three parents?”
“I don’t know which is weirder: a child with two mothers and one father/uncle or a child with two mothers, one of whom she always thought was her aunt.”
“You presume this child understands what an aunt is.”
“Good point. And I don’t even know whether she’s trying to replace my client as the mother. I don’t think so, from what Gerta said. Also, she can’t prove abandonment. But I need to read it before I call my client.”
“So it sounds like I’m going to the MOMA by myself this afternoon, while you take care of this.”
“’Fraid so. I’m sorry.” I give him an apologetic look, but he can see I’m distracted.
“Constitutionally, can a child have one parent at birth and then the court designate another parent to replace her later if it’s better for the child?” The legal question has bitten Adam, the constitutional law professor.
“Not without proof of abandonment. But can you add other parents later? Especially when that wasn’t what was intended when the child was conceived?” I eat my soup between questions.
“Wasn’t there a case like that?”
“Yeah, one of the three lesbian mom cases involved an ovum donation. I know they both ended up as parents but I can’t remember the Supreme Court’s reasons without going back to read it.”
“I got it!” Adam holds a spoonful of soup in his mouth as if he is winetasting. “Lemon cucumber.”
I laugh. “I bet you’re right. Now if you can help me figure out the issues in this lawsuit as well as you did the soup…”
“We’ll be cookin’.”
By the time I return to the hotel, the package awaits me at the desk. I rip it open and read it quickly before even getting to the room. Then I sit down and read it again, as slowly as I can. The petition is as plain vanilla as such a thing can be. Patty alleges that she and Karen are Dawn’s two parents – she genetically through her ovum donation and Karen by giving birth. She doesn’t list her husband as another parent. But she has also filed a motion for access to the child, alleging in full detail how Karen had stormed out of the driveway with tires screeching, because she didn’t like Dawn’s haircut. Ever since then, Karen has prevented Patty from seeing Dawn, even though Dawn had lived with her and her husband and two children for over nineteen months. The supporting declaration makes Karen sound vindictive, a little crazy and certainly oblivious to Dawn’s interests. No wonder Karen feels unhinged. I sat for a moment trying to organize my thoughts before calling Karen.
Karen answers somewhat breathlessly on the first ring. I can hear Dawn in the background, as if she is singing softly or reading.
“Karen, it’s Analee. I’m so sorry to see what Patty has filed. Are you able to talk?”
“I have to talk to you. I’ll go into the other room.” Her voice rejoins after a moment, and I can no longer hear Dawn in the background. “Can she do this?” Her voice breaks.
“I’m afraid anyone can file a lawsuit. But this is really a strange one. You know how surprised I was when she didn’t do anything after the guardianship termination? The court lost jurisdiction after sixty days to grant her visitation. So now this.” I think but do not say that this might not have happened if Karen had allowed Patty to visit with Dawn, as I had urged her to do a few days after the hearing. I know I need to keep any blame out of my voice; it would only make matters much worse.
“But can s
he win?”
“I wish I could tell you that this lawsuit is nonsense and will be dismissed as soon as we ask the court to do that. But this is very strange new territory, and I can’t give you that reassurance. I know of only one other case involving an ovum donor claiming to be a parent.”
“What happened in that one?”
“The ovum donor was found to be the second legal parent. It was a lesbian couple who had lived together and reared the children together. I haven’t read the decision in a few years, and I don’t remember the court’s reasoning. Obviously, I’ll research it as soon as I get back.”
“But that wasn’t what we planned. She has children of her own. This child was supposed to be mine.”
“You’re right. And then a lot of other things happened that make this a tougher question. She’s also filed a motion to have visitation rights. Are you willing to reconsider on that point?”
“No way! Not after she’s done this to me. She doesn’t deserve to see Dawn.”
I can see it would be pointless for me to try to persuade her to do anything right now. I promise her I will research this as soon as I get back, and that we will sit down together and try to figure out what to do. I tell her I will call the other attorney and ask him to postpone the hearing a few weeks.
“Analee. Be straight with me: am I going to lose this? Am I going to have to share Dawn with Patty?”
Raising Dawn Page 10