by Bill Heavey
A statistic I didn’t know I knew popped unbidden into my head like some magic flash card. More than three-quarters of marriages in which a child dies do not survive. It occurred to me that in one stroke I might have lost not only Lily, but Jane and Molly as well.
Jane and I had long talked about adoption as our backup plan if the fertility route failed. We’d done some research and decided that we preferred a private, domestic adoption, rather than going through an agency or adopting from overseas. We didn’t like the idea of seeing a photo, taking a trip to China or Korea, and then having to decide yes or no on the spot. We wanted to meet the mother, get to know her, make sure it felt right. It was more work and would probably take more time than an agency adoption, but it offered more control. At this point, we were big on control. We got involved with a local group, Families for Private Adoption, that offered advice and support. One of the first things we learned was that everyone you know or meet is a potential lead: friends, family, the checkout girl at the grocery store, the attendant at your health club, people at parties. “Get over being self-conscious,” one woman who had adopted three children told us. “You’re on a mission. Do at least one thing every day. Post a card on a new bulletin board, research a new place to run an ad, buttonhole a stranger. Most people are happy to help. If they’re not, that’s their problem.” You give every contact at least one business-size card with your pitch. The rule of thumb about the pitch is the simpler the better. You also have a separate, toll-free line installed in your house to receive the calls, ensuring no busy signals and a level of protection against scam artists (people desperate to adopt are notoriously easy to con). The toll-free part means a prospective mother doesn’t have to talk to the operator and can leave a message whether you’re there or not. “You want to make it as easy for a mother to contact as you possibly can,” we were told. We pared away the language on our card until it was bare-bones: “A very warm, loving couple unable to have second child seeks newborn to love and nurture. Can pay medical, legal expenses. Call toll free.” And listed the number.
We passed out cards diligently. We ran ads in newspapers all over rural Virginia. (A baby is a commodity subject to the laws of supply and demand, just as soybeans are. In metropolitan Washington, D.C., with a high number of career women who sometimes wait too long to have babies, the demand is high and the supply is low. In southern Virginia, the situation tends to be somewhat reversed.) We checked the message machine every time we walked in the door. And nothing happened. Months dragged by. We had been warned about this. We knew that all it takes is one phone call. “If you stick with it long enough, you will find a baby,” we had been told again and again. When we got lucky, after just five months, it wasn’t an ad or a friend-of-a-friend, it was our neighbors, Kevin and Ellen Bailey, who led us to Lily. Ellen had been having her hair done when she dutifully mentioned to a manicurist that she knew a couple who were looking for a baby. The woman had a friend, another Vietnamese manicurist, who might be a possibility. She would check.
The car came to a stop. Someone opened my door. Inside the emergency room was a clot of people. In the middle were Jane and Molly, wild-eyed, their faces flushed and streaked with tears. The three of us ran and clutched at each other, the sobs at last finding their way up in my throat. Some nurses shepherded us into a private room. Jane had been there for more than an hour, had already done the unthinkable, gone in to see Lily’s body alone except for a nurse. She had pleaded with the nurses not to take her to the morgue before I got there. A nurse came in to talk to us. She said that Hien, the woman who ran the daycare center in her home, told them she put Lily down for a nap, then checked back to find her blue-lipped and still. She had tried CPR, had called 911. The paramedics had worked on Lily in the ambulance. At the hospital they had worked on her as well, but she had probably been dead when she arrived. It sounded to the nurse like sudden infant death syndrome, SIDS, also known as crib death. Doctors didn’t know why, but each year about one in a thousand babies in the United States, most between one month and one year old, simply stop breathing and die. There is no telltale sound, no warning, no sign of a struggle. SIDS is unpredictable and, currently, unpreventable. I could see Lily, though the woman warned I might not want to, as they’d had to stick tubes down her throat and in her leg. In a voice so enraged I could barely control it, I bit off the words: I would see my daughter.
Jane and I held each other as a nurse led us into an examining room cluttered with medical equipment. A uniformed cop stood off in one corner absently, as if a bus he wanted to catch might be passing through soon. I scarcely noticed him. My daughter lay swaddled in a blanket on a table, wearing only a diaper. The tubes were there, but otherwise Lily was unblemished. “She was warm before,” mumbled Jane, stroking her cheek. “She’s . . . cold now.” I picked her up, felt her smooth baby skin, cradled her head in my neck. I recognized everything about her: her small heft, her black hair, her brow, her cheeks. But this was not Lily; this was just the doll that death had left behind. Her cheek was cold against mine. I couldn’t seem to breathe. My vision started to go again, the sides of the room caving in. “She’s . . . so . . . cold,” I finally managed to croak. The police officer shifted once on his feet. What was he doing here? Then it dawned on me that they might suspect us, the parents, of having killed our own child. As long as the world had turned into Hell, why not throw in a murder charge as well?
I started to dissociate again, to feel like I had a part in some strange play, that I was performing for the cop. But the fact of her body in my arms was too real. Then I felt a tiny bit of warmth in her back, the last spark of life that was even now on its way out of her body, this room, this earth. “Still warm!” I blurted out to Jane. “I know,” she wept. “There was more before.” I held Lily tight and rocked, long swings forward and back as if I might somehow wake her. I was aware enough to be terribly scared. I was numb now. What would happen when the numbness wore off? The nurse came in and put a hand on my shoulder. I understood the signal. I was a good boy. I obeyed.
We had met Lan (not her real name) on a Wednesday morning at her friend’s house over cups of mint tea. She was in her early twenties, with a round face, shoulder-length black hair, and, of course, impeccable nails. Our first impression—of a reserved, serious young woman—was just the armor she wore until she felt comfortable. Underneath, she was a strong-willed, jovial girl who liked to laugh. She was unmarried, worked seventy hours a week at a salon in D.C., already had two toddlers, and had just had another baby. We liked Lan right off the bat. She hadn’t brought the baby, but one of her two other children, a four-year-old named David. He was a happy, well-cared-for boy. When I shook his hand and kept shaking it as though he were the one who wouldn’t let go, he giggled.
Lan had come to the United States in her early teens from South Vietnam, dropped out of high school when she got pregnant for the first time, and had been working full-time ever since. Her parents were divorced, her siblings scattered all over the country. She was pretty much one her own. “It’s just too much,” she said. “I can’t take care three children.” We stayed for an hour, drinking tea and making small talk. We showed her pictures of Molly, our house, the Christmas card at the animal shelter with the three of us standing around Santa’s sleigh and Snoop, our adopted dog, looking forlorn in a red stocking cap with a snowball on the end. We said we would love to meet the baby. She told us to come to her apartment in D.C. on Sunday, her day off.
The next Sunday was Easter. Jane, Molly, and I drove into D.C. and stopped at a bakery in Adams Morgan for a cake in the shape of an Easter bunny with white coconut fur to bring as a gift. Lan lived in a tiny apartment in a building apparently occupied exclusively by Vietnamese. Lying in a baby carrier and wrapped up so that all we could see was her face was a six-week-old baby girl with black hair and brown eyes. She did not look particularly impressed to see us. I did not know then that at six weeks, a baby sees anything more than a coup
le of feet away as a blur. We sat on Lan’s bed and fed cake to her son and daughter, a two-year-old who was instantly fascinated by Molly. Jane and I took turns holding the baby, whom Lan had named Stephanie. She was small but solid and seemed remarkably self-contained, as if accustomed to spending time on her own. At six weeks, babies are not particularly concerned with how they are coming across to strangers. As I held her I wondered, Are you the one? How will we know? Jane, however, was smitten instantly. “Oh, she’s so charming,” she told Lan. “She’s beautiful.” I looked at Jane’s face. It was glowing with the look of a woman who had already begun bonding with her daughter, a process that bypasses the brain entirely. That was how we knew.
Lan had a boyfriend upstairs, whose mother lived with him or in the unit next door, we never did decipher which. The mother took care of all three children while Lan worked. Lan told us to wrap Stephanie tightly and not to hold her too much. “She smell you,” Lan said. “Then you can’t put her down easy.” We nodded. We didn’t say that having the baby smell us, bond with us, and demand to be held was exactly what we wanted. Lan’s face never changed, but tears began to invade her face. “You good people,” she said. “You take her.” Jane and I exchanged glances. We had discussed that we might be coming home with a baby today, had even hauled Molly’s old crib out of the attic against that possibility. Suddenly, it was actually happening. Lan insisted on loading us up with diapers, formula, clothes, a car carrier, and a few toys. She refused any money for these things. We explained a little about how the adoption process worked, that we would get her an attorney, as well as a social worker who spoke Vietnamese to do the required counseling, and that eventually she would go to court with us in Virginia to make the adoption final. We told her we would take care of Stephanie and that she could visit her anytime she wanted, that we wanted the child to have the opportunity to know her biological mother when she was older if she wanted. Her face was losing its composure now. “Please,” she whispered. “Take her now.” And suddenly we were on the sidewalk blinking in the bright sunshine of Easter morning with a baby in our arms, feeling a strange mixture of elation at our good luck and sorrow for the heart-wrenching loss Lan was going through. It was as close to instant fatherhood as a man could get. I did not know then that in ten weeks it would be over.
I had told my sister, Olivia, about the baby, but not my parents. They’d already had three rides on the fertility roller coaster with us and I wanted to spare them more disappointment if possible. But we were due to have lunch with them and a family friend at the Morrison House in Alexandria, where Olivia worked, and we intended to surprise them with the good news. My mother had never said anything about it, but it was obvious she wanted nothing on earth so much as a grandchild. Our plans were foiled when Jane went into the ladies’ room at the restaurant to change the baby before our triumphal entrance and ran smack into my mother. Baby, mother, and grandmother proceeded into the restaurant, where Lily was officially welcomed into the family with laughter, tears, and champagne. Olivia took the baby back to the kitchen to meet the staff. Photos of the occasion show me looking like a man who has just been hit in the face with a frying pan. We had already decided on a name. Elizabeth, after my mother. Ashley, Jane’s maiden name for her middle name. And Heavey.
I wish I could say she came home with us and fell sound asleep. In fact she was up all night, crying. “I think she’s terrified,” said Jane. “She doesn’t know why she’s here or who we are.” Jane stayed up all night with her, alternately walking the living room and massaging her back as the baby lay sobbing in her crib. I opted for the only constructive thing I could think of: a massive anxiety attack. Staring at the ceiling in bed, I suddenly wondered if we had done the right thing, whether I was ready for this, what business I had accepting another woman’s child to raise. I called a good friend who had also adopted. “I’m just freaking out,” I said. “I’m so anxious I can’t think straight.” “Enjoy it while you can, pal,” he said laughing. “You’re gonna be too busy to freak out soon.”
We got through that night. And the next, and the next. My friend was right. I learned to change a diaper one-handed while pinning a squirming child to the changing table with the other. To always wipe down, in the direction of the feet, instead of up during changing, to heat a four-ounce bottle precisely twenty-seven seconds in our microwave, to transfer the napping baby from my arms to her crib with the dexterity of a bomb disposal technician. I learned to sing lullabies I didn’t know I remembered as I stroked her stomach to put her back to sleep after a feeding in the middle of the night.
Some nights I would linger after she had gone back to sleep, watching over her as she slept, and just listen to her breathing. She began to smile when I approached her crib or picked her up. “It’s Daddy,” I would say as I tucked her up in the hollow of my shoulder. “How’s my girl today?” She especially loved it when I stretched her arms and legs on the changing table, yoga-style. She was yielding but quite strong and the harder I tugged the more she smiled. Sometimes she would gurgle in delight. “Little Buddha girl,” I cooed at her. “The perfect being.” The happy sounds she made seemed as close to pure joy as humans are permitted. I was becoming a father. I was learning what all adoptive parents know: It’s not DNA that confers paternity. It’s baby poop.
We always called her “the baby” until we took her for a visit to my father’s mother, Granny, ninety-nine years old and living in a rest home on the Eastern Shore. “Elizabeth,” mused Granny, when we told her the name. “You know, Queen Elizabeth was called Lily when she was a girl because she couldn’t pronounce her own name. She could only say, ‘Lilybeth.’” Jane and I looked at each other. Lily. That was the name we’d been looking for. Thereafter the baby was Elizabeth on legal documents, but Lily for all other purposes.
Jane and I quickly arrived at a wholly unsatisfactory arrangement for baby care. Since my wife sees clients at her psychotherapy practice mostly in the afternoon, she would take the baby in the mornings, leaving me free to write. In the afternoons, we would switch. In the evenings, we would share duty. For reasons I cannot now fathom, I expected to be a natural at baby care. Jane said I was better at it than most men, but she said this in the same way you might note that horses are better at needlepoint than most fish. I only knew three things to do with a crying baby: feed it, change it, or burp it. If none of these worked, I generally repeated the sequence until overwhelmed by anxiety, frustration, and crankiness, not unlike Lily herself.
Jane, having already raised one child and coming from a large family overflowing with nieces and nephews, had not only more experience, but another quality I seemed to lack entirely: baby intuition. She could tell what Lily wanted just by looking at her, a feat bordering on witchcraft. “She wants water, not formula,” she would say, based on a look. Or that the baby would stop crying if I a) took her for a walk, b) put her on her stomach, or c) sang the theme from The Sound of Music.
The arrangement was supposed to be fifty-fifty, but wasn’t. Jane ended up doing far more than her share. It was the source of more than a little friction in the marriage. Three hours alone with the baby would leave me feeling exhausted. “You don’t get it,” Jane would say. “You have to surrender to her.” I come from five generations of career military. My father was a fighter pilot. Surrender was not on the curriculum. When I had to travel, we figured we’d need extra help. We turned to a local Vietnamese woman who offered daycare in her home nearby and came highly recommended by dozens of parents in the area. We inspected her house one afternoon. It was clean and bright. Hien picked Lily up and the baby beamed at her. We told Hien we would be irregular clients, and she said that would be fine. She asked us to try to give her a couple of days’ notice since she only took one or two infants at a time.
When we got home from the hospital, I began the grim job of notifying family and friends. The protective dissociation was beginning to wear off. I would compose myself to make the call,
but the moment it went through—even to an answering machine—I fell apart. I can’t remember most of the calls. I know I talked to my mother and managed to blurt out the news, but that’s all. I left a message on the car phone of my friend who had adopted, several more locally. There weren’t that many people it felt right to tell. My friend got the message while driving. At first he’d thought it was a terrible joke. Then he’d pulled onto the shoulder, listened again, and broke down crying, too.
The bottle Lily had drunk this morning was still lying unwashed in the sink when we got home. Her clothes were still on the floor and the changing table. Her favorite toy, a cloth butterfly with big red wings with mirrors in them and long blue antennae, lay in her crib. I pressed my face into the mattress and smelled the baby smell lingering in the sheets. I fell to my knees, clutching at the bars of the crib. She was dead all over again. It was still happening. The unthinkable had invited itself in as our houseguest. It would be here for an indefinite stay.
My parents and Olivia came over. Friends of Jane came by. Around eight o’clock, it suddenly occurred to me that while the family was embracing each other and saying that we would get through this somehow, my daughter was alone and lying on a stainless steel table in the morgue. I wanted to be with her, to watch over her one last time. I made frantic calls to the emergency room and was turned down at every turn. It was, I was told, impossible. Once again, I obeyed. (Months later, in a SIDS support group, I met a single mother who had experienced the same feelings, made the same phone calls. Only she wouldn’t take no for an answer. She had gone and sat on the steps of the morgue building and refused to leave. She hadn’t been let in, either. But she had made the attempt, had made the people who told her no look her in the eye. I was filled with admiration for her tenacity. And I will always regret that I didn’t find out exactly where my baby was, go down there, and beat at the door until they let me in to sit by Lily or had me arrested for trespassing. I owed my daughter that much.)