by Cronk, LN
We sat down and looked at the posters on the wall. A ceramic Buddha smiled at us from the desk. I could hear what sounded like a waterfall or a fountain, but I couldn’t find its source.
Starr came into the office, looking all of about seventeen years of age. She was wearing a Green Peace t-shirt and cargo pants. There was a star tattooed on her neck.
Star . . . Starr.
Cute.
We stood up when she entered the room. She extended her hand.
“Hello, I’m Starr.”
“Hi,” I said, shaking her hand. ‘I’m David and this is my wife, Laci.”
It might have been my imagination, but I thought I saw a flash of surprise cross her face.
“You’re interested in adopting?” she asked, sitting down.
Adopting? From our orphanage in Mexico? Yes! From here? No!
“Yes,” Laci and I both said as we sat back down.
“How about if I go over our procedures and then you can let me know if you have any questions. Is that cool?”
Cool.
“A pregnant woman who doesn’t want her baby and decides not to terminate her pregnancy can come to us to search for the person or persons that she would like to have raise her baby.
“Prospective parents fill out a lengthy questionnaire,” she said, handing us a thick red folder. “The expectant mothers browse through the files until they find the parent or parents that look most attractive to them. We set up a meeting and – if things go well – our office helps to work out all the details of the adoption.”
Laci opened up the folder and we looked at the top sheet. The first thing I saw was a section with eight boxes to choose from:
□Single (male)
□Single (female)
□Single (other)
□Couple (male/female)
□Couple (male/male)
□Couple (female/female)
□Couple (other)
□Other
Other?
Okay, now I was beginning to see why this place was called Adoption Alternatives. I was also beginning to understand one of the posters on the wall.
I took the folder from Laci and looked at it closer.
The next section asked you to describe your religious preference. I won’t even get into what options were listed there.
“Are all of the adoptions open?” Laci was asking.
“Usually,” Starr answered, “but not always. Sometimes the mother changes her mind and decides it will be easier not to see her baby after the adoption is complete.”
“We live in Mexico,” I said quickly.
“You live in Mexico?”
We both nodded.
And we’re conservative Christians, I wanted to add, but I kept my mouth shut.
“Why did you choose our agency?” she asked carefully.
My horoscope told me to.
“We felt drawn to come here,” Laci said. Starr nodded and seemed pleased with that answer.
“Is it possible that someone would choose us even though we live in Mexico?” Laci asked.
“It’s possible . . .” Starr said.
Is it possible that any mother who wants to place their baby through your agency would actually ever pick someone like us?
“So we need to fill this out?” Laci asked.
We left the clinic with the packet and got into the car.
“What do you think?” Laci asked as we pulled away.
“You don’t want to know,” I answered.
“I think we need to fill this stuff out right away and get it back to them as soon as we can,” Laci said.
“You don’t really think someone who chooses that agency is actually going to pick us, do you?”
“No,” Laci admitted, “but that’s not our problem. I say we fill it out honestly, get it back to them, and then get on with our lives. It’ll be up to God after that.”
“So we’re still flying back to Mexico next week?”
“Unless He tells us otherwise,” she said.
“Deal,” I answered.
~ ~ ~
DO YOU KNOW how long it took for God to ‘tell us otherwise’?
Five days.
Someone actually wanted to meet us and talk to us about adopting her baby. Some girl named Kelly. Before I knew it we were back in Starr’s office, listening to the sound of a waterfall or a fountain and waiting for Kelly to arrive. We didn’t look at the posters this time . . . we just stared at each other in disbelief.
Kelly entered the room and sat down. She didn’t look very pregnant yet. She was pretty . . . she had long, strawberry blond hair and blue eyes. But she also had a sad, haunted look about her.
“Kelly,” Starr said, “this is Laci and this is David.”
Kelly nodded at us and we nodded back. Then Kelly looked down at the floor. Starr told us she was going to leave us alone so that we could get to know one another a little bit.
“How are you, Kelly?” Laci asked her as Starr pulled the door closed behind her.
Kelly looked back up at us.
“You don’t remember me, do you?”
Remember you?
“Have we met?” Laci asked gently.
Kelly nodded.
“I’m Kelly Dunn,” she said. “Kyle’s sister.”
I know my mouth dropped open.
“Kyle Dunn?” Laci asked.
Kelly nodded.
Kyle Dunn?
The Kyle Dunn who had killed my best friend and his father?
My mind flashed back to the execution.
It was. It was the same young teenage girl who’d tried to comfort her mother as they’d watched Kyle die.
I was speechless.
“I recognized your picture,” she said, holding up the file we’d compiled a few days ago. “Kyle told me and my mom all about you.”
“How’s your mom?” Laci asked quietly.
Kelly shrugged. I rubbed my forehead.
“Why did you contact us, Kelly?” Laci asked.
“You want a baby, right?” She looked to Laci and then to me.
I managed a slight nod.
“When I saw your picture I remembered what you did for Kyle. I want the same thing for my baby.”
“What’s that?” Laci asked. “What exactly do you want for your baby?”
“To grow up in a home with people like you . . . not someone like me or my mom.”
“People like us?”
“Yeah, you know . . . people who believe in God.”
“If you don’t believe in God,” Laci asked, “why do you care if your baby grows up with people who do?”
“Oh,” Kelly said. “I believe in God, I just meant people who’re better than me.”
“We’re not better than you,” I said.
“You know what I mean,” Kelly replied. “People who go to church and stuff.”
Oh, boy.
When Laci and I got back into the car we didn’t say anything to each other for the entire ride home. We pulled up in the driveway. I turned off the car and finally looked over at Laci.
“Our tickets aren’t refundable, are they?” she asked. I shook my head. She sighed and we got out of the car and walked inside.
~ ~ ~
WE STARTED MEETING with Kelly on a regular basis to get to know her. It was so obvious right from the beginning (even to me) that God wanted us to minister to Kelly. No, actually, God wanted Laci to minister to Kelly.
Kelly wanted absolutely nothing to do with me.
“What’d I ever do to her?” I asked after Laci had met with her for their second lunch together without me.
“Well,” Laci said, “she probably thinks you hate her because her brother killed your best friend.”
“I don’t hate her.”
“I know you don’t, but she doesn’t know that.”
“Why doesn’t she think you hate her?” I asked.
“Because I’m sweet,” Laci smiled. “She can tell I don’t hate her.”
&
nbsp; “I’m sweet!” I argued and Laci laughed.
“That’s not the word I would use to describe you when you realized who she was.”
“Well, I was shocked, Laci. You’ve got to admit that kind of came out of nowhere.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m not blaming you, I’m just telling you why Kelly probably doesn’t feel all that comfortable around you.”
The truth was that I didn’t feel all that comfortable around her either.
“I think you need to go ahead and put the house on the market . . .” Laci said.
“NO!” I replied, surprising myself by how adamant I sounded. “She never said that we have to stay around here . . .”
“We haven’t talked about it,” Laci said.
“We put in our file that we live in Mexico.”
“I don’t think she read our file,” Laci said. “I think once she recognized our picture she didn’t look any farther than that.”
“That’s her problem.”
“Kelly,” Laci said the next time the three of us got together. “We need to talk about something.”
“Okay.”
“Did you read our application?”
Kelly nodded.
“No,” Laci said. “I mean did you really read it? Do you know that we live in Mexico?”
“You live here,” Kelly said, a confused look on her face.
“Not really,” Laci said. “We live in Mexico. We’re just here for . . . for a while.”
“Oh.”
“Is it going to be a problem for you if we take the baby to Mexico? You won’t be able to see him very often . . .”
“I don’t know,” Kelly admitted. “Can I think about it for a while?”
“Sure,” Laci said.
“I just know I want you two to be its parents,” Kelly said, looking at me and then at Laci.
Laci smiled at her. I just sighed.
We went with Kelly to her twelve week appointment and heard the baby’s heartbeat. Afterward we took her out to eat and brought up the subject of Mexico once more.
“I don’t know,” Kelly told us again, looking down at her plate. “I haven’t decided.”
“She’s just stringing us along, Laci,” I complained after we’d dropped her off at her house.
“What are you talking about?”
“I mean she needs to go ahead and make a decision. Either she’s okay with us taking the baby to Mexico or she’s not. If she’s not then she needs to start looking for somebody else.”
“David, we have to take this baby no matter what!”
“Even if she doesn’t want us going to Mexico?”
“Yes.”
“You’re serious?” I asked her. “You’d stay here and raise her baby and not go back to Mexico?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“She needs us, David. Her baby needs us.”
“No, Laci. There are a ton of Christian couples who would love to have her baby . . . you know that. She could just go to a Christian adoption agency. As soon as they found out she’s having a white baby she’d have so many people clamoring to pay her medical bills and help her out that she wouldn’t know who to pick. It doesn’t have to be us.”
“Yes it does.”
“Why?”
“It just does, David. You know that.”
I pulled over to the side of the road and put the car in park. I looked out my window.
“What’s the matter?” she finally asked softly. I didn’t say anything, I just shook my head.
“You’ve got to talk to me,” she said, putting her hand on my shoulder.
“I don’t want this baby,” I finally said, still staring out my window.
“I know,” she said softly.
I looked at her.
“Do you want this baby?”
“No.”
“Then what are we doing, Laci?”
“We’re obeying God.”
“I can’t believe He wants us raising a child we don’t want.”
“We’ll want it by the time it’s ours,” she said. “I know we will. We’ll love it.”
“I just can’t see it happening,” I said, shaking my head.
“There was a time when I couldn’t see myself ever loving you,” she said, “but I do. I love you with all my heart.”
“This is different.”
“How? How is it different?”
“This baby will always be related to Kyle . . . always. Every time I look at him or her I’m going to remember that.”
“We’ve forgiven Kyle . . .”
“But we haven’t forgotten what he did,” I said, feeling tears in my eyes. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life thinking about that every time I see my child.”
“You won’t,” she assured me. “I promise you that God will let you love this child and not think about that.”
“I don’t know, Laci.”
“What about women who get pregnant because they’ve been raped? You’ve heard stories about them being able to raise their babies and love them in spite of how they were conceived.”
“Most of them put their babies up for adoption because they don’t want to be reminded about it every day,” I said, not sure if that was actually true or not.
“But not all of them,” she argued back. “I’ve heard some of them on talk shows and stuff talking about raising their babies and about how much they love them . . .”
I shook my head and looked back out the window.
“She’s having a sonogram in two weeks,” Laci went on. “Maybe after we see the baby . . . maybe we’ll start to feel differently then.”
I leaned my head against the headrest and closed my eyes. Laci let me sit there for a minute.
“I guess I don’t have much choice,” I finally said.
“You can choose if you’re going to have faith in God or not.”
“That’s not fair, Laci. If I didn’t have faith I wouldn’t be going through with this. You know that.”
“Well,” she said, “you can choose what your attitude about it’s going to be.”
She had me there.
“Okay,” I finally nodded and I started the car and drove home.
We started praying that God would put a love in our hearts for Kelly’s baby. Of course we already had a certain kind of love for her baby just because it was one of God’s children, but we wanted to feel about it the way we’d felt about Gabby – or at least close.
I tried to have a better attitude . . . to give thanks even though I didn’t feel particularly thankful.
It helped a lot that Laci was struggling with the same thing. Somehow I didn’t feel like such a louse.
~ ~ ~
WHEN KELLY WAS sixteen weeks pregnant we went with her to her sonogram. I was hoping that as soon as I saw the baby on the screen I would feel something for it, but I didn’t. When I wasn’t thinking about Gabby I was thinking about Kyle. I barely blinked when the technician told us it was a boy.
We took her out after that appointment too and brought up the subject of Mexico once more. This time she’d made a decision.
“I can’t raise him myself . . . I know that,” she said, “but I love him and I still want to be a part of his life.”
She also told us she wanted us to think of a name for him. She thought it should be our decision, but she wanted to know as soon as possible. She said she’d read somewhere that she should be talking to the baby and she thought it would be good if she started calling him by his name.
~ ~ ~
WHEN WE’D BEEN expecting Gabby, we’d spent a lot of time picking out baby names and arguing until we’d found the right one. Laci had wanted a Spanish name and of course I hadn’t. We’d finally compromised, deciding to name her Gabrielle and call her Gabby.
But before we’d known that Gabby was going to be a girl, I had sometimes wondered – if the baby was a boy – if we might name it Greg.
I’d wondered then if that would be too weird
. Would it be appropriate? I’d never brought it up and then we’d found out we were having a girl, so it hadn’t mattered anyway.
Now, however, we knew we were having a boy. What about now? Would it be too weird now?
Hi, baby. Your name is Greg. We named you after my best friend . . . you know . . . the one who was killed by your uncle?
No. That didn’t seem weird at all.
We settled on Stephen.
~ ~ ~
KELLY DIDN’T UNDERSTAND at first why we’d decided to call the baby Stephen. Then Laci read to her from Acts and explained Stephen’s story. When Laci got to the part about how the last thing Stephen had done was to ask God’s forgiveness for the people who were killing him, Kelly finally understood.
We still hadn’t picked out a middle name though.
After rereading Acts, Laci asked me if it could be Paul. I knew why she wanted that for his middle name and she was right – it would have been perfect.
But I said no.
I just couldn’t do it . . .
That’s what Greg’s dad’s name had been and what the “P” had stood for in Gregory P. White.
~ ~ ~
RESIGNED TO THE fact that we were in Cavendish to stay, we started getting involved again with the community we’d grown up in. Laci rejoined the church choir and we started going to the adult Bible study on Tuesday nights. I went to the high school baseball team’s games to cheer Jordan on in the spring and he finished out the school year with a “B” in Pre-algebra.
Summer came and Laci and I joined the pool. I quickly discovered that the pool’s not all that much fun if you’re not a teenager and you’re not hanging out with your friends all day long.