Again and again during the following weeks, I imagined Danielle’s last moments with Ethan, the way she must have pressed her cheek against his hair, breathing him in, the way she must have kissed him. How long did she look at him before she pulled the covers over his sleeping body and left? I hated myself for not hearing her, for not waking up when she left my house to set her terrible plan in motion. I thought of all those people who leapt to their deaths from the Golden Gate Bridge each year; statistics showed that if someone intervened and the first attempt at suicide failed, the person had a high likelihood of surviving the next few years. So often, it takes just one person to say, “Don’t do it.” I should have been that person for Danielle. I should have seen the warning signs. “He’d be better off without me,” Danielle had said. She had uttered these words in my own house, and I had said nothing.
The funeral was held two days later at a church on Geary. There were only five people in attendance. The grandparents who had raised Danielle were dead, she’d been estranged from her sister, and she had apparently had few friends. In an unsettling turn of events, the priest asked me to speak. I had been introduced to him by the social worker, Terry, as “Danielle’s friend” and Ethan’s temporary guardian, so he must have assumed I knew her better than I did. I stood in front of the cluster of strangers, feeling entirely out of place, and said something about what a loving mother Danielle had been, and how much she would be missed.
The next day, Tom and I hired a family services lawyer, who filed a petition to the court for emergency custody. The judge granted it, for a period of three months. “If no next of kin comes forward,” our lawyer explained, “you can begin proceedings for a more long-term arrangement.”
“What do you mean, ‘long-term’?” I asked.
“Well, there are several options we might pursue under these circumstances. You’ll have to go through the foster care system. The father’s paternal rights have been terminated, as he will be incarcerated for at least three more years. What do you know about the next of kin?”
“There’s an aunt, but she didn’t even come to the funeral. Danielle wouldn’t have wanted her to have anything to do with Ethan.” I pulled the postcard out of my purse and placed it on the desk. “Danielle sent me this before she committed suicide.”
The lawyer glanced briefly at the note. “Unfortunately, this is hardly a legally binding document. The state is unlikely to take the deceased mother’s wishes into consideration under the circumstances.” He slid the postcard back across the desk to me. “But you never know,” he continued. “Maybe the aunt isn’t interested. Before we go any further, let me ask you—is adoption something you two might want to pursue?”
“Adoption?”
I looked at Tom. He squeezed my hand. In his eyes I saw fear but also possibility. This was the man who so fervently believed that anything was possible, the man who made a living debating the skeptics. “We become so used to the way things are,” he had said on the night we took the ride with his old friend Wiggins in the orange Avanti, “we can’t imagine things being any other way. But there’s always another way.”
Sitting in the attorney’s office, I took a nervous breath. The whole thing felt surreal. Just days before, our lives had seemed so neatly arranged; we had each other, we had our work, and one day, when and if the time was right, we would make the decision to have our child.
Then, with a knock on the door, everything had changed.
23
8:02 a.m.
We’re taking on more passengers at Kearney when John Lennon’s voice comes through the radio, singing “Beautiful Boy.”
How can Tom play this now? He used to play it for Ethan, and sometimes, at night, he’d sing it to him. I’d stand in the hallway outside Ethan’s room and listen. Tom’s voice was too deep to hit the notes properly, but that only made the song sweeter somehow.
Beautiful boy. It is how I think of him now. It is how I thought of him during the time he was with us, which, by any accounting, was far too short.
I would cup my hands around his small round face and stare at him for as long as he would allow it—never more than a few seconds. “A whirling dervish,” Tom used to call him, “our little Tasmanian devil,” referring to Ethan’s relentless energy, the fact that he was incessantly in motion. Sometimes Tom would pick him up and look under his shirt, sending him into a spasm of giggles. “Where’s the Pause button?” Tom would tease, pressing his belly button. “Is this it?”
I’ll admit there were many times, in the first few weeks, when I panicked, wondering whether Tom and I had made a mistake. But Ethan always won out over any doubts. Just a few months into his time with us, I was startled to realize I couldn’t imagine life without him. A dangerous attachment, I knew. At any moment, a relative might step forward out of the woodwork, a judge might sign a paper, and our world would come crashing down.
We quickly settled into our new routine. I would leave for work each morning at seven-thirty, and Tom, just home from the night shift, would spend a couple of hours with Ethan, feeding him and playing before the babysitter arrived. Tom, as usual, would spend the day sleeping, except on Thursdays, when he recorded Anything Is Possible. For years, the station had been trying to get him to take the morning rush-hour shift—more listeners, higher pay—but the odd hours suited him, and he couldn’t imagine relinquishing his role as the Voice of Midnight. He’d wake up in the afternoon to relieve the babysitter. Home from work, I’d find Tom and Ethan sprawled on the living room floor amid a minefield of Tonka trucks and Duplo blocks. Our evening meals changed to accommodate Ethan. Instead of take-out burritos or Thai food, our table would be laid with plain buttered pasta, sliced carrots with brown sugar, vanilla yogurt. In the evening, Tom and I took turns reading to Ethan before tucking him into bed, and after he fell asleep—it was a lengthy process, getting him down—the two of us would spend a few hours together before Tom left for work. Both of us were utterly exhausted. My job had always been demanding, but caring for a small child was tiring on a whole different level, a kind of emotional and physical shock to the system. How had my mother done this, alone, with my sister and me?
And yet, the little joys Ethan brought into our life were so constant and so utterly new to me, I wondered how I’d lived without them. The first time we took him to the beach, pointed to the ocean, and said “Waves,” his eyes lit up with understanding, and he began to wave. “He waved at the waves!” I told my mother over the phone, finally feeling that I had something I could share with her, a subject on which we could relate.
After the first month, we enrolled him at the child-care center at the VA campus. I would visit him during my lunch break, and at the end of the day we would walk through Lincoln Park to the Legion of Honor, where he liked to look at the iron statues of men on horses towering over the front lawn. There was such a sweetness to that time, the feel of his small fingers curled around mine, the way his eyes grew wide as he gazed up at the statue, his shrieks of pure delight when he touched the water in the fountain in front of the museum.
It amazed me how quickly Ethan began to feel like an essential part of our lives. I had fallen in love with him. It was happening to Tom, too. Often, in the middle of the night, Ethan would cry out, and I would bring him into the big bed to sleep with me. When Tom got home from work in the morning he would crawl in bed beside us, and we would hold hands over Ethan’s sleeping body. “He smells like bread,” Tom would say, burying his face in Ethan’s hair.
While we didn’t share a name or a genetic code, I came to think of Ethan as our son. He called me “Mommy,” and he called Tom “Daddy.” We were, in every way that really mattered, a family.
After several home visits from our caseworker, Terry, miles of paperwork, and a slew of required classes, our emergency custody was turned into long-term foster care. Meanwhile, our adoption attorney worked to get the glacially slow process moving.
For almost two years, we negotiated the limbo state of foster
parenting. “Where did he get those beautiful curls?” other mothers would say in public, glancing from Ethan to me. My hair is straight as a board, a dirty shade of blond, while his was dark and lustrous, with curls so beautiful I couldn’t bear to cut them. Long after we lost him I’d still find curly strands of his hair on the sofa cushions, in the fibers of the carpet.
I had to work sometimes not to become envious of the parents whose children were theirs to keep. At a play group, a party, an Easter egg hunt—wherever—I would find myself standing beside another mother, who would point to a child and say, “That one’s mine.” Such a simple declaration. Almost always uttered with a naked sense of pride. I came up with my own phrase for these occasions. I would smile and point at Ethan and say, “I’m with him” or “This is Ethan”—leaving out the crucial word, “son.”
By carefully omitting the words that didn’t belong to me, or to us, I felt as if I was betraying him. But as much as I wanted to, I could not promise him that I would be his mother for the long term.
The problem was Danielle’s sister, Allison. She had never expressed even the most rudimentary interest in Ethan before Danielle’s death. Then, seven months after Danielle’s suicide, Terry told us that Allison wanted to meet her nephew. I was seized with fear. Why, after all this time, would she take an interest in him? Tom and I decided that the best thing we could do was to try to get along with her, to make her like us. If she saw how happy Ethan was with us, surely she wouldn’t interfere. On the day of her visit, I cleaned the house from top to bottom, made coffee, and set out cheese, fruit, and pastries.
At four in the afternoon, an hour after the scheduled time, the doorbell rang. The cheese was sweating on the plate, the edges of the cut pears had begun to brown, and the coffee had turned bitter. Ethan’s little blue pants and striped T-shirt were wrinkled and smeared with yogurt. I opened the door to find a woman of average height with a razor-sharp blond bob, dressed in a beige suit and pointy heels, clutching a cellphone. “Sorry I’m late” were her first words of greeting. “Bridge traffic.”
I looked for some resemblance to Danielle, and it was there, around the eyes, the mouth. “Allison Rhodes,” she said, thrusting her hand toward me.
I invited her inside. When Tom offered to take her purse, she declined, holding it close to her side. Ethan was running around the living room in circles, dragging a stuffed snake behind him. He paused briefly to point at her and demand, “What’s that?”
“This must be Ethan,” Allison said. She walked over to him and patted his shoulder stiffly. “He’s dark. What’s the ethnicity of the father?”
“Greek,” I said, taken aback. Did she fail to notice how beautiful he was? I looked at him and saw a sweetness so complete it was impossible not to fall in love with him; how could she be immune to his charms? “Is this the first time you’ve met Ethan?” I ventured.
She shook her head, and the bob remained in place. It was the kind of hairdo that could survive a tornado. “Danielle and I were estranged years ago, before he was born, but I visited when he was a few weeks old. I’m surprised she had him, to be honest. Before him, there were abortions, you know. A few.”
I didn’t know. There was really so little I knew about Danielle. I had thought some of those answers might come from Allison, but I realized now that anything she had to tell me about her sister would be ugly, filtered through years of disdain, even hatred. I didn’t want to go down that road. One day I would have to tell Ethan what I knew about his mother. In my mind, I already had part of the script: I met your mother at a clinic. She was troubled. She loved you very much. She wanted the best for you.
“The flapping.” Allison perched on the arm of the sofa. “Is he autistic?”
“No,” I said. “He just flaps his arms when he’s excited.” I’d had experience with children on the autistic spectrum; Ethan didn’t fit the diagnosis. Out of an abundance of caution, I’d done a good bit of research, and we’d had him evaluated by a specialist at Stanford’s Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital, who’d given us a name for his condition.
“Complex motor stereotypy,” I explained to Allison. “CMS. The pediatric neurologist thinks there’s nothing to worry about.”
“What causes it?” she asked, frowning.
“No one really knows,” I said. “It’s still a relatively new diagnosis.”
“He needs to get control of that,” she said, “before the other kids start making fun of him.”
“He’s two and a half years old,” Tom said. “The other kids don’t notice.”
At that moment Ethan popped his thumb into his mouth and started sucking enthusiastically. Allison got up and went toward him, and I thought she was finally going to play with him, but instead she reached down and jerked his thumb away from his mouth. “No!” she said, slapping his hand.
Ethan stared at her, as stunned as Tom and I were, and then he started to cry. I rushed to him and picked him up. “We don’t hit him,” I said coldly.
Ethan pointed at Allison. “Bad,” he said. Then, more loudly: “Bad lady go time out!”
Allison continued to stare at Ethan, as if observing a stranger’s unruly dog instead of her own nephew. “He’s rambunctious,” she said. “Like his mother.”
“He’s a little boy,” I said. “He has a lot of energy.”
“I have two boys and a girl. They all know how to sit still.”
I exchanged glances with Tom.
My heart clenched at the thought of Ethan living with this joyless woman. She was there for forty minutes, and she never did hug Ethan. She didn’t even smile at him. “I’ll be in touch,” she said as we escorted her to the door. It sounded more like a threat than a promise.
For weeks after that, the sound of the phone ringing tied my stomach in knots. Every time, I was terrified it would be her. But the phone call never came, and, gradually, I began to relax. After that visit, we didn’t hear from her for more than a year, and I began to believe that she wanted nothing more to do with Ethan.
“It must be so hard to think about giving him up,” people would say when they learned of our situation. “I could never do it.”
And I would think, I can’t do it either. If it ever comes to that, I won’t be able to.
On the radio, the song comes to a close, John Lennon singing softly about his beautiful boy.
And then Tom is on the air, saying, “I know a girl who thinks I’ve forgotten. That was my mistake. But here’s the thing: I never forgot.”
24
“So you and your sister have reconciled?” Dennis asks.
“Something like that.”
“Then why is she staying at the VA hotel? Why isn’t she staying with you?”
“She thought it would be easier this way.”
“Right,”
I don’t like the way he says it—like he’s judging me, judging us.
When the guy whose apartment Heather was borrowing returned home a few days ago, I invited her to stay at my place, but she refused. “It would be weird,” she said.
“Weird how?”
But as soon as I said it, I realized she was probably remembering the last time she spent the night, when everything went to hell.
“The VA hotel is clean and cheap,” she said. “Anyway, I like being around the other vets. I feel at home there.”
It’s not what I would have chosen, Heather having the baby with me at the VA, but she insisted.
“I haven’t delivered a baby in ages,” I’d pointed out months ago, when she’d first made the request.
“But you have done it,” she said. “It was part of your training, right?”
I nodded. “One month on the maternity ward at San Francisco General.”
“It freaked you out the first time,” she reminded me. “Placenta all over the floor, shit on your surgical gloves.”
“Right,” I said, remembering it as clearly as if it had been yesterday. “They came in too late for an epidural, and the father was s
creaming at me to do something about his wife’s pain. I think his exact words were ‘Can’t you do something to put her out of her goddamn misery?’ ”
“The baby was fine,” Heather reminded me. “The mom was fine. The dad hugged you at the end and gave you a coupon for a free salad bar at Fresh Choice. By the time your month in the ward was up, you told me you could have delivered babies in your sleep.”
“It was a very long time ago.”
“You’ll be great, Julie. Like riding a bicycle.”
“The VA doesn’t even have a maternity ward.”
“I don’t need the bells and whistles,” Heather said. “Women have babies at home in the bathtub every day. Need I remind you of the lowly circumstances of your own birth?”
She was talking about a supermarket in Jones County, Mississippi, where my mother had been hiding out from a tornado when she went into labor with me. The very thought of my seventeen-year-old mother on her back in the storage room, being coached through her contractions by a middle-aged store manager named Ryan Ranahan, who kept repeating, “There’s nothing to it, honey,” made me queasy. Our mother used to say that I’d summoned the weather. “All drama from the word go,” she’d say. “Not Heather. Heather came along quiet as a feather.” Which was true. My sister made her entrance following two hours of labor in a near-empty maternity ward, took one blurry look at my mother, and fell asleep.
“Heather was the sleepy one,” our mother used to say. “You were the hungry one.” Moments after my entrance into the world, while the storm ripped the roof off the store and the manager fumbled around in the dark for a pair of scissors to cut the cord, I’d climbed my mother’s slick belly and latched onto her breast with a ferocity that astounded her. Tree limbs plowed through the windows, produce flew like ammunition, and I drank.
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