That Kind of Mother

by Rumaan Alam

  “Terms.” Christopher spoke through his food, dispassionate.

  “I hope I haven’t—done anything wrong.” Cheryl was not smiling.

  “He’s a good man.” Ian pushed his own plate away. “When it’s time. If it’s time. McDougal. I just had a feeling about him.”

  Christopher drank his water. “I think it’s best, when working with lawyers, not to rely too much on feelings. But it’s good, I suppose, to have a good feeling about a man.”

  Rebecca understood. She held Andrew close to her breast as though he were a life preserver. “Why don’t I put on some tea?”

  They picked it up, as a correspondence game of chess, after their guests had departed, the children fed once more, bathed, read to, tucked away for the night.

  “McDougal.” Christopher poured himself a drink.

  “I’m sorry. I should have prepared you.”

  “What on earth are you doing, Rebecca?” Christopher splashed water into his whiskey. “What promises have you made?”

  “I haven’t made any promises.” She sat at the kitchen island, on one of those stools that were so tall her feet swung helplessly, like a child’s.

  “Isn’t this—this whole thing—a promise? You think I don’t realize what’s happening?”

  “I just wanted to make everything better. For everyone.”

  “It’s not your job to make anything better.”

  “Then what is my job? Writing poetry?” She had wished, once, for something to happen to her. She had thought it would give her something to write about. “I can do this, I can make this better.”

  “Maybe it’s our family so you should discuss it with me. Maybe it’s their family so you should just stay out of it.”

  This was important to admit. “I should have—discussed this with you. Before. But it’s been so hard to find the time.”

  “And you didn’t want to. You want something, you seek it out, it doesn’t matter who else might be affected.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.” She felt, herself, like having a drink. She would regret it, wake thirsty and depleted to Andrew’s steady wail.

  “You wouldn’t, naturally. What if it’s not what they want? A white family with a black child, that can’t be what they want.”

  “Don’t be silly, Christopher.”

  “Don’t be willfully naive, Rebecca. It’s not . . .” He paused. “He needs—it’s important, the child’s roots, to maintain—what is natural.”

  “Don’t give me nature, please. If you object, fine, but don’t tell me it’s because of what the universe wanted. Just admit what it is. You don’t want a black child, say that you don’t want a black child.”

  “You think so little of me.” Christopher tugged on an earlobe, a tic that had developed as he’d tried to smoke less. “Or maybe not at all. Maybe you think only of yourself.”

  “I am thinking of Andrew.”

  “You may well believe that.”

  “Why are you—” But she knew. “So let’s discuss it.”

  “I’m so pleased.” He drained his drink and set it back on the counter. The ice clattered and the sound was angry. “You’d deign to discuss—with me—whether or not we’ll have another child. Whether we’ll adopt a child. The child of a stranger. On your whim.”

  “It’s not a whim. And she’s not a stranger.”

  “Why do you presume that this is your responsibility? Why do you presume it’s your right? How can you know that they wouldn’t rather have some money? I proposed that and you were so—righteous. But how do you know, for certain, that they wouldn’t rather have some financial help than give up the baby? He’s her brother. He’s nothing to you. Or maybe you don’t like to hear that, but you’d be nothing to him.”

  She took this as it was meant: a blow. She tapped her fingers on the table, impatient but still intent. Fine, she was nothing to him. A mother is nothing to her children. “How can you think they’d rather have a check than a loving home, a family—fine, a different sort of family but that’s what we’d all be.”

  “How can you think that you know what it is they would want? Have you ever asked anyone what they wanted?”

  “So, you don’t want the baby. You want me to go upstairs, pack a little bag up, and send him away.”

  “To his sister. Not to Fagin, for Christ’s sake.” Christopher poured another drink. “I don’t want you to send him away.”

  Rebecca was quiet. “You don’t.”

  “This is an impossible situation.”

  “He’s ours, Christopher. Let’s make him ours. Let’s adopt him. Let’s say it’s forever. He’s my baby. My God.” The tears came, which was maddening. She felt like such an idiot, such a girl, crying, now. “He’s my baby. I can’t live without him, you can’t take him away, he doesn’t have anyone but me. But us.”

  The room was quiet. “Why wouldn’t you just ask me?”

  She didn’t know. There was no answer.

  Christopher dumped his drink into the sink. “I’m going to bed.”

  It went unsaid, in the parenting books, in the chatter on the playground, in the warnings from her big sisters, that the baby needed you but also you needed the baby. They were reassuring. You could hold on to them and it was like you were holding on to life itself. You could hold on to them and nothing else seemed to matter, not the vanishing of species, not the signs of war, not the anger of your husband, the various depredations of contemporary life. A baby was so weak—why should it make you feel so invincible?

  Rebecca walked upstairs and took the baby from his bassinet, though you were not supposed to disturb them when they were sleeping. Even the sound of Christopher in the shower was angry. Andrew stirred and began to cry.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” She took him downstairs and sat on the sofa with him and he fell asleep and she just held him, like that, asleep in her arms, and felt renewed.

  Christopher was asleep when she crawled into their bed, and asleep when she crawled back out of it. Rebecca stood in the kitchen doing that whole ridiculous routine with the baby’s bottles, and Christopher came into the room, his hair matted, his eyes tired.

  “How did you sleep?”

  “I don’t know.” She didn’t have an answer.

  “You think I don’t know, what you were trying to do, all this time. And what’s worse, Rebecca, is that you think I don’t care. You think I’m some kind of monster.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Have you thought of me, though, at all?” Christopher poured a coffee. “I don’t think that you have.”

  He was right, was the terrible thing. Maybe she was wrong about everything and there was only some finite amount of love in her, if not in the world, and she’d apportioned all of hers to Jacob and to Andrew and now here they were. “Can we talk about it? What comes next? Can you forgive me for not talking to you about it sooner, and can we talk about it now? Right now?” Andrew was in the little mechanical swing that had been Jacob’s and she looked at him and he looked right back at her as though aware they were discussing him.

  “Let’s talk about it.”

  “Is it so crazy? Really?” Rebecca had not planned an argument but one emerged. “We were going to have another child. Weren’t we? I always envisioned another.”

  “But a person doesn’t—” Christopher hesitated with his coffee. “It is a little crazy, since you ask. It is. You must admit that.”

  “It just feels right. Inevitable, somehow. It feels like—so crazy that it’s not crazy at all.”

  Christopher looked out of the window. “It’s animal, don’t you know? A baby works on you, by some magic. You see them, they’re so small, they need everything, and your brain tricks you into giving them everything, and we call it love.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve been here, with you, haven’t I, all this time? Since December. Months. But you think because Jacob came from your body that you love him more than I do. And you
think you’re the only one who cares about what happens to Andrew.”

  “No.”

  “You think because you brought this baby, this stranger’s baby, this black baby, into my house, that I’m going to say no, we can’t give him my name, we can’t care for him, we can’t send him to college. You think that this baby, you think that Andrew—that I haven’t been here, all this time, his entire life. Falling in love with him.”

  “I don’t think that.”

  “You thought I was going to object. Maybe I do object. Maybe the small part of my brain that is still able to be rational about things knows that this is a big fucking mess, an impossible mistake. But it’s too late, isn’t it? We’ve already—it’s too late.”

  “Too late for?”

  “It’s too late to talk about reason.” Christopher stood and patted his pocket in search of a lighter. “Call the lawyer. Make it happen. He’s our son. Jesus Christ, Rebecca.” Christopher left the room. She called McDougal two hours later.

  16

  THERE WERE CHUCKLES, DURING THOSE SPOUSAL CONVERSATIONS before bed, over the fact that Christine and Tim had called their second child Michael when they already had a child named Michelle. But it’s the same name? Christopher had been more flummoxed than amused, but Rebecca still found it quite hilarious even though he was, her nephew, very sweet, pink and wrinkly, creaky and complaining. She held him and Christine held a cup of tea and their mother held Andrew and Judith held the floor. The bigger kids were in the yard, watched over by the husbands who were drinking Dewar’s and feigning camaraderie. The women were where the women always ended up but never mind because the kitchen was a household’s actual seat of power, especially Judith’s, with the Jenn-Air stove that glowed red when hot, the complex bronze cappuccino maker, the wine fridge.

  “All of which is to say, what I’m trying to get the hospital to understand is what you’re saying—it’s not surgery. It’s the body doing what the body does. It’s the eighties for God’s sake. The future.” It all had the sound of a stump speech, which it was. Judith had gone into obstetrics because it was mostly men and she wanted to effect a change.

  “Mmmm.” Christine’s response was neither approval nor disagreement. They all knew how to deal with Judith. “Well, it’s over now. And he’s here. And I’m never doing that again.” She lowered her voice. “Tim’s getting a vasectomy.”

  “Never mind.” Lorraine nuzzled Andrew. The mother who made her daughters march for the ERA, who had happily left her kids in a nun-run day care to go back to work, who had leveled with her daughters about Maude’s abortion, had become a grandmother squeamish about labor and delivery, a woman who wept when her youngest, near spinster, married at last. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  Because it was Lorraine’s birthday, the daughters were amenable.

  “Chris, I brought you some clothes. They’re in the trunk, don’t let me forget. I should just ask Christopher to get them now while I’m thinking of it.”

  “Clothes?” Judith was confused.

  “You wouldn’t know about hand-me-downs, I guess.” Rebecca meant that Jennifer was an only child, but also she meant the grandeur of the place (seven bedrooms!). Steven worked at Legg Mason. She nodded at Andrew. “That one is out of the six-month stuff two months early.” Rebecca rocked the newborn carefully. He was so small, compared to Andrew, compared to Jacob, so flawless, so pink. He began to cry.

  “Thanks, Bec. I was reusing some of Michelle’s things but Tim is—well, he doesn’t approve. I can hang on to them for you. I mean—you’ll want them back, I guess?”

  Rebecca knew that Christine was not digging, as Judith might; she was flustered. They all were. No one knew what to say about Andrew, for fear of it coming out wrong. “As it happens.” She didn’t want to make a scene. It was her mother’s birthday. “I don’t think we’ll need the clothes back.”

  “It’s nice, you girls having one another, your kids growing up together. I always wished your uncle Bruce and his kids didn’t live across the country.” Lorraine wiggled a finger and Andrew reached for it, tantalized.

  “I think we’ve—well . . .” Rebecca faltered as Michael began to cry. The body doing what the body does, Judith had said. A tidy précis if not quite true. Motherhood was in the body, but it was not only in the body.

  “I’ll take him.” Christine pushed the teacup away and unbuttoned her shirt. “He’s hungry.”

  Rebecca handed the child to his mother, carefully, fearfully, though she knew they were designed to withstand almost anything. “It’s Mom’s birthday so I don’t want to make this all me me me, but you should know that we’ve, we all—Cheryl, and Ian, and me—we’ve decided that Christopher and I are going to keep the baby. Andrew, I mean.”

  Christine looked up from the child at her breast. “What? Sorry?”

  “We’ve been talking, and we think it’s . . . I think it’s the perfect arrangement.” Rebecca felt relieved to have it all out. “We’re meeting with a lawyer next week.” She itched with that particular urgency to hold the baby—to hold her baby. She was still trying out that possessive.

  Lorraine—maybe sensing her daughter’s need—handed Andrew back to Rebecca. “I’m a little surprised, honey. I don’t know what to say. You’ve discussed this?”

  “It’s good news, Mom. It’s something to celebrate! Or, you know, it will be, when we sign the papers and get everything sorted out.” Rebecca felt hot. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make this big announcement, but happy birthday, you’re going to be a grandmother for the fifth time.”

  “So you’re seeing a lawyer, but you haven’t yet?” Judith was concerned. “I don’t need to tell you, I don’t think, that you can’t have any of these sorts of conversations without involving a lawyer. You can’t—make promises. You don’t know these people—”

  “I know them, Judith. Cheryl and Ian? I know them, you know them. Let’s not overreact.”

  “No one’s overreacting. But Rebecca. You do have a tendency—”

  “What tendency?” She smelled the baby’s hair.

  “Rebecca, this is a big choice. Life-altering. This is what you want? What Christopher wants?” Lorraine leaned toward her over the counter. “Of course, the baby is lovely. Andrew is lovely. But this is a major thing you’re talking about, it’s not like—getting a cat.”

  “Yes, Mom. Of course we’ve talked about it.” She demurred. They were her sisters and her mother, but Christopher, Jacob, Andrew: they were her family.

  “I think it’s wonderful. It’s the best possible outcome.” Christine lifted the baby off her, eased him up in her arms. “Who would ever have thought. It’s the craziest story! It’s like—fate.”

  “I don’t know if it’s fate.” Rebecca had been down that road. Fate was a grandiose term because no one wanted to admit that bad luck existed. “And I don’t know if I have a tendency, I don’t know what that means.”

  “Don’t be insulted.” Judith was slicing a cantaloupe; it smelled of garbage. “We worry. You bounce. You know it. You had that whole thing with your teacher, in Boston. Then you come back here and you say you’re going to be a poet and you live with Mom and Dad and you teach at the school—I mean. Christopher is wonderful, you’ve got a beautiful kid, that gorgeous house of yours, you won that prize. It took you—well, you’ve got all this and now you want to adopt someone else’s baby, a black baby?”

  This was what Rebecca expected from her oldest sister. No transgression would ever be wholly forgotten. Her words were calm. She couldn’t be bothered. “I’ve looked after him, his entire life.”

  “Of course.” Judith swept the knife across the board, balancing the fruit on its edge, then tossing it into a bowl. “You know, Priscilla looked after Jacob all his life. So if you’d died, would you imagine she’d adopt him?”

  “Jude. Let’s not—” Christine tried to preserve the peace.

  “Don’t be crazy.” Rebecca shook her head.

  “He’s very swe
et, of course, Rebecca, but he has a family.” Judith shook her head as if it were not to be believed.

  “Yes. My family is his now. This is happening so maybe pretend to be excited about your new nephew.” Rebecca thought that might do it, that some words did have power.

  “I think it’s possible to be excited but also to be reasonable.” Judith had slipped into her stern and steady bedside manner. “What if there’s some disagreement? Or it turns out they want money, or they’re going to change their minds? You don’t know anything about these people. What if there’s a family history of schizophrenia. What if there’s AIDS?”

  “Let’s not.” Lorraine stood up. “Judith. Come on. Rebecca, honey, I’m amazed. I’m a little in shock. We adore Andrew, obviously.” She put a hand on the baby’s head.

  “Obviously,” Rebecca said.

  “This is what Christopher wants, this is what you want?” Lorraine had not gone pale, not exactly, but there was a clear effort to retain her equanimity. “It’s . . .”

  That last word hung there, and none of them expected their mother to finish her sentence. What was there to say, anyway? “This is what I want,” Rebecca said, and as she said it knew that she always got what she wanted.

  17

  THE PICTURE ON THE DESK TOLD THE STORY OF HOW MCDOUGAL had once been a handsome boy and was now an unremarkable man. Matriculating McDougal, in ill-fitting suit, beaming under the arm of his father, was a ghost of the man before her, who was heavier, softer, and beginning to lose his hair. He was kind and efficient. The things he explained—the petition, the letters, the background check, the social worker who must be engaged—seemed simple and reasonable. The ladder of the law had no top and no bottom, but every rung was paperwork.

  “I brought this letter, from the doctor’s office.” Rebecca produced the paper that said it plain: Andrew Johnson had been seen by Doctor Anderssen the day after he’d been discharged, then a week after that, then at a month, two months, four months, and six months. He’d been poked with life-preserving sera and pronounced hale.