Nick is silent, his lips now pursed in thought as he processes my statement, probably parsing through the different possibilities—what would happen to his job, to Wyatt. My thoughts follow the same path.
“No,” I say before he speaks. I’ve changed my mind already. Just like my mother, it seems I’m chock full of big ideas that I have no intention of carrying out. “I think it’d be too much for Wyatt. Getting a new brother and also having to relocate all at once? Definitely too much. Forget that suggestion.” I walk back to my chair and slump down. “I could never live in that city again, either.” I don’t want to admit to Nick that I’m grasping at straws, that I’m so far out of my depth. Whether I meant to or not, I gave Kai up. It’s my fault. So, is it fair now if I just rip him away from everything he’s known, from the men he thought were his fathers, from Teddy, who isn’t even the half-brother he’s always believed him to be? But even with all my questions, I just can’t shake the feeling that Kai belongs with us, with his real parents and his real brother, under the beautiful, starry, Arizona sky.
“Maybe there’s some reason it’s been just us three?” Nick asks, and I can hear the wistfulness in his voice. “Maybe we just weren’t meant to have another child. Certainly not like this.”
“You really want to back out? To let it go, like this was some inane idea we dallied with and now we should move on to something else? Nick. He’s our son.”
“I know.” His voice is stronger now, his own anger rising. “Which is why I think we have to make the choice that’s best for him. You just said you wouldn’t do it to Wyatt, that moving to New York and adjusting to a new brother would be too much—but you’ll do it to Kai? We have to put him first, too, before our own wants and needs.”
“That is what we’re doing!” My voice is growing louder too, shrill and incensed. “He’s not some toy, some pet that I want to add to our collection. Is that what you think of me?”
“Jesus, Maggie. For once, just once, can you realize that not every goddamned thing is about you?” He pushes back from the table and walks off toward our bedroom, leaving me alone with my anger.
Of course this isn’t about me. Is it? I mean, it’s about all of us, isn’t it? As I try to contain the rage inside me, the boiling anger I feel toward Nick, I wonder if he’s right, if I should simply be thankful for the family we’ve created and let Kai remain where he is. But then I think of Kai—what he might feel knowing that I didn’t fight for him, that just I let him go.
All I know for certain is that the air in the kitchen feels easier to breathe without my husband in it. I hear him coming back toward the front door, and I don’t turn to watch him as he leaves the house for his evening shift.
As I stare down at the notes on the yellow pad in front of me, my thoughts drift to the pet my family had when I was a kid, a yappy little terrier named Penchant who lived to be nearly fourteen years old. We called her Penny. An older couple from three floors up used to watch her for us whenever our family traveled. I always worried when Penny went to stay with that couple—Gloria and her husband, whose name I can’t recall— because I was afraid the dog wouldn’t know which home was temporary and which people were her “real” family. If she lived with Gloria for a week while we were in the Bahamas, how did she know it wasn’t we who were the babysitters watching her only temporarily, that she wasn’t just waiting for Gloria and the husband to get home so she could go back to her real life? My dad used to tell me that Penny would just know—that dogs know their family, no matter the vacations their owners take. I chose to believe him back then because I liked his version of the truth better than the possibility that we didn’t mean any more to Penny than our upstairs neighbors, whom she only saw a couple of weeks a year.
I wonder if the same logic could apply to Kai—that he will just know where he belongs, that he might feel something different because we are his real parents, his real family. Like there’s some sort of sixth sense for genetic bonding.
As I continue to mull this over, I hear Wyatt’s key in the door. I glance toward the clock on the microwave and see that it’s 9:58, meaning he’s made it home just in time for curfew.
“Cutting it close tonight,” I say lightly as I walk into the foyer to meet him.
He stands on the terracotta floor in his cargo shorts and an untucked button-down shirt, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. I can’t help but admire how handsome he looks when he upgrades from his usual athletic attire. I would tell him so, but he’s been giving me attitude for days, so I hold my tongue.
“Yeah, but I’m still on time.” He puts his key back in his pocket. “I’m tired.” He looks toward his bedroom, seemingly unsure whether he’s free to go. He meets my eyes with that same unreadable expression he’s been wearing since we got back from New York.
“What?” I ask him, tired of his reticence. “What is it?”
He shakes his head. “Nothing.”
“How was Chester’s?” I ask, trying to engage him, to ferret out the issue we are having—or rather, the issue he is having with me.
“Fine.” He adds a half shrug. “Summer’s not mad at me anymore.” His phone buzzes with a notification in his shorts pocket, but he ignores it.
“That’s good.” I nod, relieved that Nick’s meddling won’t have long-term side effects for Wyatt’s relationship with Summer. “So . . . you want to tell me what’s on your mind, then?”
He walks past me back toward the kitchen and goes to the cabinet for a juice glass. I can’t see his face, but I can tell that he’s deciding whether he wants to share anything with me. He fills his cup with water from the sink as I wait, and then turns to face me.
“Summer forgave me because she likes Bennet, and she wanted me to talk to him for her.” As he looks at me from across the kitchen, there’s a pleading look in his eyes, as though there is something I can do to redirect Summer’s affections. He’s never confessed his crush on her, but he seems more in need of comfort than privacy at this moment, so I assume we are taking the infatuation as a given from here on out.
“What’d you say?” I ask.
“What could I say? I talked to him, and then he asked her to the movies for next weekend.”
“Well, then, you’re a good friend to her, and maybe she’ll eventually realize that you could be more.”
He looks unconvinced.
“In the meantime,” I say, squeezing past him to access the freezer, “a snack.” I pull out a large container of chocolate chip ice cream and glance back at him. When he nods, I collect a few more supplies—a bottle of whipped cream, rainbow sprinkles, bowls, and spoons.
“You know what my friends and I used to do when boys got us down? This.” I open my mouth and spray the Reddi-wip directly onto my tongue while Wyatt looks at me in disbelief.
“Now you.” I move toward him with the can. He laughs and opens his mouth, which I promptly begin filling to the brim with clouds of whipped cream, keeping at it until he starts waving a hand like a white flag.
He swallows a couple of times and smiles. “That is so wrong.” He laughs as he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Again.” He opens his mouth up to me like a baby bird.
This time, instead of spraying the Reddi-wip into his mouth, I intentionally spray the whipped cream directly onto his nose.
“Hey!” he protests, wiping at the white fluff. He looks down at his hand to see what he’s collected and then rubs a big glob right onto my cheek with whoop of victory. “Ha!”
“You are dead meat, Wyatt Wingate.” I smile and step toward him, the can poised in the air.
“Don’t shoot.” He raises his hands in mock surrender and steps back, a sheepish smile on his face.
I lower the whipped cream. “You’re lucky you’re cute,” I tell him as I grab a paper towel and wipe my cheek
After assembling our sundaes, we drop down on the sofa in the family room and turn on an old Jim Carrey movie. I watch Wyatt laughing over and again at the slapstick humor. Inste
ad of giving myself a pat on the back for knowing exactly how to cheer up my lovelorn son, my mind shifts again to Kai, and to Nick’s doubts about taking him away from Chip and Donovan. If Kai came home upset, pining over a girl or a tough day at school, would I know what to do to put a smile back on his face? For a moment, I think that Nick might be right, that Kai should stay with his adoptive fathers, but then Wyatt laughs again, and when I look at him, I see all the parts of his face that resemble Kai, who is just as much my son as Wyatt is.
In spite of everything, I want to bring my child home to his family. This is where he belongs.
Chapter 28
DONOVAN
SEPTEMBER 2018
Let’s look at this logically,” Lorraine is saying. We’ve been sitting in her office on the thirty-second floor of a Midtown skyscraper for the past ninety minutes, prepping for our court appearance on Monday and running through a host of possible scenarios. Lorraine insists that the initial hearing will be administrative only. We’ll show up, and the judge will assign us a trial date. The court will likely appoint a lawyer for Kai as well.
Thankfully, he doesn’t have to be present at the first appearance. He’s struggling enough already just coming to grips with the fact that he’s not genetically related to any of us. We haven’t told him yet that his birth parents are trying to take him away from us completely. Even though we won’t participate in substantive arguments in court next week, all three of us—Chip, Lorraine the Lawyer, and I—will feel better if we’ve hashed out various possibilities, and the main points to be argued at trial, in advance.
“Obviously we need to list a host of reasons why Kai’s continued residency in his current home is in his best interest,” Lorraine says, “but we also need to anticipate the other side’s arguments so that we can be prepared to rebut them.”
Lorraine has already informed us of various factors the court will consider in its examination of this case. There is the age of the parents, which is basically a wash, as there are only a few years’ difference between us and the Wingates. Other considerations could include family finances, the overall home environment, the mental and emotional stability of potential guardians, existing custodial arrangements, siblings, religion, substance abuse, availability of the parents, and preferences of the child.
Lorraine explained that guardianship cases are different than most court cases because when the question is custody, the judge has to use the evidence to make guesses about the future. So instead of looking backward, like most other cases do, where the judge or jury tries to determine what actually happened in a given scenario—like, did the defendant really steal the bread, or was it Mrs. Peacock with the lead pipe?—in custody cases, the court has to try to predict what will happen going forward. There’s never been a case exactly like ours, so the best we can do is try to find situations that are somewhat parallel and then draw comparisons. For example, we’ve been looking at cases where children were placed with adoptive families and then, several years later, the birth parents wanted their biological child returned to them and filed for custody.
Chip starts reiterating all the grounds we’ve listed already to attest that Kai is living in a stable home.
“Look,” Lorraine interrupts him. She puts her palms flat against the small conference table where the three of us are sitting and leans forward like she’s got a secret. “Courts generally don’t like to undo adoption agreements years after the fact unless one of the birth parents didn’t receive notice of the adoption or there’s been an error of fact or law.”
“But there was clearly an error of fact in this case.” My words come out in near-falsetto as my panic rises.
“Right.” Lorraine looks down at the pile of papers in front of her, searching for something, and I notice that her russet curls are greying at the roots. “But the court will still look at the best interests of the child before making any changes to his guardianship. Plus, aha!” She holds up the paper she’d been digging for. “The keystone. The California pre-birth order.”
She’s referring to the document we obtained prior to the boys’ birth, when Maggie was living in LA. Thanks to the generous surrogacy laws in California, we were able to obtain a court order before the boys were even born stating that, pursuant to our gestational surrogacy arrangement, both Chip and I would be listed as the parents of record on the babies’ birth certificates from the time of birth, rather than having to amend the birth certificate at a later time.
“But New York doesn’t recognize surrogacy contracts, so doesn’t that negate the impact of the pre-birth order?” Chip asks as his eyes roam over the paper Lorraine is holding.
“Nope.” She says it triumphantly, and I feel a flicker of hope. “There was a case. A gay couple that had twins in 2001. Like you, they obtained a pre-birth order from California listing them each as the parents. In 2010, after the couple split up, they got involved in a dispute over child support, and Dad Number Two sought to escape support obligations by challenging the validity of the California parentage ruling. The court said that the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Constitution trumps New York’s surrogacy ban and that the California order would stand. See, here it is.” She hands a printout to Chip. “The case of D.P. versus R.M.”
I cringe hearing another one of these family court cases designated by the parties’ initials only, protecting their identities because something about all this family drama is considered shameful. I never want Kai, or Teddy, for that matter, to feel embarrassed about their family structure or the conflicts that have arisen in this situation.
“Still, isn’t there some validity to the ‘error of fact’ argument?” I push. “I mean, Maggie didn’t know she and the baby were biologically related when she agreed to issuance of the birth order. That’s got to sway a judge, no?”
Lorraine shimmies the pen she’s holding between her thumb and index finger back and forth as she considers my question. “If they take that argument seriously, our response is that by entering into the surrogacy arrangement, Maggie Wingate assumed the risk. Clearly, surrogacy is still an evolving field, and there was no guarantee that some sort of medical error wouldn’t be made. Additionally, there were any number of safeguards she could have put in place to ensure this didn’t happen, and by failing to do so, she relinquished her rights to seek custody a decade after the fact. She could have tested the babies’ DNA at the time of birth, or even in utero through amniocentesis. Or she simply could have kept her legs crossed for the duration of the pregnancy.”
I find myself nodding along with Lorraine the Lawyer. The points she is making seem logical, and maybe even persuasive.
“So, let’s get back to the best interests of the child, shall we?” She pulls her laptop closer and positions her hands, poised to type.
As Chip tells her about the state of our finances, my mind drifts back to what happened last night. We were sitting at the kitchen table, eating takeout with the boys, when Kai started up again about computers. He and Teddy are both still navigating several of the logistical adjustments attendant to becoming middle schoolers, and the big topic at dinner was how so many kids at school are now using laptops instead of paper and notebooks in class.
“I just don’t understand how that’s productive,” I said. “Isn’t everyone going to just tune out and surf the internet?”
“You can’t do that,” Kai argued, maintaining his position as the leader of the crusade for two new laptops in the house. “The teachers walk around the room so they can see what’s on all the open screens.” His comment reminded me of the way classmates in my architecture program would play solitaire and Tetris on their laptops until someone inevitably got busted by an instructor. I always credited my pen-and-paper approach with my higher class ranking throughout grad school.
“Why don’t you guys focus on getting used to middle school for the time being, and we can revisit this discussion in seventh grade,” Chip offered as he lifted another chunk of ahi tuna from his poke bowl.
“Yeah, but Aiden’s parents buy him whatever he wants ever since they got divorced,” Kai said. “It’s, like, gifts for messing up his life or whatever.”
“Maybe you should ask Maggie Wingate,” Teddy said, brightening up at his new idea. “Maybe she’d get them for both of us out of guilt for messing up our lives.”
“Messing up your lives?” I echoed. “What’s messed up with your lives?”
“Well, she does sort of owe us because she made us think we were brothers, and since it turns out we’re not, maybe she needs to make it up to us,” Teddy postured. When he looked next to him and saw Kai’s stricken expression, his smile disappeared. “Not that we’re not brothers now,” he hedged, his usual sensitivity to his brother’s feelings arriving on a delay. “It’s just that we had to do all the work ourselves instead of just relying on our genes, like other people can. So . . . laptop from Maggie?” He raised his eyes hopefully at the rest of us.
Whatever tension had started to build in Kai was apparently alleviated by the latter half of Teddy’s argument. He started nodding along.
“Maggie did say if I ever needed anything, I should call her.”
“You don’t need a laptop!” I bellowed, surrendering to my rage and shocking us all into silence.
Kai didn’t know that Chip and I would be spending the morning with Lorraine, dealing with Maggie and Nick’s decision to seek full custody. He didn’t know that they’re trying to snatch him from us and drop him into a whole new life.
As I sit in Lorraine’s office now, remembering my reaction, I think back to all the years I regarded Maggie as a godsend. I wish I could send a letter to that Maggie, the one who called us each week when she was pregnant to tell us about every last kick and punch from the babies. That woman would never want to cause the kind of stress and anxiety that’s now rippling through my family, unsettling everyone—us, the boys, their grandparents, their cousins, my sister. This isn’t just about the parents and the child. We’ve built a whole, large life for Kai over the last decade.
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