by Ann Hood
From behind him, Charlie heard Brooke coming down the stairs, the clop of her heels on the worn wood of the deck.
“Is it that bad?” she asked him.
He waited for the ball. Swung. Watched it fly.
Then he turned, grinning. He put one hand on his heart, as if to still its pounding. “Look at you,” he said.
Brooke frowned at him. “You’re out here hitting baseballs,” she said.
He shrugged. “That’s what I do.”
“Yeah,” she said, “what you do when you’re miserable.” She put two fingers under her tongue and let loose a whistle. She stood close enough that Charlie could smell her.
“My pineapple princess,” he whispered, pulling her close. Then he could smell the ginger lime. He felt himself growing hard and pressed against her. Out of the corner of his eye he saw all three of their dogs come bounding up from the beach, hair stiff with salt water, baseballs in their mouths. They dropped the balls on the grass and went back for more.
“We’ve got the meeting,” she whispered back to him. But she was letting his hand ease inside her blouse, the almost sheer seafoam green one with the tiny pearl buttons that he liked so much. She was letting him find her nipple inside her bra and rub. He heard her breathe in sharply and he knew if he slid his hand under her skirt, the pleated full ocean blue one, and into her panties he would find her wet. So he did. And she was.
The dogs were back, dropping the new round of balls. Charlie nudged Brooke back against the house.
“Here?” she said, not resisting.
“We have a meeting,” he said.
She unzipped his shorts. “Right,” she said.
“Don’t want to be late.” He liked how much bigger than her he was, how he could lift her so easily. He liked when she wrapped her legs around him. He heard her saying his name. The worn beach shingles on the house were rough against his arms. He liked that too. And the heat from the sun on his shirt, and the bigger heat from inside him burning. His head filled with her smells, pineapple and coconut and ginger and lime, and the salt from the ocean and the grass somebody was cutting somewhere down the street, and even the smell of wet dogs, all of it blending and making him intoxicated.
“It’s okay,” she said, laughing, giving him permission to come without her this time.
She tangled his curls in her fingers, pulling him closer still. After, he saw that his mustache had left red marks on her neck. He pressed his fingers there gently, then lowered her slowly.
“It’s okay?” she said, squinting up at him.
“More than okay.”
“Not that,” she said. “I mean the meeting. The whole thing.”
Charlie nodded. He didn’t know if it was okay. But last night when she’d tried to explain how much having a baby meant to her, she broke his heart. Baseball used to be like that for him. But a baby?
“Charlie?” she said.
“Come on,” he said, “let’s go get us a baby.”
SUSANNAH
Susannah’s grandmother had taught her to knit when she was ten years old. Susannah had sat her on her lap, facing out, and her grandmother had placed the needles in her hands, wrapped her arms around her, and knit. Their hands, making the motions together, were like being on a sailboat, rhythmically rocking. That was the year her mother got sick, and Susannah was sent to Newport to live with her grandmother. During the day, she sailed a small skiff named Clarabelle, after her mother. She used to hope the sailing would bring her mother closer to her. But it didn’t. Instead, she felt like a small girl on a big ocean, alone. At night, she slept in her mother’s childhood bed with its white canopy and stiff sheets that smelled of strong soap. This too failed to make her feel her mother’s presence. She felt like a little girl alone in a big house. “It’s a mansion, you know,” another girl who sailed told her one day. “We live in mansions. It’s just tacky to say that.”
But when Susannah sat on her grandmother’s lap and knit, the old woman’s soft hands on top of her own, moving the needles through the stitches, she could almost feel her mother. Maybe it was the perfume, an expensive French one that they both wore. Or maybe it was the hypnotic sound of the needles clacking together. Susannah wasn’t sure. She just knew that it was the favorite part of her day, unless the day included a telephone call from her mother in the hospital in New York City.
She supposed that was why she had picked up her knitting needles now, when she needed to find comfort. She’d had to search hard for them, up in the attic where her grandmother’s and her mother’s things were packed away in trunks and cedar chests. Susannah never looked at them. Her neighbor had told her that the things were valuable, that on Antiques Roadshow a woman’s grandmother’s belongings had been estimated at eleven thousand dollars. And her grandmother, the neighbor had reminded Susannah, had been rich. “Bloody rich,” the neighbor had said. That woman liked to use phrases like that: bloody this and bloody that, joie de vivre, ciao. It drove Susannah crazy. The whole neighborhood did, with its tennis-playing women taking power walks every morning, and the monthly book clubs, and the men mowing lawns and barbecuing every weekend.
Her husband Carter loved it. But to Susannah, it was just one more way she didn’t fit in. Susannah thought this and paused in her knitting. She lay her knitting in her lap and let her eyes drift toward the window where her daughter Clara played with the babysitter, a college student from Salve Regina.
Whenever she glimpsed Clara like this, from a distance, her stomach dropped as if she were seeing her for the first time: the dull eyes, the awkwardness. The babysitter, Julie, seemed able to pull something more from the girl, something that Susannah could not. Even through the closed windows she could hear Clara’s squeals of laughter. She wondered if she and Clara had actually ever had fun together? Her mind landed on the one sweet memory she had.
When Clara was about three, Susannah had taken her out for the day on one of the J-boats from Sail Newport. Sometimes she went out alone on one, sailing out beneath the Newport Bridge, the water the only place she knew where she could be away from the confusion of her house with Clara’s tantrums and Carter’s patience and her own mixed-up feelings about all of them. That day, something in her had wanted to connect with her daughter, almost desperately. That used to happen back then. Clara’s diagnosis of Fragile X syndrome was still new enough that Susannah found herself disbelieving it, hoping that she could break through to her daughter.
She had buckled Clara into a bright orange life jacket and smeared her pretty face with sunscreen and the two of them had set sail. Susannah could still see Clara, her face tilted up as if to catch the wind herself, her fine blond hair blowing around her, and a smile—a real smile, of this Susannah was certain. Susannah had imagined that they would have many days like that. She had imagined that she had found the thing that would bring them together, keep them together. But the very next week, when she tried to put the life jacket on Clara, the girl had howled and torn at Susannah’s hands. Susannah kept trying, speaking in the soft soothing tone that Carter used, but Clara would not put that life jacket on, and eventually Susannah gave up. It seemed to her now that all of her attempts to teach her daughter some simple thing always ended with frustration.
Carter’s old Volvo pulled into the driveway. Susannah sighed. They would have to leave right away if they were going to make the orientation at the Red Thread. She watched Clara run toward Carter, her pale blond braids flying behind her. Carter bent and scooped Clara into his arms. The two of them standing in the late afternoon sun looked golden, special, blessed. Susannah bit hard on her bottom lip and looked away from the sight of them. She picked up her knitting, hoping to feel the weight of her grandmother’s arms around her.
3
MAYA
The Little Schoolboy cookies were laid out artfully on a green plate from China. The lemonade looked cool and refreshing in a fat round pitcher. In front of it, Samantha had fanned out the paper napkins with the Chinese characters for lov
e and family and good luck on them. Maya moved each thing an inch this way, shifted a corner that way, until she was satisfied. Samantha’s accent aside, she did get the details right. Jane was not always as good about the small things. She had to be watched, even nagged a bit. But tonight, she had rolled down the big map of China with the colored pushpins indicating the provinces from which they had received children. The information booklets and the Red Thread’s own information folders had been placed on the antique red lacquer table. Everything was ready.
Samantha walked in with fresh coffee in the silver urn. Already she had placed cubes of sugar with small silver tongs and a pitcher of half-and-half on the mahogany sidebar. After she put down the urn and counted the porcelain cups and saucers, Samantha cleared her throat.
Maya waited.
“This sounds crazy,” Samantha said awkwardly. She was a plain woman who tried hard to overcome that plainness, with mixed results. Tonight she wore vintage cat glasses with rhinestones around the frames, and a flat red lipstick that made her mouth seem smeared somehow. “You know how you told me to put away the oldest files? To make room?”
“Yes?” Maya said. New families about to arrive any minute, and Samantha decides to discuss her office tasks. “Well?”
“Well, I saw your file.”
Maya let the information settle. She tried to stay calm, but she felt her heart pick up speed.
“I didn’t read it or anything,” Samantha added quickly. Too quickly? Maya wondered. “I just…I was surprised that you almost adopted a baby yourself.”
Maya met Samantha’s gaze. “Is that all?” she said. “Are we going to get back to work now?”
Samantha blinked. Nodded.
Thankfully, the office door swung open and someone called a hesitant “Hello?”
“Our families,” Maya said, relieved. “They’re here.”
MAYA WATCHED THE people come in. Over thirty of them, all nervous. Even Emily and Michael looked terrified. She smiled at them, but Michael avoided her eye contact and Emily’s face seemed as if it might crack if she dared to smile back. Why was everyone who walked in here so afraid? So tense? When you are about to begin the journey of getting a baby, it should be a precious time. For an instant, a memory came to the surface. But she shoved it back, and focused on the couples. Samantha greeted them all warmly, poured them lemonade, offered cookies. She showed them the table with the information, brochures and reading lists, the photo album of happy new families holding their beautiful babies.
At precisely 7:00 p.m., Maya stood in the front of the room, beside the large map of China. She cleared her throat and waited for the people to quiet. She observed which couples held hands, which sat without touching. None of that mattered, of course. Yet Maya noticed everything, and she remembered it all.
“My name is Maya Lange,” she began in her lilting voice.
She purposely spoke softly so they would have to stay quiet. Some of them even leaned forward in their chairs to hear her better.
“I opened the Red Thread Adoption Agency in 2002. That year I placed ten children, all from the province of Sichuan.” She pointed to Sichuan on the map.
One of the women scribbled in a notebook, frowning. She had expensively dyed blond hair, this woman, with highlights and lowlights and streaks meant to look like the sun had kissed her. Her husband, with his loosened tie and shiny cuff links, did not want to be here, Maya noted.
“Last year,” Maya continued, “I placed one hundred and ninety-seven children from eleven different provinces.”
She liked the woman who gasped a little and nodded eagerly. She was plump with curly hair and a round open face. Maya wondered why her husband looked so frightened, why he jumped slightly when his wife placed her hand on his knee.
“This year,” Maya said, “who knows?”
The group laughed politely.
Except the woman with the straight pale hair that was too long for her age. She was too close to crying to laugh, even a little. She didn’t hold her husband’s hand so much as clutch it, tight.
“Perhaps one of the babies this year will be yours,” Maya said.
They had been through something. All of them had. People who came here to adopt had been through infertility failures, arguments, lost hopes and expectations. They were vulnerable, her families. She knew this.
“I have so much to tell you,” Maya said, pressing the palms of her hands together. “So much information. So many details.”
On cue, Samantha handed out the red folders with everything spelled out for them. Costs, deadlines, procedures.
“But don’t feel nervous,” Maya said. “You have already accomplished step one on the list: orientation.”
Again, polite laughter.
Maya’s gaze settled on the couple in the back. The man, with his walrus mustache and light brown curls, looked familiar. Had they been here before and changed their minds? No. The woman, a pixie with short dark hair and a sunburned nose, did not seem at all familiar. Maybe they lived near her and she had seen the man on the street or in the grocery store.
“Before we go through so much information,” Maya said, “let’s introduce ourselves. If all of you leave here deciding you will indeed adopt a baby from China, then it is very likely that you will be in the same DTC group.”
“DTC?” the notetaker said without looking up.
“Documents to China. The day they arrive becomes the day your wait begins,” Maya explained. “It is very likely, then, that you will all travel together to China, that your babies will come from the same province, the same orphanage. It is very likely that some of you will become lifelong friends. Best friends, perhaps.”
The round-faced woman grinned broadly. Maya met the woman’s eye and smiled back at her.
“Why don’t you and your husband begin?” Maya said to her. “Just tell us who you are, where you live, why you are here.”
The woman nodded enthusiastically, pleased, even eager to introduce herself. “I’m Sophie and this is my husband Theo. We live in the Armory District now but we met in Thailand.”
Theo shifted uncomfortably, but she continued. “We traveled extensively through Asia. Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia.”
Sophie glanced at Theo as if he might join in, but he didn’t. “We decided we would have biological and adopted children, and it just seemed natural for us to adopt from Asia. You know,” she said.
Maya waited, but that seemed to be the end of Sophie’s introduction.
“And do you?” Maya asked.
Sophie frowned.
“Have biological children already?” Maya said.
It was Theo who answered. “No,” he said. “We don’t.”
“Not yet anyway,” Sophie said cheerfully.
But Maya could see that her husband, this Theo, was not cheerful.
Before Maya could prod, the notetaker put down her pen and turned to face everyone.
“I’m Nell Walker-Adams. I’m a lawyer here in town. We live on the East Side, over on Freeman Parkway. And we’re here just for information tonight. Still undecided. We’re still undergoing fertility treatments, but we’ve decided against IVF. So, who knows?”
“I’m Mr. Nell Walker-Adams,” her husband said. “With such an efficient wife, who needs anything else?”
Maya ignored his sarcasm and instead said, “Many people come to the orientation undecided. One thing I like to tell everyone is that adoption is a sure way to getting a baby. If you start both processes, in a year you will definitely have at least one child.”
“So the wait is a year?” Nell Walker-Adams asked, pen in hand. “From tonight?”
Others seemed to become more alert too. They were eager and anxious, Maya knew that.
“Approximately,” she said. “We will give you all of that information. It’s also in your packet.”
Nell frowned, and began to flip through the pages in her folder. She wanted facts, this one.
“Is it my turn?” the man in the back w
ith the walrus mustache said.
“Wait,” Nell said. “I have another question. How do we get the child?”
“That’s what you’re here to learn about,” Maya said. “The process.”
“No,” Nell said, shaking her head. “I mean, who decides which child we actually get? Do we get to choose one ourselves?”
“When China first opened to foreign adoptions,” Maya said, trying to stay patient, “that is what happened. But now the process has become much more formalized. The Chinese government assigns you your child. There’s actually a matching room where photographs of babies are matched with portfolios of prospective families.”
“Randomly?” Sophie asked.
Maya smiled. This was actually one of her favorite parts of the adoptions, an almost magical occurrence. But she had to be careful how she phrased it. Talk about magic in the first ten minutes and she might scare people off.
“Technically, yes, it is random,” Maya said. “But without exception, the matches are uncanny. For example, in my last group, a woman’s father died right before the referral. He had been so looking forward to this grandchild. He knew the suffering his daughter had been through, the loss of pregnancies, the heartache. But when they got the referral, the baby’s birth date was October 9. The grandfather’s exact birthday.”
Many in the group smiled, but Nell was jotting in her notebook again. “So no consideration or requests to things like IQ? Or likes and dislikes?”
“No,” Maya said. “Nothing like that. But the matches are indeed magical.”
“So I can’t ask for a kid who’s a swing hitter? Or one who can throw a knuckleball?” the guy with the walrus mustache said.
His wife, the pixie, slapped his arm playfully. “Behave,” she said. “He likes to be center stage,” she said, not apologetically but proudly, Maya thought.