Detour

by James Siegel

  Pablo asked if they were all right.

  “Yes,” Paul answered, aware that Pablo seemed remarkably undisturbed by the incident. Maybe when you lived in Colombia, it was just another day at the office.

  When they entered the hotel elevator, Paul smiled at the middle-aged Colombian couple who walked in seconds later, expecting the smile back that seemed to be the right of new parents everywhere. No dice. He was greeted with cool and unmistakable hostility.

  For a moment he wondered if it was simply their nationality. Weren’t Americans targets of everyone’s anger these days? But the man whispered something to his wife in Spanish, and among the Spanish words was a word Paul recalled from his high school foreign-language labors. Niña.

  It wasn’t because of who they were. It was what they were doing. Adopting a baby.

  A Colombian baby.

  They were just two more Americans doing what Americans had always done in countries not their own. Depriving it of its natural resources. First gold and oil and coal and gas. Now babies. Paul hadn’t considered that point of view before. Now that he found himself in an uncomfortably frigid elevator, he did. It made him feel a little less like a rescuer and more like a pillager.

  Luckily, their floor came first. He ushered Joanna out of the elevator and down the hall.

  “Did you see that?” he asked Joanna.

  “What?”

  “Those people. In the elevator.” He slipped his key into the lock and opened the door.

  “Talk low,” Joanna said. “Joelle’s sleeping.”

  “That couple,” Paul whispered. “They looked like they wanted to have us deported. Or shot.”

  “What?”

  Maybe Joanna had been trying to forget what she’d just seen on that street. She hadn’t noticed.

  “They hated us, Joanna.”

  “You can’t be serious. They don’t even know us.” Joanna slowly settled into an armchair, where she looked close to collapse.

  “They don’t have to know us. They don’t approve of us. We’re taking their children from them.”

  “ Their children? What are you talking about?”

  “Their country’s children. Colombia’s children. I’m telling you, they looked like I should be handing her back.”

  “It doesn’t matter. That’s them. Everyone else has been perfectly nice to us.”

  “Everyone else is taking our money. That might color things a little.”

  Joanna wasn’t listening anymore.

  She was staring down at her child, busy doing what mothers do, he supposed—basking in that part of the unbroken circle where even fathers don’t dare to tread.

  FIVE

  This is how they met Galina.

  They’d fallen into a half-stupor by the armchair and awakened to a shrill, deafening alarm that turned out to be their daughter. They immediately knew they were in trouble.

  They’d forgotten to sterilize the bottles they’d brought with them from New York.

  They’d forgotten to sterilize the nipples.

  All the things the nurse at Fana had gone over with them ad nauseam.

  There was a kitchenette just off the sitting room. Paul threw a pot of water on the stove, then began frantically looking for something to open up the cans of baby formula. Joelle’s screams reached heretofore unknown decibel levels.

  Paul dropped two bottles and nipples into barely boiling water, but there wasn’t a can opener to be found. Both kitchen drawers were starkly empty.

  Joanna rocked Joelle while walking back and forth from the kitchenette to the bed, which only seemed to cause Joelle to scream louder, if that were humanly possible. Joanna, fearless, indomitable, a four-year subscriber to Mother & Baby magazine, looked scared out of her mind.

  There was a knock on the door.

  Paul began rehearsing his apologies on the way to open it. New baby, hungry, sorry for any —

  It was Pablo. And a woman.

  “Galina,” he said, evidently the woman’s name. “She’s your nurse.”

  PABLO’S JOB DESCRIPTION PROVED TO BE A MODEST ONE.

  Technically, Galina might’ve been a nurse, but she was really a miracle worker.

  Joanna, who still maintained at least a tenuous connection to the Catholic Church of her youth, was ready to nominate her for sainthood.

  “Do you see this?” Joanna whispered to him.

  Galina had managed to calm Joelle, retrieve the sterilized bottles and nipples, and locate a can opener for the formula, all in less than two minutes. At the moment, she was providing a startling display of ambidexterity, feeding Joelle in the crook of her left arm while arranging an impromptu changing table with her right.

  Paul thought she looked pretty much like what a baby nurse should look like—anywhere from her mid-fifties to her mid-seventies, with a gentle face highlighted by pronounced laugh lines and soft gray eyes that seemed to resonate with the patience of, well . . . a saint.

  “Can I do that?” Joanna asked her, but she was gently waved away.

  “Plenty times to do this when you take your baby home,” Galina said. Her English was excellent. “You watch me now.”

  So Joanna did. Paul too, who’d vowed to be the kind of hands-on father that actually pitched in.

  Galina finished feeding Joelle, then proceeded to demonstrate her burping technique, which was, of course, perfect. One firm pat on the back and Joelle made a noise that sounded like a bottle of sparkling Evian being opened. Galina gently placed Joelle down on the kitchen-counter-turned-changing-table and relieved her of her soiled diaper, with Paul acting as number one helper.

  He was happy to note that the unpleasantness of changing a baby’s diapers was mitigated by the baby in question being yours .

  The hotel had placed a small white crib in the corner of their bedroom. Galina put Joelle facedown on the freshly laundered sheets and pulled a pink coverlet up to her neck.

  “Um . . .” Joanna looked plainly uncomfortable about something.

  “Yes, Mrs. Breidbart?” Galina said.

  “Call me Joanna, please.”

  “Joanna?”

  “Isn’t . . . I thought a baby needs to be put on her back . When she sleeps. So she doesn’t choke or get SIDS.”

  “SIDS?” Galina smiled and shook her head. “The stomach is fine,” she said.

  “Well, yes, but . . . I read something, there were some studies done five years ago and they said—”

  “Stomach is fine, Joanna,” she repeated, and patted her on the shoulder.

  Now Joanna didn’t look so happy at being called by her first name.

  An uncomfortable silence suddenly permeated the room.

  Paul thought that a kind of trespass had been committed, only he wasn’t sure who’d trespassed upon whom. Joanna was Joelle’s mother, true. Galina was her nurse. Her highly experienced and, by all evidence, highly competent nurse. A jury might have a tough time with this one.

  Galina broke the silence first.

  “If it makes you more comfortable, Joanna,” she said, and reached into the crib, gently turning Joelle over onto her back.

  In the battle of wills the other guy had apparently blinked.

  SIX

  You didn’t say anything,” Joanna said.

  Joanna wasn’t sleeping. Paul wasn’t either, but only because she’d just woken him.

  Said anything when ? He’d been in the middle of a dream involving a college girlfriend and a torpid tropical beach, and for a moment he was shocked to be on a bed in what was obviously a hotel room.

  In Bogotá. Yes.

  Consciousness continued to fill in like a Polaroid being furiously waved in the air. He was in a hotel room in Bogotá. With his wife.

  And his new baby daughter.

  Not with Galina, though. She’d departed for home after allowing them to go downstairs for dinner, where they couldn’t find a single Colombian dish on the menu.

  Galina was what Joanna was talking about. He hadn’t said any
thing when Joanna accused Galina of putting Joelle to sleep the wrong way.

  “I thought discretion was the better part of valor,” Paul said.

  “I see. I read babies are supposed to sleep on their backs, Paul.”

  “Maybe she hadn’t read the same articles.”

  “Books.”

  “Right, books. She probably hadn’t read those either.”

  “You should’ve taken my side.”

  Paul considered that one. That maybe he should’ve taken her side. He was tempted to point out that they were novices here, and that all things considered, he was inclined to go with empirical knowledge over self-help books and Mother & Baby magazine. On the other hand, if he agreed with her, he had a reasonable chance of being able to turn over and go back to sleep.

  “Yes, sorry,” Paul said. “I should’ve, I guess.”

  “You guess ? We’re her parents now. We have to support each other.”

  “You mean we didn’t have to support each other before?”

  Joanna sighed and rolled away from him. “Forget it.”

  It was clear that Joanna didn’t actually mean he should forget it.

  “Look,” Paul said. “I didn’t know who was right. Suddenly, this baby is ours. We’re . . . responsible for her. Galina seemed to know what she’s doing. I mean, it’s her job. ”

  It occurred to Paul that the process of becoming a circle might involve some growing pains. God knows, they’d had enough of them trying to have a baby.

  Take sex, for instance.

  You could pretty much mark its decline from the moment they’d decided to start a family.

  As Paul remembered it, they’d been lying on a nice four-poster bed in Amagansett, Long Island, sloshed on California cabernet. When Joanna said I don’t have my diaphragm in, he didn’t say okay, I’ll wait, and she didn’t get up and get it.

  They’d been married six years. They were thirty-two years old. They were drunk and horny and certifiably in love.

  It would turn out to be the last spontaneous moment they’d have involving the act of conception.

  When her period came a month later, they immediately decided to have another go at it.

  This time there was no California cabernet and no Amagansett surf. The results were pretty much the same.

  Her friend came right on schedule. Again. Only it wasn’t a friend anymore, as much as an embarrassing if intimate relation she thought she’d booted out of the house, only to discover sitting back out on her front stoop.

  In the Breidbart household, menstrual tension became decidedly post.

  They soon began the exhausting roundelay of doctors in search of ever-elusive answers, as sex continued its slow and painful evolution from lovemaking to baby -making.

  At one point he’d needed to shoot her with fertility drugs exactly one half hour before they performed sex. And it was a kind of performance—increasingly a command performance, summoned to do his duty at various times of the day and night. These times predicated on all sorts of physical factors, none of which had anything to do with actual lust.

  A subtle kind of blame game ensued. When a thorough testing of Paul’s sperm revealed that he had a below-average and barely serviceable sperm count, he’d sensed a slight shift in the air. The word you seemed to enter Joanna’s conversation with greater frequency and with what he perceived as an accusatory intonation.

  When a thorough testing of Joanna’s ovaries revealed a slight abnormality that could, in some cases, inhibit proper fertilization, Paul had returned the favor. It was cruel and unforgiving.

  It was also impossible to stop.

  For both of them.

  And it wasn’t just each other who began getting on their nerves. Other people too. Lifelong friends of Joanna’s, for instance, whose only crime was their apparently unlimited aptitude for getting pregnant. Including her best friend, Lisa, with two towheaded toddlers, right across the hall. Complete strangers began bugging them as well. Three seconds into meeting them, they’d invariably ask the k-question. Have any kids? Paul wondered why that wasn’t considered unconscionably rude. Did they go around asking strange couples if they owned a car, or a decent bank account, or an in-ground swimming pool?

  Eventually, their long road of futility inexorably led them to the new great hope of infertile couples everywhere. In vitro fertilization, otherwise known as your last chance . It was a kind of roulette wheel for high-stakes gamblers. After all, it was ten thousand dollars a spin. And Paul could’ve recited an entire actuarial table on its success rate—28.5 percent, with the odds getting lower with each attempt.

  They took Paul’s sperm. They took Joanna’s eggs. They formally introduced them. They sat back and hoped the romance would take.

  It didn’t.

  They tried once.

  They tried twice.

  They tried three times.

  They were up to forty thousand and counting when a remarkable thing happened.

  It came the morning after a particularly bad night.

  All their thinly nuanced charges had finally turned the air poisonous and explosive. Perhaps that wasn’t surprising given that all exhalations are made of carbon dioxide; it had just been waiting for a match. In this case, a shouting match where they both said—okay, screamed —things better left unmentioned. Joanna had dissolved into tears, and Paul had sullenly disappeared into the den to watch some b-ball, which, given the general state of the New York Knicks, hadn’t improved his mood any.

  They were walking it off the next morning in Central Park, neither one saying much to the other, when they passed the playground off 66th Street. The sound of laughing children was particularly hurtful that morning, a lacerating reminder of what they couldn’t have.

  Paul was about to execute a detour when a small girl wandered past them in the futile process of capturing a runaway pink balloon. She was dark, Latin, and impossibly cute.

  “Where’s your mother?” Joanna had asked her.

  But the more interesting question would have been, who’s your mother? The woman who came breathlessly running up to them just a few seconds later, gently admonishing her daughter for running away. This woman was blonde, pale, and about their age. She picked up her giggling daughter, nuzzled her neck, smiled at Paul and Joanna, and retreated back to the seesaws.

  Up to that moment they hadn’t thought about it.

  Adopting.

  Maybe they’d just needed to see it in the flesh.

  That afternoon when they got back to the apartment, Joanna asked Paul to take out the garbage. Surprisingly, this garbage consisted of syringes, thermometers, various fertility drugs, dutifully recorded journals, and everything else they’d accumulated in an effort to have a baby. Paul gladly dumped it all into the incinerator room.

  When he got back inside, they’d ended up making love the way they used to—which, all things considered, was pretty terrific.

  They went to a lawyer the very next day.

  Now Paul could hear Joanna next to him in the dark. And the soft, soothing sound of Joelle’s breathing. He rolled over and kissed his wife on the mouth.

  “Next time I’ll support you. Okay?”

  He could sense her smile in the dark.

  All systems were go for reentry into the land of Nod.

  Except Joelle woke up.

  And screamed.

  SEVEN

  It began the next afternoon.

  Galina put Joelle in for her afternoon nap. She hummed a plaintive lullaby over the crib. Paul cocked his head from the bathroom, listening to Galina’s lilting voice. When he came out, freshly shaven and only slightly sleep-deprived, Galina suggested that he and Joanna get some fresh air. The baby was asleep. Galina would be there for another few hours.

  It was technically winter in Colombia, but even mountain-bound Bogotá was close enough to the equator to retain a dreamy warmth. Joelle was sleeping—a walk seemed like just what the doctor ordered.

  They turned right out the hotel
lobby and soon passed the kind of stores only tourists and one percent of the Colombian population could afford to walk into.

  Hermès.

  Louis Vuitton.

  Oscar de la Renta.

  They walked hand in hand, and Paul congratulated himself on his tactical maneuver last night in bed. Things were clearly fine between them.

  Joanna had fed Joelle this morning, while he’d pulled diaper duty. They’d taken turns babbling nonstop baby talk at her. That is, when they weren’t telling each other how remarkably gorgeous she was. How unbelievably expressive her face seemed. What an unusually sweet disposition she had. Obviously, some natural law was at work here, able to turn two reasonably intelligent people into love-struck idiots.

  Paul, though, was kind of enjoying idiothood.

  Now he squeezed Joanna’s hand as they waited at a curb. He kissed her neck when they stopped and lingered before an art gallery window. A Botero exhibition, the Latin American painter who portrayed everyone as grossly distended, fat, and swollen, like Thanksgiving parade balloons.

  After they had strolled a few more blocks, he found he missed his daughter. This was a new experience—going somewhere and leaving a piece of yourself behind. He felt . . . incomplete. The circle needed to be closed again.

  “Want to go back?” he asked Joanna.

  “I was about to say the same thing.”

  “I think I’m going to call her Jo,” Paul said after they had crossed the street and turned back toward L’Esplanade. Two couples on mopeds gunned their engines and surged past them, spitting out a thin cloud of blue exhaust.

  “Ugh,” Joanna said; evidently, she wasn’t referring to the noxious fumes.

  “Something wrong with Jo ?”

  “When you tried to call me Jo, I threatened you with bodily harm. I think I did you bodily harm.”

  “Yeah. Why was that again?”

  “I dated a Joe, remember? He was unemployed and psychotic—not in that order. So all things being equal,” Joanna said, “I’d prefer that you not call her Jo.”