Desperate

by Daniel Palmer

  “Nothing as in no blackness, no something following me?”

  “Nothing as in nothing. I don’t know what it means, but it was like she was warm water. Not too hot, not too cold. She seemed just right to me. In fact, she seems really great, Gage.”

  “What about Anna’s mother?”

  “Late-stage Alzheimer’s is very unpredictable.”

  “So you’re saying it’s all just a series of coincidences? The present, the necklace, the strange dark force, Anna’s mother, nothing is connected, no paths back to Lily, no hidden agenda here.”

  “I’m saying, I couldn’t read Lily’s aura. That’s it. But as a friend I’d say you should let yourself relax and enjoy this experience. I think you and Anna are two very lucky people.”

  Brad drove off, leaving me alone to wonder why I didn’t feel lucky in the least. I glanced up and saw Lily standing in the window, looking down at me from her vantage point above.

  This time, I had no trouble seeing her smile.

  CHAPTER 21

  Much transpired in the weeks following Brad’s visit, most of it at work. For reasons of great complexity, we were unable to reverse engineer the exploding battery. We did root cause analysis, but no one could figure out why it had caught fire. Subsequent builds of the battery, we found, worked fine. Something had happened to the big demo build, and my only conclusion was sabotage.

  “Who would want to sabotage Olympian?” Patrice asked me in a private meeting after I’d flung my accusation.

  I should have said “Matt Simons,” but thanks to Lily, who seemed to have wormed her way into my office life as well as my home life, I was gun-shy about making unsubstantiated accusations. So when Patrice asked the question, I gave no answer and the discussion ended as quickly as our big battery demo.

  Meetings followed, many meetings, some in Patrice’s office, some in the large conference room, some in the demo lab, but none with the CEO. Apparently he was too busy visiting projects that actually worked. Even with all the uproar and chaos surrounding this significant setback, Adam kept his job, at least for the time being. However, it was clear to all that his tenure on the project was tenuous at best. Matt Simons was no longer shouting for his dismissal, probably because he’d already fired the bullet that would eventually be fatal.

  It was Patrice’s job to break the news to upper management. We would need to conduct a full audit of our configuration management systems before we could demo again. These batteries were a big deal, and the testing had to be exhaustive. Bad press from a burning battery (hello, Boeing Dreamliner) could cost a company its fortunes.

  While work continued on the battery—not business as usual, not by any means—my home life seemed to smooth out. I stopped doubting Lily, or more accurately stopped voicing my doubts.

  Anna and Lily were growing ever closer. A bond had formed between birth mother and adoptive mother that I had inadvertently helped forge. My suspicions, my outbursts, simply drove the two together. There were shopping trips, lunch dates, and such. On one memorable afternoon, I came home from work to find Anna and Lily in the living room chatting like a pair of college roommates. Apparently, they’d just come back from the nail salon and were sitting on the sofa admiring their results.

  “How’d you end up there?” I asked, slipping away into the kitchen to grab myself something cold to drink. Anna’s voice carried as I fished around for a Diet Coke in one of those pony-sized cans.

  “Oh, we were just doing some window shopping and decided to pop in and get one.”

  I offered them both something to drink, but they turned me down. I returned to the living room with my soda, wondering when, if ever, it would feel natural and normal to have Lily in the home.

  “What did you talk about?” I asked. What secrets did you share?

  “Mostly we talked about shopping and read magazines,” Anna said.

  “Or we fished our magazines out of the water,” Lily said.

  They shared a laugh while I wracked my brain in search of the joke. Anna noticed I was on the outside looking in.

  “I was getting my pedi done,” Anna said, “reading a Cosmo, some article about work mistakes to avoid like the plague, and it just slipped out of my hand and landed in the water.”

  They laughed again, effortless, easy, and genuine. Then they took turns showing me the results of their mani-pedis. Anna went for a more neutral look—no surprise there—while Lily’s looked like the flag from some African nation.

  “Mine is called Fiji Weejee Fawn,” Anna said, showing me the muted brown tones coated with a metallic sheen. “Do you think I should have gone more extreme?”

  The subtext of her question was evident: should mine have been more like Lily’s? That was when I knew for certain they really had grown close. I hadn’t become a nonfactor, but clearly my role had been diminished.

  Anna and I dropped in at Jillian’s to play pool when Lily was working. Naturally, Lily was our waitress, and she took great pleasure serving us fried mozzarella sticks and Diet Cokes. She also demonstrated some remarkable pool skills, sinking what to me was an impossible two-ball combination with fluid ease.

  I wanted to change my tune about Lily. I wanted to embrace her and our future family with joy. But when I let my guard down, into my head popped all the various incidents, including Bessie and her accusatory rant.

  You! I know you!

  Anna and I visited Bessie again, but this time Lily didn’t come along. There were no incidents, no flare-ups, nothing to suggest Bessie had any memory of Lily from that day or before, for that matter. In truth, she had no memory of anything, not our last visit, not the sonogram. Anna broke the news about the baby again and she’d keep on breaking the good news until the baby was born. The other person Anna told was her mother’s cousin, Gladys, who resided in California and whom she called every Sunday night without fail. I spoke with Gladys on only a few occasions, and she always ended our brief chats by commenting on how handsome I looked in the pictures Anna had sent. During those calls, Anna would give detailed updates on her life and Bessie’s health and well-being along with some harsh words directed at Bessie’s errant sisters. If Gladys weren’t eighty-five and of bad health herself, she’d have come for a visit.

  This was our life for the better part of a week or so. We were halfway through Lily’s fourth month of pregnancy: the sixteenth week of gestation. By this point, the uterus should have been around the size of a melon, but Lily’s could not have been much bigger than a navel orange. Still, she was rounder in the belly, though not round enough to assuage all of Anna’s concerns. There was a frustration for adoptive parents, I read, that had everything to do with control. A pregnant woman decided what she ate, when she slept, how she might exercise, while the mother waiting to adopt could only hope for the best. We were the navigators, guiding our passenger on a pathway to home, but we were not the pilots. Those controls were in another’s hands, and so Anna’s concern grew in reverse proportion to the size of Lily’s belly: the smaller the bump, the bigger the worry—simple math for a complex equation.

  Anna showed me a website after we got home from playing pool.

  “Do you think Lily’s gained five pounds since we met her?”

  I read the post on BabyHelp.com. An expectant mother had expressed her concern about not showing at fourteen weeks.

  “What did you search to find this thread?” I asked.

  “Not showing at fourteen weeks,” Anna said.

  Sure enough, I typed the words “Not Showing” into the Google search bar and got auto-complete results for not showing at twelve weeks all the way up to twenty weeks.

  “If she’s gained five pounds, I think we’re fine,” Anna said, though her voice failed to mask a lingering concern. Anna looked me in the eyes and it broke my heart. “I just want this, Gage. I want this so bad.”

  I felt her pull toward motherhood. It was strong enough to create its own presence. I remembered Karen’s pregnancy more vividly than I recalled Max’s
infancy. I knew where Karen’s stretch marks were, what ointments she would rub on her expanding belly. I could tell Karen when she was hungry before she knew it herself. We did the music thing—little headphones on the belly playing intelligence-boosting classical music—even after reading articles that debunked claims of benefits.

  “What if they’re wrong?” Karen had said.

  Nodding in agreement, I’d turned up the volume on my iPod just a notch.

  “They could be wrong,” I had said.

  Perhaps sleep deprivation played a part in my fuzzy recollections of Max’s infancy. Or maybe it was this: a first pregnancy was when all the possibilities of the world drew parents closer, and then, after the birth, reality set in with feeding schedules, fumbling newness, constant uncertainty, and lack of sleep. With no control over the pregnant body, Anna and I were missing a component of this early bonding. Perhaps that was the dark energy surrounding me, pulling us apart.

  CHAPTER 22

  On the third day of Lily’s fifteenth week (yes, that was how we measured time), the doorbell rang. On our porch stood a rather heavy woman wearing a pink paisley blouse and flowing black skirt. She was in her late fifties, I determined, with shoulder-length brown hair parted down the middle. Her glasses were wire-rimmed—no fashion statement there—but her jewelry, big and colorful beads, along with the rest of her attire, gave off little echoes of her past. It was easy to imagine her at a Grateful Dead show, twirling in the twilight to “Uncle John’s Band.” But her dark eyes were kind, and she was the sort who made anyone feel comfortable in her presence. If Brad were here, he’d probably see a yellow aura bordering on a pure white glow.

  “You must be Gage,” the woman said, extending her hand along with a smile. “I’m Margret Dodd, your social worker.” We shook hands, and I noticed the padded folder tucked underneath her arm. I assumed it contained all the paperwork for our home study orientation.

  “It’s great to meet you, Margret,” I said, stepping aside. “Please come in. Anna is looking forward to meeting you as well.”

  I escorted Margret (it took all of two seconds) through the living room and into our small dining room. If I hadn’t been paying attention, I might not have noticed a slight shift in Margret’s eyes. She was searching our home in the subtlest of ways, looking in this understated manner for signs of future trouble. Did we smoke? Was the home clean? Did we live like respectable people? Could we be trusted to care for this precious gift? I knew she was just doing her job, but it was hard not to feel slightly judged.

  We were safe, though. The apartment was probably the cleanest it had been in ages, right down to the freshly washed floor. If anything, the place smelled like a Pine-Sol bomb had gone off.

  Anna came out of the kitchen carrying a tray with a pot of tea and some milk and sugar. Lily followed on her heels, carrying a tray of cookies neatly arranged in colorful pastry holders.

  Lily looked absolutely beautiful. Here was a girl who could be a contestant on The Bachelor and receive a rose every single episode, even if she just sat in the corner and sulked. Her hair, freshly washed, shining, flowed with a life force of its own. She wore a long, floral-patterned dress—not her usual black hipster attire—that flattered her narrow shoulders and hips, and she had sandals on her feet. Margret gave me a look as if to say, “Your baby is going to be absolutely gorgeous.”

  The tea, the cookies—all of it had been carefully chosen by Anna beforehand. Everything here was intentional, well-thought-out, as though this orientation meeting were really a job interview, which in a way it was. Margret had shaken my hand, but she gave Anna a warm embrace. They were somewhat familiar with each other. Anna was in charge of managing communications with the lawyer, the social worker, and adoption agency. It was Anna who was writing the checks. She maintained the big folders of paperwork, all neatly labeled and organized in a file cabinet in her office. This, I’d come to realize, was as close to being in control of the pregnancy as Anna could manage.

  I, too, learned a lot about the process. Massachusetts law prohibited the placement of a child for adoption by any person other than a licensed or approved placement agency. Exceptions were made in cases of relations by blood or marriage. Birth mothers were allowed to select the adoptive parents, and such adoptions were referred to as “identified,” “designated,” or “parent-initiated” adoptions. Margret came to us via the agency Anna hired. As long as Margret felt we were suitable, she would honor Lily’s wishes to have us become the adoptive parents.

  Lily was a new person to Margret, but they hugged anyway, a quick and friendly little embrace. Anna wanted Lily to be a part of these meetings from the onset so she would be informed each step of the way. Lily didn’t seem to mind. In fact, I picked up on a childlike exuberance from Lily in Margret’s presence. This meeting, after all, was centered on Lily. Perhaps for the first time in her life, she felt truly important. What did Lily have besides us? She had a job in a pool hall, a louse for a boyfriend, an absent birth father, and a distant relationship with her parents. It seemed to register in Lily’s every move that her pregnancy was a very big deal. She wasn’t just part of the show, she was the show.

  We sat at the kitchen table making small talk, drinking tea, and going about the business of becoming parents. Our home had become a fertility clinic of sorts. Instead of hormone injections, we would use a pen. And until we passed the home study, Lily’s baby was ours by desire alone.

  “So tell me a little bit about yourself, Lily,” Margret said.

  “Not much to tell,” Lily said. “I grew up in Saugus.”

  “Did you go to high school there?” Margret inquired. “I know some people from the town.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Lily said, her Boston accent coming out now. “I didn’t go to college or anything. Is that a problem?” Lily gave Anna a nervous look as Margret laughed warmly.

  “Not at all, Lily,” Margret said. “I just wanted to learn more about you.”

  I noticed Margret wasn’t taking any notes, so I hoped Lily understood this to be an informal inquiry. Still, she was looking at Anna a bit apprehensively, as if she was failing some sort of test, wanting our approval and worried about disappointing us.

  Well, not us, but Anna. Lily hadn’t really made eye contact with me. I was a prop in these proceedings more than a participant, as far as Lily was concerned. This was the Lily and Anna hour. And even though Brad had cleared her aura, it was hard for me not to think that this had been Lily’s intention from the start.

  “What do you like to do?” Margret asked. “Do you have any hobbies?”

  “Mostly I just work,” Lily said. “I’m a waitress at Jillian’s. I do like to draw.”

  Draw? I’d never seen Lily so much as pick up a pen or pencil in the time she’d been living here. No drawings of hers hung on the walls.

  “Have you always been artistic?” Margret asked.

  Lily became shy, reverting into herself.

  “I wouldn’t say that I’m artistic,” she clarified. “I’m not very good.”

  “What do you like to draw? Do you have a favorite subject matter?” Margret inquired. She took a long sip of tea, eyeing Lily over the rim of her mug. Lily got a pensive look to her, thinking.

  “I mostly draw people,” Lily said with a shrug. “I like to observe people, watch their mannerisms and stuff. I think everyone has a secret life, you know? Something they want to hide, something they wouldn’t want anybody else to know about. That’s what I like to draw.”

  My throat tightened and I felt my palms turn slick. For the first time since Margret’s arrival, Lily was looking right at me.

  CHAPTER 23

  The meeting continued without any hiccups, nothing that would derail our plans. If Lily had some hidden designs, she held out. Margret went through the details of the home study process never bothering to check her notes. I suspected she’d placed so many children in so many homes that the process had been etched into memory.

  The point of the hom
e study, she told us, was to educate and prepare the adoptive family. In most cases the social worker gathered information about prospective parents that could help the adoption agency connect the family with a child whose needs they can meet. Since we had a child in waiting, our home study was to evaluate our fitness as parents.

  Margret began by getting our story. Why did we want to adopt? What had led us to this moment? How did we connect with Lily?

  Oh, but she didn’t know the floodgates her questions had opened. As I told her about Max and Karen, Margret went fumbling in her purse to remove a package of tissues. I was sure Margret had heard sad stories before, but ours might have exceeded her emotional threshold. When Anna spoke of Kevin, his sickness, a tear that had been threatening formed fully and fell. Anna left out the part about how her ex-husband, Edward, raped her body and soul—which was for the best, as I was sure Margret would have turned into a fountain.

  Anna and I were finishing each other’s thoughts as we told Margret how we met at the grief group. Here even Lily looked emotional and Margret was downright heartsick, wetting half the tissues in the package. By the time we told her about how a chance encounter at a bus stop led to Lily finding us on an adoptive parent website, Margret had gone through the entire package of tissues.

  “And I thought I’d heard ’em all,” she said, making a nervous laugh as she dabbed the corners of her eyes. “You’re all so very lucky.”

  A heavy silence followed until Lily threw open her arms wide and clapped her hands together, snapping the spell of sadness.

  “But we’re here now and everyone is happy,” she said.

  Anna and Margret nodded with enthusiasm, while I did my best to pretend to agree.

  Over the course of the next hour, we discussed more elements of the home study process. There were training programs we were required to complete, educational seminars designed to help us understand adoption issues and agency requirements.

  “How involved will Lily be with the baby?” Margret asked.