A Mother's Goodbye

by Kate Hewitt

  The doors ping open directly onto the underground parking garage and Isaac races out.

  ‘Isaac,’ I call. ‘Cars.’

  He slows down for a millisecond, and then keeps on skipping ahead. Testing me, another new development, and one I don’t feel emotionally prepared for.

  That first morning I left Tina to call my lawyer, Eleanor. She was calm, no-nonsense, and I felt my heart rate start to slow when I heard her speak so practically.

  ‘In agency adoptions the birth mother can’t surrender the child until seventy-two hours after the birth,’ she told me. ‘It won’t be considered valid beforehand.’

  ‘So she has time to bond.’ I pictured Heather, cradling my son. My son, whom I hadn’t even seen yet, wasn’t allowed to see. A ragged gasp escaped me.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Eleanor answered calmly. ‘The baby is in ICU at the moment, correct? So the birth mother can’t see him easily. That could work in your favor, especially if you don’t cover any medical expenses once she changes her mind.’ She sounded so cold but in that moment it was what I needed. ‘If you feel you have the relationship,’ Eleanor suggested, ‘and she wants to see you, you could talk to Heather. See what she’s thinking. But be careful.’

  ‘And after the seventy-two hours? If she doesn’t… surrender?’ I pictured Heather waving a white flag from her hospital bed, a war being waged. Why did it have to be like that? The soft-focus stories I read online made everything seem so amicable, and she and I had reached a certain kind of friendliness, hadn’t we? Now it seemed like so much fakery, even though I felt it at the time. I’m sure I did.

  ‘There’s not much you can do then,’ Eleanor admitted.

  ‘But I gave her money,’ I said, even though it wasn’t remotely about the money.

  ‘You mean you paid for her expenses, I hope,’ Eleanor returned sharply. ‘Any compensation should have gone through the proper channels, Grace. The laws are very strict about how you give money to a birth mother. Trust me, you do not want to look as if you were trying to buy a baby.’

  ‘I know.’ Guilt and fear prickled through me as I thought about that five grand I’d given Heather. I hadn’t thought it mattered, but what if it jeopardized my case? What if she used my generosity against me, made me seem unfit or even criminal? Everything felt like a minefield, explosions all around me.

  ‘And what if she does sign the papers after seventy-two hours?’ I asked, trying to focus on the what-ifs, the ones I wanted. ‘Can she still change her mind, even then?’

  ‘She has forty-five days to reconsider her decision after executing the form. But she’d have to take you to court, and it wouldn’t be a certain outcome for her.’

  Or for me. Still, I felt the tiniest bit better. I didn’t think Heather wanted the expense and drama of going to court. But the next three days were critical.

  I click my keys to unlock the door to the SUV I bought after Isaac was born. He clambers in the back and I slip into the driver’s seat, steeling myself for what lies ahead. Four excruciating hours of Heather’s overt neediness, her family’s tense silence, my son’s heart-wrenching discomfort. Every month. But that’s going to change. Finally, that’s going to change. Isaac buckles up, and then asks if he can play his iPad, as usual.

  ‘Why don’t we play the alphabet game?’ I suggest. It’s something we’ve started doing in the last two years, since Isaac learned to read. ‘You go first.’

  ‘A on Avenue!’

  I meet his eyes, the same hazel as Kevin’s, in the rearview mirror. ‘Good one, bud.’

  ‘Your turn, Mom.’

  I never tire of that word. Mom. Me. ‘Hmm, let’s see,’ I say as I turn onto Eighty-Sixth Street. ‘Where am I going to find a B?’

  ‘Columbus!’ he crows as we drive through the park, toward Columbus Avenue. ‘And C too!’

  We’ve finished the game – Z in Zappos on a billboard by the GW Bridge – by the time I turn onto I95, and I relent and let Isaac play on his iPad. I’m used to this hour-long drive to Elizabeth. I’ve made it eighty-two times in the last seven years, eighty-two visits, excruciating for everyone. But maybe this one will be the last, or at least close to it. I can hope.

  Seven years ago it was twenty-four endless hours before Heather agreed to see me. I’d gone home, then gone to work because I didn’t know what else to do and I needed to face the partners and Jill, who wouldn’t even meet my eye. I went back to the hospital in the evening, feeling as if I were on an awful loop I was desperate to get off, and yet I still dreaded seeing Heather. Reading the truth in her face, hearing it from her own mouth. Facing the end of everything.

  When Heather finally said she would see me, and I cracked open the door to her hospital room and saw her struggling to sit up in bed, I had no idea what to expect. My mouth felt dry and my heart thudded. I ached to see my son, but I didn’t even know if he would be mine. But he felt mine.

  ‘Don’t sit up, not with your stitches,’ I said, waving her back down with one hand and putting the huge bouquet of flowers that now seemed showy and completely inappropriate on a side table with the other. I’d debated getting the flowers, but it had felt wrong to come empty-handed. ‘How are you feeling?’

  Heather’s lips trembled and she pressed them together. ‘I’ve felt better.’

  ‘I’m sure you have.’ I sat on the edge of the chair near her bed. ‘Have you seen Kevin?’

  She nodded jerkily. ‘He was here earlier. My sister watched the girls.’

  ‘How is… how is the baby?’ The words felt incendiary, but I had to ask. I needed to know.

  ‘He’s going to be fine.’ Heather turned toward the window, away from me. ‘They’re going to have to keep him in the hospital for a couple of weeks, because of his lungs. And they’d like him to be over five pounds before he… before he goes home.’ Her voice wobbled and she sucked in a hard breath. Tears pricked my eyes and I realized, with a ripple of shock, that they were for Heather.

  Underneath my fear and selfish desperation, I ached for her. I knew I couldn’t even begin to imagine what she was feeling, and I was humbled by that knowledge. No matter what I was facing, Heather faced more. And yet maybe it was still all going to be okay for her. Maybe I was the one going home with empty arms and an aching heart.

  ‘He’s beautiful, you know,’ she said, her voice thick. ‘Tiny but beautiful.’

  ‘I’m sure he is.’ Now I was the one who sounded like I was going to cry. The two of us broken over this little baby boy we didn’t even know yet but we both loved.

  ‘I’m not going to change my mind,’ she said, her voice hardening, the threat of tears gone now, her face still turned toward the window. ‘When I first saw him…’ She draws in a quick breath. ‘Well… All you need to know is I’m not going to change my mind. So don’t worry.’ I couldn’t mistake her bitterness, and yet everything in me pulsed with painful relief.

  I released my breath in a slow, quiet rush. ‘Thank you.’ I had no other words.

  ‘But things are going to have to be different,’ Heather continued.

  I wanted her to look at me, so I could see her face. She took a deep breath.

  ‘I want an open adoption.’

  Her tone was so non-negotiable that I almost wished my lawyer were there. ‘What… what exactly do you mean by that?’

  ‘One visit every month.’ She turned to me, suddenly fierce, furious. ‘Every month. Saturday afternoon. That will be mine.’ Forever. She didn’t say it, but I heard it all the same, felt it, and everything in me recoiled. I pictured Heather’s and my lives forever intertwined, hopelessly tangled, this baby boy at the center, tugged in different directions.

  ‘I’m not going to back down on this,’ Heather said, and she sounded tougher than I’d ever heard her sound before. ‘I know it’s different from what I said before, but I didn’t know how I’d feel, seeing him. Holding him.’ Her voice broke and she sucked in a hard breath. ‘And it’s not just because it’s a boy, if you’re thinking th
at. That jolted me, maybe, but it was bigger than that, Grace. My own child… I’d forgotten how it felt, to hold them in your arms. To know they came out of you. He was so tiny.’ Another breath, this one ragged. ‘And he knew me, right off. He knew my voice, he turned to me when I spoke. He tried to nurse, but he was too small. But he tried.’

  She was torturing me with her words, and I knew I just had to take it, punch after punch. ‘I’m sure he did,’ I manage.

  She sniffed and dashed a tear from her cheek. ‘So that’s how it’s got to be. I’ll give him to you, Grace, I swear I will, but I’m not backing down on this. I want it drawn up, legal. You can pay the lawyer like you have everything else.’ She spat the last words. It felt as if she hated me, and I wasn’t even sure I could blame her.

  I stayed silent, not wanting to commit to anything. I didn’t want either to put her off or make promises. ‘I’ll contact a lawyer,’ I finally said, and Heather nodded, her jaw set.

  ‘Fine.’

  It felt like I should leave, so I got up from the chair. I stopped, hesitant but also determined. ‘Heather… can I see him?’

  A long, tense silence. ‘Fine,’ she said finally. ‘I’ll tell the nurse.’ Before I’d made it to the door Heather had curled up onto her side. I heard her gasping, tearing sobs, and I started to turn again.

  ‘Go away,’ she choked. It sounded as if she were being rent apart. ‘Please, go away.’

  It felt wrong to leave her like that, yet I could hardly force myself on her. And so I went, and a little while later, the nurse came and took me to the NICU nursery, all the plastic bassinets in a row, the babies tiny and swaddled and red. I knew him right away. I don’t know how, I just did. And when he opened his eyes I felt myself fall. My child. My son. It seemed so simple, then. So right. Like it would all fall into place, just because it had to.

  Isaac is bored with his iPad and so he starts drumming his legs against the back of my seat.

  ‘Isaac,’ I say, keeping my voice mild, ‘easy.’

  These visits are always so tense; they have been since that first, aching one, when I, exhausted and emotionally overwhelmed, both afraid and euphoric, brought a four-week-old Isaac to Heather’s house. When he’d cried, which he’d done a lot of in those first fatigue-fogged weeks, her shirt grew damp patches and she’d laughed in embarrassment, but also in a sort of pleasure and pride.

  ‘They gave me pills to dry up my milk, but I guess they don’t work so good.’ She held out her arms for Isaac; he was still in his car seat, dressed in a pale blue onesie, his scrawny, red legs akimbo, his little face screwed up for another one of his bleating shrieks. He couldn’t take the bottle easily yet; I’d only had him at home for five days.

  ‘Let me take him,’ Heather said.

  For a single, frozen second the words registered with both of us, and then, wordlessly, I handed her the car seat. I’ve gone back over that moment, which felt like stepping off a ledge into thin air. What if I’d refused? What if I’d said no, this won’t work, I can’t? I won’t? But I couldn’t have. Isaac was only twenty-eight days old. Heather still had seventeen days to change her mind, and we both knew that. I saw it in the steely glint of her eye, felt it in the tremble of my soul.

  Of course, there have been many times since then that I could have refused. Those first few months, when she took him from me so possessively the second I came in the door, and told me all the things I was doing wrong? Laughed as she watched me fumble and said I couldn’t hold a baby like a briefcase?

  His first birthday, when Heather made a gooey chocolate cake and insisted on feeding it to him, smearing it all over his face? When he was two, and she gave him Sprite in a bottle? When he was five, and her little demon daughter Amy cut off all his hair and Heather just laughed and said he’d needed a haircut, he looked like a girl? They’d been his baby curls.

  Or maybe after the ill-conceived vacation I was forced into last year, when Heather booked tickets for Disney World, including one for Isaac, without asking me. A week with her family, and she’d never even asked me if I minded, or checked if we were free. I’d struggled with what to do, how to respond, because I could see she was absolutely counting on this trip. Refusing to let Isaac go would destroy her, and no matter how resentful I felt, I couldn’t make myself do that. So I decided on an awkward compromise; I went too, and ended up paying for a lot of it. Worst seven days of all our lives, or at least mine.

  No one knew how to act with me and Isaac there; Kevin simmered with resentment, the girls kept shrieking and asking me for money for candy or games while they ignored Isaac. Heather clung to him, holding his hand when he obviously didn’t want her to, insisting on going on all the rides with him, even when Isaac asked to go with me. Everything about it was awful, but I thought, stupidly of course, that maybe after that Heather would back off, be satisfied for once, but she only came closer, clinging, always clinging, always wanting more.

  And now finally, it’s been seven years. Seven years. And I’ve talked to a lawyer; a judge can legally enforce open adoption agreements but she thinks I have a strong, solid case to terminate, or at least limit, contact. I can show that the visits aren’t beneficial to Isaac, because they’re not. He doesn’t like Heather, or her family, and that is not my fault.

  ‘Almost there, Isaac,’ I call back, and he groans and kicks my seat again. I don’t mind. It’s almost over. It has to be, because I really don’t think I can take any more.

  Fourteen

  HEATHER

  I am icing the cake in Minecraft green when Kevin comes into the kitchen.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘A cake,’ I answer, although it’s obvious. ‘For Isaac.’ Minecraft is his favorite game. I managed to track down a little figurine of the character Steve from the game and placed it on top, along with the glittery candle in the shape of a seven.

  Kevin looks at the cake for another moment and then looks away, saying nothing. I’m used to this by now, the silences that I’ve stopped trying to analyze. Is he angry? Bitter? Bored? Or maybe, after all these years, Kevin is just indifferent to our son. I really have stopped trying to guess.

  ‘We’re having pizza too,’ I tell him as I squeeze another blob of green onto the cake. Last month all Isaac could talk about was Minecraft. That is, when he was talking. He tends to be pretty quiet during these visits, shy like Emma, but I always try to get him to open up, and sometimes I succeed. ‘Can you get the sodas and put them on the table?’

  I don’t really need Kevin to do anything, but I want him to be involved. So often during these visits he just sits in his chair, sullen and silent, the way he used to be when his back was really bad.

  I don’t remember exactly when his back started getting a little better; it happened gradually, in small, hopeful increments. After Lucy started school, he got another job, full-time, working the counter of a UPS store, and financially, after a couple of years, we just about managed to get ourselves on an even keel.

  When Lucy was seven I got my high school diploma at night school and then took a course in computing at the community college.

  It was a big step, and one I still feel proud of. Stacy supported me through it, picking up the girls when needed, taking up the slack with my mom, whose health has continued to flag and fail. She doesn’t leave the house most days, and my dad can’t manage on his own. We take it in turns, but Stacy did more for her – and me – then.

  Kev supported me too, in his own way. The classes weren’t cheap, but he never said a word. And he put his fair share of frozen pizzas in the oven when I was going out to one of them at night.

  For the last three years I’ve worked as a receptionist for a small company that owns a couple of greeting card stores in the area. It’s not much, just answering phones and doing some data entry, but the pay is much better than cleaning and I like wearing nice clothes to work: low heels and button-down blouses. It makes me feel like I’ve come up in the world a little bit, like I’ve managed to hold ont
o a dream amidst all the lost and broken ones.

  Kevin grabs the two-liter bottle of Coke and puts it down on the dining room table with more force than necessary, not quite a slam. Again with the Mountain Dew. I focus on the cake. A few seconds later Lucy skips in, her angelic smile telling me that she’s up to no good.

  ‘Amy’s left,’ she announces proudly, always glad to be the bearer of grim news, and I can’t keep from letting out a sigh.

  ‘Left? What do you mean?’

  ‘She’s gone to meet her friends.’ Lucy’s eleven now, and she and Amy, who’s fifteen, are usually bickering. Amy gets into trouble and Lucy tattles.

  I squint as I try to finish the green piping on the cake. My fingers ache from kneading and squeezing the icing bag so hard. Lucy leans forward and takes a big swipe of icing with her finger.

  ‘Lucy.’

  ‘Is Amy going to get in trouble?’

  ‘Maybe, but so are you for messing up the cake.’

  ‘It’s a gross color.’

  ‘Thanks.’ It is a gross color, but I know how much Isaac loves Minecraft. Every month I try to find something for him to like, to enjoy while he’s here. Every month I try not to doubt myself and the decision I made seven years ago.

  His birth was a blur, right from the moment my waters broke all over the carpet, and Aneta drove me to the hospital. A rush of doctors, tests, tubes, the pain squeezing the breath out of me, and I feared, the very life. The insistent beep beep beep of some monitor, and then how the beeps suddenly got faster and doctors began talking urgently, telling me I needed an emergency C-section. I felt as if I were seeing everything from afar, from behind a gauzy curtain. I wanted Kevin.

  And then the next thing I knew they were putting up a little curtain so I couldn’t see the mound of my own pregnant belly, and someone, a stranger, was holding my hand. I felt a weird, tugging sensation, everything moving too fast, and then the words I’ll never forget: You have a little boy.