The Search Angel

by Tish Cohen

  One bag sits at the front of the lineup, smaller but most important. This taupe Gucci-knockoff carry-on is Sylvie’s. It contains the most precious cargo. Diapers. Formula. A doll. A crushable rattle. A muslin swaddling blanket. A pink ruffled dress with matching bloomers. A Kissy Kissy matching bodysuit, cardigan and hat. All sized for a child six months. They’ve been warned that Sylvie is tiny.

  “I can’t believe she’s going to be ours,” Eleanor calls to Jonathan, who still hasn’t appeared. “What am I saying? She is ours.”

  Angus, a massive black Great Dane that better resembles a baby dinosaur than a dog, pants at her feet, huge bony elbows and knees jutting across the foyer. His uncropped ears work to catch any sound that might signify departure. Every minute or so he whines accusingly at the suitcases—the source of his distress. If they’d just stayed under the bed where they belong, his humans wouldn’t be leaving. A growl emanates from deep within his barrel.

  “Poor baby.” Eleanor pauses to rub his nose. To Jonathan: “Don’t forget, we have to drop him off. Cab driver should love a dog this size in the car almost as much as Angus loves the vet.” Angus looks up at her and pleads with a thwack of his tail on the floor. “I need to get rid of my guilt. What was it you told me about dogs and their sense of time?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Something like, they can sense when it’s four o’clock every day but not the passing of hours, whatever that’s called?”

  Jonathan has a mind for scientific facts no matter what the species. “Linear time. That’s a construct of a more developed type of brain.”

  “Right.” She tickles the velvet of Angus’s floppy ears. “We could be gone half a day to him, right? Not a whole week.”

  Silence from behind the bathroom door.

  “Jonathan?”

  “Mmm.”

  They got the news three weeks ago. A large envelope from California, the stamps depicting the state flag. Holding her breath, she tore open the envelope and scanned the letter. It was the news they’d been waiting for. Their adoption had been approved. The baby girl she and Jonathan had only seen in one photograph was theirs.

  The infant’s story is tragic, and unusual after a quake that injured many but only killed five. The Baja California earthquake happened April 4 in Mexico, earning it the nickname the Easter Sunday Quake. The epicenter was just off the coast of the Gulf of California and while Mexico was hit hardest, with the sides ripped off buildings, fallen telephone poles, and cracked roads, it was the strongest quake to hit Southern California in eighteen years. Skyscrapers shook in San Diego. Sporadic power outtages. Broken water mains.

  In El Centro, in the far southeastern corner of California, the damage was largely limited to gas leaks, collapsed chimneys, and sheds. There were many injuries, but only one death: a young Irish-Vietnamese woman named Tia Kim, who had just moved into a forty-year-old apartment building. She’d been sunning herself on her main-floor balcony when the three balconies above collapsed on her and her three-month-old infant.

  Sylvie Kim had no father on record, though with her pale green-gold eyes, caramel freckled skin and wild kinky hair that ranged from deep brown to blond at the hairline, she was clearly a striking mix of races beyond her mother’s unusual background.

  With only a disabled aunt as a family member, the infant was declared an orphan and placed in an already crowded foster home with five other children. There, she shared a room with two other babies. Eleanor and Jonathan saw her photo at Back Bay Adoption here in Boston. Eleanor took one look at the girl’s cute-as-a-button face, stunning eyes wide with wonder, tulip-bud mouth half open, impossibly tiny white teeth, and fell hard.

  They met all the requirements through the partner agency in California, including the paperwork and a home visit by the Boston branch to save precious agency dollars. Everything is finally in place. They’ve been approved and will finally have their little girl.

  Now, two beeps from outside have Eleanor racing to the living room window. There on the sill sits a fat wooden picture frame she bought specifically for the stock photo it came with. A photo of a toothy family, all windswept and bare-toed and brunette, all in jeans and black T-shirts on the grass in front of a lake. Not posed stiffly either. This is no boring family. These people frolic, laugh, piggyback. As if this is life all the time, not just when a professional photographer is poised to immortalize them on a stock photo website.

  This family is either whole, or doing a damn good job of pretending. Which is fine. She’ll replace them with one of her own family soon. Herself, Jonathan, and Sylvie. And Angus, of course.

  She leans over the photo to look down at the street. There, double parked, is a yellow Boston Cab glistening in the rain. “Car’s here.” She rushes to the kitchen to make sure the window is locked tight, then to turn off the lights throughout the apartment. “Jon!” She drags all the bags into the outer hallway. Another beep from the street. “It’s rush hour. And we have to stop at the vet’s first. Then we check in. Fight our way through the lineup at check-in …” One quick stop in the bedroom to make sure she hasn’t left anything on the bed, to find she left something on the bed. She grabs the car seat and rushes it to the door. “Then the plane. Then the mile-high make-out because we’re going to be parents but we’re not going to be dull. Jonathan, hurry. Sylvie!”

  A click. A thunk. The bathroom door creaks open. Her favorite room in the apartment. Deep porcelain tub, black and white hexagon floor tiles, many of which are cracked from a near century of use. The freestanding sink still has separate hot and cold faucets—a feature Eleanor finds charming and Jonathan does not. Keeps burning his hands, he says. He steps out from behind the door wearing nothing but boxers.

  She stares at his bare feet, arms, chest. “You’re not even dressed!”

  He leans against the door frame. He doesn’t speak.

  “Hurry. Throw on some pants. We have to go.”

  A movement so small she doesn’t realize right away that he’s shaking his head.

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  More honking from outside.

  “Jonathan. Talk to me.”

  “I just. I can’t do it.”

  “Can’t do what?”

  He doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. She doesn’t breathe. For what seems a lifetime, he stares at a spot on the wall just over her left shoulder. The front door is wide open and a chill from the stairway makes her shiver. A series of clicks as the heat kicks on inside the apartment. The honking has stopped.

  Finally, Jonathan motions toward the bags and car seat in the doorway, the airline tickets on the hall table, the bedroom awaiting their adoptive daughter. “Any of it.”

  Chapter 3

  Her first instinct is to bolt. To get on the plane without him. Without a word she grabs her purse, her passport, the car seat, then her bag and Sylvie’s, and heads down the narrow staircase. She trips halfway down and her suitcase and the car seat somersault to the bottom, where the seat lands on its yawning face and the bag bursts open. Ignoring her T-shirts and panties splayed out on the tiny landing beneath the row of mailboxes, she rushes out onto the street to stop the driver from leaving.

  The cab is gone.

  It’s okay. She’ll repack her bag. Hail another cab. She’ll get to the airport if it kills her. She marches back into the building to stuff sundresses and flip-flops and a tampon box back into the suitcase as Jonathan tries to stop her.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t just show up as one half of the adoptive couple and take her with you.”

  “Oh yes I can.”

  “Eleanor, be real. We need to talk about this.”

  “I’ll go get her, bring her back, then we can talk.”

  The case won’t zip up. Eleanor shoves sleeves and stray socks back inside the bag and leans her weight onto it. Tugs on the zipper.

  “Eleanor. Forget it.”

  She tugs harder and harder on the zipper until part of it breaks off in her hand. Droppin
g back onto her heels, she sinks to the floor and stares accusingly at the metal slider on her palm. The scream inside her head comes out as a whisper. “How could you?”

  A half hour later, they’re back upstairs. Jonathan lowers himself onto the bed and leans over his thighs, rubbing his jawline. “Cassie Shreve from ICU’s been telling us all these stories about her sister. Adopted a boy from Russia. Now the kid’s a tween and a total horror show. Shoots coke, smokes in the house. He’s barely fifteen and grabbed the car keys one night. Took off until the next day; they had no idea where he was. It’s a nightmare. They have two other kids and thought they’d give back by taking in this orphan. Now their lives are ruined. Cassie said specifically: don’t do it.”

  Eleanor sits on the other side of the bed. Reaches for a pillow and presses it into her abdomen.

  This bed, king-size. She didn’t say anything about children when they picked it out; there’d been too many miscarriages at that point and Jonathan had placed a moratorium on baby talk. “Every conversation doesn’t have to be about how great our lives would be with kids,” he’d said. When they lay side by side on the display mattress, he spoke about the way the pillow-top sunk down just enough that it felt like a full-body hug. He asked the salesgirl if it came with a warranty. If it was included in the Spring Price Wars promotion.

  Eleanor didn’t care about the price. She was busy imagining their baby on a Saturday morning, all fed and changed and happy, crawling around between them and giggling when the downy surface knocked him off balance. Or her. She hadn’t shared her fantasy with Jonathan until the bed was delivered. He kissed her hand then and said they were going to have that one day. They were going to have it all.

  “That’s one case,” Eleanor says now. “One boy. We don’t know how they raised him. What mistakes they made.”

  “Their other two are honor students. Dream children. But their lives are being completely messed up by this Pavel kid.”

  “When did this conversation with Cassie even happen?”

  He shrugs. “A while ago. Couple of weeks.”

  “And you’ve gone along with everything. Painting her room. Booking the flight. Letting me think you were onside.”

  “I guess I thought … I don’t know what I thought. I’d change my mind or something. Getting this baby seems like it will fix everything. Like it will be the same as our own child, but it won’t.”

  “Of course it will.”

  “You don’t know what you’re getting. It’s too risky. The attachment bond is broken at the infant stage. Once that’s severed, there’s no repair. Not even with years of therapy.”

  She says nothing.

  “The child can grow up to have difficulty forming meaningful relationships,” he says. “They can reject those who love them and chase down those who don’t in an attempt to win back the mother who rejected them. The damage can last a lifetime.”

  Sylvie’s curly pigtails. Those sweet, streaky pom-poms above the tiny whorls of her ears. Eleanor will never get to touch them. To pull out the elastic bands and see what her hair looks like loose and wild. To bury her nose in Sylvie’s neck and inhale the smell of her own child. To stare into those incredible eyes. “This is a young baby.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Attachment is everything.” He reaches over to squeeze her fingers. “It’s not as if we’re trained to handle this, even. We’d mess her up for sure.”

  She pulls her hand away.

  “It would be different if she were our own.”

  “We can’t have one, Jonathan.”

  “But why destroy our lives by taking on someone else’s problem?”

  “I was someone else’s problem. And I turned out fine.” He hesitates a moment too long. “I didn’t turn out fine?” she snaps.

  “Ever since we started dating, you’ve asked over and over if I’m going to leave you. And over and over I tell you I’m never going to leave you. Our entire relationship you’ve been certain I’ll take off, like your birth mother did. How is that fine?”

  It was true. Eleanor always knew he would leave.

  They met at a pet store not far from the shop. Eleanor was still in business school and wanted a low-maintenance pet, something she could say good morning to and good night. She’d spent half an hour studying a little brown mouse working to tunnel through the corner of the aquarium, his furious efforts creating an impressive mound of cedar shavings behind him. There was something about his desire for more that she found admirable. As she priced out cages, a man with a narrow nose and a headful of black curls lifted a sack of dog food over his shoulder, only to have the bag rip open and kibble scatter across the floor like marbles. She rushed to help him, feeling her cheeks heat up when his green eyes were upon her. His wild hair, his Saturday-morning stubble, his lazy grin—men like this did not pay attention to Eleanor Prue. So when he asked her for coffee after, her instinct was to say no. But she didn’t.

  Ever since, through the engagement, on the honeymoon, and well beyond, she’s been certain he’ll come to his senses. Figure out she isn’t worth his time. He’ll suddenly notice something that escaped him before. Like how flat her hair is in the morning. Or that she can never pick a good movie. That her nose looks bigger from the left.

  But he hasn’t.

  From the start, he said he loved the way her focus followed him, like a spotlight. Even if he left the room, left the apartment, he could feel her thoughts, her affection still with him. He was raised the middle child of five, by parents too busy trying to keep their framing shop in the black to pay one studious child much attention. Jonathan did well in school, he didn’t cause trouble. The others just needed more. One with dyslexia, another partied away his future. Jonathan could raise himself.

  Eleanor not only had time for him, but made time for him. And that was something he’d never before experienced.

  Once in a bookstore he was riffling through the magazines while Eleanor debated between two just-released novels. She felt his eyes on her and looked up to find him staring, an odd expression on his face. That’s it, she thought. He’s realized he’s made a horrific mistake and wants out of the marriage. He’s trying to figure out how to tell me he doesn’t like my laugh and that he’s done. Instead, he came closer, draped his arm over her shoulders and said, “God, I’m lucky.”

  She would concoct scenarios in which she left him and he pined for her. Oh, how he pined! In one make-believe, oft-repeated sequence, Jonathan wakes up from a nap in the living room to find she isn’t in the kitchen making her same old spaghetti with ground turkey that she always overcooks. Instead she’s made ginger-soy glazed mahi mahi and spooned it onto platinum-edged plates she doesn’t even own. He gets up and searches the apartment for her, baffled. Eleanor never goes anywhere on a Sunday night.

  Then he sees it. Tacked to the inside of the front door is a note he can barely read through his tears.

  Dear Jonathan,

  I’ll always love you. I’ll always wish you well.

  Goodbye,

  xox

  Eleanor

  “Baby, let’s just go,” Eleanor says now. “Meet her in person. Then decide.”

  He lets out a heavy breath.

  “You may feel differently. You can’t make a decision this big until you see her.”

  Jonathan gets up, moves to the window. Outside, a neighbor’s balcony light goes on. Then off. Blurry red and white dots in the sky mean a plane lowering itself for a landing in the rain at Logan. Minutes pass, or hours. Maybe years. Finally, he turns.

  “It’s not just Sylvie.”

  Eleanor doesn’t breathe.

  “All these years of thinking about getting pregnant and trying to get pregnant. The thermometer and the sex that was no longer about sex but about a goal. And then the adoption frenzy—where from, and are we good enough, and home visits, and meetings with Nancy. You and me, we just vanished. Or you did.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “When was the last time we had sex?”
r />   “Sex? I don’t know.”

  “Well I do. It’s been a month and five days. And it had been two months before that. Almost three before that. I ask and I ask. And you keep saying you’re tired.”

  “It’s been rough, this process.”

  “We used to sit at the kitchen table on a Saturday morning and do the crossword puzzle. You actually looked at me when you spoke. And when you spoke it was about something other than ovulation charts or adoption agencies. You were right there with me. Present. You once faked a sprained ankle to surprise me in the ER, remember? And you’d snuck in a bottle of champagne in your purse.” He laughs. “Damn near got me fired.”

  “That’s not gone. We’ve just been living this battle for a baby.”

  “But that shouldn’t break us. That shouldn’t ever have taken over and replaced what we had. What we were.”

  “It hasn’t. Don’t you see? Once we have her, it’ll fix everything. We’ll be just like before.”

  “That’s not the way it works, El. You don’t get a baby to fix your life. We need to fix us first. Then we can see.”

  “I can’t do it that way. We’ll lose Sylvie. They’ll give her to someone else. People are clamoring for her, you know that.”

  He slides his hands into his pockets and leans against the window frame. “It’s the only way I’ll even consider it.”

  “You’re telling me to choose between you and my baby?”

  “I’m telling you I’m no longer sure.”

  “About me, or about the adoption?”

  “About anything.”

  The rattle of his keys as he stuffs them into his pocket. The sweep of air as he moves past on his way out of the room. From the hall, as the door swings shut, a sharp click, then footfalls down the apartment stairs.

  She walks into the second bedroom and stares. The walls they painted yellow so the Boston climate would feel sunny to Sylvie, even in the dead of winter. The stuffed penguin poised atop the change table to offer her something to play with during diapering. The vintage trunk Eleanor covered with cotton batting and striped fabric, the lid of which Jonathan rigged with a safety hinge to protect small fingers.