Other People's Children

by R. J. Hoffmann

  Every object in the room had started as an entry on a list in her notebook. Jon hated the lists, but Gail had started when she was ten and had forgotten how to function without them. She had copied her grandfather, who kept a tiny spiral-bound steno pad in his shirt pocket, a nub of a pencil crammed into the coil. Her lists made sure that she never missed a homework assignment, never arrived for an exam unprepared. During high school, when Gail’s mom fell most deeply into the booze, Gail’s lists made sure that food landed in the fridge, dentist appointments were kept, and the utilities got paid. When she started selling for the family knife-sharpening business, the lists helped her stay on top of the accounts and the calls and the proposal deadlines. She tried going electronic once, but the lists on her computer felt insubstantial, ephemeral, easily ignored. Before they started trying and failing to conceive a baby, the lists had been Gail’s superpower, her secret weapon. But after her first miscarriage, they started to feel obsessive, even to Gail. Still, she didn’t set them aside, because they helped her with the waiting.

  She made individual lists devoted to children’s books and clothes and supplies like diapers and wipes and creams. She devoted a list to the cribs they might buy, along with the pros and cons of each, the cost, the safety rating from Consumer Reports. After she found a negative review on The Glow or ChildMode, she could draw a line through the name of the crib, striking the very same chord of satisfaction as completing a task. She made a list of potential themes for the nursery—nautical, polka dots, outer space. She finally settled on zoo animals. Another list cataloged paint colors, and on that list, she taped a tiny slice of the color swatches from Benjamin Moore, because it was hard to remember the difference between North Star and Smoked Oyster and Carolina Gull. Now, everything was in place, except, of course, for the most important thing, and for that she could only wait.

  The waiting wasn’t always so difficult. Gail’s twenties didn’t feel like waiting at all. In the beginning, when she was struggling to learn how to sell, her notebook was crammed with lists of lost customers, customers at risk, and eventually, as she learned the job, customers won. When she moved to downtown Chicago, to that apartment on Paulina Street, she made lists of parties she attended, the bands she saw at the Double Door, and the dates of the best summer street festivals. And after Jon moved into that apartment on Paulina, they hosted many of the parties, so the notebook held guest lists and mai tai ingredients and a recipe for hash brownies. When she and Jon got married at Salvage One on the Near West Side, her lists exploded with potential dresses and florists and caterers and DJs. And as they approached thirty, the friends who had flocked to their parties slid away with their first and second babies, so she listed the names of other people’s children and new addresses in the far-flung suburbs like Buffalo Grove and Glen Ellyn and Oswego. It was hard to remember, after everything that happened, that Jon was the first to ask the question.

  When should we have kids? he asked, like he was asking about takeout from Jade Garden or a movie on Netflix, like it was only a question of when, not if. He claimed that he had always wanted kids, but it took a while for Gail to decide that she was willing to try.

  That first night of unprotected sex terrified her. The second was thrilling, the third an adventure. For a while, every month delivered another opportunity, each menstrual cycle another lunge at the brass ring. But then too many months piled up, and Gail discovered that a small, hard nugget of hope had begun to metastasize in her gut, even as her womb remained stubbornly empty. She listed her cycle dates and her basal body temperature and the state of her cervical fluid and, of course, the sex. She made lists of what she ate and her sleep patterns and how many times she went to the bathroom, and Jon’s question gained weight even as Gail remained thin. Finally, when it became clear that things needed a shove, her doctor prescribed the shots.

  The shots worked, and four years ago, Gail had become pregnant for the first time. When she told her friend Cindy, Cindy had given Gail the number for a Realtor in Elmhurst, where she lived, and that nugget of hope began to mutate toward expectation. The fetus was just the size of a grain of rice when they made an offer on their house, just a little bit bigger when it bled down her leg. Every setback rattled Gail badly, but the truth was, those failures not only crystalized her answer to Jon’s question, they made her obsess upon it.

  Gail probably would have settled into the rocker and ruminated on the one thing that was still missing from the room, becoming more and more annoyed by the muffled plunk of the banjo, if her phone didn’t vibrate in the pocket of her pajama pants. And she probably wouldn’t have answered if it hadn’t been Paige from the agency.

  “Hello?”

  “Her name’s Carli,” Paige said.

  Gail pressed the phone tightly to her ear. She opened her mouth to speak, but her tongue seemed to fill her mouth.

  “The girl from Morris. Her name’s Carli, and she wants to meet you.”

  Jon

  Gail sat on her hands on the seat next to Jon, her body still. Her long dark hair fell in a braid down her back. She sometimes reminded Jon of a bird because she was small and thin, and her eyes were large. And because she usually never stopped arranging things, like a wren, weaving twigs into a nest. She only stopped moving when she was anxious.

  “What if she doesn’t like us?” Gail said.

  “Relax,” Jon said, immediately regretting the word. It was like asking Gail to stop breathing. “She chose us.”

  Paige, from the agency, picked the diner—halfway between their home and Carli’s. It was the real deal, Edward Hopper except all the stools were taken, and the booths along the windows were filled with noisy families. It smelled of pancake batter and burnt bacon. They sat in a window booth next to the street. Carli would recognize them from the adoption book, and they’d recognize her from her social media posts. The blue streak in her hair would stand out.

  “She chose our book.” Gail chewed her lip. “It’s not the same thing as choosing us.”

  The book. Every couple who tries to adopt must create a book, an advertisement, a brochure about their lives. The book contained pictures of them and their extended family and their house and their town and their essay that told a birth mother that the only thing they wanted in the whole world was a baby. It promised that if she chose their book, her baby would become their child, and they’d raise it with love and care, and they wouldn’t let anyone, or anything, hurt it. Gail revised the book more times than Jon cared to remember. She swapped out the pictures, changed the wording; she even agonized over the font and the color of the cover. She asked him over and over again what he thought about the assortment of pictures, until he couldn’t remember how he had answered the last time. He was so damn sick of that book.

  Jon put his hand on Gail’s knee and forced a smile. “We’ll make her like us.”

  Gail checked her watch. “She’s ten minutes late.”

  “She’s eighteen years old. Ten minutes late is early.”

  “I brought some information about the school district. You think I should show her?”

  “No. I really don’t think that you should.”

  They fell silent as they waited, and Jon tried to listen to the conversations of the people at the surrounding tables and the sizzle of the grease from the grill, but the silence at his own table distracted him. Gail had grown quiet since she got the call from Paige, as she waited for something to go wrong. The silence reminded him of that trailer outside of St. Louis where his mother would retreat into the back bedroom for days at a time. The only sounds had been the pit bull barking next door, the whoosh of the stovetop when he lit it to cook himself canned ravioli, and the voices on the television that he sometimes responded to. He was eight when his mom’s “nervous spells” grew longer and longer, until they melted into an unbroken silence. He finally went to live with his aunt Carol and uncle Mark, and although Aunt Carol talked all the time, and although they had raised him since he was eight, it wasn’t their
blood that thudded in his ears when Gail went quiet. Gail hadn’t put anything about his mom into the book, which Jon found vaguely sneaky.

  Out the window Jon saw an old brown pickup truck pull up at the curb. A large, middle-aged woman sat behind the wheel, her jaw flapping, her hands slashing the air. Paige had said that Carli’s mom would probably drive her. The person in the passenger seat remained still, and although Jon couldn’t see clearly through the glare on the windshield, it looked like a teenage girl. The girl finally got out of the truck and came around the front. Dirty-blond hair with a blue streak fell across her face.

  “She’s here.”

  The bell above the door jangled when she came through, eyes darting. Jon could feel Gail stiffen next to him. He waved, and the girl walked their way. A bulky sweatshirt hung well past her waist, making it hard to see if she was showing. Scrawny legs sprouted from her Converse high-tops. The bridge of her upturned nose was littered with freckles. Too much mascara made the rest of her face seem pasty.

  She slid into the booth. “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey,” Jon said. “I’m Jon, and this is Gail.”

  Her pale blue eyes flicked from one of them to the other. “Carli.”

  “It’s so nice to meet you, Carli,” Gail gushed. “I can’t tell you how much we’ve been looking forward to this.”

  The way Carli tugged the sleeves of her sweatshirt over her fists told Jon that she had not been looking forward to this at all, that she’d rather be anywhere else, even in the cab of the pickup truck listening to her mother rant. The waitress appeared before anyone could say anything else.

  “Can I get you somethin’, hon?”

  “Coffee. Black.”

  “Decaf?” Gail suggested quietly.

  Carli’s eyes settled on Gail, really taking her in. “No. Coffee. Black.”

  The waitress left, and Gail gathered herself.

  “We were so excited to get the call. We’re so grateful that you chose us.”

  Carli picked up the saltshaker, studied it, said nothing.

  Gail faltered for a moment but pressed on. “Did the father help you choose?”

  A barely audible snort and a twitch at the corner of her mouth. She shook her head.

  “This must be really fucking hard,” Jon said.

  Carli shook a tiny pile of salt into her palm. Her eyes cut to the counter, out the window toward the truck, back to the salt in her hand. She nodded. “Yeah. It is.”

  Gail leaned into the table. “You must have so many questions for us.”

  Nothing.

  Gail looked down at her hands and then continued more gently. “It’s hard to put everything into that book. I mean, we tried to give you a feel for who we are and where the baby will grow up, but you can’t put your whole life, your whole world into so few pages.” Gail looked to Jon for confirmation and then at Carli. “This is such a big decision. Is there anything you want to ask us?”

  Carli dumped the salt from her hand onto the table. She glanced briefly at Gail and then her eyes settled on Jon. “My mom told me to ask about the medical stuff.”

  Jon stiffened. Gail hadn’t mentioned any medical problems. Surely Paige would have told her if there were problems. “The medical stuff?”

  “The tests. The doctor visits. All that.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re gonna pay for that, right?”

  * * *

  Jon gripped the steering wheel on the way home from the diner and tried to make sense of what had just happened. What series of events had delivered them to Aurora to charm a pregnant teenager into giving them her baby? He wanted to become a father, but even when they were trying to conceive a baby themselves, he became terrified every time it seemed that they might succeed. He was afraid that he’d fail, like his mother did, and if he failed a child who was entrusted to him by someone else—well, that seemed a sin of a different sort.

  “How do you think it went?” Gail asked.

  Gail’s knee was bouncing, and she kept tugging at her seat belt, so Jon chose his words carefully. “It’s hard to say. I think it went as well as it could have. Given the circumstances.”

  “Do you think I came on too strong?”

  “No, I—”

  “She was so hard to read. I couldn’t get her talking. And she only asked that one question.”

  “I think that—”

  “I expected her to ask more questions. I mean she’s deciding whether to let us adopt her baby.” Gail was quiet for a long moment. “I’d have more questions.”

  Jon worked to contain a smile. He tried to imagine the list of questions that Gail would bring to that meeting. Of course, he struggled to imagine the circumstances that would lead Gail to give up a baby.

  “If only I could have gotten her to talk.”

  “We did great, Gail.”

  “I should have shown her the information about the school district.”

  “Gail. Some things you just can’t control.”

  * * *

  Gail changed into her running clothes and was gone for more than an hour. Paige said she would call as soon as she heard from Carli. She said that she’d call by the end of the day no matter what. When Gail returned, Jon could tell by her closed-up expression that Paige still hadn’t called. Gail kept her phone on the table during dinner. She picked at her salad. She pushed her pasta around the plate. She looked at the phone more than she looked at Jon.

  “What time’s hockey?” she asked as they cleared the table.

  Jon had played on the Dumpsters, a beer-league team, since shortly after he moved to Elmhurst. He needed the ice tonight—the sweat, the exertion, the meaningless locker-room chatter—but Gail’s stillness told him that he needed to stay home even more.

  “Seven thirty. But I think I’ll skip the game.”

  “Why?”

  “With everything. You know. With Paige calling.”

  “Go.”

  “But—”

  “I’d rather you go. Otherwise you’ll stare at me, while I stare at the phone. Eventually you’ll say something stupid, I’ll yell at you, and then we’ll fight.”

  She was right, of course. Still, it didn’t seem like the right time to leave. “But—”

  “Go.”

  * * *

  Hockey usually calmed Jon. The hiss of steel on ice, the slap of the sticks, and the heavy thud of the puck against the boards usually kept him in the moment. But that night he fell climbing over the boards. He hooked a guy in the neutral zone—a senseless penalty with a minute left—and he sat in the box while the other team scored the game winner.

  Jon checked his phone in the locker room, but there were no messages. He almost called Gail from the car but thought better of it. When he entered the mudroom, he stood still for a moment, listening, but all he heard was silence. When he went upstairs, he found Gail on her edge of the bed, bent over her brown leather notebook, making lists. She was pretty in a way that used to embarrass Jon. The dim glow of the dresser lamp painted her olive complexion even darker. Her eyelashes were impossibly long, and the shape of her mouth still sometimes caused him to miss a breath. A rubber band gathered her long brown hair into a ponytail. One of Jon’s old T-shirts draped over her tiny body down to her thighs. Jon knew the answer to the question, but he couldn’t not ask it.

  “Did she call?”

  “Not yet,” Gail said. She kept her eyes on the page.

  Jon stripped to his boxers and climbed in on his side. They used to wake tangled in the middle, but now they kept to the margins of their California king. The more obsessed Gail became, the farther away from each other they seemed to settle. It happened slowly, a bit at a time, like that frog on the Bunsen burner.

  He wondered what list Gail could possibly be working. No list could help control what would happen when Paige called, but Gail gripped her pen tightly and scribbled. Jon hated the notebook. Gail always grew quiet when she made her lists, and Jon hated the silence. It reminded him too muc
h of his mom. Jon and Gail still went back to St. Louis twice a year—at Christmas and Father’s Day. It was always good to see Aunt Carol and Uncle Mark, and Jon could tell that Aunt Carol hungered for those weekends. But when he escaped back across the Mississippi to Illinois, his breath always came easier.

  During their last visit, Gail sat in the family room with Uncle Mark, working a jigsaw puzzle and watching CNN, while Jon dried the dishes. Aunt Carol had let her hair go gray, and her face was starting to sag. She pushed up the sleeves of her cardigan, but one sleeve kept sliding down into the dishwater.

  “Any news?” Aunt Carol asked. “About the adoption?”

  “Nothing solid, yet. We sent out one book, but the birth mother chose someone else.”

  They worked in companionable silence, the splash of the water the only sound.

  “I’m looking forward to it,” she said. She looked up at Jon and smiled. “It’ll be nice to be a grandma.”

  Aunt Carol would make the perfect grandma, spoiling her grandchild just enough, and reveling in every moment of it. But as Jon dried the pot in his hands, her words forced a question to his lips that he’d been struggling to swallow.

  “What was she like?” Jon asked.

  Aunt Carol stopped scrubbing the lasagna pan for a long moment. In the family room, Uncle Mark laughed at something Gail said. Finally, Aunt Carol’s hand started moving again. “Who’s that?” she said, as if he could be asking about anyone else.

  “My mom.”

  Aunt Carol rinsed the pan and found a corner that needed more work. She grabbed the Brillo pad from the counter and locked her eyes on her hands as she scraped the charred cheese. Jon had broken their oldest unspoken rule, and Aunt Carol’s whole body had gone rigid. It had been almost two decades since they last spoke of his mother. “I think you know exactly what she’s like.”

  Jon put the towel over his shoulder, folded his arms across his chest. His mom still lived just a few miles away from Aunt Carol’s house, in the very same trailer he’d left when he was eight. Sometimes, after a trip to the grocery store to pick up something for his aunt, Jon drove by. The shades were always drawn, the parking pad empty. Weeds hugged the side of the trailer instead of bushes. He didn’t ever get out of his car. He didn’t knock on that door. The last few years, he mailed a check to that address every month, and every month the check was cashed. He sometimes logged on to the Citibank website and stared at his mom’s scrawled signature.