Other People's Children

by R. J. Hoffmann

  * * *

  The bell jangled, and a little boy stumbled through the door, followed by his mom carrying a car seat. Carli recognized the spiky blond hair and the tattoo of vines and flowers that wrapped the mother’s bare arm down to her wrist. This family came in about once a week, sometimes for lunch, sometimes late, like tonight, never with a dad. The mom always looked exhausted, and she always yelled at the little boy. She pushed her son into the booth near the window and set the car seat on the other bench. Carli grabbed menus and made her way to the front of the restaurant. She forced a smile, placed the menus on the table. “Hey there.”

  “One second,” the mom said without looking up from her phone. “Make up your mind, Lucas—pepperoni or sausage?”

  Carli tuned out the pizza argument and allowed her gaze to linger on the baby. The little girl grinned at Carli while at the same time eating her own fingers. Her eyes locked on Carli’s, and they wouldn’t let go. The empty place fluttered.

  “Congratulations,” the mom said.

  “Huh?” Carli grunted, tearing her attention away from that face.

  She nodded toward Carli’s stomach. “Last time I was in here, you were about to pop.”

  Carli stared at the woman for a long moment before she could make her mouth work. “Thanks,” she mumbled.

  “Boy or girl?”

  And suddenly Carli felt like she should explain everything, but she wasn’t quite sure what she would say. She’d have to tell the lady that the baby belonged to other people now, and that would get complicated. She was certain that the woman’s face would harden, and then Carli would be forced to sit down in the booth across from the woman and sob.

  “It was a girl.”

  Was. Not is. She said was, and the word tasted like a rotten tooth, but the woman didn’t seem to notice. Instead, she glanced at her own daughter and then glared at her son. “You got lucky. Girls are easier.”

  Paige

  Giamonti’s opened for lunch at noon on Saturday, so Paige waited until twelve fifteen to call. A girl that wasn’t Carli answered the phone, so Paige just hung up. She filled a travel mug with tea and trudged reluctantly to her car. When she first started as a social worker, she made the rule: no weekend work. It was the type of job that could take over your life if you let it. But Carli wasn’t answering, and if Paige didn’t find her, she’d just stew on it all day, and her Saturday would be ruined anyway.

  Twenty-four hours of emails and calls and texts—to Carli, who never went anywhere without her phone. She was probably checking Instagram when she birthed Maya. Hell, she might have been texting somebody while she conceived her. But now she was refusing to answer her phone. So Paige had to follow her GPS southwest out of the city to where the corn grows, in order to collect the signed final consent. Thing was, Paige didn’t like her odds.

  Her career numbers were nothing to sneeze at. One hundred and twelve successful adoptions spread across almost two decades in the business. Paige counted herself responsible for several dozen saved marriages, hundreds of graduations, thousands of birthday parties, and innumerable tantrums about crusts that weren’t cut off peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Just eight times things went sideways. Better than 93 percent. An A on any grading scale. An absurd batting average. She didn’t know another social worker with better numbers, not that it was a contest.

  But it wasn’t the numbers that mattered the most to Paige. Every success reminded her why she did this thing. When new parents held their baby for the first time, she could always feel the room vibrate with the energy of a new family being formed. She had a drawer full of pictures of her kids as they grew. That’s what she called them, her kids, even though she usually only spent a few minutes with each. Most of them never even knew Paige’s name, much less the critical role that Paige had played in their lives. But Paige knew.

  Paige kept another drawer of pictures. It wasn’t as full, but those photos made her just as proud. Her girls, the birth mothers she helped through the process, sent her pictures when they graduated from high school or college or when they got married. The adoptions were always hard for the birth mothers. That deciding. That letting go. When she did her job well, she could help her girls make the decision for the right reasons, and she could help them adjust to the idea that other people would raise their children. Her favorite photos in that second drawer showed her girls holding the children that they were finally able to raise themselves.

  For all the success, Paige remembered every one of those eight failures viscerally, and she always remembered the warning signs. If this one ended up in the loss column, Marla would be the red flag. Usually the mother of a teenage birth mom was all up in Paige’s business, fingering the books, asking questions about school districts, demanding answers about the process. All that noise proved comforting. When the birth mom’s own mother was quiet, that was when she had to worry. And Paige didn’t hear a peep from Marla throughout the pregnancy—until that night at the hospital.

  Paige passed the rest area that came right before the Morris exit. The Chicago suburbs sprawled into farms far from the Loop, but it’s difficult to say that you live in a suburb if you pass a rest area on the way to the city. The only other time that Paige came out to Morris was in the middle of the pregnancy. Carli’s car had broken down, and Paige needed the paperwork that the birth father signed, so she made the drive. When Marla answered the door that day, Paige introduced herself. She offered her hand in greeting. Marla just glared down at her hand and then turned without a word, leaving Paige to wait on the front step for Carli.

  All the houses on Carli’s block looked depressingly the same. White clapboard shacks with concrete stairs planted in front. Only the degree to which the hedges covered the front windows and the age of the cars, some measured in decades, differentiated each. Paige pulled up in front of the house with Marla’s old battered pickup truck in the driveway. Carli’s Corolla wasn’t there, but it could be in the shop again. She texted Carli one more time and waited in vain for a response. She called her, but it again rolled directly to voice mail.

  Paige heaved herself out of the car and made her way to the house. When she knocked, she expected to wait, but the door opened almost immediately. Marla loomed, sporting a Dale Earnhardt sweatshirt and jeans. Her lips twisted around a sneer. Paige pasted on her standard-issue social-worker smile.

  “Good to see you again, Marla.”

  “She ain’t here.”

  Paige forced her smile steady. “Can you tell me where I can find her?”

  “It don’t matter.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  Marla’s coffee-stained teeth flashed. “Yeah. You are.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I told you at the hospital. What you did ain’t right.” Marla shook and snorted. “Glad you finally realized it yourself.”

  Paige should have kept driving when she didn’t see the Corolla. Rookie mistake. “Can you tell her I came by?”

  “She ain’t gonna sign it.”

  Paige went still inside. Marla knew about the final consent. Paige had been counting on the fact that Marla wouldn’t take an interest, that she would think that the process was done. Either Carli told her about the final consent, or somebody taught Marla how to use the Internet. Paige widened her smile.

  “Thank you for your help, Marla.” She turned to go.

  “We want to reclaim the baby.”

  Goddamn it. She was even using the right words. Paige turned back to Marla and studied her more closely. “Carli hasn’t told me about that. Why don’t you have her call me?”

  “I’m telling you now. I’m her mother.”

  “With all due respect, Marla, you’re not Maya’s mother. I work for Carli. Have her call me.” She turned to go again.

  “Bullshit.”

  “Come again?”

  “You work for the fucking Durbins.”

  Paige felt the urge to set Marla straight, to tell her that she didn’t take sides, but the
hard glint in Marla’s eyes told her that she would hear none of it.

  “One way or the other, we’re gonna get my grandbaby back.”

  With that, Marla slammed the door. Paige stood on the concrete steps for a long moment before turning to trudge back to her car. One way or the other. If Carli reclaimed, Paige knew from experience the long odds that she and Maya would face. And she knew that taking Maya from the Durbins would kick loose whatever it was that held Jon and Gail together. None of that mattered, though. The fact was, she didn’t take sides. And the law sided with Carli. It didn’t matter what Marla or the Durbins or Paige herself wanted to happen. During Paige’s first few failures, she had made the mistake of hoping for a certain outcome. Long before the eighth loss, she had learned to push hope aside. Hope just made adoptions more complicated.

  Paige started the car and tried not to think about Gail. This whole thing was going to shit—she could feel it. Maybe Carli would finally return her call, and they could talk this through. As she pulled away from the curb, she reminded herself not to hope for it.

  Jon

  Late Sunday morning, Jon sat on the bottom porch step, waiting for Gail. The stroller stood at the ready, and Maya slept, wrapped in a blanket on Jon’s lap. Throughout the weekend, a steady stream of women came to see the baby. Kara came to see the baby. Gina and Allison came to see the baby together. Gail’s aunt and her cousin came to see the baby. Jon called Aunt Carol, and she and Uncle Mark would drive up later that week to see the baby. Sunday, they would venture out into the world.

  Jon couldn’t fathom why they needed so much stuff to go six blocks for three hours. Gail had packed three pacifiers, five bottles, ten diapers, two packages of wipes, three burp towels, a camera, two changes of clothes, and a rattle that Maya didn’t even know how to use yet. They would need a trailer when Maya started to crawl.

  Jon studied the other houses on the block. The McKennas’ youngest, who had just turned one, could become a friend of Maya’s. The Jensens’ four-year-old was probably too old for her. The McConnells had three older girls who seemed likely babysitter candidates. The Pratt woman was pregnant, but Jon didn’t know much about the Pratts. The fact was, he didn’t know much about any of his neighbors. They learned the central truth about the suburbs early: until you have kids, you don’t really exist. They had gone to the block party a few weeks after they moved in. Every woman Gail met asked her which kids were hers. Her answer was universally met with awkward pauses and quizzical looks. Each woman drifted off to check on her own kids or to return to one of the tight clusters of women near the jump house. Jon and Gail retreated back inside after an hour, and they avoided the next three block parties entirely.

  They should have stayed in downtown Chicago, in that apartment on Paulina, until they were parents. Jon knew it when they moved, and although they never talked about it, he was pretty sure that Gail came to realize it, too. They had been happy on Paulina. They fit together there, even if the start had taken some adjustment. It was Gail’s apartment before Jon moved in, and at first he felt like a fugitive in a foreign land. Cindy had moved out a few weeks before—to Elmhurst with Ted—but Jon could still smell her sickly sweet perfume, and he occasionally found blond hairs on his black jeans. Gail had simply smiled and shaken her head when Jon offered to bring his couch with him. Gail’s furniture tended toward pastel cushions and painted wood. Bowls of shriveled leaves and twigs that Gail called potpourri lurked on the coffee tables.

  It helped to unpack his CDs and add them to the shelf that held Gail’s tepid collection, but T-Bone Walker and John Lee Hooker seemed uneasy leaning against Whitney Houston. It helped when he set up his computer in Cindy’s old room and propped his guitars and his banjo against the wall next to it. It helped even more when he plugged in an air freshener to smother the stink of Cindy’s Malibu Musk.

  Their first party was an awkward affair, with his friends clustered around the keg and Gail’s chattering loudly in the kitchen. Over time, though, their friends began to mix, and by the end of that first year, their parties were populated by their friends. Soon enough, they were arguing about who knew Greg first and who brought the Steve Miller CD to the shelf. Paulina became the meeting place, in part due to its strategic location. Almost equidistant from the Vic, Schubas, and the Double Door, they all met at Paulina before shows to drink and smoke. As they pushed through their twenties, the weed fell away with the concerts, and they all sat out back on the deck, drinking, laughing, and listening to the bands that they used to see live.

  But Paulina wasn’t always crowded with friends. Most of the time it was just Gail and Jon, and that’s the part he remembers most vividly. They always seemed to be touching. Cooking stir-fry together in the too-small kitchen, watching Netflix all tangled up on the mauve couch, sprawled across the bed with the Sunday Times, nudging each other to point out something of interest. They touched last thing before one of them left and first thing when one of them returned. It felt so natural that he didn’t really notice it until they moved to Elmhurst. After Gail got pregnant that first time, before the miscarriage, she called the Realtor on the sly. Before Jon realized what had happened, movers were carrying their stuff into the house on Myrtle. As that first year wore on, they seemed to forget how to touch each other. Maybe it was the size of the house compared to the Paulina apartment, all that space they suddenly found themselves not quite sharing. Maybe it was because they’d grown older. Probably it was the grit of the expectations that had sifted into the cracks between them and seemed to expand with each month, with each failure.

  Jon worried a bit that a baby might come between them, driving them further apart, but he was wrong. He marveled at the changes that Maya had brought. Gail hadn’t opened her notebook since Maya was born, and she seemed able to breathe deeply again. She was becoming the old Gail, the Gail from Paulina, in the way that she laughed and the relaxed slope of her shoulders and the easy way she moved around the house. More to the point, she no longer seemed to shrink from his touch. And when he wasn’t expecting it, he found her hand on his forearm or felt her fingertips whisper across the back of his neck. He hadn’t realized how much he missed the Gail from before all the waiting and failing and trying again until she came back. The baby had come between them, but like a magnet, pulling them back to where they used to be.

  * * *

  Gail finally came out on the porch and locked the door behind her. She wore makeup, a sundress, and a smile. “It’s a nice day,” she said.

  It was a nice day. Almost seventy. It would drop back into the fifties the next day. “Seems a shame to ruin it with a trip to Ted and Cindy’s.”

  “Nice try,” Gail said. “We’re already late.”

  Jon strapped Maya into the stroller and shouldered a backpack full of the gear that didn’t fit in the basket underneath. As they set off, he felt like he was acting in a play. He’d seen hundreds of families pushing strollers down their street while he sat on the porch reading the paper or answering emails or drinking coffee, but he’d never really imagined manning the stroller himself. The handle felt too big in his hands. And when they walked through the little downtown by the train station, everything seemed new and strange. When they first moved from the city, he’d been disoriented by the town’s cloying cuteness—the vintage movie theater, the bowling alley, the ice cream shops and nail salons in every other storefront. The bars attracted a strange mix of middle-aged alcoholics and students from the college. He and Gail only really liked one of the restaurants. The record store closed a few months after they moved in. Nothing in Elmhurst had seemed relevant. As he pushed his daughter down York, though, the smell of fudge drifted from the candy store, and he wondered which ice cream shop would become their favorite. And on the opposite side of the town center, as they turned onto Cindy’s street and approached her yellow two-story, all the debris on the lawn—the bikes, the soccer ball, the Wiffle ball bat—seemed suddenly necessary.

  Gail pulled Maya from the stroller and
rang the bell. Ted opened the door wearing his barbecue apron and his toothy grin.

  “There she is!” Ted said, cupping the side of Maya’s face in his hand for a moment. Maya squinted at him.

  “She’s nice-size,” he said, as if measuring a fish. “What? Eight pounds?”

  Gail smiled, accepted a kiss from Ted on her cheek. “Seven pounds, fourteen ounces.”

  “Come in, come in.”

  “Is that them?” Cindy shouted from the second floor. She turned the corner and rushed down the stairs. Cindy wore bangs now, and sensible shoes. She was always a little heavy, but four babies had each left her with a few more pounds.

  “She’s beautiful,” she whispered.

  Gail surrendered Maya to Cindy. She blushed, and her mouth squirmed as she tried but failed to suppress a smile. She glanced quickly at Jon and then back at Cindy.

  They drifted into the kitchen, where Cindy’s youngest—Jon could never remember whether it was Teagan or Ryan—sat in a booster chair, eating chicken nuggets, his face painted with ketchup. The counters sagged under catalogs and sippy cups and half-eaten food, and the floor of the family room was littered with brightly colored plastic toys.

  “What color beer can I get you?” Ted asked.

  “I’m easy,” Jon said. “Whatever you’re having.”

  “Is that your baby, Aunt Gail?” the child in the booster chair asked.

  “She is.” Gail smiled. “Her name’s Maya.”

  Cindy bent down to give the boy a good look at Maya. He reached out with sticky hands to touch her, but Cindy pulled Maya away.

  Ted handed Jon a bottle. “I’m thinking the ladies can handle the dwarf. Why don’t you help me burn meat?”

  Jon followed Ted out to the patio and settled into a frayed wicker chair. He took a long swallow of his beer while Ted lit the Weber with a whoosh. He scraped the grill and wiped it down with olive oil while Jon watched Cindy and Ted’s two oldest play tetherball in the back of the yard. Aidan and Olivia. He could remember the names of the older ones. Maybe because they’d been around longer. Maybe because with age, they had become more distinct. Like people. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen someone play tetherball.