That notebook sat too close to Gail’s nose, and the stink of the leather, of dead cow, stirred the bile in her stomach. She allowed her mind to drift toward the unthinkable. She imagined that bassinet empty and their house so terribly quiet, and the acid rose to her throat. And then her mind started to pick at the aftermath of her miscarriages, when she had felt so empty. But Maya wasn’t a grain of rice or a sweet pea. She was eight pounds of living, breathing baby. It would be so much worse, and when Gail started to pick it apart, she found that it was unthinkable, and her mind refused to think it.
The breath whistled through Maya’s nostrils right there at the foot of the bed. Every ounce of her baby told Gail that Carli would sign that paper. She was just busy. She had forgotten about it. She might be studying for a test. Her phone battery was always running low. Maybe she had lost her phone entirely.
Gail reached for the lamp and turned it on. She sat up against the headboard and picked up the notebook and pen. She opened it to the first blank page. She licked the tip of the pen and then bent over the notebook, carefully printing the title of a new list. She held the paper flat with one hand and gripped the pen tightly as she wrote. It wouldn’t change anything. She knew that, of course. But it would help keep her mind away from the places that it shouldn’t go. She drew a line below the words and then licked the tip of the pen again. Perfectly Good Reasons Why Carli Hasn’t Called Back. Because there was a perfectly good reason. Because she would call. She would sign the final consent. Because she had to.
Jon
Jon sat in his darkened office, Cheap Trick leaking from the speakers, his hands awash with the blue light from the monitor. He kept rereading two sentences. First: I wish to and understand that upon signing this consent I do irrevocably and permanently give up all custody and other parental rights I have to such child if such child is adopted by ________________ and ________________. But the same web page showed him the birth-parent rights and responsibilities and all the way at the bottom of the list, number thirteen: You have the right to decline to sign a Consent, Specified Consent, or Unborn Consent even if you have received financial support from the prospective parents. He learned that Carli was not allowed to sign the final consent until seventy-two hours after the birth. He learned what Gail had already told him: his baby wasn’t yet his baby.
He searched for and found the adoptive parents’ rights and responsibilities. He found that he had the right to be informed of the rights of birth parents, and he had the right to be treated with dignity and respect. He searched for the right to appeal, but he found nothing—just dignity and respect, whatever the hell that meant.
Jon vaguely remembered Paige telling them all this a year and a half ago, at the beginning of the process, and he probably signed something all those months ago that said that he clearly understood the risks. But adoption paperwork was like mortgage agreements—you had to sign it all or else you wouldn’t get the house or the baby, and if you tried to read it, you wouldn’t understand it anyway.
Google helped him remember what he’d forgotten. It helped him learn what he’d never taken the time to know. Reclamation, they called it. He found a story about a sixteen-year-old birth mother in Iowa who reclaimed her baby and then left it with the seventeen-year-old father while she went to work. The baby died hours later. He found a lot of adoption sites. They all had logos made of hearts or abstract drawings of parents’ arms wrapping babies. They assured birth mothers that they had the right to reclaim their baby, and they reassured adoptive parents that it seldom happens. Just 4 to 6 percent of domestic adoptions end with a reclamation. If he had read those numbers at the beginning of the process, they would have seemed puny, irrelevant. Now, they loomed enormous and reckless. He changed his search terms, followed every link, even forced himself to read through the Illinois Adoption Statute, but he could find nothing about a right to appeal.
Finally, he turned off the music and the monitor, pushed himself out of the chair, and walked into the hallway. He saw a finger of light underneath the bedroom door. He opened it, expecting to find Gail buried under the covers, but instead she was sitting up in bed, bent over her notebook. He stood in the doorway, exhaustion clawing at him. For a long moment, she scribbled in the book as if he weren’t there. He heard the tip of the pen scratching the paper. He watched her clenched fist drift across the page. For the love of God, what was she doing? What list could possibly help with this?
“She’s going to sign it,” Gail finally said, her voice in the wrong key. When she looked up, her eyes looked flat, like the heads of screws. “She has to.”
Gail
Gail peeled the onesie from Maya and threw it into the trash can by the door. Jon had dressed her in the outfit with the ladybugs that Gail’s mom had brought when she visited. What an idiot. She reminded herself to do the same with the other clothes from her mom so that she wouldn’t have to think about her mom and her baby at the same time. She slipped Maya into the caterpillar onesie that Cindy gave her at the shower, pinching the tiny snaps. She tickled Maya’s feet, and Maya squirmed on the sea turtle rug. She leaned down and kissed Maya’s forehead, greedily breathing in those pears.
“They’ll be here in ten minutes,” Jon said quietly, contrition muffling his words. He stood in the doorway of the nursery, buttoning his shirt, his hair wet. Gail’s parents were coming for lunch. Her father wouldn’t take no for an answer, Jon had said. But Jon should have known better. He should have forced no for an answer.
Gail plucked Maya from the floor, stood up, and held her close. She walked to the window and looked down at the redbud tree, bending in the wind, clinging fiercely to its pink blossoms. It just bloomed last week, but the wind was already tearing the flowers from the branches, scattering the petals like trash. The pink balloons drooped from their ribbons, battered by the wind against the bottom of the welcome sign.
“What are we going to tell them?” Jon asked.
“There’s nothing to tell,” Gail said sharply, because there was nothing to tell.
Jon had been picking at this thing all morning, like it was a chicken carcass and he was trying to find a morsel of meat, but there was none there. Carli was busy working, or she was studying for class, or she was just sitting in front of the television, too lazy to call Paige back. Paige would find her, though, and Carli would sign the piece of paper. In the twenty-four hours since Paige called, Gail had forced herself certain.
Gail had replayed every moment in all those waiting rooms with Carli. She parsed every sentence that she could remember, but there wasn’t a morsel of doubt to chew. Gail could feel the weight of Maya, her baby, in her arms, so much heavier than a grain of rice, or a sweet pea, or a prune. Carli would sign the paper, because the baby in Gail’s arms was real, and Maya was hers, and no piece of paper, with or without a signature, could change that.
“It seems like we should tell them something,” Jon persisted. “Just in case…” But his voice trailed off.
Heat climbed Gail’s back, and she blinked rapidly. Jon still didn’t get it: there was no just in case, because they had waited so long, and they tried, and they failed, and they waited, and she bled, and they grieved, and they waited, and they tried, and she bled, and rinse and repeat and cry in between. The baby in her arms, the baby who weighed almost eight pounds when she was born but felt so much heavier now, was her baby. Jon could pick at it all he wanted, and Paige could keep calling him with her updates, and they could both talk about just in case, but Maya was her baby. Carli would sign the paper, and this would all be just a funny story that she’d someday tell their friends whenever Jon accused her of being uptight like he always did. To tell anyone about that unsigned piece of paper would just give that piece of paper weight and color and odor and an importance that it didn’t deserve. Because Carli was going to sign it, because she had to sign it. Besides. If Gail was going to tell someone, her mom would be the last person in the entire world she would tell.
Her dad had been calling s
ince their last visit. She had let all his calls roll to voice mail, because she knew that her dad wouldn’t come without her mom.
“After what she said last time, I don’t know why you even returned their call,” Gail said. “You shouldn’t have told them they could come.”
“Your dad sounded worried,” Jon said. “And he said your mom was sorry.”
Sorry. Her mom was sorry when she missed Gail’s recitals and ruined Gail’s prom and got so drunk at Gail’s wedding that she made out with one of Jon’s groomsmen on the dance floor. She was a nasty drunk, but she was nasty sober, too, and careless always. If it weren’t for her dad, Gail would take Maya out to Starbucks and wait for Jon to call to say they had left. Yes. Her mom was sorry. On that they could agree.
“I’ve been doing some research,” Jon said.
Gail kissed Maya on the top of the head and worked to contain her rage. A few hours on the Internet and suddenly he was an adoption expert. He was poking around websites that Gail had long ago memorized. He was reading all the documents that he had signed last year without reading. He was investigating options that Gail knew weren’t any more viable than that grain of rice, or that sweet pea, or that prune.
“She’s going to sign it,” Gail said.
“I know she will,” Jon said, but his raccoon eyes darted to the floor, and his shoulders hunched when he tried to shove his hands deeper into his pockets. Gail could tell that he didn’t believe a word of it. “Can I hold her?” he asked.
She said nothing for a long moment, and his question hung heavy in the air. He seemed to search the floor for somewhere firm to stand. “No,” she finally said.
He looked up, startled, and Gail tried to gather words to explain, but they darted around inside of her head like the squirrel in the redbud tree. She knew that the words she might manage wouldn’t sound right. They wouldn’t say what she meant, and they wouldn’t tell him what she felt. She didn’t have the energy for the fight they would spark. She was almost relieved to hear the doorbell.
* * *
Gail’s mom stood in the entryway wearing a dress, looking as stiff as the cardboard tray that held the coffee. Gail’s dad wrapped Gail and Maya in a warm hug and kissed Maya on the top of the head. He sat in one of the wingbacks. Jon took the seat next to Gail on the couch, forcing Gail’s mom into the other wingback, and for this, at least, Gail was grateful. And Jon talked. He talked about diapers, and the taxonomy of infant poop. He talked about how the baby monitor sometimes picked up crying or conversation from the McKennas’ baby monitor next door. He said that the lack of sleep reminded him of finals week his freshman year of college. He paused for a moment, perhaps to let Gail say something, but she had nothing to say. Instead, her dad looked meaningfully at her mom, and her mom glared back at him. She cleared her throat anyway.
“I’m sorry about the other day,” she said, looking down at her hands. “I think you might have interpreted what I said in a way that I didn’t intend.”
Like a politician after a racist Twitter rant. Gail got up from the couch and carried Maya over to the front window. The wind was blowing hard, and she couldn’t summon the anger that her mom’s careless words usually fueled. So she stared at the redbud, feeling helpless as the April wind clawed at its few remaining flowers. Her dad murmured something to her mom.
“I’m sorry, Gail,” her mom spat, as if the words tasted sour. “I was wrong.”
Just three blossoms clung to the tree, and Gail couldn’t watch them go, so she turned. Better to see an empty tree when it was all over, better, even, to look at her mom. “It’s OK,” she said quietly. “It doesn’t matter.”
Gail’s mom recrossed her legs and sprayed Gail’s dad with an I told you so glare. Her dad’s face softened with relief. Jon looked terrified.
“Can I hold her, Gail?” her dad asked, pushing up from his seat.
“No,” Gail said too loudly. His face collapsed, and he sagged back into the chair. “Not right now,” she said more gently.
And then her phone rang. She shifted Maya to her shoulder and pulled it from her pocket. Paige. A rush of relief warmed her, and she answered. Carli must have signed it.
“Hey, Paige.”
Jon’s eyes locked on her, demanding too much, so she turned back to the window. Just a few petals left.
“Hi, Gail. I found Carli.”
“She signed it?”
The phone was quiet for a moment, and Gail wondered if she lost the connection, because there was no reason for silence. Her vision went black around the edges, and all she could see was that tree clinging desperately to one final shred of color. She was about to lower the phone from her ear, to confirm that she had lost the connection, because that was the only plausible reason for the silence, when Paige finally spoke.
“She didn’t.”
Gail closed her eyes and waited for the explanation. She didn’t ask why, because Paige would tell her why, and then it would all be OK.
“She’s not going to,” Paige said quietly. “She wants to reclaim the baby.”
Gail dropped the phone and there was a shriek like a blade held to the stone at the wrong angle with too much pressure and she was twelve again and her grandfather took hold of her wrists and adjusted the angle and reduced the pressure to keep her from ruining the blade but the noise got worse not better, and when she opened her eyes it was Jon grabbing her wrists not her grandfather and his face was red and his eyes were wide and he was saying something but she couldn’t hear him because the noise was so loud and she knew that the tree was bare and the shrieking grew even louder and Jon pulled hard and his mouth opened wide and she could finally make out what he was shouting over the terrible noise.
“You’re squeezing her, Gail! Stop squeezing her!”
And he tried to pry the baby out of her arms, but she couldn’t let go. She tried. But she couldn’t. She just couldn’t.
Carli
When Carli woke up and told Marla what she had decided, she could tell by the smug look on Marla’s face that Marla thought it was the trash bags that had swung the balance. Carli would let her think that. She wouldn’t tell her that the decision was made last night, before she opened the front door, before she even got out of her car. After Paige left, she had spent her whole shift trying to sort out what she would regret the least. She thought about selling her textbook and throwing out her school ID, and she thought about that grubby apartment with Mountain Dew cans on the windowsill. She thought about the promise she had made to the Durbins, and she thought about packing boxes at the warehouse with her mom for ten-hour shifts. But Paige was right, thinking got her nowhere. She couldn’t turn the decision into some sort of math problem, adding regrets, subtracting pain. Thinking just turned her in circles and made her eyes burn. Thinking just allowed her to avoid the real problem.
She didn’t stop thinking until she drove home from Giamonti’s and sat in the driveway, staring through the windshield at the glow of the lamp in the front room. She finally allowed herself to poke and prod against that empty place and found that it wasn’t empty at all. She stopped thinking and allowed herself to feel. She had built that wall to shield herself from the feelings—the pain, the guilt, the shame. But as she sat in the car, staring at the glow of the lamp in the window, she realized that those were just the symptoms of the real problem. The real problem grew right along with every pound she had gained. It jostled her every time the baby kicked. It bulged against that wall she had built, even as the baby bulged against the drum-tight skin of her belly. The real problem boiled down to this: over nine months, although she managed not to admit it to herself, she had fallen in love with her daughter. Love had seared that baby’s face into her memory, and love smelled like vanilla cream soda. Once she allowed herself to feel, the decision made itself.
When she finally went inside, the front room was littered with a half-dozen black garbage bags, each knotted at the neck. A Bowflex commercial blared from the den, and a flickering blue light spill
ed through the doorway. She knew without checking that those bags contained all her clothes. She closed the front door and picked her way through the bags and down the hallway to her room. She crawled under her blanket and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
As soon as she woke up, but before she told Marla what she had decided, she dragged the garbage bags into her room and unpacked her clothes. Then, she dropped her psych course, before moving her computer into the laundry room to make room for the crib. She would take more shifts at Giamonti’s to pay for stuff, and the rest of the time she’d be with the baby. She promised herself that she’d enroll again next semester—she’d find a way to make it work. And she promised the baby. Carli pushed her bed away from the wall. She planned to put the crib between it and the window. Carli smelled smoke and looked up to find Marla leaning against the doorframe.
“You talk to Paige yet?” Marla asked.
“I did.”
“What did she say?”
“She said she’d get the paperwork started.” Carli’s eyes fell back to the bed. She pushed it a little bit farther from the wall and then moved to the other side of the room. She cleared off the little shelf, dumping everything into one of the black trash bags: pictures of people who used to be her friends, some books from high school, the trophy that she won that year her neighbor signed her up for soccer. She would need the shelves for the baby supplies.
“Rhonda’s gonna bring the crib over when she gets off work,” Marla said.
“OK.”
“We’ll need to go to Walmart to get diapers and shit.”
“OK.”
“When’s Paige bringing the baby?”
Other People's Children Page 12