A Necessary End (5 page)

She shifts her weight a little and smiles to herself, because she's nervous or because it's funny to do this to people, to make them wait on pins and needles and pigeon wings. I don't know which it is; I don't know her. But I feel like I'm about to know her a whole lot better.

“I brought a lot of stuff, right?” she says. “For a weekend trip. That was what you were thinking.” I nod. “I was thinking that if everything's good for the next couple of days, if it seems like we fit together, then I don't go back to Rhode Island. I stay here with you until the baby's born.”

Gabe is nodding slowly, not like he agrees but like he's willing to entertain her proposal, which is more than I would have expected a couple of hours ago. I don't exactly mind the idea because if she's here with us, she can't be out interviewing anyone else. Six weeks in our home, six weeks of hospitality and heartfelt talks, and she'll feel indebted. It'll be like a promise she's made. She won't be able to back out, even if she wants to.

I start to smile. But she's not finished.

“Then I stay for another year.” She's watching our faces carefully, and I feel like this has to be a test. This is the real audition. I keep my face neutral and nod,
Go on
. But she doesn't.

“So you sign the adoption papers but then you keep living with us for another year?” I ask.

She shakes her head. Good, I misunderstood.

“I sign the papers
afte
r the year.”

I don't trust myself to speak.

“You're only leasing us the baby,” Gabe says. “Then you're the one with the option.”

Her lips curve upward just slightly. “I didn't think of it like that, but yeah, I guess it kind of is.”

“So after the baby's born,” I say, “for the whole first year, he wouldn't really be ours?”

“Oh, no, go ahead and think of him as yours.” I already do. But then, she must know that, after my reaction to touching her stomach. I should have kept a poker face, like Gabe. I've put us in a pretty weak bargaining position, since I can't imagine walking away, not now that I've felt him. “See, you've convinced me! I'm thinking it's a boy, too.”

My mind whirs like a helicopter blade. A year with a baby that I want but can't fully have? It's like Chinese water torture. Who is this girl? Satan?

No, the last “birth mother” was Satan. This one's just a kid pressing her luck.

Part of me wants to tell her to get out of my house and find her own way back to Rhode Island. But I know that's our child she's carrying. A-million-to-one odds, and we're the one.

“I don't want a baby,” Leah says. “I know that. I'm not staying so I can be around him.”

“Then why are you staying?” I'm using the present tense, like this is already, inexorably, in motion. That's what I told Gabe.

“I'm staying because birth mothers get a shit deal. They're treated like they're important right up until they have the baby, and then they're just, like, thrown away, sent back where they came from. I'm giving my baby a new life, and I want one, too.”

“In California,” I say faintly. That's why she responded to our profile. Not because I look like her or because of enduring love, but because we're geographically desirable, and maybe just crazy enough to agree to her terms.

She's nineteen, and dictating terms. I should open that door and tell her to get out.

But not a single limb so much as twitches. My palm is still tingling where I felt our baby kick. Parents can lift cars off their children, are willing to walk through fire. Surely, I can tolerate Leah for a year. Someday, she'll just be a story we tell: Look what I put up with so I could have you, and it was all worth it.

“I don't want to get thrown back to my old life,” Leah says. “I want a soft landing. A year, that's enough time for me to get everything together out here. To find a job, or enroll in school. After a year, I can get my own place. Then I'll be nearby, which will be easier for you guys. No plane trips on holidays, I'm right here. I can babysit if you want to, like, take a long weekend somewhere . . .”

She keeps talking, and I'm thinking, She's got to be delusional. To believe she's capable of living alongside her own child for a year without developing a bond; for her to think she can just babysit him occasionally—it's like she doesn't anticipate having any feelings at all.

“This gives you a whole year to change your mind,” I interrupt her. “To fall in love with him, and take him with you, and then you're living right up the street with the baby that was supposed to be ours.” I didn't mean to say any of that, but the words flew up through my esophagus, like projectile vomit. I'm scared, I realize. More than scared. Irrational as it is, I already love him. But then, love
is
irrational, at least all the love I've known.

Leah gets up and comes over, kneeling in front of me. “I swear
to you, Adrienne, I don't want him. I won't. He's yours. But I need your help. I can't go back home.” She's on the verge of tears. “You don't know what it's like for me back there, the way people shit on me because of Trevor, because he told them I'm a stupid whore who tried to trap him. I dropped out of school. I need to start over.” It's the craziest thing, looking into her face, like young me pleading with old me. Older me, not old.

How am I supposed to say no to myself?

But if she's really nineteen-year-old me, then this could be an act. At that age, I wanted what I wanted, and screw everyone else. I thought that's how the world worked. I had to grow up to grow a conscience.

She looks genuine, all right, but I can't trust her.

My eyes meet Gabe's. He's buying all of it. They say that the best salesmen are also the best customers, the biggest dupes.

Leah can tell she's got Gabe, even without looking at him. That's why she's kneeling in front of me. I'm the hard sell.

“Two other couples said no. One said yes but then they backed out on me a few weeks ago.”

So that's why she's thirty-four weeks pregnant and still looking. She wanted other parents, probably the ones with more money and bigger houses. She had to work her way down to us. She's settling. Slumming.

“But I'm glad it didn't work out with them,” she says. “Because I saw your profile, and I just went, ‘Yes!'” She's staring into my eyes. It's uncanny and disconcerting. “You've got love to spare, so you can let me in. You don't need to be stingy like those other people.” Over her shoulder, to Gabe: “Chintzy.”

He smiles at her and then rests his eyes on me. It's like they're both pleading. Doesn't he get that this is extortion?

“We'll think about it,” I say, and she actually kisses my hand, the one with the ring on it, like I'm the Pope.

T
hree
A.M
., and I'm standing in the yard in my bare feet. It's a spring night, a perfect sixty-eight degrees, but I want to be cocooned in my bed. Adrienne hauled me outside. She couldn't sleep, and she couldn't be sleepless alone. She tried, though. She made it until 2:57. A valiant effort, before she prodded me awake.

The grass is in need of a mowing, the blades long and soft between my toes. We're at the far end of our yard, at the fence we share with the Olegsons, yet we're still whispering. I tell Adrienne we don't need to act like cold war spies, I could hear Leah snoring when I walked past the office, but she's insistent.

“I don't want her to know what I think of her,” Adrienne whispers fervidly.

“If you hate her so much, then let this one go.” I picture it like a game at the fair, the pregnant women bobbing along on little rafts, and if you don't shoot one, you'll get the next. Okay, bad analogy. “There'll be more.”

“I wouldn't give her the satisfaction.”

I can't help it, I yawn.

“We're going forward,” she says.

“Seriously?”

“Oh, yeah. She's not going to win. This is our baby, I feel it. I
felt
it. Didn't you?”

If it's a competition, Leah's already winning. What she wants is a soft landing in California, a year lease, and Adrienne is willing to provide one. The question is, do I go along with it?

I'm as shocked as anyone to find that a big part of me actually wants to. But if Leah could see our profile and jump on it, so could another mother with a few weeks to go and no lease. If that happened, I could be a full-on father with no notice at all. With Leah, there's a loophole: I don't need to be full-on, not for months, because there will be two mothers. If that's not a gradual breaking-in period—a soft landing for me, so to speak—then I don't know what is. Adrienne and I can go out on dates while Leah stays home and babysits. It would be like having an au pair for a year.

Plus, my natural reticence about fatherhood would be warranted: No point in getting too attached to a baby that might not be ours. It's like we'd have a yearlong trial run as parents, a money-back guarantee. If at the end of it, we don't want the baby, well, Leah can't make us take him. (Or her. I refuse to indulge Adrienne's sudden conviction that she can divine the sex of unborn children.) Let's say we do back out—a hundred other couples would step up to claim a healthy infant.

Or maybe it turns out that Adrienne and I are great parents, that we make the transition as seamlessly as she's been predicting. Then, qualm-free, we go through with the adoption. We're a family, just like Adrienne wants, but now, it's what I want, too. Leah's deal gives Adrienne and me time to get back on the same page.

Also, I like Leah. I think she's a good kid. Spunky, like a young Adrienne. This is a chance to do something nice for someone in a hard spot. You don't get many opportunities like that. It could be win-win, and those are rare.

Adrienne is so adrenalized she can hardly stand still. She keeps shifting her weight from foot to foot.

“Why are you so mad?” I ask. “She's just going for what she wants. Making lemonade out of lemons.” It's what Adrienne would have done.

“Our baby is not a lemon.”

“That's not what I meant.”

“Shh,” she says, casting a glance back to the house. “Machiavelli's sleeping.”

“If that were actually true, do you want Machiavelli to be the mother of your child?”

“Our child,” she says, correcting me, “and I believe in nurture over nature.”

“We don't need to decide this tonight.”

“Time is kinda of the essence, don't you think?” She tips her head, like she's trying to get water out of her ear.

“She didn't give us a deadline.”

“There are
other couples in the queue
!” She manages to give the impression of yelling without raising her voice. “If we don't say yes quickly, she'll go down the list.”

“Then let her go,” I say again, but hollowly. I realize that I don't mean it. I don't want her going anywhere. That's our birth mother in there, the one who'll toss in babysitting.

Adrienne studies me closely. She sees something and she's not sure if she likes it or not. “You don't want her to go. You were totally resistant before she got here, and now you want her to stay an extra year. What's the deal, Gabe?” Her hand flies to her hip, which then juts out, the timeless choreography of the suspicious wife.

“I'm doing what you want. I'm conceding.”

She purses her lips, scrutinizing me. “I'm going to make this work. She is not going to bond with that baby. That is our baby.”

Adrienne's self-regard is so high that she believes she can make this turn out to her specifications, not Leah's. No, it's not just that.
Her competitive streak has been engaged. As they say in reality TV: It is
on,
and she is not here to make friends.

“You really want to do this?” I ask her.

“Do you?”

“I kind of do.”

She breaks out into a smile so bright it's blistering. Then her arms are around my neck and her tongue is in my mouth. “I knew this was the one,” she says between kisses. I'm dimly aware of the raging impropriety of this whole thing—this isn't how things are done, how families are born, in a whispered conversation on bare feet at three
A.M
., with the invocation of Machiavelli—but somehow, comfortingly, it's pure us. This, I tell myself, is how Bonnie and Clyde would decide to adopt.

A couple more minutes and a tent-pole later, Adrienne abruptly stops. “We need to talk details.”

“Can't that wait?” I reach for her again. “We'll do that with Leah tomorrow.” We haven't had sex outside in too long.

She takes a step back. “No, now. It's about the pool table. It has to go in the garage.”

The garage smells like motor oil. It's full of junk. The lighting is lousy, and it's drafty in winter. Most significant, it's a
garage
.

I try to communicate all that to her with my eyes. She appears not to understand. “We agreed to convert the office into the baby's room,” I say.

“Right.”

“So . . . what's the problem?”

“Leah needs a room, too. We have three bedrooms, one of which is currently taken up by your pool table.”

I stare at her, doing the math. “Or Leah and the baby bunk together.”

Her eyes widen. Out of this entire conversation, that's the thing that sparks incredulity? “Leah and the baby are not going to share a room.”

“Why not? She'll probably be breast-feeding—”

Her eyes bulge. “Leah will not be breast-feeding! Do you know how much bonding happens during breast-feeding? Leah is not going to spend an extra minute with that baby.”

Unease washes over me. “You can't really spend the year policing her.”

“Watch me.” She leans in close, and it's like her next statement is in bold: “I'm the mother, not her!”

My unease ratchets up. “Is this really about Leah, or about someone else?” I don't like to even say Patty's name. Best to forget it ever happened, and over the past months, it seemed like Adrienne had. But for a while, she was consumed. It was like Patty had engulfed my wife in flames.

“This isn't about Leah, or anyone else. It's about our child. So whatever I need to do to keep him safe, to keep him with us, I'll do it.”

“Leah's a person, too.” I don't like that it bears reminding.

“Don't worry about her. I'm going to kill her with kindness.”

“And while you're killing her, what happens to us? We're talking about an entire year.”

She sidles up to me. She catches my bottom lip between her teeth, and her hand inside my pants is shockingly cold. But it doesn't stay that way for long.