Fresh Kills (8 page)

Outside, the trees were just beginning to waken; crocuses poked purple and yellow heads above the newly thawed earth. Birds were making nests in the still-bare branches, getting ready for eggs that would hatch into nestlings.

New life. That was what spring was about. New life in bud and flower and bird and—

And babies. A sharp pain stabbed through my belly, the same pain I felt every year around the time I could have given birth. I could not imagine sitting in a bed with my baby, saying farewell forever. But if I had, if I'd had the courage to do what Amber was doing now, would my belly still hurt?

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

You can't do spring without e.e. cummings. I all but skipped along Clinton Street on my way from court, his rhythms bouncing in my head.

when faces called flowers float out of the ground

…

—it's april (yes, april; my darling) it's spring!

And faces did float out of townhouse-sized gardens, cat-faced pansies and yellow trumpet daffodils, and suddenly the brownstone fronts were graced with bright yellow forsythia and creamy white apple blossoms. Life burst from every branch and the air had a soft, warm tang.

Even the animals were getting into the act. At the Arab market, where I bought hummus and
babaganoush
to dip Afghan bread into, a cat had given birth and tiny pussywillow kittens tumbled on the floor.

I drank in a long breath of spring air, ready to believe at last that winter was over. Then I turned my steps toward my office and the client who waited there.

Spring was a relief after a long brutal winter, and today's meeting with Amber would bring relief as well. She was to sign the final consent, which Marla would finalize before the Surrogate next week. It was three weeks since she'd handed her baby over to Ellie Greenspan, three weeks during which I mentally held my breath.

I was late; I quickened my steps, but I was puffing when I passed the Japanese restaurant and turned to climb the steps of the four-story brownstone that housed my office, my apartment, the Morning Glory Luncheonette at ground level, and gave me one apartment to rent out for added income. I stopped on the way up to catch my breath, hoping Amber would be late, giving me a chance to read over the unfamiliar legal papers one more time.

She wasn't. Amber sat in a mission chair I'd received as a fee from an antiques dealer on Atlantic Avenue. She thumbed through an old issue of
New York
magazine, her glossy fingernails reflecting the sunlight that came through my picture window. The amber talisman around her neck gleamed gold, glinting in a teasing wink as she moved in and out of the sunbeams. She smiled and stood up as I entered, then followed demurely as I motioned her into my office. I set the briefcase on the chair next to my desk, waved Amber into one of the red leather client chairs, and took my place behind the desk.

Marvella Jackman, the best cheap legal secretary in Brooklyn, had placed Amber's file in the center of the desk along with the Domestic Relations Law, open to the section on private placement adoptions, and put away the other motions I'd been working on—part of a harmless fiction that let each client think hers was the only case that mattered.

I opened the file and took out the final consent form. “This is—”

“I've changed my mind,” Amber said. Her fingers caressed the amber pendant. The amber pendant Ellie Greenspan hand-made for her.

I've changed my mind
. Four words that shook the world. They were shaking my world; what the hell would they do to Josh and Ellie? And to Adam: that was what really mattered. What would they mean to Adam?

My response was brilliant. “What?”

“I've changed my mind,” she repeated. “I can't go through with it. I can't give up my baby.”

“Amber, what's wrong?”

“Nothing's wrong. Everything's right. Everything's finally right,” she replied. She sounded breathless, elated. High.

I almost asked her if she was on anything, if she'd taken drugs. I was so used to dealing with criminal clients, and so unused to regular people who could feel exhilaration by natural means.

“You want the baby back.” I said it flatly, trying for a neutrality I didn't feel. Amber was my client, but it was Ellie Greenspan's face I saw in my mind's eye. The image of her pressing her face into Adam's tiny chest and merging her breath with his stayed with me, almost as if I'd really taken the photographs I'd pretended to shoot.

How in hell was I going to tell her her dreamchild had to go back to the shop?

Actually, I wasn't going to tell her. I was going to tell Marla, who would tell Ellie and Josh.

Marla. Jesus. Marla would kill me.

“What changed your mind?” Even as I asked the question, I remembered the silver car outside the group home, the dark-haired guy who'd assaulted Doc Scanlon at the hospital. The man Marla had identified as a lurking boyfriend, promising marriage. That was it. That had to be it. Marla, dear cynical Marla, had been right after all.

Amber looked into the sun, her bright blue eyes gleaming sapphire. “I lost one baby,” she said, her voice a near whisper. “I can't let myself lose this one, too.”

“But you knew—”

“No, I didn't,” she replied, leaning forward in her chair. “I
thought
I knew. I thought I wanted to leave it all behind and go on with my life. But I can't stop thinking about him. I keep picturing him in his crib, crying for his mother. Crying for me. I keep wondering if he looks like me. Oh, I know Ellie will be a good mother,” she explained, “but it hurts so much to think of her walking him to his first day of school instead of me. I can't let her keep him. I can't.” Her voice broke, and she dropped her head into her hands.

For a moment there was nothing but the sound of sobs.

Thanks to the propensity of my Atlantic Avenue clients to pay me in furniture and collectibles, I had a nice collection of vintage posters on my office wall. I felt a sense of sisterly solidarity when ever I looked over at Rosie the Riveter flexing her muscles, hair bound up in a polka-dot scarf to keep it out of the machinery, her forties face determined. “We Can Do It!” the poster proclaimed.

I looked at Rosie now. We can do it.

But should we?

Amber raised her head; tears streaked her face. Her pink blusher had melted onto her hands; she brushed them on her black jeans with an air of apology. She gave me a watery smile, then said, “I can't stop thinking about Laura.”

Laura? Another birth mother, I figured, someone who'd given up a baby and spent the rest of her life regretting the decision, searching for the child she'd—

“My first baby,” Amber explained. “I was so young, but I had such high hopes. Jerry and I were married as soon as I told him I was pregnant. He was a good guy, Jerry. I knew he'd take care of me and love the baby as much as I did. But then, when Doc Scanlon told me she was sick, that she—”

“Doc Scanlon?” I was still reeling from the news of her changed intentions; I was following this story about as easily as I would a discussion of nuclear physics.

“He delivered her. At first, he told Jerry and me she was fine. No problems. But then a couple days later, he said they'd found a heart defect. I never even took her home; she died a week later. It was nobody's fault, but—”

“Amber, this is not new,” I said, gently, I hoped, but firmly. “No matter how bad you feel about losing Laura, that has nothing to do with this baby.”

“Doesn't it? I thought I could let him go, but now that he's real, alive, I can't do it.”

I looked down at the massive file on my desk. All that paperwork for nothing. All the hopes and dreams the Greenspans had put into Adam, and now—

Now what? Now Amber wanted her baby back. But under the laws of the State of New York, it wasn't at all certain she would get what she wanted.

“Once upon a time,” I began, going into law professor mode, “there was a little girl named—”

“Baby Jessica,” Amber cut in. She said the name with reverence, invoking the child taken from her adoptive parents in Wisconsin and returned, at two-and-a-half, to Iowa birth parents she had never known.

I shook my head. “Baby Lenore,” I corrected.

Blank stare. I was telling her a story she hadn't heard before. Which was no more than I'd expected.

“This happened here in New York,” I went on, “in”—I consulted the practice commentary to Section 115-b of the Domestic Relations Law—“1971.” I was a first-year law student at NYU when the case hit the headlines, and its legal twists and turns had both fascinated and appalled me.

“Baby Lenore was adopted under the old law of New York State,” I explained. “That law gave a lot of rights to the birth parents, so that when the birth mother petitioned to get the baby back, the adoptive parents weren't even allowed in the courtroom.”

I transferred my gaze to the window at my right. Ornamental street trees waved in the stiff breeze, shaking pompoms of white and pink blossoms. Cotton candy clouds floated in the bright blue sky.

“When the judge ordered them to return the kid,” I went on, wrenching my attention back to my client, “which happened after they'd had custody for at least three years, they scooped her up and went to Florida. It was a major heart-breaker of a case, and as a result, the Legislature amended the Domestic Relations Law.”

I looked into Amber's guileless blue eyes. She seemed to be listening attentively, but would she really understand?

The innocence of spring seemed very far away.

“So the law in New York now,” I finished, going for the bottom line before my client's eyes glazed over entirely, “is that you and the Greenspans are on equal footing in the eyes of the law. If they refuse to give up the baby, there'll be a hearing. You make your case for why the baby should be with you, and they get to make their case. The judge decides based on the best interests of the child. This isn't Iowa,” I went on. “There the law favored the birth parents, just as New York did before Baby Lenore. That's why the Iowa couple got Baby Jessica back. If the Greenspans contest your revocation of consent—”

“There is something else,” Amber interrupted. Her face was pale, but her tone determined. “I'm married.”

“When?” All the other questions I could have asked were pushed aside as I went straight to the legal heart of the matter. “If it was after the baby's birth, it has no legal effect.”

She allowed herself a tiny smile of triumph. “It was before,” she said. “About a week before. I was big as a house, so the guy at Borough Hall looked at me like I was a whore, but I didn't care.”

It flashed upon me that Amber knew the full legal implication of what she'd done, that she'd deliberately chosen to marry before the baby's birth so that her legal position would be stronger when she changed her mind. Then I discarded the thought; a woman who'd never heard of Baby Lenore was unlikely to know that a husband is legally presumed to be the father of a child born in wedlock.

On the other hand, one week before birth was perfect. Marla would have checked state records before she let the Greenspans start preliminary negotiations. But once papers were signed, once investigations were complete, who would monitor the county clerks' offices on the remote chance a birth mother would choose to marry a week before delivery?

I recalled sitting in the straight chair in Amber's room at the group home, listening to her sad tale of date rape. Anger ran through me like a hot flash; how dare this girl play on my emotions with a story like that, when all the time she'd known her intended husband could throw a monkey wrench into all the careful legal planning?

Was the rape story even true, or had she—

“What about the rape?” I'd abandoned all pretense of neutrality; I felt used and betrayed. I went into full cross-examination mode.

“What about that lovely image of the sperm running down your leg? Was that just a sob story, something you cooked up so the court wouldn't have to get the father's consent to adopt?” I stopped for breath. Amber sat still, her face a mask of endurance.

I raised my voice, letting my words assault her perfect calm. “Was this whole thing a scheme, Amber, a way to get Josh and Ellie to pay your expenses, buy you gifts, when all the time you knew you'd change your mind, that you had no intention of letting them have the baby?”

She shook her head. “No,” she replied. “It wasn't like that. I really was raped. But,” she went on, her voice shaking, “I was seeing Scott at the same time. I wasn't sure who the father was. But I thought I couldn't stand it if the baby turned out to look like him. If every time I played with my kid I remembered what that bastard did to me. But now—”

I waited for the inevitable. I wasn't going to help her, but I was beginning to feel something like sympathy. The young lawyer who'd agonized about her own unplanned pregnancy couldn't help but feel the pain of this young woman who'd made hard choices about her unexpected child.

“I don't care who the father is anymore,” Amber concluded. Her eyes locked with mine, and again I felt her reading my thoughts. “I know I'm his mother, and I know I can give him a good home. And so can Scott. He says—”

“Scott.” The wild card. The new husband. The guy in the silver car, waiting outside the group home. The guy who'd tried to assault Doc Scanlon at the hospital. The guy who rode around in a car with a license plate that read PIZZA 21.

My lawyer's mind went into gear, pushing aside thoughts of unwanted babies. “I'll have to talk to him. The court won't give the baby to you without first certifying him as a fit parent.” I looked at my desk calendar. “When can I see him?”

“Now,” Amber replied. The cool self-possession I'd seen at our first meeting was back. “He's downstairs in the car.”