The Mothers: A Novel (20 page)

Ramon went to take a shower but our bathroom was tiny and right off the living room, so he couldn’t leave the conversation.

“I’ll call the agency, and they’ll be able to tell us more,” I said, sniffling.

Ramon turned on the shower.

“She’s chosen us, Ramon,” I said, louder. “She told me we are her first choice.” I could hear him step into the shower. “We had a connection. I don’t think we should just let this go.”

_______

On Monday, I finally talked to Crystal at the office in Raleigh. Crystal said Katrina had done an intake already and she was: Caucasian. Her boyfriend was: Caucasian with some Native American. She lived where she told me she lived, and she was the age she told me she was. Her last child, however, had been adopted through another agency. The real red flag here, Crystal said, was that she could be talking to more than one agency. And? Crystal said, we don’t have a confirmation of her pregnancy.

Red flags. We learned about those in Raleigh, too, and not having a pregnancy confirmation would be a major one. Another red flag? If the birthfather does not know the birthmother’s plan to give up the child. Or? If the father does know the adoption plan, because then he can hinder it. If it’s early in the pregnancy, before five months, say, then the birthmother has ample time to change her mind. If the grandparents are involved, they can decide they will parent the child. And if they’re not involved, that’s a red flag too, because the birthmother isn’t getting the support she needs.

“That’s not a problem,” I said. I did not mention the Third Reich imagery. “Trina told me she’d be going to the doctor on Wednesday. We’re set to talk after her appointment.”

“That’s great!” Crystal said. “I’ll let you know as soon as I get the paperwork.”

_______

Katrina did not call me after her appointment on Wednesday, nor did she call on Thursday. On Friday I left her a message, and then I tried her several days later.

“Oh hi, Jesse.” She sounded very faraway. Not just alone-on-the-surface-of-the-night-desert far, but also: gone. As if I had not heard about her mother who never loved her, her daughter’s drug problem, her son’s anger-management issues.

“Hey there!” I was terribly cheerful. “How are you?” I thought then of something Katrina had said in one of our many hours of previous conversations: What would I have been had I the power to choose my own mother? she’d asked. I could have everything you have. I could have been a professor, like you, or a doctor or a musician. I want to choose my child’s mother right.

But she was only choosing by what a mother
does
. I realized, from where she sat, trying to get herself and her children out of a trailer park I saw tilted on some desert precipice, that was important. A professor? I speak from experience: great hours, summers off, but the world is coming down around us. I thought, My mother was a good person, her job was a job that helped people. But was she a good mother? I thought of all the mothers of my youth—the ones who schlepped us across town, who cut oranges into smiles for our soccer games, who sewed patches on their kids’ torn pants, the ones who were there, station wagons humming, when we got out of school. Who was a better mother? Claudine read to me before my parents came home. But does it really matter who read to me? Because I was read to. I grew up being read to every day.

“I’m in the grocery store, can I call you back?” Katrina asked.

Her tone was changed, dismissive. I wondered if she had found someone else, another person who had what she wanted, for herself or for her child; I couldn’t say.

_______

“Nope,” Crystal said when I called to tell her. “We never got a verification of Katrina’s pregnancy. Sometimes,” she said, “the birthmothers are scared. They’re so young. They change their minds.”

“She’s forty.” The rare birthmother bird, shaking the branches of a leaf-filled tree. I pictured Carmen again, young and beautiful and hopeful, a spiral notebook at her chest as she leaned back dreamily against her locker.

“It’s like dating,” Crystal said now. “You get some duds before you find true love.”

“She’s a grandmother,” I said. I still did not tell Crystal about the emblems of Nazism on Myspace, which would have precluded another date on both our parts.

“She might not have been pregnant,” Crystal said. “She might have just been looking for a friend. Or she might be shopping around agencies. She might have been after money.”

“Why,” I asked Crystal, “am I talking to someone who has not sent in a confirmation of pregnancy?”

“Sometimes it takes a while to get that. Sometimes,” she said, “we have to go on our reserves of faith. You will have a child. It might not be Katrina’s and it might not be the next birthmother’s, but it will totally happen for you guys!”

How many ways, I thought, my breath short, can we fail?

_______

I called to tell Lucy about Katrina, and as the phone rang I could imagine the beat of the conversation. Did I tell you the one about the Nazi birthmother? I would ask her. She goose-stepped right out of the picture, I would say, and we would both laugh.

“Hey, Mom,” I said when my mother answered.

“Hi, honey. How are you?”

“Fine!” I said cheerily. “Is Lucy around?”

“She is.” She paused. “She’s had a few complications,” she whispered into the phone. “Nothing serious, she’s going to be fine, but she’s going to stay here for the birth.”

“Oh!” I swallowed. “Okay.”

“I’ll let her tell you about it. Bye, honey.” I heard my mother put the phone down and call my sister. “Lucy!” she cried. “Mommy! Your sister is on the phone.”

My heart beat quickly. I pictured my sister’s growing belly, stopped. Then I pictured it growing obscenely large, Hannah giving a cartoon karate chop from within, pressing out.

“Hey!” Lucy came to the phone, breathless.

“Is everything okay?” I asked.

“Just some bleeding. I didn’t know what it was. I freaked. I thought it was happening again, but so late! It turned out it’s going to be okay, I just need to lay low. Not run around figuring out where to live and all that.”

“Okay,” I said. “That makes sense.”

“Any news on your front?”

“No.” Nothing was funny. Nazis were never funny. “Just checking in on you is all,” I said.

“That’s so sweet, Jess,” she said. “Thank you.”

20

__

December 2010

T
hough we were told contact eases up over the holidays, November through January were the months of the birthmothers. After Katrina, California Allison called to tell us there was another young person—Edwina—who might be contacting us. I heard the word clearly:
might.
She was choosing between three families. I waited f
or the call, but I was not surprised when Allison called to report that she had decided on a family with another child.

“She wanted siblings for her child,” Allison said. “A big family, which was how she grew up.”

That felt below-the-belt, as if Edwina, twenty-two and in Indiana, knew we were too old to ever do this again.

“This is such a good sign,” Allison said. “So many contacts. Even if they don’t work out, there’s clearly a lot that’s appealing about your profile.”

I sniffed.

“You know what?” she whispered, and I could picture her covering the mouthpiece and looking around to make sure no one was listening.

“What?” I whispered back.

“We have this game we play here at the office. It’s called: Who Would You Want to Adopt You. You know? What couples!”

“You do?” I imagined that board game, little cards of our profiles turned facedown, a tiny wheel to spin before choosing a card.

“And I chose you guys! Bethany did too. We think you guys would make such awesome parents!”

“Oh my gosh, thank you!” I said, thrilled.

It was not until I got off the phone that I wondered about this office game, these social workers, the ones who did the birthmother intakes, the ones who dealt with the prospective parents, the administrators, all of them looking at each of us, so desperate for a child that we have submitted to this wearying process. We, the prospective adoptive parents, the Christians from Mississippi, the long-distance runners from La Jolla, the Pakistani and white doctors from Indiana, all the profiles Ramon and I had looked through on the agency website to see who we were up against, all the ones we saw fall away,
Matched
stamped digitally across their photos. We were being judged not only by the birthmothers, but also by the gatekeepers to the birthmothers.

And still, I did not care. Because the gatekeepers had selected us! All I could think about as I went to call Ramon with the disappointing report of losing Edwina, was the great news that finally, we’d been chosen.

_______

Just as I didn’t speak to Carmen and Edwina, I never spoke to the following birthmother either, though looking back I think I could hear her, the steady rhythm of her breathing in the background of my conversations with the birthfather. They were a couple from Cairo who had a sick baby at Mount Sinai, on the Upper East Side. How sick, we didn’t know, but they needed to go back to Egypt, where they claimed they could not get proper medical care. I wanted to visit the baby at the hospital so, as I was told by the birthfather, we could speak to the doctors directly about the child’s illness.

“No way,” Ramon said. “We cannot get to know these people and get caught up in their lives and then have to say no to a sick child we can’t take on. They could have hundreds of thousands of dollars of bills racked up already.”

“You’re being negative again,” I said. “We can talk to the doctors ourselves! We can talk to accounting, too.” What would going to a hospital be like, I wondered, and seeing a two-week-old child hooked up to strings and needles, a marionette. I didn’t know if I could bear seeing a child suffering, crying, without any sound. I had cried so often when I was alone, in the dark, and yet I could not hear myself. But this was not about that. This is to say that my mother had come every day. I could do that too, be the mother who comes each morning and leaves after dark and heals the child with her singular mother’s love.

“What would be too much for care in Cairo?” Ramon asked. “Cairo is a modern place. What kind of an illness would this baby have? We are not going until the agency gets information about it. We just can’t.”

“Please, Ramon.” I saw myself lifting a fragile child, attached by wires, a machine beeping.

All weekend I thought of raising an Egyptian child we had cured with the power of our big love and our democracy, our Americanness—well, mine; Ramon just had a green card—but the man did not put his wife on the phone. I didn’t want to pressure him, as I theorized that birthfathers, while adorned with more colorful feathers, are easily frightened too, but I began to think that the mother did not want to give up her baby—a red flag, yes? I thought of her hovering next to her husband, silent, as he signed away their sick child.

A social worker I did not know called me on Monday to tell me the man had signed the release for her to talk to the doctors, but that he had also done something peculiar and disturbing. He’d asked her, she said, if there were any single women in search of children, to which she had responded, yes. He’d then asked if any of those women would be interested in marriage, because he would prefer a second wife here in the States to an open adoption.

“What?” I asked. I could not wrap my head around it and I thought of my absent father-in-law, all the way in Java with his second, unofficial wife. And then I thought that this new social worker was racist against Muslims and so was telling me something so stereotypical I considered having her fired.

“Yes,” she said. “You heard me correctly. He asked for another
wife
.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“We’re not that kind of agency,” the social worker told me, as if to imply that I was that kind of adoptive parent, who, already married myself, mind you, was out to marry a married Egyptian man who would be leaving me here in the States to raise his sick child. “It was a red flag that you never spoke to the birthmother,” she said.

This mistake, somehow mine, I thought, would surely make them all rescind their votes for us as parents they’d most like to adopt them. So were we back again at square one?

Square one: the place where those who haven’t yet been chosen, wait.

“Jesus,” Ramon said when I told him.

“That’s exactly what I said.”

“I’m just wondering, what the hell is the agency doing to help us? I mean in the beginning we were told we had such a great chance. We’re straight. We are young. We’re open with race.”

“We aren’t young.” It was six months away now. The numbers were set to shift radically then.

“Compared to a lot of those couples, we’re young. I speak Spanish. We translated every goddamn line of that goddamn letter into Spanish. Has one Hispanic birthmother called us? No.”

“It’s true,” I said. “I thought all the Spanish stuff would help.” So much for the Ramon Advantage.

Ramon was silent.

“I think people are scared of New York maybe,” I said.

“I thought New York would make us seem cool.” Ramon looked intently at his laptop.

“That’s because you’re from Europe.”

“I thought that this was going to be easier.”

My throat grew thick, as if it were stuffed with cotton. “And what are you doing, Ramon? Because I’m the one talking to these people.”

“Jesse.” He was still looking straight at the screen. Who knew what was on it. “It’s really the woman who should field the calls. It just is.”

“Hmm,” I said.

“You really think I should be the first to talk to the mothers?” he asked.

“They are not the mothers!” I said. “I am the mother,” I said. “Aren’t I supposed to be the mother?”

22

__

January 2011

A
nother new year, and I started to recognize a pattern. We waited, until inactivity panicked us. Then someone made contact. It could be the agency, telling us someone would or should or might or could be calling, or the birthmother herself, like Katrina, or even the birthfather, like the nameless man from Cairo, who had found our profile online. We tried to protect ourselves. Let’s be cautiously optimistic, we’d tell each other over (several) beers in front of the television (this might be our last few weeks of freedom! I mused). We thought, again, that we had been the lucky ones. And then, when the call did not come, or the call that came said we had not been chosen, when we traveled that vast terrain from almost, practically three to merely two, we grieved.

We grieved differently. Ramon railed at the agency for not vetting people, and at me for choosing this place and for screwing up with the mothers. I wept. And then, as he railed, I wept again, for being married to someone who railed instead of being supportive in times of grief. I thought of the men I knew and felt sure they would not behave this way. I thought of Anita, and her care and feeding of all those gorgeous animals.

“This hurts me too,” Ramon said, many times. “It is not just you who wants this.”

And now I see that I knew this was true but I did not care. The loss of these birthmothers was unbearable to me. They were the loss of everything.

But inevitably, after a day of chaos and misery, I got up and went to teach my classes. I met friends for drinks or coffee or dinner. I attended a colleague’s book party, a lecture. I went to a movie or to hear live music. In this way, I moved on.

Until we were fortunate enough to be contacted. And then, well, as my grandmother used to say, it was déjà vu all over again.

_______

It had been several weeks since the Cairo Incident, as we had come to call it, when Ramon and I went to meet several of his cousins who were in New York on business. (Business? I’d asked, and was brushed off.) On the train uptown, I removed Katrina’s flower icon from my phone. As I heard the
swishing sound of the deletion, I thought of Katrina’s heart, as big as a cloud, and it seemed to me the bigger the cloud, the more bad weather it could hold.

We were out to dinner at their hotel, an Italian place—why must Italians always eat Italian cuisine when not in Italy? So they can say how terrible it is by comparison? Will they die without a plate of pasta?—when another call came in to the 800 number.

“Hello?” I was breathless, crazy, as I always am when I know it might be a birthmother calling.

Just from that first ring our percentages of becoming parents went from zero to a hundred.

“Hi,” the young woman said. “I’m Heather.”

I went out to the lobby, opening my purse and struggling to get my pen and a pocket-sized Moleskine as I walked. “Hi!” I said.

“I saw you and Ramon online. I’m having twins.” She said all this at once, a torrent of rain. “Are you open to twins?” Heather asked.

Am I open to twins? Not really. We live in a fourth-floor walk-up, for one. But twins, we know, is our only chance for siblings. I had, after all, checked the box for twins on our client profile form.

“Of course we’re open.” I sat down on a bench against the wall of the hotel before a window facing the street. I thought of Carolyn and her forthcoming twins and I imagined us blocking all the nonmothers (suckers!) with our double strollers on our neighborhood sidewalks. “We love twins.”

“Oh,” she breathed out, relieved. “Great.”

I wrote that down.
Twins,
I wrote.
Great.
“Thank you for reading our profile. What was it you liked about our letter?” I asked Heather.

“Your education,” she said. “And the way you and your husband spoke about each other. You have a beautiful relationship.”

I snorted, but silently, as I wrote down:
Jan. 18, 2011. Heather likes our education and our relationship.

“Thank you, Heather,” I said. “We are fortunate. Can I ask your last name?” Several couples walked in and out of the shining lobby, the women’s heels
click-click
ing along the floor.

“Sure,” she said, and she told me. I wrote it down. We love to cook! I told her when she asked what we do together. Big meals for our friends and—I coughed—
family
. And go to museums! And the movies! Also, lest she think we spent our lives inside, I told her, We really love to hike!

“I’m in Westchester with my parents,” she told me. “Well, we’re in Westchester,” she giggled.

This is all so good! Suburban, young, with prenatal care. “I hope they’re being supportive,” I said. And, in imbuing all things with magical thinking, I thought that by excising Katrina’s flower, I had lighted a path for Heather to get to us. For Grace.

“Absolutely. They’ve been awesome. We were on a cruise to Mexico over the holidays. I realized after the cruise, actually, because I thought it was being on the boat that was making me so sick.”

“Right!” I said. “Of course!” The only red flag here was the grandparents, who were edging in like the shadows of circling birds. “And how are you feeling now?”

“Tired,” she said. “But done with the morning sickness. Thank God. It would wake me up in the middle of the night. Not sure why they call it morning sickness.”

I laughed. Lucy had told me the same.

“I’m due on June eighteenth.”

My heart flipped, that goldfish slippery in a hand. Here was a date, five months from then, and three days from my own birthday. Hannah would be four months old; it would be like having triplets in the family. I pictured my digital calendar with the June 18 date embroidered in pink:
Baby.
No.
Babies.
I thought of all the showers I’d been through in the past five years, women’s faces pitched into bowls, biting at nipples, sipping on strawberry sparklers. No matter what happened, I had resolved not to have a baby shower. Now I instantly revised this: I will not have a shower until I’m holding a child in my arms.

I looked out at the street. They were calling for a storm but now snow was just beginning to fall, ever so lightly. Fairy dust. I watched people look up at the sky, their faces smiling, catching snowflakes, arms outstretched to the weather. Twins.

“Look,” I said. Already I was having memories and making memories, simultaneously. My father, my sister, and me building a snowman. Big black buttons for eyes set in the packed snow. Ramon and two blank-faced children padded up in purple snowsuits. “Look,” I said again. To Heather. “It’s starting to snow.”

_______

Heather’s story was this: She was taking a year off between high school and college. Her boyfriend (part Caucasian and part Hispanic, she offered) had broken up with her before the cruise, and though she had tried to get in touch with him since discovering she was pregnant, she’d had no response. She’d heard from friends he was overseas. Perhaps, she said ominously, fighting in Iraq.

When she told me that she’d considered keeping the child, but with two there was no possible way, I thought of her leaning over the rail and looking out at the Pacific on the deck of a massive ship strung with fairy lights.

I love the ocean at night, how it meets up with another darkness at a horizon point I cannot recognize. I thought of Heather, before she knew her youth would be cut short. She looked out and dreamed of this boy who had stopped calling. Perhaps she was sad about those promises not kept as she gazed out at the sea, heard it breaking against the boat, heard the tinkling sound of people eating and drinking, caught the sound of her future.

Twins. We will have to move but no matter. I was fed up with this apartment, with its pocket-sized bathroom, its gapped floorboards, the scratch of mice in the bedroom walls. Besides, I’d heard from a colleague there would be an opening, tenure-track, at a small liberal arts school upstate; I could apply for that job in the fall. I’d heard a friend from graduate school would be on the search committee. By the summer, the five of us could be in the country.

I thought of a house with open sunlit rooms, copper pots hanging over a gleaming steel stove, pies bubbling in the oven, a pair of toddlers with their too-big mittens attached to the sleeves of down-stuffed little parkas, giggling as they lie back, moving their arms and legs, angels in heaps of snow.

_______

I called the agency the following afternoon.

“I just talked to a Heather from Westchester who’s having twins. Did you do the intake with her?”

Crystal said she was the one who talked to Heather when she called in, but that Heather from Westchester was Heather from the Bronx; she lived with her boyfriend, who was half African-American, half Hispanic. She was attending college online, studying to be an accountant. She might have smoked pot once before she knew she was pregnant. But remember, Crystal said, this is a self-report.

“That must be a different Heather,” I stated after I had written the information down.

Crystal was quiet. “It isn’t, I’m afraid. Sometimes the birthmothers say what you want to hear. Just like prospective adoptive parents.”

“That’s bullshit.” I stopped myself. If we are the sorts of parents who curse, who will give us a child? Panicked, I continued. “We have never lied about anything.” Had we? I wondered. “Why would she lie? I don’t care if she’s from Westchester or the Bronx. What a terrible way to begin a relationship.” My heart drummed so hard in my chest it was in my ears, but I was not hearing that there was anything necessarily
wrong
with Heather. Perhaps she was trying to impress us, which sounded positive.

“Birthmothers often feel that the adoptive parents, the women in particular, look down on them. Everyone wants to feel loved and approved of,” Crystal said.

Really, I thought. “That’s just awful. I’m sorry to hear they might feel that way.”

I was sorry Heather felt she had to lie about her situation. That she told the agency the truth, however, showed authenticity and ambition.

This is what I informed Ramon of when we were out to dinner in our neighborhood, at a place that puts popovers sprinkled with salt and glazed with honey on the table as soon as you sit down.

“Ambition?” He was incredulous.

I could see he was letting go of Heather, heading to the rage part of what had become an unbreakable cycle, but I was still in our cautiously optimistic stage.

“Yes, she wants a good family for the child. Wouldn’t you call that ambitious?” I bit into a popover: eggy, light, sweet, delicious.

“No,” Ramon said. “I would call it untrustworthy.”

“Don’t.” I looked hard at my husband. “It’s maybe a little weird, yes, but her boyfriend is part Hispanic. See? The Spanish stuff is working!”

Ramon looked back at me. Big almond eyes; that dimple; wavy black hair that was nearly gray. When did he get so gray? He shook his head. “You know, Jesse, we’re not desperate. We’re not.”

I felt my face grow hot and I imagined being plunged like a vegetable into a pool of cold water to stop my cooking and retain my vibrant color. “Speak for yourself, Ramon,” I said, waving the waitress down to order.

_______

Walking back to our apartment, Ramon disappeared, and then reappeared in the fluorescent-lit threshold of a deli on Smith Street holding a clutch of wilting little daisies.

“A flower for my flower,” he said, and I hugged him, taking the sad bouquet.

When we got back to our apartment, I put the flowers in one of the vases on the mantel, beneath a print of
Guernica
Ramon had insisted on hanging.

We sat on the couch beneath my daisies, and Picasso’s depiction of war, searching the web for Heather. We found a young blond woman guzzling beer on Facebook, but that was Manhattan Heather, and apparently we needed Bronx Heather. Soon we came upon a young woman in a local paper. At eighteen, she’d been arrested for prostitution, a year ago almost to the day. There was a mug shot of this Heather and a friend of this Heather, young girls whose faces were ravaged. Their hair was stringy; their skin was thick and their eyes were dark, set deep in their sockets.

Before Ramon could say anything, I said, “I don’t care.”

“You don’t care,” he said. “That’s just brilliant.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t. As long as she’s not doing drugs while she’s pregnant.”

“Look at her!”

I closed the screen.

“If she wasn’t doing drugs, why else would she be a prostitute and a liar?”

“That was a year ago!” I said. “She could be a totally different person now.”

I thought of myself a year ago, which hardly reinforced my point. I was unbearably the same: filled, as ever, with want. “She could be seriously reformed. Which is why she didn’t have an abortion. Maybe she went to Narcotics Anonymous and found her higher power and now she’s religious, Christian religious, and so she doesn’t believe in abortion anymore.”

Ramon sat back and closed his eyes. He took off his wool cap. We hadn’t even removed our coats, and the snow—the big wet flakes we stomped off our boots in clumps before walking in—was melting. The wool of our coats and hats and mittens smelled like honey and rosemary and hot wax.

“Wait,” he said in that way that means he’s going to say something disingenuous. “So are you thinking that the father is her boyfriend or are you thinking that—and please tell me you’re at least entertaining this idea—it is some horrible guy who paid her to have sex with him sometime after being arrested for soliciting undercover detectives at a Best Western in Queens? And you remember, this was the girl who told you she got knocked up at her prom in Westchester.”

“She did not say it was her prom, okay? There is never going to be an ideal here.” I closed my eyes. “There just isn’t.” I won’t lie. Once we had thought the girl on her way to Princeton who got knocked up at the prom was a likely scenario.

“She’s lying to us,” Ramon said.

“To me, you mean,” I said. “She’s lying to me. Because I’m the one who has been talking to her.”

“Yes. She is lying.”