To See the Moon Again (24 page)

The plan was still under construction, maybe completely improbable, most likely imprudent. But if they could only observe the child, maybe happily involved in play, might that not help Carmen in time come to terms with her guilt?

At least she had the girl's attention now. She was chewing slowly, her head cocked, her brow furrowed, clearly thinking over what Julia had just said.

Even now Julia was formulating a larger point she could make, something that would resonate with a person like Carmen:
If your God is merciful, as you claim
, she would say,
then surely he would show mercy to an innocent child. And surely he would allow you to see his mercy in her life.
And she would push it further.
And if he is the master of the universe, as you also claim, can he not repair as well as create? Can he not mend your sad heart?
And somehow she would link that thought with this:
Sometimes the same thing can bring good and ill. Take rain, for example. Floods can destroy things, but sometimes after rain, good things happen, too. Crops can grow and flowers bloom and rainbows spread across the sky.
Oh, yes, she could wax eloquent with a thought like this. A little bit of metaphorical lace to pretty up the speech, to draw attention away from the fact that she was touting the power and goodness of a God whose very existence she had never avowed.

But she would wait for all that. The breakfast room was starting to fill up. A couple with a sulky-looking teenage girl set their plates down at the table next to theirs. The girl had a silver ring in one nostril and straight, stiff hair the color of a radish.

“And what if . . .” Carmen started, but a yowl of dismay rose from another table nearby. Someone had just dumped a whole plate of scrambled eggs and hash browns on the floor. A worker appeared to help clean it up.

Carmen and Julia fell silent and finished their breakfast quickly.

•   •   •

S
OMETIME
later that morning they were headed west from Boston on Highway 20—the same basic route as the turnpike, but without the tolls. It wouldn't be a long trip to Danforth, under three hours.

Julia put in a CD titled
Solely Slowly
, a collection of adagio pieces—something that should make an easy background for thought as well as something to imply that she didn't want to talk. It was evidently a sentiment Carmen shared, for she put her seat back and closed her eyes.

As she drove, Julia's mind went over and over the same thoughts. She wished she knew more about the legal aspects of adoption, how the whole process worked, where the records were kept, who had access to them. There were probably different laws for different states. She had heard about open versus closed adoptions, but in a case like Carmen's there wouldn't have been such a discussion.

Even if they somehow managed to find out where the child was, no small
if
, the plan was still fraught with danger. What if they saw the child happy and healthy, well provided for by doting parents? Wouldn't Carmen be likely to feel even more keenly the loss of what could have been hers?

Or what if they saw the child but she didn't seem happy and well cared for? Or what if their search ended with the discovery that Carmen had been told the truth, that the baby had died at birth? Another very real and unhappy possibility, one sure to reignite Carmen's thoughts about the wages of sin.

These were all questions for which there were no answers. Not on this side of the journey. Like everything else in life, you couldn't know what was at the end of the trip unless you packed your bags and set out.

They had driven less than half an hour when Carmen sat up and said, “Hey, I thought I was supposed to drive after we left Boston. I'm going to forget how if you don't let me. Besides, I can't just sit here, I need to
do
something.” Julia had gotten behind the wheel out of habit, but she didn't mind trading places. The route was easy, and traffic wasn't bad, certainly nothing the girl couldn't handle. So she pulled off and Carmen took over.

The CD of
adagios
and
largos
was still playing. Maybe it had helped to discourage conversation, but it certainly hadn't provided a very soothing background, for today Julia was hearing things she had never noticed before—a flute obbligato that wailed like a cold wind down a chimney, a ponderous bass line that labored like an aging heart, a percussive effect like the whirring of bat wings, a trumpet with a scalpel edge. Even her favorite pieces—Albinoni's
Adagio in G Minor
, Massenet's
Meditation
—failed to steady her this time. Off and on for no good reason, she kept imagining a scene out of Edgar Allan Poe, a deathly slow masquerade ball with an evil presence floating among the dancers. Strange sensations for the dazzle of a perfect October day.

The plan began to seem less feasible with each passing mile, Julia's responsibility for error more profound. She wondered if Carmen's mind was full of the same doubts. More than once she came close to raising her voice above the music:
Stop, this is all wrong. Let's rethink this.

But each time she held back:
No, keep quiet. Stay the course.
Besides, if they didn't continue on their way to Danforth, what would they do while they waited around for their flight home? Or should they pay to change their reservations and go straight home? Or drive to Hartford and sit in a hotel for five days?

Hartford was another problem, but one Julia couldn't think about now. She had no idea how Carmen felt about returning there, whether she would want to see her old haunts or avoid them altogether. She had claimed to love the boy; maybe she thought she still did. Regardless, she must be curious about him.

But Julia could only wonder. She wouldn't think of asking such things. For herself, she felt the urge to look the boy in the eye—well, he would be twenty-five now, hardly a boy. She wanted to tell him what he had done to Carmen, tell his parents, announce it to the whole church. She couldn't imagine being so bold, but her outrage was so great she felt she could.

For now, however, Hartford would have to wait. One town, one weighty memory at a time. First, Danforth, Massachusetts. But as the last piece on the CD played—Samuel Barber's famous
Adagio for Strings
—she imagined over and over all the different ways their quest could fail.

•   •   •

A
FTER
the CD ended, they drove on in silence. Julia's mind drifted to an article she and Carmen had read weeks ago in which a backpacker across Europe had written about his travels and urged readers to “leave home and watch yourself grow.” She remembered one of the last things he had said—something about the need to take a picture of yourself before leaving home so you would have a record of who you used to be, for you would certainly be someone different when you returned.

Carmen had made a joke of it at the time, had even taken pictures of the two of them. They were on Julia's cell phone right now—Carmen, lounging on the glider, clownish, her eyes crossed, tongue sticking out the side of her mouth; herself, sedate and cautious, sitting in her wicker rocking chair with a book in her lap. That day on the porch seemed like eons ago.

And now Julia had already lost her way to whatever big idea she was trying to reach. More useless woolgathering. It was so exasperating when she needed to be thinking clearly.

She must have made a sound, for Carmen glanced over. “What? Is something wrong? Are you as scared as I am?”

“There's nothing to be scared about,” Julia said. “We're just going to see what we can find out.” Calm and confident—that was the tone she was trying for, though she felt neither. She turned the radio on, then leaned her head back and closed her eyes. There was a sudden burst of audience laughter and applause.

It was a weekly quiz show on NPR called
Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me!
She listened, but not with interest. All the quiz questions seemed silly:
Which product did Vincent Price's grandfather invent? Tootsie rolls, contact lenses, or baking powder?
A year from now who would remember what the answer was? Or care?

But the radio stayed on anyway. The program ended, and another followed, called
Whad'ya Know?
More trivialities, including an interview with a professional chef who had worked at the White House for twenty years. The chef told about finding Richard Nixon in the kitchen one time making himself a sandwich at two
A.M.
“Another one of those late-night break-ins he liked so much,” the host quipped. All the repartee was too pat, the audience laughter too quick, probably prompted by a lighted sign that read
Laugh now
. The whole thing was like a rehearsed skit.

Yet she left the program on all the way to the end.

•   •   •

T
HEY
stopped for gas in Springfield, Massachusetts, and ordered a sandwich for lunch at a place called Friendly's, where the waiter, ironically, wasn't. As she had done at every restaurant on their trip, Carmen asked for sweet tea, knowing what the answer would be but interested in the waiters' various responses. This one pointed to the packets of sugar and sweetener on the table and said tersely, “We have
those
.”

They ate quickly and were done within half an hour. As they were getting back into their car outside the restaurant, a black van pulled in beside them, and a swarm of children spilled out the side doors. A big, jolly man got out of the driver's seat and started corralling them while a woman leaned into the backseat and unbuckled a toddler and a baby. Carmen waited until the way was clear and backed out slowly. Across the rear window of the black van, twelve stick-figure decals were lined up side by side—two parents, eight children, and two dogs. Julia knew Carmen saw the decals, was probably even counting them. Maybe she had a contest going and this was some kind of record.

Back on Highway 20, the opera was on now. Today it was
La Bohème
, but it was nothing Julia wanted to hear. She fell to thinking about the place where they were headed, and what had happened there. Even if they found that the baby really had died, there was no question in Julia's mind by now that Milo and Joyce Shelburn had been up to no good.

She had already compiled a list of adjectives for them:
hypocritical
,
greedy
,
oppressive
,
authoritarian
, and of course
pious
and
virtuous
in their most negative sense. And
villainous
. Julia's words, all of them. None came from Carmen. Her word was a mild one:
strict
.

Though Carmen had believed them in the end, the things she told were more than enough to let Julia know what they were really like. More than anything, it was the pressure they had brought to bear on the girl, when she wouldn't commit to adoption, that convinced Julia they were not to be trusted.

The Shelburns had a speech they gave over and over. It would be unfair to the baby to have a single girl like Carmen for a parent, someone without a home or a job or a car. How was she going to take care of it, feed it, clothe it, get it to the doctor when it was sick? What kind of life could she give a child? And so forth. And think of all the good Christian couples who wanted a baby but couldn't have one—how unfair to deprive them.

Unfair to the baby, unfair to the childless couples, but never a word about the unfairness of taking a baby away from her mother. They weren't used to “balky girls.” That was what Milo had told Carmen.

They had narrowed the choice of adoptive couples to four, whom they claimed to be “good matches,” which Carmen thought was odd since she had told them so little about herself and nothing at all about the father. They magnanimously told her she could have the final word about which couple got the baby, but she kept saying no, she couldn't meet with any of them yet, she needed more time.

But the strongest evidence in Julia's opinion had to do with the papers Carmen wouldn't sign. “You know, the ones agreeing to an adoption,” she had said when Julia questioned her. “They kept trying, and I kept saying the same thing—I had to pray about it some more. And Milo kept saying I didn't need to pray about a
promise
, which I didn't remember ever making in the first place.”

Julia didn't know much about adoption, but one thing she did know was that papers like that were signed by a birth mother only after a child was born, never before. And she was pretty sure the mother usually had a certain amount of time even after signing to change her mind. Poor, young, ignorant pregnant girls wouldn't necessarily know this, however.

If she didn't agree to place the baby, they told Carmen, she would have to pay them back for room and board and medical care. Another way to pressure a girl who didn't know better. They kept reminding her, too, of the money they would give her when she left—without the baby—to help her start a new life.

All of this, and yet Carmen had taken their lie to be true. All because they had acted sympathetic when they told her the baby had died. Incredible.

It was almost beyond belief that things like this could happen today, especially in a liberal, progressive state like Massachusetts, which surely must have watchdogs to keep adoption agencies honest. But perhaps it was also true that those who knew the adoption laws best were also best equipped to circumvent them, to resort to duping if a girl refused to cooperate.

•   •   •

O
N
the radio, a tenor was singing an aria now. Julia turned it down. She was curious about something. “Why didn't you just leave the Shelburns' house and ask someone else for help?” she asked the girl.

Carmen looked puzzled. “Well . . . it never crossed my mind to leave,” she said.