Lone Stars

by Justin Deabler

  Philip emptied the medicine cabinet and moved to the bedroom. The bed was tightly made, with military corners, no duvet, two white pillows stacked neatly at the top. He opened the closet and found a few dress shirts, ties, the suit Aaron wore when he came to New York. He bagged them and moved to the pine dresser, the only other furniture in the room. He ran through the drawers quickly, tossing undershirts and khakis and white briefs, but when he reached into the sock drawer his fingers touched something plastic at the bottom.

  He pulled out a large Ziploc bag of papers. Underneath it, at the bottom of the drawer, was a children’s book. The Story of Ferdinand. He opened it. On the inside cover, scrawled in messy green crayon, it said Julian Warner’s Book. Philip set it on top of the dresser and opened the Ziploc. He pulled out a faded ticket to the Astrodome, from some Yankees-Astros game in the sixties. Then he pulled out a picture of a blond woman with big Farrah Fawcett hair, smiling anxiously at the camera with her arm around a blond-haired boy. The rest of the papers were letters from Lacy to Aaron, addressed to a base in Vietnam, one of them signed Your Truest Love.

  “Jay?” he called. “I found the other letters from when your parents met. Your mom’s half. Jay?” Philip stood upright and listened, but there were no sounds from the kitchen. He came out of the bedroom. The apartment was empty and the front door ajar. Philip poked his head outside and saw Jay sitting on the curb, hunched over. His shoulders were shaking. It’s the Parkinson’s. Philip panicked for a moment. An idiotic thought, he scolded himself immediately, a stupid, irrational thought. Julian was crying. He was shaking from crying. And a lot of the time it wasn’t even genetic. Jay was young. They were young.

  Philip sat down beside him on the curb. Jay leaned over and buried his head in Philip’s chest, and Philip held him until his body stilled.

  13

  The Match Meeting

  Julian and Philip were having a baby. Maybe. They were possibly adopting a boy who was definitely due in three weeks. They had been in this position before, or similar high-stakes insanity. For two years they’d ridden the adoption roller coaster—going to work and living their lives through constant upheaval, maybe having twins in LA in a month, then not, or getting in the car to drive to Philly for a match meeting when a birth mom they’d been talking to for weeks suddenly ghosted, never to be heard from again. Each time their hearts fluttered to their throats and plunged to their feet, destroying them for days, making them oversleep, until they got up a little more bruised each time. But this time when they got in a car—a red Dodge Charger at the airport Hertz in Houston—things felt realer.

  “What have we got on the Sirius?” Julian said, attacking the radio dials and scanning intensely. “Whoo!” he hooted at the sound of R.E.M. He pulled out of the parking garage into the bright Gulf sun, quickly accelerating from mouthing the words into a lusty sing-along of “Losing My Religion.”

  “Do you think Marisol is ashamed of where she lives?” Philip asked, turning the volume down a few notches.

  “Umm, I don’t know. We barely know her. Why?”

  “Do you think that’s why she wants to meet us at a restaurant?” Philip shifted in his seat. “Have you noticed, whenever we Skype, there’s—laundry?”

  “Laundry?”

  “Everywhere. Stacked on the coffee table. In baskets.” Philip whipped his hand around. “Hanging on chairs. Laundry all over.”

  Julian considered this. In their calls after Marisol emailed them through their website—eight months pregnant with no plans—he did recall seeing a lot of laundry on her end of the computer. “Well,” he reasoned. “Her mom, two sisters, Marisol, and her daughters living there. Six people. Lots of wash. Whoo!” He jacked up the volume. “Chumbawamba! I love this song. We should get Sirius for our car. What station is this?”

  “Adult Hits.”

  “Oh.” Julian readjusted his hands on the steering wheel. “We’re adults. We’re about to have a kid; that’s how it works. God, the nerves! We’ve Skyped with her, but face-to-face—it’s like a first date.” He shot Philip a glance. “Remember ours?”

  “Do I remember our first date? Both nights. You made me work for it.”

  “You wanted to get laid. Tell me it wasn’t worth the wait. At your peril. I think it’s normal Marisol wants to meet in public the first time. I feel good. Don’t you?”

  “Worried.” Philip scowled. “From the moment she called. I worry every time with these calls, every woman. You know that.”

  “But we’re ready.” Julian grinned and hit the gas. “Aren’t you ready? For this whole awful process to make sense? The coincidence-not-coincidence that we got a call from”—he shrugged dramatically—“Houston?”

  “We said in our profile that you’re from Houston,” Philip mumbled.

  “A Mexican woman? Who already gave birth to two healthy kids? It’s perfect. She could go into labor any day now. She wants this to work too. It’s like the agency said, and then the lawyer said—you just know when it’s right. Doesn’t it finally feel right this time?”

  “Don’t ask me that,” Philip snapped. “I’m a wreck.”

  Traffic slowed to a crawl. “This used to be 59,” Julian observed. “The highway. They renamed it since we were here. Sixty-nine now.” He looked out the window at a rusting bridge over the San Jacinto, connecting two forgotten roads. He nudged the car toward the next exit. “We’ll go local the rest of the way.”

  Julian maneuvered the car off the highway onto roads he still remembered like the back of his hand, past taquerias and gun shops, guys selling okra out of trucks, falling-down houses one after the next, miles of rotting porches and chain-link fence. As they waited at a red light by a particularly run-down place, Philip gasped. He pointed past an old car on blocks at something swinging in the breeze. Julian squinted. At first it registered as a tetherball with some kind of fabric trailing from it.

  “An effigy.” Philip sat up straight. “Obama. Look.”

  Julian saw it. A basketball painted black, with a monkey face and two round ears stuck on, pointing straight out. A blue boy’s suit and red tie rippling in the wind below the ball, all of it at the end of a noose. And a sign next to it, hand painted on cardboard and faded by the sun: HANGING AROUND ANOTHER 4 YEARS. A truck honked. Julian looked up at the green light and hit the gas with a shiver.

  They had the Obama Talk so often it was like playing chess with the same person—the first few moves always routine. Julian was the skeptic. If Obama was more than a feel-good symbol, he asked, if he was real change, then why, after the people had spoken twice, were there still lynching scenes on Facebook or birther crap spewed by reality stars on TV? To which Phil always answered with a question: are you listening to our president? It’s not about Obama the man; it’s about the people who elected him, because no matter what came next, the genie was out of the bottle. People could change history, one vote and conversation at a time. But that day in the rental car, going local to Royalwood, they drove in silence. Julian thought of Marisol on their Skype calls—her dark skin, and the black guy she guessed was the birth dad, and what their baby boy would look like. He figured Philip had the same thing in mind when he put his hand over Julian’s on the gearshift and gave it a squeeze.

  Julian passed the back way into Royalwood, by his mom’s old house, and drove toward the main entrance. It was closer to Bonnie’s, where they were staying, but also something in him wanted to see it again—the wood welcome pillar emerging from the lake, which had such a grand Excalibur feel when he was a boy. It was smaller than he remembered, he thought as they approached, but what really hit Julian was all of the trees missing. Not the silver ones in the logo on the welcome pillar—they were still there above the suburban motto, A LIVABLE FOREST—but the real trees behind the lake. His whole life a thick wall of green stood between the feeder road and willy-nilly development outside the entrance, and the suburb within. It was gone now, thinned to a row of trees through which a new Whole Foods was visible.
r />   Philip took a photo.

  “What are you doing?” Julian asked.

  “Posting to our Adoption Journey page. I haven’t updated the blog in weeks.”

  “There are better angles. Prettier spots of Royalwood, if you’re posting.”

  “It’s not about the angle,” Philip mumbled and typed on his phone.

  The rest of the drive Julian mused on Philip’s resiliency. As much as he agonized over the process, Phil documented every moment along the way. He blogged about birth-mom leads and heartbreak when they didn’t work out. He posted photos of their vacations and cats to their adoption Facebook page and Instagram feed, fashioning the story of their lives for digital consumption, doing what it took to catch the eye of a young woman swiping on her phone. They had both reluctantly accepted that their lives were wide open on the Internet—for any Jane, Jill, or Nigerian princess to try to scam them—but it was Philip who single-handedly invented the Warnerblum family online.

  “Here it is,” Julian said, turning onto Bonnie’s block in a fancy subdivision. As they rolled up to her stucco McMansion, he thought of the last time they stayed with her, when they cleaned out his dad’s apartment a few years ago. This visit was different. About the future, not the past. He pulled into the driveway and parked behind a gleaming Lexus sedan. “Wow,” Julian muttered, “that’s the divorce that keeps on giving.”

  “And a new guy too,” Philip said, “right?”

  “Jeff. Christian Mingle Jeff. A year or so they’ve been together. Oh, a buzz!” Julian dug in his jeans for his phone. “A text from Marisol. She says—” His brain froze. He blinked, and blinked, couldn’t blink away what he was reading. “Oh God.”

  “What?” Philip cried. “What’s the matter?”

  “Marisol.” Julian took a long breath. “‘Sorry, guys,’” he read haltingly. “‘Don’t know if I can do this. So crazy. Gotta think. I’ll text y’all.’” He shut his eyes and leaned his head on the steering wheel. Dark thoughts crashed over him. Another baby slipped through their fingers. It was never going to happen. They weren’t meant to be parents. And he might as well accept that it was just the two of them and their cats, and Sunday dinners with Ruth and Gerald, because that was all the family they were ever going to have.

  * * *

  Julian hadn’t always imagined himself as a dad. Unlike Philip, who’d wanted kids his whole life, he’d had stuff to work through first. The lasting effects of the air he breathed in his youth, telling gay people they didn’t exist or weren’t a part of the story of life. The way his mom never talked about him being a dad. And his own parents? The hubris to look at each other one day and say, Let’s have a baby? Bring a life into this fucked-up world, and stay together too long for his sake and ironically fuck him up in the process? And yet if they hadn’t, where would he be? On and on his thoughts looped.

  But with time and Phil’s nagging, the doubts began to fade. New things seemed possible. He came to believe he was a good person and say it to himself like his mom once did—a person with something to offer a kid, maybe one who was getting born anyway, and maybe make the world slightly less awful? They reached a point, in their early thirties, when the self-focus started tasting like too much sweetness in their mouths. The apartment was renovated. Careers were good. Philip’s nonprofit grew to ten cities. Julian rose to run his project at the ACLU. After many wasted nights on Ancestry.com, trying to track down his mom’s Mexican family, Julian realized that finding a Maria Elena near Laredo was like finding Tony in Bay Ridge or Ira on the Lower East Side. So instead he searched for the warmth of family in the faces of his clients—from Mexico first, then El Salvador, Burma, Syria. When the police swept up men who were driving while brown, or schools turned away refugee kids, Julian never missed a chance to do battle. And each time he stood up in court, before he laid his watch on the table to time his argument, he turned it over to see the words of Lacy Adams Warner that he had engraved on the back: Raise hell. Never shut up. It’s all over before you know it.

  Things were fine.

  And then one day Julian and Philip woke up, and all their friends had kids.

  They went to showers and simchat bats and first birthdays. Julian saw the muted joy on friends’ faces as they nuzzled babies. It reminded him of his mom, the years before school when it was just the two of them. He thought if those memories could move him to tears, there was power in what she did, and he felt not just gratitude but a new kind of awe. It dawned on him that being a dad might be the greatest thing he’d ever do, more than any court case or crystal award on the shelf. Maybe he could raise his head, he thought, reveal his whole imperfect loving self, and be the dad he wanted and never had. He shared this with Philip when he turned thirty-three, along with a lingering fear—that his mom was gone and he couldn’t ask her how she did it, became a good mom. Philip smiled. “What if she couldn’t tell you when she was alive?” he asked. “What if the answers are already in you?”

  They tried an adoption agency first, sitting through trainings as social workers described typical scenarios in dreamy nonjudgmental tones. (“Birth Mom did butt shots at a party. Birth Dad held her head while she vomited, and is maybe part Cherokee. Thoughts?”) They waited two years and never got a call. Then one morning a friend tagged Julian in a post with a message, SOOO sorry, and a link to a video from Inside Edition. Deborah Norville had a breaking story about the bankruptcy of a once-respected adoption agency and the shattered dreams of its clients. Just like that, their nascent family went up in smoke. Julian threatened a lawsuit. They cursed lost money and grieved lost time. They winced at sudden sharp memories of hopes—of who their child would be and what she’d become in America, where most days anything still seemed possible. For months they licked their wounds. Then they got an attorney, built a kickass website and Facebook page to show off their fabulous life, and joined the digital Wild West of private baby hunting.

  That’s when things got weird.

  There were the financial scammers. The Slavic woman who used to run a day spa, soothingly named Russian Roulette, but was now a bounty hunter and obviously couldn’t work in such a dangerous field while pregnant with their baby. Or the emotional flashers who took up an hour of their time on the phone, normal sounding at first until they started talking about being a sex slave to grandpa or hung by meat hooks in a barn, and abruptly ended the call. The emails from teens across Asia whose parents hated them. Calls from Uganda in the middle of the night. And just when it seemed there wasn’t an honest woman in the world, when nobody was who she said she was and their sense of reality was coming unhinged and the only thing left was to fulfill Ruth Rosenblum’s dream and jerk off in a cup and go all Handmaid’s Tale on a surrogate, right then an email popped up on their website from a Marisol with a 281 number:

  hey im 39 weeks u guys look nice.

  i have 2 girls

  i cant keep this baby. OK call me if u want

  They painted on their smiles again and gave “Marisol” a call. She was twenty-two, friendly, calm given the circumstances, with huge dark eyes and lustrous hair—they couldn’t help but notice—and a sane mom who fired off legit questions when she joined their Skypes. She seemed like the real not-crazy deal for more than one conversation. The paperwork checked out with the lawyer. Julian and Philip wondered, one last time, if they could let the bud of trust open and grow. They lowered their shields. Which was why Julian was stricken mute, sitting in the rental car in Bonnie’s driveway a week later, as he read and reread Marisol’s cold-feet text. They never learned. Childless fools who flew to Texas for nothing.

  “Jay?” Philip whispered beside him. “We’ve got company.”

  Bonnie knocked on the window, bending down inches from his head. She was blond as ever in her late sixties, with her hair blown out and full face on. “Jules!” she called through the window. “What’re y’all doing? Come on in!”

  They hugged and followed her inside as she chattered. Julian glanced around the house. Someth
ing was different. He used to love coming to Bonnie’s as a boy. Her sons were in high school and never around, and the place was like an empty castle where he could slide in his socks or tumble on the carpet while Bonnie and his mom gabbed. When he came home from college, after Bonnie’s husband left, she had redecorated—a Laura Ashley detonation that left no surface un-floraled. Now he scanned the living room, saw the couch, and put his finger on the change. “Your Beanie Babies,” he said.

  “Don’t y’all make fun,” Bonnie drawled. She hurried to the couch and grabbed a Beanie bear and elephant off the top edge, dropping them in a cardboard box on the floor. The past few times they were there, maybe a hundred Beanies covered the tops of the couch and armchairs, the mantel, an army of plush watchers arrayed around the room. They were gone. “You boys were laughing at my Babies on your last visit.”

  “No!” Philip protested.

  “But I’ve been meaning to put them away, and y’all coming down was the kick in the pants I needed. After the divorce, I liked waking up to something smiling at me when I came out in the morning. But now with Jeff spending the night—I roll over and there he is. Enough about me.” She clapped her hands. “Tell me about the bay-by!”

  Julian sighed. They sat down at the granite island in the kitchen and spilled the tea, beginning with Marisol’s text and rehashing the whole two-plus years they’d been trying. In the middle, Bonnie started fussing around in the kitchen. “Go on,” she said gravely, “I’m listening.” She set a bowl of Cheez-Its on the island, poured three Diet Cokes, and pulled out a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from the pantry. She splashed it over their drinks. They didn’t toast. Julian and Philip were crying by then. “Well,” she said at a lull in the story, “your birth mama might text any minute now. I can’t believe this is the end.”