When You Least Expect It

by Whitney Gaskell

  “Come on in,” Candace said, turning to start down the short hallway. “We’re all in the living room.”

  “Who’s here?” Lainey asked, her heart sinking. She’d noticed the cars parked at the curb, but had hoped they belonged to one of the other houses. The street was mostly made up of duplexes, all tightly squeezed in on too-small lots, each with only a single driveway.

  “Al, of course, and his friend Richie.” Al was Candace’s live-in boyfriend, and as he was a complete loser, he had a lot in common with every other boyfriend she’d ever had. He sponged off Candace for every dime he could get out of her. Candace wasn’t wealthy, but she did have a steady job at the Florida Department of Transportation that she’d managed to keep despite her drinking problem.

  Lainey followed her mother down the hall, into the tiny, cramped living room. The house was a mess, littered with empty soda cans and discarded chip bags. There was a funky odor, too. A mixture of unwashed male and stale beer. Al was stretched out on a recliner, drinking a can of Budweiser. He had greasy hair that was prematurely gray and a scrawny build. His friend, who was the size of a baby whale, was lounging on the brown sofa, his feet propped up on the coffee table. They were both absorbed in the Gators game blaring on the television.

  “Hey, girl,” Al said. “This is Richie. This is Candace’s kid, Lainey.”

  “Hey there,” Richie said, leering at Lainey in a way that he obviously meant to be sexy. Lainey rolled her eyes. As if. Richie’s thick curly hair had receded back to display a shiny forehead, and he’d cut his sideburns into muttonchops. Behind his thick glasses, he had small, piggy eyes. She was fairly sure that he was the source of the unpleasant smell.

  “You want something to drink? A beer or something?” Candace said, passing through the living room, into the kitchen. Lainey followed her, mostly wanting to get away from Richie, who was now looking at her like she was a lollipop he’d like to cram into his mouth.

  “No. Just some water,” Lainey said.

  “What’s this about you and Trav?” Candace asked. She stuck a smudged glass under the tap and, once it was full, passed it to Lainey.

  “I’m pregnant,” Lainey said.

  Candace stared at her and, for a moment, looked surprisingly sober. Then she shook her head, sighed, and sipped from a glass containing a bright yellow liquid. Gin and diet Mountain Dew—her mother’s favorite cocktail. Actually, this was a good sign, Lainey thought. She only really had to worry when her mother switched to whiskey, which she drank straight.

  “I thought you were smarter than that,” Candace said.

  “You’re one to talk,” Lainey said. Her mother had given birth to Lainey when she was sixteen, four years younger than Lainey was now.

  “That’s why you should know better,” Candace retorted.

  “I’m not keeping it,” Lainey said.

  “Make Trav pay for it,” Candace said immediately.

  “I’m going to have it. I’m just not going to keep it. I’m putting it up for adoption,” Lainey said.

  Candace, who had been in the middle of lighting a cigarette, stopped and peered at Lainey. “You are?”

  “Why does everyone find that so hard to believe?”

  “You’re just not the type, I guess,” Candace said. She inhaled deeply on the cigarette and then, without removing it from her mouth, blew the smoke out one corner of her mouth.

  “Obviously I am,” Lainey said. She waved away the smoke. “And can you please not smoke around me? I am pregnant, after all.”

  Candace shrugged and continued to puff on her cigarette. “So that’s why Trav kicked you out?”

  “Yep. Well, that, and the fact that he’s a dick.”

  “Trav’s not so bad. Didn’t he buy you that nice handbag?”

  “Yeah, he’s a real prince. So can I stay here for a few nights?”

  Candace shrugged. “We don’t have any room. If you haven’t noticed, this isn’t exactly Mar-a-Lago. Richie’s got all of his stuff stored in the second bedroom. You can’t even open the door to get in there.”

  “I can sleep on the sofa.”

  “Richie’s got the sofa,” Candace said. “He’s staying here for a while.”

  “Since when?” Lainey demanded.

  “Since he lost his job and couldn’t pay his rent,” Candace said.

  “Now it’s not just Al sponging off you, but his friends, too?” Lainey asked, her eyebrows arched. Her mother just shrugged. “Jesus, Mom, I’m pregnant and I’ve got nowhere to stay. Shouldn’t your daughter come before your scumbag boyfriend’s freeloading friends?”

  “Watch your mouth, little girl,” Al said as he ambled into the kitchen, heading straight for the refrigerator. He pulled out two beers.

  “Don’t tell me what to do, asshole,” Lainey said. She could feel her temper flaring again.

  “I won’t be insulted in my own house,” Al said. He puffed his thin chest out.

  “It’s not your house, it’s hers.” Lainey thrust a chin in Candace’s direction. “So I’ll speak to and about you however I fucking please.”

  Al looked at Candace, who said, “Cut it out, Lainey.”

  Lainey laughed without humor. “That’s right. Take his side. You always do. Doesn’t even matter who the guy is, it’s always the same.”

  “Hey, buddy, you getting me a beer or what?” Richie shouted from the living room.

  Al gave Lainey one last triumphant look and shuffled back out of the kitchen.

  “Why do you put up with him?” Lainey demanded. “He’s disgusting.”

  Candace didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. Lainey knew why. Her mother would always do whatever it took to keep a man, no matter how greasy and worthless he was.

  She’s pathetic, Lainey thought as she felt something inside of her harden. And there’s not a chance in hell I’m ever going to end up like her.

  “That’s it, then? You’re going to let that fat piece of shit stay here instead of me?” Lainey said.

  “I just can’t kick him out without notice.”

  “Fine.” Lainey slammed her glass of water down on the kitchen table. “I’m leaving.”

  She turned and marched back through the living room, ignoring the two men as she passed and headed to the front door.

  “You don’t have to go off in a huff. We’ll figure something out,” Candace said, trailing behind her.

  “No, thanks.” Lainey threw open the door and marched out into the warm evening, letting the screen door slam behind her. She’d go to Flaca’s for the night. And tomorrow she had an appointment with the adoption lawyer.

  It’s all going to work out fine, Lainey told herself. It almost always did.

  Four

  INDIA

  I stared at a tiny silver cell phone resting on the kitchen table, willing it to ring.

  “Staring at it isn’t going to make it ring,” Jeremy said. We were sitting at the kitchen table, still wearing our pajamas. Jeremy was reading the paper while devouring his morning bowl of Frosted Mini-Wheats.

  “I know,” I said, still not taking my eyes off the phone.

  The cell phone was the infamous birth-mother phone. It was standard for every adoptive couple to have one, a phone dedicated to a single purpose: for prospective birth mothers to call. Mike Jankowski had told us to always keep it charged, turned on, and nearby, because you never know when a birth mother will see your profile and decide to make the first tentative contact. Birth mothers don’t leave messages, Mike had warned us, so we had to be prepared to take the call whenever it came.

  While I knew Jeremy was technically right—the phone wasn’t any more likely to ring while I stared at it—I had to believe we’d get a call soon. After all, we had the most kick-ass parenting profile out there. I knew—I’d become semi-obsessed with studying other couples’ ads posted on adoption websites.

  Our profile was elegant and simple, but warm at the same time. Between my photos and Jeremy’s text (which I’d had to rewrite e
xtensively), we looked and sounded like something out of a magazine. I’d even managed to make Otis look noble by snapping a shot of him when his head was lifted high and his ears were perked up. No one had to know that at that moment Jeremy was standing behind me, waving a cookie in the air.

  “Maybe we should name it,” Jeremy suggested.

  “You want to name our birth-mother phone?”

  “We could call it the Bat Phone,” he said.

  “I think the Fetus Phone would be more appropriate.”

  “The Bun-in-the-Oven Hotline?”

  “Too much of a mouthful. How about the Stork Cell?”

  “That sounds like a prison for wayward birds,” Jeremy said.

  We grinned at each other. And just then, a phone rang. Jeremy and I both stared at the cell phone in wonder. But then I realized it wasn’t ringing; the house phone was. I sighed and picked up.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, India, it’s Mike Jankowski.”

  “Hi, Mike. Have any pregnant women desperate to give us their baby hanging around?”

  “As a matter of fact, I happen to have one sitting here in my office who wants to talk to you.”

  “Are you serious? I was kidding!”

  “I wasn’t. How fast can you and Jeremy get here?” Mike asked.

  I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. Jeremy frowned. “Are you okay?” he mouthed at me.

  “India?” Mike asked. “Are you still there?”

  I cleared my throat and attempted to regain my composure. “I’m here. We’ll be there in half an hour.”

  Jeremy and I broke speed records for dressing (both of us), putting on makeup (me), and letting Otis out before he peed on the bedroom rug again (Jeremy). Once Otis was back in the house, I threw some kibble in his dish, and Jeremy and I sprinted for the car.

  “I’ll drive,” Jeremy said.

  “Let me,” I countered.

  “No way. I hate it when you drive.”

  “You have control issues,” I said. “Do me a favor, and try to hide that from the birth mother. She’s not going to want to hand over her baby to a control freak.” I attempted to pry the car keys out of his hand.

  Jeremy tightened his grip on the keys. “Seriously? You think I’m the control freak in this scenario?”

  “Okay, fine, you drive. But hurry!”

  On the way to the law office, Jeremy asked me questions I didn’t have the answers to.

  “What’s her name?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “How old is she?”

  “I don’t know. Would that make a difference?”

  “Maybe,” Jeremy said. “What if she was one of those freakishly old women who get pregnant in their sixties? That would be weird, wouldn’t it?”

  “I highly doubt she’s sixty,” I said. My chest was so tight with anxiety it was hard to breathe. I felt the urge to roll the window down and stick my head out into the wind, the way Otis does when he rides in the car, but suppressed it. I didn’t want to mess up my hair.

  “It’s possible, though,” Jeremy said.

  “No. It’s not,” I said. “Women in their sixties don’t get pregnant by accident. They have fertility treatments. They do IVF. They use donor eggs. As we’re all too aware of, it’s a long, expensive, and frequently unpleasant process. A woman who’s gone through all of that isn’t likely to give up her baby at the end of it.”

  Jeremy considered this. “Maybe you’re right,” he conceded. Then he brightened. “Unless—just hear me out—unless her husband dropped dead of a heart attack, and she decided she was too old to raise the baby on her own!”

  “Can we not talk about this right now?”

  “Sure. Whatever.” Jeremy was quiet for a few minutes. “You know what else would be weird? If the birth mother was pregnant with twins and wanted to adopt the babies out to two separate families. So we’d have one baby, and somewhere out there would be its identical twin. They’d grow up without ever knowing each other, and then one day, they’d bump into each other—at the grocery store, or gas station—and think they were meeting their clone. Wouldn’t that be freaky?”

  “The Parent Trap,” I said.

  “What?”

  “It was a movie. Hayley Mills starred in it, playing twin sisters. The parents divorced when the girls were babies. One grew up in Boston with the mother, the other in California with the father, and they never knew about each other. Then the girls ended up at the same summer camp. Instead of being devastated by the discovery that their parents had been lying to them for thirteen years and developing an eating disorder or a drug problem like any self-respecting teenager would, the two Hayleys spend the rest of the movie trying to get their parents back together. I can’t believe you’ve never seen it. It’s a classic.”

  “Chick flick,” Jeremy said dismissively. “It would be way cooler if it turned out that one of the twins was recruited by the government to be an assassin. And then the other twin didn’t know anything about it until she was falsely accused of a murder her assassin twin had actually committed. That’s a movie I’d want to see.”

  “Honey?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m about two minutes away from asking Mike Jankowski if he does quickie divorces on the side.”

  “You might want to keep that to yourself. I have a feeling it wouldn’t go down so well with the birth mother,” Jeremy said.

  By the time we reached the lawyer’s downtown office, I could feel sweat dripping down my back. Between the drumroll of my heart and the sickly sensation in my stomach, I was feeling much like my sixteen-year-old self when out on a first date with Kevin Thorn. In fact, that was exactly what meeting with a birth mother was like—a nonsexual version of dating. We were checking her out, too, although we were the desperate ones, so our opinion didn’t matter as much. What she thought of us was far more important. In high school terms, she was the star football player who was heading to Harvard with a full sports scholarship, while we were the shy girl with the small breasts, thick glasses, and an intimate knowledge of Jane Austen’s collective works.

  The receptionist—moon-faced with a wall of eighties-era bangs hairsprayed into place—looked up when we entered the office. We’d been there several times before, but she never seemed to remember us.

  “India and Jeremy Halloway,” I reminded her. “We’re here to see Mike. He’s expecting us.”

  She didn’t smile—she never did, at least not that I had ever seen—but instead just punched a few buttons on her phone and said into her headset, “Mike? Mr. and Mrs. Halloway are here…. Okay.” She looked up at me. “He’ll be right out.”

  Jeremy took my hand and squeezed it. I squeezed it back. Were we really about to meet our baby? Well, not the actual baby, obviously. But the baby would be there in the room with us, even if he or she was out of sight.

  Don’t get your hopes up, don’t get your hopes up, I silently chanted. The birth mother may not like us. We may not be what she has in mind.

  Mike came out. He was wearing a blinding red Hawaiian shirt with big yellow flowers.

  “Hi there,” he said jovially, shaking Jeremy’s hand and giving me a half hug. “Let’s step into the conference room.”

  As we followed Mike back through the office, my heart started to pound again, and my stomach cramped with nerves. This is it, I thought. This is a moment I’ll never forget for the rest of my life.

  I hadn’t given a lot of thought to what our baby’s birth mother would look like. I was too consumed with fantasies inspired by innumerable BabyGap ads, featuring babies with big grins, round eyes, Nordic-knit hats. I knew this was ridiculous; life was not a BabyGap ad. And babies in South Florida rarely, if ever, wear Nordic-knit hats.

  When I did occasionally wonder about the birth mother, I pictured her as a fresh-faced schoolgirl who’d gotten knocked up by her seventeen-year-old boyfriend. She’d be frightened and tearful, and he’d be wearing a varsity letter jacket. I wasn’t even s
ure if kids still wore letter jackets these days; in fact, I was fairly certain they didn’t. Still, the picture stuck.

  But when Mike opened the door, the conference room was empty.

  “Did she leave?” I asked, unable to keep the disappointment tinged with despair out of my voice.

  “She’s waiting in my office,” Mike said. “I wanted to talk to you alone first, to prepare you before you meet her.”

  “Prepare us for what?” Jeremy said. “What’s wrong with her?”

  I was glad he said it, because although it sounded ungracious, it was exactly what I was wondering. What if there was something wrong with her?

  “Nothing,” Mike said soothingly. “But do you remember what I told you about how nearly every birth mother we deal with is in crisis?”

  Jeremy and I exchanged an alarmed look. I knew we were both picturing the same thing—a woman with a needle full of heroin stuck in her arm. Or popping Haldol while muttering about how the CIA was bugging her thoughts and looking around for a tube of tinfoil to make a hat out of.

  “Yes,” I said, trying to stay calm. “We remember.”

  “This woman is no different.”

  “How old is she?” I asked.

  “She’s twenty. And she’s in a difficult situation. I just want you to be prepared for that before you meet her.”

  “Mike, you’re pretty much freaking us out,” Jeremy said. “Just tell us what the issue is.”

  Mike nodded. “She’s homeless,” he said.

  “You mean she lives on the street?” I asked.

  Every news story I had ever read about homeless drug addicts flooded back to me. Suddenly, the sheer helplessness of my position terrified me. I wouldn’t just have to worry that the birth mother was taking her prenatal vitamins and eating plenty of green leafy vegetables. I’d have to also pray that the baby—my baby—wouldn’t be born addicted to crack.

  “Don’t you have any nice knocked-up teenage girls back there?” I blurted out. “I mean, I keep hearing about the terrible teen pregnancy problem we have in this country. Where are they all?”

  Mike and Jeremy looked at me, both startled. Mike cleared his throat.

  “I’m sorry. That was inappropriate. I’m just a little nervous,” I said.