The Mothers: A Novel

by Jennifer Gilmore

  I swallowed.

  “And to be honest, you never asked me. Anything. You would sort of pass judgment on me about everything, and I wanted to explain more deeply about my choices. I started to write you several times as well. But every time I did I still felt you looking down at me, like you’d be grading my letter. I thought in the end it would be better if I saw you. I knew I would be coming back soon, and I couldn’t even explain that to you.”

  I smiled crookedly. “I understand.” I likely would have been grading her letter. “I realize I didn’t give you a lot of opportunity. I’m sorry. That’s awful, how long you’ve been trying to talk to me.”

  We sat, silent, for a moment. I could hear the sounds of our family downstairs, Ramon’s and my mother’s laughter overlapping.

  “Do you have a name?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Lucy said. “I think so. Hannah. What do you think of Hannah?”

  Our grandmother’s name. Life is what happens, Grandma Hannah used to say, when you’re busy making other plans. “It’s lovely,” I said.

  “I looked it up,” Lucy said. “Hannah was the mother of the prophet Samuel. She was unable to have children, and so she prayed that if God gave her a son then she would give him up to be a priest.”

  “Are you giving her up to me?” I said brightly.

  “Are you a priest trainer?”

  “How did you guess? All this time hanging with Ramon’s mother has turned me into a priest trainer. There’s a lot I haven’t told you as well,” I said.

  Lucy began to laugh and then stopped, her smile fading. “Anyway, the name means ‘God has graced me.’”

  I laughed, very softly.

  “What?”

  “It sounds perfect,” I said. “It’s a perfect, beautiful name.” I took Lucy’s hand in both of mine. “I can’t wait to meet her.”

  _______

  The talking and laughing ceased when Lucy and I arrived again at the table.

  “Everything okay?” my father asked cheerily.

  “I see you, Dad,” I said. “Feeding Harriet.”

  “Her Royal Highness needs some food. She’s too skinny!”

  “Fine,” I said. “Whatever.”

  And then something unusual happened. My parents turned toward Lucy.

  “So,” my mother said. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “Do you have a job?”

  “Possibly,” Lucy said. “In New York. I’ve been talking to people at the Wildlife Conservation Society.”

  “Wonderful!” my parents said at the same time.

  “Something along those lines anyway,” she said.

  “That sounds good,” Ramon said. “You know who else lives in New York?”

  “I know,” Lucy said. “Why on earth else would I want to work for an animal conservation organization in New York City?”

  “You better figure all this out, honey,” my father said, slipping Harriet more chicken, totally poker-faced. “When are you due exactly?”

  “February twenty-sixth,” Lucy said. “To be exact.”

  “That was my grandmother’s birthday.” My father gazed away from the table dramatically.

  My mother looked at my sister. “Well, you better get cracking,” she said.

  I leaned back, watching everyone. And for the first time in a long time, the pressure was off.

  _______

  That night, after we finished dinner, and my father’s famous apple pie with cheddar, the way Grandma Hannah showed him how to serve it when he first met our mother, after listening to tales of Lucy’s travels, and after several glasses of wine, Ramon and Harriet and I went upstairs to bed. Harriet was reluctant to leave the living room should more food or more love be proffered, but Ramon swept her up and I watched her look out longingly as he carried her upstairs, cradled in his arms.

  He set her down at the end of my bed, where she stretched out. So much so that when I climbed into the tiny bed, I could not straighten my legs. I slid her up, parallel to me. I lifted up her ear leather: Grr, I said, and she licked the air.

  “Wow,” Ramon said from the other bed, set perpendicular to mine, when we were still, in the dark.

  Downpour. What a color. It made the room exceedingly dark, but for the streetlights shining through the spaces in between the slats of the blinds.

  “I must say, I was very surprised,” I said.

  “A bit of a shock for sure.” Ramon thumped his pillow.

  Here we go, I thought. He’s going under. “I was obviously upset, but I get upset when anyone I know is pregnant. You know? I don’t think it was necessarily particular to Lucy.”

  “But it is your sister.”

  “But because of that I also feel happy about it. I’m glad that she doesn’t have these struggles, you know?”

  “Absolutely,” Ramon said. “Look, every time someone else has a child or gets pregnant or whatever, I die a little. I do. And then I get resurrected or something. This took me a second to be happy again.”

  “Resurrected? How Catholic of you.”

  “Well.”

  The pillow was still beneath Ramon’s head, so I continued. “But look, we have everything ready. It could be quick, the adoption. We could have kids at the same time. Lucy and us. Our kids could be almost like siblings.” Of all the things I know, I know I am grateful for a sibling. I am grateful for my sister.

  “Especially if she ends up in New York,” Ramon said.

  I imagined it for a moment, Lucy finding a place in our neighborhood, walking the streets with her and Hannah, who would resemble us almost equally. If I were to take her out alone, a neighbor might ask me how I lost the baby weight so quickly.

  I was glad for Lucy’s child, and for the first time in a long while, an aspect of Ramon’s and my future had a face and a body and a name. Another generation peeked her head around the corner. Someone else would be there to sit at that dining room table, and listen—or decidedly not listen—and grow up there.

  Ramon rose out of his bed, a ghostly shape, a darker figure than the fuzzy darkness of the room.

  “Hi,” I said as he crawled into bed next to me.

  He moved in closer and placed his arm around me. He cupped Harriet’s head. Between them, I could feel two heartbeats. “Do you think it will happen?” I asked.

  He bristled. “Do I think what will happen?” he said, holding me close.

  “This,” I said.

  He didn’t pause. “I do,” he said. “I know it will.”

  Close together in my childhood twin bed, I could feel the “we” of our bodies. My family, I thought as the two of them fell to

  snoring.

  20

  __

  November 2010

  The first birthmother to call was Katrina. It was just before midnight on Thanksgiving.

  All that waiting, and when I saw the number coming in, I wasn’t prepared.

  “Ramon!” I shook him awake. “It’s a birthmother!”

  “Well answer it!” he said. “Before it goes to voice mail and we lose her.”

  “Hello?” I could not still the crazed hysteria in my voice.

  “Hi,” a voice said calmly. “I’m Katrina,” she said. “A birthmom. I found you online.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Thanks so much for calling.” I got out of bed and went into my office/closet for my pen and notebook.

  I sat down at my desk. “Hi,” I said, and before I could ask her what she liked about our “Dear Birthmother” letter, as I was trained to do (was it our many travels? our diverse community?), she began speaking.

  “Let me tell you about me,” she said. “Because I’ve done this before, and I know what a gift this is for a family. I’m forty. I’m a grandmother.”

  “Wow,” I again said. Forty, I wrote. Grandmother. “A child is a generous gift, absolutely.” A generous gift? One thinks of golf clubs. A trip to Paris. What gift could be more generous? “What can I tell you about Ramon an
d me?” I asked. “What would you like to know about us?”

  The agency told us not to ask for any information we could get from them directly, as it could be construed as pressure. This is what the agency can later tell us: what color she is, what color the father is, if she has been to the doctor, if she has taken drugs, if she is on drugs now, how old she is, if she has a job, if she has a mental illness or if anyone in her family has a mental illness, if anyone has a clubfoot or a cleft palate. How open she wants this adoption to be. Will she want to come for Thanksgiving, for instance? Like tonight. Where had she gone for Thanksgiving? Or will she only want photos? How open?

  Our offering of openness was our first and last names on our profiles. I’d spent countless hours fretting over students’ coming upon Ramon’s and my letter and profile along my Google trail of academic articles and disgruntled Rate My Professor reviews. But what was open, really? What would it look like? And feel like?

  “I want to know,” Katrina said, “why you want my baby. I know,” she said, “that I have what you want.”

  “I can tell you that we want to be parents.” I doodled in my notebook. Jagged stars. “Very much.” How desperate, I wondered, was it cool to appear?

  I pictured this faceless woman holding her stomach. We, I wrote. I. Each of the birthmothers is a “we.” There we were, our different lonely women’s bodies. But the birthmother one becomes an

  “I,” too.

  “I’m not selling my baby,” Katrina told me. “I’m not.”

  Which made me think, Is this person trying to sell me her baby?

  “I’ve got four kids. My youngest, Connor, is three. My oldest just had a baby of his own. But let me tell you something. It’s only with a daughter if you really know that baby is your grandchild. Do you know what I’m saying?”

  “I think I do,” I said.

  “How do I really know that baby is not some other boy’s?” she said. “Some shitty fuckup like the one my seventeen-year-old got knocked up with? I have five children. The last one—Davis—I gave him up two years ago. This will be number six. I see the light in that family’s eyes.” Katrina began to cry a little. “I see what they couldn’t have without me, and I am happy that I made the decision. It was two weeks before the birth and my boyfriend left. What was I supposed to do? One minute you’re preparing for a kid, and then the next? Well.”

  “I hear you.” I pictured the CHILD PROOFING! sign at the gynecologist’s office. They would have had a field day in here.

  “I have a three-year-old at home, and a girl, Cassie, and even though I told my boyfriend, ‘You do so much as come on my knees I’ll get pregnant,’ he didn’t listen, and so here I am.”

  “Here we are,” I said. “How lucky.”

  “But this time I want to be there. Last time, the decisions were made for me. I’d checked out. Emotionally I mean. But not this time. I’m talking to a lot of people. I’m going to do it right this time,” she said.

  “Of course,” I said. “We want to be here in whatever way makes you most comfortable.”

  “In April,” Katrina said. “I’m going to do it right.”

  “You’re due in April?”

  “The twenty-second.”

  “I understand,” I said. “You have to be sure you get what you need. We want as open a relationship as you want to have. Whatever you need.”

  “I need to bond with my baby.” Katrina was crying harder now. “I need to have that time in the hospital to just see him again. Last time I didn’t even want to hold him.”

  “That must have been so hard. I’m sorry for what you’ve been through.” I couldn’t think about what that would be like. Holding a baby. After.

  “I need to get the hell out of this trailer,” Katrina told me.

  I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to answer this with reassurance of some kind. I didn’t know if she was asking me for help moving and I didn’t know if that was right or wrong. I had lost sight of a lot of things.

  “I know I am a good woman,” she said. “I know what I am on the outside. I know what people think, all the tattoos. The bad boys. But that’s not necessarily me on the inside. I read a lot of books. Self-help books and books about God. I am going through a spiritual change and I know who I am now. On the inside? I have a heart as big as a cloud. And also? Jesse? I have a heartbeat that isn’t just my own.”

  _______

  When I hung up with Katrina, I climbed back into bed next to Ramon. I lay on my back looking up at the ceiling, convex, as if the pressed tin were a bowl that held the weather.

  “Do you want to know about the conversation?” I asked my husband.

  “Sure, though I heard the whole thing. You were great.” He patted my leg, anticipating my next question. It seemed like he might want to wait until morning to discuss this, which was an abomination as far as I was concerned. Here was progress. I thought of Carmen, the perfect birthmother who never called, and how now we were moving forward. For one split second I felt time stop. I imagined going up to Fishkill next year, holding our own baby. It was hard, I’d say, rocking her in my arms, kissing at her ear, but so worth it! I imagined Lucy and I leaning on two strollers, moving through the neighborhood we grew up in, smiling at the neighbors whose houses we once ding-dong-ditched, whose gardens we once plucked lily of the valley and lilacs from.

  “She’s forty and a grandmother. But it’s her second adoption. I know she’ll go through with it. That’s what the agency said, remember?” I said to Ramon.

  “Remember what?”

  “The best birthmothers know how hard it is to parent.” I would be lying if I said I didn’t picture parenting as finally peaceful, mother and infant together on a giant bed, two spoons. But I do know—my head does, anyway—that an infant doesn’t quiet from only having been wanted.

  Ramon was silent. “Well,” he said.

  “She seems smart.” I sighed. “She said she had a heart as big as a cloud.” I smiled in the dark. Outside I could hear the tires of a bus singing down Smith Street. Several people were laughing out front, and then a car door slammed. Families home from dinner, far away. Families, I thought, and I did not feel like the word would make me cry. “I like that expression.”

  April, I thought. Already I could smell spring.

  _______

  The agency was closed for Thanksgiving weekend, and Katrina called several times in the next few days. Katrina and I talked—she did mostly—for hours on end. We talked about her children, about California, the ocean, the desert, about God. She told me she wore her heart on her sleeve, an uncomfortable place for a heart, she said, laughing, and she told me she was looking for a real connection with someone, though I was not sure then if she meant someone who would parent her child or just someone who would understand that she looked to the world like one person, but to herself she was someone different.

  My phone plan had one feature: I could talk to five select people for free. That weekend, I exchanged my mother’s cell (calling it amounted to listening to her trying to talk and drive, a terrifying, one-way conversation) with Katrina’s, using a flower for an icon. Even though it felt like an emoticon, which I would never use, and even though my phone had a nearly unreadable cracked face, I liked that this flower represented the birthmother. It felt like Katrina was growing something beautiful.

  On Saturday morning, Ramon and I looked for Katrina online. But we couldn’t find her. It was strange and wondrous for someone to leave no digital footprint, as if she had wings or was merely physical flesh, only the mother of a fetus that could one day grow to be our child if we simply answered the phone late at night and listened to her body talking. Her body: a green growing place. Her body: lodging for the tiny beat of a pulse, the pin-sized black spot, the finger curled at the mouth, a curved floating form attached by corded rope, tightly tethered. Finally, the birthmother.

  _______

  Katrina told me she lived in her trailer in the desert, in Joshua Tree, a place I consider ma
gical. The first time I went, after giving a paper at a conference in Los Angeles, I got my teaching job in Manhattan. The second time, when I was visiting a friend who loved extreme sports and had rented a house there, I found out I was pregnant. Even though the latter didn’t stick and the job was not tenure-track, that Katrina lived there was an intimation of magic.

  The desert was extraordinary to me with its blind white heat, the flowering beaver tail and prickly pear cacti nestled between rocks, the rock daisies blossoming out of scorched earth. I was as shocked by the desert as I had been by the New York skyline, the lights switching on at twilight across the water from Brooklyn. The desert was as breathtaking as stepping onto the surface of the moon, the sudden drop to freezing, the ceaseless howl of the coyote as its night soundtrack. As Katrina talked about her children, her boyfriends, her tiny-ass trailer, her good looks and young skin, I wondered how the desert had formed her, the way the city has formed me. Surely it makes you something, I thought as I imagined Katrina leaving her trailer while we talked, looking up at the stars—the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, the crescent moon suspended from an invisible string—her robe gathered at her throat, the silhouette of a Joshua tree at her side.

  “You know we look alike,” Katrina said. “I’m dark too. And like Ramon, I’ve got some hot Italian blood. There’s a lot of me to love, but we all look alike.”

  All of us? I thought. She had access to our information, the many happy pictures of Ramon and me smiling broadly while cooking with his cousins in Terracina, pictures of us seated around a massive bowl of pasta in his mother’s hot kitchen, us in profile looking out over the Hudson with Harriet, the changing leaves bursting into flames below.

  “Can you send a photo?” I asked timidly. No pressure! the agency told us at that session. The birthmother, they told us, that most fragile bird, might fly away. We don’t want them to change their minds, the agency said. We don’t want to hurt them, Crystal told us. Which made us realize that the agency was there mostly to protect the birthmothers.