For our protection, Ramon and I only had each other.
“I’m on Myspace,” Katrina said. Myspace. I forgot that was even still a thing. “Trina,” she said. “No one ever calls me Katrina.”
“Oh, Trina.” We’d been searching under the wrong name. “Thank you so much for calling us. We will find you.”
_______
I was ready with my laptop on the coffee table when Ramon came in from his run, smelling of dried leaves and sweat. He sat next to me on the couch, breathing hard.
There she was! And she was pretty. Dark hair and green eyes. And there were her gorgeous children. Gorgeous children who might look like the child who could become our child.
“Why didn’t we do this earlier?” I pointed to the child on the screen. “Gamble on the place where you are guaranteed to be a parent.”
“I tried,” Ramon began, but he stopped.
I paused and looked up at him now and saw him in Michelle’s gazebo, weeping. The fathers, he had said.
Flipping through the images on Katrina’s page, we came across photos we assumed were of her daughter, and the grandchild, and then some animated flowers spilling out from between animated spread legs, a lot of mermaids and fairies, and then a block of text that said: SS. White Girls Only.
“Whoa.” Ramon touched my shoulder.
“What?” I shot three images ahead, to a photo of a kid flipping the bird at the camera.
“Go back,” Ramon said.
I closed my eyes. I could feel the tears escaping from under the lids, so I closed them tighter. “No.” I moved ahead, confronted now by photos of heavily tattooed men with shaved heads, one with a swastika on his bicep.
Ramon edged the laptop toward him with the tips of his tapered fingers and flipped back several images. Of course it was there again, in that special font reserved for all things Hitler: SS. White Girls Only.
“Who cares?” I said. I’d spent days on the phone with this woman. I haven’t felt this kind of connection with anyone else I’ve spoken to, she’d told me. I had been silent, but it had been a while for me as well to talk to someone without interruption. With new hope. “It doesn’t matter. Nurture over nature, right?”
“We have to deal with these people.” Ramon stood up. “They are going to be in our lives, remember? Open adoption.”
“It’s always you seeing the negative! It’s nurture over nature,” I said. “All the research says so.”
“Jesse,” Ramon said. Now he bent down and held my wrists. “What is the positive here? She’s forty years old. We want someone young and healthy and who isn’t a fascist.”
“But she chose us!” I was crying; I couldn’t stop it. And forty, it was only six months from now. “That could be anything. People put stuff online without knowing what it means all the time. She might not even know what it means.”
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
Though 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 for 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
Another 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.
The Mothers: A Novel Page 21
