The Mothers: A Novel

by Jennifer Gilmore

  The birthmothers have only been women.

  The door was closed.

  “You just don’t know,” Ramon said when I told him. He looked up from his computer. “Maybe she had a really messed-up scanner.”

  “Maybe,” I provisionally agreed. But by his impulse to mollify I realized: he knew too.

  He turned back to his work. “Why do they all keep telling us the babies will be here for spring? What,” Ramon asked, “is it with springtime?”

  _______

  The next morning a call came in from the agency.

  “Hi,” Crystal said. “So I’m not sure if Heather told you yet, but she lost her babies in the night. She left a message on the office machine. I’m just calling to let you know. Sad.”

  I laughed. I put down my pen.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is hard. For many prospective adoptive parents, matching takes a while.”

  God forbid she said adoptive mothers. If she used the word mother on us, what would we women do? Start a riot so big and angry that no amount of tear gas, Tasers, or armored vehicles could hold it back? “You know she didn’t, like, lose two babies in the middle of the night, right?”

  “Not likely, no.” Crystal sighed.

  “So it was a scam then, right?”

  “Yes, it appears to have been. Though a scam tends to mean you gave her money, which you didn’t, thankfully. But I am flagging her profile.”

  The red flagging of the red flag. “I can’t help but wonder if all of these aren’t scams. We haven’t talked to one viable birthmother.”

  “It’s usually one in, say, thirty that’s not real. But with the economy as it is, we have seen a rise in them.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “Very interesting,” I said. “Okay, thanks for letting me know, Crystal.”

  Then she assured me that despite these few bad dates there would ultimately be a match, and that while we were having all these unusually crazy experiences, when we did get our match, when we found the right birthmother, it would all make sense. And this, Crystal had said, would all disappear, not unlike childbirth.

  Childbirth?

  The pain of childbirth, Crystal had told me.

  I walked the five steps into the dining room, where Ramon was working or playing his hedgehog mouse game or playing billiards or poker or whatever the hell Ramon had been doing. “It was a scam,” I said.

  He was silent.

  “That was Crystal. Well, we knew it probably was.” I thought to touch his shoulder but did not. “We knew.”

  There was a long sigh. “Seriously?” Ramon looked up, his fingers still poised over the keyboard. “When is the part that is mutually beneficial? The altruism part. The goddamn adoption part. Because this is ridiculous. Who does that? It’s like preying on the elderly.”

  “Thanks.” I thought, If I get a child right this minute, when that child is my age, if I am still alive, I will be just about eighty. Just about.

  “You know what I meant.”

  I went to check my e-mail, trying to get far away from this moment, a trick that I can only say I have learned from growing up a girl.

  Among my accumulation of morning e-mails there was one from that friend who consistently sent out mass messages about dogs.

  I clicked on the link and, as always, there was a dog in need. This one, a beautiful gray pit bull with a creamy white chest, maybe eight months old, had been found chained to the Williamsburg Bridge during the snowstorm the night Heather called. Who would do that? Who would leave a beautiful, helpless animal that way? I tried not to think about Harriet’s ever leaving us. I started sobbing for the dog, abandoned and freezing, all alone on the bridge. What did the world look like to him now? I thought.

  Who would do such a thing?

  _______

  After several hours, I left my office/closet and went to the kitchen to make a sandwich. Ramon and Harriet were on a walk, and while they were out, I noticed that the daisies Ramon had gotten me on the way home from the restaurant two nights previously, delicate as wildflowers, had drunk up much of the vase’s water and perked up. I was about to trim their stems and add more water when my phone rang. Katrina. I had removed her icon but I had not expelled her from my phone book altogether, and now I made out her name through the fractured face and leaking ink. It had been well over a month since we’d spoken, and I didn’t know if she was pregnant, or if she was ever pregnant. I didn’t know if she was looking for a friend or for money, and I didn’t know if she was a Nazi, and still? I was excited.

  Because, I thought, Katrina from Joshua Tree might be our birthmother. Because she might hold what we want like a cloud holds the rain. Because perhaps she had her pregnancy confirmation and had talked to other prospective adoptive parents, from many agencies, but she had still decided we were perfect, and, because she lives across the country, we will send photos and letters as our child grows and we will not have to deal with the host of Aryan Nation boyfriends she courts.

  “Hello?” I answered in that breathless way I will never be

  able to control. I grabbed a pen and turned a bank envelope blank side up.

  No one said anything but I could hear movement in the background.

  “Hello?” I said. “Trina? Are you there?”

  Still there was no answer, but I could hear her speaking. Oh, that looks cute, she said. There was murmuring, and then the sharp knifelike sound of a hanger moving along a rack, the ruffle of clothing, the smack of plastic hangers hitting other plastic hangers. Let me see, I heard Katrina say. Turn around, she said.

  I sat down on the couch, where I could see that on the fire escape, the snow was still piled high.

  Cassie, that tank top is so cute! I like the way it hits you just here at the waist. Right here, she said, and there was again the sound of movement. I knew Katrina was touching her daughter at the hip. Come on, let me see. We should get that one.

  I lay back on the couch and looked up at the bowed ceiling. I held my breath. I couldn’t hang up.

  Oh, do you see those boots there? Do you want to try them on?

  Something was said that I could not catch, and then I heard Trina’s voice again. Oh, that is nice. Go try that on, honey.

  Then there was a voice from a distance. Mom? It was farther away than Trina’s voice but I could hear it clearly; I could hear its youth. Do you think this is too small?, the voice, the voice of a teenager, said. Mom?

  I stood up, cradled the phone between my neck and shoulder, and pulled a daisy, dripping with water, from the vase on the mantel. I watched my thumb snap the bloom from the stem. I pulled another and flicked it off. And then another.

  There was a short silence, and I pictured Katrina’s daughter spinning around for her mother. Also there is my own mother turning me by the shoulders in front of the full-length mirror in

  Garfinckel’s, where I was almost born, in the coat department. There was a spot there that marked that moment. Then the spot was gone. That department store is gone now too, but my mother’s chin hooks over my shoulder, and she’s smiling. Look at you, my mother says, all grown up.

  I flicked the head off another daisy and watched it—the face of the sun—fall to the couch, join the small accumulation of the heads of all the little daisies.

  What do you think? the girl’s voice said now. Mom, she said. Do you think I look pretty?

  ____

  Part 4

  FLYING

  23

  __

  February 2011

  Still it waged on, the saga of the birthmothers. I knew they were not all bad people; I knew that the ones who were pregnant, who truly were birthmothers, were just doing what they could. And yet, I could not help but think, as we hurtled toward Hannah’s due date, toward spring, about all the babies that might have been: soon time would move through their arrivals as they passed into the arms of other mothers.

  It defies storytelling, waiting. We think if there is a beginning, surely there is an end. That is t
he way a story works. The end of this story can only be the end of waiting. And yet we were still waiting for the birthmothers, for our birthmother; she was as invisible to us as the future.

  At the end of January Anita had e-mailed that their baby had arrived. It had been hard, she wrote, as there had been a moment when they thought it would not happen. The birthmother disappeared. We had a room filled with baby things. A changing table. A Diaper Genie. A hanging mobile. Paula took leave from work, Anita wrote, but we could not find the birthmother. It turned out she had given birth and the birth grandmother stepped in and took the child. And then a month after she was born, they got a call . . . The point is, Anita wrote, we thought it was over and it was so awful, I couldn’t even write to you. And now? Now. It really is just all behind us now. I hardly remember a bit of it.

  Attached was a photo, the three of them in front of a picture window. I couldn’t help myself, still I looked at real estate—the elegant view of their vast backyard.

  “Ramon!” I called into the dining room. “Look!”

  I heard him sigh. For a moment there was no movement, and then there was the sound of his chair against the floor, his feet walking.

  “What?” He stood at my office/closet door.

  I pointed to the photo of the child on an unmade bed swaddled in a muslin cloth printed with swinging monkeys. A puppy sniffed at her ear.

  Babies and puppies. What’s not to love?

  He laughed.

  “This is good,” I said to Ramon, but I still wondered just whom it was good for.

  He nodded. “I know.” His chin was hooked over my shoulder. “Not everything has to end in tears, does it?”

  I laughed. Because of course, I was crying, but not all tears are sad ones.

  _______

  Not long after, a young woman named Jordi began to e-mail our account. Like me, she was a student of history, she wrote. Still in college, she had big dreams of academia (which I did not put her off of), and her boyfriend, an artist, like Ramon seemed to be, had big dreams too. Too big, Jordi wrote, to have a baby now. You two, she said, are a perfect match, LOL.

  When I first received the e-mail—again the beat beat of my heart, indication now of the conflation of excitement and fear—I remembered that couple on the film, the young and beautiful couple who had chosen the parents for their child based on the prospective father’s interest in music. And so every time I wrote Jordi about what I’d cooked that day, about my students, my own studies, what I was reading, I tried to decipher her own sets of likes and dislikes, as if I were cracking code.

  Jordi wrote back that she would like to be more brave with food. I’d like to be braver in general, she wrote, and she had me. You are brave! I responded, and very generous, too, and she replied with a smiley face and updates on the papers she was writing and how she wished she could cook. I sent recipes.

  Eventually Jordi told me her own story of being adopted, and I in turn explained how Ramon and I were a little gun-shy, as we’d had several people lie to us in our most raw and tender moments. My exchange with Jordi grew over the weeks to a daily correspondence, nearly fifty e-mails. We made several distinct plans to speak on the phone, but when I would call at the designated time, I would get her cheery voice mail. I ignored this issue, understanding Jordi to be shy, bookish even, someone who preferred writing, which I understood, believing in our forged link.

  Then one day, Jordi decided she wanted to meet. I called Crystal, who told me that she did not yet have Jordi’s paperwork, but if we wanted to take the risk we should go ahead.

  There are a few other families I am choosing from, and I want to be sure, Jordi wrote, and so Ramon and I felt compelled. That day Ramon and I drove to meet Jordi in the Garden State Plaza in New Jersey. We were stopped in traffic at the George Washington Bridge. I thought of what Jordi would look like. My pale skin is so burned today!, she wrote in an e-mail, which only now made me realize both that she was white and that she felt it important to let me know this.

  Eventually traffic abated, and while we thought we might have trouble finding this mall, we didn’t, because it was nearly as big as the island of Capri, and instead we couldn’t find the restaurant Jordi and I were set to meet in. Soon, we parked in a lot bigger than an airport, and Ramon, who had spent about as much time in malls as I had spent on the shores of Italy before meeting him, staggered into the massive building to kill time.

  It was three thirty or so and I was the sole person in the restaurant. I sat in a booth and watched the teenagers pass by, impossibly young girls, their thin arms and legs tan and exposed, wrists wrapped in bracelets. There was a distinct smell of something foul covered over as I waited, staring at the menu and rubbing my thumbnail along the polyester tablecloth.

  An hour after we were set to meet she entered the restaurant, and I knew it was her because her eyes searched for me. She was white. She didn’t look particularly pregnant, but she was heavy enough that it was difficult to discern. She sat down across from me and I tried to ease the awkwardness by giving her some Italian face creams and telling her how wonderful it was to meet her.

  “I’m starving,” she said.

  “Order something,” I said. “Please.”

  She ordered a burger, very well done, and I ordered chicken soup. When the food arrived I picked a fry off her plate without thinking; perhaps I was trying to show her how comfortable I was with her, and with this fraught situation.

  “Tell me everything.” I chewed on her fry.

  Her iPhone rang (How can she afford an iPhone? I thought, looking at my banged-up, cracked phone) and she took the call. Then she hung up and, after several failed tries to many different pizzerias, she ordered a large pie for her mother, who was apparently at home.

  “Sorry.” Again she picked up her burger.

  “How open do you want your relationship with the adoptive parents to be?” I asked.

  Jordi shrugged. “I’ll figure that out later,” she said. “I’m talking to two other families. One keeps drunk-texting me that they want a girl. They want a white baby, which this is.”

  I expected her to look at her stomach but she didn’t. I had been where those families were sitting—I sat there now, in fact, in a not-so-comfortable chair—and I didn’t believe anyone would text a birthmother, drunk or not, to demand a girl baby. “When are you due?” I asked, realizing that one of the few details Jordi did not know about us was the many boxes we’d checked.

  “Sometime in June,” said Jordi.

  “Can I ask what made you decide, so unselfishly, on open adoption?” As I posed this question, only then did it arrive, again, knowledge, the sort I already held: She can’t have made a decision. If she is actually pregnant, she is not yet pregnant enough to feel what this will mean.

  She shrugged again. “I’m adopted too? Like I told you, my boyfriend and I have big dreams. A baby doesn’t fit into them?”

  I nodded. “I understand,” I said. “I hope we can continue talking.”

  She nodded back, looking away.

  _______

  After I paid the bill and Jordi wandered away and into JCPenney, I called Ramon and he pulled the car around.

  “You’ve been in the car?” I got in and slammed the door shut.

  “It’s more comfortable here,” he said. “That place is horrible.”

  Following a long silence, he asked, “Are you going to tell me about it?”

  “I’m not sure what just happened. She didn’t sound like the person writing all those e-mails. But I’m wondering if that’s not my issue. I mean, maybe she is.”

  We drove onto Route 17, and then there was more traffic at the bridge.

  “I just don’t know,” I said.

  I conjured Jordi leaving the mall and heading to her doctor’s, faxing the paperwork immediately, so moved was she by me and my creams and my comfort in sharing. I thought of riding my bike with my about-to-be husband onto the George Washington Bridge, the brilliant skyline before us, the
thrilling feeling of having ridden so far uptown. I didn’t know yet that my vertigo would not allow me to make it across.

  A few days passed and then Crystal told me the paperwork had still not been sent in, and so I wrote Jordi that we’d need her paperwork to go forward. Her e-mails ceased.

  After a week or so of silence between us, a time where I parsed each past e-mail, searching for clues, analyzing emoticons, I got a text from Jordi that she’d been to the doctor. It was so good!, the text said. We know what it is! I thought of Heather, those blurry birds peering out from the unfocused ultrasound, and I felt I was being played. I tried to imagine myself in Jordi’s situation. Would I not just tell me the sex of the child? Would I not write me a more feeling e-mail? If Jordi was like me then she most certainly would.

  But she was not like me and so she did not write me a more feeling e-mail. And I did not write her. She texted me again this time with the question, Do you want to know what your baby is? Again I did not respond. Another text came in several hours later. Don’t you want to know the sex? When I did not respond to this, Jordi texted me: It’s a girl! She offered this at least ten times a day for a week: It’s a girl! Again and again: It’s a girl! A girl! A girl!

  “This is just torture,” Ramon said. “Can’t we silence your phone?”

  “We can,” I said. “But it’s all still there.”

  This, Crystal told me, when I’d reported in, was an emotional scam.

  “Emotional?” I said.

  “It doesn’t seem like she wanted anything but to talk to you and keep your attention.”

  “That she got,” I said. “Why did she keep telling us it was a girl?”

  Crystal paused. “Everyone wants a little girl.”

  Do they? I thought. Because little girls do, one day, turn into women. And women want so much. “How do I make this stop then?”