Katherine’s hands rested at her sides to avoid her still-round abdomen. In each of her fantasies, she had had the baby, yawned and stretched as it was carried away by a smiling go-between, hopped up to put on her pre-pregnancy pants, and marched out of the hospital under sunshine, her hair bouncing on her shoulders. She had not counted on being exhausted and in bed, a room so dry her nostrils burned, or the obduracy of her body’s physical memory.
Stretch marks, she had read about and prepared for. But this—This, she had not looked into. This was disappointing.
She tried to sleep.
At gentle pressure on her arm, she awoke to Graham and a stranger with dark, spiked hair and unusually large eyes standing beside the bed.
“This is Thelma,” Graham monotoned. “From Happy Baby.”
Thelma extended a hand.
Katherine shook it and said, “Pleasure!” Graham winced behind his polite smile. Katherine fixed her blanket and pushed her hair away from her face. “The baby is available. Graham can show you the way.”
Thelma blinked and said, “Um.” She adjusted a clipboard pressed flat to her pelvis.
Katherine looked at Graham. He shrugged.
Thelma looked down at her clipboard and then at Katherine. “You did, um, initial the clause explaining the agency’s right to revise or terminate the agreement.”
Katherine’s throat spontaneously burned with vomit. She leaned over the side of the bed opposite of where Graham and Thelma stood and splattered it on the linoleum. She hovered there in case there was more to come, but that seemed to have taken care of it. She wiped her mouth with a tissue from the box on her nightstand.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Oxford. I would come back later, but I can’t leave without these forms signed.”
“Terminated is terminated,” Katherine said. “Either way, my future is—”
“Oh, no, this isn’t a termination. It’s a revision.” Thelma laughed.
Graham looked at Thelma, and he laughed.
Thelma looked at Katherine, and then at Graham, and she quieted herself into a nervous smile. “Um, I don’t think there should be a problem.” She handed the clipboard and a pen to Katherine. “See, it’s just a simple last little thing to make sure this is what you really want.”
“Oh, I see. You want to protect me from my thoroughly considered and personal decision. How thoughtful.”
“Katie, she’s just doing her job.”
“Yes.” Katherine read the form, which was not a form but a single sentence followed by signature and date lines on an otherwise blank page:
I hereby permanently surrender any and all custody of my child(ren) to the Happy Baby Agency for the purpose of re-placement with an adoptive family.
“What confuses me,” Katherine said, “is that we already signed something like this.”
“Yes, Ms. Oxford. But they said sometimes people change their minds right about now.” Thelma looked over her shoulder at the hospital room door, where Katherine saw a figure waiting behind the window. Thelma waved her hand, and the notary pushed through the door with a yellow-swaddled baby in his arms.
“What is that?” Katherine said.
The notary carried the baby to the bed and plopped it on Katherine’s chest before backing away to stand against the wall. Without looking at it, Katherine slid the baby to the space between her breasts and the leftover lump. She positioned her arms into bumpers to prevent it from rolling off her body and dropping to the floor. It was soft and warm against her, and the approximate weight of a house cat, she mused, remembering the stray female cat her college roommate had brought home. Chopin.
Graham, his face suddenly shining and red and his eyes wet and bright, leaned over and put his mouth to Katherine’s ear. “It’s a girl” was a whispered shriek that made her ear canal itch.
“Well, you are absolutely right that there should be no problem,” Katherine said to Thelma. She propped the clipboard on the baby’s side and signed her name and scribbled the date. She handed the form to Graham, who held the board loosely with his eyes on the baby.
“Graham.”
He laid the clipboard on the bed and, in an automatic, fluid glide of his arms, lifted the baby off Katherine. He rested the head against his bicep for support.
Katherine bounced her knee under the blanket to slide the clipboard toward Thelma. “The form is signed—by me, Katherine Oxford, the person who gave birth—and the original forms are signed, as well, so you may feel free to take it away, now.”
“She’s a her, Katie,” Graham said. “A widdle baby her-she baby, yes you are.”
Thelma apologized profusely and said the signatures of both biological parents were required at the time of transfer. “This is, um, the new standard procedure now that there’s kind of an overload,” she said. “We want to give everybody one last chance to keep their babies.”
“But I do not want to keep the baby,” Katherine said. “I already signed a full, notarized stack of papers saying I do not want to keep the baby. Graham, please sign the form—again—so the notary and this nice young woman can get on with their day. No doubt they have plenty of babies to collect.”
“We actually do.” Thelma exhaled a laugh of nervous relief. “Luckily, they hired a lot more people. I was having the hardest time finding a job until the Hap—”
“Graham.”
Graham took his eyes off the baby long enough to look at Katherine.
“Sign the form, please,” she said.
Graham closed his arms more snugly around the yellow blanket.
Katherine said, “Will you please excuse us?”
“Of course.” Thelma nudged the notary away from the wall. “We’ll be right outside.”
When they were alone, Katherine said, “Please, Graham.”
Graham looked at Katherine, and then at the pale head nested in his elbow.
Katherine slid gingerly off the bed (she would have to remember to buzz somebody about the mess on the other side). She had already passed her bathroom test, but her legs wavered, still weak from the pain killer. Using the side rails for support, she dropped into a clumsy kneel. A tiny rock or bit of dirt dug into her left kneecap, but she ignored it and joined her hands in so tight a prayer fist that the stone of her wedding ring pierced her pinkie. Graham looked down at her over the balled up newborn pressed to his chest.
“I am begging you,” Katherine said.
“Oh, come on, Katie. It’ll be fun!” he bounced the baby. “Let’s just do it!”
She unclasped her hands. With a palm planted on the floor for support, she sat on the cold linoleum.
“Well? What do you think?” he said. The skin under his chin gathered happily at his neck as he peered down at her.
“Do you care what I think?” she said.
“What do you mean?—What happened to your hand?”
The ring had broken her skin. She had blood on her pinkie. She wiped it on one of the bunnies printed on her infantile hospital gown. “Please answer me, Graham. Does what I think actually make a difference? Do you truly care?”
“Of course I care.”
“In that case, please allow me more than fifteen seconds to reconsider my entire future.”
Graham touched his nose to the baby’s and said, “Okie dokie, boogie bokey.” He whispered, “Boogie bokey. Who’s a cookie? Who’s a little baby cookie boogie?”
Katherine tried to be positive, to visualize only good things. She activated fuzzy, glowing images created by the likes of romantic novels and family movies. A baby sparkling with unlikely dewiness. A squealing toddler crashing through a leaf pile. Soft curls backlit by late afternoon sunlight. She imagined the joy of witnessing a first crawl, a first step, a first “pee in the potty,” as she would likely call it.
But then she inevitably visualized the struggles of potty training. Of pees in the pants and poo on the walls. Of exhaustion, marital strain, parent teacher meetings, car seats, and diaper bags.
None of it bothe
red her very much, she discovered with some surprise. Each item by itself was manageable, and altogether the list of to-dos struck her as nothing more than a byproduct of having a child. She was repelled not by the work, and not even by the child. It was parenthood. She had no more desire to be a parent than to be a podiatrist.
Still, for Graham, she tried again not only to see what he saw, but to embrace his vision, to repress her automatic and overwhelming instinct to recoil from the mental image of them as a picket fence Family smiling under glass. She allowed herself to envision the development of uninhibited, wholly vulnerable affection for the baby in Graham’s arms.
Her aversion grew, manifesting physically as a tickling, sickening weight pulling at her chest from behind her ribs. She also felt inexplicably, crushingly tired. Bored. Unenthused and hopeless about a predetermined (and irreversible) future.
She knew that if she allowed herself to love that baby, she would be consumed. Inextricably bound to a disagreeable life.
Graham’s feet rolled to their sides one at a time as he rocked the baby. “It’s not her entire future she’s reconsidering, is it? No, it isn’t. No, it isn’t! She’ll still have the stores, and she’ll still have me, and we’ll have the house and all the stuff in it. Why, you’re the only little chan—”
“No.” Katherine shook her head. She shook it and shook it.
Graham’s feet stopped rocking.
“Please,” she said to his shoes. “Please sign. Is there anything so wrong with our life as it is?”
“But Katie, there’s no reason anything has to change!” He sat on the bed and made mouth noises at the baby.
She pressed her hands together again. “What do I have to s—”
He tapped the toe of his shoe at her, just once. “I don’t want to raise my voice in front of the baby,” he said. “Don’t beg me. It’s kooky. And it’s making me see you in a way I don’t like seeing you.”
“But you already signed it once. It was a legal contract, Graham. It was notarized.”
He smiled. “Do I need a lawyer?”
She dropped her head between her knees and screamed into the pastel bunnies.
He stroked her neck and rested his hand on her shoulder. “I really hope you’ll stay.”
She could leave, she knew, but the only thing more devastating to her than a life with a child in it would be a life without him. She moaned into her knees, “Why must bad things happen to good people?” before being overtaken by spontaneous, spasmodic sobs. Graham petted her thigh with the toe of his shoe.
The curtain over the window was drawn, and—but for the unfortunate orderly tasked with mopping up her vomit—Katherine was alone. The wine sat unopened in her bag on the floor. The nurse named Barry had recommended breastfeeding, so Katherine had consented to do it, but, “No alcohol just yet, Ms. Oxf—please leave that there for now,” Barry had insisted more than once while struggling to help Katherine give the baby, Millicent, a nipple.
That they would name the baby for Katherine’s paternal many times great-grandmother had been Katherine’s idea, as had a new condition of their marriage.
“If you truly want to keep her,” she had told Graham, “that means wanting—not accepting, Graham, but wanting—the bulk of the bur…the responsibility. Yes? Graham?”
He’d bounced the bundle in his arms. “Sure! Of course!”
That there would be no fucking had been his idea.
“You didn’t say it, but I know you didn’t like it,” he’d said. “I think it’s an even trade, don’t you?”
At the time she had not thought that, no, nor did she think it now, but, “Yes,” she had agreed. Had he not brought it up, she would have. She could only suffer so much.
“Someone’s knocking, ma’am,” the orderly said from the floor.
Margaret’s nose and eyes filled the bottom half of the door’s small glass pane. Katherine waved her in, and Margaret battled wheelchair wheels against the door while holding her baby steady on her lap. The orderly stood and offered to help, but Margaret waved him off and worked her way in. Katherine smiled at the baby Margaret displayed with an uneven lift as she rolled toward the bed.
“Name?” Katherine said.
Margaret covered her nose with the sleeve of her patterned gown. Her eyes were bright and red, the skin around them dark. “Lenore,” she said behind her hand.
The orderly mumbled a shy, “Congratulations to you both,” and left the room with his rags and bucket.
Her nose still covered, Margaret parked her chair at Katherine’s knees. Her gown’s print was teddy bears and rainbows.
Margaret gestured to her chair. “C-section. You?”
“Oh, Margaret.”
“I’m okay.” She laughed. “Well, I am now. I decided I’m happy she has an interesting birth story, and I can’t wait to tell her.”
When Katherine said her delivery was natural, Margaret frowned and then cried into her sleeve. It was her fault, she said, that Katherine had missed her appointment—“Margaret, you idiot,” Katherine said—and all because she and Ernie always paid too little attention to the world around them. Had he not used that gas station on that street…
“But,” Margaret said, sniffing and stroking her baby’s dark brown hair, “you saved her life. She would have died, they said. If not for you.”
“And you named her Lenore instead of Katherine?”
Margaret laughed again. She uncovered her nose and gave the air a tentative sniff before lowering her hand and looking around the room. “Is yours already…Is it…It’s not here, so I assume…?”
Katherine straightened the blanket over her midsection. “Graham has her.”
“Her?”
Katherine closed her eyes, then furiously wiped them and looked away. “Yes.”
Margaret nudged Katherine’s leg. “What’s the matter?” After a moment, she said, “Oh, Kat. Is he leaving you?”
Katherine covered her face with her hands and wailed, “No!”
NINE
Police typically parked half a block, or so, from popular drop-off points. The unmarked patrol cars were the first thing Katherine had learned to look for when driving around with the baby tucked to rigid safety standards in her car seat. Until recently, she had of course not known what an unmarked police car looked like. On television, they were dark Ford sedans with tinted windows and painted black grilles. She now knew, from frequent runs around town since the last snow had melted, that they could be anything from a ten-year-old manual-drive Mercedes to a rumbling Mustang 6sT-AV. The only somewhat obvious tell, she had learned online, was a narrow LED strip behind the grille, which took some maneuvering to spot. Harder to search for (also learned online) was the pinhead reflection of a camera lens in the rear license plate’s dark, coiled snake graphic. Over time she had noticed on her own that the wheels on the older cars they used were often a bit too shiny, too modern.
Katherine pulled into the parking lot across the street from the Department of Social Services, an unlit cigarette between her fingers. She set the parking brake and was reaching for the door handle when she saw a man in a hooded jersey creeping away from the building’s entrance, his head bobbing over manicured bushes lining the sidewalk. Just then, a car she had hardly noticed screeched into motion, zipping away from the curb and skidding to a diagonal stop in front of the man before he could cross the street. He dropped to his knees, clasped his hands behind his head, and released such a guttural, sorrowful cry that he might have been dying.
The police cuffed the man and dragged him toward their light blue sedan, one of them knocking him off his feet with a sucker punch while the other officer looked back across the street. They bent to pick him up, and the cap of the officer who had punched him fell off as she swept his wallet off the ground. Thick blond hair spilled to her shoulders. She opened the wallet, took a moment reading what was inside, and closed it. The officers said something to each other, and when the male partner broke off to head toward the gove
rnment building, the female officer picked up her cap and looked around—at her partner, at the sidewalks, at the windows of surrounding houses.
Katherine started to slide down in her seat, but remembered what Margaret had taught her and froze. The officer threw another quick look at her partner’s back, then tripped the man with a deft strike to his bare ankle. When he was flat on the ground, she kicked him between the legs. He screamed so loud Katherine heard it through her closed window. The officer dropped on top of him, then, and pressed her chest to his back while tucking a knee between his thighs. She seemed to say something into his ear as she stuffed his wallet into the back pocket of his shorts, and when she finished, he flattened his cheek to the road and lay limp. Using his body as support for her knees and the balls of her hands, the officer stood, kicked the shining metal toe of her boot into the man’s side, and casually opened the car’s back door and waited.
Her partner returned with a child Katherine could only tell was old enough to walk. Dark hair fell to the collar of a t-shirt worn with blue jeans and brown shoes. The officer was having a hard time keeping the small hand in his, grasping for it and smiling down every time the child yanked it away, until he finally surrendered and scooped up the toddler, who pressed away with elbows locked and palms flat against the officer’s shoulders.
When both officers were busy securing the child inside the car, Katherine lowered her window one click.
“…hell else was I supposed to do?” The man on the ground lifted his head. “I’m not a bad man. I am not a bad man!”
The male officer popped his head over the roof. “Quiet.”
“She said she couldn’t get pregnant! But guess what? She got goddamn pregnant, and then she left with the kid and came back a year later to goddamn drop him on me. Why don’t you go find her and arrest her?—Wait, serious, now. Can you do that? Can you find her?” He struggled for balance when the male officer yanked at his elbows to pick him up off the street. “Well, can you, or what? You’re police, aren’t you?—Why won’t you answer me?”
The Age of the Child Page 8
