“Whatever it takes. It’s a start. Have you talked to your mom?”
Wendy told Carli that Marla was at home with an ankle bracelet, waiting for her next court date, which was just as well. It would keep her from showing up unannounced at Carli’s apartment. Marla hadn’t called Carli, and Carli hadn’t called her. She was still digesting everything that had happened, trying to make sense of it. “Not yet,” she said. Maya squirmed and crackled. Carli bounced her in the way that seemed to help her settle. She looked back up at Paige. “How’re Gail and Jon?”
Paige studied her mug. “I talked to Gail a couple of days ago. I think that she’s doing all right, considering everything. Jon—not so much. I told Gail what you said, but I’m not sure they’re ready.”
When they met at Liberty Street, Carli told Paige that Jon and Gail could come see Maya if they wanted to.
“You can’t be feeling guilty about all that, though.”
“I don’t,” Carli said. “I tried to feel guilty about it. It seems like I should feel guilty.” She looked down at Maya. “But then I hold her, or even just smell her, and I can’t manage it.”
“Good,” Paige said. “Is there anything else I can do? Anything else you need?”
She needed friends and more time in the day and money for her psych class in the fall and enough coffee to kill a bear and something to eat besides ramen for lunch and leftover pizza for dinner. She needed a couch and an extra set of plates and clothes for Maya as she grew and more diapers and formula and wipes. She needed one of those Diaper Genies, so that she wouldn’t have to run down the back stairs to the dumpster every time Maya pooped. But Paige had already given her so much that she’d be ashamed to ask for more. And when she looked down at Maya, her daughter’s lips squirmed in a way that Carli took for a smile, even though she knew that it couldn’t be one yet. She knew that she didn’t really need any of that.
“Thank you,” she said without looking up from Maya. “But I have everything I need right here.” And beneath all the exhaustion and anxiety and terror, she felt large and powerful and full when she said it.
Gail
Gail opened the door to Jon’s office. He sat in his desk chair playing guitar. His leg, casted to the hip, was propped up on another chair. The scars on his forehead and around his mouth sill glared red. The song sounded like Jackson Browne, but Jon was toying with the melody, twisting it into something of his own, so it was hard for Gail to tell. She waited until his hands fell still.
“I’m going to bed,” she said. “I’ve got an early account call in Glenview tomorrow.”
Jon nodded. “I’ll finish up soon.”
“Good night,” she said, and closed the door.
The guitar began to speak again. He was weaning himself off the hydrocodone, so he was able to concentrate a bit. His headaches had finally settled just the week before, allowing him to tolerate his own music. Gail knew that he might not stop playing for a while, but that was OK. The guitar always nudged Gail toward sleep rather than away from it. And it sounded so much better than the silence. After she had finally made him understand what she had done, the silence between them had roared.
* * *
Two months earlier, when she arrived back in Grand Forks, Gail and her dad went straight to the hospital. The policeman sitting outside Jon’s door wouldn’t allow her to see him. Instead, she found herself in jail for a night, until her dad was able to arrange bail. When she finally saw Jon, he didn’t say much because of the morphine and the concussion. As they weaned him toward hydrocodone, his short-term memory flickered back, he asked the obvious question, and she told him what she had done. She tried to explain why. She told him that she was sorry. They cried. That first day of talking, every time he surfaced from the haze, he’d ask again where Maya was, she would tell him again, and again they would grieve. It was terrible, that cycle of grief, but with each pass, Gail found that she was able to explain it to him more clearly, and each time, it made more sense to her, if not to him. They went through those horrible motions all day long, until finally, that evening when he woke, instead of asking where Maya was, he stared at her with a steely-eyed anger and growled, “Maya’s gone.”
Then he said a lot of things that couldn’t be unsaid, things that Gail worked hard to blame on the pain and the drugs and the concussion and the grief. And then he fell silent. When he was well enough, and after they posted his bail, she drove him home. Those eleven hours of silence filled the longest day of Gail’s life.
They slowly learned to talk again, beginning with the necessities like What should we do about dinner? and Do you need another pillow for your leg? and What did the doctor say? and The lawyer called again. The lawyer gave them plenty to talk about. He was working hard to get the kidnapping charges dropped, but the reckless endangerment and grand theft auto charges weren’t going to go away. He told them that the man who rolled from the station wagon when Jon stole it had a broken collarbone. He said that they were lucky it wasn’t worse. They talked about their next court dates and about how they would manage the jail time when it came to that.
Eventually, they started talking about Maya, but at first Jon was only able to use pronouns—her and she and hers. At some point he said her name again, and a few days later they both talked about how viscerally they still missed her, and they both cried for a long time. While they cried, though, he lay on the couch, and Gail curled into a chair. They didn’t touch each other. Jon wouldn’t look at her. It was more like they cried at the same time than together.
They did not talk about what Gail had done to the room that used to be the nursery, although it was impossible to ignore the banging and the sanding and the moving of the ladder those weekends that her dad put it right. They didn’t talk about the paint color. Gail quickly picked a neutral beige, because it didn’t matter what color you painted a room that used to be a nursery. They didn’t talk about what would happen after the legal mess was squared away, after Jon healed, when he no longer depended upon her for just about everything. Gail didn’t tell him that she went to visit Carli and Maya, because she wasn’t sure how to tell him, and she was pretty sure that he wasn’t ready to hear it. And she didn’t tell him that she was pregnant.
She knew only too well what pregnant felt like. And the calendar pointed directly to that afternoon just after Maya came home, when Gail woke Jon from his nap. After Gail became certain, she thought a lot about that old knife that came into the shop that first summer. The tip was ruined—a butcher probably used it to pry open a drawer or some other such foolishness. One of the grinders tossed it into the scrap bin, but something about that knife caught her grandfather’s eye. Maybe it was the ancient ivory handle, or the inlaid rivets through the full tang, or the perfect slope of the grind. Gail watched as he picked it up and hefted the weight of it. He tested the edge with his thumb, studied the handle, and then set it aside. Gail asked him what he was going to do with it. He picked the knife back up and studied it for a long time before he answered. He said that he’d shorten the blade to create a new tip. That would change everything, and he would likely regrind it from convex to hollow. The balance would be lost, and to restore it, he’d take apart the handle and thin down the tang. It might work, it might not, but if it worked, it would result in an entirely different knife. “That sounds like a lot of work,” Gail said. Her grandfather considered the knife again before he spoke. He rubbed his thumb across the handle. “Before they ruined it,” he said, “this was a wonderful knife.”
Gail realized she was pregnant the week after her dad started fixing the room that used to be the nursery, but before he painted it. She stuck with the beige, though, because she refused to start thinking of it as a nursery. She started taking the vitamins that she still had stacked in the medicine cabinet, and she stopped drinking wine and coffee. But she refused to go to the doctor, because she knew what he would say anyway. And she didn’t make any lists, because right now they didn’t need anything. If she had learned n
othing else, she had learned that right now was all that she could count on.
When Jon was finally well enough to play the guitar again, it felt like a blessing. Two nights ago, he played James Taylor while Gail lay in bed drifting toward sleep. That sounded to Gail a little bit like forgiveness, and she had wept into her pillow.
* * *
By the time Gail finished brushing her teeth, the guitar had fallen silent. After she turned off her bedside light and curled under the comforter on her edge of the bed, Jon’s crutches squeaked their way down the hall. Gail heard him lean the crutches against the wall and felt the mattress shift as he lowered himself onto his edge of the bed. She heard his sharp intake of breath when he hoisted his casted leg onto the bed, and the long sigh as he settled against his pillow. Gail had tried to help him in the beginning, but he had made it clear that he didn’t want her help.
While Jon’s breathing slowed, Gail counted weeks. She’d start showing soon. If she made it that far, she’d have to tell Jon, and she knew that would change the course of everything. But she didn’t know if it would salve the wound or rip the scab off anew. She thought he had fallen asleep when he spoke.
“Do you think Carli would let us come see Maya?”
Gail’s eyes clicked open. She swallowed. “Yes,” she finally managed. “I think that she would.”
Jon said nothing for several minutes. “Can you call her and ask?”
“I will,” Gail said. She smiled into the dark. “First thing tomorrow.”
The sheets rustled, and Jon twisted his cast under the covers. At first Gail thought he was getting out of bed to return to his office, to play more guitar or to code. Instead, he moved across the center of the bed. He leaned into her, wrapped his arms around her, and squeezed tightly. It was the first time they had touched since Jon figured out how to climb off the couch by himself, and it startled Gail to realize how much she had missed it. She thought again of that old, broken knife. She found his hand, and she laced her fingers through his. She pulled it to her mouth and kissed his knuckles.
“I love you,” she whispered.
“Me, too,” he murmured into her hair.
Acknowledgments
Many people were enormously generous with their time, feedback, and encouragement while I wrote this story. Carolyn Boykin, Dan Fouts, Bob Hoffmann, Jean Hoffmann, Carole Mackey, Ben Mba, and Mark Splitstone fought through the early drafts and told me the truth about what they found. My Columbia College cohort—Ally, Amanda, Christine, Dee, Grace, Haydee, Laura, Matt, Peter, and Ted—read way too many pages but remained graciously relentless in their feedback. Amy McConnell made me look younger and less tired. Jessica Worobec traded her patience and creativity for a bottle of wine.
I owe a tremendous debt to my teachers. Don DeGrazia helped birth the story. Joe Meno encouraged me to grow it into a novel. Garnett Kilberg-Cohen forced me to shorten my sentences and strengthen my characters. Alexis Pride coaxed those characters more fully onto the page, and Patty McNair taught me to paint a world in which they could live. Sasha Hemon asked, What else? And if any poetry leaked into my prose, I blame CM Burroughs.
Bart Maestranzi, who hails from a long line of moletas, told me about his family’s knife-grinding business, taught me about sharp objects, and shared the story of his ‘Greek’ father. Patrick Grassi’s On the Edge of Emigration provided an excellent history of the diaspora of knife grinders from the Val Rendena.
Harvey Klinger, my agent, saw enough in my initial submission to suggest that I change everything and then ushered my revised story into the world with enormous enthusiasm. Jackie Cantor first generated excitement for the story at Simon & Schuster. Marysue Rucci, my editor and champion, challenged me to craft a better novel with her incisive and thoughtful feedback. Hana Park, Sara Kitchen, Erica Ferguson, and the rest of the team at Simon & Schuster applied that special magic that turns 83,000 words into a book.
My mom and dad first taught me about love. They also decided that they wouldn’t replace the broken TV until all three of their children made the honor roll in the same quarter. My brother, Bill, and sister, Linda, helped me ensure that no television intruded for several years, making space for me to fall in love with books. My work with Bob Knott allowed me to set aside years in the middle part of my life to write a novel. Roshan and Grace made me a father, taught me everything that I hadn’t yet learned about love, and helped me to see the world through new eyes. And last but most: this book would not have been started, much less finished, without Sara, my partner, my wife, my love. She read this book more than anyone—even though it made her stomach hurt every time.
More in Fiction
Still Alice
Then She Was Gone
Who Do You Love
When Life Gives You Lululemons
The Storyteller
Beautiful Disaster
About the Author
R.J. Hoffmann was born and raised in St. Louis and received an MFA in fiction from Columbia College Chicago. Hoffmann is the winner of the Madison Review’s 2018 Chris O’Malley Prize in Fiction and a finalist for the Missouri Review’s 2019 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize. He lives in Elmhurst, Illinois, with his wife and two children.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition April 2021
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hoffmann, RJ, 1969– author.
Title: Other people’s children / a novel by RJ Hoffmann.
Description: New York : Simon & Schuster, 2021. | Summary: “A riveting debut novel about a couple whose dream of adopting a baby is shattered when the teenage mother reclaims her child”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020031134 | ISBN 9781982159092 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781982159115 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Adoption—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3608.O4727 O84 2021 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020031134
ISBN 978-1-9821-5909-2
ISBN 978-1-9821-5911-5 (ebook)
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Other People's Children Page 26
