Authors: Chandra Hoffman
Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Suspense, #Family Life, #Adoption, #Adopted children, #Adoptive parents, #Social workers
T
hey don’t take a stroller out yet—even those two feet between him and the baby feel too cavernous. By unspoken agreement, it is Paul who carries Wyeth in the BabyBjörn, strapped crisscross to his chest. It has been six weeks, but the baby still does not sleep in the bassinet across the room but rather wedged between them, and both Paul and Eva sleep in fetal curls, bracketing him like parentheses, as though birds of prey might swoop from above and take him again.
“You realize,” Paul had joked to the ER nurse the day they were reunited, “that after this you will never see Wyeth Nova in the NFL, or even PeeWee Football. And no soccer either—those kids are rough! In fact, you might want to invest in bubble wrap stock, because we’re going to be buying a lot of it.”
The nurse had laughed, one of her fingers in the sleeping baby’s clutches, Paul holding the other hand, smoothing Wyeth’s hair with his palm. Eva was in the bathroom down the hall—relief had liquefied the contents of her stomach, and she was doubled over on the toilet. Paul leaned down to kiss Wyeth’s downy head again, shocked to smell stale smoke and sour milk.
“And I don’t think”—Paul swallowed, trying to keep his voice light as he looked at the ghost of a bruise on his son’s cheek, the scab
forming on his tiny nose—“we’ll even be able to let him take up an instrument. A cello, a tuba—those things are heavy. They could fall on him. Maybe the harmonica.” And the nurse had laughed again, and Paul knew it must feel good to have moments like this in her line of work, to be a part of a happy ending.
N
OW, SIX WEEKS LATER
, and they are walking back from Strohecker’s on a Saturday afternoon, a warm wind and struggling sun heralding the spring in the hilly, twisted streets of Portland Heights. He has a cotton short-sleeved shirt on under the baby carrier, and Wyeth’s feet and head are bare outdoors for the first time in his short life. That we know of, Paul thinks, and again it makes him weak to realize there are so many days unaccounted for in the short life of his son.
Eva is carrying a grocery bag with lemons, wax-paper-wrapped scallops, a crumbly wedge of parmesan cheese, all of the ingredients for Paul’s famous seafood pasta. Baby steps, the painfully slow return to Life As They Knew It. This week, for the first time, Paul had kept normal electrician hours, leaving early, not coming home for lunch. He had let himself get wrapped up in the demands of his growing business (there is no longer anyone in the Portland metro area, maybe even the whole state, who doesn’t know the name Nova).
“It really is spring.” Eva points out snowdrops nodding around the base of the McAdoos’ lampposts, purple crocuses with yellow throats by their For Sale sign.
“Mmm-hmm.” Paul puts his lips to the top of Wyeth’s head, lets the wispy hairs tickle the skin between his lips and nose. He inhales the delicious smell of oatmeal baby wash and apricot massage oil, hints of milky sweetness; the smells of vulnerability.
“Francie says she’s having an open house tomorrow. She expects a good turnout.”
“Mmm. That place will go quickly if they get the right buyer.”
Now it is Eva’s turn to nod, reach over with her left hand, and
take hold of one of Wyeth’s dangling feet, cup his heel in her palm as they walk. His wife looks like a stranger. Tired of being recognized from all the publicity, Eva had cut her blond masses to her chin, had it chemically, permanently straightened, lightened to platinum. She looks like a Dutch doll, her sleek hair bobbing along as she walks. Her eyes are clear, her features sharper, thinner than they have ever been. This morning she had had him punch a new hole in her belt, amazed that her old jeans no longer stayed up.
“Not a diet plan I’d recommend,” he’d heard her joke wryly to Francie McAdoo the last time they had gotten together and she had exclaimed over the new Eva.
“How is Francie?”
“Fine. We’re getting together for a playdate on Monday. She said she’s finally feeling settled.”
Paul doesn’t answer right away. Still picturing Eva driving Wyeth to Francie’s, he has to grab the reins of his imagination—these are normal things. Mothers and babies do this, get in cars and go places. Baby steps.
“The shelter came, picked up the crib.”
It made sense, donating the brand-new crib Wyeth never slept in to the women’s shelter downtown. They had been reading about attachment parenting, all the benefits to cosleeping with your baby. It seemed better to give it to someone who needed it.
“I have the tax slip for you,” she adds.
Paul swallows, nods. He wants to touch her fragile blond hair, brittle like spun sugar. Her transformation is comforting, appropriate, the outside matching the inside. They are not the people they were before.
“Maggie called. He says Dubai is amazing.”
He and Paul had made up before Magnus was called to shoot his new film. It is a good thing Paul’s sense of humor returned with their son; Magnus signed him up for Omaha steak delivery every two
weeks and a wine-of-the-month club. Paul honestly wouldn’t mind if his brother-in-law settled in Portland whenever he came back.
Paul lets Wyeth grab his finger and pull it toward his mouth, gumming on the knuckle. They have been saying over and over all week how he will be getting teeth soon. There is not much else safe to talk about.
“Look at that,” Eva remarks on cue. “Definitely teething.”
“Yep. Definitely.”
If anything good came out of Wyeth’s kidnapping, it was that he came back a new baby. The formula recovered at the apartment where he was being kept, soy-based, seemed to sit better with him—he was wide-eyed and quiet the first night home, so Eva went off dairy, and now Wyeth never cried with the tortured intensity he had before. A bonus, Paul thinks, when he is feeling generous and optimistic.
They walk on in silence, Paul careful to catch his wife’s arm and steer her around a slippery patch of moss. There is a conversation that has been brewing, rolling toward them like the thunderheads that rumbled across the hills of Magnus’s old Costa Rican hacienda. Eva had finally acknowledged it the night before, after they had made love for the first time in two months, her head on his chest, his hand cupping her shoulder, Wyeth asleep in his bassinet at the foot of the bed, facing away from them.
“One of these days we’re going to have to talk…,” she had said tentatively, and Paul had silenced her by tightening the grip on her shoulder. They would, he knew. It would be brief, he hoped, but it was inevitable and dreaded, like tax preparation. He would tell her he forgave her for leaving Wyeth in the car. Then he would apologize for the ways that he punished, that he continues to punish, her even now. She would forgive him that as well, acknowledging, shouldering her guilt like an X-ray blanket. And then, only then, will they be able to move on. Then he will be able to say, like a black-masked torturer with a soft streak,
Enough. She has suffered enough.
Until this happens, they will never be able to move forward as anything but parents, Wyeth’s sentinels. This they are mastering; the hovering, the appreciating, the reveling in their good fortune.
“Look at this! He knows his name, watch, I’ll say it and he’ll smile,” and they lean in with animated, wide-eyed anticipation, marveling at these tiniest of accomplishments. One day soon, they might hear him crying and wish for a little peace and quiet, or they might look forward to him falling asleep so that they can wrap around each other on the couch and watch a movie, but not yet. In the future they might even consider taking Francie up on her offer to babysit while they go out for a meal, but nobody is pushing it.
It will come, this conversation, with all the intensity of that Costa Rica thunderstorm, and the sky will go dark, and it might seem that a perfectly good day is ruined, plans for a picnic, a hike down to the waterfall, stolen sex in a cove on the beach. And then, fifteen minutes after it starts, it will stop, leaving in its wake brilliant sunshine and tropical steam, the crystal raindrops dripping off succulents and cannas. They will realize that the day was not spoiled after all, only made more beautiful, more precious, by the storm.
Paul is thinking about this as he reaches over and takes her hand in his, brings it to his lips, and kisses the baby-fine golden hair on the back of her wrist. He keeps her hand, and she turns to him, eyes huge, eyebrows lifted.
“What?” she asks.
“Nothing.” He kisses Eva’s hand now. Wyeth’s head swivels to follow his mother’s face, leaning in to kiss his smooth forehead, his eyelids fluttering as she presses her lips to his skin.
Maybe today will be the day, Paul thinks, tucking Eva’s hand in the bare crook of his arm, and they turn off Vista toward home.
T
he nurse from Penny’s adoption was right, Chloe realizes. She said Chloe wouldn’t be able to do her job, coordinate adoptions, once she had a child. She was right; Chloe is not. Aside from the unpredictable hours, no health benefits, and low pay, Chloe finds she has a new sensitivity, a tenderness that connects her to all mothers in a way she never had before. Her skin is too thin to put her name as witness on documents spotted with the tears of a woman in the agony of admitting that she cannot care for the life she created, carried, and birthed.
Heather calls it Motherzone. She says once you have a child you are changed, for the better, but forever.
Chloe hangs up her apron on a hook by the unscreened window, turns the hot plate on for tea. Twenty-five hundred miles to the east, it is nearly July, the most beautiful time of year in her favorite city in the world. Here, there are tangles of branches, the ever-present humidity like an overbearing relative, a complicated, Micheneresque territory, America’s grass-skirted stepchild, banana trees and birds of paradise. Outside the tree-house window, miles away, Chloe can glimpse a sparkling strip of sapphire sea.
On the little shelves Dan built are the following items:
O
UTSIDE THE TREE HOUSE
, there is the telltale crunching of tires on koa and banana leaves, and Chloe leans out the window. Two months ago, after his surf shop was featured in
Kiteboarding
magazine, Dan picked her up from her waitressing job at the Cannery in a sun-faded red Ford Windstar. She came out to find him braced, beaming, against the hood.
“You bought a minivan?”
“Yeah. The price was right, and it’s got an excellent safety rating.”
“Safety rating?” Chloe had snorted.
“Yeah, you know.” He polished some invisible dirt off the hood with his sweatshirt sleeve. “And then, Paolo and I are going to trick it all out with some tribal art along the doors, maybe a tiki head on the grille. I’ll get the Windsong logo on it; it’s a totally sweet ride. I’m going to take out the backseat, for my gear, but there will still be plenty of room for all of us.”
Dan honks once now. He has a place for her to see, a one-bedroom guest cottage on a large estate in Makawao, because they can’t exactly stay in the tree house much longer.
“And it’s perfect for us, babe—the landlord is a pediatrician!”
Chloe is six and a half months pregnant.
Every night, when Dan gets back from the surf shop, he lays her down on the bed and uncaps the wild hibiscus lotion. Like a concert pianist practicing a memorized piece on a tabletop, he runs his lotioned palms over the mound of Chloe’s abdomen in light, circular massage. He hums, eyes closed, and it is like she is seeing him again, all those hours as a Girlfriend on the beach, watching him lovingly claim his surfboards with a puck of wax. The expression on his face is peaceful, unhurried. Every night, he is marking them, Chloe and their daughter, with his hands as one of his things, bodily claiming them the way a cat does as it weaves between your legs, rubbing its head on your shins. It is enough.
“Babe, let’s go!” Dan calls now, and Chloe wipes out her mug, puts it carefully on the shelf.
Crossing the catwalk, she thinks about the past, all of the connections, all the lives she has touched in the last three years. All those adoptions where she believed she was creating a family, playing the puppeteer, choosing the right parents for this baby, or the perfect baby for the best couple. She thinks about the things she said, the half-truths and omissions, the phone calls she made, or didn’t make, at crucial moments.
There are the lives her choices colored with a light stroke, brief
interactions, the incarcerated birth mother from eastern Oregon she met just once, the dozens of eager, earnest couples—“we have tons of birth mothers!”—she glad-handed after Prospective Client info sessions. There are other cases where her influence was heavy, life-changing, like Heather, or Francie McAdoo.
And then there are those for whom her actions were like strokes on the Zen watercolor paper, where the darkest of watermarks disappear after brief moments: Jason and Penny, free; Paul and Eva, reunited with their son.
Before, Chloe believed that all these interactions came from her, but now…The baby moves inside her. She looks to the west, where through the trees the sunlight is flashing on the Pacific. Beyond the garage, Dan is jumping out of the van to open the door for her. Chloe wonders if everything didn’t happen, for all of them, just as it did to lead to this moment, and all that are to follow.