Chosen (10 page)

OREGON OPEN ADOPTION
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A place for all mothers

FRANCESCA97201

Joined: 26 Jun 1998

Posts: 17270

Posted: Fri, Dec 1 2000 8:24 pm

HE IS HERE!!!!!

How many years has Francie waited to write those words?

Angus John McAdoo, born at 2:49 am December 1st, weight 9 lbs 15 oz, 22", by emergency C-section. While we were unable to be present for the delivery due to a problem with our CW’s cell phone,

we were able to hold him shortly afterwards. It was an incredible moment, John spouting poetry, the baby in my arms.

This was true: John
had
said something lovely while they were waiting, a paraphrase, “I always knew that at long last I would take this road, only yesterday I did not know it would be today.” A beautiful sentiment, except that yesterday he
had
known, and he boarded the plane to Los Angeles anyway.

They are in bed, on their laptops, ice packs on John’s calves, a bucket of champagne and two glasses on a tray in the bed between them.

They are keeping Angus for observation in the nursery. Apparently it is very common for C-section babies to inhale some fluids during the birth process, but they assure us he is healthy. John asked for a toxicology screen
to be done before we take him home. CW said she would speak to the pediatrician on staff. We have been assured by the agency that this mother did not use drugs after some early marijuana use that may or may not have occurred in the first trimester, but all my research shows that this is not much to worry about.

I was able to give the baby a bottle twice and he is a very good eater. He is already enormous; I think I will have to return many of the newborn-size clothes and diapers and go straight to 3 month! I am trying to choose an outfit to bring him home in—the one I had selected is never going to fit, LOL!

Looks: He is a handsome baby, lots of straight dark hair, and big hands and feet. I told John that the baby already looks a bit like him. Obviously there is no biological connection, but something, around the nose, the shape of his ears, maybe. Despite his genetic makeup, we think he looks almost white.

Does this sound racist? One comment from Eva, and she’s paranoid now. Because she’s not! It’s John, really, the old Scot in him.

[BACKSPACE, DELETE]

In my profile photo he looks darker than he is, the lighting at the hospital is terrible, and there is a little lilt to the corners of his eyes, but it could just be swelling?

Anyway, he’s a gorgeous baby and John even said he couldn’t believe our good fortune, after everything we have been through.

There was a chance they would discharge the baby tonight but John requested that he stay in for one more night of observation, get our last good night of sleep, LOL.

This is only partially true: the other thing is, Jason and Penny haven’t signed yet.

“It’s a formality,” Chloe Pinter had said. “A matter of time.” But Francie knows—they have twenty-four hours.

It had been hard to leave the hospital, knowing that Jason and Penny were the ones down the hall from Angus John, his first night
in the world, but the nurse had assured Francie she could come back for morning visiting hours.

“We’ll save his eight a.m. bottle for you.”

John has an urgent business trip to Asia that he postponed for this and he plans to leave tomorrow, so the next time I sign in, I will be doing so as a single mother! Don’t be surprised if you don’t hear from me for a few days!

Next to her, in their California king, John is typing on his laptop, the screen glowing blue on his glasses.

“I miss him!” she tells her husband, and he nods, pats her thigh, never taking his eyes off the keyboard. Francie takes a sip of lukewarm champagne.

I look forward to getting the baby home and feeling like he is
mine

[BACKSPACE, DELETE]

ours.
Though of course I am grateful to the birth parents for everything they have given us, I will feel better when they are no longer any part of our lives.

She will not mention the gift shop, how after she called Jason’s bluff, after she walked out on his second extortion attempt, she retched, just a little coffee and half a slice of Weight Watchers toast, into the water fountain around the corner.

It has been hard not to think of Jason—even in the hospital photo of Angus John she has scanned into her online profile, she sees the biological father in his face. Francie wonders how long it will be before she looks at him and he is simply Angus John, not a sum of his inherited parts.

As you know, by Oregon law an adoption can be contested for up to a year if they can prove duress. If BF leans on BM, it could get ugly later. He is probably physically abusive; BM is covered in scars, poor thing. He prob
ably can’t help it, you read about how pervasive it is in the Native American community, and he’s part Apache. That sort of thing doesn’t just disappear in a handful of generations.

Francie reads over her last few paragraphs.

[SELECT ALL, DELETE]

Her phone rings—Chloe Pinter on caller ID.

They’ve changed their mind.

“Hello?” Francie swallows, looks around the room for something to throw up in. The ice bucket? The ceramic wastebasket?

“Congratulations, Mom—they signed.”

D
uring morning rounds on the second of December Dr. Woo gives Eva the green light to go home later that afternoon. He writes her a prescription for painkillers and then, as an afterthought, checks the box that allows for refills. This makes Paul anxious—Eva’s lovesick brother Magnus is flying up from L.A. to meet the baby, and the last thing they need in the house is a big supply of prescription drugs, but okay.

“One of the more serious repairs I’ve done in a while,” Dr. Woo says, his hand on the door. “Make sure you use your sitz bath—I understand they really help with the pain.”

Paul sits down next to Eva, inhaling deeply. The air feels effervescent, bubbly with hope. He breathes in again—his chest fills with a giddy weightlessness, breathlessness so powerful he struggles to breathe more shallowly, carefully.

“What’s wrong with you?” Eva glances at him, and the millimeter that her eyebrows have arched means that she’s more irritated than concerned. Paul has already seen their son make this face, and his heart lurched with recognition. He takes careful inventory of his feelings, his euphoria, the surreal bubbling, before he answers.

“I feel like, we’re almost there. Like everything we have been working toward for so long is almost here.”

“What are you talking about?” Eva says, a prickly artichoke hair more annoyed than before. “He
is
here.”

“No, I know. But it doesn’t feel like he’s ours yet, like he still belongs to the nurses, until we sign out this afternoon. I’m trying to savor the moment.”

Eva exhales, turns away from him, grimacing in pain. Wyeth starts to wriggle in his plastic aquarium, and Paul is the first to him, waving Eva to stay where she is. In the past thirty-nine hours, he has created a private little challenge for himself—get to the baby and settle him before his cries go from the pathetic “ahhh-ahhh” to the desperate “wah-wah-WAH, wah-wah-WAH” wail that drives Paul’s blood pressure up. So far he is three for seven, not bad odds.

Paul unwraps the flannel hospital blanket and pulls the tabs on the gapping diaper. Wyeth’s legs are skinny, as sinewy as a frog’s, and he pumps them now as Paul assesses the situation. Yes, there is a dark smear, and it takes Paul three diapers and half a box of the dry tissue wipes they’ve given him to get the job done. By then, the baby’s screaming, the kind that no amount of shoulder-bouncing will bring him back from.

“He’s probably hungry, hon,” Eva says as she unsnaps her hospital gown. Paul hands him over, determined not to lose the rush. They can both meet his needs, he thinks, as the baby latches on and sucks.

“That’s my little barracuda,” Paul murmurs, wedging himself on the bed by Eva’s shoulder, one hand on the baby’s swaddled bottom, the other in his wife’s still-matted hair. He wants to feel something flowing between them all, wants his wife to look up at him with pride and adoration, but Eva is drifting back to sleep with Wyeth at her breast.

There is a knock, and Francie McAdoo pokes her head around the doorway; the car seat hitched over her skinny arm pulls her off balance, like it’s full of bowling balls.

“Oh
how sweet
!” she stage-whispers, and Paul grits his teeth. Her thin blond hair looks wilted, her makeup overdone. “Aren’t you the
proudest papa?” and though he had been a moment earlier, the treacly way she says it makes him take his hand off Eva’s hair.

“How’s it going?” Paul asks. He wishes Eva would wake up, do the woman-to-woman social thing, but her head is lolling to the side, breathing deeply.

“Great!” Francie stops whispering. “The birth parents signed, thankfully. God knows what the birth father said to her, it was touch and go. But I just did my paperwork, so…he’s ours.”

“Congratulations,” Paul says, and finds that he even means it. He glances in the car seat she has set on the chair by the window. Funny how her baby elicits a complete nonresponse from him. It is just…a baby. He wonders about this; what if this was his daughter Amber’s baby? How long would it have been before he felt for her the way he feels for Wyeth? “Handsome little guy,” he says, because he should.

“Thanks. They’re discharging him now, but John’s been back at the house on a conference call to Singapore, and he doesn’t know how long he’ll be…” She trails off, and Paul feels a stab of sympathy for her. “So, I hate to bother you, but I was wondering if there’s any way you could give me a ride back to the Heights?”

“Sure.” Paul eases himself off the bed. The baby has fallen asleep, his head rolling back like a regulation-size softball. “Just a second.” Keeping one hand on the baby so he doesn’t keep on rolling right on down Eva’s stomach, Paul tugs free the front flap of Eva’s gown.

“Looks like breast-feeding’s going well,” Francie says as Paul carefully covers Eva’s giant white breast with its blue-veined tributaries. There is sharpness, bitterness, in Francie’s voice, and Paul realizes she might be jealous, that for some women breast-feeding is a privilege, not a fact of life.

“Yes.” Paul scoops the baby up adeptly, sliding a broad palm under Wyeth’s head. He is wrapped like a Jesus in a Nativity—white swaddle, tiny peach-colored head, beatific face, so otherworldly, still half angel—and Paul’s heart lurches again. When Wyeth opens his eyes, Paul is one step ahead of him, popping the hospital-supplied green
plastic pacifier in his mouth. Francie is watching him, and it feels good to know that he’s shining.

Then Eva wakes, and the two women lay the boys side by side on her bed, going over them like lionesses, trading compliments and observations.

“Look at this, does this look like eczema? Do you think I should try a soy-based formula?” Francie smooths Angus’s dark curls straight with her narrow palm. “And look at this, he’s got a dimple here, a bb-sized divot out of the back of his right ear. It’s his mark.”

“His what?” Eva asks.

“His mark, for identification. When I was a girl,” Francie says, “a baby was kidnapped in our town. A little girl, six months old, and the scumbag who took her had a boy, an older boy, maybe twelve? He’d gotten him from someone else. He was keeping them in one of those raper vans, with no windows.

“A year later, the boy got out through the vent in the roof, led police back to the little girl. By this time, she was a year and a half old. They gave her back to the parents, who they thought were the parents, but the guy had cut off all her hair, and she was so much older they weren’t sure if it was her. I remember watching it on the news and thinking, Doesn’t a parent just know? So right away, first thing when I got Angus alone, I stripped him down and looked for something on him, something distinctive and permanent, so I would always know he was mine, if anything happened.”

Together, they pore over Wyeth. Paul leans in.

“Oh, here!” Francie points with a polished pink nail. “I don’t know if this will stay, but look at this triangle of bright blue in his left eye, right there, four o’clock.”

Paul has had enough of this. Women are such crisis-mongers. How often does a baby get snatched? Paul wonders. He zips up his SuperNova Electric fleece and puts the Volvo keys in his pocket. Paul kisses Eva on the head, tucks Wyeth in her crook like a taquito, and promises to be back before they can miss him.

“All set?” he says.

“Ready!” Francie chirps, and he gallantly scoops up the car seat, surprised by its weight.

“I really appreciate this,” Francie prattles as Paul swings the car seat slightly by the handle. Francie has two diaper bags over her bony shoulders, one fancy-schmancy one and the standard black hospital bag and a giant, ridiculous-looking stuffed animal under her other arm. She looks like a teenager lugging her boyfriend’s winnings at the state fair. “John’s
so
busy, there’s this brewery in Singapore that wants to go into partnership on the Soaring Scotsman, and they’re just hammering out all the details. I told John we have to go by the Chosen Child to sign his name on the documents this afternoon, and then believe it or not, he’s on a plane out tonight…”

They wait for the elevator to arrive.

“I thought John was a computer guy.”

“He was—he is, I mean; he consults and he’s still on the board so he has to fly to California for that every few weeks, but this brewery is his baby.”

Both their eyes drift to Angus, swinging along in the car seat between them.

In the parking garage, Paul opens the back of the Volvo so Francie can load the diaper bags and stuffed animal while he carefully buckles the car seat. He catches a whiff of cigarettes, and he can feel eyes on the back of his neck. Paul is not superstitious, but as he fumbles for the safety belt, he wonders…Could it be his father, somehow, a crossing between worlds, a visit from Paul Sr. as he becomes a father himself? It is something Eva would say, that him smelling his father’s cigarettes and feeling a strong sense of being watched were signs, proof that Paul Sr. was still with them.

Shaken, Paul straightens up, looks over his shoulder. By the parking garage elevators there is a hulking, skinhead-type guy in a leather jacket pacing, jiggling his legs, smoking.
Of course
; Paul exhales. The man narrows his eyes at Paul, squares off, agitated. Paul walks
quickly to the back of the Volvo and shuts it, puts his hand protectively on Francie’s elbow as he hurries her around to her side of the car. Inside, he hits the lock, puts the car in reverse. In the rearview mirror, Paul sees that the man hasn’t broken his gaze, is still studying them through an exhalation of smoke.

And then the baby starts screaming, a horrible ragged cry, and Paul turns his attention to driving, to shepherding Francie McAdoo and her new baby home.