Daughters for a Time (8 page)

“You’re wrong, Helen. Not everyone leaves. Just because your father left and your mother died, doesn’t mean that’s all there is to your track record. I’m not leaving. Our new baby isn’t leaving, either.” Tim shrugged, palms up. “Do you even believe that someone can actually stay?
I’m
staying, Helen. I’m not going anywhere. And our daughter will stay, too.” He shook his head. “Do you need to know more than that?”

“No.”

“No one’s leaving,” he repeated.

“No matter what?”

“No matter what.”

The next night I found myself behind the wheel, heading in the direction of Arlington. Tim wouldn’t be home for hours, and other than diving into the packet of adoption materials, I didn’t have anything to do. I zipped through the drive-through at Starbucks for a caramel latte and a piece of coffee cake and turned onto the road that led to my father’s house. I slowed to a stop in front of the park and squinted to see through his front window. There was light inside. He was in there, moving around, but I couldn’t make out much. Next time I would remember to bring binoculars. I squinted again at the window. What was he doing? Putting away his dinner dishes? What did a guy living alone even
eat
for dinner? A frozen pizza? A steak fried in a pan? Maybe he had more skills than I was giving him credit for. Maybe someday I’d cook him a big pot of chili with a batch of corn bread muffins. That would last him all week. He’d like that, wouldn’t he? A home-cooked meal?

I stared at my father’s house as if it held the answers to all of my questions. Why did my mother die when she would have done anything to live to see us grow up? Why did my father live but leave when we needed him so badly to stay? Where was my family when I needed them to fill the hole in my heart?

If you want a family so badly
, some pesky intruder in my head chimed,
then make it happen.

The next day, I pulled the adoption packet out of my bottom desk drawer, flipped over the brochure, and stared into the eyes of the girls who needed mothers.
I get it
, I wanted to tell them.
I’ve been left, too. I have a hole in my heart, too
.

With the completion of each form, a new eagerness rose in me, a resounding assuredness that this might work. But as quickly as the hope would rise, I’d push it back down.
Not yet
, my heart seemed to be saying, as if it knew that it was safer to keep some distance. The file of paperwork grew. Soon it was so thick that I transferred it to a box, a tangible pile of evidence pointing in the direction of a baby. But still, there were no guarantees, my skeptical mind would remind me. I was afraid of opening my heart completely until she was in my arms. Just in case she never was.

Nonetheless, with each completed form, I felt my body calm, my shoulders drop, my heart heal. Some nights, when I closed my eyes, an image of a precious porcelain-faced baby with lacquer-black hair popped into my mind. I could almost imagine her rosebud lips and almond-shaped eyes. I’d see her a few years down the road when she was Maura’s age, regaling me with her stories from the day.
We got to paint, Mom! With our fingers!

The adoption paperwork was voluminous. We produced tax returns, pay stubs, investment summaries, medical exams, police screenings, fingerprints. We collected letters of recommendation, wrote essays, swore that we would feed, clothe, educate, and never hurt this child. Each form required our signatures, a notary public witnessing them, a certification stating that the notary public was indeed a notary public, and authentication. While unfit parents everywhere were popping out babies, we were being scrutinized in order to adopt a baby nobody wanted. The irony was rich.

One day, I was outside collecting our mail. My neighbor, Kathy, was at her mailbox, too. We chatted and she stepped easily into my personal life, asking how the “fertility problems” were going. Before I thought it through, I told her that we were putting in to adopt.

“Mark my words!” she said in her know-it-all voice, wagging her finger at me. “You’ll adopt and no sooner get pregnant. You watch! It happens all of the time.”

I nodded, refraining from arguing that thousands of adoptive parents out there would beg to differ with her theory. Infertile was infertile, as it were.

Back in the house, I sat down with a cup of tea and considered Kathy’s point. Maybe, I thought, Kathy and her cohort of intrusive, busybody women who spouted their philosophies whether you asked them or not were correct. “Just watch!” I’d heard them cluck a thousand times. “Your body will relax and you’ll get pregnant!” they’d said, laughing with their mouths open, as if it were the most delightfully ironic thing in the world. How I could have punched them in the mouth, those women who sprouted babies from their hips and arms like eyes on a potato.

And while there was no science to back up Kathy’s claim, it was true that it happened all of the time.

Tim was elated that I had finally come around and that we had submitted the last of the paperwork to the agency. And truly, I
had
come around. My continuing efforts to procreate now sent an uneasy shiver down my spine, as if I were betraying the Chinese orphan whom I had never met but was somehow already growing to love. But still, I was split. I was courting two lovers and was flanked with the attendant guilt. I desperately wanted the baby in China, but I also couldn’t help reserving a glimmer of hope for a last-ditch effort, a secret plan to tempt fate, confuse karma, and trick my body. I pocketed my
plan as my own little treasure, something I clung to in private, something I would take out if I ever achieved pregnancy again.
See!
I’d say.
I told you not to count me out.

In September, we met with our social worker, Dr. Eleanor Reese.

“Call me, Elle,” she said, standing at our front door, fluffing her nest of wild auburn hair.

We asked her into the family room, offered her coffee. She sat in the upholstered chair in front of the fireplace. Her eyes were greenish, feline, and her body was voluptuous, with a pendulous bosom and curvy hips. She was dressed in flowing fabrics of bright hues, three-inch heels, and a pound of jewelry. She looked like an advertisement for Chicos. She was so vibrant and I was so
anything-but
in my khaki pants and blue sweater from the Old Navy Boring Department. The juxtaposition was glaring.

I was already squirming. Her eye contact was
too
good. What if she could detect that I wanted to adopt, but that I wasn’t quite finished trying to get pregnant?

“It’s so nice meeting you both,” Elle said, waving her arm in the air, her bangles falling like dominoes down her wrist. “I enjoyed talking to you the other day on the phone.”

During that phone conversation, I had told her a bit about Tim and me, our desire to adopt.

“Tell me more about yourselves,” she said now. “How long have you been married?”

“Seven years.”

“And how did you meet?”

I told her about meeting at cooking school in France—two kids from Virginia falling in love halfway around the globe.

“A real love affair,” Elle said, shimmying in her chair, bracelets chiming.

I looked at Elle, wondered what it would be like to be so
jolly
, to wear such bright clothing, to laugh so loudly, to feel so much joy.

“Once you were married, did you have conversations about having children?”

“All the time,” I said. “We both have always wanted a family.”

“And seeing that you both went to cooking school, are either of you chefs?” Elle asked.

“Tim and I own a restaurant—Harvest, on Seventeenth Street?”

“Harvest!” Elle roared. “I have dreams about the braised pheasant and parmesan polenta.” She opened her mouth and let out a gravelly laugh that caused tremors throughout her body.

“Yeah, that is pretty good,” I admitted, imagining the slow, thick bubble of the deepening sauce sliding into the earthy polenta.

Tim and I looked at each other, smiled through our eyes.

“Why don’t you tell me what brought you to the decision to adopt.”

We told her about the years of trying, the infertility, the miscarriage, the baby room that was dulling with age.

“I just want to be a mother,” I said in a pitiful voice. Elle Reese’s killer eye contact operated like truth serum on me. With her, I wanted to bare my soul.

“Have you had a hard time accepting your infertility?”

I looked at her, paused before I answered. What did she see in me? “I admit, I wanted to have a baby badly. And I haven’t yet completely mourned that loss. But I’m ready to adopt,” I said. “My heart is in it.”

“Tell me about your family.”

“My family spans the spectrum,” I said. “I have a father who left us early on—so, not a good thing. But I have an older sister who carried her responsibility to me like a torch, so she’s definitely a ‘positive’ in my family column. And Tim has two parents who are just lovely, incredible people.”

“Where does your mother fall?” Elle asked.

“My mother just fell, period. She died of cancer when I was fourteen.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that,” Elle said, and pulled a thin box of Kleenex from her bag. “For you, raising a child as a ‘motherless mother’—a mother who lost her own mother at an early age—will have its challenges. I recently read a study that showed that these mothers worried more about ‘getting it right’ than mothers who still had their own mothers around.”

“I want to be a good mother,” I said. “I know that.”

“When you lose your mother early on, as you did, having your own child is remarkably healing, in that it can restore what was taken from you. But it also forces you to face your demons. There’s no running away.”

We worked with Elle for a few months. She told us that the wait to get a baby would be about twelve to fourteen months from the time that our paperwork was approved. A pregnancy, plus some. When all was said and done, on the first day of November, the adoption agency sent our dossier of paperwork to China, requesting on our behalf that we be matched with a baby. If all went well, in about a year’s time, Tim and I would fly to China and return with a baby girl.

Months passed, Thanksgiving and then Christmas. Before we knew it, the New Year was upon us. With each passing day, the adoption grew closer.
My daughter
, the words that used to get caught in my throat as I thought about adoption were now smooth and welcoming, like a caramel melting in my mouth. Each month brought us closer to getting our referral, the document
with information about the baby with whom we had been matched. Each day, my fixation with having a biological baby eased. What was once an obsession was now like a part-time hobby.

My efforts to get pregnant became halfhearted, at best. Some months I would be aware of my cycle and would make an effort to seduce Tim on prime nights. But most months, I wasn’t paying attention. The desperation was gone. A new calm had infiltrated my being. One morning, when I was feeling particularly strong and well adjusted, I cleaned out the cabinet below my sink, tossing the ovulation and pregnancy tests in the garbage. I tossed, too, the dog-eared books on the mechanics of getting pregnant and understanding fertility that had filled a bookshelf. Finally, I threw away the ovulation-inducing medication.

Claire urged me to get the baby’s room ready. “I’ll take you shopping,” she said. She knew everything that we would need, every piece of gear that could possibly be required. Finally, I acquiesced and we went shopping for the big items: stroller, crib, dresser, car seat—impersonal items that could be returned if we ended up empty-handed. Still in their boxes, I lined them against the wall in the baby’s pale-yellow room.

“We need to get some clothes, too,” Claire said.

“Not yet.” Still superstitious, I needed to stay away from the onesies and the OshKosh overalls and the rubber-footed sleeper suits. Falling in love with a piece of clothing with duck feet seemed like a bad idea. My heart was only so strong.

When Tim got home from work, he found me on the floor of the baby room, lying on my back, taking in the scent of lavender sachets and the crisp air from the open windows.