Pretending to Dance (11 page)

“Is this about Uncle Trevor's idea for the land?” I asked.

“Yes, darling, as well as a few other issues,” he said. “It'll be boring, that much I can guarantee. You'll be better off with Nanny.”

“Okay with me,” I said.

“Great.” He looked at the computer screen. “Let's give up on the book for today,” he said. “How about you save it—and back it up—and then push me to the kitchen? Save Russell a trip.”

“Sure.” I backed up the work I'd done and then turned his chair around. I was pushing him into the hallway when the phone rang. Someone picked it up, and in a moment Mom's voice called from the kitchen.

“Molly!” she called. “Stacy for you.”

“Okay!” I called back. “I'll be there in a minute.” I continued pushing my father toward the kitchen, wondering if I could ever adequately explain my family to Stacy. There was no need to go into the whole “Amalia on the bench with my dad” thing with her again, since she seemed to have forgotten about it … which was good, I decided, because no matter how easily my father had handled my questions, deep down I wasn't completely sure of his answers.

 

13

San Diego

Aidan and I join sixteen other people in a large room at the Hope Springs Adoption Agency. We sit in a circle on folding metal chairs and as we wait for the arrival of Zoe, who will lead the group, everyone talks in hushed whispers as if we're in church. I don't really want to be here. I'm afraid it's going to be one of those soul-baring groups where I end up crying my eyes out over the baby I lost.

I feel an air of desperation in the room and wonder how much Aidan and I are contributing to it. I glance furtively around the circle. There are a few people who are older than us and several who are younger. We are comfortably in the middle, agewise, I think, and that's reassuring.

Although I feel as though I know Zoe after talking to her more than a dozen times on the phone during the application process, Aidan and I have never met her in person. From her voice and her gently supportive, almost maternal, attitude, I would guess her to be a matronly fifty-year-old. I picture her with dark hair streaked by strands of gray, so I'm surprised when a beautiful red-haired woman walks into the room in stiletto heels and introduces herself as Zoe. Aidan and I exchange a look.

“
Not
what I imagined,” Aidan whispers to me.

“This can't be ‘our' Zoe,” I whisper back, but as soon as the woman opens her mouth, I recognize her comforting voice.

“It may take some time,” she says, turning to take us all in, “but every one of you in this room is going to find your baby.”

A man begins to applaud and several people join him. Aidan and I share a nervous glance. He has his arm across the back of my chair and he gives my shoulder an encouraging squeeze.

Zoe asks all of us to introduce ourselves and tell a little about our “story.” I learn quickly that we are quite a mix of waiting parents. In addition to several straight couples waiting for their first child, there are two lesbian couples, one gay couple, and two single women, and there are two couples trying to adopt for the second time. One of them already has three adopted children and is coming back for a fourth. I feel bitter about them. I can't help it.
Let the rest of us have a turn,
I want to say. I'm fairly certain I'm not the only person in the room with that sentiment. The stories of infertility are heartbreaking to hear. The failed IVF attempts. The multiple miscarriages. One of the lesbian couples talks about the nightmare of being chosen by a birth mother only to have the young woman change her mind a week after the baby had been placed with them. Everyone in the room visibly shudders as the women speak about the agony they went through after bonding with the baby they'd quickly come to think of as theirs. I feel tears growing closer and closer to the surface as I listen to everyone's story and I make the decision I won't tell them about the baby I lost. I can't get through it. I will simply talk about our infertility and my hysterectomy. But when it is our turn, Aidan blurts out, “We lost our daughter when Molly was twenty weeks pregnant,” and there it is, out in the open before I can stop it. Murmurs of sympathy ripple through the group. Tears well up in my eyes and my voice is stuck in my throat. I try to smile a grateful smile and don't even attempt to speak. I let Aidan do the talking for both of us.

“I came from a very loving, happy family,” he says, “and I want to re-create that. Molly's parents both passed away when she was young and she has no siblings and I know she wants the opportunity to create a real family of her own.”

I'm relieved when Aidan is done talking and Zoe takes over again. Balancing on her stilettos in the middle of the room, she gives us information most of us already know. She describes the legalities surrounding our relationship with the—so far phantom—birth parents. She tells us the agency will provide counseling for the birth mothers, and goes over the cost of medical care and other potential expenses we'll be expected to cover. She talks for about twenty minutes, then suddenly shifts gears.

“So,” she says, “I'd like each of you who is here with a partner to tell us why your partner will make a good parent. Those of you here alone, of course, will tell us about yourselves.”

She looks directly at us, and I know we're expected to go first. I'm embarrassed by my inability to speak during our last attempt at sharing, so I dive right in. I talk about Aidan's easygoing nature and how he'd love a son or daughter to share his passion for sports and adventure. “He's the sort of person you can count on,” I say. “He has strong values and puts them into action, which is why he practices immigration law. He'll make a wonderful role model for a child.”

I turn to Aidan and he smiles at me. “Thanks, babe,” he says. Then he looks around the circle.

“Molly is the most generous person I know,” he says. “She's one of those people who sees what other people need even before they know they need it. I first realized this about her when we were dating. Of course she was very attentive to my needs back then.” He offers a mildly prurient smile to the group. “But it was the way she treated other people that I really noticed,” he continues. “The way she'd look out for the needs of the underdog or help her friends who were in trouble. She offers pro bono legal services at the women's shelter downtown. She arranged one of those meal trains for my sister after my sister gave birth to twins, even though it was only a few months after Molly had lost our own baby. I don't know how she did it; I couldn't have.”

My throat tightens again. I don't know how I did it, either.

“She takes extraordinary care of the people she loves,” Aidan says. “She'll make a phenomenal mother.”

He turns to the woman on his right to let her know he is finished and it's her turn. She begins to speak, but I don't hear her. I'm overwhelmed by Aidan's description of me. Am I really the generous, caring person he described? I want to be. Maybe I truly am. I'm so hung up on my dishonesty these days that I've lost track of anything good about myself.

“Now, you know when we talk about open adoption that there are many different levels of openness,” Zoe says after everyone in our circle has had the chance to speak. “There's no right or wrong,” she says, “only that degree of openness you and the birth parents settle on in your ‘contact agreement.' I thought it would be fun, though, to invite a family here today that epitomizes openness in adoption.” Smiling, she nods toward the door behind me and I turn to see two women, a man, and a little girl. They move toward us and Aidan gets up to make room for them to walk into the center of our circle, where Zoe and another man are setting up three chairs.

The man and women sit down and one of the women offers a stuffed kitten to the little girl, who cannot be much more than a year old. Zoe introduces them to us. They are an adoptive couple in their late thirties with their little girl and the child's twenty-year-old birth mother. They begin to tell us about their relationship.

“Gracie lived with us the last month of her pregnancy,” the adoptive mother says. “Things were rough for her at home and we'd already come to love her, so it just made sense.”

“I live with my boyfriend now, though,” Gracie says.

“We still have dinner together a couple of Sunday nights during the month,” the adoptive father adds.

“And we just hang out sometimes during the week,” Gracie says. The little girl taps the kitten on Gracie's knee and Gracie lifts the child onto her lap. I wish I could steal a glance at Aidan.

I am not the only person in the room who appears stunned by the relationship in front of us. Is this what we want? Is this what
I
want? To share my child to this degree? I decide right then that I can't handle it. I'm afraid of it. I'm afraid of losing my child's affections to his or her birth mother.
There.
I let the thought in. I feel weak for having it, but it's the truth. I am not that generous person Aidan described. Secretly, I wonder if those old-fashioned closed adoptions still exist and, if so, can we find one.

*   *   *

“How about that family!” Aidan says as soon as we get in the car. “Was that fantastic or what?”

“I thought it was a little much,” I say. “I mean, that couple didn't just adopt a
baby.
For all intents and purposes, they adopted the baby's mother as well.”

“Well, that's an exaggeration, but can you imagine how great it is for that little girl to have a relationship with her birth mom like that? It's too bad the birth father couldn't have been equally as involved.” The birth father, it had turned out, had been “unknown.”

“Do you really want an adoption that's that open?” I ask.

He nods. “Absolutely,” he says, then he turns to frown at me. “I thought you did, too. You said there should be no deep dark secrets.”

He doesn't understand. I have never told him enough about myself to
let
him understand.

“Well, like Zoe says,” I say, “there are different degrees of openness.” I press my hands together in my lap. “I don't want deep dark secrets,” I say, “but I don't want the birth mother to move in with us, either.”

“She was only with them for a short time,” Aidan says. “You're really blowing their situation out of proportion.”

“You're the father,” I say. “You can't see it from my perspective.”

“You mean … are you talking about competition? That's ridiculous.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. That little girl knows who her mother is. But she loves them both, and more importantly, she's loved
by
them both. You've said that yourself, babe. How great open adoption is because the child knows he or she is loved by so many people.”

Had I really said that? These days, I seem to say one thing when I mean another. I'm a mess. I turn my face away from Aidan and look into the darkness outside the car window. I think of my father. If he were here right now, he would root out my true feelings in ten seconds flat. He'd know I'm afraid of losing the child I haven't even met yet.

 

14

Morrison Ridge

If someone was plunked down on Morrison Ridge and asked to pick which of the five houses had once been the slave quarters, they might pick Amalia's last. Well, that wasn't quite the truth. Nanny's big brick house was clearly the main building, but Amalia's small house was so modern and cool, no one would guess it had ever housed Morrison Ridge's slaves. Amalia's half acre was technically part of Nanny's twenty-five. I don't know how Daddy did it, but he'd talked Nanny into letting Amalia live there. I expected she would live there for all time.

I heard music as soon as I turned my bike off the loop road and onto the narrow lane that led to her house, although I had to ride another ten yards or so before I could make out what it was: Phil Collins singing, “I Can Feel It Coming in the Air Tonight.” I loved dancing to that one, and I pedaled faster.

Amalia's house seemed to pop out of the woods. One minute it wasn't there, and the next it was. Only one story, it seemed to hug the earth with wood and glass.

I hopped off my bike and leaned it against one of the trees in her yard. Through the wall of windows, I could see that she was already dancing in the long living room. She was a shadowy figure blending in with the reflection of the trees in the glass. I ran inside, and when she spotted me, she smiled and held out her hand. I took it and we moved slowly across the wide wood plank floor to the final haunting refrain of the song. She had on a black spandex camisole and a loose lavender chiffon skirt that fell below her knees and was split up the middle to give her the freedom to kick her legs high. She had a bunch of those skirts in all different colors. The skirt floated in the air when she turned and her long hair swung around her shoulders. When Amalia spun in circles, everything spun with her.

By contrast, I was in my cutoff denim shorts and pink tank top, my hair up in a ponytail. I kicked off my sandals so we were both barefoot.

The room was perfect for dancing, the only furniture two huge round Papasan chairs at one end and a disorganized pile of floor pillows against the windows. The tops of the windows were filled with the abstract stained-glass designs she loved to make and the colors seemed to sway around us as we moved. I watched, mesmerized, as my arms turned blue, then gold, then red. I loved dancing so much. At school, my friends and I were into the Electric Slide and the Running Man, but I really liked the freedom of Amalia's interpretive dance, moving however the music made me feel. How I felt today, though, was undeniably different than how I'd felt the last time I danced with her. I knew things about Amalia now that I hadn't known then.