A Necessary End (26 page)

“It's not my fault she left her phone behind. It's not my fault Michael had a fever.” He looks sulky. “I don't get it, why she's suddenly all into him.”

Oh, man. Leah's into Michael, more than Trevor? Adrienne better not hear about this.

“He's sorta cute, but he's always, like, projectile vomiting. What's that about?” So Trevor's jealous of Michael, too.

“This is better than it was. You should have seen him when he was first born. It was like Vesuvius erupting every time he had a feeding.” I take the next shot, because it doesn't seem like he's going to. The ball sails into the pocket, and I don't know why, but I instantly feel lighter.

Trevor laughs. “I guess I should thank him. Leah never used to
have tits like this.” He lowers his voice. “I couldn't help it, I had to try it.”

“Try what?”

“The milk.”

“No shit! Are you serious?”

He grins. “It's, like, sweeter and more watery than real milk. Kind of like—have you ever had almond milk? It was a little like that.”

I laugh.

“I like Adrienne,” he says. I shoot him a look. I'm not that thrilled about his segue from Leah's tits to my wife. “I'm just saying, she's cool. But Leah . . .”

“Yeah, I know. Leah doesn't think so.”

“She can't. I'm surprised your whole house doesn't smell like piss. You know, from the two of them marking their territory.”

I don't want to like him. I will not like him. Once I'm sober, it'll be like this never happened.

“I think part of why Leah's upset with me,” he says, “is because Adrienne was so upset with her.”

“Adrienne was upset with Leah? Today, you mean?”

“She didn't tell you? She was trying not to go off, you could just see it.”

It's possible Adrienne told me and now I can't remember. Slim chance, but possible. A long story, she said.

“The problem with Leah,” he says, “is that the more you tell her she can't do something, the more she wants to do it. So if Adrienne treats her like she can't be a mom, well . . .”

“Reverse psychology.”

He lines up his cue stick. “Maybe you should tell Adrienne that.”

I have the feeling all our male bonding was leading up to this particular piece of advice. Unfortunately for Trevor, even if I could recall, I'm not really inclined to pass it along.

I
t was a fitful night's sleep. I don't even know what time Gabe came to bed, and I'm pretty sure that he was drunk again. He's keeping a bottle of bourbon in the garage now. What gets me is that he thinks I'm too stupid to realize it.

I'm practicing behavior modification, like I do in the classroom. Sometimes you have to ignore a behavior to extinguish it. Even getting mad is a form of reinforcement. Gabe's not going to get my negative attention this time; he needs to grow up.

Enough of his excuses. I refuse to humor him and change our son's name. It's high time that he got over this obsession with his brother.

Sometimes I think I should just come clean. Then Gabe would know who his brother really was: not some hapless victim, but a master manipulator, the kind whose strength lies in playing up his presumed weakness. But once upon a time, I decided it was kinder to keep that from Gabe so he could to hang on to a pristine memory of his brother. That's obviously backfiring now.

I wish I could summon more compassion. All I want to say is:
Man up. Be a father. Be a husband. Be something substantial. Right now, he's the ghost, not his brother. But I must be exercising some compassion, because I haven't said any of that. Last night, I was definitely tempted. Who renames a baby?

I glance at the clock: 8:04
A.M
. Gabe's still snoring next to me, and Michael should have started crying by now.

I pull on a robe over my pajamas and head for the nursery. The door's open, and Michael's not in his crib. My heart immediately starts to pound as I dash out into the hall. Then I see them in the living room: Leah and Trevor down on the blanket, encircling Michael. Michael is inside their circle. How did this happen? It was supposed to be a circle with Gabe and me; that's what I said in the adoption profile.

I'm inflamed by the utter wrongness of it. I stride down the hall, not even caring what kind of entrance I make. I'm prepared to let fly. This has to stop.

What freezes me in my tracks is that he's smiling. There's drool on his chin and a bib full of spit-up still around his neck and he's just staring at Trevor and Leah in awed delight. Smiling up at his parents.

I feel like a deflating balloon. None of them have noticed me. Leah is doing “this little piggy” with Michael's toes, and Trevor is “whee-whee-whee”–ing all the way through it.

Without turning, Leah says, “We already fed him.”

“Passed him back and forth like a football,” Trevor adds. “It was awesome.”

Et tu, Trevor? I thought he came out here to take her away from all this. They should be on the road back to Rhode Island. That was the deal.

“Does anyone want breakfast?” I say. “I'm going to make eggs.” Before they can answer, I'm in the kitchen, slamming the cast-iron skillet down on top of the stove. I shouldn't do that, it's an electric stove with a black ceramic cooking surface. The last thing I need is a hairline crack to remind me forever of this moment, the moment when I lost my son.

No, I haven't lost him yet. I've been his mommy for almost six weeks now. The fact that he saved his first smile for them—that doesn't mean anything.

I don't understand how things have spiraled this badly, this fast. I don't understand how Michael could do this to me. I'm the one who's been changing every diaper, doing every feeding (well, last one excepted), loving him. Where's the loyalty? Where's the justice?

As I crack eggs into a bowl, I'm thinking that maybe I deserve this. Not because of Gabe's brother, but because of my own hubris. I should have known better than to make any deals with a potential devil, after Patty. Leah chose us, sure, but I chose her right back. Of course, when I first met Patty, I had no way of knowing I was dealing with the actual devil.

Not that Patty's her real name. The irony is, even if I'd been able to figure out her true identity, I wouldn't have been able to touch her. Nothing she did was illegal. It's incredible how the most immoral of acts can be entirely legal.

She was in her late twenties. That's what she said anyway, and that's what she looked like the first time I met her in person. There were tiny cobwebs just starting to form by her eyes and they intensified when she smiled, which was often. I liked her. Maybe I even loved her.

She came into our lives after only four months of searching. She was early in her pregnancy, only four months along. The numerology felt like kismet.

Hers was the first call I ever received on the birth mother line. We were both so nervous (well, I was nervous, she was just playing at it, playing me), and that forged its own kind of bond. Neither of us had done this before (or so I thought). When she confided that she was embarrassed to be pregnant by a married man, I empathized instantly. I believed her totally.

She seemed so sincerely flummoxed by her predicament. We talked for hours about her misfortunes. She was the kind of person who was lied to by dates, abandoned by her family, mugged in the
grocery store parking lot. Her last apartment building burned down. “But I won't let it harden me,” she said. “If I do, then it's like they all win.”

I didn't know who “they” were—the terrorists, maybe? I was charmed by her seemingly misguided resolve. I couldn't imagine being so open to the world, so unprotected, and maybe I even admired that in her. It must have been contagious, because I was open to her in a way I'd never been before with a friend, only with Gabe.

Plus, I wanted to love this woman, the mother of my baby. I wanted to trust her. With her life being so full of calamity, it seemed certain that she would never be one of those mothers I'd read about on the adoption message boards, the kind who changed her mind. She could barely handle her life as it was; there was no way she'd throw a baby into the mix. That's what she said, repeatedly, and there seemed no reason to doubt her.

I swore that Gabe and I would do right by her, and I meant it. We would not be another in a series of catastrophes.

She said she couldn't wait to fly out and meet us in person. “I love you guys already,” she told me. “I know you're going to be the best mom.”

But among her other troubles, she had an ogre of a boss. She was an administrative assistant at a corporation, and she needed another month in order to accrue a PTO day (she'd used all hers up on things like replacing the car windshield that got randomly smashed). I told her we could fly her out on a Friday night and back on a Sunday, it was a short flight, but she said she wanted us to have more time to get to know each other.

I look back, and obviously, I should have seen through her. But she was so convincing. She was the little engine that could, the hooker with a heart of gold. I realize that part of why she seemed so familiar was because she was like something out of a movie. If there were an Oscar given for swindling prospective adoptive parents, she'd win.

We kept talking on the phone, and she kept postponing the visit.
But she was sending me ultrasound pictures and we were so close that I felt sure that Gabe and I were the only parents she could ever want for her baby. I mean, why wouldn't she want us? I was the best friend she'd ever had; she told me so.

Yes, I sent her money a few times. More than a few times. They weren't large amounts, and she never asked directly. But it was clear she didn't earn much, and she was always incurring additional expenses, none of them her fault. She found her cat in the bushes with a broken pelvis after he'd apparently gotten hit by a car. She posted the pictures on Facebook.

That was part of how she fooled me. Her Facebook seemed to attest to her being an incredibly sweet and deeply unlucky woman. Everything that befell her had photographic evidence. Yet, my bullshit detector must have been going off on some level because I didn't tell Gabe that much about the conversations. I didn't tell him about her cat with the broken pelvis or her car with the busted windshield. I certainly never told him about the money.

I think the genius of her performance was that she seemed so trusting herself. The world was giving her no reason to believe in it, and still, she did. She found a way. It made me want to be like her, at least enough to pay her vet bills and buy her a new winter coat and send a little something extra for her birthday.

I opened up to her more and more, told her everything because I knew she'd never judge me. It seemed like a win-win: I got a best friend, and she was going to have my baby. But as Gabe says, win-wins are rare as comets.

I should have thought of that before I let Trevor into our home. I scramble the eggs in the pan and try to drown out the sounds of him and Leah playing with Michael. I will not hear Michael's happy gurgles. I won't imagine his smiles.

Patty did eventually come out to see us. We put her up at a four-star hotel in San Francisco, not because she asked but because it seemed like the right thing to do. She never got to go anywhere; I
wasn't going to stick her in a Motel 6. She said she wasn't comfortable staying with us, that it would feel like far too much of an imposition (not that she seemed to mind imposing on our credit card).

During the long weekend, she didn't end up spending much time with Gabe and me. She had reconnected with some old friends on Facebook, she said, who lived in San Francisco now, how cool was that? Indeed, I could read their ebullient posts. I didn't feel like I had any business trying to take her vacation away from her.

Gabe and I met her for brunch in the city near her hotel. She had a new pixie haircut and was quite rounded, since she was seven months pregnant. But she told me that she couldn't feel the baby kicking, he was too far back in the womb, which meant there was no point in my touching her stomach. “My doctor says there's nothing to worry about, the baby's totally normal.” She added gaily, “I just have one of those uteruses!”

In retrospect, it was all pretty suspicious. At the time, though, I was heavily invested in her. In just a few months, she was going to give birth to my child. I had all the ultrasounds in the baby book, and I looked at them every night, the way I'd someday read him (or her) bedtime stories. I was sleeping so well.

Throughout brunch, Patty kept answering texts. She didn't ask us anything, really, just rambled on about her favorite parts of the city. But then, it wasn't your average adoptive parents/birth mother interview. She and I were best friends, while she and Gabe were virtually strangers (they'd had a few brief chats on the phone prior). So I chalked up any awkwardness to that: It's always strange when your significant other meets your friends, when you have to navigate two different levels of intimacy at once. It's bound to create unusual dynamics.

“There's something off about her,” Gabe said that night.

I wasn't ready to hear that, and we escalated quickly. I told him he was just afraid to be a father. “You don't want to like her,” I said accusatorily. “Then you'd have to grow up.”

It was one of the ugliest moments in our marriage—in part, because it's turned out to be true.

We ran through the emotional scales: from rage to sadness to disappointment to forgiveness, crescendoing in some of the best sex we've ever had. Sex has always been our way to restore equilibrium and silence dissension.

Patty went home, where the mishaps continued. Her cat was a money pit. But the poor thing was fourteen, he couldn't last much longer even with dialysis. (His kidneys were damaged in the car accident.)

After the visit, I didn't feel the same way about Patty. I felt like maybe she was a bit of an opportunist, especially given how little time she spent with me—her supposed best friend—during her visit. I was hurt and disappointed, but I was still going to be a mother soon. I just needed to focus on that, which was the point of it all.

A month before her due date, Patty wanted to come to San Francisco again under the pretense of getting to know Gabe better. I insisted she stay in our house and that we see a lawyer to finalize the contract. Unlike our previous dealings, I didn't just roll over and accept her terms.

Patty suddenly had a lump in her breast that needed to be biopsied, so she bailed on the visit. I sent flowers to her work instead of money to her PO box. She never did thank me.

In fact, she never contacted me again. She didn't respond to my calls or texts for the next week. Then she defriended me on Facebook, and her cell phone was no longer in service. Gabe had watched one episode of
Catfish
and had the genius idea to search for her pictures under Google Images. If only he'd gotten proactive sooner. We found that Patty had five alter egos, each with her own Facebook page. We couldn't see what was on them (they were private, of course), but I was pretty sure that each page was patronized by at least one prospective adoptive parent and featured pictures of a cat in traction.

Patty broke my heart clean in half. For the last month we were
talking, the month when my faith in her was shaken, I sustained myself by dreaming of soon being a mother. I started buying infant paraphernalia and storing it in a high cupboard in the kitchen. Sometimes I'd idly stroke, say, a newborn wool hat while listening to Patty. It soothed me, a fantasy that was soon to become reality.

I didn't even know how to grieve for this baby that would never be mine. I didn't seem to know how to do anything except be angry: at her, at myself.

My fantasies turned to revenge. I had a PO box address for her, and I talked about staking it out. Gabe tried to convince me not to. “What would you do if you found her anyway?” he asked. “Confront her? She's got no conscience.”

He didn't get it. I wasn't interested in making her feel bad. I was interested in making all her bad luck come true. When I couldn't sleep—which was often—I'd let visions of her bloody face dance in my head instead of sugarplums. My dreams were full of beautiful, satisfying, cleansing violence.