Desperate

DELIRIOUS

HELPLESS

STOLEN

DESPERATE

Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

KENSINGTON BOOKS
http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Dedicated to Marjorie and Stephen.
Thank you for raising such a wonderful daughter.

and

In loving memory of my father, Michael Palmer.
I sure do miss you, Pop.

T
he only thing unusual about the bus stop was the crying woman sitting on the yellow-painted curb. Her hands were covering her mouth, and even with all the traffic whizzing down Massachusetts Avenue, I could still hear the muffled sobs. It was the beginning of August, and a warm breeze carried with it the sweet scent of marigolds mixed with pine. I was carrying a brown paper bag with a carton of General Tso’s chicken steaming inside. Stapled to the front of the bag was an order slip with just my name, Gage Dekker. No phone number or address supplied; the gang at Lilac Blossoms and I were that close. In fairness to my heart, the bag also contained a carton of steamed broccoli, brown rice (not white), egg drop soup, and some vegetable medley thing that came with the squishy tofu Anna loved.

It was Anna, my wife, who stopped, stooped to the crying woman’s level, and asked, “Are you all right?” What Anna was really asking was, “Do you want our help?”

The woman looked up at Anna, her eyes veined as though layered with bloody spiderwebs. She was breathtakingly beautiful, like a runway model: high cheekbones, a translucent complexion, and almond-shaped brown eyes perched below two perfectly arched eyebrows. Her face was a delicate oval, framed by dirty-blond hair, which hung limply over her shoulders in long, straight strands. As for her age, I’d have said late twenties—a decade my junior—but her denim jeans, ripped at the knees, along with the accompanying jean jacket, suggested a younger woman. A girl, really.

“Are you okay?” Anna asked again.

The young woman sucked in a heavy breath, pushed a thick band of hair away from her eyes. She sniffed twice, rubbing the underside of her nose with the back of her hand, flashing me her chipped (and chewed) fingernails.

“Yeah, I’ll be all right,” she said. “Thanks.”

Anna sat on the curb beside her. I kept standing, marveling at the depth of my wife’s strength and compassion. She connected while I just watched like a spectator in the stands. It didn’t surprise me; Anna had done the same for me.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Anna asked, reaching out to touch the woman’s shoulder with her well-manicured hand.

“I’m fine, really,” she said.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“You’re not from Planned Parenthood, are you?”

Anna looked up at me. The flicker in her eyes registered something important, or the possibility of something important.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” Anna replied.

The woman exhaled a weighty breath and shook her head. “Sorry, bad joke. Look, since you asked, I just told my boyfriend that I’m pregnant and he went nuts, made this big scene, and just drove off. I guess he left me stranded.”

Something passed between Anna and me, a look we’d shared on any number of occasions. It was the look she gave me every time we saw a pregnant woman or a mother with her baby, the look that said:
Why can’t we have what they have?

“How come your boyfriend was so upset?” Anna asked.

The crying woman’s laugh was spiked with anguish. “I guess ’cause I don’t know if it’s his,” she said.

I studied Anna carefully, gauging her gestures and mannerisms to get a lock on her emotions. In the six months we’d been married, we already had been to couples therapy. In fact, everything about our union was accelerated, but that wasn’t uncommon in extreme situations like ours, the marriage counselor had explained. In those half-dozen sessions, I’d learned all about active listening. About checking in. Making sure Anna knew I was there for her. In truth, we had gone to therapy proactively, before we had any major issue to address. Figured it was a bad idea for two grieving parents to join their lives without having the tools to make the marriage work. Anna likened it to moving into a house without checking to see if there was a roof.

“Do you have any place to go?” Anna asked.

“I’m going home, unless that asshole won’t let me back in.”

Anna stood, brushing bits of sand and gravel from the back of her skirt. She found her wallet from within her purse, took out a business card, and hesitated before offering it to the young woman. Anna was a management consultant. She worked out of the house and traveled a lot on business. She was accustomed to passing out her card with our home address on it to strangers, but with this young lady she had hesitated. This wasn’t about business. No, this was a personal matter, and Anna knew giving out her card was as much about Anna trying to remediate her own troubles as about offering to help this young woman.

“Please take my card,” Anna said. “My name is Anna Miller and this is my husband, Gage. If you ever need to talk to someone, you can give me a call. Okay?”

I knew what Anna really wanted to say. I could read between the lines, no different than learning a new language. Anna’s eyes spoke of hope; her hands, each trembling slightly, spoke of desire; her skin color, flush with a rush of blood to the head, spoke of divine intervention. Our hopes and dreams could be answered in the form of this girl.

“Thanks,” she said, taking the card from Anna. “My name is Lily.”

Lily.

She’d always be the crying woman to me.

W
e didn’t intend to grow our family through adoption. We weren’t even planning to get married or have kids, at least not right away. But I knew from past experience that plans and reality were not always one and the same. On our wedding day, Anna and I laughed, and said we’d had a five-year relationship in less than one year’s time.

We went out on six dates before we made love. Six months later we were essentially living together. Three months after that, we got married in a private civil ceremony. No family, no friends were in attendance. It was a mutual decision. We wanted to celebrate each other but didn’t want to explain our reasons for rushing into matrimony. A few months before our wedding, a few days after Anna missed her period, she had gone to CVS in Arlington Center, bought an EPT, peed on the stick, and showed me the word PREGNANT. We were going to become parents again. It was both terrifying and elating, and we needed to experience those feelings in private.

I held Anna in my arms, the two of us kneeling on the tiled bathroom floor. Even though I was happy, I felt a stab of guilt. I didn’t share this with Anna. This was a time for us to celebrate. But secretly, I felt I had betrayed the memory of my son, and wondered if Anna felt anything similar in regard to her son, Kevin.

How quickly did our elation come and go? Two weeks and seven hours. That was when Anna, her voice strangled by tears, called me from a hospital in Seattle. Anna, a self-employed and highly sought-after management consultant, was traveling on business, finalizing a significant new contract, when the bleeding started. I didn’t get all the words, but enough to paint a vivid picture in my mind. Alone in a hotel bathroom, trying to breathe away the throbbing pain in her abdomen, reaching down between her legs and having her hands come away covered in blood. I found out later she took a cab to the hospital. I was crushed to think of her desperate, panicked, and so alone.

When Anna came home, everything was different. I could see it in her eyes. We wouldn’t try again, even though her doctor in Seattle said we could give it a go as soon as Anna felt emotionally ready. But Anna wasn’t ever going to be emotionally ready. That was what her eyes told me. But the experience had awakened in her a strong desire to become a parent again, as it had with me. It also brought us closer together as a couple and made me realize this was the woman I wanted to marry.

The day Anna decided she wanted to adopt was early springtime, a cool and crisp morning with a blanket of fog low enough to kiss the ground. She had emerged from the shower, towel-drying her shoulder-length dark brown hair. She flopped down on the bed in her plush and fuzzy bathrobe and looked up at the ceiling.

“I’ve had enough loss, Gage. I can’t risk getting pregnant again,” she said. Tears lined the bottom of her eyes.

I climbed onto the bed and lay down beside her. Our eyes met. My mind flashed on an image of my first wife, Karen. Anna looked nothing like Karen. My therapist told me this was all intentional on the part of my subconscious. I said it wasn’t subconscious at all. I couldn’t be with a woman if every day she reminded me of my first great love.

In truth, I hadn’t noticed Anna right away. She was new to our grief group, which met on Tuesdays in the basement of a nearby Unitarian church. Her blank and unreadable face didn’t draw me to her, but she was clearly attractive—later I’d say gorgeous—tall and long-limbed, athletically built, with alluring brown eyes, a prominent nose, and a beautiful olive complexion. Unlike most of us at group therapy, Anna kept to herself. But one evening while filling our Styrofoam cups with coffee, Anna had smiled at something I said and I felt my heart quicken.

Was it attraction? Could I be interested in another woman?
It had been four years since the accident that had claimed the lives of my wife and son.
Was it too soon to have this feeling?
But I felt it—a powerful tug on my heart from just one simple smile.

Hope.

Attraction.

Desire.

Anna had experienced a similar loss with the death of her son, Kevin. After this new loss we agreed on two things: we wanted to parent a child, and we wanted to adopt. A few days after we made the major decision Anna said, “I don’t want to use an agency in the traditional sense.”

Again, we were in bed and I propped myself up on elbows to look at her. “How else do you adopt a child?” I asked.

“I’ve been doing a lot of research,” Anna said.

I wasn’t surprised. Anna was on a mission to have a baby, and I was in lockstep on the journey with her. She was also very practical and methodical in her business dealings, and these attributes carried over into our new quest. She felt her age, thirty-eight, and wanted to have a baby as soon as possible. It was like a thirst that had to be quenched.

“We can skip the agency and do a direct adoption with a birth mother. Technically direct adoptions aren’t legal in Massachusetts, so we’ll eventually have to hire an agency to facilitate, assuming we find a willing birth mother.”

“Why go that route?” I asked.

“Direct adoptions are much faster than agency adoptions. At least, that’s what I’ve read online. But it does require a lot of extra effort. We’ll have to use our enthusiasm and initiative to find a birth mother. It might take some luck, but from what I’ve read it’ll definitely take a lot of work.”

“Do we take an ad out on birthmotherswanted.com?” I asked, smiling.

Anna gave me a funny look. “Actually, you’re right about taking out an ad, sort of,” she said. “We have to make a profile on a website that birth mothers search to select potential parents.”

“So we make a profile and then the birth mothers contact us?”

“Like I said, it’s faster than going through an agency. I want this, Gage. I need it,” Anna’s eyes were wide with exuberance, her hands wringing mine like they were dishrags. “My heart hurts. It literally aches with this longing.”

We both lay quiet on the bed. “Do you think I’m turning my back on Max?” I asked. It surprised me to hear myself voice this fear aloud, but relieved me too.

“You mean by adopting?” Anna asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Do you think I’m betraying his memory?”

Anna nestled into my chest.

“I think we’ll never heal,” she said. “But I don’t want to give up my dream to become a mother again. I want to raise a baby. I want to see my child grow up, play sports, have friends, learn an instrument, go to a dance or on vacation. These are all the things I can’t do with Kevin anymore, but it doesn’t mean I can’t ever do those things again.”

“The obligation of the living is to live,” I said.

Anna sat up, looking impressed. “Did you just make that up?”

“No,” I said with a little laugh. “My therapist did.”

For the next few weeks Anna and I were on a mission to make the greatest, most compelling, most desirable profile on ParentHorizon.com, the largest registry of parents seeking to adopt.

This was, I soon discovered, a very competitive process. Yes, it’s all about giving a child your complete and total unconditional love. And yes, it’s also about expressing sincere gratitude for the gift, the true blessing of the birth mother who makes possible the completion of a family. But at the end of the day it’s also about being picked from tens of thousands of would-be adoptive parents, so you’ve got to put your best foot forward. Anna and I wrote draft after draft of the birth mother letter until every single word conveyed the spirit of our family and the reasons we’ve decided to adopt. I’d learned that this letter was extremely important in the adoption process, not unlike a cover letter from a job applicant. It set the tone for the rest of the profile.

After the letter, we completed the profile information. We listed our education (BA for me, MS for Anna), occupations (Director of Quality Assurance at Lithio Systems for me, self-employed management consultant for Anna), ethnicity (Caucasian for us both), religion (Unitarian for me, Presbyterian for Anna), smoking (no for both), years married (one), preference for a child (baby), and special considerations. Were we willing to consider an adoption with an open grandparenting arrangement? I said sure, but Anna said not so sure, so we decided not to list any special considerations.

The process of creating our profile offered us both the opportunity for some serious self-reflection, something neither of us did much of since we stopped attending grief group. For Anna, it rekindled a desire to start painting again. Prior to Kevin’s death, Anna would paint murals in the hospital rooms of extremely sick children near her former home in Los Angeles. Soon after we started dating, she showed me samples of her work—pictures the parents of the children had posted on social media—and it was truly breathtaking. She could paint a jungle, a moonscape, or an underwater scene with such vivid detail, it was like being transported there.

Her passion to paint, inspired by her mother’s artistic streak, was partially responsible for her becoming a business consultant to top retail clothing brands. Anna had graduated with honors from San Diego State University, carrying a dual major in art history and business. After graduation, she moved to LA on a whim and got involved in the world of high fashion as a PR flack and quickly climbed the ranks. From there, the jump into running a successful retail consulting business was ten years and various jobs away. Uniquely skilled for her line of work, Anna could critique a balance sheet as cleverly as she could a window display.

It took nearly a week of steady effort to complete our profile. We identified our favorite things from a preset list of categories. Mine included sweet tea, Twix, Rock’Em Sock’Em Robots. Some of the items Anna had selected were Dr Pepper, Skittles (never liked them myself), and her Strawberry Shortcake doll.

Pictures for the photo album section of the profile presented us both with a bit of a conundrum. Prospective birth mothers would want to know what we looked like. Anna and I had a few photographs of the two of us together to share, but most of my pictures included Max or Karen. Most of Anna’s pictures, what she had on her smartphone, included both Kevin and her ex-husband, Edward. Soon after we started dating, I’d given Anna a surprise gift. I’d used Photoshop to take Edward out of one of the pictures with Kevin and had the doctored image framed so Anna could hang it up in her office. I was more than happy to delete her ex from the photograph, but I’d rather have him deleted from the planet.

Edward was good-looking in a California businessman kind of way; I had no trouble seeing Anna’s attraction to him. Perpetually tan skin, dark hair, strong jaw line and teeth whiter than the whitecaps off the coast of Santa Monica where they used to live. He didn’t look like a rapist, but that was what he was. Six months after Kevin’s death, Edward forced himself on Anna because she was too depressed to have sex with him. The bastard raped his own grieving wife.

Anna never reported the crime. She was mourning the loss of her only child to a rare blood disease and couldn’t endure more pain and emotional turmoil. Instead of charging Edward with rape, Anna left him in the dead of night—along with the home computer containing all of their family photographs. She hadn’t been in touch with Edward since and, despite my urging to at least get more pictures of Kevin, showed no desire to revisit that part of her past.

So we made our profile with the photos we had, and Anna kept an online journal to show we were active on the site. When we met the crying woman, the profile had been a part of our lives for two months, our version of Geppetto’s wooden puppet before it turned into a real little boy. Anna had a few contacts via the site, e-mail exchanges with prospective birth mothers, but nothing that led to a face-to-face meeting.

This was our life, playing the waiting game. I went to work at Lithio Systems, a manufacturer of lithium ion batteries located in Waltham. Anna went to work in her home office, or she’d travel on client business. She was working hard to reestablish client relationships neglected in the aftermath of all she had endured. Each morning brought renewed hope that we’d find a willing birth mother, and each night we went to bed with a hole in our hearts that could be filled only by the presence of a child. And so we waited and wondered when he or she was going to come home. Meanwhile, we did that thing living people were obliged to do. We lived.

On the day everything changed, the Red Sox were playing a day game at Fenway, but I was watching a rerun of
Pawn Stars
. I can’t watch the Sox anymore. Can’t read the sports section, either. Our air conditioner was doing what it could to keep the apartment cool. My beer was doing what it could to numb my thoughts. It had been a long week at work. Too many meetings collided with too little time. The doorbell rang.

Anna called from her office, “Babe, can you answer that?”

“Who is it?” I called back to her.

“If I knew without opening the door, I would have a superpower, love. I’m busy in here. Can you please get the door?”

The doorbell rang again.

I groaned as I got up from my beloved green armchair. I was too young to be groaning when I stood up. We lived in Arlington, on a street with lots of two-family houses and nice landscaping and not a lot of crime. It didn’t occur to me to check outside before I opened the door. But when I saw that woman standing there, my jaw came unhinged.

“Hi,” the woman said. “My name is Lily. I hope you remember me.”