Fresh Kills (6 page)

“Nice,” I commented. “A thoughtful gesture.”

“Yeah,” Josh chimed agreement, but his tone was wry. “A thoughtful gesture with our money. You don't really suppose she spent her own cash on this, do you, babe?”

“Josh, why do you have to be so cynical? Why can't you take something at face value, for a change?”

“Because with Amber, nothing is face value, that's why. She uses us, she takes and takes. I can't wait,” he finished, emphasizing his words with the slap of his huge palm on the bleached coffee table, “till this baby's ours and that woman is out of our lives forever.”

I hadn't known much about adoptions when I took this case, but I'd read a book or two since meeting Marla in the motion part, and one thing I'd learned about open adoptions was that the birth mother and the adoptive parents were supposed to be able to keep up contact after the baby was born. It didn't sound as if Josh was entering into the open adoption spirit at all.
Out of our lives forever
wasn't particularly realistic, since Amber knew the name and address of the people who were going to raise her child.

I left the carriage house with a feeling of trepidation that swept through me like the icy wind off the river.

“It just bothers me, that's all,” Mickey Dechter said. We were not quite partners, since a lawyer is forbidden to go into practice with a non-lawyer, but she had an office next to mine and she gave social work services to many of the same clients I represented in court. I had without quite realizing it taken Amber's case in the secure belief that she'd help me with it, that she'd lend her considerable knowledge of human behavior to the enterprise. Now she was flatly refusing to have anything to do with an adoption.

“Oh, and it doesn't bother me?” I countered, trying to keep a lid on my rising anger, without much success. “Because I'm just an insensitive lawyer, right? I'm too crass, too—”

“I didn't say that,” she retorted. Her voice held an edge of exasperated resentment. “If you'd just let me explain.”

I sat back against my high-backed leather chair and said, “Explain already.” I folded my arms across my chest to convey my earnest desire to listen with an open mind.

“I don't like adoptions,” she said flatly. “I don't like the way they're conducted in this country, and I—”

Mickey and I had degenerated to conversation by interruption. It was my turn to break into her train of thought.

“What do you mean, the way adoptions are conducted in this country?” I stood up and walked toward the coffeepot for a refill, prepared to warm up Mickey's cup as well. Even a knock-down, drag-out argument was no excuse for depriving someone of coffee.

She waved her hand over her mug to signal that she'd had enough. This after I'd brewed total decaf in deference to her. I filled my own cup, took the pot back to the stove, and sat down to mix in the desired amounts of milk and sweetener.

“Do you realize,” she began, fixing me with her earnest eyes, “that adoption agencies in the U.S. discriminate in ways the local McDonald's would get sued for? That in an adoption it's not only permissible but required to classify people on the basis of race, age, religion?”

I nodded. “Ellie told me she and Josh had trouble with the agencies because of their ages and their mixed marriage.”

“That's what I mean,” Mickey said. “If he was being fired from his job because he was Jewish or because of his age, he'd have a discrimination case, right?”

“Right.”

“But it's okay for an adoption agency to deny him a child because he's too old or because his wife isn't Jewish. And don't get me started on race,” she went on. I didn't; I didn't say a word, but she was off and running anyway.

“It used to be that white couples could adopt nonwhite babies, but now there's a big emphasis put on same-race adoptions. Which leaves a huge number of nonwhite children without homes while white babies are at a premium.”

She leaned forward and lowered her voice, as if afraid of microphones in the coffee mugs. “They even try to match skin color among nonwhite families,” she said. “As if a dark family shouldn't raise a light child.”

“But doesn't it make sense for the adoption agency to give a baby to people who look as much like him as possible?” I asked. “Skin color is part of that; I suppose they look at other factors as well before they match—”

“Who says that's the only basis to make a family?” Mickey shot back. “Who says blond parents can't love a dark-haired child or that only light-skinned parents should raise a light-skinned child? Where is it written that an adoptive family is a second-best copy of a ‘real' family?”

I opened my mouth to reply, then pulled myself back to the real issue at hand. “What does all this have to do with Amber?” I asked. “Her case has nothing to do with agencies.”

“Oh, yes, it does,” Mickey countered. She leaned forward on the couch—no easy feat at eight and one-half months pregnant—and tossed the words at me with a passionate intensity that would have gone down well on “The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour.”

“It has everything to do with society's bias toward biology. Look at the way we pay for babies. I'll bet every visit your Ellie Greenspan made to a fertility specialist was covered by insurance. But no one pays the costs of adoption. Which is society's way of saying that if you choose to reproduce yourself, in spite of all the children already born who need homes, we'll subsidize you. And if you can't have your own, we'll help you find a white infant
if
you're the right age, the right religion, live in the right place, and have lots of money. If not—” she shrugged and held her out hands in a gesture that said,
You know the rest
.

“If not, what?” I demanded, deliberately obtuse.

“If not,” she continued, letting her hands come to rest on her swollen belly in a protective manner I was seeing more and more as the delivery date loomed, “then you go into the marketplace and make the best deal you can with some poor kid who doesn't know which end is up, who's going through her own crisis, who needs counseling before she makes a decision that will affect her and her baby for life—and all she gets is a desperate older couple waving money in her face. She gets whipsawed between society's supposed belief in adoption and its vilification of a mother who gives up her baby.”

I shook my head, recalling the “HEADLESS CORPSE” T-shirt. “You haven't met Amber,” I said. “A poor helpless kid she's not. Besides, if you think she needs counseling, give it to her. That's why I need you, Mickey.”

“Don't you get it, Cass?” Mickey fixed me with eyes that had already decided, eyes that couldn't be reached. “I refuse to take part in the adoption system. I refuse to participate in something that came about because of society's basic lack of respect for children. It's a direct result of the narcissistic search for a perfect little replica—which can only be satisfied by a white baby. And in a capitalist society, we therefore justify the creation by science of white babies and the sale of white babies by birth mothers.”

“Oh, now I'm a baby-seller?” I flung myself back on the couch and shot a look of pure hatred at my friend and colleague.

“Nobody is selling a baby here,” I went on, aware of the sullen edge to my voice. “Amber's expenses are going to be documented in affidavits filed in court. No payments are being made over and above what the law allows.”

This remark was greeted by a superior smirk designed to let me know that only a naif with a law degree would believe such a fairy tale.

“I understand, Cass,” Mickey said in a tone that reeked of empathy. “You think the fact that I won't help you with this case is directed at you personally.”

“That when you say people are selling babies, you mean
I'm
selling babies,” I cut in, my voice ragged. “Yeah, I'm
hearing
that,” I said, parodying the self-help jargon I associated with social workers. “I guess I'm
feeling
attacked here.”

“Cass, I'm not accusing you of selling babies,” Mickey said in a tone so reasonable I wanted to rip her face off. “I
am
accusing you of choosing to become part of a system that treats white infants like commodities.”

She paused, took a deep breath, and fixed me with eyes that pleaded for understanding.

“I have my own baby growing in here,” she said, touching her belly with reverent fingers. “I know you have conflicted feelings about my pregnancy. But one of the things it's doing for me is making me sensitive—maybe too sensitive—”

I nodded fervently, but it didn't stop the flow of words.

“—to the whole issue of birth and babies. I can't help but think of the other ones,” she went on, and so help me, her eyes filled with tears. I tried to dismiss them as the too-ready tears of the very pregnant, but it wasn't easy.

“I can't help but think of all the babies I used to see when I worked for BCW,” she went on, naming her first employer, the Bureau of Child Welfare, the agency responsible for all the unwanted and abused babies born to people unable to care for them. “How can we continue to let those babies rot in foster homes while at the same time we reward white parents for making babies by the most artificial means?”

“Are you saying you'd help me if Josh and Ellie Greenspan were adopting a crack baby?” I demanded. “Mickey, this doesn't make sense.”

“It does to me,” she said with quiet stubbornness. Again her hands caressed the bulge around her middle. Again her eyes dropped to caress the unborn child with a look seen on Madonnas in Italian paintings. Again I was shut out—the barren woman who could never understand the feminine mysteries.

The worse-than-barren woman: the woman who could have given birth but chose not to.

I rose, picked up the coffee mugs, and slammed them down on my kitchen counter with a force that broke the handle off one of them.

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

It's just like a closing
, I repeated to myself, leaning back against the headrest on the passenger's side of Marla's sleek air-conditioned automobile.
You represent the seller; Marla's got the buyer. No big deal
.

It wasn't helping. This wasn't a closing, and the word
seller
reminded me all-too-forcibly of my argument with Mickey. And even though I was along for the legal ride and was not supposed to play social worker, I had a dark suspicion this was going to be a landmark awful day in my professional life.

We swung into the parking lot of—believe it or not—Our Lady of Pity Hospital, Marla making straight for the handicapped spaces right in front of the entrance. I wondered if she had a permit, then shook my head at my own naïveté. If Marla wanted a handicapped permit, she'd find a way to get one. Sure enough, she whipped a large plastic-coated card out of the glove compartment and tossed it onto the dashboard. She then swept out of the car in a cloud of expensive perfume. I followed, racing to keep up even though the heels on my shoes were half the height of the bronze pumps Marla wore. Did the woman ever
walk
?

As I grabbed the door Marla let close into my face, a blue-uniformed security guard nearly knocked me down. He shoved me out of the way unceremoniously and ran into the parking lot. I turned to look after him; was some poor woman giving birth out there, unable to make it into the emergency room?

Even from a distance I recognized Doc Scanlon's Santa Claus figure. He stood in a section of the parking lot marked “DOCTORS ONLY.” His car was blocked by the same silver car I'd seen outside the group home the day I met Amber. The young man with the curly dark hair stood yelling at the doctor, his arms flailing. I strained to hear the words, but couldn't. The young man took a swing just as the security guard rushed up and grabbed him from behind.

I made my way into the lobby, catching up with Marla at the information desk. I started to tell her what I'd seen, but she waved me silent with an impatient hand.

The young woman behind the desk gave Marla a fish-eyed stare as she repeated, “We have no patient by that name.”

“Yes, you do,” Marla contradicted. “You've probably got her listed as a DNP.”

I was about to show my ignorance and ask what that meant when a second security guard rushed up to the desk, a walkie-talkie at his chin. He started making a report to someone about the assault in the parking lot.

I turned to Marla. “The guy he's talking about,” I said under my breath, “is the same guy who was hanging around the group home the day we visited Amber.”

“He was
here
?” Marla's face and voice registered shock and alarm; her body stiffened as if for physical combat. She turned to the receptionist. “If you let him see her, you stupid—”

“Marla!” I said sharply.

“Lady, I told you,” the woman behind the desk repeated, “we have no patient by that—”

I turned to the guard. “Did you get the license plate of the car he was driving?”

“'89 Ford Taurus, license plate P-I-Z-Z-A two-one,” he spelled out, his mouth widening in a lizard grin.

“Pizza?” I repeated. “The man's tailing after Amber in a car with a license plate that says ‘PIZZA'?”

“PIZZA Twenty-one,” the guard corrected.

“That means twenty other citizens of the State of New York actually paid good money for a license plate advertising their favorite food. I can't believe it. Paying a fee for a—”

“Cass, who the hell cares?” Marla cut in. “I don't. He didn't get in, and that's all that counts. Let's get Amber's room number and get this thing over with.”

“Don't you care that this guy just assaulted Doc Scanlon?”

Marla shook her head. “As long as my clients walk out of here with a baby, Amber can have a hundred boyfriends looking for her, and they can all hit Doc Scanlon for all I care,” she replied.