Fresh Kills (7 page)

The girl behind the information desk was losing patience. “Nobody here by that name,” she repeated.

“Yes there is,” Marla said in her slow-burn voice. “She's under a Do Not Publicize code because we're here to transfer her baby to the adoptive parents. We're the lawyers.”

The magic L-word had the girl riffling through index cards, and two minutes later Marla and I were in an oversized elevator riding up to the maternity floor in the company of blue-suited medical personnel and one wheelchair-bound senior citizen with a bright, vague smile on her face.

Amber had a private room, courtesy of the Greenspans, so she wouldn't have to lie in bed next to a new mother cooing over her baby. It was a standard hospital room, cramped and functional, with a framed New York City Ballet poster on one wall and a window with a view of the parking lot on the other. Amber sat up in bed, pillows propped behind her, looking a bit frail. There were circles under her eyes, a pallid cast to her face, and her hair was lank and unwashed. In the late-March sunlight, she looked older, harder.

Marla took a worn leather cigarette case out of her purse and lit up. “There's no smoking in the hospital,” Amber said with a pleased smile.

“Who gives a rat's ass?” Marla muttered.

“In that case,” Amber countered with a bad-girl grin, “give me one. I stopped because of the baby, but now—”

The two of them puffed hastily, their nicotine high fueled by the knowledge that a nurse could walk in at any moment. They exchanged glances that spoke of covert pleasures, of hiding in the girls' bathroom and taking a few puffs before Chemistry class, of lighting up before outraged parents—or if their parents weren't outraged enough, grandparents—as a way of proclaiming adulthood. All the stuff I'd done before I quit.

A tiny—a very, very tiny—part of me wanted to bum a cigarette and prove I could be a bad girl, too.

About halfway through, Marla abruptly walked into the tiny private bathroom and tossed her lit cigarette into the toilet. She strode over to the bed and took Amber's butt away from her, then marched resolutely toward the john. A moment later she flushed away the physical evidence of their crime, though the smoke smell lingered in the air.

Marla reached into her capacious bag and pulled out a bluebacked legal document, folded in thirds like a racing form. She held it in the air and tapped it against her fingers.

“Is that the consent?” Amber asked.

Marla nodded. She was about to say more, but I decided it was my place to explain things to my client. “It's a consent to give temporary custody to the Greenspans,” I said. “It permits them to take the baby home today, but it won't become permanent until you sign the consent to adoption before the Surrogate next month. The law gives you thirty days to change your mind. Forty-five in some circumstances,” I amended, hoping she wouldn't ask what those circumstances were, even though I knew the answer; hoping that changing her mind wasn't something she wanted more information about.

Marla shot me a look; it was clear she didn't want Amber thinking along those lines any more than I did. But Amber's legal right to revoke consent wasn't going to go away just because we didn't talk about it.

I wheeled the bed table over in front of Amber. Marla opened the blueback and laid the legal form on the table, then opened her thick black pen and set it down on top of the neatly typed foolscap. “Read it first,” she ordered.

Amber lifted the pen off the paper and let her eyes scan its contents; she raised the first sheet and read the second page with impressive speed. It wasn't until she reached page three that I realized I was holding my breath.

She raised her blue eyes to mine. “Looks okay,” she said with a shrug meant to convey supreme indifference. But there was a slight tremor in the lower lip; Amber clamped her lips shut and picked up the pen. She signed on the space provided, with a savage quickness that made the signature a graffiti scrawl. Then she lifted her head in a proud gesture and stared straight ahead.

“There,” she said. “It's done.” She fell back against the pillows, letting her stiff shoulders go limp against their soft support. She pulled the thin blanket closer, as though feeling a sudden chill in the overheated air of the hospital room.

If signing the papers was this bad, what would it be like when Amber handed her baby to Ellie Greenspan?

She didn't have to hand the baby over physically. Many birth mothers, according to Marla, didn't want to see their babies after labor. They were afraid that holding the baby would break down their resolve to give it up for adoption. But in open adoptions such as this one, birth mothers often said good-bye to the infants, hoping the ritual of physically transferring the baby to its new parents would ease the pain of loss.

“Where's Ellie?” The male voice behind me made me jump. I turned; Josh Greenspan filled the door with his impatient presence.

“Not here yet,” Marla replied. She narrowed her eyes. “I thought she'd be coming with you.”

He shook his head. “I had to visit a construction site,” he explained, “so I drove here in the four-wheel. She's bringing the Merc.”

Where I came from, in the auto-conscious upper Midwest, a Merc was a Mercury. A good family car, if a tad flashier than the GMs we made just down the road at the Fisher Body plant. But here in the affluent East, a Merc was a Mercedes—and of course Joshua Greenspan, Architect, drove a Mercedes.

What was there about this man that brought out the snide in me? Was it the not-so-subtle air of entitlement that seemed to cling to him, the unspoken assertion that he owned a Mercedes because he deserved to own it?

I didn't give a damn how he felt about cars, but his sense of entitlement extended to the child; he deserved a son and heir, and if his wife was too defective to produce one, he'd buy the best.

I walked with quick, angry steps toward the window, deliberately fixing my eyes on a clump of deep-purple crocuses at the side of the hospital. This was my first and positively last adoption. I didn't like Josh, I didn't like Marla, and most of all, I didn't like myself. Who the hell was I to sit in judgment on a man I'd met once, a man who was moving heaven and earth to make his wife's motherhood dream come true?

Yes, it took money to adopt a child the way Josh Greenspan was adopting this one. Would I feel happier if Baby Adam were heading into a life of poverty instead of privilege? Would he suffer so much, having to choose between St. Ann's and Packer—only two of the best private schools in the city, conveniently located in Brooklyn Heights?

While I pondered this, Ellie rushed breathlessly into the room, beginning a disjointed explanation about traffic and directions. She sounded very young and very nervous. By the time I turned around, Josh had her in a bear hug, his huge paw soothing her back. It came to me that their relationship was as stylized as a ballet, with Josh as the strong, protective male, positively reeking masculinity from every hairy pore, while Ellie played the sensitive, feminine clinging vine.

Marla took over. She'd been here before, and she organized things like a cross between a sergeant-major and a cruise director. She rang the nurse and ordered Baby Adam to be brought from the nursery. She opened a second set of legal documents and handed them and her thick European pen first to Josh, then to Ellie for signature. Josh wrote with a heavy hand, while Ellie's elegant strokes resembled calligraphy. Neither looked at Amber before, during, or after the signing. It was as though they wanted to ignore her out of existence, to cut out the middleman so they could walk out of the hospital with their baby, pretending Ellie and not Amber had sweated through sixteen hours of labor.

Had nearly died. That was the part I couldn't put out of my mind. Unlike everyone else in the room, including Marla, I looked at Amber, looked closely at the pale skin and drawn face, the dark circles under the tired blue eyes. She'd had dangerously high blood pressure, Marla told me, and Doc Scanlon had performed a near miracle to keep her alive during the birth. And now no one spoke of it, no one acknowledged what she'd gone through to bring this child into the world.

I walked softly toward the bed, stopping just short of the wheeled table that still sat across Amber's chest. “Are you feeling all right?” I asked in a near whisper.

She nodded, but her lips tightened. “I might want to sue the bastard,” she said.

It took me a moment; given the reason I was there in the first place, the word
bastard
threw me. Then I realized she meant Doc Scanlon. “He said you might have trouble,” I pointed out. “He told you to stay off your feet,” I added. “Which you didn't do. Instead, you went to the mall.”

“He did something to me,” Amber insisted. “I know he did. I was fine until I got in here, and then I nearly died. I could have died.” Her voice shook, and she gripped the thin blanket with clawlike fingers.

“Not that anybody here would have cared one way or the other,” she went on, bitterness choking her. “As long as the baby was all right, these assholes don't care whether I live or die. And I didn't have complications until the baby was almost out. That proves Doc Scanlon did it—he waited until it wouldn't hurt the baby, and then he gave me something to raise my pressure.”

“Amber, this is—” It was verging on the paranoid, but I was trying to find a less confrontational way of saying that. Was this typical postbirth thinking by a woman trying to say good-bye to the living creature she'd carried for nine long months?

Maybe Mickey could have told me. If she'd been speaking to me.

“Here he is,” the nurse crowed in a bright voice that sounded as incongruous as the early spring sun outside; Amber's mood required snow and ice, harsh winter winds, somber rain. And a voice of mourning, not celebration. Everything the Greenspans were gaining, she was losing.

The nurse placed the baby in Ellie's eager arms. Ellie smiled with a radiance that lit her from within, yet tears rolled down her cheeks like melting icicles. She pressed the blue-blanketed bundle close to her heart, then leaned her head down and laid her ear against the tiny chest, listening for his heartbeat. She closed her eyes and drank in the smell and sound of baby.

I did something I hadn't done in a long time: I translated the scene into a black-and-white photograph, the kind I always dreamed of seeing on exhibit at the International Center for Photography with my name neatly typed underneath.

Ellie's pale gold silk shirt would come out gray; her hair falling across her broad forehead would show blond only because of the way the light struck it from above. There would be interesting shadows on her face and in the folds of the blanket, but the focus would be Ellie's ecstatic expression as she listened to her child's life beating within his breast, and the baby's wide-eyed wonder as he met the woman he would know as mother.

I decided to reshoot in color, mentally bathing the scene in golden light. Amber light: the highlights of Ellie's straight, fine hair, the sheen of her blouse, the glints off the amber pendant she wore around her neck—the same pendant she'd given the mother of her golden child.

Josh walked over to them, and I took another mental photograph. This one was of a large, male hand with thick fingers adorned by a chunky gold band, reaching toward a tiny replica of a hand, touching the translucent baby fingers, lit from behind by the bed lamp next to Amber.

Even I knew enough psychology to realize that mentally taking artistic photographs of the scene was a damned good way to insulate myself from the emotion that threatened to swamp the room.

I turned my attention back to my client. She sat bolt upright in the bed, avidly taking in the expressions on Josh and Ellie's faces. There was something atavistic in the scene; I was reminded of old wives' tales about cats sucking the breath out of babies. Amber looked like a cat, staring without blinking, expressionless, predatory. Sly.

Was that a real insight or just another arty photograph?

She wore her pendant over a faded T-shirt that read in huge block letters “JUST DO IT.”

Then Amber caught me looking at her and gave a rueful shrug. Her smile threatened to turn into a flood of tears; she choked up and turned away.

I turned to Marla and whispered, “Could they take the baby outside? I think this is upsetting Amber.”

Before Marla could take action, Amber shook her head and said, “No, please. I need—” She broke off, ducking her head. Her thick gold-brown hair shielded her eyes.

She gathered herself with a visible effort and said in a calm tone, “I need to say good-bye.”

There was a tiny gasp of relief from Ellie. She clutched the baby tighter for a moment, then walked over to the bed and placed the blue-wrapped bundle in Amber's arms.

“Could … could everybody leave?” Amber asked. Her eyes locked onto mine, begging me to make sure she had a private moment before the final parting.

“No,” Marla shot back. She was in full battle mode and looked ready to get a court order. Her clothes were bronzehued; she resembled a statue of an armored woman warrior come to life.

“I'll stay,” I volunteered. I looked past Marla and fixed my gaze on Ellie. “You have the rest of your lives with Adam,” I said. “Please let Amber have a few minutes.”

Ellie looked at me, then at Amber. Even though both Marla and Josh were trying to get her attention, to force her to acknowledge them, it was Amber she cared about. At last, she nodded and made for the door. Josh and Marla followed, but not before each sent dark, threatening looks in my direction.

I didn't want to do this. I didn't want to be here in this place of extreme joy and gloom, I didn't want to watch this farewell or witness the birth of a dream of motherhood.

I walked to the window and looked out into the burgeoning spring day; I was standing guard, but I didn't have to eavesdrop.