In Every Way (5 page)

Here's a joke we like: how do you make a tissue dance? Put a little boogie in it. We're old-fashioned, but we like it that way.

Whether you choose us or another family, we wish you the best of luck. If you would like to get to know us better, please feel free to contact our adoption counselor, Anne Vanstory, at 1-919-555-0143.

Yours,

Nina and Philip

“Can you clarify what an open adoption is?” Maria says, handing the book to Jack. He and her mother begin to read it together.

“When you maintain contact with the adoptive parents,” Anne says.

“I don't want that.”

“We encourage it,” Anne says. “Birth mothers, after birth, they want to see their kids. And even if you don't, with the internet, and Facebook, and God knows what. Even if you don't want to be found by the other party, it happens.”

“We're going to do it closed or whatever the regular way is,” Maria says. So much time has been spent making decisions that she feels she
has run out of emotional real estate. This door, she feels, needs to close definitively.

“Do you make them write these just like this?” Jack says, holding the book open to the letter.

“There's a template,” Anne says.

“That explains it,” Maria's mother says, sighing in relief.

“To make this explicit,” Anne says, turning back to Maria. “This is a closed adoption?”

“Yes,” Maria says.

Anne makes a note. Maria's mother extends the photo album into the space before her, as if it might levitate.

“That's for you to keep,” Anne says. “And that's what you'll get mailed to you, every year. A letter and some photos so you can track the child's progress.”

“We get that even with a closed adoption?” Maria says.

Anne nods.

“Are adopted kids always screwed up?” Jack says. “Orphans and unwanteds?”

Anne's words emerge slowly. “If adopted children develop issues,” she says, “it's not because of adoption. It's often in spite of adoption. We're going to put this child in the best household possible.”

“Then why were you all weird about Philip and Nina?” Jack says.

“I wasn't.”

“Yeah, but you were.”

“Philip smokes,” Anne says. “Like I said. And they're not religious. Most of their income is drawn from independent wealth. They're an unusual option for some people. Many people, actually. But if they weren't viable, we wouldn't have them in our organization.”

“I smell fish,” Jack says. “Do you smell fish?”

“Jack,” says Maria's mother, and Maria is grateful for the attempt to calm him. She is concerned that Anne will be scared off by Jack's bluster.

The door opens and Pinky enters with a bra dangling from his jowls. The bra is new, not yet even worn, purchased at Roses to accommodate the rapid increase in Maria's breast size. One of the padded cups is torn apart in Pinky's jaws, the foam padding sprinkled in pink pieces across his muzzle. He lopes over to Anne, lifts his front paws into her lap, and there drops the bra.

“Jesus Christ,” Maria says, rising from the couch. “No!”

Maria is mortified. But with convincing nonchalance, Anne rubs Pinky's head. Maria is filled with the sudden knowledge that Anne enters the houses of strangers every day. Strangers who do not want to keep their children. Maria has never even met another pregnant woman her age, let alone one planning an adoption. Surely Jack and a sickly border collie with bra innards scattered across his muzzle are a more common workplace sight to Anne than the bright abstract art on the walls of the country's leading Alexandre Dumas scholar.

Maria pulls Pinky off Anne's lap and pushes the shredded bra against his nose so firmly that she can feel him struggle for breath. She has never before had a dog and does not understand the logic of this move but has seen it enacted once by a neighbor and it feels right.

“Maria,” her mother says. “Stop.”

But Maria does not stop. Not only is she certain this needs to be done, she is frustrated at her mother's doubt about said fact. She wonders at hormonal instinct—if she would have been capable of this before she was pregnant, if there are now chemicals in her
system sent from the fetus, preparing her for discipline, chemicals that her mother no longer has. There are times when Maria has felt unjustly deprived of her youth, and lately they've been increasing. The present moment is one of them. Maria is not above feeling sorry for herself. Where are her lost afternoons? Where are her petty arguments over what movies to see, what shows to attend? She is too busy with medicine and proto-motherhood to find them. So smell the bra, Maria thinks. My mom is dying and my boobs are getting weird and I have to pee almost always. And I'm nineteen years old. So smell this bra, and understand right now that you cannot make my life any harder.

Jack lifts Pinky by the scruff of his neck, something Maria has never actually witnessed done before. Silent and resigned, the dog dangles from Jack's grip, shifting his glance from side to side. Maria thinks it would be nice to be so resigned, to be so led. To be held in the air by someone trying to teach you the lesson that not everyone wants to be licked. He carries the dog out of the room, and Maria, dropping the bra into the trash, says, “I didn't ask for that dog.”

“They can be a handful,” Anne says, and gives Marie a two-page photocopy that outlines the five stages of grief.

“Actually, my mom's doctor already gave me one of these,” Maria says.

Anne squints in confusion, then says, “Oh no, I'm so sorry.” She looks at Maria like she shouldn't have to explain any further. But she does need to. “I don't mean . . . I mean, you're going to lose your child. It is a serious loss.”

Maria nods with understanding, but as with so many of the truths she is told to accept these days, she does not in fact believe it.

THAT AFTERNOON MARIA
finds Pinky asleep beside a bottle of Dolophine. The bottle has been chewed open. Several pills remain within the mangled orange canister, but others have fallen out upon the rug. She is sure others are at that very moment releasing synthetic morphine into Pinky's bloodstream.

She finds it surprisingly easy to lift the dog. It is as if his insides are filled with nothing more than air and pills. She places him gently into the backseat of the Volvo.

Heading north on Airport Road, Maria finds the Orange County Animal Shelter on the left. The receptionist is young and blasé. Maria wonders how many times a day the woman witnesses someone cry.

“He just ate my mom's medicine,” Maria says, heaving Pinky onto the couch in the entry.

“What kind?” the receptionist says.

“Dolophine.”

“This isn't an emergency clinic.”

“I don't want him back.”

“Reginald,” the receptionist says into a phone, and Reginald almost immediately appears. He is a withered piece of humanity in blue scrubs with a lined face sprinkled in gray whiskers. Lifting Pinky from the couch, he says, “You eat too many goofballs, baby? OK OK OK.”

As Reginald carries Pinky through a pair of orange swinging doors, Maria is reminded of the last time her mother carried her to bed. She was nine. She fell asleep on the couch watching
The Great Mouse Detective
and awoke being lifted silently into her mother's arms. Maria knew she was too old to be doted upon like this, but pretended to be asleep anyway, savoring the pillow of her mother's shoulder as they padded softly into the front hallway. But there Maria's mother
stopped. Maria opened an eye. Through the window, on the moonlit lawn, she saw a white dog hunched atop Sid, the neighbors' cat, with his mouth clamped calmly on Sid's neck. After a moment, the dog released his grip and strode slowly into the azaleas. Sid raised his head, looked both ways, and lay back down. Maria told herself he was going to be all right. She remained silent as her mother continued upstairs, sure her mother could feel her heart as it raced wildly within her chest. Only after she was tucked in and the door firmly shut did Maria run to her window. Below, Sid remained on the lawn, and as Maria watched, willing him to rise, her mother appeared in the moonlight. She carried a shovel glinting on her shoulder. Maria wondered what her mother was going to dig. But she wasn't going to dig anything. She raised the tool above her head and, with the sudden force of finality, let it fall upon the cat.

AFTER DINNER THAT
evening, night falls easy around Maria for the first time in weeks. The home of her child is now known. Pinky is gone. Her mother is asleep. Maria sits in the small pool of light from the lamp on the kitchen table and flips slowly through the photo album of Philip and Nina. What good does it do her to dream of their house? She will not occupy its rooms. She tells herself to stop looking, but cannot. Their faces soothe her, smiling at her very decision to give her child away. She lingers over each page, thinking she recognizes a tree there, a corner. The waterfront of Beaufort in the background. Then her reverie is interrupted by the door. She raises her head. It is Jack, wiping his hair from his eyes, a leash in his hand as he enters through the back.

“I came to take him out,” he says. “We're in this together, partner.”

“I took him back,” Maria says, closing the book. She is embarrassed to be seen dreaming over its pages.

“To jail?” Jack says.

“He ate Mom's medicine.”

“Well I do too!”

“It's too much,” Maria says.

“No,” Jack says, grabbing the leash with both hands and pulling it taut before him. “No no no. You're gonna want him back.” He loops the leash around the back of his neck and raises his face to the ceiling. He breathes a deep sigh.

“I don't need a dog,” Maria says.

“What do you need?” Jack says, his eyes still pointed upward.

“You,” she says.

Jack lowers his gaze and sets the leash gently on the counter. He circles the chopping block and kneels before Maria, pressing his face against her stomach. “Listen to me, little pollywog,” he says into her flesh, over-pronouncing each word. “Your momma is a sweet, sweet thing.”

Maria tangles her fingers into Jack's hair. She feels the warmth of safety and love tangled therein but is immediately suspicious of it. Is it Jack who is making her feel this way? She is unsure. It seems more likely she is just experiencing a reflex of affection triggered by something soft and warm. Perhaps he was right about Pinky after all, she thinks.

“You're part baby and part dog anyway,” she says, and Jack raises his eyes and barks.

WHEN MARIA'S OWN
father had a heart attack in the blue leather chair in their living room, she was two years and three months old.
She remembers neither him nor the event of his death. But she does remember when, at age four, she got out of bed after a nightmare about a fox and scampered down the hall to her mother's room. At the door she stopped. Within she heard what sounded like a sick animal, though she knew it was no such thing. She understood that these were the sounds of her mother's sadness. To return to her own bed, haunted there by that evil fox, was still more tempting and safe. She felt guilty, even then, at the fear of her own mother's pain and the decision to not enter the room and comfort her.

“Thank God I get these summers off,” her mother would say to Maria from time to time. “My job is the best in the world.” Even then Maria understood that she wasn't talking about her actual job, but rather the space around it—the hours it allowed her to devote to Maria. Her childhood was filled with joy and the opportunity for even more of it. Now Maria understands that she will come to know loss. This is not what looms largest in her thoughts of her mother, though. What she spends her nights thinking about is how her mother deserves as many days of happiness now as possible. These she is determined to provide.

CHAPTER 3

L
ATE AUGUST. SCHOOL
has already begun, but Maria is no longer attending. As her classmates gather in fluorescent-lit classrooms and play the name game around circular seating, she sits on the edge of her bed, groaning in the dusty afternoon daylight. The yellow shag carpet is clenched between her toes. When the contraction ends she falls back upon the bed and pants.

Down the hallway she tiptoes. “Mom?” she whispers.

Her mother is frail, yellow, and attended to by a bearded nurse named Hank. She is still alive is what's amazing. There has been no change in weeks. Every few days, she tells Maria to drive her to the coast. “Let's go to Beaufort, just for dinner,” she says, but Beaufort is four hours away and Maria's mother knows she would not, at this stage, even survive the car ride. Maria feels certain that her mother has willed herself to stay alive long enough so that she can meet her daughter's child and wonders why, if her mother could do that, why she cannot will herself to live forever.

“It time?” her mother says.

“I just had a real one,” Maria says.

Hank—a man who wears several colorfully beaded bracelets—steps out of the room, his finest qualification an ability to disappear. Maria's mother places one papery hand on Maria's abdomen.
Blood has spilled in pools of blue and green under the surface of her mother's skin.