When You Least Expect It (3 page)

But I wasn’t sure if the bank would approve another, larger loan. And even if they did approve it, what were the odds that another round of IVF would be successful? Or another after that? I could spend years letting them shoot foreign fertilized eggs up into my uterus, only to have my body spit them back out two weeks later.

Rose’s words suddenly came back to me.
Why don’t you adopt?
She made it sound so simple, so obvious. Taking someone else’s unwanted baby into our desperate-for-a-baby home. The theory had a nice ballast to it. Of course, it meant that the child wouldn’t look like either of us—even with the borrowed-eggs scenario, any successful pregnancy would have resulted in a baby that inherited half of its DNA from Jeremy. Did this matter to me? Would it matter to Jeremy?

I thought about it, trying to imagine a baby as unlike Jeremy and me as possible. A baby with a fluff of dark hair and serious eyes. A little girl who danced with the natural grace I’d never known. A boy who loved to run until his legs tired and his breath came in gasps. A child who would be mine, even if he or she didn’t come from me. A child who would call me Mama. I would hold him in my arms, and he’d wrap his chubby arms around my neck. I’d blow kisses on a soft, round stomach. I’d inhale that sweet baby smell, until it swamped all of my senses….

A longing washed over me that was so intense I had to put a hand on the countertop to steady myself.

The back door opened, and Jeremy came into the kitchen, Otis panting at his heels. I was right—he
did
smell like a fish.

“Are the troops all tucked in?” I asked.

“They’re in their sleeping bags, but no one’s gone to sleep yet. They’re asking for cocoa. Which they apparently want served in a thermos,” Jeremy said.

At the children’s insistence, Jeremy had pitched a borrowed tent in our backyard, and the three of them were sleeping out there.

“Isn’t it a little hot out for cocoa?” I asked.

“You would think. I already had to talk them down from building a campfire, which I’m pretty sure is against the city code,” Jeremy said.

I poured some milk in a pan and turned the burner on
underneath. “I don’t think I have a thermos. Will they accept their cocoa served in regular old mugs?”

“I’m sure. Are there any marshmallows left?” Jeremy asked. “Or did Otis eat all of them?”

I reached into the cupboard and pulled out a new bag of marshmallows. “Ta-da.”

“Excellent. What else are you hiding in there?”

“Two bags of Hershey’s Kisses,” I admitted.

“You’ve been holding out on me!”

“They’re not for us. They’re for you to bring to the sci-fi convention tomorrow,” I explained. Jeremy would be manning a table at the annual South Florida Science Fiction Convention, or SciCon for short.

“Okay, I’ll bite. Why am I bringing two bags of Hershey’s Kisses to SciCon?” Jeremy asked.

“I thought it would be a good marketing trick. You put the Kisses out in a bowl on your table. And then when people stop for the candy, you can sell them a book,” I said brightly.

“No,” Jeremy said.

“Why not?”

“Because bowls of Hershey’s Kisses are not very manly.”

“Do you want to be manly, or do you want to sell books?”

“I want to sell books in a manly fashion,” Jeremy said.

I rolled my eyes, but put the Kisses back in the cupboard. “I’m worried about them sleeping outside. Do you think it’s safe?”

“It’ll be okay. I’m going to stay with them.”

“Is there room in the tent for you?”

“No. I’ll sleep on one of the chaise lounges,” Jeremy said. We had a pair of chaise lounges next to our tiny pool, another feature that had sold us on the house.

“It’s supposed to rain tonight,” I protested.

“So? I don’t melt,” Jeremy said, smiling.

“But you’ve got SciCon tomorrow. You need to be well rested.”

“I’ll be fine.” Jeremy pulled me into his arms and nuzzled his chin against the top of my head. “You okay?”

I nodded. “I’m fine. The kids didn’t notice anything, did they?”

“Those three? They notice everything. But what exactly are you referring to?”

“My getting all blubbery at the beach,” I said.

“First of all, a few tears hardly equals blubbery. And second, no, I don’t think they noticed. They were too busy with their impromptu gymnastics training session,” Jeremy said. “I think the milk is boiling.”

I broke out of his embrace and reached for the pan before the milk could scald. I dumped some cocoa into the pan and whisked it into the milk. Jeremy leaned against the counter and watched me.

“So … I was thinking,” I said slowly. “Maybe Rose is right.”

“Right about what? That she should be crowned Imperial Leader of the World? Because I have to say, I don’t think she’d be a particularly benevolent dictator,” Jeremy said. “She’d force us all to be her slaves. In fact, she’d probably keep us chained to her throne.”

“No, not that. Although, yes, I agree, the thought of Rose in power is terrifying. But I was thinking about what she said earlier at the beach. About how we should adopt a baby. I think …,” I began, but then stopped and swallowed hard, trying to quell my nerves. “I think maybe we
should
think about it.”

Jeremy nodded, but didn’t say anything for a few beats.

“We always said adoption was a possibility,” he said finally.

I realized I’d been holding my breath, and let it out in a whoosh. “We did,” I agreed.

“But we wanted to try IVF first,” Jeremy said. “We wanted to pursue that for as long as it was a viable option.”

“That’s just it. I don’t think it is a viable option,” I said. I was trying to keep my voice steady, but I could hear the pain seeping in
around the edges of my words. Jeremy heard it, too. His face creased with worry, and he reached for me.

“No, I’m okay,” I said. “I just … I just really want to be a mom. And I think that adoption is the only way it’s going to happen for us. So maybe it’s time we looked into it.”

Jeremy inhaled deeply. Finally, he nodded. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

I sat at my out-of-the-way table at SciCon, trying not to yawn. The plum table assignments had been given to the rock stars of the sci-fi community—minor actors from hit television shows, comic book artists, computer game developers. As the writer of a series of paperbacks with middling sales, I’d been placed so far away from the action I might as well have been in the parking lot. I perked up as a pair of twenty-year-old geeks dressed as Captain Picard and Spock from
Star Trek
passed by.

“I’m telling you, I totally saw Tricia Helfer by the laser exhibit,” Spock said. “Caprica Number Six in the flesh.”

“No way. That wasn’t her,” Captain Picard replied. “That was just some blonde chick in a Caprica Number Six costume.”

“I’m telling you, it was her. The
real
Six,” Spock insisted.

They glanced in my direction. I smiled winningly.

“Hi,” I said. I held the bowl out. “Hershey Kiss?”

India had talked me into bringing the candy with me, despite my protests that I wouldn’t use it. I held out for about an hour. After watching convention stragglers trailing past my table without once glancing in my direction, I finally gave in and broke out the Kisses.

“Thanks, dude,” Picard said as they each grabbed a handful of Kisses. Neither one even glanced at my book display or at the
cardboard sign that read,
JEREMY HALLOWAY, AUTHOR OF THE FUTURE RACE SERIES.
Instead, they walked off in the direction of the stage, where characters from
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
were scheduled to appear.

A robot passed by, headed in the opposite direction from the Trekkies. “Kiss?” I offered, shaking the bowl. The robot didn’t speak. He—or she, it was impossible to tell—held up one silver hand and pointed toward its masked head. “Oh,” I said sympathetically. “Yeah, I guess it’s hard to eat when you’re in costume.”

The robot shrugged and kept moving. I slumped back in my chair and swallowed back another yawn. It had been a late night. The chaise lounge had not made a comfortable bed, and the situation got even worse after the storm blew in at around two in the morning. Luckily, the kids hadn’t wanted to stay out in the tent once it started thundering, so we moved indoors. Miles slept in the guest room, Rose and Luke unrolled their sleeping bags on the sofas in the living room, and I managed to get a few hours of sleep in my bed.

But at daybreak, just as the first fingers of light were stretching into the room, I woke up with something sharp jabbing me in the side and something else waving disturbingly close to my face that—after I started awake—I belatedly realized was a foot. The two younger kids had relocated to our bed—or, more specifically, to my side of our bed—at some point during the night. Rose had fallen asleep upside down in the bed, with her feet on my pillow. Luke was lying across his sister, his legs looped over her back and his knee lodged firmly in my side. Both of them were snoring softly. I gave up on sleep at that point and headed downstairs to make pancakes and extra-strong coffee.

But, tired as I now was, I had a feeling my inability to focus on pitching my books had more to do with my and India’s conversation the night before.

Adoption.

I hadn’t lied to India. I did think we should look into adoption. I just didn’t have any idea how we were possibly going to afford it. After three rounds of IVF, we were broke. We already had a large second mortgage on the house, and my career was not exactly taking off at the moment. Actually, India didn’t know that. I hadn’t told her about the low earnings statements I’d received from my publisher a few weeks earlier, figuring she had enough stress to deal with—but I was all too aware of it. And I knew adoptions weren’t cheap. A college buddy—Dave, who when I knew him was famed for his ability to eat four pizzas on his own in a single sitting—and his wife had adopted a little girl from Russia two years ago, and when I ran into him at our ten-year college reunion, he’d said that the process had cost about forty grand.

Forty thousand
dollars
. Needless to say, we did not have forty thousand dollars. In fact, we owed more than that to the bank. A lot more.

But the expression on India’s face when she broached the subject of adoption—a mixture of relief, elation, and desperate hope—had stopped me from bringing up our strained finances. She’d been through too much over the past few years. Month after month of disappointment, followed by first a grim infertility diagnosis and then the IVF failures, had taken a toll.

I wanted kids, too, of course. I always had. But for me, it was more of a hazy, indefinite future goal. I had vague images of wearing scrubs in the delivery room while I reminded India to breathe and, later, cheering from the sidelines of my kids’ soccer games. For India, it went deeper than that. She longed for a baby. And Rose was right, India would be an amazing mother. She’d always loved kids. She’d even chosen to have her photography studio specialize in children’s portraiture.

So if adoption was the only way for us to have a baby, I was all for it. I just didn’t yet know how the hell we were going to swing it.

A crowd of women, all wearing matching neon pink T-shirts
emblazoned with
MIDDLE EARTH BABES
in black block letters, approached. I sat up straighter, and smiled at them. Most of them ignored me, although one of the women—in her fifties, with heavy blonde highlights and a large handbag slung over her shoulder—peered at my sign through a pair of reading glasses perched on the end of her nose.

“Jeremy Halloway,” she said out loud. She examined me. “Is that you?”

“It is,” I said.

“You look different in person than you do in your picture,” she said. She studied my author photo again. “Oh, I see what it is. You have more hair in the photograph.”

Feeling somewhat deflated, I tried to laugh it off. “At least I don’t get carded anymore.”

Ignoring my joke, she picked up one of my books and began to page through it.

“That’s the sixth book in my Future Race series,” I explained.

“Do you have to read the first five to understand what’s going on?”

“No, each book is written to stand alone. But the first five books provide the backstory,” I said.

She held the book up. “Are you giving these out for free?”

“No. You have to buy it. But I’ll sign it for you,” I said, holding up one of the Sharpie pens I’d brought with me that morning and had yet to use.

“No, thanks,” she said, dropping the book onto the middle of the table, rather than returning it to the top of the stack. She helped herself to a handful of Kisses and, without another word to me, turned away and hurried off to catch up with the rest of her group.

I returned the book to its place and moved the bowl of Hershey’s Kisses back from the edge of the table. If people kept insisting on taking handfuls, I would run out before lunchtime.

———

“Hey,” I said as I walked in the garage door, which opened onto the kitchen.

“Hi, honey,” India said. She was standing at the counter, chopping an onion into a neat dice. “How was SciCon?”

“I sold three books,” I said.

“That’s all?” India asked sympathetically.

“Your Hershey’s Kisses were a big hit.”

India opened the refrigerator and pulled out two bottles of Amstel Light. She popped the caps off, handed one to me, and then clinked her bottle against mine.

“Did you get the kids home in one piece?” I asked.

India nodded. “They were so sticky, though. Especially Luke.”

“He did pour nearly a whole bottle of maple syrup on his pancakes,” I said.

“Maybe I should have made him take a bath before I brought him home.”

“Or thrown him into the pool.”

“Mimi didn’t seem to notice. Then again, she said she had three martinis last night and was still feeling pretty fuzzy,” India said, grinning.

“Did they have fun in South Beach?”

“They had a great time. She said to pass on her thanks a million times over for watching the kids.” She picked up her knife and went back to dicing the onion. “I told Mimi what we talked about last night. You know. About how we were considering adoption.”