The other thing deciding made possible—besides not having to think and talk and play Baby War about it anymore—was that India was finally able to tell her mother. It would have been hard and terrible and possibly impossible to have to say, “Mom. I need to tell you something. I’m pregnant.” But it was not so hard, terrible, or impossible to say, “Mom. I need to tell you something. I’m pregnant, but it’s okay because I got into college, and I have a plan, one that’s good for everyone, so you don’t have to worry.”
The next morning was Saturday. When India came downstairs, her mother raised first her eyes then her eyebrows at her up-before-noon, changed-out-of-pajamas-already daughter. India pretended to ignore this. She got herself some cereal she couldn’t eat. Her mother folded her newspaper and waited.
India swallowed. “I got into NYU and pregnant.” Someone in her head was calling, Line? Line? helplessly into empty wings.
Her mother got up and traded her newspaper for a cup of coffee.
“I mean,” India clarified, “I got into college—everywhere actually—and I also got pregnant.”
“I understood that the first time,” her mother said. “I was waiting for more information. About the latter.”
“Oh. Okay. I got pregnant. A couple weeks ago. Well, I found out a couple weeks ago. I think it was actually at Guys and Dolls. Well, not at Guys and Dolls. After Guys and Dolls. But it’s okay.” She stopped talking. Her mother sipped her coffee. “Why aren’t you saying anything?”
“I am waiting to hear why you believe this is okay.”
Ahh, right, she’d forgotten. This was what she was supposed to lead with. This was what was going to make this conversation non-hard and non-terrible and non-impossible. “I have a plan.”
“Oh good,” said her mother. “What, pray tell, India, is your plan?”
“I’m going to give it up. For adoption.”
“You are going to place. The baby. For adoption,” her mother corrected. “You are going to make an adoption plan. For the baby. Your baby. To whom you are going to give birth in, let’s see”—her mother counted the fingers of one hand with the other then the next hand with the first—“August?” She looked back from her fingers to her daughter. “Is that your plan?”
“Yes.” India sat on the counter and looked at her feet swinging over the kitchen floor. This had sounded so much clearer in her head.
“And how are you going to execute this plan?” her mother wondered.
“Execute?”
“Yes, a plan suggests a detailed proposal addressing all necessary steps and eventualities between one’s current state—pregnant and admitted to college—and one’s goal state—childless and enrolled.”
“I … haven’t worked out the details yet,” India confessed.
“I see. So you don’t have a plan. You have a dream.”
“A dream?”
“An outcome you are hoping for with no particular sense of what it means or entails or how to cause it to occur.”
“I guess?”
“You guess?”
Her mother was maddening. “Robbie made study cards. We played Baby War.”
“You played Baby War?”
“You know, abortion versus adoption, getting married versus breaking up. Single parenting. That kind of thing.”
“I see.” Hadn’t her mother said “I see” half a million times already? “And adoption won?”
“I mean, not won,” India said, “but yeah.”
“You do realize what this means, India?”
“I … think?” India asked.
“Well, just in case,” her mother offered, “let’s play this out a bit, shall we?”
Her daughter nodded mutely. This wasn’t really a question.
“In order to place a child for adoption, you need to grow the child. Inside your body. For the next … sounds like about thirty-two weeks.”
“I know,” said India, “I’ll get more and more pregnant.”
“No. You will remain exactly as pregnant as you are right now. You will get more and more large. You will get more and more bloated. You will get more and more uncomfortable. But you will not get any more pregnant. You will find it harder and harder to do many of the things you do now without thinking about them. Fitting into the chairs at school, for instance. Sitting for long hours to read, write papers, study for exams, complete homework assignments. Entering the cafeteria without everyone staring and making rude comments. Your social life in general, I imagine, will take quite a hit. May I ask how Robbie feels about all this?”
“He wants to do what I want to do,” India said, and for the first time in the conversation, she saw something other than carefully corralled horror pass over her mother’s face.
“Which is to say he agrees that adoption is the best path forward,” her mother asked, “or that his position is one of support for whatever you decide?”
“The latter, I think?” India was glad for the opportunity to talk about this part with someone.
“You discussed”—her mother required a sip of coffee to get it out—“marriage?”
“I mean, sort of? We love each other, but—”
“Yes,” her mother interrupted, “but. Tell me more about that ‘but’ please.”
“It just seemed … I mean we would have to get jobs but. And then the baby. It seems like an apartment would be … And it would be kind of gross. I guess. You know?”
“Remarkably, I do know. I’m glad you do too. And may I ask why you—you two—decided against the obvious answer?”
“Abortion?”
“Abortion.”
“Well, I got into college.”
“The admissions officers won’t know. And if they did know, they would still allow you to matriculate.”
“Right, but see, I was never going to get into all these incredible programs.” It was important she say this right. It was important her mother understand this part. “And then I did get in. And this baby, if you imagine it when it grows up, the little kid it turns into, and the big kid, and the high schooler, and the adult after that, that was probably never going to happen either. The odds of this person existing were less than the odds of me getting into NYU, but that happened, so this can too.”
“Can? Yes. Should is my question.”
“Right, yeah, no. So I mean I wasn’t going to get into NYU, and then I got into NYU, and that feels good.”
“Yes.”
“And no one got hurt.”
Her mother squeezed the bridge of her nose. “Please make sense, India.”
“My dream came true. It’s so amazing. It’s the best thing that could have happened to me. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. And no one suffered. No one feels sad because I feel happy. There’s no downside. There’s only upside. Robbie’s going to come with me and get an apartment near campus. You can come out and visit and see my plays.”
“What does this have to do with—”
“It sounds stupid when I say it,” India admitted, “but everything’s better when your dreams come true instead of not coming true.”
“While I am not willing to grant you that in perpetuity, the more pressing question is this: Are you telling me it was your dream to be an uneducated, unemployed, pregnant teenager?”
India laughed out loud. “I’m saying my dream came true. Someone else’s should too.”
“Who?”
“Whoever really, really wants a baby.”
“Ahh.” Her mother said. Then she didn’t say anything else.
So India kept talking. “Somewhere out there there’s a person, or a couple, and maybe they can’t have a baby, and all they want is a baby, and I can give them a baby. I can make their dream come true just like someone made my dream come true.”
“That’s very kind, India.” Her mother softened and exhaled a little, like a quiche when you take it out of the oven. India could see her turn from her lawyer into her mother, and that was good because she needed a mother more than she needed a lawyer at the moment. “But first of all, someone didn’t make your dream come true. You made your dream come true. You studied for all those tests. You revised all those essays. You made those audition tapes. And second of all, there are other ways to spread joy and kindness in the world than by making babies for strangers.”
“But if I gave them my baby, they wouldn’t be strangers. They would be family. I mean not family who you have Christmas with or really ever see again, but there are lots of different kinds of families.”
Her mother inhaled, exhaled, declined, India could see, to address that for the moment. “Have you considered what this would do to your life?”
“High school is a waste of time anyway,” India enthused, for this was the part she had thought through. “It’s not like Ms. LaRue’s going to cast me in the spring show. It’s not like I’m learning anything practical. I already got into college.”
“I don’t mean just academically.” India was surprised because her mother always meant just academically. “What about socially? Mentally? Emotionally?”
“Well, I’ll still have Robbie. And it’s not like I’ve ever been super popular or whatever. I’ve had a lot of practice not caring what anyone thinks.” If she’d had social standing to lose, if she were otherwise going to be prom queen, if because she was pregnant she couldn’t be top of the cheerleader pyramid or class president or yearbook editor, if because she was pregnant she couldn’t be in the school play, then this would be a harder decision to make. As it was, she had none of that to lose. This was something no one ever talked about, how being socially awkward was great preparation for being knocked up at sixteen.
“Are you going to talk me out of it?” she asked when her mother had nothing to say to that. She did not ask if her mother was going to try to talk her out of it. Her mother could successfully talk anyone out of anything she chose, so the question was only whether she would.
“I would never talk anyone into or out of anything on this front,” her mother said, more carefully than she usually said things. “Robbie is right. The choice is yours, and the job of the people in your life is to support you in it.”
Which made India cry.
Which made her mother come over and hop up on the counter next to her, press her hip to India’s, run her hand over India’s hair then face.
“But it is my job to make sure this decision is not undertaken lightly.”
“You want me to get married?” India wondered.
“God, no.” It was also unlike her mother to answer directly, unequivocally, unsocratically. “In fact, that I might try to talk you out of.”
“You don’t like Robbie?” She felt wounded. And protective.
“Oh, Robbie’s fine.” Her mother waved her hand in front of her like Robbie was a cobweb she had to walk though. “He’s a sweet boy. But good lord, if you were twice as old as you are now, I’d still think you were too young to get married. And besides, having a baby has nothing to do with having a husband.”
India nodded. She knew this, of course. It was maybe the first thing she had ever learned from her mother. Then she said—barely whispered, really, “I could have an abortion.”
“Yes, you could,” her mother agreed. “And you are lucky that you can. Lots of people can’t. Lots of people fight for you to have that right.”
“I know,” India said. “But that doesn’t mean I have to.”
“No,” said her mother. “In fact, it means you don’t. You having the right to an abortion means you having the right not to have an abortion.”
“But?”
“But it’s okay to want this to go away.”
“Yeah, but then it would all have been for no reason.”
“Sometimes you have to cut your losses,” her mother said.
“And no one’s dream would come true.”
Her mother nodded. Then she put her arm around her. “Congratulations, India.”
“On being pregnant?” That didn’t make sense if she was giving up the baby. Placing it. “On making a decision?”
“On getting into all those drama programs.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
“That’s really wonderful.”
“Yeah. Thank you.
“I’m proud of you.”
Her mother never said she was proud of you. And she especially never said it after you told her you were pregnant. It would have been a nice place to leave what had been a fairly hard and impossible conversation after all. But she still needed help.
“I don’t know where to do it,” India said finally.
“Where to do what?”
“Where to give the baby. Like the actual giving. The actual putting up.” Like a poster on a wall, India thought, or a hat you weren’t planning to wear all that often anymore but weren’t ready to get rid of forever.
But that was the part where her mother could help.
India was picturing an orphanage, like the semester she failed to get a part in Oliver!, or like the animal shelter where her mother made her volunteer one summer in order to convince her she didn’t really want a dog. She knew there wouldn’t be babies in pens with cement floors and wire cages, but she was expecting something frightening, bad smelling, sad. The adoption agency, though, was cheery and bright and a suite of offices. She was welcomed like a hero, though whether that was because these people worked with her mother all the time or because she was donating the goods, she couldn’t say. Everyone told her how brave she was and how strong and how impressive that she got into so many great schools and how generous of her to make a plan like this and how her child would be so loved and how she was going to make an adoptive parent or parents very happy and how she wasn’t committing to anything and could change her mind at any time and would never be compelled to do anything she didn’t want to do. Did she understand? She understood. Did she have questions? They had answered ones she didn’t even know she had.
India had not realized that where the baby went would be her decision. She was not entirely convinced it should be. She didn’t know anything about choosing parents because she had never done it before. Shouldn’t someone who was an expert in parent-picking be in charge? Or maybe they could take a DNA sample from the baby—couldn’t they do that while it was still inside?—and determine it would be tall and athletic and place it with basketball-loving parents, or an X-ray that showed its brain was unusually large and they could find some parents with PhDs, or maybe they could tell it was allergic to peanuts and place it with parents who were also allergic to peanuts who would for sure never have peanuts in the house and would also be great at showing a child where peanuts might accidentally or secretly be.
Instead, applicants submitted binders about themselves, which seemed like they would provide lots of information but did not. The would-be parents all looked like, well, parents. They looked like adults. So it was weird that they were all also kissing her ass. They all wrote letters that began, “Dear Birth Mother,” or “To a special birth mother,” or “Thank you, Birth Mama.” She was grateful not to be abbreviated BM, but she wasn’t sure the M was appropriate anyway. She wasn’t a mother. Not at the moment. And the whole point of this process was so she wouldn’t become one. Not at the moment.
They thanked her for considering them. They admired her courage and generosity. They hoped she knew she was so strong and what a wonderful gift she was giving the world and how much God loved her and how happy she could make them. They hoped she knew how much they would love her baby.
She didn’t want anyone to love her baby because she didn’t want it to be her baby. She wanted it to be their baby.
They all promised family holidays and a good education, trips to the beach, grandparents, ice cream, and fresh air. They all promised snuggles and birthday parties and bedtime stories. Some had tire swings in their backyards. Some had skis in their mudrooms. Some had secret recipes for pancakes and gardens to supply the blueberries. They told her how they met. They told her their favorite pizza topping and their favorite band and their favorite TV show and their favorite baseball team, and though she wasn’t sure what criteria it did make sense to base this choice on, she couldn’t figure out why it would be any of those.
Some of them told her why they couldn’t have their own child, and though she saw what they meant, she didn’t want them to say “own child.” She wanted this child to be their own child.
There were so many binders filled with so many photos and so many facts and so much hope, and India felt like she needed to look at every page. It had taken her two hours last August to pick which backpack she wanted for the school year, and there had only been five or six choices, and that decision didn’t matter. She considered letting Robbie pick, but none of the letters said Dear Birth Father or even Dear Birth Parents. Plus, lots of them promised to tell the child all about her, and she didn’t want some kid to have to walk around with “Your birth mother didn’t really give a shit what our favorite band was.” Nor “Your birth mother was so overwhelmed she let her boyfriend decide even though he’d already proven himself to be completely irresponsible what with the whole you-existing thing.”
And then, one afternoon, she found Camille.
When people thought of mothers, they smelled cookies baking and chocolate melting. But actual mothers got shit for giving their kids too much sugar. When people thought of mothers, they thought soft and warm and cuddly. But actual mothers went to great lengths to eradicate their soft warm cuddly bits. When people thought of mothers, they thought of mama bears and cheerleaders—fierce love and unconditional support—but actual mothers were accused of coddling and helicoptering.
Camille Eaney did not enter into scenarios where you were damned if you did and damned if you didn’t. She did not play games that could not be won. She did not believe “helicopter” was a verb. And therefore, she did not want any part of this.
Except that wasn’t quite true. She wanted one part.
Camille was a planner. Honestly, she couldn’t understand why everyone wasn’t. Making plans resulted in results. If you wanted what you wanted—and by definition, who didn’t?—you had to make a plan.
At first she thought she’d just get pregnant. Martin would probably still be willing. He liked sex. He liked sex with her. He’d make her sign some forms absolving him of financial obligation in the event of reproduction in this universe or any other in perpetuity, but he’d draw up those papers himself so she wouldn’t have to pay for them, and obviously she didn’t want him or his money in her life or that of her child. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have divorced him.
But she’d meticulously rid herself of everything Martin, so she wasn’t wild about having his DNA learn to crawl in her home.
She thought about going to a sperm bank—were they still even called sperm banks?—but could only picture Greek-columned buildings full of men in expensive suits whispering in expensive tones who heard a sudden noise and all turned at once to front doors flung open by a positive deluge of spunk.
But adoption? Adoption was spunk free. It was ex-husband free. It was giving an out to someone in a position she didn’t want to be in and a home to a baby who needed one. It seemed like a better choice in exactly the way single was a better choice than married: not the obvious choice, not lots of people’s first choice, but the best choice, at least for her.
There was a lot of paperwork. Camille was good at paperwork. She looked through scores of profiles filled out by other would-be adoptive parents and gleaned two important facts: they did not know how to use apostrophes, and they all wrote the same thing. The apostrophes would take care of themselves. (Camille had excellent grammar and usage.) But she could see that standing out was hard when that list of qualities that made someone a good mother was so fixed in people’s minds.
She spent three days trying to decide what band a desperate pregnant teenager might like her to like. The latest thing would look immature or as if she was trying too hard. The honest answer would make her seem old and joyless (or wouldn’t make her seem anything since no teenager would ever have heard of it). Eventually she decided anyone who picked parents on the basis of their favorite band was not someone whose genes she wanted in her house for the next two decades anyway.
Plus, she didn’t want to trick anyone into picking her. It was important to be honest. If ever there were a journey to start off on the right foot, surely it was this one. Lots of people’s journeys to parenthood started on the wrong one—drunken nights, regrettable hookups, poor decision-making on any number of fronts—but Camille knew she’d have to explain herself to her kid someday, and “I guessed your birth mom’s favorite band” seemed a bad way to begin. It was important to be undemanding, too. Being pregnant and not wanting to be, being pregnant but not ready, growing a baby with whom you planned to part seemed stressful enough. As much as she could, Camille wanted to ease their way, these women, these birth mothers. Asking them to absorb a hundred-page scrapbook seemed like a lot.
So she settled on an easy-to-read, easy-to-use guide to herself. She made a table of contents and color-coded section tabs. She used Times New Roman 12-point font, double spacing, and numbered lists. She eschewed puns, rhymes, and imagery (in the parent profile and in life). She used not a single exclamation point.
She asked herself what a birth mother would want to know about the person who would be her baby’s parent and concluded it probably had less to do with the person she was than the mother she would become. A would-be mother’s favorite bands, movies, and ice cream flavors were irrelevant for lots of reasons but mostly because all her predilections were about to be usurped. Instead, Camille detailed:
TYPES OF MUSIC I WILL TOLERATE IF THE BABY GROWS UP TO LIKE IT
1. Rock
2. Rap
3. Classical
4. Jazz
5. Top 40 [Camille was not a monster. She understood that listening to shitty but trendy music was an unfortunate but unavoidable stage of adolescence, like snootiness toward your beleaguered mother, or braces.]
TYPES OF MUSIC I WILL NOT TOLERATE, EVEN IF THE BABY GROWS UP TO LIKE IT*
1. Country
2. Heavy metal
3. Musicals
4. Opera
ACTIVITIES A CHILD MIGHT COME TO ENJOY WHICH I WOULD BE WILLING TO INDULGE
1. Team sports
2. Board games
3. The arts
4. Skiing
5. Scouts
ACTIVITIES A CHILD MIGHT COME TO ENJOY WHICH I WILL NOT BE WILLING TO INDULGE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES
1. Anything involving horses
2. Anything involving weaponry
3. Opera
KINDS OF DESSERTS I WILL ALLOW
1. Any with three or fewer unpronounceable ingredients
2. Except licorice, which is gross
She included one photo of herself, her headshot, the one she used on her website: professional, capable. She wasn’t embarrassed about how she looked in pictures and she wasn’t trying to be coy, but it seemed smug to press vacation photos on someone who was unlikely ever to have been anywhere yet. It seemed unkind to show photos of her big, supportive family—Camille had six brothers—to someone who was turning over part of hers.
Whereas most parent profiles were literally bursting from their seams, Camille’s was compact, easy to read, and largely monochrome, just like Camille herself.
When she submitted it, Marie, the social worker, laughed. She thought it was a joke. Camille rarely explained herself, but she made an exception for underpaid, overworked adoption social workers.
“I know the binders sometimes seem silly,” Marie admitted, “but it really does help everyone get to know each other.”
“It’s all in there,” Camille assured her. “Everything pertinent.”
“I just worry you’re going to take yourself out of the running with a lot of birth mothers.”
“That’s the plan,” Camille smiled. To find someone who valued directness, honesty, and simplicity rather than someone diverted by packaging, trivialities, and shiny things. Everyone else’s portfolio screamed “Pick me!” Hers whispered and did the picking for her.
Camille was not a control freak. She was a control connoisseur.
Now though, sitting at the agency, waiting, she was uncharacteristically worried. She had come fifteen minutes early. Fifteen minutes was the bare minimum of early Camille allowed herself to be. Whoever showed up second was always at a disadvantage, a disadvantage she could make sure wasn’t hers without sacrifice or expense or even any hard work. All she had to do was be wherever she was going anyway. She had no idea why everyone didn’t go where they were going early, but she was glad they didn’t. She also felt this was exactly the sort of life hack a child would be lucky to learn.
Therefore she was watching alone when the trio bundled into the lobby, late, dripping on everything, soaked to the skin. Was it normal to want to parent your maybe-child’s parent? What if this child—the child carrying her maybe-child—got sick? And what about the woman with her, clearly her own parent? Was this how what had happened happened? Was knocked-up-at-sixteen what you were when no one thought to make you put on a raincoat?
The girl and boy kept laughing together and dripping, but Camille locked eyes with the mother. The mother of the mother.
What passed there? Neither could have said, but they both felt it. Possibly it was:
MOM OF MOM: You’re taking my grandbaby.
CAMILLE: I promise to be worthy.
Or maybe:
MOM OF MOM: You’re helping my daughter.
CAMILLE: Yes, but also she’s helping me.
Or likely:
MOM OF MOM: I forgot an umbrella. It was stupid.
CAMILLE: If you throw a couple extra in the trunk of your car, you’ll never have this problem.
Everyone filed in. Camille tried to keep her eyes on India’s face but they wouldn’t stay and kept wandering to her stomach instead. It was wet and round. It was so wet and round it was obscene. Why round and rained on should conjure such a feeling of indecency, Camille did not know, but she really tried to keep her eyes off the stomach and on the face.
“I hope you’re not cold,” Camille said. Absurdly. What a time to forget how to talk like a person.
“God, no,” said India. “I’m a million degrees. Just watch—I’ll be steamed dry in like three minutes. I haven’t been cold in months.” She rubbed her round, wet belly. “It’s like a furnace.”
It. The baby. India’s baby. Camille’s baby. Camille’s maybe-baby.
“I want to apologize for the brevity of my binder.” Camille was surprised to hear herself say this since she did not believe in leading with an apology, especially one she didn’t mean. But this was too important a thing to begin the wrong way, and she didn’t want the girl to think she was being cagey or secretive.
“Oh, I loved your parent profile. That’s why I picked you. Most people go on and on.” India waved her hands around. “I mean, I have homework.”
Camille laughed. “You can ask me anything. I don’t want you to feel like you can’t.”
India leaned forward immediately. “Why did you say no musicals?”
“Oh, uh…” Shit. She should have anticipated the girl might be one of those high school theater geeks. “Of course, if musical theater is important to you, or important to the child, I could be flexible on that point.”
“But why musicals in particular?” India pressed.
“I just”—Camille reminded herself she was aiming for honesty in this meeting—“find their unpredictability unnerving.”
“Unpredictability?”
“How they might start rhyming or dancing at any moment or break into song with no warning.” It sounded ridiculous when she said this out loud. “Or, I don’t know, maybe I’m just jealous because I can’t sing myself. I’m happy to negotiate if that’s a deal breaker for you.”
“No need,” India smiled.
When she seemed to have no further questions, Marie jumped in. “Why doesn’t India tell you a little bit about why she’s making the decision she’s making?”
“I got into college,” said India.
“Congratulations,” said Camille.
“I got in everywhere, but I decided on Lenox. At first I thought, Duh, Juilliard, but it’s a little bit like when you order a chocolate chip cookie and it’s all chip. Chocolate is good, but if that’s all you wanted, you wouldn’t have ordered a cookie, you know?”
“I meant the decision you’re making about placing your baby for adoption,” Marie said.
“That’s what I’m doing. Juilliard is the obvious choice, but it’s not the only choice, and when I thought about it, I realized it wasn’t the right choice for me. Adoption is the same.”
Camille nodded slowly. “Me too.”
“Really?”
“Not the obvious choice, not the one many people would make, certainly, but a really good one and the right one for me.”
India beamed. “Getting into Lenox, getting in everywhere, it was a dream come true. Is a dream come true. So I wanted to make someone else’s dream come true too. I know that sounds cheesy.”
“It doesn’t sound cheesy at all,” Camille allowed herself to lie. Then she turned to Robbie. “Do you have plans to go to college?”
He looked surprised to be addressed. “Maybe. I had been planning a gap year, but now I’m going to go to New York with India. Get a job. See what happens.”
“It’s ironic, right? We’re staying together, but we don’t want a baby. You’re single, and you do.” India waved toward Robbie to include him in her “we,” but she was looking at Camille so she didn’t see the wince that lightninged the space between his eyes.
Camille wished she could ignore this. She wished she could go back in time three seconds and keep her eyes on India’s and miss Robbie’s reaction altogether. She wished she could take a moment to explain a working definition of “ironic.” But she knew she couldn’t do any of these things. Instead, she reached her hand along the table in Robbie’s direction and said, “Are you sure?”
He looked startled. They all looked startled. “Sure what?” he said.
“Sure this is what you want to do.”
“I want to support India.” He said it instantly. Reflexively. Camille knew a mantra when she heard one.
The mother shot her a look. The mother of the mother. It said, Yes, I know, but he’s not the priority. It said, They’re children still, and they have other things they need to do. It said, It’s better this way, and just because this boy doesn’t believe it yet, doesn’t mean it isn’t true. India’s mother was supporting what her daughter wanted and needed. Camille supposed Robbie was right that he should do the same.
“India and Robbie have decided on a closed adoption,” Marie said, even though everyone in the room knew it already. The agency encouraged open adoptions, and that was what most birth families chose, at least a little open, slightly ajar, cracked to let the light in. But India didn’t want that.
“I mean, if you need a kidney, call me, obviously.” India’s tone suggested this was an eventuality as likely as the earth falling into the sun. She was sixteen. But Camille knew sometimes you needed a kidney.
“Or me.” Robbie wrinkled his nose like his glasses were slipping, but he wasn’t wearing glasses. “I have kidneys too.”
India squeezed his hand. “But we want this baby to be your baby, totally, completely, in every way yours, and we just kind of thought if we had scheduled visits or check-ins or even just you have to send us pictures every few months, it’ll feel more like … not like a loan or going halfsies or whatever. I know technically the baby will be yours but…” She trailed off again.
“We find that open adoptions help ease the transition”—Marie had clearly given them this speech already and had no qualms about giving it again—“and lend support going forward to everyone involved: birth parents, adoptive parents, children who often have questions about—”
But India waved her away. She’d already heard this. She’d already decided. “We don’t want it to be like you and the baby owe us anything,” she said to Camille. “We don’t want it to be like we’re this huge chunk of your family, but we’re mostly totally absent all the time. We don’t want … do you call it ‘half measures’? Like we want to commit, one hundred percent, and we want you to commit, one hundred percent. We’re all in.” She nodded once, hard. “The baby’s all in. We want you to be all in too.”
Camille’s ear snagged on that “we” every time it came out of India’s mouth, but if Robbie disagreed, he was doing a good job of faking it. They weren’t adults, but they were old enough to make a decision, and Camille thought second-guessing it or lecturing them about what the grown-ups knew best was selling them short. She also thought making them guess what a child who didn’t exist yet would or wouldn’t want from them was asking a lot. They had already put the baby first, in the most generous way Camille could imagine, and it was enough, more than enough.
“I’m all in too,” she assured them. “The only kind of in I ever am is all.”
As she got bigger and rounder, as rumors spread, as it slowly dawned on her classmates and teachers that she had not just become overly fond of cake, India braced herself for savage laughter and too-loud whispers in the cafeteria, slackened jaws and pointing fingers, appalled eyes raking all of her but her face. Instead, she became invisible. Hubbubbing classrooms fell silent when she entered. Faces turned away as she passed. Teachers would not meet her eyes. She became a ghost roaming the halls of her high school, unnoticed but implacable, a reminder to one and all about the unremittingly gossamer fragility of life-as-you’ve-known-it. And of condoms.
She thought Robbie would start to be grossed out by her body. It was kind of gross. But he didn’t seem to mind. When her fingers got too swollen, they held toes instead. When her toes got too swollen, he sat at the other end of the couch and pressed the bottoms of his feet against the bottoms of hers. It was comforting but weird but sweet but skeevy all at the same time, kind of like being pregnant. Sometimes he liked to put his head on her knees where her lap used to be and talk to the baby inside. “You’re such a lucky baby,” he told it. “We picked you such a good mom.”
Or, “My teeth hurt when I eat chocolate ice cream but not any other kind of ice cream. Just so you know what you’re up against.”
Or, “One of my uncles has six toes on his right foot. My dad started going bald in high school. My mom can’t roll her tongue. It hasn’t held her back, though.”
Sometimes he made up songs to sing to it:
Little baby
Someday maybe
You will wonder
’Bout our blunder
But we’re happy
That your nappy
Is the problem
Of your mo-om—
“Why are you crying?” he broke off to ask India.
“I’m not crying.”
“Why are tears coming out of your eyes and running down your face?”
“You’re such a good singer.” She kept crying, but she was laughing too. “I was wooed under false pretenses.”
“Good thing, though,” Robbie said. “This baby has a fifty-fifty shot at being able to sing. Imagine if you had a baby with someone who sings like you do. Poor kid wouldn’t stand a chance.”
She pushed him off her tiny lap but laughed until she peed a little.
“Seriously,” he said when he’d picked himself off the floor. “I think we’re lucky we can share our talents with the baby.”
“I’m not sure heredity works that way.”
“No, like if I were a good painter, there would be no way to show it my paintings because it’s still inside. If I were good at numbers, I couldn’t do math for it. But it can hear me sing. And it can hear you act. Do your Merchant of Venice monologue for it.”
“No. I’m embarrassed. Babies don’t care about Shakespeare.”
“Don’t you want to share your gift with it? Don’t you want it to know what you can do?”
“‘The quality of mercy is not strained,’” she told it. She could not tip back in a chair anymore. She could not raise her feet as high as a table. “‘It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.’”
One day while she was making peanut butter toast in the kitchen, he waited until she was done and said, “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
He got down on one knee, and her heart stopped, which couldn’t have been good for the baby.
“Will you go to prom with me?”
And she laughed until she cried, which was not that long.
She thought it would be impossible to find a dress that would fit her, but apparently lots of pregnant women had formal affairs to attend, and if the black off-the-shoulder dress she chose therefore looked like something her mother would wear, a little old for her, a little less sequined than everyone else’s, it was classy, and for the first time in maybe ever she felt pretty. She felt beautiful, even.
The music was too loud, and there was too much jostling and nothing good to eat, and her feet hurt, but they slow-danced, very close around the baby between them, and she looked at him in his tuxedo and could not stop herself from picturing their wedding and the road she had resolutely refused to take. Under her dress, on the front of her enormous underpants, she had written “NYC” in black marker just under her popped-out belly button. She had written it backward for exactly this eventuality, and she excused herself from the table at which they were sitting and holding hands during the fast songs and went into the bathroom and hoisted her dress up so she could read it right way around in the mirror. She stared at herself, at her stomach, at her stretch marks, and those letters, “NYC,” turned to face her, indelible. Two girls burst in, laughing too loudly, but stopped when they saw her like they’d been silenced by a spell. They met her eyes in the mirror. She turned her whole body toward them so they could see. They backed out of the bathroom silent and somber as stones.
There were only three more weeks of school. Of her five thousand forty hours, she was down to less than a hundred.