from June 21, 1973
I'm sixteen and I'm on my way to the maternity ward of King's Daughter's Hospital in Frankfort, Kentucky, with a boy I'll call Joe. He's my husband, and we're riding the elevator, which we once skipped school to do all afternoon, for that rush of up and back down and up. Now a nurse with crimson nails is guiding my wheelchair and some woman is holding the hand of a little girl with lace-edged socks and a deep cut on her forehead, stitched at a slant.
Nothing but a baby, says the woman, and she means me. She has cat-eye glasses, and her voice is slurred as whiskey.
Or that's me. I'm buoyant already, with contractions and momentum. The labor isn't much, yet. Physically, there's a pushing down between my legs, a shove at my lower back, an ache, none of it worse than menstrual cramps. It's my image I want to keep intact. I'm with it. I'm moving forward, steady as we go. I'm tough, ready to give birth as if it were an everyday affair, casual as buttered toast or sex.
Nothing but a baby her own self, the woman says, looking at me with a rat-toothed smile.
And she's right. I'm a teenaged girl and I'm married to a teenaged boy and we've decided to give our son away at birth. I'm sixteen and I'm waiting for the future to happen, but it already has, in ways I'll discover for the rest of my life.
These are the facts. My son, relinquished to adoption on the day he was born, was named Brian Keith McElmurray by the Kentucky Department of Social Services in June of1973. Other than his name, which they later sent to me in a form letter, I know very little about this boy who long ago became a man. I know that he was born very early in the morning, after a hard two days of labor. I know he weighed six pounds and something when he slid from my womb, the only time I ever heard him cry. I know that I was allowed, by law, to refuse to relinquish my son to my father who, two days after the birth, told me how he'd stood looking through the hospital nursery window and wondered that such a new being could so resemble his own father, a Standard Oil service station man who died when I was nine. I know that this is the only second-hand glimpse I have ever had of my son's face.
I know, or I have been told according to what is admissible by Kentucky Adoption Law, that my son was adopted one year after I relinquished him. Twenty-five years after his birth I will finally receive a letter from the Kentucky Department of Social Services, my first irrefutable proof that my son has a life beyond my own imperfect memory. The letter, dated January 15, 1998, states:
Dear Ms. McElmurray:
In response to your request to place information in the adoption/case record of Brian Keith, this is to let you know that your letter/request has been placed in his adoption record. To date, our agency has had no contact with him or the adoptive family since he was adopted by a Kentucky family in 1974. If he should ever contact our agency in the future seeking information about his birth family, we will advise him of your letter/request.
Under Kentucky's current adoption law, KRS 199.570, we can share the following non-identifying information about the adoptive parents.
The adoptive father was born in 1936 and had his Ph.D. in math. He was a professor at a large university. The adoptive mother was born in 1938 and also had advanced degrees in math. She taught part-time at the college level. Both enjoyed good health and had more than adequate resources to provide for a child or children. Brian Keith had adjusted quite well to the adoptive parents and they to him. The adoptive mother enjoyed being a mother and housewife. Our agency has no current information on the adoptive family.
I hope this information is helpful to you. For your information, Brian's birth date as given in our record is June 21, 1973.
Sincerely,
Virginia Nester
Program Specialist
These are the facts I currently possess, accrued like stray traces of dust. A paper trail that might lead, if I knew how to follow it, to irrefutable truths about what it meant to bear a son and give him away on that long-ago day, June 21st, 1973.
On this day of the birth, I woke in a room shadowed by floodlights Joes father kept on in the dog lot, for his coon hounds. Damian, the Siamese cat, slipped out from the bend of my knees. We both often got out of bed at that time, the cat for a midnight kitchen raid and myself to stand at the window. White and liver-spotted dog coats, night moisture on glass, all of it gleaming and cool. Pain in my lower back woke me this night, a tightness starting in my back and moving down, pulling between my legs. Not for sure yet this was labor, I raised my hand to the window. A thin hand, and in the flood light I saw blue. Pale blue skin, blue bones, right down to the blue, chilled insides of me.
Joe, I said. Wake up. I think it might be time.
Time, he said.
His chubby cheeks were bluish, a two day beard, and his boy eyes were pale blue with bits of sleep in the corners. He rubbed his fists against them hard, and I thought of the times I'd seen those eyes, wide and black, the pupils expanded and electric with acid or speed or whatever else we could drum up from the streets and medicine cabinets of our town. I wished both of us could fall into those pupils, some bottomless and safe place, and never come back again. Instead, I saw blue sparks ignite in the close bedroom air. We were both so small in that light. Blue sparks of fear, his and mine, ignited the scents of socks and sleep. What I didn't imagine yet was the stretching, the slow opening of me.
Oh my god, Joe said.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed, full lips beneath his mustache twitching. He had a habit of drawing his long mustache hairs into his mouth, sucking, especially when he was frightened or angry. I went to him, tucked his head next to my stomach, where he could hear movement. If this child could talk, I wondered, what would be the words? I'm late, I'm late, like the rabbit in Alice and Wonderland. I want to stay here, the baby might say, in this soft place of blood.
Joe and I had a plan of sorts down pat. We'd prearranged with his parents, Rose and Joseph, with whom we lived, to use their station wagon for the hospital run—no fooling around in the middle of the night with hot wiring the Duster, which was now our car. We envisioned a back road shortcut to the hospital, a screeching halt at the emergency room, a wheelchair or two and then, in the most undefined part of our plan, a fast-forward version of that thing called labor, a painless, tidy version that involved no excretions or wounds, nothing so flesh-like as afterbirth. The real exodus was chaos.
My water had not yet broken, but the pain was shifting lower, and had developed an urgent, burning edge. Joe threw on cutoffs and a rose-colored polyester shirt and, still barefoot, opened the door, flipped on the hall switch and flooded the room with light. Somewhere, in the piles of blue jeans, Marvel Comics and the circuit breakers and boards that were his hobby, lay a spare set of keys to the station wagon, ready for an emergency. I stood in the middle of this emergency, cradling my belly, which was lower than it had been and needed hands to hold it up….