CHAPTER SIX

Talking to God

Mother’s Day. Creamy cloths on the tables, classical music. Wired with prerevelation nerves, Scott and I sit at the restaurant table: For weeks we’ve wanted to tell my parents about our plans to adopt, but we’ve held back. Scott, who frequently has clearer glimpses into my parents than I do, says we’d better make sure we’re ready to let go of the far side of the pool. I know what he means. It can be a bad idea to reveal too much to my father: With the slightest inspiration, he will erupt into assumptions and advice. And at this point, we’ve kept the secret of our deliberations for so long, it’s hard to know how to begin. Sometimes it seems as if the story resists its own telling—some silences harden in place, some things so tamped down we forget how to say them. Scott and I talked it over carefully on the drive to Pompano Beach—how we’d open the conversation, how we’d put it, after so many child-free years: Well guys, you’re never going to believe this but. . . .

The restaurant itself is scary: There’s a server at one’s elbow, seemingly at every moment. They fidget over the silverware, snap open napkins and settle them in our laps, refill the water glasses to a hairbreadth of the brims. My husband and I wait for a moment of privacy, looking at each other behind the waiters’ backs. We squeeze each other’s hands, tap toes under the table, about to begin, when another man in a tuxedo emerges with a tray of cutlery. Eventually, there’s a break just after the black jackets clear away our amuse-bouche and before they bring the consommé. But then I start breathing like a landed trout, too anxious to say a word. I wonder if we will just have to raise our child in total secrecy. To my terror and relief, I hear Scott clear his throat lightly and say, “Hey, so we’ve got some news!”

He looks at me. I manage, “We’ve decided. . . .” We interlace our fingers. “We’re going to adopt a baby.”

My parents freeze, spotlit, their silhouettes painted onto the folding curtains behind them. Bud grabs the table, looks from me to Scott back to me again, a big, open-mouthed, not-quite-smile on his face. “You are . . . now, what are you doing?”

“A baby?” Mom puts her hand on Bud’s.

“We talked about it and talked about it and we finally decided to go for it,” Scott says gently. “We want to start a family.”

“Can you believe it?” I ask brightly, trying to penetrate the layers of shocked silence.

A man in a black jacket appears and begins rearranging all the utensils on the table. “The consommé will be arriving at any moment,” he informs us.

Bud’s hands move to the top of his head, then, very slowly, he lowers his forehead all the way to the tabletop. I’ve never seen him do that before. The waiter backs away. “Dad? You okay there?”

Mom says quietly, gingerly, “Well, I think. I think it’s wonderful. I think a baby is a very, very good thing.”

Dad lifts his head a bit, looks from me to Mom back to me again. “I’m happy? I don’t know. Am I happy? How do I feel? I can’t tell.” He slowly returns to an upright position.

Mom faces Dad and says in a fresh, assured way, “It’s wonderful. Incredible. A baby—it’s a miracle. You’re happy, Gus.”

Bud looks at her. “I am?” A veil lifts from his features. He turns to me. “But—how—where will you get the baby?”

“Well, Dad, so—”

New ideas glisten in his eyes. “You know what—you can get him from Jordan! Maybe even, can we get a boy baby? I would like that, a boy baby. What will you name him? Maybe you’d like to name him after my father, Saleh. We can all go to Jordan to get him—he might even look like me. I have a cousin who runs an orphanage—she has babies. She can give us a baby.”

Mom watches him during this outpouring with a familiar sort of patience. It reminds me of the times when my sisters and I were young girls and Bud would lament, “If we lived in Jordan, you girls would marry royalty. Actual princes.” Mom’s face would light up and she’d say, “Hey, great, where are the actual princes? Are they coming for dinner?”

Now she says to Bud, “Gus—you aren’t the one adopting this baby. Diana and Scott are.”

Scott leans forward. “We’re going to sign up with an agency in town. It’ll be a domestic adoption—I mean, assuming someone picks us.”

“Who wouldn’t pick you?” Bud’s chin is tucked. “I would pick you first.”

We’ve just spent weeks constructing a profile, a kind of life-infomercial, including snapshots of house, car, friends, and family, which the agency gives to birth parents, along with information about your careers, religion, and ethnicity. Scott explains this to my parents, and Bud nods and puts his forearm on the table, taps it. “In Jordan, we don’t say we’re white or black. We’re qameh. Which really is the best-looking—you get a little of taste everything. See?” He shows off his tan skin as the waitstaff attempts to exchange one set of bowls with another. Qameh means “wheat.” “I think the baby should be qameh, too. He will be beautiful.”

“It doesn’t really work so much that way, Dad. They pick us.”

“The baby is going to be beautiful,” Mom tells Bud—now fully embracing the facts. “Whoever this baby is. Whatever she looks like.”

The waiters are before us, ladling bowlfuls of steaming brown broth. Plumes of meaty aroma dampen our faces, mesmerizing as incense. Bud leans over his bowl, gazing at a reflection. “Look, there’s an us’meh,” he breathes. A sign. “The baby will look like me!”

Over the summer, we filled out psychological profiles, got fingerprinted, underwent background checks, submitted a handful of personal recommendations, attended adoption classes, group sessions, parenting workshops. We are settled in for what, by all accounts, will be a good long wait, for a young pregnant woman to point to our pictures and say: Them. It’s well into the fall, but the Floridian heat has hung on, a deep, scorching presence with slashes of summer in it. I’m half-writing, my mind in that funny, multilevel pentimento in which thoughts drift over unformed but persistent underthoughts, transparencies of preoccupations, layers superimposed on top of one another. Sometimes I think it would almost be a relief to be pregnant, to let the body take over what’s needed and free the mind for a little while longer. But just as with any pregnancy, I’m learning there’s a vigilance about adoption—nothing’s taken for granted. Every now and then, Scott will stroke my hair, put his lips on top of my head, and say, “How’s it going in there?” I’m at my desk, my husband and dog out in the front yard, playing catch. Here is our dailyness, the regular rhythms that bind our days and help keep us as calm as can be managed. Without listening, I hear the sounds of their play, Yogi’s regular woof at each toss of the ball, Scott’s Go get it! Behind all this, the oceanic currents of traffic whirl down the street, just a few doors beyond our house.

There is just a slight pause, a moment that seems tender, like a sag in time. That’s what I first notice: not the woof, but its absence.

Then a mechanical screech, brakes. Her scream breaking open the wall of my office, a crescendo, higher and louder than any sound she’s ever made. Shock enters my body like icy fog. I stand. I can’t seem to remember how to walk normally. I tell myself, okay.

Scott rushes in the front door as I reach the living room. He says, “She’s hit.” He says, “Don’t go outside.”

“Call 911,” I gasp, forgetting that Yogi isn’t a person.

He wraps his arms around me.

I see, through the open door, our dog’s body, a dark pool, a young man in a suit squatting beside her, hands out as if in supplication. The car askew at the side of the road. I stand in the doorway, trying to take it in, but I can’t because the world is wavy. There are men working on the roof across the street, yet far away, the neighborhood is silent, the air has turned thin and silvery and hot. My knees and throat feel molten. I cling to the door frame and someone screams at the young man, “YOU KILLED MY DOG.” Maybe I didn’t scream it. He doesn’t seem to hear.

Scott says it happened in a weird, logy, impossible moment—something from the back of a dream. He watched as she turned and casually strolled past our front lawn, right into the street. No reason. The car, he says, materialized.

Scott heads back out, tells the driver, “Go. Get out.” The man scuttles to his car, shoulders hunched, and vanishes. We move quickly, before any more cars whirl around the corner. Scott slides her body onto a bit of cardboard and we carry her into the backyard. I place my palm on her side, the silk of her, the ribs as delicate as fish bones; I try to detect the old hum of energy, a steady drum, but she feels flat. Through my shock, I focus on an emerging thought: to bury her myself, to do it with my own hands, in our backyard. We start digging a hole. Then another, and another. Scraping and hacking, here and there and here and there, we discover that our entire yard, and possibly the whole of South Florida, is built on a substratum of coral covered by a few inches of topsoil. We can’t carve a hole any deeper than five or six inches. There’s a high, white, whining sound in my ears. I tear up our yard while our dog’s body grows cold, loosely wrapped in a towel. Finally, Scott brings out bigger tools, chisel, crowbar, and hammer. We don’t stop: The harder it is, the harder we push, as though performing some kind of death-duty or penance. We smash away layers of stone, trading the chisel back and forth. Scott can break away twice as much as I can, but I keep swinging and bashing, which is better somehow than crying or praying, sweat streaming down my back, laboring at this small, hard act.

I spend six days outside visiting with our dog in her shallow grave. Each morning, I talk to her and tell her about the day—trying in some way to keep her beside me. I’m squatting by her grave again, knees aching, when I hear the phone ring inside. It’s our adoption agency. Our social worker’s voice sounds different—shimmering, somehow, almost iridescent. I’ve never heard her like this. I lower myself slowly into my chair as I hear her saying that there’s a pregnant girl—not far away. “Guys—she chose you.”

Am I underwater? The air won’t come into my lungs. Everything is shiny, ungraspable.

“Are you there? Did you hear me?”

“I can—I am. . . .” I look at Scott, who is staring at me, just inches away, but it’s hard to see him clearly, the way tears make everything smeared and waxy.

The social worker faxes the information on record for this woman—her family and medical history: She’s single, without work, and six and a half months healthily pregnant. Beyond these bare details, all is mystery.

I put down the pages of medical tests, go outside, and look at the arc of yellow flowers behind our house, blossoms curling into tiny bubbles. For the past week, I’ve been subsisting on sips of broth, tea, crackers, not a trace of sugar: a grief diet. I climbed out of bed and the clang of sadness sent me straight back. “Someone is coming,” I murmur to the ground. “You knew.” This might be the closest I’ve come to prayer in years. As I rise from my crouch beside her grave, the palm trees lift their fronds, sailing on the midwinter air.

A few weeks after we learn we’ve been “matched,” a social worker calls to ask if we’d like to meet the woman who will give birth to our daughter. Our birth mother, she’s called, as if she will be delivering all of us.

I spend days thinking about gifts. Nothing is right. In despair, I settle on a basket to fill with fruit, cheeses, nuts, and chocolates. We pile up the big woven basket. It occurs to me this will also be a gift to our child. I try to find the sweetest Satsuma oranges, the rosiest pomegranate. I imagine whispering to the baby: Have a taste of this and this—cashews and macadamias and strawberries dipped in chocolate, buttery shortbreads scented with vanilla, triangles of Camembert and winey grapes. On the day of our meeting, I change clothes until my hair’s crackling with static, everything in a floor heap. My nerves are hectic, sprung, my breath feels raw. I glare at my reflection: Does this make me look like a mother? Does this?

The drive isn’t long, but it feels Odyssean. The sky stretches into elastic blueness and white, architectural clouds. The birth mother’s social worker decided we’d meet at an Olive Garden. Bud hooted, “In an olive garden! Jordan is all olive gardens! And lemon trees. It’s an us’meh.” That’s how the us’meh is: dreadful or funny or miraculous, and always unquestionable. We pull into a vast parking lot, a shopping-mall sea. I picture decades of jangled adoptive families gathering here to wonder, meet, pace, and fret. Scott and I have arrived too early and wait in the front window-lined lobby, holding hands tightly. I gaze with beagle eyes at everyone who pushes through the doors. At two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, every woman walking into the Olive Garden is seven months pregnant. The room seems slightly tilted, noises zoom around us, in and out of focus. I pat the hair out of my eyes over and over, my hands damp.

Scott’s eyes lift over my head, to the parking lot beyond, and stay there. Then I turn too.

That’s her. We just know. She has brave, erect shoulders and her eyes are lowered. I feel abashed, suddenly uncertain; twelve years old in the middle-school gym, eyeing my square-dance partner. I watch through the glass as she approaches, an echo bounces between us like déjà vu. We are versions of each other—tall and angular, our faces have the same flat planes. Crazy hair. The glass door flashes, she walks in, bringing a bolt of humid air from outside. Somewhere in the distance, a lawn mower growls awake. Connie, the social worker, introduces us to Lilah and her boyfriend. She signals us from behind Lilah, shakes her head, rolls her eyes, mouths: NOT THE DAD.

I take Lilah’s hand; soft as a wish. This is all so almost-normal. We’re seated in a quiet, open area to the right, at a big round table. The social worker places herself like a plump hen between me and the young woman. “Can you believe the traffic? It’s crazy—they’re like crazy people!” Connie swabs her forehead with a folded napkin. “Every time I come out to this mall I think, that’s it—I’m giving up on shopping. It’s not for me. Sometimes I wonder if I’m cut out to be an American—you know? Like maybe I should go try Portugal or Sweden or someplace. Because really, what’s the point anyway? All of this rush, rush, rush. Where they all rushing to?” She rattles on, her small head turning from me to Lilah to me to Lilah.

Scott tries to lean around her and address Lilah. “We were so glad you wanted to meet. It’s not every day that—”

“Oh, no, it isn’t, is it?” Connie intercepts him. “None of us hardly go to this side of town. And now it’s getting toward the holidays—well, forget it. It’s not going to get better.” She scolds as if he’d asked her to direct traffic.

Lilah holds her menu up like a mantilla, shyly covering her face. When the waiter comes, she and Miguel stare at him, blinking and speechless. Connie orders antipasto for the table. “Please—whatever you like,” Scott urges them. “Take it home if you don’t finish.”

Lilah orders in a nearly transparent voice. Twice, the waiter asks her to repeat herself. Once he leaves, Connie resettles herself, smooths out her skirt, and begins quizzing Lilah: Where did she grow up? What did her parents do? How did she get her hair like that? She fingers a lock of Lilah’s hair as if this were a perfectly normal thing to do. “So you use a curling iron or is it like that naturally?”

“I straight-iron then curl it.” Lilah looks bemused. “Why you asking so much about my hair?”

Connie sniffs, rests her chin on the back of her curled fingers, and turns toward the window. I hold a section of my own hair. “This drove my parents crazy. Dad was always saying . . .”—I switch to a Jordanian accent—“‘Make there less of it!’”

Lilah lets go of a wisp of laughter, then glances at Miguel. “My mother don’t like my nails,” she allows, flaring out her fingers. A tattoo of musical notation spirals up her arm. Connie leans between us. “Diana is a college professor,” she murmurs in a low voice, as if to say professors don’t approve of nail polish.

Lilah sinks into her seat, edging toward Miguel, who hasn’t stopped smirking. Scott nudges my foot under the table. He asks Lilah, “Did you like being in school?”

A look at Miguel. “Sure.”

I try, “Did you have any favorite classes?”

A shrug, her lids like hoods, hiding places; her face is crossed with shadows. “I don’t know. . . .”

“Oh, now I loved social studies.” Connie begins tearing a slice of bread into pieces. “I thought I’d become a teacher. Maybe I missed my calling? Who honestly knows? Okay, but now my fifth-grade homeroom teacher. . . .” She prattles on, buttering each of the little bits. I imagine pushing her under the table.

Lilah’s gaze flits to mine. Her eyes tip and her lips wrinkle slightly, as if she’s thinking about laughing.

So, dessert. Connie picks something for the table that turns out to be a big block of chocolate covered in whipped cream, scrolled with chocolate sauce and tiled with chocolate curls like wood shavings. Lilah and Miguel lean forward, hands on their laps. Connie wedges a fork in one corner and gets stuck. Lilah and Miguel wait for her to work out the one bite, then they go at it, cutting in, closing their eyes as they eat. Scott speaks to a waiter, and when the man returns with our check, he hands Lilah a takeout box containing another brick of chocolate.

I hang back to walk out with her. She lowers her head, slides hands in her pockets. I ask if she’s tired. She says, “Oh, yes, I am. Can’t wait to get my jeans back on.” Her sugar-drunk smile lingers. “The normal ones.”

Connie says, “How about a picture?” We stand in the lot beside the dusty backs of cars. Between Scott and Lilah, I put an arm around each of them. In the shot, I’m grinning, chin tucked, goofy, unbalanced; Scott is more reserved with the weight of the moment, and Lilah gazes into another direction, her smile quiet and private, her eyes sleepy, as if, with a little more sun and a spot of grass, she could curl up for a nap. The hidden one is also there, of course, asleep beneath our arms, full of pasta, cream sauce, and chocolate.

Strange, to know one is predestined, appointed, to fall in love before meeting the beloved; like the presage of bouquet before the wine. It seems that pregnancy isn’t limited to the physical but fills the mind, colors the soul. She is coming, the air whispers; she is somewhere.

Seven weeks later, the highway swims before our eyes, its path blurring and shifting in the predawn. I keep seeing imps in the roadside shrubbery. Scott didn’t get any more sleep than I did, but he drives easily, eyes soft, resembling someone who feels calm and clear-headed. Lilah has scheduled a birth induction today. At 4:00 a.m., Scott and I sat up in bed, looked at each other, the suitcases waiting like ghosts in the gloom, and he said, “Okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s go.”

Halfway into the three-hour drive, my cell phone rings; it’s the birth mother’s social worker, Connie. “Um, don’t leave quite yet.”

I’m holding the phone tightly; calls from Connie have this effect on me. “What do you mean? We left! We left hours ago. We want to be there for the birth.”

There’s a reshuffling sort of pause. Finally, she says, “Well, the thing is, they’re trying to talk her out of it.”

Scott is trying to drive and watch me at the same time. I turn toward my side window. “Who is trying to talk who—”

“It’s a thing these days. . . .” She releases an aggravated breath. “These religious types get a hold of the nurses and start trying to tell them religious things. Evangelicals or something. Are they all over the place down there? They think that kids should only be raised by their birth mothers. No other choices. Nobody else ever.”

The agency brochures didn’t mention this. I hunch into the phone, tucking my elbows on my knees. “Aren’t fundamentalists, like, antiabortion?”

“Who knows? They just want to dictate the whole deal—no abortions and no adoptions, no nothing. They think it’s all just gonna be handy-dandy. Birth mothers don’t have any say in any of it, as far as they’re concerned. It’s the people on the bottom that always get sat on.”

“But Connie?” I hunch closer to the phone. “Do we stop? What are we doing now?”

“No, no, no. You’re already this far. Come on.”

Connie assures me, before hanging up, “Lilah’s been clear from the get-go, this is what she wants. There’s just—you know—some idiots and maniacs trying to freak her out.”

I don’t remember saying goodbye. I sit holding the cell, gazing ahead, sleepiness a dull weight at the back of my head.

We pull into the familiar circular driveway: My in-laws’ house is just half an hour from our birth mother’s hospital. We’ll stay with them as we wait for the baby. Geraniums and loquats and oranges are blooming in their yard. When I first met my father-in-law, Dave walked around the front yard with me, plucking ripe fruit; we inhaled its incense. He and I filled a paper bag with loquats from the tree in the front yard. Six feet six, he was able to reach the fruit on the highest branches. He kept asking questions; it was our first meeting, and Dave was incorrigibly curious: “When do you write?” “What does your last name mean?” “What do you think of Yasir Arafat?” “Did you grow up with pets?” “How do you say ‘loquat’ in Arabic?”

There’s no fruit my own father loved more than the loquat: tiny, tender plums, rare and sweet. For thirty years, Dave had more or less ignored them as they bloomed and burst on his front lawn. When Scott and I took my parents a grocery bag filled to the brim with Dave’s fruit, Bud stared, lifted one with reverence. “This, look. This is eskidinia.”

The first time my father and my father-in-law met, Bud arrived with peaches and wine-dark grapes he’d bought from a man selling them from a truck tire on the side of the road. “Dave, Dave!” Bud nearly jumped out of the car, leaving Mom to collect their bags. “You have to try these guys. You’ll love these guys.”

I hadn’t introduced them yet. Bud held a bunch, but Dave’s hands were filled with tools or potting soil. He leaned forward to see and my father put a grape in his mouth.

Dave took a step back. Then he said, “That is good.” After a pause, he added, “I don’t think I’ve ever been fed by a man before.” For years, the memory returned to him at random moments and he would tell the story again.

Dave still lives at the lakeside home where his children grew up. The kids got married and moved away, Dave divorced, remarried, but stayed at the old place. The yard rambles down to the water, filled with fish, gators, egrets. A few miles away rise the steaming freeways of Orlando, a dreary downtown, but here you can smell tangerine, avocado, acres of citrus fields, the freshness from the lake washing the air. And there is Dave, tall and good-looking, affable as Jimmy Stewart, reaching the highest branches or bent over his workbench, tinkering.

Just a few months ago, he was diagnosed with lung cancer, though he’d never touched a cigarette. Now he’s on oxygen: still genial, but propped in bed. Within a month, the medications have distorted his body—shrinking and then bloating him. He’s no longer hungry; his wife Judie struggles to find something that tempts him. We bring him crackers that are made out of nuts—mostly for the novelty—anything at the market that looks interesting or distracting. One of his lungs is filling with the hard, gnarled substance of tumor: It’s overtaking him, despite radiation and caustic treatments, tearing at him the way a dropped stitch unravels a whole sweater. We talk about guided imagery, tai chi, acupuncture, massage therapy. He is open to all sorts of alternative therapies. As his body breaks down, his mind seems to be growing freer and wilder. People keep calling and dropping by, bringing food, offering services. Dave and Judie curl up in their airy bedroom, watching TV, the rafters of leaves beyond their windows.

Scott and I drop our bags then pace between the rooms, waiting to hear something, scanning the heaps of food Dave’s friends have dropped off—piles of coffee cakes, Danish, boxed doughnuts. The phone rings at 7:00 a.m.: “They started inducing a while ago,” Connie says. “I forgot to mention that. But don’t come to the hospital.”

7:40: “She definitely wants this adoption, there’s no question. She says you can come soon.”

8:14: “That nurse just doesn’t want her to do it. She thinks she can get Lilah a job at Burger King.”

8:50: “Okay, well—she doesn’t want you at the birth.”

Ah, disappointment. I feel a pressure between my ribs, flat and aching, like swallowed tears. “No. Of course. We understand. Can we come right after?”

“Sure. Probably.”

Around 10:30, the four of us assemble for breakfast, the counter stacked with donated bakery boxes, a drift of icing, cheese filling, toasted pecans, apple strudel, apricot glaze. Between the wheeze and thump of the oxygen machine and the jingling phone, we lean on our elbows and chat with Dave and Judie about parenting.

“Don’t let the kid know you’re a socialist,” Dave warns me.

“I promise, I won’t.”

“What are you going to tell her about the war on terror?”

Judie rolls her eyes and balls up her napkin. “Here we go.”

“I’ll probably wait till she’s three or four to get into that.”

He laughs, then says, “No, but really?”

Scott says, “Yeah, she might want to know sooner. Her first words might be threat level orange.”

Dave laughs, then scowls. “I’m glad you think terror is funny.”

Judie says, “For Pete’s sake, David.”

“But just for the sake of argument—like when she asks about President Bush—”

“Which she will,” Scott says. “Obviously.”

“If she asks about Bush—how are you going to describe him?”

I hunch and hold up claws. “He was squinty and he laughed like ‘heh, heh, heh.’”

The phone spins and whirs: We jump. Scott takes it into the next room. Each call has gotten progressively more nerve-wracking, so we’ve taken to trading back and forth. I can hear his voice lift, he runs back to the table. “Gracie’s born! She’s healthy, almost eight pounds!”

“Oh.” It’s a rush like a bucket of water over the head; my shoulder blades seem to unpin, my chest fills. “Oh my God.”

Judie hugs us. Dave drums the table, then stops to catch his breath. “But how long is she?”

Scott nods, phone pressed against his ear. “She’s as long as an otter! But apparently she’s already registered with the socialist party.”

Dave’s smile is brief and sneaky. “Joke now. That’s right. Just wait.”

I’m clutching the table. “Can we go see her?”

Scott snaps the phone shut. “She says in an hour. She’ll call soon.”

We call people, crowing, “Eight pounds! Sea otter!” Mostly we wander around aimlessly from room to room, until Judie asks us to take it outside. We hold hands and stroll through the lakeside neighborhood, wild-eyed sleepwalkers. We check the cell every twenty minutes, but an hour passes, then two. Three. Waiting to see our daughter, to hear news, gradually becomes a form of low-grade torment. I note an incipient ache in my throat like a knot, my breath pushed to the top of my lungs. The swimming gestures of the palm trees, the crenellated surface of the gray lake, the silent, matter-of-fact cars and bikes and dogs and billboards—everything is otherworldly and heartlessly normal, as if this could be just another day. By two o’clock, I beg Scott to call Connie. Vagabonds, we sit on the grass in front of his father’s house. Scott hunches over into the phone. “Hey, it’s us again.” Long pause. “Scott and Diana?” Pause. “Okay. Okay. Okay. Is it—look, is she changing her mind or anything? Yes, but, I see, okay. Is she going to change her mind?” He’s up and doing a boardroom pace, back and forth, over the front lawn. “So—okay. Okay. Okay.” He closes the phone and looks at me: I can practically see him trying to order his thoughts.

“She changed her mind,” I say quietly. “She doesn’t want to do it.”

“No, no,” Scott’s voice is light and crisp. “Not exactly. I don’t know.” He lowers himself to the grass, puts an arm around my shoulders. “I guess she’s just not totally sure she wants us to come to the hospital today. I mean, right this second.”

Thoughts run in pieces through my fingers. Over these days and months, I’ve formed an attachment, a link—invisible and intangible, yet very real—to our growing child who-is-not-yet-our-child. Yet I must, it seems, be prepared to relinquish her, to do it with good grace and equanimity. “We don’t have to bother her—we won’t go by her room. If we could just stop by the nursery and peep at the baby? We don’t even have to hold her—just, you know, to see her.”

Scott takes my hand and there’s something in the gentleness of this gesture that makes the skin prickle up the back of my neck. I know I should feel lucky for the love in my life, yet already I’m hungry for this one as well.

“She doesn’t want us to go into the hospital. She doesn’t want us in the building.”

“Did she say that? The building? Did the social worker tell you that?”

Lilah and Connie have turned into “she” and “the social worker.”

“She made it pretty clear. ‘She wants to take a nap and rest and she doesn’t want to think about anything.’ She says she can’t relax if we’re in the building.”

“Oh.” My head lowers. “God, I’m no good at this.” I feel spinning anxiety that she is about to change her mind. What chutzpah, it occurs to me now, that I’d never even considered this possibility before. The agency had mentioned that birth mothers will change course about a quarter of the time—generally, not surprisingly, right after giving birth. That percentage had wisped past me like smoke signals. Later, a social worker will confide it’s closer to half and half.

Now Scott pulls me in so I can feel the scruff of his grown-out shave on top of my head. “Hang on,” he says. I feel the sigh fill and exit his chest.

We’d thought we’d be at this birth and hold our daughter in her first hours. A dry little swallow, tight throat, my broody self; caught in the usual spaces between expectations and reality. I feel a bump of guilt over how angry I used to get with Gram and her talk of disappointment. Our relationship became more layered and complicated when I entered my teens and began to notice how I’d been unwittingly enlisted in her war with Bud. “Stop telling me those stories,” I’d barked at her once. “All that about horrible men. I don’t hate men—I’m not like you!” She was hurt and amazed. “I don’t hate men, either,” she’d said. “I’m just telling you how it is.”

Now it seems she’d wanted to warn me, to brace me for whatever we couldn’t know, couldn’t even guess was coming. But when you haven’t yet felt big disappointment, such talk can feel like someone is trying to rob you of happiness, darkening the colors. Grace just wanted me to be ready.

Winter Park, an upscale suburb, is a place where life appears to take a little less effort. Pregnant mothers are draped in linens, their babies transported in cloudlike beds, on wheels that scarcely touch the ground. No one cries on these sidewalks. Trying to distract ourselves, we stroll, peer through windows at twinkling pendant lamps and low, creamy couches. While we’re sitting at a café, not touching our food, the phone rings. I seize it, then close my eyes. “Hi.”

“Tonight at the very latest!” Connie’s voice bounces. I imagine a rubber ball going up and down. It keeps moving, just out of range.

That evening, we sit with Dave watching the news. Tomorrow is the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama. Dave shakes his head, smiling. “The things you never thought you’d ever see.” He and his wife sit crooked together on the big recliner. They had planned to finally take a trip to Europe this summer. Judie canceled the tickets a few days ago. At the back of their house is a terrace with vines and a trellis and many windows and doors that the summery night glides through. It carries the sound of field insects, a familiar scent of hot earth and roads. We watch more news then switch to World War II documentaries. But my attention keeps wandering to the night shining in the doors, the silent telephone on the kitchen counter, 8, 9, 10 o’clock and no call. Finally, at 11 o’clock, Scott’s cell rings. He leaves the room. I don’t have the heart to follow. I’ve been trying to coach myself to accept reversal, to look at it all dispassionately, with curiosity, the way that Dave, with his engineer’s mind, tells the pulmonary technicians midprocedure that he finds getting his lung drained “fascinating.” Dave has had long talks with Scott in which he confesses to great curiosity about this whole business of illness and dying. “I keep wondering if I’m going to have some big emotional reaction. But so far, not so much, really. . . .”

Why can’t I do that? Pull back a little? We haven’t once held this baby or looked into her eyes, but I am bereft at the thought of losing her. Scott has reassured me that if Lilah changes her mind we’ll just wait for the next baby. “Remember what Bud says about us’meh? We can’t fight this stuff.” His gaze is steady. “We’ll have the baby we’re meant to have.”

Yes, okay. Then I think, no. This baby. I feel it all the way to the small bones in my fingers.

Scott returns to the room; we look at him. He gestures for me to come back in the bedroom. I sit with him and say again, “She’s changed her mind. It’s okay.”

He shakes his head. “Connie says she still wants to do it. But we can’t see the baby yet. Lilah wants to be left alone tonight.”

He holds the side of my head. I hold his arm. We sit together like that, very still, not talking, just waiting.

Hi Buddies,

Hooray!! Grace (Coquina? Nalani? Anaya? Bimini?) Abujaber-Eason was born today, 7 pounds 11 ounces, without very much hair. Dad asked if she looks like me, to which we say, yes, she looks exactly like both of us.

Just one little detail, we haven’t actually met her yet. . . . It may be another day or so before we can swoop in and actually stare at our little bean. If anyone has any advice on how to achieve deep Zen states of patience, please let us know.

Xxx
D and S

We wake before dawn, peering at each other’s outlines in the shadow. Gray light tilts into the room, filtering through the windows, rising slowly, faintly, a flinty shadow softening to pearl, a nearly invisible blue sky, the transparency of skin. On the kitchen counters, there’s another big breakfast: more well-wishers have come with doughnuts, cakes, fruits, cellophane boxes for my in-laws. So many plates, bags, and boxes stacked, toppling across the counter. We nibble pastry without much appetite, and eventually drift back into the TV room. The screen flashes with images of Obama’s inauguration. Together, we watch the assemblies of new political figures, a procession through the building, emerging to the doors, press, and crowds. Obama’s family is there, the previous administration as well, the smirking, outgoing president: Such a sharp contrast between the last of the good old boys and whatever this new paradigm will be. On his ceremonial walk to the people, Obama moves fluidly. He has a fine, upright head, an open bearing; he scans the sky, the Capitol grounds, collected, waiting. The massive crowd can’t stop cheering—wave after wave crests. The churning crowds, ceaseless shattering applause, the ecstatic sense of a future radiates from the screen. Several times during the broadcast my breath catches; tears slide down my face. The world is so immense at this moment, filled, it seems, with revelations. Even my father-in-law is moved. He shakes his head. “You know? I voted for the other one, but I can’t help feeling excited. Funny. Like, you just really want the guy to do good.”

The phone rings. I can’t hear Connie over the cheering on the TV, so I ask her to wait. Once I’m sitting alone in the front yard, I say, “Okay?”

She says, “Get ready!”

I’m a little disoriented, my emotions radiant and blurred: I don’t know whether my eyes are damp from the TV, from the phone call, from the way the light sharpens and vibrates on the orange tree leaves. “Today?” I stand up. “Really, you’re sure?”

“You’ll take your daughter home.”

First: delays. Lilah doesn’t want to wait in the hospital to complete the adoption paperwork. She’s ready to clear out, so the social worker, the agency’s lawyer, a notary, and two witnesses need to be reassembled at Lilah’s home before anything can happen. “Can we call anyone for you?” I tug on an orange leaf, its fragrance rising out of leftover rain. “Drive someone somewhere? Anything?”

Just dig down and wait, Connie advises, they’re working on it.

Odd reports come in, scattering around us, bits of confetti in the air: One of the birth mother’s friends thinks the baby is too pretty to give up and maybe the friend wants to keep her. The birth mother thinks of a few other men who might be the father, potentially requiring us to formally notify several more people of this birth. The evangelical nurse feels that she needs to have another sit-down with Lilah. The birth mother decides that we should get to the hospital within the next ten minutes to prove our dedication. Connie calls back minutes later: No, wait. The day stretches out. The phone’s ring hardens, a small, cranial hammer. Each previous snarl melts away before the new one. Scott tries to console me, saying at least we’re not doing this in a frozen Eastern-bloc country, pockets filled with baksheesh. Then he pauses, adding, Well, maybe today is a compressed version of the freezing Eastern-bloc-country experience. I send a series of e-mail updates to my sisters and a few friends; they counsel patience and calm distance: “Unfocus your eyes,” someone writes. My friend Lola suggests a nap. This strikes me as almost comical—as if anyone could relax! I stretch out in the guest bedroom with a thought of attempting to meditate and free-fall into sleep.

An hour later, there’s the sound of a voice through the wall. Scott is talking on the cell in the hallway. The door eases open; for a moment, I see just his eyes. The door creaks as he enters, a small, quiet smile on his face, and I feel all the blood in my body begin to levitate; breath leaves me. He says, “Time to meet her.”

The short winter day is already arcing toward its close. On the highway, I see shreds of unexpected color in the sky, the clouds high and massing like their own mysterious country, backlit and ineffable. But the traffic! The drivers race after each other’s taillights on the rainy highway, throwing out spume. At one bend, we watch in the rearview mirrors two swerving cars collide just behind us like bumper cars, then spin off to either side of the road. We just keep going.

Once we finally get there, it takes far too long to find the entrance to the hospital complex, too long to find parking, too long to run to the front door, for someone to direct us, in our adrenalized, headlight-dazed state, to the right lobby. We have to stand still and smile for photos, placed in ID badges looped over our heads, in order to be allowed to enter. Before sending us upstairs, the security guard with a short, gray nimbus of curls stops us to squeeze our arms. He rumbles, “God bless you two.”

The corridor leading to the nursery has closed-circuit monitors and a steel double door that unlocks with a mechanical thump, like something in a medium-security prison. We speak our names into the intercom and the door vibrates, whirs open. Scott takes my hand: It’s like walking onstage, only this stage is hushed and crowded with tiny, even breaths and bassinets propped here and there on wheeled carts. The big room is shadowy, translucent with sleep. A nurse holding a clipboard looks up, smiling broadly—to my relief. She says, “Scott and Diana?”

We stand still, surrounded by this galaxy of dreaming babies. I breathe, “Which one?”

She lifts her chin.

My arm is touching the bassinet. She’s wearing one of their little knit caps, jaunty as an elf, her slate-gray eyes partially open, glimmering in a half-state, watching, just as though she’s been expecting us.

They wheel the bassinet into a private room. When the nurse lifts the drowsy, soft bundle into my arms, a sob breaks from my throat, my eyes flood with tears. The nurse turns away as she leaves the room. Scott’s eyes are dark and wet as he touches her head. I don’t know how to hold a baby. My hands feel big and clumsy; we’re so new to each other. Her diaphanous fingers open and close carefully about my thumb. We feed her a minute bottle, then later, at the nurse’s coaxing, dare to change her diaper, her limbs rubbery, bent into froggy folds. Her paper ears lie flat against her head, intricate as origami. She is the color of my palm, soft as a blush, a song.

After a couple more hours of paperwork, notaries, interviews, and observation, the door to the nursery opens. I am, as first mothers go, unsteady. Wiping off her tiny body in the nursery sink, we’re terrified of spilling water over her head, anxious to get the swaddling right. I need to stop in the ladies’ room before we leave, but I hesitate: Can I just “dash” into the bathroom? Do I take the baby? Do I hold her? Where do I put her? Thankfully, the nursery attendant kindly offers to watch our child. I stare at the inside of the restroom stall door, staggered by how little I know.

It’s a frosty day for Florida, a thin January wind curls through the air. I cover the bassinet with blankets, curve my body around the sleeping inhabitant as I carry her, dismayed to have to take this small being out into the cold. We move quickly, clipping her into the car seat. The nursery attendant and the social worker stand shoulder to shoulder in the hospital entrance like Bogart and Rains. “Congratulations!” They wave at us. “You’ll be great! Don’t be scared—it’s only a baby!”

As promised by friends with kids, she sleeps through the four-hour ride. Scott drives, I sit in the backseat holding her silky hand, marveling. I say at least once, in complete astonishment, “There’s a baby in our car.”

When we get home, we walk in and set her, still dozing in her bassinet, right on top of the dining-room table. We sit at the table beside her, holding hands, breathing lightly, watching her sleep. The air feels curved and sparkly, as though we were seated inside a soap bubble. We hold each other’s gaze a moment. This is our first prayer, this wordless pause. A plea for blessings, addressed to all the unknown places, the darkness between the stars, the machinery of dreams. My synapses feel electrified, racing up and down my spine with raw fear and elation. Our child. Our Gracie.