Jon
Gail sat on her hands on the seat next to Jon, her body still. Her long dark hair fell in a braid down her back. She sometimes reminded Jon of a bird because she was small and thin, and her eyes were large. And because she usually never stopped arranging things, like a wren, weaving twigs into a nest. She only stopped moving when she was anxious.
“What if she doesn’t like us?” Gail said.
“Relax,” Jon said, immediately regretting the word. It was like asking Gail to stop breathing. “She chose us.”
Paige, from the agency, picked the diner—halfway between their home and Carli’s. It was the real deal, Edward Hopper except all the stools were taken, and the booths along the windows were filled with noisy families. It smelled of pancake batter and burnt bacon. They sat in a window booth next to the street. Carli would recognize them from the adoption book, and they’d recognize her from her social media posts. The blue streak in her hair would stand out.
“She chose our book.” Gail chewed her lip. “It’s not the same thing as choosing us.”
The book. Every couple who tries to adopt must create a book, an advertisement, a brochure about their lives. The book contained pictures of them and their extended family and their house and their town and their essay that told a birth mother that the only thing they wanted in the whole world was a baby. It promised that if she chose their book, her baby would become their child, and they’d raise it with love and care, and they wouldn’t let anyone, or anything, hurt it. Gail revised the book more times than Jon cared to remember. She swapped out the pictures, changed the wording; she even agonized over the font and the color of the cover. She asked him over and over again what he thought about the assortment of pictures, until he couldn’t remember how he had answered the last time. He was so damn sick of that book.
Jon put his hand on Gail’s knee and forced a smile. “We’ll make her like us.”
Gail checked her watch. “She’s ten minutes late.”
“She’s eighteen years old. Ten minutes late is early.”
“I brought some information about the school district. You think I should show her?”
“No. I really don’t think that you should.”
They fell silent as they waited, and Jon tried to listen to the conversations of the people at the surrounding tables and the sizzle of the grease from the grill, but the silence at his own table distracted him. Gail had grown quiet since she got the call from Paige, as she waited for something to go wrong. The silence reminded him of that trailer outside of St. Louis where his mother would retreat into the back bedroom for days at a time. The only sounds had been the pit bull barking next door, the whoosh of the stovetop when he lit it to cook himself canned ravioli, and the voices on the television that he sometimes responded to. He was eight when his mom’s “nervous spells” grew longer and longer, until they melted into an unbroken silence. He finally went to live with his aunt Carol and uncle Mark, and although Aunt Carol talked all the time, and although they had raised him since he was eight, it wasn’t their blood that thudded in his ears when Gail went quiet. Gail hadn’t put anything about his mom into the book, which Jon found vaguely sneaky.
Out the window Jon saw an old brown pickup truck pull up at the curb. A large, middle-aged woman sat behind the wheel, her jaw flapping, her hands slashing the air. Paige had said that Carli’s mom would probably drive her. The person in the passenger seat remained still, and although Jon couldn’t see clearly through the glare on the windshield, it looked like a teenage girl. The girl finally got out of the truck and came around the front. Dirty-blond hair with a blue streak fell across her face.
“She’s here.”
The bell above the door jangled when she came through, eyes darting. Jon could feel Gail stiffen next to him. He waved, and the girl walked their way. A bulky sweatshirt hung well past her waist, making it hard to see if she was showing. Scrawny legs sprouted from her Converse high-tops. The bridge of her upturned nose was littered with freckles. Too much mascara made the rest of her face seem pasty.
She slid into the booth. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” Jon said. “I’m Jon, and this is Gail.”
Her pale blue eyes flicked from one of them to the other. “Carli.”
“It’s so nice to meet you, Carli,” Gail gushed. “I can’t tell you how much we’ve been looking forward to this.”
The way Carli tugged the sleeves of her sweatshirt over her fists told Jon that she had not been looking forward to this at all, that she’d rather be anywhere else, even in the cab of the pickup truck listening to her mother rant. The waitress appeared before anyone could say anything else.
“Can I get you somethin’, hon?”
“Coffee. Black.”
“Decaf?” Gail suggested quietly.
Carli’s eyes settled on Gail, really taking her in. “No. Coffee. Black.”
The waitress left, and Gail gathered herself.
“We were so excited to get the call. We’re so grateful that you chose us.”
Carli picked up the saltshaker, studied it, said nothing.
Gail faltered for a moment but pressed on. “Did the father help you choose?”
A barely audible snort and a twitch at the corner of her mouth. She shook her head.
“This must be really fucking hard,” Jon said.
Carli shook a tiny pile of salt into her palm. Her eyes cut to the counter, out the window toward the truck, back to the salt in her hand. She nodded. “Yeah. It is.”
Gail leaned into the table. “You must have so many questions for us.”
Nothing.
Gail looked down at her hands and then continued more gently. “It’s hard to put everything into that book. I mean, we tried to give you a feel for who we are and where the baby will grow up, but you can’t put your whole life, your whole world into so few pages.” Gail looked to Jon for confirmation and then at Carli. “This is such a big decision. Is there anything you want to ask us?”
Carli dumped the salt from her hand onto the table. She glanced briefly at Gail and then her eyes settled on Jon. “My mom told me to ask about the medical stuff.”
Jon stiffened. Gail hadn’t mentioned any medical problems. Surely Paige would have told her if there were problems. “The medical stuff?”
“The tests. The doctor visits. All that.”
“Yeah?”
“You’re gonna pay for that, right?”
Jon gripped the steering wheel on the way home from the diner and tried to make sense of what had just happened. What series of events had delivered them to Aurora to charm a pregnant teenager into giving them her baby? He wanted to become a father, but even when they were trying to conceive a baby themselves, he became terrified every time it seemed that they might succeed. He was afraid that he’d fail, like his mother did, and if he failed a child who was entrusted to him by someone else—well, that seemed a sin of a different sort.
“How do you think it went?” Gail asked.
Gail’s knee was bouncing, and she kept tugging at her seat belt, so Jon chose his words carefully. “It’s hard to say. I think it went as well as it could have. Given the circumstances.”
“Do you think I came on too strong?”
“No, I—”
“She was so hard to read. I couldn’t get her talking. And she only asked that one question.”
“I think that—”
“I expected her to ask more questions. I mean she’s deciding whether to let us adopt her baby.” Gail was quiet for a long moment. “I’d have more questions.”
Jon worked to contain a smile. He tried to imagine the list of questions that Gail would bring to that meeting. Of course, he struggled to imagine the circumstances that would lead Gail to give up a baby.
“If only I could have gotten her to talk.”
“We did great, Gail.”
“I should have shown her the information about the school district.”
“Gail. Some things you just can’t control.”
Gail changed into her running clothes and was gone for more than an hour. Paige said she would call as soon as she heard from Carli. She said that she’d call by the end of the day no matter what. When Gail returned, Jon could tell by her closed-up expression that Paige still hadn’t called. Gail kept her phone on the table during dinner. She picked at her salad. She pushed her pasta around the plate. She looked at the phone more than she looked at Jon.
“What time’s hockey?” she asked as they cleared the table.
Jon had played on the Dumpsters, a beer-league team, since shortly after he moved to Elmhurst. He needed the ice tonight—the sweat, the exertion, the meaningless locker-room chatter—but Gail’s stillness told him that he needed to stay home even more.
“Seven thirty. But I think I’ll skip the game.”
“Why?”
“With everything. You know. With Paige calling.”
“Go.”
“But—”
“I’d rather you go. Otherwise you’ll stare at me, while I stare at the phone. Eventually you’ll say something stupid, I’ll yell at you, and then we’ll fight.”
She was right, of course. Still, it didn’t seem like the right time to leave. “But—”
“Go.”
Hockey usually calmed Jon. The hiss of steel on ice, the slap of the sticks, and the heavy thud of the puck against the boards usually kept him in the moment. But that night he fell climbing over the boards. He hooked a guy in the neutral zone—a senseless penalty with a minute left—and he sat in the box while the other team scored the game winner.
Jon checked his phone in the locker room, but there were no messages. He almost called Gail from the car but thought better of it. When he entered the mudroom, he stood still for a moment, listening, but all he heard was silence. When he went upstairs, he found Gail on her edge of the bed, bent over her brown leather notebook, making lists. She was pretty in a way that used to embarrass Jon. The dim glow of the dresser lamp painted her olive complexion even darker. Her eyelashes were impossibly long, and the shape of her mouth still sometimes caused him to miss a breath. A rubber band gathered her long brown hair into a ponytail. One of Jon’s old T-shirts draped over her tiny body down to her thighs. Jon knew the answer to the question, but he couldn’t not ask it.
“Did she call?”
“Not yet,” Gail said. She kept her eyes on the page.
Jon stripped to his boxers and climbed in on his side. They used to wake tangled in the middle, but now they kept to the margins of their California king. The more obsessed Gail became, the farther away from each other they seemed to settle. It happened slowly, a bit at a time, like that frog on the Bunsen burner.
He wondered what list Gail could possibly be working. No list could help control what would happen when Paige called, but Gail gripped her pen tightly and scribbled. Jon hated the notebook. Gail always grew quiet when she made her lists, and Jon hated the silence. It reminded him too much of his mom. Jon and Gail still went back to St. Louis twice a year—at Christmas and Father’s Day. It was always good to see Aunt Carol and Uncle Mark, and Jon could tell that Aunt Carol hungered for those weekends. But when he escaped back across the Mississippi to Illinois, his breath always came easier.
During their last visit, Gail sat in the family room with Uncle Mark, working a jigsaw puzzle and watching CNN, while Jon dried the dishes. Aunt Carol had let her hair go gray, and her face was starting to sag. She pushed up the sleeves of her cardigan, but one sleeve kept sliding down into the dishwater.
“Any news?” Aunt Carol asked. “About the adoption?”
“Nothing solid, yet. We sent out one book, but the birth mother chose someone else.”
They worked in companionable silence, the splash of the water the only sound.
“I’m looking forward to it,” she said. She looked up at Jon and smiled. “It’ll be nice to be a grandma.”
Aunt Carol would make the perfect grandma, spoiling her grandchild just enough, and reveling in every moment of it. But as Jon dried the pot in his hands, her words forced a question to his lips that he’d been struggling to swallow.
“What was she like?” Jon asked.
Aunt Carol stopped scrubbing the lasagna pan for a long moment. In the family room, Uncle Mark laughed at something Gail said. Finally, Aunt Carol’s hand started moving again. “Who’s that?” she said, as if he could be asking about anyone else.
“My mom.”
Aunt Carol rinsed the pan and found a corner that needed more work. She grabbed the Brillo pad from the counter and locked her eyes on her hands as she scraped the charred cheese. Jon had broken their oldest unspoken rule, and Aunt Carol’s whole body had gone rigid. It had been almost two decades since they last spoke of his mother. “I think you know exactly what she’s like.”
Jon put the towel over his shoulder, folded his arms across his chest. His mom still lived just a few miles away from Aunt Carol’s house, in the very same trailer he’d left when he was eight. Sometimes, after a trip to the grocery store to pick up something for his aunt, Jon drove by. The shades were always drawn, the parking pad empty. Weeds hugged the side of the trailer instead of bushes. He didn’t ever get out of his car. He didn’t knock on that door. The last few years, he mailed a check to that address every month, and every month the check was cashed. He sometimes logged on to the Citibank website and stared at his mom’s scrawled signature.
“I mean before.” Jon had been avoiding the question since they started trying. But when they decided to adopt someone else’s child, it had gained urgency. “Was she always like that, or did it start after I was born?”
Aunt Carol rinsed the pan again. Both sleeves had fallen into the water, but she didn’t push them back up to her elbows. She inspected the pan, rinsed it again, and then handed it to Jon. When she finally looked at him, her face was knotted up like a fist. Her voice when she spoke, though, was clear and certain.
“Some questions are like scabs, Jon. Best if you don’t pick at them.”
She dried her hands and then walked out of the kitchen, down the hallway, toward her bedroom. Probably to change her sweater. Jon dried the pan and tried to figure out what Aunt Carol wasn’t telling him. Scabs? What the hell did that mean?
Jon watched Gail set the notebook and pen on the bedside table next to her phone. She turned out the lamp and curled onto her side, facing away from him. This was when Jon usually ventured across the middle of their bed and kissed her goodnight, but he knew that they weren’t going to sleep yet. They were just waiting in the dark now.
Jon’s fingers ached for his guitar. Music would help him wait. The strings under his fingers would help him make out the shape of the future and feel the best from the past. He remembered the day his uncle had taught him the G and D chords and patiently walked him through his first progression. Uncle Mark told Jon how hard it was when he was learning to play. He talked about practice and determination and muscle memory and calluses. He talked about strings and fingers and sounds. He helped Jon adjust his fingers on the fretboard again and again. It took Jon more than an hour to manage that first progression, and his nine-year-old fingers burned against the wire. But finally, he shifted from G to D in a way that felt just a little bit like a song, or at least part of one, and he looked up at Uncle Mark, who smiled through his beard and nodded. Jon did it again. And again. He could still feel the warm, heavy pressure of Uncle Mark’s hand on his shoulder as he bit his lip and struggled against the strings. That was the day that he started thinking of Uncle Mark as more than just an uncle. And sometime between that day and the day he met Gail, he had decided that someday he would become a father.
But Jon also remembered that morning Gail came out of the bathroom wearing a coy smile and carrying a plastic contraption with two red lines. He squeezed her tight and giggled into her ear, but even as he released her from that embrace, before they kissed and started to plan, anxiety tugged at him—the self-doubt, the suspicion that he was trying to do something that he had no right to try. But before the fear devoured him, Gail had bled, and then again, and again. He’d spent the last four years learning to hold both the hope and the fear at once. Lately, the fear seemed to have teeth.
It always started with the mundane. What if he dropped the baby? What if he fed it the wrong thing? What if it choked or spiked a fever, or he laid it down for a nap the wrong way and it never woke up? It helped to think that Gail would be there. Gail had read all the books and the websites; she had made lists. But inevitably he’d be left alone with the baby. And what about when it started to crawl? What if he forgot to close the gate at the top of the stairs? And, of course, it would learn to walk. What if it escaped and got hit by a car on Myrtle Avenue or just wandered off and got lost? And if all that wasn’t terrifying enough, what if something happened to Gail? What if she got hit by a car or got cancer or fell down the stairs, and it wasn’t just a few hours while she was at the gym or the store? What if he was expected to raise a child on his own, like his mother tried to do after his father left? What if the same dike that broke in her and flooded her with helplessness gave way in him? What if the terror that swamped him now was already eroding that dike, softening it, destabilizing the silt?
Gail squirmed, kicked off the comforter, and then settled to a tense stillness. Jon blinked at the ceiling. It was almost eleven when Gail’s phone finally rang. At first, Gail didn’t move, but then she answered it, just before the fourth ring.
“Hi, Paige,” she said, her voice pregnant with expectation.
Paige talked, and Gail listened. Jon lay still, terribly aware that he was about to plunge toward fatherhood, or that Gail was about to dive into another tailspin. His body felt cold all over, because he wasn’t quite sure which to hope for.