Jon

Jon sat in his darkened office, Cheap Trick leaking from the speakers, his hands awash with the blue light from the monitor. He kept rereading two sentences. First: I wish to and understand that upon signing this consent I do irrevocably and permanently give up all custody and other parental rights I have to such child if such child is adopted by ________________ and ________________. But the same web page showed him the birth-parent rights and responsibilities and all the way at the bottom of the list, number thirteen: You have the right to decline to sign a Consent, Specified Consent, or Unborn Consent even if you have received financial support from the prospective parents. He learned that Carli was not allowed to sign the final consent until seventy-two hours after the birth. He learned what Gail had already told him: his baby wasn’t yet his baby.

He searched for and found the adoptive parents’ rights and responsibilities. He found that he had the right to be informed of the rights of birth parents, and he had the right to be treated with dignity and respect. He searched for the right to appeal, but he found nothing—just dignity and respect, whatever the hell that meant.

Jon vaguely remembered Paige telling them all this a year and a half ago, at the beginning of the process, and he probably signed something all those months ago that said that he clearly understood the risks. But adoption paperwork was like mortgage agreements—you had to sign it all or else you wouldn’t get the house or the baby, and if you tried to read it, you wouldn’t understand it anyway.

Google helped him remember what he’d forgotten. It helped him learn what he’d never taken the time to know. Reclamation, they called it. He found a story about a sixteen-year-old birth mother in Iowa who reclaimed her baby and then left it with the seventeen-year-old father while she went to work. The baby died hours later. He found a lot of adoption sites. They all had logos made of hearts or abstract drawings of parents’ arms wrapping babies. They assured birth mothers that they had the right to reclaim their baby, and they reassured adoptive parents that it seldom happens. Just 4 to 6 percent of domestic adoptions end with a reclamation. If he had read those numbers at the beginning of the process, they would have seemed puny, irrelevant. Now, they loomed enormous and reckless. He changed his search terms, followed every link, even forced himself to read through the Illinois Adoption Statute, but he could find nothing about a right to appeal.

Finally, he turned off the music and the monitor, pushed himself out of the chair, and walked into the hallway. He saw a finger of light underneath the bedroom door. He opened it, expecting to find Gail buried under the covers, but instead she was sitting up in bed, bent over her notebook. He stood in the doorway, exhaustion clawing at him. For a long moment, she scribbled in the book as if he weren’t there. He heard the tip of the pen scratching the paper. He watched her clenched fist drift across the page. For the love of God, what was she doing? What list could possibly help with this?

“She’s going to sign it,” Gail finally said, her voice in the wrong key. When she looked up, her eyes looked flat, like the heads of screws. “She has to.”