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The Baby Wait
Cynthia Reese
Nothing will stand in her way…Sarah Tennyson has it all planned. In two months she' ll travel to China to adopt the beautiful baby girl she' s always wanted. Even after a mountain of setbacks, she has the faith that one day she' ll hold her daughter. But that' s before the man she loves starts to doubt….Joe is Mr. Fix-It. The only thing he can' t do is get Sarah her baby. Now, after all the disappointment they' ve faced, he' s begun to wonder if their little family was really meant to be.Sarah can' t give up her dream, but what if waiting for her baby means losing Joe?SUDDENLY A PARENTLife will never be the same.
“You’ve never had any faith in this, have you, Joe? So why’d you go along with it?”
“Because. You. Want. A. Baby. The one damn thing I can’t build for you with my own two hands. If I could, I’d go turn one out on a lathe for you right this very minute. I can’t buy a baby. I can’t borrow it. I can’t make it. Do you know how that makes me feel? To see you crying and to know that I can’t fix it? Me? The guy who goes in behind crappy contractors and cleans up their messes for half the price?”
“We’re fixing it!” Hearing Joe say the things I’d suspected he’d been thinking ripped into me like a chain saw. “If you’ll just believe…”
Dear Reader,
Every year hundreds of babies from China find loving homes in the U.S. Each one of those stories has a happy ending where baby and parent are united at last. One of those happy endings is my own—my husband and I brought our daughter Kate home from China in 2002, when she was just eight months old.
Our wait, though long, was nothing like Sara and Joe’s, and my childhood was nothing like Sara’s. But I kept thinking, what if? What if something had happened? What sort of woman would hang on? Why? What would her husband, hiding his own broken heart, do?
I thoroughly enjoyed creating all the characters who people Joe and Sara’s world. Dublin, Georgia, is real—though I’ve taken small liberties with south Georgia geography and created the town of Campbell—which doesn’t exist. Also, for dramatic reasons I chose a shorter initial Wait; the current wait, which fluctuates, is now about a year. Joe and Sara’s story isn’t my story—it’s theirs…and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
If you’re interested in adopting from China, see links from my Web site, www.cynthiareese.net, which will point you in the right direction. I look forward to hearing from readers!
Cynthia Reese
The Baby Wait
Cynthia Reese
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For Kate,
My sweetie-pie, my miracle baby, the gift
God gave me…I love you!
This book would not exist without the help of
so many people: my editor, Laura Shin, who took
a chance on me, and other Harlequin editors—
Jennifer Green, who listened to me stammer
out this idea, and Ann Leslie Tuttle, who called
it the book of my heart. Thanks, too, go to
my agent, Miriam Kriss; to my critique partners:
Cindy Miles, Steph B., Tawna Fenske, Nelsa, R,
and Babette D.; to my husband, who thinks
I’m welded to my laptop; to Tessa Hill for an
inside look at how adoption agencies work
(any errors are my own); to my sister and
my mom for believing in me; to the 2005 BIAYers
and to the entire staff at Bellevue Avenue Post
Office—thanks for getting my work to my editors
on time, every time!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cynthia Reese lives with her husband and their daughter in south Georgia, along with two dogs, three cats and however many strays show up for morning muster on their back deck. She has been scribbling since she was knee-high to a grasshopper and reading even before that. A former journalist, teacher and English professor, she also enjoys cooking, traveling and photography when she gets the chance. The Baby Wait is her first book.
An invisible red thread connects those who are
destined to meet, regardless of time, place or
circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle,
but will never break.
—An ancient Chinese belief
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER ONE
I STOOD in an airport, not an English printed word or a Caucasian face in sight. Old Chinese women swarmed me like an angry colony of bees. They shook their fingers in my face. They looked me up and down, jerking their heads in disdain. I could not understand a single word they said. Finally, one tiny, shrunken lady shoved her face close to mine and in broken English shouted, “Missy, you forgot baby! No lucky baby for you!”
Another Chinese lady whipped a black telephone that looked straight out of the 1940s from behind her back. The force of the phone’s rings made the handset vibrate.
And, then, consciousness seeped in. The phone’s ringing was a digital buzz, not the t-ling t-ling of the old heavy clunkers. My phone. My cordless. In my bedroom, not a Chinese airport.
It had to be Ma, probably drunk again, maybe even in jail. I groped for the phone, dropped it and retrieved it from the jumbled-up covers.
“Hello?” I squinted at the clock.
“Sara? It’s Joe.”
I sat up, pushed a hand through my mussed hair. “What is it? And what happened to the alarm? It’s eight o’clock.”
“I turned it off. You said you weren’t going in this morning. I thought you could do with the extra sleep.”
He sounded a little wounded at my lack of appreciation. “Um, thanks. Did you need something? Forget your lunch? I’ll take it by.”
“No, I just wanted to let you know I could meet you at the doctor’s office. Things here are under control, and the trusses are going up faster—”
“Joe, it’s just a routine Pap smear, okay?” I interrupted him. “Relax.”
Joe sucked in a breath, apparently not believing what I said. “You always used to get so down when you had to go to the ob-gyn…what with the pregnant women. And I’m worried, anyway. Damn, Sara. With all you’ve been through, nothing’s routine about a visit to your ob-gyn.”
“Joe.” I thought for a moment about how to proceed. My stomach had already tensed from being reminded about today’s appointment, but I ordered my nerves to calm down. “I’m a big girl, and I want to go by myself. We talked about how important it is for me to do this on my own.”
“I know. I know.” He sighed. “Well, call me when you get through. I may be on the roof of this house, trying to get trusses in, so if I don’t hear the phone ring, just leave me a message, okay?”
“Sure. The minute I get out. I’ll see you tonight. And, hey…thanks for offering. I love you.”
“Back atcha,” he said before hanging up.
I replaced the handset and swung my feet to the floor, my heart still racing from the unpleasant task ahead and the dream. Stress. Good old-fashioned stress. I’d had this nightmare before, and I knew stress had woven it.
Of course I wouldn’t forget my baby in some airport. I’d waited too long for her. I’d stumbled through a dozen years of dashed hopes and dreams before discovering China, before knowing Meredith Alicia whatever-her-Chinese-name-was Tennyson could be my daughter. I’d know her second middle name when they finally told me the name they’d given her. When I could finally see my daughter’s face.
As I fumbled for my bedroom slippers, my toe stubbed a stack of books: Toddler Adoption, Lost Daughters of China, A Passage to the Heart, What to Expect the Toddler Years. The ache in my heart replaced the ache in my toe. What was Meredith doing today? Was she getting enough to eat? Did she have adequate clothes? And, the famous question, what on earth did she look like?
I rubbed my eyes and stacked the books on my nightstand. Reconsidering, I shoved them on the shelf. No point in hearing Joe grouse about me staying up all night reading again.
In the shower, after scrubbing all the nooks and crannies with an extra dose of elbow grease, I let my finger run over the thin scar on my belly. You had to look hard this many years afterward to see the surgeon’s neat handiwork, a souvenir from when I’d lost my ovary. At the time, he had saved my life but ripped out my heart.
Joe had left a note on the fridge and azalea blooms stuck in a mason jar on the kitchen island. I smiled and went to read the note. He’d scrawled, “Good luck! If you change your mind, I’ll go with you,” and signed it with his customary X’s and O’s. On the end he’d written, “PS, I put Cocoa out. She was on the couch again.”
The missive made me stick out my tongue at the paper it was scrawled on. Sure enough, Cocoa, our chocolate Lab, had heard me moving around in the kitchen. She gazed through the French door with soulful brown eyes.
I let in our wayward girl, scolding her. “You know he doesn’t like you on the couch.”
She answered with a couple of cheerful thumps of her tail.
“Oh, all right, I forgive you.” The couch didn’t seem like such a biggie to me. After all, it was leather, and Cocoa had been treated for fleas and ticks. But Joe was adamant about that rule. I shook my finger at her, trying to recapture some of my will to discipline. “But be smart. Make sure you get off the couch before he gets out of the shower.”
Cocoa had a way of easing the tension in me. I headed for the fridge again, this time to get started on breakfast. When I caught sight of my Wait Calendar, it caused a badly needed smile and restored some of my usual optimism. I grabbed a marker and X’d out another day. Maybe by Father’s Day we’d get The Call from our adoption agency telling us the CCAA had matched us with our baby girl.
CCAA. DTC. APC. That’s the alphabet soup I lived in these days. Joe and I had sent paperwork off to our adoption agency in late November. Our agency had forwarded the thick dossier to the CCAA, the Chinese government agency in charge of foreign adoptions, in the middle of December. That meant our Dossier to China date—our DTC date—was December. It was April now, four months into the wait. With wait times hovering at around six months, we could have our baby home in time for the Fourth of July.
With breakfast in me, I drove through Dublin’s light morning traffic to Dr. Kaska’s office. I said a little prayer for luck as I parked, switched off the engine and tried to settle my nerves.
Six years. You’re cured. They’ve looked. You’re cured. It had been my mantra all morning long, all week long, actually. I hated to admit it, but I was shaking in my boots. Gynecologists had found few good things to say about my body over the years.
You could have had Joe or Maggie come with you. You turned down your husband and your best friend, so this is self-inflicted agony.
My scolding had its intended effect, moving me out of the car and across to the front door. Here, I took a deep breath again.
The only vacant seat was between two abundantly pregnant women who had struck up a conversation about babies. They moved their magazines and purses, and I took the seat. I listened to their debate over natural versus epidural, breastfeeding over formula, cloth over disposable.
Amazing, I thought. A year ago, I would have run crying to the restroom.
