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Joe had not filled me in on this little detail. I gripped my forehead with my free hand and pressed my thumb and middle finger to my temples. “What happened this time, Cherie?”
“That new shift manager made a pass at me. Not even Saint Sara would put up with sexual harassment, would you?”
I gritted my teeth in hopes steam—or worse, foul invectives—wouldn’t spew forth.
I was no saint. That was for sure. I wasn’t even a candidate. But Cherie liked to rattle my cage by telling me I was a Miss Goody Two-shoes. She somehow thought women who actually put on panty hose for work and drove a Volkswagen felt they were superior to the rest of the working-class world.
“No, but…did you talk to your restaurant manager?”
I knew the answer before she gave me a surly, “No. What good would that do? Besides, I told Dave I didn’t think it was a good idea for us to keep seeing each other.”
“Dave?” That would be the shift manager. Apparently, Cherie had left some large, highly incriminating pieces out of her version of the story. “Were you…seeing him before he made this pass at you?”
“Not exactly. I mean, yeah, we’d slept with each other a couple of times, but he’s got no call to—”
The rest of Cherie’s words escaped me. I worried about her enduring single motherhood, STDs, HIV. Cherie floated through life aimlessly, with the mating habits—and standards—of a guppy.
“Are you looking for something else, Cherie? Have you thought about going back to school, getting your GED?”
How was it possible my serious, responsible, dependable Joe had actually come out of the same womb as Cherie? I tempered my frustration with her by reminding myself of her very real losses in life.
She’d been almost nine when she and Joe had lost their parents in a freak auto accident. She’d lived with their aunt and uncle while Joe was in college. Once we got married, she’d begged Joe to let her stay with us—and I’d agreed. In all the years since, she’d never bothered with the tedious task of growing up, at least not emotionally.
“I’m doing the best I can!” she hollered. “Just because I’m not a nine-to-fiver like you, you look down your nose at me. Forget it! Just forget it! I’ll figure something out! You never listen, Sara! You never take my side of anything!” With that, she banged down the phone, leaving me listening to silence and then the beep beep beep of the disconnect.
I left for work thinking I’d made things worse, not better. When would I learn? Damn, what defect possessed me to insert myself into their no-man’s-land?
In our front office, Lucy, the board secretary, greeted me with a panicked look on her face and Mr. Eeyore by her side. “Uh, Sara. Mrs….South is holding on line one for you.”
I stifled another groan. Mrs. South was Lucy’s code name for my mother. I chickened out.
“Uh, take a message and tell her I’m returning calls in just a few minutes,” I suggested brightly.
Lucy crooked her eyes at dour Daryl, who stood hunched over with a thick sheaf of papers in his hand. The one thing sure to make Daryl glower even more were personal calls during business hours.
“Uh, no, don’t think that will work,” she said just as brightly. “You remember the last time you tried that, she parked herself on my couch until you had a free moment.”
I folded. It was unconscionable to let Lucy take the brunt of my mother on a tirade. “Okay, okay, I’m going.”
“Sara, you think you can wrap that up pretty quickly? Don’t mean to take all of your morning, but you and I need to go over strategies to up attendance during the upcoming CRCT. Not that any of it will do any good,” Daryl said in his best Eeyore impersonation, referring to the standardized test the elementary schools gave.
“Right, right. Be with you in a sec,” I told him.
I wasn’t, of course. It took me fifteen minutes to get Ma settled down, and another five to part on good terms. My workday was toast in a blender from then on.
I met Maggie in the deserted office an hour after we could have gone home had we not been swamped with work.
“Well.” Maggie brimmed over with mock cheer. “This day was a total waste of makeup.”
“Amen, sister. Daryl’s war-room meeting about CRCT attendance chewed up my entire morning.”
“Heard anything about the referrals?” Maggie asked.
I shook my head. “Haven’t had a chance to check out the APC board. Maybe there’s good news. I could use it after today.”
I felt for the poor couples down to the last nail-biting days, only to have The Wait’s chasm yawn wide once again. Mostly, though, I’d absorbed myself with my own anxious thoughts.
Chinese adoptions were subject to the winds of bureaucratic fortune. Any number of things could cause a slowdown. It had happened before. Actually, we current adoptive parents could consider ourselves lucky. The Wait had crept up to more than a year just four or five years before, not including the paperwork. Now all we had to do was wade through The Paperchase—four to six months—and endure another six months of the official Wait.
But the CCAA’s dormant state had awakened all sorts of bad memories on the APC about how once before Chinese adoptions had been temporarily suspended. This was the true fear of all the people in the midst of the process: that the Chinese government would suddenly take offense to some event that took place either in our government or our media and turn off the spigot of adoptions.
The delay was because of the increasing strife with Taiwan, one school of thought went. Another opined it was the worrisome increase in numbers of children adopted by foreigners. Still another said, no, none of these. The Chinese government was actively rethinking their one-child policy, since demographics were dooming the country to a population heavily tilted toward males.
In truth, none of us knew anything beyond the fact that we wanted our babies. Or an explanation. Or preferably both. Give us our babies, please, then tack on the whys and the wherefores.
I’d tried to downplay all this to Joe. The last thing I wanted to do was give him any reason to doubt the outcome of the adoption.
WHAT I SAW when I logged onto the APC at home that afternoon left me reeling. Instead of finding the much-coveted referrals, I found the postings of mothers wearing sackcloth and ashes.
It was a reorganization of the CCAA, unexpected, unplanned, unheralded. A moratorium had been placed on all foreign adoptions until the new head of the CCAA could get up to speed. Sorry for all the trouble, we’ll get back on it as soon as possible, nothing to worry about.
Oh, but we did worry. Our worst fear had been realized. It didn’t help that all the major adoption agencies had been caught flat-footed by the news. This was a middle of the night head-rolling no one could have predicted. No one dared speculate when referrals would start flowing again.
It took all the guts I had to tell Joe. He stood on the back porch and just sagged with the news. The only other time I’d seen him go boneless was when I’d told him I had ovarian cancer.
He looked down at the work boots he hadn’t had a chance to pull off. “Do they…do they know how long?”
I blinked back tears and shook my head. “No. I called the agency, and they don’t really know any more than we do. They’re trying their best to be optimistic, but I could tell they were at their wit’s end. I just don’t know, Joe.”
“Anything like this ever happened before?”
“Yeah, a couple of times. One big time before, but usually it’s just a slowdown, you know, something that just gradually creeps up. This, this is kind of odd for the CCAA to do. And it came out of nowhere. No political incidents, no bad-mouthing in the media about Chinese adoptions…nothing.”
“Sounds like some head-honcho over there got in trouble with his higher-ups,” Joe mused.
“Maybe that’s all it is.”
Joe toed the rough boards of the porch. “I’m sorry, Sara. I wish…I wish…”
We ate our supper in silence, my throat closing up with so much grief I could barely swallow. Joe pushed his food around on his plate. He looked as though he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words.
I needed space, time, to process it, to think. The supper dishes in the dishwasher, I climbed the stairs to the nursery.
I sat on the floor, the bifold closet doors wide open. Around me I spread the contents of a box I’d been collecting: vacuum packing bags, a soft yellow baby blanket, tiny packable baby toys and the one and only outfit I’d been able to bring myself to buy for Meredith.
In the solitude, I let tears course unashamedly down my face.
I hated this feeling, this awful, sick envy that gripped me whenever the door on the possibility of children seemed to slam shut. The feeling slept within me like an alien creature. Awakened, it devoured me at its leisure until I could finally loose myself from its grasp.
Joe and I had carefully avoided unprotected sex after we got married. After all, we were both twenty, I was still in college, and Joe had dropped out to work construction on his uncle’s crew. Too young to have a baby on the way.
Plus, Cherie’s presence threw a major monkey wrench in any plans we might have had. I didn’t want to upset the delicate balancing act I’d accomplished; bringing another child into the picture might well have done that.
At twenty-four, though, I was ready to start a family, and Joe had no objections, either. I went off the Pill, bought some frilly little baby clothes and eyed maternity wear.
Two years later, the baby clothes gathered dust in a closet. I hadn’t really worried until I heard a midday radio talk show about infertility. When the expert defined infertility as a year of unprotected sex with no resulting pregnancies, my heart seized in my chest.
I was infertile.
In that moment, I went from being a whole woman to damaged goods. Crazy, I know, but nonetheless true.
That’s when the two of us jumped on the infertility treadmill. I’d go into fertility specialists’ offices and gaze at the wall of baby photos with the awe of someone on sacred ground. These experts would fix me. I knew it.
Only, they hadn’t fixed me.
In their search for an explanation as to why I couldn’t conceive, they’d found a tumor growing in my left ovary—a freak misfiring of genetic chromosomes. Just the way life happened, the way the ball bounced, the way the cookie—and my hopes—crumbled.
Joe told me I was lucky. I was lucky. I was alive. I was a cancer survivor. But I was still damaged goods. Barren. The word is empty and meaningless to anybody who hasn’t ached for a baby.
Being barren made me cry at Mother’s Day services at church.
Being barren made Easter and Christmas and Thanksgiving and even Halloween torture.
Being barren made graduations unbearable, knowing I might never see my baby toss a cap in the air.
Being barren made baby showers unending agony. Picking out the tiny layettes or rattles was only half the battle. No, actually standing in the glow of an expectant, hopeful mom-to-be was far worse, because then I had to endure everyone’s pity. I’d smile and smile and smile at the women who would bend down and whisper, “Are you all right? This must be so tough on you.”
Back home from my surgery, I’d looked in the mirror and seen a thirty-year-old woman. I gathered up my fertility drugs, tossed out the so-called experts’ business cards and gave the dusty baby clothes to Goodwill.
The day after that, Joe brought home Cocoa. We’d decided by silent assent we’d remain childless.
And we’d stuck to that decision—until Joe had seen an ad in the paper about becoming foster parents. Which led us to Matthew.
Now the blue walls of the nursery, with the airplane I’d painted for Matthew, mocked me. No furniture graced the carpet here, and only a set of dusty mini-blinds shut out the night sky. Superstition had kept me from breaking out the pink paint and the cutesy alphabet-block border I’d found. My preparations focused on the trip to China. I didn’t dare let myself picture life with a little one of my own.
The image of a round face with blue eyes, freckles across the nose and a cowlick of wheat-straw hair swam before my tear-filled eyes. I would not think of Matthew. I would not.
Now Joe thumped up the creaky old stairs, and I hastily scrubbed my tears away with the baby blanket.
“I figured I’d find you in here.” Joe’s voice echoed in the bare room. “You okay?”
“Yeah. I’m getting there.” With the heel of my hand, I caught a stray tear. “How about you?”
He slid down along the doorjamb until he collapsed onto the carpet, his long legs stretched out in front of him. “Hell if I know. Just numb, I guess.”
“Oh, Joe…” His vulnerability, his pain, shone through loud and clear for the first time. I got up and crossed to his side, touching his face. “We’ll get through this. It’s just a setback. It’s hard, but it’s happened before. We’ll get our baby.”
An expression I couldn’t translate—didn’t want to translate—flickered over Joe’s face.
“What?” I asked. “Go ahead. Say it.”
“You. The eternal optimist. Haven’t seen a whisper of a referral in weeks, even the agency can’t tell you when they might start coming again, and yet you keep holding out hope the phone’s gonna ring and they’re going to say, ‘Come to China, we’ve got your baby.’”
I snatched my hand back as if his cheek had suddenly turned scalding. Folding my arms across my chest, I lifted my chin. “And who’s to say it’s still not going to happen?”
Joe shook his head. “Incredible. You are just the most incredible woman I know. Don’t you see the writing on the wall, Sara? What’s it gonna take? Our agency finally calling you up and saying, ‘Oops, guess we made a mistake?’ Don’t you know they’re not going to do that for as long as they can get away with it? They don’t want to let loose the money everybody’s been sending them.”
“You’re incredible. Incredibly cynical! These agencies are not in it for the money, Joe. They want to see these babies have homes.”
“They’re not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, either. They’re making money. I’m a businessman. I know how business operates. I just don’t want to see you get hurt. It’s happened before. You just pour so much faith that this next idea, this next trick, will get you a baby. All that fertility hogwash, doctor after doctor…and even after you had cancer you still couldn’t be satisfied with just making it out alive.”
I held my breath, prayed he wouldn’t say what I thought he was going to say. “Joe—”
But he plowed on, like a crazed bull in the narrow streets of Spain chasing a legion of white-shirted men. “I thought after they took Matthew you’d finally get it.”
I closed my eyes to ward off the pain, wrapped my arms around my knees and rocked back and forth.
“Sara, isn’t it obvious? Don’t you think we ought to be listening? It’s like God is shouting at us, ‘You idiots! I don’t want you to have a baby!’”
Shaking my head, I forced myself to look at Joe. “No, no. You just have to have faith. You just have to hang on.”
“Hell, maybe God’s right. It’s not like I’ve done a stellar job with Cherie. Remember how you told the social worker that I’d raised my little sister? That I’d make a brilliant father? Right. Brilliant. I did such a brilliant job of it that my little sister is a high school dropout who can’t even keep a minimum-wage job.”
“Joe, Cherie’s failures are not your fault—”
“And you. Your mother wasn’t exactly a great role model. She always cared more about where her next drink was coming from than you. Still does. It’s a miracle you weren’t molested or abused or God knows what else. We’re crazy to think we can raise a child to be something besides a juvenile delinquent.”
I sucked in my breath. How dare he? How dare he throw my own miserable childhood in my face?
“You’ve never had any faith in this, have you? So why’d you go along with it if you thought it was a boondoggle?”
“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 the 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, dammit!” Hearing him say the things I’d suspected he’d been thinking ripped into me like a chain saw. “If you’ll just believe—”
“Right. That’s what you said about Matthew. Believe and the judge will never give him back to that crackhead of a mother. Believe and Matthew will be ours forever. Believe.” Joe’s mouth twisted, and he gave me a curt shake of his head. “Well, I’m all out of faith, Sara. And I can’t find any place to order a fresh supply. I’m through. Done. Finito. I’m just not able to pick up the pieces when the next disappointment shatters you.”
“What do you mean, you’re through?” I put my fingers to my mouth as I whispered the words.
“Admit it, Sara. It’s over. Pull the dossier. Call the agency and tell them we’re quitting. Let’s end this.”
Every cell in my body screamed a visceral no! at his words, but I couldn’t force the words from my throat. All I could do was get away from him. Rubbery legs barely held me up as I stood. My hand steadied me against the door frame as I made for the stairs.
“Where are you going? We haven’t finished!”
Joe had twisted around the door frame so that he faced me. I looked at him, not recognizing anything at all familiar or dear or lovable in his grim, rock-stubborn countenance. “I have. This conversation is done, Joe. I mean it. I’m not stopping the adoption. My baby, my Meredith, is in China. So I’m going to China. With you or without you.”
Nothing more to say, I stumbled down the stairs, my sobs breaking loose in hard heaves.
