The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,27

was wrong. Perhaps the birthfather wandered through his days unsure what was the matter, but knowing, profoundly, that something important, ineffable, had escaped him.

“How did you decide on the adoptive parents?” the voice asked.

The couple looked at each other and laughed. “It sounds so silly,” he said, “but I’m a musician. I mean, I want to be. And Tony, the adoptive father, also plays music. We both like, umm, Crash Test Dummies, Barenaked Ladies, alternative stuff, and he had that on his profile. It made me feel connected to him. Now we hang out and jam together. It’s kind of awesome, and I feel like we chose for our baby what we might have been.”

The young woman nodded her head. “Or what we might become,” she said. “Now that we have the chance.”

“It’s true it’s the littlest thing that makes you decide,” she said. “We chose to live close and be involved, we have Christmas together, and Mother’s Day of course, and it is really nice to be able to see our daughter growing up. But before that we weren’t sure about near or far, we just knew not in New York City. That was our number one criteria. Not in New York City, people get shot there.”

I snapped to attention and looked around the room to see how the others had reacted to this. Martin and James were nodding their heads in agreement. And so were Herman and Alex, and I even saw Paula and Anita smiling a bit, though perhaps this was just to show goodwill toward the couple. Or, I thought in a more sinister manner, they were smiling about the competitive nature of this venture; if no one wanted to place babies in New York, then we were out of the running. Get rid of the straight Brooklyn couple! Which only meant more opportunity for the gun-bearing fireman and his nurse partner.

The only person I didn’t look at was Ramon.

After the film, James the fireman flicked the lights on.

Tiffany or Crystal rubbed her hands together. “Let me just say, the New York comment was from a long time ago.” She looked at Ramon and me. “I meant to warn y’all about that.”

Paula cleared her throat. “So what happened to that couple anyway?”

“What do you mean?” Crystal or Tiffany asked, cocking her head.

“Well,” Anita said, and I noticed how often she completed Paula’s sentences in a way that made Paula shrink back in her chair, “the musician couple, in college. Are they still together? That was what, fifteen years ago. Do they have kids now?”

Tiffany and Crystal nodded. One of them said, “Well, they broke up when they were in college, not long after this was filmed, actually. And we lost track of them, to be honest. They don’t see the adoptive family anymore.”

“What?” Brian the journalist said. “I thought this was a film to promote openness.”

“It does, and we as an agency do, but, to be honest, many of the birthmothers lose contact. If they move, or have other children, more often than not—statistically speaking, I mean—they fall out of touch.”

You catch more bees with honey than with vinegar, but who the hell wants a collection of bees? And so I asked, “If openness is best for the birthmother, and dealing with her grief is a large part of this, which I totally understand, but if it’s also about the child knowing who her family is so she doesn’t have to fantasize about her parents, and doesn’t feel abandoned, well, what happens, say, when the child is four, and the birthmother just disappears? What

about the child’s grief? To feel left twice? How is this healthy for anyone?”

The room was silent but for some head-bobbing in assent, and I could feel myself galvanizing my troops, a trait I inherited from my mother.

Crystal or Tiffany paused a moment before speaking. “The child will know the reality. Open adoption is not a science, but from the research we all know open adoption is best for all parties. It is.”

I looked around the table and all of us were nodding, myself included. But how did we know? We didn’t, after all, have children.

“But there is no guarantee that it works for everyone or that it is stable at all times,” she continued. “This is about people.”

I thought of myself as a teenager, those nights I screamed at my mother, who would not let me go to a concert or to a friend’s to study. What would that have been like