The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,36
she’d said at her address at the Seneca Falls women’s convention of 1848, and this appeared, largely without attribution or analysis, in nearly every paper.
I called social service organizations to secure yet another training session at the earliest date possible because we were required to use a New York agency to do all the local paperwork, including the home study, a major event in the adoption process. Other particularities offered refuge from my own invention. For the home study, a social worker was to come to our home and interview us, to ensure that we were both suitable parents and lived in a satisfactory home.
After securing the earliest date—January!—I nudged Harriet, who was asleep beneath my desk, gently in her soft stomach with my slipper.
“Want to go for a hike, H?” I asked.
She slept on.
“Harriet!” I knelt down. “Want to go for a walk?”
Her eyes shot open. And then closed again.
Eventually she rallied and I packed up water and a few snacks for us both, and we got into the car. After some pawing and sighing, she settled herself in, and then we were off to hit traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge and on the West Side Highway, before we were in more traffic on the George Washington Bridge. Ramon and I had once biked uptown from Brooklyn all the way to the George Washington Bridge the autumn after we’d met in Italy, and I remembered the exhilaration of getting to the bridge and riding out over the glistening river. And then: sudden, paralyzing fear. I could not move, not forward or backward. We had walked our bikes off the bridge and cycled back to Brooklyn, where we wolfed down burgers and too many beers as the sun went down, and it was the kind of day that I recognized as a salient memory, even while it was happening.
Finally, Harriet and I crossed over and onto the Palisades, the Bronx across the river to my right, as glittering and shining and bright as any jewel I’d seen.
The local news was on NPR, and soon a story about a young woman abducted as an infant in a Bronx hospital came on the radio. After twenty years, she’d been reunited with her biological mother. There had not been one day, her biological mother said, that she had not thought about her daughter and what had happened to her. What had happened was that the woman, the kidnapper, had had several miscarriages, disguised herself as a nurse, and took the child. She then went on, the piece said, to abuse her. Now the FBI was hunting her down.
As the city fell away, and Harriet and I made our way to Harriman State Park along Seven Lakes Drive, toward the trail that snaked around and up from the water, I wondered if I understood any of the players in that drama, the child, the woman whose child was taken, the woman crazed by loss. I felt I had been all of those things; but I knew exactly which one I was now.
_______
At Lake Askoti, there was a large flat rock that Ramon and I would sit on and eat chicken sandwiches as Harriet flung herself into the lake, then, trembling with joy as she shook water all over our food, she would attempt to eat our sandwiches, and lick our faces, before jumping back into the water.
Ramon and I came here on weekends, when the rock and other places to hang out comfortably around the lake were crowded with boys guzzling beer and smoking joints, and the trails were filled to bursting with families and hikers. But occasionally it was still and quiet but for the lapping of the water, the creaking of trees, and the swooping of small birds.
When we arrived, Harriet leapt out of the car and made her way to the familiar trail, jumping in and out of the water along the lake before I even got to the water’s edge. We passed by our rock, and I stood for a moment as she hurled herself in, and then I hauled her up when she couldn’t make her way up the smooth, wet surface. The lake was a brilliant blue, a mirror reflecting a cloudless day, the remaining foliage browning. I turned from the lip of the lake and Harriet followed, pushing ahead of me, her energy boosted by being wet, and we made our way up along the rocky trail that led to another trail higher on the ridge.