The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,85

in profile looking out over the Hudson with Harriet, the changing leaves bursting into flames below.

“Can you send a photo?” I asked timidly. No pressure! the agency told us at that session. The birthmother, they told us, that most fragile bird, might fly away. We don’t want them to change their minds, the agency said. We don’t want to hurt them, Crystal told us. Which made us realize that the agency was there mostly to protect the birthmothers.

For our protection, Ramon and I only had each other.

“I’m on Myspace,” Katrina said. Myspace. I forgot that was even still a thing. “Trina,” she said. “No one ever calls me Katrina.”

“Oh, Trina.” We’d been searching under the wrong name. “Thank you so much for calling us. We will find you.”

_______

I was ready with my laptop on the coffee table when Ramon came in from his run, smelling of dried leaves and sweat. He sat next to me on the couch, breathing hard.

There she was! And she was pretty. Dark hair and green eyes. And there were her gorgeous children. Gorgeous children who might look like the child who could become our child.

“Why didn’t we do this earlier?” I pointed to the child on the screen. “Gamble on the place where you are guaranteed to be a parent.”

“I tried,” Ramon began, but he stopped.

I paused and looked up at him now and saw him in Michelle’s gazebo, weeping. The fathers, he had said.

Flipping through the images on Katrina’s page, we came across photos we assumed were of her daughter, and the grandchild, and then some animated flowers spilling out from between animated spread legs, a lot of mermaids and fairies, and then a block of text that said: SS. White Girls Only.

“Whoa.” Ramon touched my shoulder.

“What?” I shot three images ahead, to a photo of a kid flipping the bird at the camera.

“Go back,” Ramon said.

I closed my eyes. I could feel the tears escaping from under the lids, so I closed them tighter. “No.” I moved ahead, confronted now by photos of heavily tattooed men with shaved heads, one with a swastika on his bicep.

Ramon edged the laptop toward him with the tips of his tapered fingers and flipped back several images. Of course it was there again, in that special font reserved for all things Hitler: SS. White Girls Only.

“Who cares?” I said. I’d spent days on the phone with this woman. I haven’t felt this kind of connection with anyone else I’ve spoken to, she’d told me. I had been silent, but it had been a while for me as well to talk to someone without interruption. With new hope. “It doesn’t matter. Nurture over nature, right?”

“We have to deal with these people.” Ramon stood up. “They are going to be in our lives, remember? Open adoption.”

“It’s always you seeing the negative! It’s nurture over nature,” I said. “All the research says so.”

“Jesse,” Ramon said. Now he bent down and held my wrists. “What is the positive here? She’s forty years old. We want someone young and healthy and who isn’t a fascist.”

“But she chose us!” I was crying; I couldn’t stop it. And forty, it was only six months from now. “That could be anything. People put stuff online without knowing what it means all the time. She might not even know what it means.”

Ramon went to take a shower but our bathroom was tiny and right off the living room, so he couldn’t leave the conversation.

“I’ll call the agency, and they’ll be able to tell us more,” I said, sniffling.

Ramon turned on the shower.

“She’s chosen us, Ramon,” I said, louder. “She told me we are her first choice.” I could hear him step into the shower. “We had a connection. I don’t think we should just let this go.”

_______

On Monday, I finally talked to Crystal at the office in Raleigh. Crystal said Katrina had done an intake already and she was: Caucasian. Her boyfriend was: Caucasian with some Native American. She lived where she told me she lived, and she was the age she told me she was. Her last child, however, had been adopted through another agency. The real red flag here, Crystal said, was that she could be talking to more than one agency. And? Crystal said, we don’t have a confirmation of her pregnancy.

Red flags. We learned about those in Raleigh, too, and not having a pregnancy confirmation would be a major one. Another red flag? If the birthfather does not know the birthmother’s plan