The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,87

swallowed. “Okay.”

“I’ll let her tell you about it. Bye, honey.” I heard my mother put the phone down and call my sister. “Lucy!” she cried. “Mommy! Your sister is on the phone.”

My heart beat quickly. I pictured my sister’s growing belly, stopped. Then I pictured it growing obscenely large, Hannah giving a cartoon karate chop from within, pressing out.

“Hey!” Lucy came to the phone, breathless.

“Is everything okay?” I asked.

“Just some bleeding. I didn’t know what it was. I freaked. I thought it was happening again, but so late! It turned out it’s going to be okay, I just need to lay low. Not run around figuring out where to live and all that.”

“Okay,” I said. “That makes sense.”

“Any news on your front?”

“No.” Nothing was funny. Nazis were never funny. “Just checking in on you is all,” I said.

“That’s so sweet, Jess,” she said. “Thank you.”

20

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December 2010

Though we were told contact eases up over the holidays, November through January were the months of the birthmothers. After Katrina, California Allison called to tell us there was another young person—Edwina—who might be contacting us. I heard the word clearly: might. She was choosing between three families. I waited for the call, but I was not surprised when Allison called to report that she had decided on a family with another child.

“She wanted siblings for her child,” Allison said. “A big family, which was how she grew up.”

That felt below-the-belt, as if Edwina, twenty-two and in Indiana, knew we were too old to ever do this again.

“This is such a good sign,” Allison said. “So many contacts. Even if they don’t work out, there’s clearly a lot that’s appealing about your profile.”

I sniffed.

“You know what?” she whispered, and I could picture her covering the mouthpiece and looking around to make sure no one was listening.

“What?” I whispered back.

“We have this game we play here at the office. It’s called: Who Would You Want to Adopt You. You know? What couples!”

“You do?” I imagined that board game, little cards of our profiles turned facedown, a tiny wheel to spin before choosing a card.

“And I chose you guys! Bethany did too. We think you guys would make such awesome parents!”

“Oh my gosh, thank you!” I said, thrilled.

It was not until I got off the phone that I wondered about this office game, these social workers, the ones who did the birthmother intakes, the ones who dealt with the prospective parents, the administrators, all of them looking at each of us, so desperate for a child that we have submitted to this wearying process. We, the prospective adoptive parents, the Christians from Mississippi, the long-distance runners from La Jolla, the Pakistani and white doctors from Indiana, all the profiles Ramon and I had looked through on the agency website to see who we were up against, all the ones we saw fall away, Matched stamped digitally across their photos. We were being judged not only by the birthmothers, but also by the gatekeepers to the birthmothers.

And still, I did not care. Because the gatekeepers had selected us! All I could think about as I went to call Ramon with the disappointing report of losing Edwina, was the great news that finally, we’d been chosen.

_______

Just as I didn’t speak to Carmen and Edwina, I never spoke to the following birthmother either, though looking back I think I could hear her, the steady rhythm of her breathing in the background of my conversations with the birthfather. They were a couple from Cairo who had a sick baby at Mount Sinai, on the Upper East Side. How sick, we didn’t know, but they needed to go back to Egypt, where they claimed they could not get proper medical care. I wanted to visit the baby at the hospital so, as I was told by the birthfather, we could speak to the doctors directly about the child’s illness.

“No way,” Ramon said. “We cannot get to know these people and get caught up in their lives and then have to say no to a sick child we can’t take on. They could have hundreds of thousands of dollars of bills racked up already.”

“You’re being negative again,” I said. “We can talk to the doctors ourselves! We can talk to accounting, too.” What would going to a hospital be like, I wondered, and seeing a two-week-old child hooked up to strings and needles, a marionette. I didn’t know if I could bear seeing a child suffering, crying, without any sound. I had cried