The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,88

so often when I was alone, in the dark, and yet I could not hear myself. But this was not about that. This is to say that my mother had come every day. I could do that too, be the mother who comes each morning and leaves after dark and heals the child with her singular mother’s love.

“What would be too much for care in Cairo?” Ramon asked. “Cairo is a modern place. What kind of an illness would this baby have? We are not going until the agency gets information about it. We just can’t.”

“Please, Ramon.” I saw myself lifting a fragile child, attached by wires, a machine beeping.

All weekend I thought of raising an Egyptian child we had cured with the power of our big love and our democracy, our Americanness—well, mine; Ramon just had a green card—but the man did not put his wife on the phone. I didn’t want to pressure him, as I theorized that birthfathers, while adorned with more colorful feathers, are easily frightened too, but I began to think that the mother did not want to give up her baby—a red flag, yes? I thought of her hovering next to her husband, silent, as he signed away their sick child.

A social worker I did not know called me on Monday to tell me the man had signed the release for her to talk to the doctors, but that he had also done something peculiar and disturbing. He’d asked her, she said, if there were any single women in search of children, to which she had responded, yes. He’d then asked if any of those women would be interested in marriage, because he would prefer a second wife here in the States to an open adoption.

“What?” I asked. I could not wrap my head around it and I thought of my absent father-in-law, all the way in Java with his second, unofficial wife. And then I thought that this new social worker was racist against Muslims and so was telling me something so stereotypical I considered having her fired.

“Yes,” she said. “You heard me correctly. He asked for another wife.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“We’re not that kind of agency,” the social worker told me, as if to imply that I was that kind of adoptive parent, who, already married myself, mind you, was out to marry a married Egyptian man who would be leaving me here in the States to raise his sick child. “It was a red flag that you never spoke to the birthmother,” she said.

This mistake, somehow mine, I thought, would surely make them all rescind their votes for us as parents they’d most like to adopt them. So were we back again at square one?

Square one: the place where those who haven’t yet been chosen, wait.

“Jesus,” Ramon said when I told him.

“That’s exactly what I said.”

“I’m just wondering, what the hell is the agency doing to help us? I mean in the beginning we were told we had such a great chance. We’re straight. We are young. We’re open with race.”

“We aren’t young.” It was six months away now. The numbers were set to shift radically then.

“Compared to a lot of those couples, we’re young. I speak Spanish. We translated every goddamn line of that goddamn letter into Spanish. Has one Hispanic birthmother called us? No.”

“It’s true,” I said. “I thought all the Spanish stuff would help.” So much for the Ramon Advantage.

Ramon was silent.

“I think people are scared of New York maybe,” I said.

“I thought New York would make us seem cool.” Ramon looked intently at his laptop.

“That’s because you’re from Europe.”

“I thought that this was going to be easier.”

My throat grew thick, as if it were stuffed with cotton. “And what are you doing, Ramon? Because I’m the one talking to these people.”

“Jesse.” He was still looking straight at the screen. Who knew what was on it. “It’s really the woman who should field the calls. It just is.”

“Hmm,” I said.

“You really think I should be the first to talk to the mothers?” he asked.

“They are not the mothers!” I said. “I am the mother,” I said. “Aren’t I supposed to be the mother?”

22

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January 2011

Another new year, and I started to recognize a pattern. We waited, until inactivity panicked us. Then someone made contact. It could be the agency, telling us someone would or should or might or could be calling, or the birthmother herself, like Katrina, or even the birthfather, like the nameless man from Cairo, who had found