The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,93
false happiness in Heather’s voice. No longer could I picture her, a heartsick teenager beneath a splash of stars leaning out onto the water, listening for her future on the waves. No longer were Heather and I versions of each other; I could not see myself in her, or her in me. “So I’m going to the doctor in two weeks. And I’ll send in the pregnancy confirmation then. But for now I have the ultrasound photos. Do you want me to e-mail them?”
“Sure,” I said. But I did not want them.
“Awesome!” she said. “I’ve got to run, Jesse, but I’ll talk to you soon!”
Please don’t send those photos, I thought.
When I heard the ping of my computer, I clicked on. The ultrasound. Nice Talking To You. The text said, enjoy :) And there it was: two fetuses, stacked little birds, one in silhouette, one looking straight on. Even my body has been inwardly imaged, that snapshot marked along the top with my name and the date, on all those mornings when hope was an entirely different animal. I had seen Lucy’s ultrasound too, the profile of her daughter already forming, a curled fist at her mouth, the stamp of my sister’s name above the developing head. Heather’s blurred photo was framed by no such information. The information that did arrive did so the way memory does, as knowledge I have always held: These babies were not real. None of the babies had been real. There will be no snow pants and mittens in the coming winters, fields of light come spring, and if I apply for that job upstate and out of the five hundred applicants, I actually get that job, I will likely be going there alone. Ramon might not leave New York. If Ramon is at ease in European cities, and less so in New York City, in the country he is a tourist. He wears street shoes on our hikes. In the woods his elegance reads as small, as if he could too easily get lost there.
The birthmothers have only been women.
The door was closed.
“You just don’t know,” Ramon said when I told him. He looked up from his computer. “Maybe she had a really messed-up scanner.”
“Maybe,” I provisionally agreed. But by his impulse to mollify I realized: he knew too.
He turned back to his work. “Why do they all keep telling us the babies will be here for spring? What,” Ramon asked, “is it with springtime?”
_______
The next morning a call came in from the agency.
“Hi,” Crystal said. “So I’m not sure if Heather told you yet, but she lost her babies in the night. She left a message on the office machine. I’m just calling to let you know. Sad.”
I laughed. I put down my pen.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “This is hard. For many prospective adoptive parents, matching takes a while.”
God forbid she said adoptive mothers. If she used the word mother on us, what would we women do? Start a riot so big and angry that no amount of tear gas, Tasers, or armored vehicles could hold it back? “You know she didn’t, like, lose two babies in the middle of the night, right?”
“Not likely, no.” Crystal sighed.
“So it was a scam then, right?”
“Yes, it appears to have been. Though a scam tends to mean you gave her money, which you didn’t, thankfully. But I am flagging her profile.”
The red flagging of the red flag. “I can’t help but wonder if all of these aren’t scams. We haven’t talked to one viable birthmother.”
“It’s usually one in, say, thirty that’s not real. But with the economy as it is, we have seen a rise in them.”
“Hmm,” I said. “Very interesting,” I said. “Okay, thanks for letting me know, Crystal.”
Then she assured me that despite these few bad dates there would ultimately be a match, and that while we were having all these unusually crazy experiences, when we did get our match, when we found the right birthmother, it would all make sense. And this, Crystal had said, would all disappear, not unlike childbirth.
Childbirth?
The pain of childbirth, Crystal had told me.
I walked the five steps into the dining room, where Ramon was working or playing his hedgehog mouse game or playing billiards or poker or whatever the hell Ramon had been doing. “It was a scam,” I said.
He was silent.
“That was Crystal. Well, we knew it probably was.” I thought to touch his shoulder but did not. “We knew.”