and meet me at Good Samaritan in an hour. The hospital social worker just called with a woman who gave birth last night and wants to meet you and sign papers today.”
What this means is that you never, ever ignore the phone, not in the middle of a dinner party, your favorite TV show, or spontaneous sex. This means you interrupt your best friend’s ravings about a trip to Indonesia so that you can just, do you mind, check the call waiting, just one second, please?
And there are other phone calls. The ones where you see the agency phone number on caller ID and your heart pounds and you imagine a pink mewling newborn, mentally clear your calendar, only to have it be a routine update, or asking for last year’s tax returns to augment your file. Or worse, the call to let you know that the birth mother who had chosen you, whose baby you felt move through her stretched blue-white skin, after you had picked a name and lined up clothes on pink-and-white hangers upstairs, had changed her mind, she didn’t want you to be the parents after all.
It is the day after Valentine’s Day when the phone rings in the nearly empty carriage house in Portland Heights. Eva is in the bath, scalding herself under the burning straight-hot spigot, her winter-white Scandinavian skin blooming crimson, an agonizing inch at a time. The bathroom is filled with steam, the mirror obscured, condensation forms on the underside of the ceiling. Paul had pointed this out to her the other day, said blandly that she might try opening the window or wiping it down afterward, “Or else we’ll have mold.” And in reply she had glared at him with such scorn. How dare he even talk about mold, house maintenance, depreciation, now?
But the phone is ringing, so Eva gets out, dripping, because Magnus and Paul are out, lightheaded from the temperature change, naked, gripping the wall as she makes her way to the bedroom. She is breathless when she answers what will be remembered forever as the most significant call of her life, sending all the agency phone calls spiraling into obscurity. Two years since they first signed with the Chosen Child, and Eva realizes she is still waiting for a phone call to tell her if she is a mother.
“Hello, Mrs. Nova. This is Detective Haberman.”
And she sags into the bed, dripping, shivering, as his words wash over her in jagged fragments.
“A breakthrough…at Good Samaritan Hospital…need a member of the immediate family to come and verify the identity—”
Breathlessly she waits for the next word, just the difference between two letters means everything.
“…the identity of the baby.”
“The baby?” Her voice is a croak, a strangled whisper.
“The baby,” he repeats. Baby, not body.
And for the first time since the blue lines on the first of dozens of EPTs years ago, she feels the utter joy, the unbridled hopefulness, as the words “I’m going to be a mother” run through her head like ticker tape.
It is a full minute before she can steady her hands enough to call Paul, and she revels in this, replaying the conversation, rubbing over the facts like polished stones. A baby boy matching Wyeth’s description found alone in an apartment in Southeast, apparently healthy, medical staff keeping him for observation as a precaution. “I understand he’s taking a bottle right now,” Haberman had said with a smile in his voice, and Eva’s milk surged, dripped onto her thighs as she sat, running in rivulets onto the bedspread.
It has taken the most extreme of circumstances to shake her, to make her realize the pure preciousness of what was there all along. It has taken the icy fear, the two-week sojourn to the edge of the abyss, to blow the bogging postpartum fog off her, and now, as she jerks on her clothes in frantic motions, she feels more alive than she ever has, running down the stairs barefoot, the phone in one hand, car keys in the other, as she gallops toward her son, her future.
52
April
PAUL
They don’t take a stroller out yet—even those two feet between him and the baby feel too cavernous. By unspoken agreement, it is Paul who carries Wyeth in the BabyBjörn, strapped crisscross to his chest. It has been six weeks, but the baby still does not sleep in the bassinet across the room but rather wedged between them, and both Paul and Eva sleep in fetal curls, bracketing him like parentheses, as though