to do that,” the nurse says, snapping into action, fiercely bundling the soiled linens of the isolette into a tight ball, “if you’re really giving him up. Your milk’s gonna come in, you’ll get engorged.”
“It’s okay, just for today.” Heather’s eyes flutter open; her voice is barely a whisper. She reaches out her hand, the one that isn’t supporting the baby’s head, to Gina. Gina sob-hiccups as she rushes forward, grabs Heather’s hand. Inside, Chloe feels her stomach muscles un-clench; it’s going to go through.
“So what are you going to call him?” Heather asks Gina, looking up at the older woman, both of them with tears running on wet cheeks. They are still holding hands.
“Well”—Gina takes a shaky, ragged breath, sniffs hard—“we were thinking of Adam, since he is the beginning of our life. Adam David, if that’s okay.”
“That’s perfect,” Heather whispers, her eyes closing again. “Adam.”
Chloe looks up as Gina’s husband, Nate, follows the nurse out of the room, a lurching six-foot-five-inch man moving awkwardly, desperately. Chloe leaves her purse, the manila folder, goes after him.
Nate Severin hasn’t gone far. Chloe finds him tilted forward just outside the door, his forehead slowly pounding against the wall as he chokes on his sobs. He sees Chloe, straightens, wipes his cheeks furiously. She reaches behind her and gently closes the door to the delivery room where his wife, and the mother of his child, are watching him breast-feed for the first and last time.
“God.” He exhales, wiping again. “I want to adopt her too. And Michael. We could move into a bigger house, or remodel the garage, or I don’t know, it’s totally crazy, and it would probably never work…”
“She has a mother, Nate,” Chloe says gently, doesn’t add that Heather’s mother is in and out of rehab, “and a convicted felon fiancé.”
“I know, I just…” Nate turns, slumps his gangly height against the wall. “What do we do? Chloe, tell me what to do.”
“It’s intense.” Chloe lays a hand on his arm. “You come on back in and sign papers.”
ALONE AT HOME THAT night, the papers signed, Chloe sips tea to calm her twisted stomach. Two years ago, this was her dream job. Two years ago she held a baby not thirty-six hours old as the prop plane from eastern Oregon bounced down at PDX, and she walked off the jetway with a satchel full of signed legals, the birth mother back in jail, no father named, and placed a baby with thick black hair and cherry-red lips in the arms of a couple who had waited seven years for this moment.
“Here’s your son,” Chloe had said, letting herself cry with the gray-haired new mother, the father wiping his glasses on the hem of his flannel shirt. Their three heads had touched over his tiny one, and Chloe was a part of something so wonderful, the creation of a family. That’s when she started saying it, that it was “an honor to be a part of such an important moment in a family’s life.”
But these moments are few and far between, and Chloe thinks now of the birth mother in that case, whose name she cannot recall. The phone call came on a slow Wednesday morning. Then it was rush to the airport, get on a prop plane, bring profiles of people willing to accept Native American newborns with prenatal substance use, a forty-three-year-old incarcerated alcoholic birth mother already in labor and ready to sign. It happened so quickly that Chloe forgot to bring a newborn outfit or the agency’s car seat—she had to stop at a Wal-Mart on the way in her badly aligned rental Taurus.
She saw the baby first through the nursery glass, a gorgeous seven-pound boy with a strong forehead and skin like oiled cherrywood, thick, straight hair. Then down the hall, the birth mother, old enough to be Chloe’s mother, gray threading her black hair, face hash-marked with lines, meth teeth small and black, who answered the questions on the agency’s forms so quietly Chloe often had to ask her to repeat them, the woman’s eyes darting to the khaki-uniformed guard at her door.
The whole thing took less than twenty minutes, a handful of questions for the medical, the birth mother flipping through the three portfolios so fast she couldn’t have even read the captions under the photos before she tapped the red binder on top and said, “This one,” then set about deliberately signing the documents with a half-dry pen in front of Chloe and