And, of course, he told Andy, who at first had just stared at him and then nodded, as if he had asked if Andy had an extra bandage he could give him before he left for the night. But then he began making a series of bizarre seal-like sounds, half bark, half sneeze, and he realized that Andy was crying. The sight of it made him both horrified and slightly hysterical, unsure of what to do. “Get out of here,” Andy commanded him between sounds. “I mean it, Jude, get the fuck out,” and so he did. The next day at work, he received an arrangement of roses the size of a gardenia bush, with a note in Andy’s angry blocky handwriting that read:
JUDE—I’M SO FUCKING EMBARRASSED I CAN BARELY WRITE THIS NOTE. PLEASE FORGIVE ME FOR YESTERDAY. I COULDN’T BE HAPPIER FOR YOU AND THE ONLY QUESTION IS WHAT TOOK HAROLD SO FUCKING LONG. I HOPE YOU’LL TAKE THIS AS A SIGN THAT YOU NEED TO TAKE BETTER CARE OF YOURSELF SO SOMEDAY YOU’LL HAVE THE STRENGTH TO CHANGE HAROLD’S ADULT DIAPERS WHEN HE’S A THOUSAND YEARS OLD AND INCONTINENT, BECAUSE YOU KNOW HE’S NOT GOING TO MAKE IT EASY FOR YOU BY DYING AT A RESPECTABLE AGE LIKE A NORMAL PERSON. BELIEVE ME, PARENTS ARE PAINS IN THE ASS LIKE THAT. (BUT GREAT TOO, OF COURSE.) LOVE, ANDY
It was, he and Willem agreed, one of the best letters they’d ever read.
But then the ecstatic month passed, and it was January, and Willem left for Bulgaria to film, and the old fears returned, accompanied now by new fears. They had a court date for February fifteenth, Harold told him, and with a little rescheduling, Laurence would be presiding. Now that the date was so close, he was sharply, inescapably aware that he might ruin it for himself, and he began, at first unconsciously and then assiduously, avoiding Harold and Julia, convinced that if they were reminded too much, too actively of what they were in fact getting that they would change their minds. And so when they came into town for a play the second week in January, he pretended he was in Washington on business, and on their weekly phone calls, he tried to say very little, and to keep the conversations brief. Every day the improbability of the situation seemed to grow larger and more vivid in his mind; every time he glimpsed the reflection of his ugly zombie’s hobble in the side of a building, he would feel sickened: Who, really, would ever want this? The idea that he could become someone else’s seemed increasingly ludicrous, and if Harold saw him just once more, how could he too not come to the same conclusion? He knew it shouldn’t matter so much to him—he was, after all, an adult; he knew the adoption was more ceremonial than truly sociologically significant—but he wanted it with a steady fervor that defied logic, and he couldn’t bear it being taken away from him now, not when everyone he cared about was so happy for him, not when he was so close.
He had been close before. The year after he arrived in Montana, when he was thirteen, the home had participated in a tristate adoption fair. November was National Adoption Month, and one cold morning, they had been told to dress neatly and had been hurried onto two school buses and driven two hours to Missoula, where they were herded off the buses and into the conference room of a hotel. Theirs had been the last buses to arrive, and the room was already filled with children, boys on one side, girls on the other. In the center of the room was a long stripe of tables, and as he walked over to his side, he saw that they were stacked with labeled binders: Boys, Babies; Boys, Toddlers; Boys, 4–6; Boys, 7–9; Boys, 10–12; Boys, 13–15; Boys, 15+. Inside, they had been told, were pieces of paper with their pictures, and names, and information about themselves: where they were from, what ethnicity they were, information about how they did in school and what sports they liked to play and what talents and interests they had. What, he wondered, did his sheet of paper say about him? What talents might have been invented for him, what race, what origins?
The older boys, the ones whose names and faces were in the 15+ binder, knew they would never be adopted, and when the counselors turned away, they snuck out through the back exit to, they all knew, get high. The babies and toddlers had only to be babies and toddlers; they would be the first to be chosen, and they didn’t even know it. But as he watched from the corner he had drifted toward, he saw that some of the boys—the ones old enough to have experienced one of the fairs before, but still young enough to be hopeful—had strategies. He watched as the sullen became smiling, as the rough and bullying became jocular and playful, as boys who hated one another in the context of the home played and bantered in a way that appeared convincingly friendly. He saw the boys who were rude to the counselors, who cursed at one another in the hallways, smile and chat with the adults, the prospective parents, who were filing into the room. He watched as the toughest, the meanest of the boys, a fourteen-year-old named Shawn who had once held him down in the bathroom, his knees digging into his shoulder blades, pointed at his name tag as the man and woman he had been talking with walked toward the binders. “Shawn!” he called after them, “Shawn Grady!” and something about his hoarse hopeful voice, in which he could hear the effort, the strain, to not sound hopeful at all, made him feel sorry for Shawn for the first time, and then angry at the man and woman, who, he could tell, were actually paging through the “Boys, 7–9” binder. But those feelings passed quickly, because he tried not to feel anything those days: not hunger, not pain, not anger, not sadness.