*
Jared turned on the radio. All the stations were carols, so we just settled into it. “Winter Wonderland” played as we drove past salted pavement and snowless fields. The Charles was half frozen but the trees on Storrow Drive were still clutching their crinkled leaves.
“How are you doing?” Jared asked as we crossed the Eliot Bridge.
“Okay,” I admitted. “I’m excited to get back to work but feel guilty for feeling that, if you know what I mean.”
“Naw, that’s normal,” he said.
“How would you know?”
“Happened with all my babies.” I shoved him and he smiled, then sobered. “But you’ve been okay, in New York?” I knew New York was a euphemism for “by yourself,” but it was Jared and I didn’t mind him asking.
“Yeah,” I said, pausing to reach a hand back for Emma to squeeze. “I’m still struggling with . . . I’m still hoping that she . . . feels more like she’s mine.”
“Interesting.”
“Not really,” I said, feeling terrible for even articulating it. I pulled up my turtleneck and looked back out at the river. “To be honest, it’s hard because she reminds me a lot of the other baby.”
Jared was silent and kept his eyes on the road.
“It’s been a long time, Audrey.”
“I know,” I said.
“She’s okay. She’s doing fine.”
“I know she is. I know.” I shifted my attention back into the car and sat up. “Look, you’re the big bad Community Outreach Chair, we can just talk about it later.”
“Okay,” he said, shrugging his thin shoulders upward. I waited for him to protest, to insist that we discuss and overanalyze—but instead he started humming “Silent Night.” “Wait till you see this pageant, Audrey, it’s going to be insane. I have this girl playing Mary who we practically had to coax out of her goth clothing. A real sweetheart, don’t get me wrong, and she’s been practicing with the other Jesus all week so if we end up needing to swap in Emma, she’ll be fine.” He turned around to make a face at the baby and got a high-pitched squeal. And I realized he was right to change the subject.
*
I found out I was pregnant in December of my senior year at college. The night before, I’d told Julian I thought I’d gained weight at school. He didn’t say anything, just looked at me with an expression of disgust. But when we went out to dinner the next night, neither of us touched the bread basket. Julian smiled at the waiter when he took it away, taking my hand and pinching at my knuckles.
We bought the test on our way home. It wasn’t the first time. I was skinny then, missing my period a lot, and we always giggled in the car about what to buy along with it.
“I dare you to buy condoms,” I’d say.
“I dare you to buy porn,” he’d tease.
That night Julian chose to buy a bag of Skittles and we shared his peace offering while we waited until I had to pee.
When the test came back positive, we drove back to CVS and bought three more. We made the mistake of telling our parents and everyone seemed to have opinions. The Elks were Catholic and that was pretty much it. Julian wanted to keep it. He told me it wouldn’t matter—that I was what mattered. That he’d love me. That we could get married.
My mother disagreed. My dad was Jewish and my mom was nothing, and to them, pregnancy was a choice.
I was somewhere in between.
“You don’t understand,” I told her that night. “You wish Dad looked at you the way Julian looks at me.” She stopped sorting clothes and let the quiet settle.
“I know,” she said. “If you loved him less, I’d tell you to have it.”
I told her she didn’t make sense. I told her there were options. I told her she was just jealous and heartless and it was my body and he wanted it and I loved him so I had to have it. I had to. She didn’t understand. She was aged and stubborn and she didn’t understand.
That Sunday, Julian and I went for a walk along the reservoir.
“We don’t have to keep it,” he said. “But if you love me, please, don’t kill it.”
So I had it. For him. And we gave our six pounds, fourteen ounces to a couple from New Hampshire on August 19, 1989. They came to pick her up two days after I’d gone into labor. They did it in another room; the literature said it was best not to meet adoptive parents. Julian wanted it open, but I wanted it closed. So we signed our names on dotted lines that even eighteen years wouldn’t undo. No, I do not want my birth child contacting me. No, I do not want the progress reports.
*
The Unitarian Universalist church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was stone and beautiful and surrounded by bumper-stickered cars. It was cold out, and I was worried about Emma, so I pressed her tiny face to my neck as we dashed from Jared’s sedan to the basement’s back door. The place was packed with screaming children dressed like animals and bearded shepherds herding angels upstairs. The basement smelled like attic and the costumes were dated but the energy circling the room was powerful and warm. A rainbow flag hung next to a bulletin board and painted Plato quotes wrapped the room’s upper wall. A girl with a head scarf was buried in her cell phone and Joseph appeared to be flirting with a Wise Man. The moment we entered, Emma started wailing, and the entire tableau seemed to freeze and face us. A gray-haired man in the middle smiled at me and I knew he was the minister even before I saw his robes. He didn’t say anything but held his hands out slightly to his sides, palms out and fingers spread. I nodded back and shifted Emma around so everyone could see.
The pageant director was a chubby man in his fifties. He cupped my elbow in his palm while he explained the procedures and walked through the logistics for the following day. I was to sit in the front row and hold Emma wrapped in blue cloth in my lap. Henry, the Stouffers’ baby, was the first baby Jesus; however, should he start crying or moving around, the director would give me the sign, Ms. Stouffer would take Henry down to the basement, and I would move forward and hand Emma to Mary. Conceptually, it seemed a bit bizarre. But I was assured elbow-in-hand that two babies were essential, so I smiled at him with only my eyes and pretended my head hurt so I could go back downstairs.
I saw my first pageant in Mesnil-le-Roi, just outside Paris, when I was in France the year after graduation. There was a Swiss boy and it was his idea, but it was stuffy and the goats smelled so we left and went back to his apartment. I’d thought I’d have a different mind in France—but when I landed at de Gaulle, it was still me. I worked in a school and walked around on weekends trying to force bohemia. When I came home, I was yearning for someone to whisper to, but everyone was twenty-three and living in New York.
Julian and I broke up just before I left. We’d tried to make it work after the adoption, but things were never quite the same. Giving her away was my decision and, like it or not, Julian understood what it meant. The baby asked if we really meant our forevers; he said yes, and I said I didn’t know. I wanted to experience the world and meet new people and everyone says you’re supposed to be single for at least some time. He tried to get me back, but not for too long.
The problem was, I’d broken up with him while I was still in love, so I never had the time to let it wash out. My mom said I shouldn’t marry the first guy I dated and my friend Eliza had said I looked like I was bored. But I never met anyone better. I dated other men, but I seemed to pass them by, waiting for someone who’d trace my back while I slept and take me to church on Sundays. I’d meet Him in Paris, after Paris, in graduate school, at work. But each location passed as I rolled them off my shoulders. My sister called it a fluke at Thanksgiving one year when a friend of our aunt’s asked about my husband.
“It’s strange,” she’d said, passing the gravy. And I’d felt a sudden urge to pour it on her head.
*
When I got back home that night, everyone was in the kitchen and living room preparing for dinner. My sister, her husband Alex, their sons Michael and Gabriel, my brother Henry, his wife Zoe, and their three children, Annabel, David, and Toby. My mother was thrilled to have her family reassembled and she scrambled around the kitchen, assigning tasks and things to chop. When I opened the door, everyone ran over to hold Emma and I could see my mother smiling behind the island in the center of the kitchen. The adoption was far less of an event than the births of my nieces and nephews and I specifically requested that I didn’t want a shower or any public announcement. My sister had driven up in October, but it was the first time Henry or any of the kids had met Emma.
“Meet your new cousin,” he said to Annabel, who was thirteen and held her arms out immediately.
“Oh my God,” she cooed. “She’s adorable. I love her!”
“Annabel was just saying in the car how excited she was to meet Emma,” Zoe explained. “She doesn’t have a sister so she was saying she wanted to give Emma all her old dolls when she’s older.”
“Wow,” I said, wide-eyed. “Annabel, that’s so kind of you. How grown-up.”
I tried to imagine what Emma might look like when she was thirteen but I only saw another version of Annabel. Inevitably, I’d thought of this same scene a hundred times when I was younger: Julian’s and my child meeting her new family in some kitchen somewhere. She was probably in that same kitchen right now—eating Christmas dinner, if her family even celebrated the holiday.
Still, it was nice to get attention for once, and not have to give it. The prospect of bringing Emma to every family holiday from now on filled me with a kind of comfort, and the idea of her older cousins playing with her and teasing her made me extremely glad. I tried to forget my (rarely expressed) concerns that the whole thing was a big mistake, and for the most part I managed. Seeing her inside my family gave it all a little context, and I was proud to be bouncing her on my knee while the adults sipped decaf coffees at the end of the night.
Christmas Day was the same as it always was—only I’d woken up early with my brother and sister to make a little stocking for Emma that I unpacked later while Henry held her up so she could watch. Zoe had planned to cook French-bread French toast with a fresh strawberry sauce but she’d forgotten to get enough eggs, so I volunteered to make a quick trip to Whole Foods, the only market nearby that’d be open. I tried to take Emma with me but my mother insisted I leave her.
“It’s fine,” she’d said. “I had a few of these myself.” I looked at Emma, clutching a new stuffed snowman, and watched her blink at me, gnawing. I wondered for a moment how well she could recognize me but dismissed the thought as ridiculous. Emma didn’t cry too often with the particular request of being returned to my arms and it sometimes made me insecure.