Emily nodded. “I hid in the city for the summer so they wouldn’t find out.”
Father Fleming fingered his collar. “What happened to the baby?”
“I gave her up for adoption.”
“Did you meet the family?”
“Yes. They were very nice. It all went very smoothly.”
Emily stared at the cross on the wall behind Father Fleming’s desk, nervously hoping it wouldn’t shoot off of its hook and impale her for lying. Her baby was with the Bakers, but things had gone the opposite of smoothly.
After Gayle had met with Emily and Aria in the café, Emily couldn’t get Gayle’s offer out of her mind. The Bakers seemed special, but what Gayle brought to the table was special, too. Aria had scolded Emily for being so preoccupied with Gayle’s money, but she didn’t want this baby to grow up the way she had, listening to her mom agonize about money every Christmas, missing out on a Washington, D.C., field trip because her dad was out of a job, being forced into keeping with a sport she wasn’t interested in anymore because it was her only ticket to college. Emily wanted to say that money didn’t matter to her, but since she’d always had to think about money, it definitely did.
Two days later, after her shift at the restaurant, Emily called Gayle and said she wanted to talk more. They arranged to meet at a coffee shop near Temple that very night. A little before 8 PM, Emily cut through a small Philadelphia park, and a hand had shot out from the darkness and cupped her belly. “Heather,” a voice said, and Emily screamed. A figure stepped into the light, and Emily couldn’t be more surprised to see Gayle’s smiling face. “W-what are you doing here?” she gasped. Gayle shrugged. “It was such a nice night I thought we could talk outside. But someone’s jumpy,” she said with a laugh.
Emily should have turned around and left, but instead she told herself that maybe she was being jumpy. Maybe Gayle was just playful. So she accepted Gayle’s carryout cup of decaf coffee and stayed. “Why do you want my baby?” she asked. “Why can’t you go through an adoption agency?”
Gayle patted the seat next to her, and Emily plopped down on the bench. “The wait with an adoption agency is too long,” she said. “And we suspect that potential mothers wouldn’t choose me and my husband because of what happened to our daughter.”
Emily raised an eyebrow. “What did happen to her?”
A faraway, uncomfortable look came over Gayle’s face. Her left hand kneaded her thigh. “She had problems,” she said quietly. “She was in an accident when she was younger and never quite recovered.”
“An . . . accident?”
Suddenly, Gayle put her head in her hands. “My husband and I are dying to be parents again,” she said with urgency. “Please let us have the baby. We can give you fifty thousand dollars cash for your trouble.”
Emily felt a palpable jolt of surprise. “Fifty thousand dollars?” she repeated. That could pay for all four years of college. She wouldn’t have to swim on scholarship every year. She could take a gap year and travel the world. Or she could donate it all to charity, to other babies who wouldn’t have an opportunity like this one.
“Maybe we can work something out,” Emily said quietly.
Gayle’s face twitched. She let out a whoop of joy and wrapped her arms around Emily tight. “You won’t regret this,” she said.
Then she jumped up, rattled off information on how they would meet again in a few days, and was gone. The darkness swallowed Gayle up entirely. Only her laugh lingered, a haunting cackle that echoed through the woods. Emily sat on the bench for a few more minutes, watching the long, bright line of traffic on the 76 expressway in the distance. She wasn’t left with a feeling of comfort, as she’d hoped. Instead, she just felt . . . weird. What had she just done?
A single pipe-organ note echoed through the church hall. Father Fleming lifted a jade paperweight on his desk and put it back down. “I can only imagine how much of a burden this has been for you. But it sounds like you did the right thing, giving the child up to a family who really wanted her.”
“Uh huh.” Emily’s throat itched, a sure sign she was about to cry.
“It must have been hard to give her up,” Father Fleming went on. “But you’ll always be in her heart, and she’ll always be in yours. Now, what about the father?”
Emily jolted up. “What about him?”
“Does he know about this?”
“Oh my God, no.” Emily’s face felt hot. “He and I broke up long before I knew I was . . . you know. Pregnant.” She wondered what Father would think if he knew that the dad was Isaac, one of his parish members. Isaac’s band had played at quite a few church functions.
Father Fleming folded his hands. “Don’t you think he deserves to know?”
“No. Absolutely no way.” Emily shook her head vehemently. “He would hate me forever.”