The doctors prescribed patience, vitamins, iron supplements. Another pregnancy came; this time it was nearly ten weeks before the bleeding began. Mrs. McCullough cried at night, and after she fell asleep, her husband cried beside her. After three years of trying, she had been pregnant five times, and there was still no baby. Wait six months, the obstetrician recommended; let your body recover. When the waiting period was up, they tried again. Two months later she was pregnant; a month later, she was not. Each time she told no one, hoping that if she sealed the knowledge tight inside her, it would stay and grow. Nothing changed. By then her old friend Elena had a girl and a boy and was pregnant with a third, and though Elena called often, though she would happily have taken Linda into her arms and let her cry—as they’d done so often for each other growing up, over big things and small—Mrs. McCullough found this was something she could not share. She never told Elena when she was pregnant, so how could she tell her the pregnancy had ended? She did not even know how to begin. I lost another one. It happened again. Whenever they had lunch, Mrs. McCullough could not keep herself from staring at Mrs. Richardson’s rounding belly. She felt like a pervert, she so badly wanted to touch it, to stroke it, to caress it. In the background, Lexie and Trip babbled and tottered, and it became easier, after a while, to simply avoid it all. Mrs. Richardson, for her part, noticed that her dear friend Linda called her less, that when she herself called, she often got the machine—Mrs. McCullough’s cheery voice singing, “Leave a message for Linda and Mark, and we’ll call you back!” But no one ever did.
The year after Izzy was born, Mrs. McCullough became pregnant again. By then it was exhausting: the plotting of her cycle, the waiting, the calls to the doctor. Even the sex—carefully scheduled for her most fertile days—had begun to feel like a chore. Who’d ever have believed it, she thought, remembering high school, when she and Mark had fumbled frantically against each other in the backseat of his car. The doctors put her on strict bed rest: no more than forty minutes a day on her feet, including trips to the bathroom; no exertions. She made it to almost five months before she woke at two A.M. with a terrible stillness in her belly, like the silence after a bell has stopped ringing. At the hospital, while she lay in a drugged fog, the doctors coaxed the baby from her womb. “Do you want to see her?” one asked when it was over, and a nurse held out the baby, swaddled in a white cloth, in her cupped palms. To Mrs. McCullough, she looked impossibly tiny, impossibly rose colored, impossibly glossy and smooth, like something blown from pink glass. Impossibly still. She nodded vaguely, shut her eyes again, spread her legs to let the doctors stitch her up.
She began to walk the long way around to the store to avoid the playground, the elementary school, the bus stop. She began to hate pregnant women. She wanted to slap them, to throw things at them, to grab them by the shoulders and bite them. On their tenth wedding anniversary, Mr. McCullough took her to Giovanni’s, her favorite restaurant, and as they entered, a vastly pregnant woman waddled up behind them. Mrs. McCullough pushed the door open and then, as the pregnant woman came up behind, let it shut in the woman’s face, and Mr. McCullough, turning back to take his wife’s arm, for a moment could not recognize this woman, so callous, so different from the endlessly maternal woman he’d always known.
Finally, after one last doctor’s appointment full of heartrending phrases—low-motility sperm; inhospitable womb; conception likely impossible—they’d decided to adopt. Even IVF would likely fail, the doctors had advised them. Adoption was their best chance for a baby. They’d put their names on every waiting list they could find, and from time to time an adoption agent would call with a possible match. But something always fell through: the mother changed her mind; a father or a cousin or a grandmother showed up out of the blue; the agency decided another, often younger couple was a better fit. A year passed, then two, then three. Everyone, it seemed, wanted a baby, and demand far exceeded supply. That January morning, when the social worker had called to say that she’d gotten their name from one of the adoption agencies, that she had a baby who was theirs if they wanted her: it had felt like a miracle. If they wanted her! All that pain, all that guilt, those seven little ghosts—for Mrs. McCullough never forgot a single one—had, to her amazement, packed themselves into a box and whisked themselves away at the sight of baby Mirabelle: so concrete, so vivid, so inescapably present. Now, at the thought that Mirabelle might be taken as well, Mrs. McCullough realized that the box and its contents had never disappeared, that they had simply been stored away, waiting for someone to open the lid.
The news had cut to commercial, and through the line Mrs. Richardson could hear the tinny jingle of the Cedar Point ad on the McCulloughs’ set, a fraction of a second behind her own. She watched an elderly woman stumble, fall, fumble for the transmitter around her neck, and Barbra Pierce’s voice-over echoed in her mind. This couple wants to adopt her child. But she won’t let her baby go without a fight.
“It’ll blow over,” Mrs. Richardson said to Mrs. McCullough now. “People will forget about it. It’ll pass.”
But it did not pass. Improbable as it seemed, something about the story had touched a nerve in the community. The news was slow: a woman had had septuplets; bears, the New York Times reported with a straight face, were the main cause of car break-ins at Yosemite. The most pressing political question—for a few more weeks, at least—was what President Clinton would name his new dog. The city of Cleveland was safe and bored, and eager for a sensation a bit closer to home.
On Friday morning there were two more camera crews at the McCulloughs’ door, and three segments that evening, on Channels 5, 19, and 43. Footage of Bebe Chow holding a picture of May Ling at one month old, pleading for her baby back. Shots of the McCulloughs’ house with its curtains drawn and front-door light off; a photo of Mr. and Mrs. McCullough, dressed in black tie at a benefit for leukemia, that had run in the glossy society pages of Shaker magazine the year before; footage of Mr. McCullough’s BMW backing out of the garage and driving away as a reporter jogged alongside holding a microphone up to the window.
By Saturday all the camera crews were back, Mrs. McCullough had locked herself in the house with Mirabelle, and the secretaries at Mr. McCullough’s investment firm had been instructed to decline any calls from news sources with “No comment.” Every night Mirabelle McCullough—or May Ling Chow, as some pointedly chose to call her—was a featured story on the evening news, always accompanied by photographs. At first there was only Bebe’s snapshot of May Ling as a newborn, but then—on the advice of the McCulloughs’ lawyer, who wanted to provide a counterpoint—came more recent portraits from the McCulloughs, taken at the Dillard’s photo studio, showing Mirabelle in a frilly yellow Easter dress with bunny ears, or in a pink romper standing beside an old-fashioned rocking horse. Supporters were emerging on both sides, and by Saturday afternoon, a local lawyer, Ed Lim, had offered to represent Bebe Chow, gratis, and sue the state for custody of her daughter.
Saturday evening, at dinner, Mr. Richardson announced, “Mark and Linda McCullough called this afternoon to ask if I’d work with their lawyer. Seems he doesn’t have a lot of court experience, and they thought I might be a good backup.”
Lexie nibbled at her salad. “So will you?”
“None of this is their fault, you know.” Mr. Richardson sawed off a bite of chicken. “They just want to do right by the baby. And the suit isn’t directed at them. It’s at the state. But they’ll be dragged into it, and they’re the ones who’ll be affected by it most.”
“Except for Mirabelle,” Izzy said. Mrs. Richardson opened her mouth for a sharp remark, but Mr. Richardson quieted her with a glance.