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But the CCAA’s dormant state had awakened all sorts of bad memories on the APC about how once before Chinese adoptions had been temporarily suspended. This was the true fear of all the people in the midst of the process: that the Chinese government would suddenly take offense to some event that took place either in our government or our media and turn off the spigot of adoptions.
The delay was because of the increasing strife with Taiwan, one school of thought went. Another opined it was the worrisome increase in numbers of children adopted by foreigners. Still another said, no, none of these. The Chinese government was actively rethinking their one-child policy, since demographics were dooming the country to a population heavily tilted toward males.
In truth, none of us knew anything beyond the fact that we wanted our babies. Or an explanation. Or preferably both. Give us our babies, please, then tack on the whys and the wherefores.
I’d tried to downplay all this to Joe. The last thing I wanted to do was give him any reason to doubt the outcome of the adoption.
WHAT I SAW when I logged onto the APC at home that afternoon left me reeling. Instead of finding the much-coveted referrals, I found the postings of mothers wearing sackcloth and ashes.
It was a reorganization of the CCAA, unexpected, unplanned, unheralded. A moratorium had been placed on all foreign adoptions until the new head of the CCAA could get up to speed. Sorry for all the trouble, we’ll get back on it as soon as possible, nothing to worry about.
Oh, but we did worry. Our worst fear had been realized. It didn’t help that all the major adoption agencies had been caught flat-footed by the news. This was a middle of the night head-rolling no one could have predicted. No one dared speculate when referrals would start flowing again.
It took all the guts I had to tell Joe. He stood on the back porch and just sagged with the news. The only other time I’d seen him go boneless was when I’d told him I had ovarian cancer.
He looked down at the work boots he hadn’t had a chance to pull off. “Do they…do they know how long?”
I blinked back tears and shook my head. “No. I called the agency, and they don’t really know any more than we do. They’re trying their best to be optimistic, but I could tell they were at their wit’s end. I just don’t know, Joe.”
“Anything like this ever happened before?”
“Yeah, a couple of times. One big time before, but usually it’s just a slowdown, you know, something that just gradually creeps up. This, this is kind of odd for the CCAA to do. And it came out of nowhere. No political incidents, no bad-mouthing in the media about Chinese adoptions…nothing.”
“Sounds like some head-honcho over there got in trouble with his higher-ups,” Joe mused.
“Maybe that’s all it is.”
Joe toed the rough boards of the porch. “I’m sorry, Sara. I wish…I wish…”
We ate our supper in silence, my throat closing up with so much grief I could barely swallow. Joe pushed his food around on his plate. He looked as though he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words.
I needed space, time, to process it, to think. The supper dishes in the dishwasher, I climbed the stairs to the nursery.
I sat on the floor, the bifold closet doors wide open. Around me I spread the contents of a box I’d been collecting: vacuum packing bags, a soft yellow baby blanket, tiny packable baby toys and the one and only outfit I’d been able to bring myself to buy for Meredith.
In the solitude, I let tears course unashamedly down my face.
I hated this feeling, this awful, sick envy that gripped me whenever the door on the possibility of children seemed to slam shut. The feeling slept within me like an alien creature. Awakened, it devoured me at its leisure until I could finally loose myself from its grasp.
Joe and I had carefully avoided unprotected sex after we got married. After all, we were both twenty, I was still in college, and Joe had dropped out to work construction on his uncle’s crew. Too young to have a baby on the way.
Plus, Cherie’s presence threw a major monkey wrench in any plans we might have had. I didn’t want to upset the delicate balancing act I’d accomplished; bringing another child into the picture might well have done that.
At twenty-four, though, I was ready to start a family, and Joe had no objections, either. I went off the Pill, bought some frilly little baby clothes and eyed maternity wear.
Two years later, the baby clothes gathered dust in a closet. I hadn’t really worried until I heard a midday radio talk show about infertility. When the expert defined infertility as a year of unprotected sex with no resulting pregnancies, my heart seized in my chest.
I was infertile.
In that moment, I went from being a whole woman to damaged goods. Crazy, I know, but nonetheless true.
That’s when the two of us jumped on the infertility treadmill. I’d go into fertility specialists’ offices and gaze at the wall of baby photos with the awe of someone on sacred ground. These experts would fix me. I knew it.
Only, they hadn’t fixed me.
In their search for an explanation as to why I couldn’t conceive, they’d found a tumor growing in my left ovary—a freak misfiring of genetic chromosomes. Just the way life happened, the way the ball bounced, the way the cookie—and my hopes—crumbled.
Joe told me I was lucky. I was lucky. I was alive. I was a cancer survivor. But I was still damaged goods. Barren. The word is empty and meaningless to anybody who hasn’t ached for a baby.
Being barren made me cry at Mother’s Day services at church.
Being barren made Easter and Christmas and Thanksgiving and even Halloween torture.
Being barren made graduations unbearable, knowing I might never see my baby toss a cap in the air.
Being barren made baby showers unending agony. Picking out the tiny layettes or rattles was only half the battle. No, actually standing in the glow of an expectant, hopeful mom-to-be was far worse, because then I had to endure everyone’s pity. I’d smile and smile and smile at the women who would bend down and whisper, “Are you all right? This must be so tough on you.”
Back home from my surgery, I’d looked in the mirror and seen a thirty-year-old woman. I gathered up my fertility drugs, tossed out the so-called experts’ business cards and gave the dusty baby clothes to Goodwill.
The day after that, Joe brought home Cocoa. We’d decided by silent assent we’d remain childless.
And we’d stuck to that decision—until Joe had seen an ad in the paper about becoming foster parents. Which led us to Matthew.
Now the blue walls of the nursery, with the airplane I’d painted for Matthew, mocked me. No furniture graced the carpet here, and only a set of dusty mini-blinds shut out the night sky. Superstition had kept me from breaking out the pink paint and the cutesy alphabet-block border I’d found. My preparations focused on the trip to China. I didn’t dare let myself picture life with a little one of my own.
The image of a round face with blue eyes, freckles across the nose and a cowlick of wheat-straw hair swam before my tear-filled eyes. I would not think of Matthew. I would not.
Now Joe thumped up the creaky old stairs, and I hastily scrubbed my tears away with the baby blanket.
“I figured I’d find you in here.” Joe’s voice echoed in the bare room. “You okay?”
“Yeah. I’m getting there.” With the heel of my hand, I caught a stray tear. “How about you?”
He slid down along the doorjamb until he collapsed onto the carpet, his long legs stretched out in front of him. “Hell if I know. Just numb, I guess.”
“Oh, Joe…” His vulnerability, his pain, shone through loud and clear for the first time. I got up and crossed to his side, touching his face. “We’ll get through this. It’s just a setback. It’s hard, but it’s happened before. We’ll get our baby.”
An expression I couldn’t translate—didn’t want to translate—flickered over Joe’s face.
“What?” I asked. “Go ahead. Say it.”
“You. The eternal optimist. Haven’t seen a whisper of a referral in weeks, even the agency can’t tell you when they might start coming again, and yet you keep holding out hope the phone’s gonna ring and they’re going to say, ‘Come to China, we’ve got your baby.’”
I snatched my hand back as if his cheek had suddenly turned scalding. Folding my arms across my chest, I lifted my chin. “And who’s to say it’s still not going to happen?”
Joe shook his head. “Incredible. You are just the most incredible woman I know. Don’t you see the writing on the wall, Sara? What’s it gonna take? Our agency finally calling you up and saying, ‘Oops, guess we made a mistake?’ Don’t you know they’re not going to do that for as long as they can get away with it? They don’t want to let loose the money everybody’s been sending them.”
“You’re incredible. Incredibly cynical! These agencies are not in it for the money, Joe. They want to see these babies have homes.”
“They’re not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, either. They’re making money. I’m a businessman. I know how business operates. I just don’t want to see you get hurt. It’s happened before. You just pour so much faith that this next idea, this next trick, will get you a baby. All that fertility hogwash, doctor after doctor…and even after you had cancer you still couldn’t be satisfied with just making it out alive.”
I held my breath, prayed he wouldn’t say what I thought he was going to say. “Joe—”
But he plowed on, like a crazed bull in the narrow streets of Spain chasing a legion of white-shirted men. “I thought after they took Matthew you’d finally get it.”
I closed my eyes to ward off the pain, wrapped my arms around my knees and rocked back and forth.
“Sara, isn’t it obvious? Don’t you think we ought to be listening? It’s like God is shouting at us, ‘You idiots! I don’t want you to have a baby!’”
Shaking my head, I forced myself to look at Joe. “No, no. You just have to have faith. You just have to hang on.”
“Hell, maybe God’s right. It’s not like I’ve done a stellar job with Cherie. Remember how you told the social worker that I’d raised my little sister? That I’d make a brilliant father? Right. Brilliant. I did such a brilliant job of it that my little sister is a high school dropout who can’t even keep a minimum-wage job.”
“Joe, Cherie’s failures are not your fault—”
“And you. Your mother wasn’t exactly a great role model. She always cared more about where her next drink was coming from than you. Still does. It’s a miracle you weren’t molested or abused or God knows what else. We’re crazy to think we can raise a child to be something besides a juvenile delinquent.”
I sucked in my breath. How dare he? How dare he throw my own miserable childhood in my face?
“You’ve never had any faith in this, have you? So why’d you go along with it if you thought it was a boondoggle?”
“Because. You. Want. A. Baby. The one damn thing I can’t build for you with my own two hands. If I could, I’d go turn one out on the lathe for you right this very minute. I can’t buy a baby, I can’t borrow it, I can’t make it. Do you know how that makes me feel? To see you crying and to know that I can’t fix it? Me? The guy who goes in behind crappy contractors and cleans up their messes for half the price?”
“We’re fixing it, dammit!” Hearing him say the things I’d suspected he’d been thinking ripped into me like a chain saw. “If you’ll just believe—”
“Right. That’s what you said about Matthew. Believe and the judge will never give him back to that crackhead of a mother. Believe and Matthew will be ours forever. Believe.” Joe’s mouth twisted, and he gave me a curt shake of his head. “Well, I’m all out of faith, Sara. And I can’t find any place to order a fresh supply. I’m through. Done. Finito. I’m just not able to pick up the pieces when the next disappointment shatters you.”
“What do you mean, you’re through?” I put my fingers to my mouth as I whispered the words.
“Admit it, Sara. It’s over. Pull the dossier. Call the agency and tell them we’re quitting. Let’s end this.”
Every cell in my body screamed a visceral no! at his words, but I couldn’t force the words from my throat. All I could do was get away from him. Rubbery legs barely held me up as I stood. My hand steadied me against the door frame as I made for the stairs.
“Where are you going? We haven’t finished!”
Joe had twisted around the door frame so that he faced me. I looked at him, not recognizing anything at all familiar or dear or lovable in his grim, rock-stubborn countenance. “I have. This conversation is done, Joe. I mean it. I’m not stopping the adoption. My baby, my Meredith, is in China. So I’m going to China. With you or without you.”
Nothing more to say, I stumbled down the stairs, my sobs breaking loose in hard heaves.
CHAPTER FOUR
MORNING FOUND US civil, stiff and using the fewest possible words to communicate. It was like Name that Tune had taken over our kitchen.
The night before, I’d bawled my eyes out in our bedroom amid soft, comforting three-hundred-count Egyptian-cotton sheets and the white matelasse coverlet that Joe always called impractical. Part of me had fully expected Joe to tap me on the shoulder, tell me he was crazy, take me in his arms and make sweet apologetic love to me.
The other part, the part that knew love wasn’t all happily-ever-after, wasn’t surprised when he didn’t.
By the time he’d come slinking into our bedroom, my humming anger had overtaken me. I waited until he’d slid tentatively under the covers, careful not to touch me. Then I headed for the computer and the refuge the Chinese adoption boards Yahoo! offered.
With nearly fifteen-thousand members, someone was always awake on the APC. It was the big board, the board where rumors about referral slowdowns and speedups bloomed, cheek by jowl with urban legends about how the CCAA really matched you with your baby.
I logged onto my DTC group first, that small intimate gathering of everyone who had the same DTC date as I did. There, typing furiously, mindless of typos or grammar or anything but relief, I poured out my story.
To my amazement, someone in the group replied almost as quickly as I’d hit the send button.
Oh, you poor dear. (((MerryMom))) Boys are stupid, aren’t they? my electronic angel, KidReady, had given me a big virtual hug. Let me go back and read your post more carefully and I’ll give you MHO. Hey, I saw a ladybug today, that’s got to mean good luck and referrals soon, right?
I sat back and waited for her to give me that humble opinion. We APCers were a superstitious bunch, no doubt about it. We saw portents and signs in almost everything. But with The Wait so long, and without a burgeoning belly to remind us our “pregnancy” was indeed real, we all went a little stir-crazy sometimes. Ladybugs and red threads and a million other nutty but harmless myths kept us occupied.
And who’s to say ladybugs were a myth, anyway?
KidReady’s reply came back in that strange garbled shorthand that had sprung up to save our tired fingers keystrokes.
MerryMom, I say your dh is just as wounded and hurt as you are—as all of us are. He just wants to run like hell before China has a chance to quit on him. If he keeps it up, just apply iron-frying-pan therapy to that hard head of his, that ought to soften him up. He’ll be okay once the referrals come, OK? JMHO.
Tears choked my laughter. I felt a deep kinship with the women on this board—and I didn’t even know what they looked like or how their voices sounded. But they were the only ones who really got what it meant to endure The Wait. Not even Maggie could totally understand. With these women I’d shared deep, dark secrets, given them the speech about our babies being worth The Wait, had cyber baby showers, cyber birthday parties, dried tears, belly-laughed, given out Heinous Husband awards.
Heinous Husband awards. In our sunny kitchen the next morning, staring at Joe’s rigid back, I was ready to paint one in the shape of a bull’s-eye on his blue T-shirt and then loan him out as target practice.
My chin up, my back just as stiff as his, I marched past him and X’d out another day on The Wait calendar with a defiant screech of the marker. Joe looked at me wordlessly, his eyes flat over his coffee mug.
Joe and I hardly ever had serious fights, not like some couples. A couple we were friends with had regular knockdown drag-out rows about every six months or so. They’d send the kids to their grandmother’s and throw down. I could never understand a woman’s complacent acceptance of such a marriage. I didn’t know how your love stayed intact after you’d screamed obscenities at each other.
The one fight we’d had that came close to this one was when I’d had my ovary removed. Joe had lobbied hard for me to have a total hysterectomy, which he thought would eradicate any future chance of cancer. I’d been horrified. Give up any chance at all of having a child? Never.
We’d sulked and pouted and yelled at each other for days. The morning of the surgery, I’d packed my overnight bag and headed to the car by myself. I was two miles down the road when I’d turned the car around and floored it back home.
Joe had been sitting on the front porch of the bungalow we’d lived in then, tears streaming down his face. We’d grabbed onto each other as though we were sliding off a sinking ship. “Don’t ever do that again,” he’d whispered fiercely, burying his face in my hair. “I love you, can’t live without you. Don’t ever, ever do that.”
In the end, he’d decided it was my body and my decision. The hands-off approach had been a tough one for Joe, but he’d gritted his teeth and white-knuckled his way through it.
I wished desperately today was a weekday, not a Saturday. We’d always made it a practice to keep Saturday mornings for just the two of us. This morning, though, I wanted to be anywhere but here.
The telephone’s ring gave me an excuse to escape the silent table. I leapt like a trout to answer it.
“Hey, girl, got any plans today?” Maggie asked me. “How about some serious shopping therapy if you don’t have anything else to do?”
I smiled. Maggie had impeccable timing. I’d called her before Joe got in the night before, just so she could give me a plateful of moral support. Now she was giving me a second helping. “Not really, other than pick up some groceries for Ma. Why? What do you have in mind?”
“I’m heading up to Macon to make a Sam’s run. Wanna come along for the ride?”
Ah, Sam’s, the call of the warehouse store. I shot a guilty look over my shoulder at Joe, who resolutely forked up bites of scrambled eggs and grits and pretended not to listen.
“Sounds tempting. What else do you have planned?”
“Maybe an Olive Garden lunch? And we could go by Bed Bath & Beyond.”
“Ooh, Maggie, you know how to tempt a gal.”
“So we’re on? You can get loose from His Royal Highness?”
“I don’t think that will be a problem in the slightest.”
“Oh,” Maggie said in a knowing tone. “He’s giving you grief?”
“You couldn’t possibly imagine just how much.” I kept my voice cheerful and upbeat so Joe wouldn’t realize I was talking about him.
“Aha, he’s sitting there and you can’t give me the dirt. Gotcha, girl. Sounds like you need to be busted outta there. What do you say I pick you up in about an hour?”
“Sure! I’ll look for you around ten.”
I came back to my breakfast, where the morning’s gloom settled back on us. The pile of eggs on my plate seemed to grow, no matter how much I ate. Joe, too, seemed to have little appetite.
The tension made me sick, but I was on the side of might and right, and I didn’t intend to give even one tiny inch.
An insidious voice in my head whispered just as it had during the night: Maybe he never wanted to adopt. Maybe he’s just been going along to keep the peace. Maybe he’ll never love Meredith. What will you do then?
I pushed my chair back and the thought out of my head. Joe’d come around. Once he saw the referrals start coming in, he’d be okay. That was my Joe.
Over the sound of the running water in the sink, Joe asked, “So, uh, what are your plans for the day?”
I looked at him as he sat at our big dining table. “Nothing special. Have to get groceries. Thought I’d see if Ma needed anything. Maggie just asked if I wanted to go to Macon with her, for a Sam’s run.”
“Oh,” he replied. Another awkward silence stretched between us.
If he could try, so could I. “What about you?”
“Don’t know, really. It’s a beautiful day.”
“Yep.” I nodded, turning the plate in my hand to rinse it before I put it in the dishwasher. I switched off the faucet. “Thinking about doing something outside?”
The house we lived in was a big, low, metal-roofed home Joe’s uncle had built years before. Then, like many contractors, Uncle Bob let it slide into passive neglect while he stayed busy improving other people’s homes. When Joe and I had bought it, we’d replaced the leaky tin roof with a steel one, painted the exterior, gutted the kitchen and sacrificed the tiny formal dining room to make a huge, modern master bath next to our downstairs bedroom.
The big things got done quickly, and I enjoyed my gleaming maple cabinets and the soapstone countertops, as well as the elbow room in the master bath.
Other parts of the house told a different story, though. The carpet in the living room and throughout the tiny upstairs was the same awful shag Uncle Bob had picked up at a close-out sale. The upstairs bathroom looked straight out of the seventies and the yards were still in the throes of an evolution from looking thrown-away to well-tended. Joe’s honey-do jar was overflowing all the time.
“Well, maybe outside would be a good thing.” Joe stood now and stretched, his lean frame reaching up to the ceiling. He yawned.
Maybe he didn’t get any more sleep than I did. My heart thawed a bit. Obviously, his volunteering to work outside and do some of the heavy work was his quiet way of apologizing.
“What are you thinking of doing? I have some day-lilies that need dividing—”
Joe’s frown stopped me. “Nah,” he said. “I don’t really feel like working with the flowers today.”
“Oh. I noticed some of the spindles were loose on the bedroom side of the porch. Maybe you could look at that?”
“Maybe.” The way he dragged out the word so grudgingly made it apparent Joe didn’t feel like home repairs, either. “If I have time.”
Suddenly the man who didn’t have any plans was so pressed for hours in the day that he couldn’t check out wobbly porch spindles? A suspicion grew in my head, bloomed and spread.
“So what exactly will you be doing outside?”
“I think…” he stretched again, popped his knuckles over his head “…think it’s a good day to work on the boat.”
Not an apology after all. Just the boat.
I hated that boat. It was an old rickety wooden boat Uncle Bob had left in the workshop when he and Joe’s aunt had sold the house to us. Uncle Bob had sprung for a fancy aluminum bass boat, so he didn’t have anymore need of something so labor intensive.
The problem with the boat was that a guy couldn’t ever do any work on it by himself. He had to have a buddy for moral support, and Joe’s boat buddy was his best friend, Rick. If they’d actually done anything on the boat, it might be different. But a day spent working on that boat got sucked down into a black hole that devoured any real signs of productivity.
Oh, they sanded the blasted thing and varnished it and patched it and painted it. My credit card bills told me Joe and Rick had bought tons of supplies. But mostly the guys just talked about the boat. To my knowledge, that boat had never been tested for seaworthiness—or lake-worthiness, if that was the proper term—and probably never would. That boat was an excuse for two guys to huddle up and dream up reasons to dash off to buy some tool or gadget or supplies that Joe probably already had.