Ed King

  “Just terrific,” she answered.

  The sarcasm worried him, and his worry deepened when she crossed her thin arms—one with its hospital ID band askew—and shook her head as though her disgust with everything, but mainly him, was total.

  “I’m sorry,” he told her, once again. “It’s sad for me, too. It’s really, really sad, actually.”

  Diane’s sigh, on hearing this, was of the never-ending variety, and left him feeling, on top of worried, blue. Blue because this had to be the darkest day of her young life, and that he had a role in it—the main role, in fact—made him feel so sick about himself his eyes filmed. “Stop blubbering,” Diane said. “There’s still, you know, the forty-eight hours. The two days I have to change my mind.”

  Walter’s stomach clenched. “I don’t know,” he said, in a panic. “I don’t think you can change your mind at this point. I’m not too sure about that.”

  Diane pulled up her knees and hung on to them. “Of course I can,” she said. “Forty-eight hours. There is a law that says I have forty-eight hours.”

  “True,” said Walter, “but that’s just because people get emotional. They see the baby and they get emotional and then they lose objectivity, Diane, they get all embroiled and they can’t see straight, and for women—this is true—their hormones get stirred up. It’s just not a good time for anyone to be making a decision about anything, it’s really not.”

  “It’s actually vice versa, Walter. You don’t know what you really want until your emotions come into play.”

  This didn’t sound too teen-agerish to him—its maturity was curious, even startling—but was that important right now? The whole thing just couldn’t disintegrate like this, not when he was so close to slipping out of it. “Diane,” he said, “come on, please. There’s a family out there expecting a baby. There’s more than just yourself to think about.”

  “That’s ironic,” Diane pointed out. “You telling me there’s more than just myself to think about.”

  “Listen,” said Walter, “I’m not a bad guy. I understand what you’re saying about emotions. Your point of view is completely valid, but this just isn’t the time.”

  “It is precisely the time,” Diane countered. “It’s the forty-eight hours I’ve been allotted to reconsider. Walter, if you were named as the father—yes?—then you might call this a discussion between two people who both have a hand in a decision. But—Walter—you are not named. You might be the father, but you are not named. If you were named, then the two of us might be deciding this together, but you’re not, so just stay out of it. I mean it.”

  “I’m not Norwegian, but Lydia is,” said Walter, “and this is a really good time to say uff da.” With that he fell, hard, into a chair.

  “Lydia who?” asked Diane.

  Now what? A counselor? Someone from the adoption agency? More money? All of those were bad ideas.

  Walter repaired to the hospital cafeteria, intending to see if a late burger and fries would help him think about what came next. But when his burger was gone, there was still no solution, so he returned to the buffet line for butterscotch pudding, and, while eating it, made a list of options under the headings “pro” and “con.” Should he go back and argue? Try to reason with Diane? Remind her of her dream to go to college someday, which probably wouldn’t happen if she kept the baby? Should he offer something? Ask what she wanted? Ask her, flat out, what it would take, in cash, to get her to keep to their plan? How about pushing the morality angle? He could already hear himself, he practiced a little: You’re giving the child a better life. Nope. When you promise someone something, make an agreement with people, you have a moral obligation to keep to your word—but no, that wouldn’t wash, either.

  This Diane Burroughs was a tough little bird, but he’d known that from the first—ever since they’d played Life together. Clever and immune to manipulation. Always watching, thinking, weighing. What would she respond to when push came to shove, this girl who hailed from a gritty slice of England? He didn’t have a clue. He couldn’t tell.

  Feeling hopeless, but armed with peanut-butter cookies, he returned to Maternity to plead his case. What Diane really liked were snickerdoodles, soft in the middle and doused heavily with cinnamon, but there were none of those, not even approximations, so peanut-butter cookies would have to do, delivered by a supplicant named Walter. “Eat one,” he said. “They’re not snickerdoodles, but they’re good.” Diane, in answer, glared, shook her head, and then, with clear disgust, said, “Please, Walter.”

  He retreated to a chair underneath her room’s mounted television. Diane had been watching a serial drama he wasn’t familiar with—about rich people and their alluring money—with curious avidity, he thought, given the pressing real-life matters at hand. How could she do that? He could never do that. “There’s something,” he said, getting up to take a cookie, “that I want you to have a little think about.”

  “And what might that be?” asked Diane.

  “Just this,” said Walter. “Try doing this. Try seeing yourself, I don’t know, a year from now, then three, five, ten years out. Try asking yourself what things might look like.”

  “What for?”

  “It’s a good exercise. I do it all the time. Humor me, Diane. Bear with me.”

  Diane shrugged her wonderful, girlish shoulders. “Ten years,” said Walter, “snap, like that. And now you’re twenty-six—okay?—with a ten-year-old kid in your life.”

  “Is your point that you know how to add up, Walter?”

  Walter threw up his hands, one of which had a cookie in it. “Is that what you want when you’re twenty-six? I’m thirty-four, and I can tell you, you don’t. What you want to do—what you tell me you want to do—is attend a good American college and really make something of your life.”

  “That would be good, but—”

  “Listen,” said Walter. “Do yourself a favor. Don’t decide anything at the moment, okay? Just do that, please. For your own good, Diane. Rest, watch TV, get a good night’s sleep, then let’s get together and have a talk about your future. A really good talk, you and me.”

  She didn’t reply. She didn’t even look at him. “Diane,” he said, “you have to believe me when I say to you that, whatever you decide, you can count on my support. If it’s college, I’ll help. If it’s not, I’ll help, too. I’m not going to shirk my duties, believe that. I only want beautiful things for you.”

  And how did she react to this? To this fresh reinforcement of his genuine sincerity? To his grasping, once again, at the straw of his own decency? She reacted by saying, “Not again, Walter. Please, not again. Please don’t feed me that stale line.”

  The next day, to his overwhelming relief, Diane decided to stay the course. Who knew why? It didn’t matter why. Baby Doe, without a doubt, was going to be adopted, and he, Walter, was going to go home, like a sailor who’d been on a long sea voyage that included sharks, scurvy, pirates, a typhoon, and a broken mast en route.

  “Diane,” he said, “I think you’re doing the right thing in a situation where, really, there’s no right thing, only lesser evils and greater evils, and that’s the problem with life, for me—it doesn’t always go the way I think it should, it’s not always under my control.”

  He thought he was speaking to her from the same corner of the ring, or from a page they shared, but Diane held her gut as if sickened by his observations and said, “I don’t need a lecture, Walter.”

  “Okay.”

  “Your problem with life—it’ll have to wait.”

  “I see that.”

  “I’m incapable of talking about your problems right now.”

  “Let’s not talk about them.”

  “The deal is, Walter, you’re the definition of a wanker. You need to understand this: you are a wanker. Wanker, okay? What’s the American? Just look it up. Wanker.”

  “I’ll look it up,” he said gruffly, and left.

  Exhausted, he called Lydia from “Baltimore
.” “I’m worn out,” he said, “and looking forward to getting home. I’m really, really looking forward to getting home.”

  But he couldn’t go home. Not quite yet. There was one more night of this mire to be endured, and of watching motel television with a headache. He felt buoyed, though, because the whole thing was nearly over—all of it except for the blackmail part, the paying-through-the-teeth part, the arm-and-the-leg part that there was nothing to be done about. But the dangerous part, the heart-soul-and-life-rending part, Walter believed that was done.

  That night, Walter dreamed. He dreamed he was standing in the Newborn Viewing Area watching Baby Doe through glass. Then a nurse appeared, plucked up Baby Doe, brought him to the window, and displayed him for Walter’s benefit. “The logical thing would be to kill him now,” she said through the pane.

  In the morning, Walter mulled this while he shaved. “Interesting,” he thought, “but dreams aren’t valid. They have no legitimacy. They’re just strangeness while you sleep. A dream is just your brain with its signals crossed. Oh well, so there you have it. Another weird dream. It’s meaningless.”

  Walter checked out and returned to Maternity, where Diane and Baby Doe, he found, were gone. They’d left the hospital—but that couldn’t be. What was she thinking? What was going on? “Oh no, no, no,” thought Walter, and called the adoption agency. He was put on hold twice, passed along twice, until the director informed him that she knew already. She’d gotten in touch with the prospective adoptive family, and the prospective adoptive family was opting out for reasons it wasn’t obligated to divulge, but also didn’t mind, in these circumstances, divulging—namely, that the birth mother had had a change of heart, and they didn’t want a birth mother who couldn’t let go, and also, what about the birth mother’s state of mind right now, how was she treating the baby? There were too many danger signals.

  The beater car was gone from the hospital parking lot. It was the middle of April—a chilly wind, stirred pollens. Walter scratched his head and weighed his choices. He could just go home and take what fate dealt him, or not go home, never go home, or—“Wait,” he thought. “What am I doing? How many times am I going to do this? What have I gotten from evaluating options? Look where it’s gotten me—to this, right now. God, what a misery it’s been, and what a breath of fresh air it would be if somehow, some way, I could just live again, free of all these problems.”

  He sat in his car feeling cheated by Diane, and banging his hand against the steering wheel. “I navigated so carefully through everything,” he thought. “I did everything right. I did everything I could. And look at me now, I’m sitting here like an idiot. And now I’m thinking about sitting here like an idiot. And I don’t have a reason to start my car. What would I do? Where would I go?”

  Diane, he remembered then, had only a little money—whatever she’d saved from the cash he’d bled. It couldn’t be much. Maybe enough for a few motel nights, but then what? She didn’t have an income. She had a new baby, and—she had Walter over a barrel. “That’s the key,” he thought. “That’s the main thing. She has me on the hook for three hundred a month. Why would she run away from that? She wouldn’t run away from that. No way is she running away from that. Why didn’t I think of this? If I just sit back, I’ll hear from the little minx—she’ll call me at the office and soak me good.” In fact, he saw, she would soak him good indefinitely, milk him for whatever she thought he was worth. He was going to be paying through his teeth for a long time, that was just the way it turned out.

  Walter drove to the final station in his journey: the Northgate Shopping Center, for gifts. For Lydia, Chanel No. 5; for Barry, the Lego Town Plan Set; and for Tina, the Happy Hippo, with a movable mouth and springy tail. Wonder of wonders, he felt buoyant walking the mall, amazed by Planet Earth and its intricacies, and by the singularity in all that had happened, and that night, at home, in bed with Lydia, he performed adequately, maybe even better. Afterward he even felt ready to turn over a new leaf, and prepared to live with himself.

  As he’d predicted, Diane called him Monday morning at Piersall-Crane. In a disembodied voice, as though reading from a script, she gave him instructions the way a kidnapper would give instructions: how much money she wanted—250 now, monthly, because of the kid—the date each month she wanted it, the post-office box in Portland where he had to send it, what would happen if he tried to play games or manipulate things or send money late or not send enough money or claim that this or that, an emergency or something, had gotten in the way of sending it even once. “You’re being blackmailed,” Diane advised him sternly. “If you don’t follow through or hold up your end, all right, then, I’ll pick up the phone and—what’s her name again?—that’s right, Lydia. I’ll call Lydia. Lydia, you wanker. And no more apologizing,” said Diane, “because I’ve had enough of your apologizing.”

  “I’ve got it,” said Walter. “But just one thing. Two hundred fifty a month? That sounds like a heck of a lot of money, maybe more than—”

  “Listen,” she hissed. “I didn’t call to negotiate—that’s not what’s going on here. Do you think I’m one of your stupid clients? This is the girl you got up the duff, Walter, this is me, Diane Burroughs, calling on behalf of your illegitimate son. This is about your son, you bloody arse, and what I want is more than reasonable when you think of it in terms of child support.”

  He couldn’t argue and didn’t argue. It wasn’t his show: he could see that. So instead he said—after peeking into empty adjoining cubicles—that he only wanted the best for her, that he had never wanted anything but the best for her, and that, no matter what, he would always do his part. In short, he fed Diane the same lines he’d fed her for months, which, it turned out, had gotten him exactly nowhere. “Shut up,” said Diane, “and send the money.”

  After putting down the receiver, Walter shook his head for a long time. “I’m an idiot,” he thought. “What just happened? And the whole time I thought I was smarter than her! Come on, Walter, clean up your act. Get a grip, buddy. Grow up—it’s time. You’re lucky this mistake didn’t blow up in your face. Lucky to get out of it alive.”

  2

  Candy Dark

  Certain nurses in Diane’s maternity ward doubled as self-appointed counselors. If a nurse was prone to even ordinary sympathies, much might incite her in those halls of extremes—stillbirth, say, or a pregnancy that ended in sterility, or a newborn with a handicap or harelip. Often it was just the birth of a baby whose mother hadn’t meant to get pregnant; on other occasions the mother held in her arms the product of her rape. Then there were the girls like Diane Burroughs, children who’d been kept under wraps until the end of their interludes as embodiments of shame. The maternity nurses all knew that poor, waifish Diane had to give up her son and not see him again—ever. That she’d have to wonder, for the rest of her life, where he was and how he was faring. That she’d yearn for him. That she’d entertain fantasies about boys she saw who called him to mind. The toddler glimpsed in tow at Sears, the teen-ager mowing a lawn on the next block, the excellent young actor in the community-theater production of Our Town—all of them might be, in her head, her son. It was hard for most of the nurses in the ward not to sympathize with Diane, or, for that matter, with many new mothers. They couldn’t keep themselves from holding hands, doling out tissues, listening with the private conviction that there was more to their work than medicine, and talking to new mothers with the sense that, like Florence Nightingale, they were ladies with lamps.

  In Diane’s case, the lady with the lamp was named Nurse Carol, so it was Nurse Carol who succumbed to Diane’s appeal, four hours before Baby Doe’s adoptive family was to arrive, for an hour with her son. One hour and then Diane would be done and could start putting her loss behind her. One hour just to hold her baby so she could remember his face, his smell, his skin; one hour because an hour like that would help her come to terms with what was happening. What could Carol say to such a plea? There was no harm in what Diane
was asking. She went to the ward, plucked up Baby Doe, brought him to Diane, and, after expressing her sorrow and hope, left and shut the door.

  Diane had it all minutely orchestrated. She’d made Walter, the day before, haul her junior suitcase to her beater car and leave it in the trunk beside its larger partner. She’d gotten her things down to where they fit in half a grocery bag. Now all she had to do was wait until things quieted in the hallway. Meanwhile, Diane cooed at Baby Doe. She put her nose to his and said, “Hi there,” softly. She drank him in up close and rocked him. Her son looked rather like her half-brother John—he had John’s constabulary brow, nose, and chin—but his green eyes were more like her half-brother Club’s. Did he look like Club or did he look like John? She hoped he’d be more like Club than John, because John was dense, and Club was charismatic. Who else did he look like? Did he look like her? Diane held him out, carefully, at arm’s length, the better to observe his features while he hung there. She decided that one day he’d have powerful shoulders. Plus, his birth height was in the seventy-fifth percentile, so he was going to be tall, and, she could see—after all, she was his mother—very, very handsome. All of this without forgetting the important point: that she hadn’t planned on being a sixteen-year-old unwedded mum, especially not of a child whose father was Walter Cousins. Nevertheless, she opened her blouse for her son, and let him take her nipple for whatever he could get—she gave him both breasts, and held him with affection. Then, after buttoning up and getting on her coat, she put a folded sweater in her half-full grocery bag, gently set her baby on top of it, and, carrying the bag against her chest, went out to the parking lot.

  Down the road three miles, Diane pulled over in the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant. The coast was clear, so she went to the trunk for a suitcase, emptied it, lined it with her coat, propped it open on the passenger seat, and settled her baby inside. In his intermittently loud company, she drove south, because north lay Canada and, maybe, a border request for her nonexistent driver’s license, and east and west lay, respectively, mountains and water. South it was, then, at a steady, modest clip. Leaving the freeway once for gas, once for nappies, pins, a terry-cloth washcloth, and baby powder, and once for a baby bottle and a quart of milk—which she had no way to warm other than to leave it by the car heater—Diane obeyed every American driving law. When her baby cried, she felt anxious and ill-equipped. Twice she pulled over to put the bottle’s rubber nipple in his mouth, twice to change his nappy and toss his old one in the weeds, and twice to burp him with soft jolts to the back, which she thought was proper technique. Too bad, she thought, that her au-pair year hadn’t included infants. She’d have to do what she thought was right and hope for the best. She turned on the radio, talked to her baby, stroked his head with one hand, and worked the steering wheel with the other, all the while fretting about being pulled over, because, it occurred to her, not only was she driving without a license, she also couldn’t produce a birth certificate if asked, just a passport with an expired visa. What she did have, though, was $250, and a plan.