The World’s Strongest Librarian

  I don’t remember the rest of my interview. My love affair with Stephen King had potentially undone me again.

  “How did it go?” Janette asked.

  “Great!” I said. I did think it went well, other than the King fan letter I’d improvised. I’d been honest. I thought I’d been charming. I’d sold our strong points without shying away from the challenges we’d faced.

  “Okay, so the director of LDS Family Services just called and they want to meet with us next week! I guess our interviews went okay!” Janette said.

  “Oh, that’s great!” The paperwork was done. The home visit had gone well. Our interviews and classes were over. We had apparently prayed enough. We would be “in the system,” meaning that our profile would be available for pregnant mothers to pore over before bestowing their precious gift on us.

  Now we’d wait. Who knew how long? But waiting would be easier than selling ourselves. Waiting isn’t humiliating.

  LDS Family Services felt different on the day of our meeting. Shiny and new and full of hope. The receptionist smiled, asked us to have a seat, and eventually ushered us down a hallway. At the end of that hall I shook hands with a plump, middle-aged man in a white shirt and dark tie. The director. I smiled my most winning smile at him. It seemed like he flinched, but that was surely my imagination.

  “So you’ll finally be graduating next week?” he asked.

  “Yes! I’m so excited! It’s taken ten years but it’s finally done!” It was true! A decade of pecking at classes had gotten me my relatively useless English degree, but I’d finished what I’d started.

  “Yes,” the director said. He ushered us into an office. An unfamiliar woman with white hair and a fat Cosby sweater—despite it being June—sat inside. She rose, shook our hands, and we sat.

  The director cleared his throat and took out a familiar-sized piece of paper. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but at this time we cannot endorse you as candidates for adoption. We will of course refund the thousand dollars that you paid at the beginning of the process.” The check stretched toward me.

  Janette issued a harsh bark of a sob.

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  He shifted in his chair. “There were some red flags in your conversations. Your interviews with our staff.”

  Stephen King, you mean. “You mean the intern that we each spent thirty minutes with?” I said.

  “Yes, that’s correct.”

  I tried to unclench my fists. I couldn’t. I actually couldn’t. Shaun and Maryanne had told us that in the six months before their adoption, they’d had two visits per month with various workers. More or less constant contact. I have no idea if that was true, but that’s what they told us. Beyond our joint interviews, our solo interviews, and the time when someone visited our apartment to make sure that it wasn’t an S and M dungeon, nobody had visited us. Maybe we should have reached out, but we’d had the impression that the process couldn’t be forced. That they initiated the proceedings and we waited at their pleasure.

  I gestured at Janette, who was shaking her head and examining the ceiling. I wondered if anyone had ever grabbed a worker in this nice little office and dashed his brains all over the walls. Things were happening fast, but not so fast that I couldn’t feel afraid of how intense the emotions were. “Can’t you give us an example of these red flags?”

  “I think…that if you’re both honest with yourselves…you’ll admit that you have some work to do. Before we can consider you suitable candidates.”

  “But we did everything right! I finished school! I’m working! I’ve never gotten this much done! I’m starting grad school next week!”

  “Yes, about that,” he said. “Do you really think that’s fair? After all the time Janette has spent supporting you. Now you’re going to do more school?”

  “That isn’t any of your business,” said Janette. She was pointing at him! She sounded pissed. I loved it. Maybe she’d be the one to murder them. They were, after all, standing between her and her child.

  “That’s right,” I said. “And we’ve explained my health to you. If I could’ve done it quicker, I would have.”

  “Josh, you can’t have it both ways,” he said. “You don’t get to joke constantly about Tourette’s—as indicated by our assessments—and claim that it is the source of all your troubles.” He leaned in front of me and placed the check in Janette’s lap. “I understand that you handle the finances,” he said, “so I’ll give this to you.” It was as if he’d planned on being as emasculating as possible.

  “Can’t you…can’t you at least tell us something we could do better?” I asked. I was close to tears. The anger was receding.

  “We just don’t feel that you’re right. Not right now. And if you’re both honest with yourselves, we think—”

  We don’t feel. There it was again. That word. “Feel.” There was subtext here, but given the pristine and pure location, it was pretty much all just text. We’ve prayed about this and received confirmation that meth heads and your insurance-less, lying friends who we gave a baby to, and all the other broken, reckless, irresponsible people who don’t even always want to have kids but get pregnant anyway—they’re all more deserving of this than you. It said that if we had a problem with their decision, we had a problem with God. They worked for God. They received inspiration from God. Were we going to argue with God if God said that we weren’t fit parents?

  I remembered the photo collage we’d made as part of our “sales package.” One picture haunted me: Janette, smiling as I tried to hold the camera still. Does it look like a fake smile? she’d asked. In the picture she’s wearing oven mitts, taking cookies out of the oven, offering a cookie sheet to whoever looks at the picture. See how many cookies your baby will get to eat! “I feel stupid,” Janette had said. “It feels fake.”

  We ate the entire sheet of cookies that night.

  The hoary vassal in the sweater spoke for the first time. She patted Janette’s knee. “Janette, you don’t seem comfortable. You haven’t said anything and it feels like you’re not comfortable talking in front of Josh. We’d love to have you come back and tell your side of the story. Alone.”

  Janette—Janette, I love you more every time I remember this—took the woman’s hand and tossed it aside. “What are you talking about? We’re here together. I’m not talking because I can’t. Stop. Crying. Because you won’t explain!” She handed the check to me and we stood. The man offered his hand. I don’t know why I shook it, but I did.

  “Feel free to try again when your situation is better, Josh,” he said.

  “Our situation has never been better. Get out of my way.”

  In the parking garage Janette put her arms around my neck. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “It’s my fault.” She was shaking.

  “Why would you say that? What could possibly even make you think that?”

  “I messed up in my interview. I told them that sometimes our marriage wasn’t perfect. I told them that it’s been hard sometimes.”

  “So did I. That’s the truth and that’s why we said it.”

  “We should have lied.”

  “No. Not you. Never you.”

  I called my mom. She cried. “That is huge news, I’m so sorry,” she said. She didn’t ask what had gone wrong, or how we (I) had slipped up. She just listened and offered condolences. I didn’t tell her about Stephen King.

  I called my dad. “WHAT! I’m going to go punch my bishop in his fat face and tear up my temple recommend! Call me back later. I’ll—”

  “Dad! Calm down.” My dad was living in Canada that year after taking a short contract with a mine. I can only guess what his bishop would’ve thought when he roared into the room and knocked him about, raving about babies and grandchildren.

  Janette smiled when I told her. By the next evening we were talking about it rationally. I think. We justified our rage and despair. We mocked them and their office. We imitated the intern. But it was all superficial an
d obviously so. It wasn’t even sour grapes. It just felt like we were at the mercy of a process breakdown. They just hadn’t asked us enough questions or spent enough time with us.

  It didn’t matter. Nothing changed the fact that we couldn’t have our own baby. Our last option—a service that provides better lives for unwanted children—had rejected us. We wouldn’t be a better option for a child. We would ostensibly make a child’s life worse. Or so God thought, maybe.

  The day of my graduation was sunny and traffic was hellacious. I rode the bus to the university with Janette, my mom, and my sister Lindsey. After ten years, I was done.

  “I knew you could do it,” said my mom when we arrived.

  I almost said, It didn’t impress them at the adoption agency, but I stayed cheery. After all, I had a mortarboard on my head. My dad said once that it’s impossible to be pessimistic with a breast in your hand. The mortarboard wasn’t as good, but it helped.

  After a speech by a former mayor that was too long, and after the presentation of some awards that went on for too long, and after the applause that went on for too long, I walked down the steps in a line that was too long.

  Someone with gray hair put a diploma in my hand and then I stepped off the stage toward the photographer. Jeff Metcalf, my favorite professor, appeared at my elbow. We’d spent his Young Adult Literature class reading the Alice books and The White Boy Shuffle. “Smile, Josh!” he yelled. “This took you ten damn years!”

  I broke out of the line and hugged him. Then I elbowed my way back into line and stood before an American flag to have my picture taken.

  “Uh…,” said the photographer. “Can you maybe kneel?” Apparently my head, far above the madding crowd of fellow graduates, was out of the frame. You can’t tell in the picture that now sits on my mom’s hearth, but I’m on my knees in the photo.

  I found my family. I hugged my mom, took off the red sash I’d bought at the bookstore, and put it around her neck. Then I grabbed it back and said, “Oh, wait, you have to read it.”

  In black magic marker: To my parents, who held me up when I couldn’t hold on. I wish I knew how to say how much I love you.

  That was in June. During the next year I finished a master’s degree in library science through the University of North Texas. We made our peace with the fact that we couldn’t have kids and we couldn’t adopt.

  “We can travel anytime we want,” I said.

  “We can go to the movies without trying to find a sitter,” she said.

  “I’ll never have to get a vasectomy.”

  “I’ll never lose my figure.”

  And so on, until July 4. “I’m late,” Janette told me that morning. I’d been joking for a year, or trying to joke, that I should write a bestselling book called What to Expect When You’re Expecting a Miscarriage. But I didn’t joke now. We went to a barbecue at her parent’s house and, strangely, we didn’t talk about it again until that evening when we were deciding whether to go see the fireworks.

  “Let’s go to Walgreen’s instead and get a test,” she said. By eleven P.M., we knew that she was pregnant. I laughed. She laughed. We stopped laughing and practiced looking worried. The next day her doctor confirmed what that portentous pink cross on the test had said: Here we went again. Janette was seven weeks along.

  “You know,” I said, “we went on a roller coaster a couple of weeks ago, so the baby would have been five weeks old at that point. That means if it’s still in there, it’s tough.”

  “I don’t know about that, but it’s not like it’s October, so I guess that’s something. I only miscarry in October.”

  “I get it.”

  “I’m just joking.”

  “Okay. My turn. Whose kid is it?”

  In October we were back in the ultrasound room with Gene Wilder. He got out the gel, the wand, and fired up the monitor as we stared at the screen. “Do you want to know?”

  “Josh? Do you want to know?” asked Janette.

  “Seriously? You know I want to know, but it’s up to you.”

  “Okay, tell us.”

  The doctor squinted, moved the wand around, and set the alien gray landscape of the womb a-churning. He’d performed all of the ultrasounds for us except for the one where the heartbeat had stopped. Maybe that was that poor technician’s only job: telling people it was over. “Give me a second. Okay, do you see that? Can you tell what you’re looking at?”

  “No,” I said. “It all just looks like…wait.” There, relaxing as if it hadn’t a care in the world, was a tiny body. Now that I’d seen it, I didn’t know how I’d missed it. It wasn’t a blip or a blob. Not a gray speck or the absence of a heartbeat. It was a tiny body, with a head, two legs, two arms—well, one arm that I could see—and—

  “It’s a boy,” said the doctor.

  “Ow!” Janette was pinching the fleshy part of my thumb between her own thumb and forefinger. I yanked my hand away, then gave it back to her. “It’s a boy! We’ve got a boy!” I yelled. We laughed like idiots and she cried and I shook the doctor’s hand harder than he liked and then he said, to distract me, “Did you see that?”

  “What?”

  He tapped the screen. “He moved.”

  He!

  Then I saw it. The little body curled up its legs and turned its head slightly, abruptly. “That was a tic,” I said without thinking.

  “Josh,” Janette said.

  I looked at her. “I just…he might— We don’t know.”

  “Josh, it’s a boy! That’s your son.”

  “He looks like a strong one,” said the doctor.

  I wanted to name him Ajax, but I couldn’t tell Janette why. She knew Ajax Hanagarne was badass, but she wouldn’t have wanted to hear me say, “Ajax was the only one in the war who didn’t need the help of the Greek gods.”

  This was the weird thing: I was grateful that a pregnancy had finally taken, but I didn’t know whom to thank. I think my sporadic church attendance and apathetic attempts at prayer over the last year had more of an effect than I’d realized. Sometimes I felt that this pregnancy had worked because I hadn’t prayed for help. That didn’t make sense, but I couldn’t keep it out of my head.

  About the labor itself I’ll say only this: That is serious business. I’m glad I was there but I don’t know how women can handle it. The nurses kept watching me as if I was going to faint or something, but I was fine. I just held Janette’s leg up in the air, did what they told me to do, and marveled at how much she was sweating.

  And there he was, being placed on Janette’s chest.

  Max had only been out for about five minutes before I couldn’t imagine life without him. Nothing before that moment when the nurse placed that pointy-headed little boy in my arms felt real.

  “I’m your dad,” I said.

  Everything before that moment felt like another person’s memories.

  “I love you, Max.” There was something in my life that I knew I would die and kill for without hesitation. It was empowering and terrifying and humbling.

  “Thank you for this,” Janette said to me.

  Four weeks later we took Max to church for the first time so I could give him a blessing. This involves male friends or family members—at the proud new father’s invitation—standing in a circle as the father holds the child and ad libs a map of the child’s life. Between me, my dad, a couple of uncles, and my brother, it was a huge circle of massive men.

  “Max Lewis Hanagarne,” I said, “in the name of Jesus Christ, I hold you in my arms to give you a blessing.” I said a bunch of things, but only remember this:

  “I bless you with a mind more agile than mine. I bless you with the courage to be whoever you want to be, and to do whatever you want to do, and know you’ll have our support. When you need guidance, I bless you with the ability to look to the women in your family, not the men. We love you more than we can say”—now my voice was shaking—“and we’re so happy you’re here.”

  I noticed that my dad smiled
. He knew I was right. There are good men in my family, but we’re more erratic and impulsive and unreliable than the women.

  Back home, in my armchair, holding my tiny boy, I realized that I was sitting completely still so that he wouldn’t wake up. I knew that I could sit still for hours without twitching just to watch him sleep.

  Max was another place of sanctuary. Misty couldn’t come near him.

  * In 2012, citing “differences of vision” with Dragon Door’s CEO, Pavel abruptly left the Russian Kettlebell Challenge. From the resulting online hysteria, you’d have thought this was an event akin to Martin Luther nailing his ninety-five theses to the door of that church. The great schism of our time!

  CHAPTER 10

  027.8—Libraries and Education

  92—Strong Men—United States—Biography

  006.7—Blogs

  828—George Orwell

  Now that I was assistant manager at the Day-Riverside branch of the Salt Lake City Public Library, I’d attend two community council meetings each month. I didn’t know what community councils did, but my boss said that I’d love the meetings. He was positively gleeful about it. My only hint of what might lie in store was a rumor: And the manager didn’t set the chairs up right for community council and the Council Chair, a nice little old lady, slapped her good.