“Are you ready to scootch?” Edward asked Sarah.
“I so am,” she said.
Edward twisted back toward me. “That’s Sarah’s idea of the quintessential mom word: scootch. Scootch over. Scootch in. Everybody’s gotta scootch and the moms are the scootch directors.”
“That’s right,” said Sarah.
“I can kind of see that,” I said, sounding doubtful rather than agreeable as I’d intended. Sarah turned the car off, checked her reflection quickly in the rearview mirror, scrutinizing her teeth in case they were dotted like dice with the scorched remnants of breakfast, then opened her door. The driveway was shoveled, and we all scootched out. The slam of our doors all in a row made me think of a squad car pulling up and the cops hopping out and going cautiously for their guns. Sarah was first to the porch, eager and businessy, and rang the bell. Edward and I were still trailing behind her like the rookies. She was already standing with the storm door propped open against her shoulder. She was loosening her scarf. When the white wooden door of the McKowens’ opened, she removed her hat, which had pom-poms on its ties. She quickly, unnecessarily poofed up her hair. “Hi, I’m Sarah Brink,” she said, and thrust out her hand. “We’re here to see the baby?”
The woman who answered the door was large and blond and seemed to have a bit of a limp as if one hip were stiff, though all she was doing to suggest this was shifting her weight in the doorway. “Nobody told us anyone was coming,” she said tersely.
“Roberta Marshall said she made the appointment,” said Sarah as we pulled up behind her.
“Who’s that?”
“She’s with Adoption Option?”
“No, we’re a foster family for Catholic Social Services, and no one has called us about this at all.”
“Oh, dear.” Sarah turned and looked at Edward, her eyes welling a little. I was getting this strange kidnapper feeling and wanted either to run for it, clear to Canada, or to bust in there and grab somebody. I hadn’t eaten breakfast, and I had to calm my mind.
Everyone stood there breathing and no one knew what to do at all. The woman in the doorway was studying us closely. I wondered what we looked like to her. Overeducated, well-preserved liberal types from Troy with their college-age daughter. Or some kinky ménage à trois. Also from Troy. To the rest of the state, Troy was the city from which all kink and pretentious evil sprang. I often thought of it that way myself.
The woman at the door, Mrs. McKowen, sighed, as if defeated. “I don’t know why they call them organizations. They are all just a mess.” She widened the aperture between door and doorjamb. “Well, you’re here, so you might as well come on in and see Mary.”
“Mary?” Sarah hadn’t bothered asking about a name — she clearly had her own name picked out and Mary wasn’t it.
“The little girl. You do want to see her, don’t you?”
“Oh, of course. This is my husband, Edward,” Sarah said hurriedly, “and our friend Tassie.” I nodded at Mrs. McKowen and she squinted at me a little, clearly wondering who the hell I could be.
We walked into a living room with yellow walls, a green rug, and a brown plaid couch. The television was blaring morning TV. Brightly colored plastic blocks and inexpensive cloth animals, fuzzy and fresh — a caterpillar and a bumblebee — were scattered on the floor. There was a teenage girl hovering in the back doorway to the unlit kitchen, and she just watched us without saying anything. The baby Mary was dressed in a pale mint green one-piecer, the feet of which had been cut off so she could fit into it. She was too big for such clothing. She was not really a baby at all but looked almost two, yet she was still in a wheeled plastic walker, which was placed in front of the television, which she was watching. Just some crap talk show, it looked like to me—“So you left him because he wouldn’t take his Zoloft?” a well-coiffed woman was asking another on the TV screen — not even a program for children. Mrs. McKowen came in and flicked it off. “Mary, look, you’ve got some visitors!” The little girl turned in her conveyance and gave us a full-lipped smile. Her teeth were tiny white shells. She had silky dark hair, skin that was a mix of biscuit and taupe, and eyes that were black and bright: she looked like a savvy Indian rug merchant. She flung her arms in the air to be lifted. The walker she treated sort of like a little office. And now she wanted out.
“Hey, baby,” said Sarah, picking Mary up, but the child’s feet were caught in the walker’s canvas leg holes and the whole contraption lifted as well, a little disastrously, and Sarah could not untangle Mary’s feet, and Mary began to cry.
“Oh, dear, that thing is caught on her,” said Sarah. I stepped forward to help, and to his credit Edward did, too, and we pulled the walker off the child, but by this point Mary was crying for Mrs. McKowen and wriggling in Sarah’s arms, trying to get away.
“Oh, Mary, come here, child,” said Mrs. McKowen, and she took Mary from Sarah and comforted her. Mrs. McKowen looked back at Sarah drily. “Do you have experience with children?”
“She’s a little old for that thing,” Sarah said, trying not to sound flummoxed.
“Why don’t you all have a seat?” said Mrs. McKowen, and we quickly did. The teenage girl in the shadows remained there. Sarah was next to Mrs. McKowen, who sat the now calm Mary in her lap. Edward sat in a chair near the TV. I noticed that he miscalculated social distances, and it was an impediment to his charm. He was either too close or too far away. Eighteen inches, I read once, was exactly the right distance, but he seemed never there, even metaphorically. Now he was mostly far and still.
“Do you want to say hi to your visitors?” said Mrs. McKowen to the toddler. “You want to go to your new mama?”
“Mama?” said the little girl, and she twisted around toward the teenager still hanging back in the shadows. This sudden attention caused the teenager to disappear entirely. And that’s when it became clear that the teenage girl was the one raising this child. Mrs. McKowen was taking in the support money, and the teenager, who perhaps had no life beyond this faux motherhood, was about to have her heart broken in a new and different way for teenagers. “Mama?” cried Mary again, looking in the direction of the dark kitchen. I guessed that the girl had secretly, quietly encouraged Mary to call her “Mama.”
“Hey, baby?” began Sarah, ingratiatingly, and the little girl looked at Sarah.
Thus began their tentative approaches toward each other. Each was playful and affectionate. Sarah scootched closer and made her fingers crawl like a spider up the little girl’s arm. The little girl smiled and hunched her shoulders up by her ears and said, “Neck,” indicating that she both did and didn’t want to be tickled there, so Sarah both did and didn’t, getting the mix just right. And soon Mary was on Sarah’s lap and playing with her watch and touching her opal earrings and Sarah was making the goofy sounds and talking in the high-pitched agitated and ingratiating voice that adults around babies did naturally if ridiculously because look, see, it worked.
The hovering teenage girl in the doorway seemed to step backwards, into an actual engulfing shadow or perhaps a china closet. This seemed to loosen the tongue of Mrs. McKowen, who began to exhibit that midwesternism of tone that was the opposite of what was typically aimed for even in a city like Troy, where friendly things—Hello, Can I help you? — were said with acerbity and anger in the cadence. Here, as in the country where I grew up, very provocative things were said with an innocuous lilt. Tone was all. Gift wrap was all. Perfect the wrap, and you could put whatever you wanted in the box. You could put firecrackers. You could put dog shit.
“So,” said Mrs. McKowen, “have you met the birth mother?”