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“Sorry this is so beat up,” she added.

“It’s OK.”

“Our bedspread is even more lurid than yours,” she confided. “Maybe hunters come here in hunting season. We’re in the Packer Suite, which is green and gold with footballs on the wallpaper. I kept thinking they were walnuts. The balls, I mean. Edward had to clarify.”

“Ha! Well, at least the water pressure’s good!”

“Yes, well, we’ll wait for you in the car out front,” said Sarah, turning to go. Was she trying to keep some irritation out of her voice? Of course! Once again I realized I wasn’t really supposed to go with them to this, but I had forgotten and in my sleepiness had said yes.

In the car they made small talk about the carseat they had just purchased at Sears. It was next to me in the back, still with some plastic around it. “It looks safe,” I said blithely.

“They make them better now,” said Sarah. “The kids are more securely locked in. Kids used to be able to leap out in no time.”

In the hospital lobby, a new transitional foster care person was carrying baby Mary, who was now sporting a hat and had been bundled into a pale blue snowsuit that was perhaps institutionally owned and intended for boys. “Hi, I’m Julie,” said the woman. “I’m a foster parent for Adoption Option. I just fetched Mary here from the CSS foster home — there was a little bit of a scene at the door.” She loosened her hand just slightly from Mary and flapped it toward Sarah like a seal flipper.

“Oh, really,” said Sarah, shaking her hand. “I’m Sarah.”

“Yes, I know. And you must be Edward and you must be Tassie.” She gave us each a nod, still hanging on to Mary.

“A scene?” asked Edward, not letting this go.

“Well, the birth mother had made her decision — she was switching agencies — but this foster family was a little upset. They were reluctant to let the child go, and the changeover, I’m afraid, was a bit dramatic.”

“Really?” Sarah looked worried. “What happened?”

“Oh, I’ll spare you.” Julie sighed and touched the little girl’s nose, making her smile. She turned back to Sarah, hesitating. “You met their teenage daughter, Lynette?”

“Yes.”

“Enough said,” said Julie. “Wanna hold your child?”

“Let me see if she’ll come to me,” said Sarah. She reached toward the little girl and said, “Come here, baby.” The little girl went with her calmly, and Sarah settled her happily on her canted hip.

An elderly African-American woman came walking by and she looked at all of us, but especially at Sarah holding Mary. “Is that your child?” she asked Sarah doubtfully.

“Yes, she is,” said Sarah, smiling in a dazed way as if she had just been smacked gleefully in the head.

The older woman stopped and looked at Mary, then Sarah. “Well, that’s the most beautiful child I’ve ever seen,” she said, and then moved on.

Edward turned to Julie, and said, “That woman was hired by Adoption Option.”

Julie laughed. “I doubt it.”

“You don’t think the agency might be worried because there’s a dearth of white babies and they need some added promo?”

“Edward,” chided Sarah, but she was beaming, and now so was Mary.

Dearth.

Mary was spectacularly pretty. I was only just now noticing it. Perhaps the blast of outdoor air had freshened her face, or the light blue of her snowsuit flattered her coloring — who could say. She was a beautiful thing. Her smile was impish but sweet, and her deep dark eyes had presence and considerable intelligence peering out beneath her flannel hat. She was a watchful child, and despite all the upheaval she had the aura of a deeply loved one. Still, there was something in that light blue alone that showed her off to advantage. The color looked like a different color on her — one that all the little girls of the world would want and snatch away from the boys if they could see it this way, this aqua of the angels. One of the few times I’d ordered clothing from a catalog — with my mother’s MasterCard — I’d ordered all the items the black models were wearing. The color of the fabrics — oranges, greens, turquoise, and ivory — looked so good against the models’ skin, but when they arrived and I put them on me, they looked like crap. My own skin, with its splotches of pale red and blue, made me a queer shade of lavender. I looked like a dead thing placed inside a living. So whenever I heard the word dearth, a word that sounded like a cross between death and birth, a miscarriage perhaps, or the sleeping car in a train wreck, this made-up color — the lilac of lifelessness — was the thing that leaped to mind.

“Baby Mary?” said a receptionist carrying a large file, and Julie pointed to Sarah. “That’s us,” she said.

The receptionist smiled at Mary and chucked her cheek. “Looks like she’s been eating a lot of squash and carrots!” she said merrily.

It was the beginning of a long stretch of thinking I was hearing things.

“She’s biracial African-American,” said Julie.

“Oh! Well. I’ve got the birth mother’s file here, too, which you are allowed to look at. The last name, of course, has been whited out for her privacy.”

“Yes — Edward? You want to stay out here and look at the file? You’re the scientist. Julie and I will go in with the baby.”

“Sure,” he said.

That left me in the lobby with Edward. At last I had stayed behind — but with Edward and the thick medical history of the birth mother. I sat next to him on an orange leatherette sofa as he patted the file and looked at me. “Shall we see what it has to tell us?” He was looking through me; some other thought had erased me, and he soon pulled his gaze back entirely.

“I guess,” I said. He turned his attention to the file. He had assumed the brusque amiability of someone used to having assistants.

It seemed an utter invasion of privacy looking at all these descriptions of personal and bodily matters, but on all the pages of the medical records Bonnie’s name was whited out. Sometimes the entirety of it, sometimes just the last name. The afflictions that ran in the family were heart disease, bipolar disorder (the suicide of an uncle), acne, and curvature of the spine. For the patient herself there were many pages of influenzas, psoriasis, depression, anxiety disorder, shingles, herpes, high blood pressure, and at the end pregnancy resolved with a caesarean. There had been some drinking at the beginning of the pregnancy, a six-pack or two here and there. Edward stared at that page, reading. “Catholics will confess,” he said to me without looking up, and then turned the page. I was trying to match up all this medical history with the large, stiff, overplucked Bonnie that I had met. On one of the pages — a sonogram page that a radiologist had attached to another report — someone had not noticed the patient’s name and so had neglected to white it out: Bonnie Jankling Crowe.

“Oops,” said Edward, noticing as well but not pointing to it, though he didn’t have to. Now we would both know forever. “Let’s not tell Sarah,” said Edward. “She’s got a slightly obsessive side.”

“Oh, OK,” I said. And so I entered a small conspiracy with him. I no longer knew anymore what I was consenting to when I said whatever I found myself saying. Yet it didn’t seem to matter.

Edward now decided to close up the file. “Nobody’s perfect. Everyone has a relative or two that’s come down with some crud or stuck a fork in someone’s eye or dynamited a perfectly good shed.”