Sarah was directing Edward: “Nine thousand one hundred twenty-seven and fifty cents,” she said quietly, but it might as well have been shouted from the rooftop.
“Does Bonnie get nothing?” asked Edward.
“You can get her a watch,” said Roberta. “No money. That’s illegal in this state.”
Sarah put her hand on Edward’s arm. “We’ll get her a really nice watch,” she said.
I peered inside the plastic trash bag. It was amazing to me that you could still be the tiniest thing and have stuff. On the other hand, it also amazed me that there was so little of it, and so it seemed sad that a human being was going through the world accumulating all this needless crap and yet also pathetic that this was all she had. She herself neither knew nor cared, I was sure. Inside the bag there was a stuffed yellow caterpillar, a green blanket, some plastic blocks with letters on them, a cardboard animal alphabet puzzle, a stuffed monkey in a little denim leisure suit.
“Congratulations,” said Roberta. “You have yourself a beautiful baby.”
“And no drugs,” added Suzanne in a kind of happy hiss. “That’s excellent.”
In the rental car on the way home back to Troy, Sarah sat vigilantly in the back next to Mary-Emma, who was soundly asleep in the carseat Edward and Sarah had purchased at Sears, along with clothes, during my nap. “Well, we’ve done it,” said Edward. “The future’s going to be a little different now. We’ve now got a horse in the race.”
There was a long pause, our tires hitting the gray slosh of the road. For driving, a January thaw was always preferable to actual ice, but when it was over things froze more treacherously than before. And in its melting and condensing the roadside snow turned to clumps reminiscent of black-spotted cauliflower. Better never to have thawed. “I once went to the track,” mused Sarah. “I was eleven and I went with my uncle, who came with all these statistics on the horses — a stack of papers the size of a phone book. He was poring over them, figuring out which horse to bet on, and I said, ‘Uncle Joe, look, there’s a horse named Laredo and I have a dog named Laredo.’ And my uncle just looked at me and put his papers away and said, ‘OK, let’s bet on that one.’ And so we did.”
“Did it win?” I asked from the front seat. Edward seemed already to know this story. He continued along the bleak winter road. What was it — was it Doppler radar? — that involved the difference in pitch between the leading end and the trailing end of the reverberation? I had taken a physics course last year with a short unit on sonar.
“Did it win?” I squeaked out again into the sharp silence of the car — but no one said anything. Edward was a scientist and so was used to heading straight into the unanswering darkness with his climate-controlled car. Snow began to fall. Large snowflakes in a lazy swirl, the flutter of ballerinas down a spiral staircase — a classic snowfall, one for the movies, one to bag and sell. For driving, however, it was a scary fairyland. Still, it was hypnotic to watch, and soon a great fatigue came over me, and after some time I thought I heard Edward say something and then Sarah’s voice say very quietly, “Well, all sex is a form of rape. One could argue.” And then she added, “Please, in this weather, don’t drive with one hand.” I looked out the window and saw a white convertible sailing past us with the bumper sticker GUILT SUCKS: HAVE SOME FUN! The driver was a little white-haired lady hunched scowlingly over the wheel. “Did you hear me?” asked Sarah, and Edward’s middle-aged face turned slightly, tensed with an adolescent’s wordless hate. He appeared to continue to steer with his right hand lightly holding the bottom of the steering wheel, his other hand shoved defiantly and absurdly in his pocket. At Sarah’s request I turned on the radio, which filled the car with a soft murmur. “How many teams with a dome for their home field have won the Super Bowl?” it was saying. “And now here is Luigi Boccherini’s ‘Festival in C’!” We passed through the marshland village of Luck, whose municipal welcome sign read YOU’RE IN LUCK. And though on leaving I spied no sign saying NOW OUT OF LUCK, every aspect of it soon was implied. Edward had taken a wrong turn, and we had to turn around and go back through the town. YOU’RE IN LUCK another sign again said, and I imagined a horror movie wherein we never found our way out of this town, and kept driving back into it again, its greeting a maddening taunt.
Eventually, I must have fallen asleep, and when I awoke there was an achy pinch in my neck. The car engine was off and we were in front of Edward and Sarah’s house. “It’s good to come in the front door with a new baby,” Sarah was saying to Edward. “There’s a superstition about bringing a baby in the back. Plus, it’s politically incorrect.”
“There’s not a soul around,” said Edward. I looked at my watch: midnight. I was feeling like a sleepwalker, needed at this point only for whatever I could help carry into the house from the car, and so I found myself lugging Mary-Emma’s plastic trash bag of cheap plush toys as well as a grocery bag of miscellaneous snacks for the car, which had neglected to announce themselves — Ritz crackers, Nutri-Grain bars, a plastic six-pack of flavored water — and so were entirely unopened. The carseat Mary-Emma was in was a newfangled double one, with an interior upright seat set within another, and so the insert could be lifted out with Mary-Emma still in it. Edward managed the awkward weight of this with just a little tug, and Mary-Emma stirred only slightly while Sarah clawed in her bag for the house keys. We pushed in past the gate, Edward fussing with the broken hinge, and stepped carefully down the steps then back up the porch stairs to the front door. Everything in this January night possessed a lunar stillness and a lunar thrill. You could see the earth from here!
Inside the house Sarah headed for the dining room, turning on two small lamps as she went. Edward placed the sleeping Mary-Emma on the table, still in her seat, her snowsuited legs and arms dangling off, her chin sunk into her collar. She’d had a big day, whether she knew it or not.
“Well,” said Sarah, looking at her.
“Yes, well,” said Edward.
Sarah was still wearing her yarn cap with the earflaps and the dangling pom-pom ties, and she took the right pom-pom and tossed it around her head like a tether ball. It made a muffled cable-knit thwack against her head. “Now what?” she said.
We all might have burst into hysterical laughter, and we probably would have if a sleeping child weren’t propped in the middle of the dining room table, next to two candlesticks, a Stangl sugar bowl, and some salt and pepper shakers. Adoption, I could see, was a lot like childbirth: Here she is! everyone exclaimed. And you looked and saw a pickled piglet and felt nothing, not realizing it would be the only time you would ever feel nothing again. A baby destroyed a life and thereby became the very best thing in it. Though to sit gloriously and triumphantly in ruins may not be such a big trick.
“Well, I should take Tassie home, is what,” said Edward.
“And leave me here all alone?” Sarah said in mock terror, still in her goofy hat. “You must be joking.” She clutched his sleeve.
“You must be joking,” said Edward.
“I am. I’m joking,” said Sarah.
Sort of, I thought. And then she said it herself.
“Sort of.” She smiled. There was a flash of mutual disgust between them.
Then Edward drove me back to my apartment. “Thank you for helping us on this very complex mission.”
“You’re very welcome,” I said. What else was there to say?