“So the farmer — he told you?” Alex said.
Tran nodded. “I grew up knowing it.”
“Excuse me,” Alex said. “It’s not exactly avoidable in your case.”
“That’s true,” Tran smiled. Maya looked at Alex reproachfully.
“And you told your children?”
“Here,” Tran said, reaching into her purse. She fished in a date book and pulled out a photo of three children bundled in neon-colored jackets on a playground shrouded in snow: two girls and one boy in various states of developmental anarchy — jug ears, mutinous teeth, shambolic hair. Maya marveled at the cycle: a Vietnamese woman had adopted three white children.
“They fit into your life.” She replaced the photo, Maya watching it disappear with envy.
“So they feel like yours?” Maya said. “I’m sorry — maybe I’m not supposed to ask that.”
“Even yours don’t feel like yours half the time,” she said. “At least that’s what they tell me. As an adoptive parent, the question on your mind is: Is it me? Is this him being a kid or is this him being adopted? But we forget that birth parents usually deal with the same things — they just don’t have the self-consciousness that makes them wonder these things. Also: You can ask whatever you want.” She paused diplomatically. “Mr. and Mrs. Rubin. I am able to have children. But I wanted to adopt.”
Alex snorted. High comfort these people supplied — now this person was waving around the fact that she was not afflicted by the same curse as the Rubins. “Excuse me,” he said. “You’re proposing we share custody with the birth parents?”
“Of course not,” Tran said. “I don’t want to say that involving birth parents is always a pleasure. Some don’t stay in contact. Some lose touch when they move away, or break up, or start their own families.”
“Some won’t let you be,” Maya added.
“Believe it or not, that happens more rarely,” Tran said. “You work out terms. They’re legally bound to obey them. I am saying only this, from experience: One day, your child will ask: ‘Why am I tall?’ ‘Why is my hair like this?’ And they want to know. You can’t bullshit a child. Pardon my language.”
“And so being told their mother and father are not their actual mother and father at age six is less shocking than a white lie about recessive genes?” Alex asked with the authority of a biologist.
“You tell them at age zero,” Tran said. “You tell them at age one. You have pictures out. The birth parents visit. They grow up knowing it from the beginning. You have no idea the resilience of children.”
“Then they’ll be resilient about not knowing it,” Alex said.
Tran pursed her lips and nodded, as if she’d asked for a donation and been declined.
“Wait, Alex,” Maya said.
“Maya, we have a long ride home and work tomorrow,” he said.
“I didn’t want to upset you,” Tran said. “So many of the counselors here lay out the facts and leave it at that. I’ve learned from mistakes. I wanted to share that with you. It was at my initiative that the orientation was revised to include this type of conversation.”
“Every family makes its own rules,” Alex closed the discussion.
+
The Rubins rode home without speaking, Alex banging the steering wheel with his thumb as if rock were on the radio and not classical.
“I can hear you boiling,” he said finally. “It’s a cult, they are.”
“You were rude to her.”
“I think it’s rude to ask me to pay money for the pleasure of being told what to do with my own child. Do you ever think about it, Maya? They should be grateful to us, but instead they treat us like we did something wrong.”
“You were rude to her because she was small. And Asian. A woman.”
“Forget mammography, Maya. Open up a psychologist’s office.”
“You are always waiting for the world to recognize what a service you are performing for it.”
He looked over incredulously. “Are you upset? Is your railroad mind chugging along? I am upset, too. Don’t take it out on me.”
Maya stared vacantly at New Jersey outside her window. Post-beach traffic was beginning to clot the highway, sedans overstuffed with children, umbrellas, and beach chairs. A truck honked at a convertible filled with beautiful girls.
“Do you think we live in a beautiful place, Alex?” she said.
“What?” Alex said.
“I think back to Kiev, and I realize: Kiev was ugly. It has its cathedrals and streets where you think you’re in Paris. But, really, it’s ugly. But I never noticed, you know. I didn’t know it was ugly until I left. And all these people in the cars — they don’t know that New Jersey is ugly.”
“So why don’t we pick up and move to Paris, Maya,” Alex said. “What’s with you? Where do you want to go?”
“Nowhere,” she said after a silence. “So I guess we will put ‘closed’ on the form?”
“It is kind to the child if he doesn’t have to wonder who his birth parents were,” Alex said, imitating Tran Caldwell. “You know what’s kind to the child?” he said. “When he doesn’t have to wonder who his birth parents are — exactly. When he lives as a happy child of parents who love him and does his schoolwork and goes to see friends and plays soccer with his dad.”
“What if we get a six-year-old?”
“We’re getting a baby. We’re putting that down. I’m sorry — you made the big decision, you have to let me make some little decisions.”
“It’s true,” Maya said mournfully. “Who needs a child after that experience? It’s easier to get into the intelligence service. It could just be the four of us. Give your parents twenty years and they’ll be just like children. What more do we need?”
“Also, I like New Jersey,” he said.
“But we met in New York, Alex,” Maya said.
“New York is for young people.”
“We’re thirty-two, Alex. Thirty-three. It’s not old.”
“That woman has three children already,” he said. “You would like to bring up your child on New York prices? Should I commute from the city to my father’s office? And which hospital is awaiting your mammography skills in Manhattan? What’s gotten into you?”
What had gotten into her? Until now, she had imagined the arrival of a child in her life as an unconditional deliverance; the terror was of not persuading the agency people, and the full-bellied mothers, that she and Alex deserved to be parents. But what if the problems started only after the child arrived? Either because of the child, or how the child fit with her, or with Alex, or with the both of them, or a million other things. Light-headed, she had a macabre vision of putting up for adoption a child she’d just adopted. She felt crazy.
“Can I drive, Alex?” she said.
He looked at her helplessly. “What?” he said. “You don’t know how.”
“I need to learn,” she said.
“Right now?” he said, indicating the baked gray ribbon of highway before them, vehicles from a dozen tollbooth lanes slipstreaming into three. She saw herself reflected in his eyes: petulant, unsteady, impulsive.
“I need to learn,” she repeated, but now in a summing-up way, as a note to the future. She looked back at the road and imagined one of the other cars spinning into their flank, all the activity that would bring on, all the new issues that would now need decision, management, resolution. She and Alex wouldn’t be hurt, of course, though the comfort of that certainty made her imagine the opposite — she saw her legs folded at an unnatural angle. In returning to the present moment and its unexceptional safety, she was flooded with relief. Imagining horror always helped her that way.