‘But things are going to have to be different,’ Heather continued.
I wanted her to look at me, so I could see her face. She took a deep breath.
‘I want an open adoption.’
Her tone was so non-negotiable that I almost wished my lawyer were there. ‘What… what exactly do you mean by that?’
‘One visit every month.’ She turned to me, suddenly fierce, furious. ‘Every month. Saturday afternoon. That will be mine.’ Forever. She didn’t say it, but I heard it all the same, felt it, and everything in me recoiled. I pictured Heather’s and my lives forever intertwined, hopelessly tangled, this baby boy at the center, tugged in different directions.
‘I’m not going to back down on this,’ Heather said, and she sounded tougher than I’d ever heard her sound before. ‘I know it’s different from what I said before, but I didn’t know how I’d feel, seeing him. Holding him.’ Her voice broke and she sucked in a hard breath. ‘And it’s not just because it’s a boy, if you’re thinking th
at. That jolted me, maybe, but it was bigger than that, Grace. My own child… I’d forgotten how it felt, to hold them in your arms. To know they came out of you. He was so tiny.’ Another breath, this one ragged. ‘And he knew me, right off. He knew my voice, he turned to me when I spoke. He tried to nurse, but he was too small. But he tried.’
She was torturing me with her words, and I knew I just had to take it, punch after punch. ‘I’m sure he did,’ I manage.
She sniffed and dashed a tear from her cheek. ‘So that’s how it’s got to be. I’ll give him to you, Grace, I swear I will, but I’m not backing down on this. I want it drawn up, legal. You can pay the lawyer like you have everything else.’ She spat the last words. It felt as if she hated me, and I wasn’t even sure I could blame her.
I stayed silent, not wanting to commit to anything. I didn’t want either to put her off or make promises. ‘I’ll contact a lawyer,’ I finally said, and Heather nodded, her jaw set.
‘Fine.’
It felt like I should leave, so I got up from the chair. I stopped, hesitant but also determined. ‘Heather… can I see him?’
A long, tense silence. ‘Fine,’ she said finally. ‘I’ll tell the nurse.’ Before I’d made it to the door Heather had curled up onto her side. I heard her gasping, tearing sobs, and I started to turn again.
‘Go away,’ she choked. It sounded as if she were being rent apart. ‘Please, go away.’
It felt wrong to leave her like that, yet I could hardly force myself on her. And so I went, and a little while later, the nurse came and took me to the NICU nursery, all the plastic bassinets in a row, the babies tiny and swaddled and red. I knew him right away. I don’t know how, I just did. And when he opened his eyes I felt myself fall. My child. My son. It seemed so simple, then. So right. Like it would all fall into place, just because it had to.
Isaac is bored with his iPad and so he starts drumming his legs against the back of my seat.
‘Isaac,’ I say, keeping my voice mild, ‘easy.’
These visits are always so tense; they have been since that first, aching one, when I, exhausted and emotionally overwhelmed, both afraid and euphoric, brought a four-week-old Isaac to Heather’s house. When he’d cried, which he’d done a lot of in those first fatigue-fogged weeks, her shirt grew damp patches and she’d laughed in embarrassment, but also in a sort of pleasure and pride.
‘They gave me pills to dry up my milk, but I guess they don’t work so good.’ She held out her arms for Isaac; he was still in his car seat, dressed in a pale blue onesie, his scrawny, red legs akimbo, his little face screwed up for another one of his bleating shrieks. He couldn’t take the bottle easily yet; I’d only had him at home for five days.
‘Let me take him,’ Heather said.
For a single, frozen second the words registered with both of us, and then, wordlessly, I handed her the car seat. I’ve gone back over that moment, which felt like stepping off a ledge into thin air. What if I’d refused? What if I’d said no, this won’t work, I can’t? I won’t? But I couldn’t have. Isaac was only twenty-eight days old. Heather still had seventeen days to change her mind, and we both knew that. I saw it in the steely glint of her eye, felt it in the tremble of my soul.
Of course, there have been many times since then that I could have refused. Those first few months, when she took him from me so possessively the second I came in the door, and told me all the things I was doing wrong? Laughed as she watched me fumble and said I couldn’t hold a baby like a briefcase?
His first birthday, when Heather made a gooey chocolate cake and insisted on feeding it to him, smearing it all over his face? When he was two, and she gave him Sprite in a bottle? When he was five, and her little demon daughter Amy cut off all his hair and Heather just laughed and said he’d needed a haircut, he looked like a girl? They’d been his baby curls.
Or maybe after the ill-conceived vacation I was forced into last year, when Heather booked tickets for Disney World, including one for Isaac, without asking me. A week with her family, and she’d never even asked me if I minded, or checked if we were free. I’d struggled with what to do, how to respond, because I could see she was absolutely counting on this trip. Refusing to let Isaac go would destroy her, and no matter how resentful I felt, I couldn’t make myself do that. So I decided on an awkward compromise; I went too, and ended up paying for a lot of it. Worst seven days of all our lives, or at least mine.
No one knew how to act with me and Isaac there; Kevin simmered with resentment, the girls kept shrieking and asking me for money for candy or games while they ignored Isaac. Heather clung to him, holding his hand when he obviously didn’t want her to, insisting on going on all the rides with him, even when Isaac asked to go with me. Everything about it was awful, but I thought, stupidly of course, that maybe after that Heather would back off, be satisfied for once, but she only came closer, clinging, always clinging, always wanting more.
And now finally, it’s been seven years. Seven years. And I’ve talked to a lawyer; a judge can legally enforce open adoption agreements but she thinks I have a strong, solid case to terminate, or at least limit, contact. I can show that the visits aren’t beneficial to Isaac, because they’re not. He doesn’t like Heather, or her family, and that is not my fault.
‘Almost there, Isaac,’ I call back, and he groans and kicks my seat again. I don’t mind. It’s almost over. It has to be, because I really don’t think I can take any more.
Fourteen
HEATHER
I am icing the cake in Minecraft green when Kevin comes into the kitchen.