It took only a few minutes for Hannah Klein's assistant, Lori, to run
the pregnancy test that confirmed my suspicions and settled my future.
Steve's and my final attempt, another intrauterine insemination (IUI,
med-speak for an expensive "turkey baster") with the last of his
deposit, had failed. The end. The bitter end.
"Morgan," Hannah declared, staring over her desk, her raspy New York
voice boring through me like a drill, "given how this has all turned
out, maybe you ought to just start considering adoption--if having a
child still means that much to you."
Hannah Klein was pushing seventy, a chain smoker who should have been
dead a decade ago, and she unfailingly spoke the truth. Her gaze
carried only synthetic solace, but I was probably her fifteenth patient
of the day and maybe she was running low on empathy. Oddly, though,
sitting there in her office, miserable, I felt strangely liberated. I
adored the woman, a child of the Holocaust, with layers of steel like a
samurai sword, but I also loved the thought of never again having to go
through the humiliation of cowering in her straight-backed office
chair, like a so-so student on probation waiting to receive my failing
grade.
It was now time to come to grips with what I'd known in my heart for a
long time. God had made me a theoretically functional reproductive
machine that just wouldn't kick over. Translation: no cysts, fibroids,
polyps, no ovulatory abnormalities. My uterus and Fallopian tubes were
just fine, Steve's sperm counts were okay, but no baby was swimming
into life inside me.
Sometimes, however, reality asks too much. It's not easy getting your
mind around the idea that some part of your life is over, finally over.
The baby part. To admit that it's time to move on to Plan B, whatever
that is. Such realizations can take a while, especially if you've been
living with high-level hope, no matter how irrational.
"I frankly don't know what else we can do," she went on, projecting
through my abyss of gloom. She was shuffling papers on her ash-strewn
desk, white hair in a bun, fine-tuned grit in her voice. Upper West
Side, a fifty-year fixture. She never wore perfume, but to me she
always smelled faintly of roses mixed with smoke. Earthy. "Aside from
trying in vitro."
We'd already discussed that, but it was definitely the bottom level of
Hell. Besides, I was running out of money, and spirit. And now, with
Steve gone, the whole idea seemed moot anyway.
"So," she concluded, "barring that, we've done everything possible, run
every test there is, both on you and on your . . ."
"Steve," I inserted into her pause. She seemed to deliberately block
his name at crucial moments. Maybe she thought I could have done
better. Maybe a nice solid dentist who owned a suit instead of some
freelance photo jock who showed up for his sperm counts wearing khaki
safari shirts. Well, let her deal with it.
". . . and I can't find anything. Sometimes, the body just won't
cooperate. We may never know why. You've got to face that. But still,
adoption is always an option."
Adoption. All along I'd told myself I didn't have the courage, or the
heart. Making movies is a full-time job, not leaving time to go filling
out forms and jumping through hoops for years and years. And to cap it
off, I was just two years short of the big four-oh and financially
struggling--hardly an adoption agency's profile of "ideal."
But now, now I'd just discovered Carly Grove and the miracle of
Children of Light. So maybe there really could be a way to adopt a
beautiful child with no hassles. Maybe it would simplify everything to
the point I could actually pull it off. Could this be my Plan B? Then
what if Steve came back? Could we be a family finally?
I wasn't used to being that lucky. And I still wanted Hannah Klein's
thoughts, a reality test, which was why I pressed her on the point.
"Truthfully, do you think adopting is really a workable idea for
somebody like me? Would I--?"
"Morgan, I know you're making a film about the realities of the
adoption process. We both realize it's not easy." She must have seen
something needful in my eyes, because she continued on, adding detail,
letting the well-known facts convey the bad news. "As you're well
aware, finding a young, healthy, American baby nowadays is all but
impossible. At the very least it can take years." She was fiddling with
some papers on her desk, avoiding my eyes. Then she stubbed out her
cigarette in a gesture that seemed intended to gain time. "And even if
you're willing to take a baby that's foreign-born, there still can be
plenty of heartbreak. That's just how it is."
"I'd always thought so too," I said. "It's actually the underlying
motif of my picture. But today I had an incredible experience. I filmed
an interview of a single woman, early forties, who just adopted a baby
boy. It took less than three months and he's blond and blue-eyed and
perfect. I saw him, I held him, and I can assure you he's as American
as peach cobbler. The way she tells it, the whole adoption process was
a snap. Zero hassles and red tape."
"That's most exceptional." She peered at me dubiously. "Actually more
like impossible. Frankly, I don't believe it. This child must have been
kidnapped or something. How old, exactly, was he when she got him?"
"I don't know. Just a few weeks, I think."
Her eyes bored in. "This woman, whoever she is, was very, very lucky.
If what she says is true."
"The organization that got the baby for her is called Children of
Light," I went on. "That's all I know, really. I think it's up the
Hudson somewhere, past the Cloisters. Have you ever heard of them?"
Dr. Hannah Klein, I knew, was pushing three score and ten, had traveled
the world, seen virtually everything worth seeing. In younger years she
was reputed to have had torrid liaisons with every notable European
writer on the West Side. Her list of conquests read like an old New
Yorker masthead. If only I looked half that great at her age. But
whatever else, she was unflappable. Good news or bad, she took it and
gave it with grace. Until this moment. Her eyes registered undisguised
dismay.
"You can't mean it. Not that place. All that so-called New Age . . .
are you really sure you want to get involved in something like that?"
I found myself deeply confused. Were we talking about the same thing?
Then I remembered Carly had said something about an infertility clinic.
"Frankly, nobody knows the first thing about that man," Hannah raged
on. "All you get is hearsay. He's supposedly one of those
alternative-medicine types, and a few people claim he's had some
success, but it's all anecdotal. My own opinion is, it's what real
physicians call the 'placebo effect.' If a patient believes hard enough
something will happen, some of the time it actually might. For God's
sake, I'm not even sure he's board-certified. Do yourself a favor and
stay away. Oftentimes, people like that do more harm than good." Then
her look turned inquisitive. "Did you say he's providing children for
adoption now? That's peculiar. When did he start that?"
Was I hearing some kind of professional jealousy slipping out? Hannah
Klein was definitely Old School to the core.
"He who?" I was trying to remember the name of the doctor Carly had
mentioned. "You mean--"
"He says his name is . . . what? Goddard? Yes, Alex Goddard. He's--"
My pager chirped, interrupting her, and she paused, clearly annoyed. I
looked down to see a number I knew well. It had to be Lou Crenshaw, our
aforementioned security guard. He'd been off today, but there was only
one reason he would page me: some kind of news from Lenox Hill.
Maybe it was good news about Sarah! My hopes soared.
Or maybe it was bad. Please, dear God.
"I'm sorry, Dr. Klein. I've got to go. Right now. It could be a medical
emergency."
She nodded, then slid open the top drawer of her desk and handed me a
list of adoption agencies. "All right, here, take this and look it
over. I've dealt with some of them, letters of reference for patients
like you." She must have realized the insensitivity of that last quip,
because she took my hand and squeezed it, the closest we'd ever come to
intimacy. "Let me know if I can help you, Morgan. Really."
Grasping the lifeless paper, I ached for Steve all over again. Times
like this, you need some support. I finally glanced down at the list as
I headed out. Sure enough, Children of Light was nowhere to be seen.
Why not? I wondered. They'd found Kevin, a lovely blond baby boy, for
Carly, a single woman, in no time at all. They
sounded like miracle-makers, and if there was ever a moment for
miracles, this was it. Shouldn't they at least have been given a
footnote?
I wanted to stalk right back and demand to know the real reason she was
so upset, but I truly didn't want to waste a moment.
Lou had paged me from a pay phone--he didn't actually have a cell phone
of his own--and I recognized the number as belonging to the phone next
to the Lenox Hill Hospital's third-floor nurses' station. When I tried
it, however, it was busy, so I decided to just get in my car and drive
there as fast as I could.
And as I battled the traffic down Broadway, I realized that by
diverting my mind from my own trivial misery to the genuine tragedy of
Sarah, I was actually getting my perspective back. That was one of the
many things Sarah had done for me over the years.
All right. Sarah and Lou, who figure so largely in this, deserve a
full-dress introduction, so obviously I should start by admitting I'd
known them all my life. Lou was my mother's half brother, three years
younger than she was, who came along after my grandfather widowed my
grandmother in a freak tractor rollover and she remarried a lifelong
bachelor neighbor. (I have old snapshots of them, and I can tell you
they all were cheerless, beady-eyed American Gothics.) I'd arranged for
David to hire Lou eight months earlier, not too long after I came to
Applecore. At that time he'd just taken early retirement from the FBI,
because of an event that shook us all up pretty seriously.
For some time now, Lou's been a rumpled, Willy Loman figure, like a
traveling salesman on the skids, shirts frayed at the collars, face
tinted from a truckload of Early Times. Over the past fifteen years I'd
watched his waist size travel from about thirty-three inches to
thirty-seven, and I'd guess it's been at least a decade since a barber
asked him if he needed any off the top. Natalie Rose, his spirited,
wiry wife of thirty-seven years, succumbed to ovarian cancer seven
years ago last September, and I know for a fact she was the one who
bought his shirts, provided him with general maintenance.
My first memories of him were when he was a county sheriff in a little
burg called Coleman, smack in the middle of Texas, some fifty-five
long, dusty miles from the ranch where I grew up. When I was about
fourteen, I remember he gave up on that and moved to Dallas, there to
enter training for the FBI. He eventually ended up in New Orleans, and
then, after Natalie Rose passed away and he more or less fell apart, he
got transferred to New York, considered the elephant graveyard of an
FBI career.
Probably the reason I saw him as much as I did as a kid was because of
my cousin Sarah, his and Rose's only child. She was six years younger
than me, a lot when you're kids, but we were very special to each
other, had a kind of bonding that I've never really known with anybody
since. We spent a lot of time staying at each other's house, me the
almost-grown-up, and truthfully, I loved her helplessly, like a little
sister. I always wanted to think she needed me, which can be the most
affirming feeling in the world. I do know I needed her.
She was now lying in a coma, and the way she got there was the tragedy
of my life, and Lou's. To begin with, though, let me say Sarah was a
pretty blonde from the start, with sunshiny hair that defined her as
perpetually optimistic--and who wouldn't be, given the heads she always
turned. (I was--am--blond too, though with eyes more gray than her
turquoise blues, but for me blond's always been, on balance, an
affliction: Sexist film producers assume, dammit, that you're a failed
showgirl, or worse. I've actually dyed it brunette from time to time in
hopes of being taken more seriously.) Sarah and I had always had our
own special chemistry, like a composite of opposites to make a
complete, whole human being. Whereas I was the rational, left-brained
slave of the concrete, she was a right-brained dweller in a world of
what-might-be. For years and years, she seemed to live in a dream
universe of her own making, one of imagination and fanciful states.
Once, when she was five, Lou hid in his woodworking shop for a month
and made an elaborate cutaway dollhouse to give her at Christmas. But
when I offered to help her find little dolls that would fit into it,
she declared she only wanted angels to live there. So we spent the rest
of the winter--I dropped everything--hunting down Christmas tree
ornaments that looked like heavenly creatures. She'd swathe them in
tinsel and sit them in balls of cotton she said were little clouds.
I always felt that just being around her opened my life to new
dimensions, but her dream existence constantly drove Lou and Rose to
distraction. I think it was one of the reasons he never got as close to
her as he wanted, and his feelings about that were deep frustration,
and hurt. He loved her so much, but he could never really find a common
wavelength.
Finally she came down to earth enough to start college, and eventually
she graduated from SMU in biology, then enrolled at Columbia for
premed. By then she was interested in the workings of the brain, in
altered states. I didn't know if it was just more pursuit of fantasy,
but at least she was going about it professionally.
Anyway, when Lou got transferred to New York, he was actually
delighted, since it gave him a chance to be closer to her. We all
managed to get together for family reunions pretty often, though Lou
and Sarah were talking past each other half the time.
Then tragedy struck. She was just finishing her master's, and had been
accepted by Cornell Medical--Lou was bursting with pride--when he
suggested they use her Christmas break to drive back down to Texas
together, there to visit Rose's grave. (I think he really wanted to
show off his budding doctor-to-be to the family.) Sarah was driving
when they crossed the state line into Louisiana and were side-swiped by
a huge Mack eighteen-wheeler, which was in the process of jackknifing
across a frozen patch of interstate. They were thrown into the path of
an oncoming car, and when the blood and snow were cleared, a
six-year-old girl in the other vehicle was dead.
The result was Sarah decided she'd taken a human life. Her own minor
facial cuts--which Lou immediately had repaired with plastic
surgery--somehow evolved into a major disfigurement of her soul. All
her mental eccentricities, which had been locked up somewhere when she
started college, came back like a rush of demons loosed from some
Pandora's box deep in her psyche. She dropped out of school, and before
long she was in the throes of a full-scale mental meltdown. She
disappeared, and in the following two years Lou got exactly one card
from her, postmarked in San Francisco with no return address. He
carried it with him at all times and we both studied it often, puzzling
over the New Age astrological symbol on the front. The brief note
announced she'd acquired "Divine Energy" and was living on a new plane
of consciousness.
Then eight months ago, the State Department notified Lou she was
missing in Guatemala. She'd overstayed her visa and nobody knew where
she was.
So how did her "new plane of consciousness" land her in Central
America? Was that part of the fantasy world she'd now returned to? Lou
still worked downtown at 26 Federal Plaza, but he immediately took a
leave of absence and, though he spoke not a syllable of Spanish,
plunged down there to look for her.