This Fragile Life

In any case, Rob is usually the one with the crazy ideas, the sure-let’s-do-it attitude. I’m the one making lists, pointing out problems. But I still don’t tell him. I don’t want to risk it.

The next afternoon I close the door to my office and type private adoption laws New York State into the search engine on my computer. I’m not thrilled with the results.

Do adoptive parents have any rights here? All I’m seeing as I scroll through the pages are how the biological parents can call a halt to the proceedings at any time, even a month after they’ve given their baby up. And as for private placement adoptions, which is what Alex and I would be arranging, there are no legally binding agreements at all before the birth, no matter what you get down in writing, or when.

I close the browser window and lean back in my chair, dazed. We’d have to engage an attorney, I realize, and there would be all sorts of legal ramifications. No matter how much good will is on either side, it could become awkward. Definitely emotional. Maybe unpleasant.

More possibilities tumble through my mind. Our families, for one. Will we tell our respective families what we’re doing? How can we not? Our parents are still neighbors and friends, after all. I imagine my mother’s response and inwardly cringe. Will she gush and think it’s wonderful, or will she go all melodramatic and predict certain doom? With her, it’s hard to tell.

And what about Alex? Will she still be my friend? Will she be involved in her child’s—my child’s—life? I resist that possibility instinctively, even as I recognize how selfish it is. But how will we explain it to family, to friends, to this child? It all feels very messy.

Yet messy is better than emptiness. It’s better than the nothing I was coping with before.

I’m still dazed, still reeling with possibilities, when my cell rings, and I see that it is Alex.

I answer the call, hold my breath. I can’t say anything more; my heart is pounding too hard.

“Martha?”

“Hey, Alex.” With relief I hear myself, and I sound relaxed, assured. I reach up and smooth my hair, adjust my earring. “What’s up?”

“I wanted to talk to you. And Rob. About…about possibly adopting my baby.”

And even as a thrill of pure adrenalin, unadulterated victory, runs through me, I feel a tiny pinprick of something else. Doubt, maybe fear.

My baby.

I suggest Alex comes over tomorrow night, but she asks if she can come over tonight instead. “I’d just like this all to be dealt with sooner,” she says. “It’s been on my mind a lot.”

“I understand,” I say quickly. “Of course.” But I need to talk to Rob first. Still I tell her it’s okay and I text Rob, asking him to come home early from work so we have an hour or so before Alex arrives.

Not ideal, but it could still work. It has to work.

He arrives home just as I am ordering Thai; I’m too wired to think of cooking. I smile and wave, gesture to the phone. Rob smiles back, loosens his tie, and waits for me to finish.

“What’s up?” he asks as soon as I’ve hung up.

“Sorry, did I interrupt something at work?”

“No, just the usual.” Rob works in mid-level finance, a job he seems neither to like nor dislike. I’ve always considered myself to be the more career-focused one; he makes good money but prefers his other pursuits, biking and pick-up basketball, judging the odd minor film festival. I, on the other hand, do not have any hobbies.

“So?” he asks as I flit around the apartment, pouring him a glass of wine, arranging magazines on the coffee table so their corners line up.

I stop. Take a deep breath. Face him. “Something’s come up.”

Rob stills, eyebrows raised. “Something good?”

“Yes. I think so. Definitely.”

“Okay.” He sits down at the dining room table, takes a sip of wine. Waits.

“You remember when Alex came over to dinner?”

“Like, the other night? Yes.”

“Remember she threw up?”

He makes a face, a kind of wry grimace. “Yeah, I remember that, Mats. I cleaned the toilet.”

“Right. Well, it turns out she’s pregnant.” I wait, not sure how to get to this next part, and Rob just stares.

“Okay,” he finally says and I plunge.

“She isn’t in a position to keep the baby.”

“Is that what she thinks?”

I tense, resist the urge to retort, snap. “Yes, we talked about it over coffee yesterday.” He nods, but he’s eyeing me warily. What does he think, that I’m pressuring my best friend into giving me her baby?

Am I?

No. There has been no pressure. There’s been no pressure at all.

“So what is she going to do?” he asks eventually and I take another deep breath.

“Well, she doesn’t want to have an abortion.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not like getting your tooth pulled,” I say a bit sharply. “It’s a big thing for a woman, Rob. A big, tough emotional decision.” I don’t mention that she’s already had two. That’s beside the point, and it’s her business anyway.

“Sorry,” Rob says mildly. “It just seems like something she might consider.”

“Well, she doesn’t want to go down that route.”

“And she doesn’t want to keep the baby.”

“No.” But now I’m wondering if that is really true. Did she even say that? I can’t remember. She seemed so unhappy and confused, and of course she can’t keep the baby. She just can’t.

I take a deep breath. “We—we discussed having her give the baby up for adoption. To us.”

And Rob doesn’t say anything for a long moment. Not anything at all. I break first.

“Say something.”

“This is kind of a shock.”

“What do you think?”