Page 22 of Summer Longing
Elise bit her lip, searching for a counterargument. And then Fern said, “Even if someone did want us to have this baby, we’d still need to go through legal channels.”
It was the first sign Fern was even remotely considering keeping the baby. “Fern,” she said, her voice quivering. “The whole time we were trying to start a family, you kept saying, ‘If it’s meant to be, it will be.’ Well, it happened. Not in the way we expected,but it has happened. The rest is just details.”
“Yes, and what about those details? They’re not insignificant.”
“We’ll figure it out.”
Fern shook her head. “I don’t want you getting attached to this baby. I bet you’ve already named her.”
Elise smiled sheepishly. “I’ve been calling her Mira. Short for Miracle. Which she is.”
Fern sighed. “Elise. What happens when her mother—or father—comes back? Or what if we try to make this official and find that legally we can’t?”
“That’s a chance I’m willing to take.”
Fern continued down the path, joining what was now a steady stream of people. Elise trotted after her.
“That’s it? You’re done talking?” Elise called out.
Fern turned back to face her. “I think you’re playing with fire. But I also know that you feel I took away your chance to have a baby once before, when I refused to keep trying to have a baby of our own. Our relationship barely survived it. I don’t want to be the bad guy again.”
“Let’s just give it a few weeks. That’s all I’m asking.”
“We never discussed adopting, Elise.”
“Maybe now is the time.”
“I’m not ready to have that conversation.”
“Why not? Why do you get to decide, unilaterally, when the time is right?”
Fern rubbed her brow. When she looked at Elise, she seemed very tired. “I’m giving this another week, long enough for whoever dropped her off to change her mind and not get in trouble. And if she doesn’t show up by then, I’m going to report what’s going on. If—if—we decide we want to try to adopt her, we have to go through the Department of Children and Families.”
“That could take months. And they might not let us. I mean, it’s a state agency. Who knows what kind of biases they operate under? We’re a same-sex couple, there aren’t a lot of school options nearby—”
“Elise, one step at a time. No matter what the hurdles are, we need to do things the right way. Can we at least agree on that?”
Elise nodded.
Fern glanced ahead at the barn. “If we’re going to this thing, we have to go now.”
Elise stood for a moment, then started walking.
A week was enough time for Fern to come around. Elise knew that although her wife was practical and tough-minded, she had a big heart. A little time with the baby, and Fern would fall in love too.
And when they were both in love, anything was possible.
Ruth sat on one of the white benches in the front yard of Shell Haven holding a glass of wine. She had sat down to watch the sunset, but now it was getting late. Still, she felt no desire to move. An identical bench was positioned across from her own, one of the house’s many design touches that suggested the home was a place for company, for a life shared.
She turned sideways to face the street. The town offered great people-watching everywhere; she tried to get lost in the parade of happy strangers.
She glanced, for the thousandth time, at her phone. Still no call back from Olivia. Not even a text. This wasn’t unusual or surprising, but for the first time in a long while, it was unacceptable. Ruth didn’t know if it was the recent long stretches of solitude, the change in scenery, or the baby she’d held in her arms that morning, but she felt an intense, desperate need to hear her daughter’s voice. It was as if the baby had had a chemical effect on her, had unleashed some long-dormant maternal longing that she had buried under years of nonstop motion.
Ruth’s chilly relationship with her daughter had been the subject of endless analysis with Dr. Bellow, who’d told Ruth that Olivia no doubt felt abandoned by her mother. Ruth knew this, of course, and suffered immense guilt accordingly.
Olivia had taken the divorce very hard. She’d been a preteen, arguably the worst time to experience a parental separation. In the beginning, for the first year or so, Ruth and Ben had tried to maintain fifty-fifty shared custody, with Ruth as the primary custodial parent. Ben moved out of the house and into a nearby apartment. But it quickly became clear that Ruth’s long workdays, unpredictable schedule, and frequent traveling made it unfair for her to hold on to primary physical custody. She moved out of the house, Ben moved back in, and life went on.
It took Ruth years with Dr. Bellow to forgive herself and accept that she had done the best she could do, and this self-forgiveness had been a relatively recent breakthrough.
