Ed King (6 page)

From a hospital pay phone—from “Baltimore,” this time—he called Lydia. “Up late,” he said. “Long day here. I’ve been burning the candle at both ends.”

“At a conference?”

“I hate conferences.”

“What’s keeping you up so late at a conference?”

“I have to hunker down and prep for meetings. Otherwise, I’m not prepared, darling.”

Then it was time for a visit with Diane, who was sitting up in bed in a blue hospital gown, a little peaked, with gray lips, greasy hair, and the amorphous torso of a completed pregnancy. “Diane,” he said cheerfully, “you’re looking good.”

“How’s he doing?”

“I was just there, checking. He’s a handsome kid. I got kind of caught up in looking at him and had to make myself stop staring at the little guy. It was emotional, Diane. Pretty painful.”

“I’m not asking about you, Walter. I’m asking about him.”

“Not a peep,” answered Walter. “Right now he looks happy. And how are you? Are you doing all right? Is everything looking like it should?”

“Just terrific,” she answered.

The sarcasm worried him, and his worry deepened when she crossed
her thin arms—one with its hospital ID band askew—and shook her head as though her disgust with everything, but mainly him, was total.

“I’m sorry,” he told her, once again. “It’s sad for me, too. It’s really, really sad, actually.”

Diane’s sigh, on hearing this, was of the never-ending variety, and left him feeling, on top of worried, blue. Blue because this had to be the darkest day of her young life, and that he had a role in it—the main role, in fact—made him feel so sick about himself his eyes filmed. “Stop blubbering,” Diane said. “There’s still, you know, the forty-eight hours. The two days I have to change my mind.”

Walter’s stomach clenched. “I don’t know,” he said, in a panic. “I don’t think you can change your mind at this point. I’m not too sure about that.”

Diane pulled up her knees and hung on to them. “Of course I can,” she said. “Forty-eight hours. There is a
law
that says I have forty-eight hours.”

“True,” said Walter, “but that’s just because people get emotional. They see the baby and they get emotional and then they lose
objectivity
, Diane, they get all
embroiled
and they can’t see straight, and for women—this is true—their hormones get stirred up. It’s just not a good time for
anyone
to be making a decision about
anything
, it’s really not.”

“It’s actually vice versa, Walter. You don’t know what you really want until your emotions come into play.”

This didn’t sound too teen-agerish to him—its maturity was curious, even startling—but was that important right now? The whole thing just couldn’t disintegrate like this, not when he was so close to slipping out of it. “Diane,” he said, “come on, please. There’s a family out there expecting a baby. There’s more than just yourself to think about.”

“That’s ironic,” Diane pointed out. “You telling me there’s more than just myself to think about.”

“Listen,” said Walter, “I’m not a bad guy. I understand what you’re saying about emotions. Your point of view is completely valid, but this just isn’t
the time
.”

“It is pre
cise
ly the time,” Diane countered. “It’s the forty-eight hours I’ve been allotted to reconsider. Walter, if you were named as the father—yes?—then you might call this a discussion between two people who both have a hand in a decision. But—Walter—you are
not
named. You
might be the father, but you are not named.
If
you were named, then the two of us might be deciding this together, but you’re not, so just stay out of it. I mean it.”

“I’m not Norwegian, but Lydia is,” said Walter, “and this is a really good time to say
uff da
.” With that he fell, hard, into a chair.

“Lydia who?” asked Diane.

Now what? A counselor? Someone from the adoption agency? More money? All of those were bad ideas.

Walter repaired to the hospital cafeteria, intending to see if a late burger and fries would help him think about what came next. But when his burger was gone, there was still no solution, so he returned to the buffet line for butterscotch pudding, and, while eating it, made a list of options under the headings “pro” and “con.” Should he go back and argue? Try to reason with Diane? Remind her of her dream to go to college someday, which probably wouldn’t happen if she kept the baby? Should he offer something? Ask what she wanted? Ask her, flat out, what it would take, in cash, to get her to keep to their plan? How about pushing the morality angle? He could already hear himself, he practiced a little:
You’re giving the child a better life
. Nope.
When you promise someone something, make an agreement with people, you have a moral obligation to keep to your word
—but no, that wouldn’t wash, either.

This Diane Burroughs was a tough little bird, but he’d known that from the first—ever since they’d played Life together. Clever and immune to manipulation. Always watching, thinking, weighing. What would she respond to when push came to shove, this girl who hailed from a gritty slice of England? He didn’t have a clue. He couldn’t tell.

Feeling hopeless, but armed with peanut-butter cookies, he returned to Maternity to plead his case. What Diane really liked were snickerdoodles, soft in the middle and doused heavily with cinnamon, but there were none of those, not even approximations, so peanut-butter cookies would have to do, delivered by a supplicant named Walter. “Eat one,” he said. “They’re not snickerdoodles, but they’re good.” Diane, in answer, glared, shook her head, and then, with clear disgust, said, “
Please
, Walter.”

He retreated to a chair underneath her room’s mounted television. Diane had been watching a serial drama he wasn’t familiar with—about
rich people and their alluring money—with curious avidity, he thought, given the pressing real-life matters at hand. How could she do that? He could never do that. “There’s something,” he said, getting up to take a cookie, “that I want you to have a little think about.”

“And what might that be?” asked Diane.

“Just this,” said Walter. “Try doing this. Try seeing yourself, I don’t know, a year from now, then three, five, ten years out. Try asking yourself what things might look like.”

“What for?”

“It’s a good exercise. I do it all the time. Humor me, Diane. Bear with me.”

Diane shrugged her wonderful, girlish shoulders. “Ten years,” said Walter, “
snap
, like that. And now you’re twenty-six—okay?—with a ten-year-old kid in your life.”

“Is your point that you know how to add up, Walter?”

Walter threw up his hands, one of which had a cookie in it. “Is that what you want when you’re twenty-six? I’m thirty-four, and I can tell you, you don’t. What you want to do—what you tell me you want to do—is attend a good American college and really
make
something of your life.”

“That would be good, but—”

“Listen,” said Walter. “Do yourself a favor. Don’t decide anything at the moment, okay? Just do that, please. For your own good, Diane. Rest, watch TV, get a good night’s sleep, then let’s get together and have a talk about your future. A really good talk, you and me.”

She didn’t reply. She didn’t even look at him. “Diane,” he said, “you have to believe me when I say to you that, whatever you decide, you can count on my support. If it’s college, I’ll help. If it’s not, I’ll help, too. I’m not going to shirk my duties, believe that. I only want beautiful things for you.”

And how did she react to this? To this fresh reinforcement of his genuine sincerity? To his grasping, once again, at the straw of his own decency? She reacted by saying, “Not again, Walter.
Please
, not again.
Please
don’t feed me that stale line.”

The next day, to his overwhelming relief, Diane decided to stay the course. Who knew why? It didn’t matter why. Baby Doe, without a doubt,
was going to be adopted, and he, Walter, was going to go home, like a sailor who’d been on a long sea voyage that included sharks, scurvy, pirates, a typhoon, and a broken mast en route.

“Diane,” he said, “I think you’re doing the right thing in a situation where, really, there’s no right thing, only lesser evils and greater evils, and that’s the problem with life, for me—it doesn’t always go the way I think it should, it’s not always under my control.”

He thought he was speaking to her from the same corner of the ring, or from a page they shared, but Diane held her gut as if sickened by his observations and said, “I don’t need a lecture, Walter.”

“Okay.”

“Your problem with life—it’ll have to wait.”

“I see that.”

“I’m incapable of talking about your problems right now.”

“Let’s not talk about them.”

“The deal is, Walter, you’re the definition of a wanker. You need to understand this:
you are a wanker
. Wanker, okay? What’s the American? Just look it up. Wanker.”

“I’ll look it up,” he said gruffly, and left.

Exhausted, he called Lydia from “Baltimore.” “I’m worn out,” he said, “and looking forward to getting home. I’m really, really looking forward to getting home.”

But he couldn’t go home. Not quite yet. There was one more night of this mire to be endured, and of watching motel television with a headache. He felt buoyed, though, because the whole thing was nearly over—all of it except for the blackmail part, the paying-through-the-teeth part, the arm-and-the-leg part that there was nothing to be done about. But the dangerous part, the heart-soul-and-life-rending part, Walter believed that was done.

That night, Walter dreamed. He dreamed he was standing in the Newborn Viewing Area watching Baby Doe through glass. Then a nurse appeared, plucked up Baby Doe, brought him to the window, and displayed him for Walter’s benefit. “The logical thing would be to kill him now,” she said through the pane.

In the morning, Walter mulled this while he shaved. “Interesting,” he thought, “but dreams aren’t valid. They have no legitimacy. They’re just strangeness while you sleep. A dream is just your brain with its signals
crossed. Oh well, so there you have it. Another weird dream. It’s meaningless.”

Walter checked out and returned to Maternity, where Diane and Baby Doe, he found, were gone. They’d left the hospital—but that couldn’t be. What was she
thinking
? What was going on? “Oh no, no,
no
,” thought Walter, and called the adoption agency. He was put on hold twice, passed along twice, until the director informed him that she knew already. She’d gotten in touch with the prospective adoptive family, and the prospective adoptive family was opting out for reasons it wasn’t obligated to divulge, but also didn’t mind, in these circumstances, divulging—namely, that the birth mother had had a change of heart, and they didn’t want a birth mother who couldn’t let go, and also, what about the birth mother’s state of mind right now, how was she treating the baby? There were too many danger signals.

The beater car was gone from the hospital parking lot. It was the middle of April—a chilly wind, stirred pollens. Walter scratched his head and weighed his choices. He could just go home and take what fate dealt him, or not go home, never go home, or—“Wait,” he thought. “What am I doing? How many times am I going to do this? What have I gotten from evaluating options? Look where it’s gotten me—to this, right now. God, what a misery it’s been, and what a breath of fresh air it would be if somehow, some way, I could just
live
again, free of all these problems.”

He sat in his car feeling cheated by Diane, and banging his hand against the steering wheel. “I navigated so carefully through everything,” he thought. “I did everything right. I did everything I could. And look at me now, I’m sitting here like an idiot. And now I’m thinking about sitting here like an idiot. And I don’t have a reason to start my car. What would I do? Where would I go?”

Diane, he remembered then, had only a little money—whatever she’d saved from the cash he’d bled. It couldn’t be much. Maybe enough for a few motel nights, but then what? She didn’t have an income. She had a new baby, and—she had Walter over a barrel. “That’s the key,” he thought. “That’s the main thing. She has me on the hook for three hundred a month. Why would she run away from that? She wouldn’t run away from that. No way is she running away from that. Why didn’t I think of this? If I just sit back, I’ll hear from the little minx—she’ll call me at the office and soak me good.” In fact, he saw, she would soak him good
indefinitely, milk him for whatever she thought he was worth. He was going to be paying through his teeth for a long time, that was just the way it turned out.

Walter drove to the final station in his journey: the Northgate Shopping Center, for gifts. For Lydia, Chanel No. 5; for Barry, the Lego Town Plan Set; and for Tina, the Happy Hippo, with a movable mouth and springy tail. Wonder of wonders, he felt buoyant walking the mall, amazed by Planet Earth and its intricacies, and by the singularity in all that had happened, and that night, at home, in bed with Lydia, he performed adequately, maybe even better. Afterward he even felt ready to turn over a new leaf, and prepared to live with himself.

As he’d predicted, Diane called him Monday morning at Piersall-Crane. In a disembodied voice, as though reading from a script, she gave him instructions the way a kidnapper would give instructions: how much money she wanted—250 now, monthly, because of the kid—the date each month she wanted it, the post-office box in Portland where he had to send it, what would happen if he tried to play games or manipulate things or send money late or not send enough money or claim that this or that, an emergency or something, had gotten in the way of sending it
even once
. “You’re being blackmailed,” Diane advised him sternly. “If you don’t follow through or hold up your end, all right, then, I’ll pick up the phone and—what’s her name again?—that’s right, Lydia. I’ll call Lydia. Lydia, you wanker. And no more apologizing,” said Diane, “because I’ve had enough of your apologizing.”

“I’ve got it,” said Walter. “But just one thing. Two hundred fifty a month? That sounds like a heck of a lot of money, maybe more than—”