New Beginnings Agency occupied the fourth floor of a converted brownstone on East Eighty-third Street. Cream wallpaper. A ficus tree in the corner that someone watered out of habit rather than hope. The director was a woman named Mrs. Halstead, sixtyish, with the particular calm of someone who had watched hundreds of young women make this decision and had learned never to flinch at any of them. She slid a folder across the desk. Inside were the forms, numbered and tabbed, each with a small red flag where I was to sign.
"We select our families carefully," she said. "James and Laura Parker. He teaches high school chemistry. She owns a bookshop in Montclair. They've been trying for six years."
I signed. Every paper. Margaret sat beside me, her hand resting lightly on the back of my chair, and I signed until my signature degraded into something unrecognizable, a black smear of ink that bore no resemblance to the name I'd practiced in law school notebooks.
The intake nurse — I never learned her name — brought the baby in for the photographs. A hospital policy, apparently. Something for the file. She arranged us the way she must have arranged a thousand such scenes: me propped against the pillows, the blanket tucked around the newborn, my arm held stiffly in place. "Smile, honey," said the agency photographer, and the flash went off twice. They took the prints away. I was handed a discharge packet and a pamphlet titled Aftercare and You that I left on the hospital tray table.
That night, in the apartment Daniel and I had shared for eleven months, I stood in his closet and pressed my face into his coat. It still smelled like him — antiseptic and coffee and the cheap cedar of the closet blocks he'd insisted on. I made a decision there, with wool against my cheek. I would never speak of this. Not to a friend, not to a therapist, not to any man I might one day marry. There are things you bury not because they are shameful but because they are load-bearing walls; remove one and the whole structure comes down.
I finished law school. I graduated in the top five percent of my class. I clerked, I billed three thousand hours a year, I made partner at thirty-six, and I never once told the story of the boy I had signed away on cream-colored forms in a brownstone on Eighty-third Street. When I thought of him — rarely, and always at odd hours, in the elevator between floors, in the shower when the water ran too hot — I thought of him as settled. Safe. Surrounded by chemistry sets and bookshop afternoons in Montclair, New Jersey.
It is remarkable, the stories we tell ourselves, and how hard we work to believe them.
Margaret paid the agency's fee and every bill that followed. She never spoke of it again. Neither did I. We had a talent for silence, my mother and I. It was the one inheritance she passed down without reservation. Sometimes, on the phone, she would go quiet at the oddest moments — a pause too long, a breath held — and I wondered if she was thinking of him too. I never asked. Asking would have meant opening a door neither of us intended to walk through.
The baby — the boy — had been given a name by then. Noah Parker. I never let myself say it. Names are hooks; they catch in the throat.
* * *
Nineteen years later, on a Tuesday in November, in the rain, he said it to me himself.
He stood outside my office building in the Garment District with a photograph in his hands and said, "You abandoned me, Mom."
I had decided, at twenty-three, that I could not keep the baby. I had signed every paper. I had kept every vow.
What I had not decided — what I had never once considered — was what to do if he decided to come back.
Chapter 6: The Boy Won't Leave
The confrontation happened on a Tuesday. By Thursday he had found the building.
Thomas called me at half past eight in the morning. "Ms. Vance," he said, in that careful tone he reserves for things that are not strictly driving-related, "there's a boy outside the entrance. I believe it's the one from Tuesday night."
The one from Tuesday night. Thomas's diplomacy was almost beautiful. I pictured Noah on the sidewalk in the November cold — torn denim, the oversized flannel, those dark eyes with their ancient recognition — and felt something tighten behind my sternum that I immediately diagnosed as irritation. That was the problem with feelings; they were so rarely convenient.
"Have security remove him," I said.
Thomas was quiet for a moment. "He's not doing anything, ma'am. Just standing there. He's been there since seven."
"If he's not a client, he's loitering. Tell the desk."
I hung up and went back to my brief. I lasted eleven minutes.
Building security is staffed by men whose job descriptions do not include tenderness. By the time I looked down from my office window at ten past nine, the situation had escalated from a boy standing on a sidewalk to a boy standing on a sidewalk being loomed over by two guards in matching windbreakers. Noah hadn't moved. He simply stood there, chin tilted up, absorbing their instructions with an expression I recognized from depositions: the look of a witness who has decided, ahead of time, that he will not be frightened.
Thomas appeared in the frame, carrying something folded over his arm. A coat. His own coat, I realized, the heavy wool one he wore in January. He held it out. Noah took a full ten seconds before accepting it, the way a stray dog studies an offered hand before deciding whether the food is worth the risk. Then he shrugged into it, and the coat swallowed him whole, sleeves flopping past his fingers, hem hanging to his knees. Thomas said something — I couldn't hear through the glass — and Noah nodded once.
I stood at the window until Thomas drove the sedan out of the garage below and the boy remained on the pavement, diminished now, or perhaps merely made human, by the borrowed coat.
Thomas told me later, as we crawled up Seventh Avenue, that the guards had been about to call the police. "I didn't want the boy in a cruiser," he said simply, eyes on the road. Thomas had been NYPD for twenty-two years before he started driving for the firm. He knew exactly what a cruiser could do to a ten-year-old with no one coming to collect him.
"He can't keep coming here, Thomas."
"No, ma'am."
"Then don't encourage him."
Thomas adjusted the rearview mirror. "I brought him soup at lunch," he said, in the same tone he might have used to report traffic on the FDR. "Chicken. He ate it standing up. Wouldn't sit down."
I turned to the window. The city slid past, gray and gleaming with the morning's rain. "Thomas, I need you to understand something. That boy is not my concern."
"Of course not, Ms. Vance."
"Saying it back doesn't help."
"Sorry, ma'am."