“Certainly, everyone will know. It’ll be obvious.” Julie crossed her arms, frowning. “Can you please be happy for us?”
A cloud passed over her sister’s face. “I am happy. I’m just worried you don’t understand what you’re getting into.”
“We know exactly what we’re getting into. Felix needs a mother and father. Mark and I want to be parents. Why is that complicated?”
“Because you’re white and he’s Guatemalan?”
Julie threw up her hands. “Listen. I want to be a mother. Just like you, just like untold numbers of women since the beginning of time. I don’t care what color his skin is.” She picked up the bread to set on the table, but Claire wouldn’t let her go.
“This probably isn’t the time to tell you.” She laced her fingers across her belly, her smile sheepish. “We’re pregnant.”
The copper pots hanging from the dish rack seemed to sway and Julie held the counter to steady herself, as she might in an earthquake. Then she put down the bread and hugged Claire, careful not to press too closely. She wanted to stay positive for her sister.
Claire’s voice drifted to Julie’s ears as the sisters pulled apart. “We’re at twelve weeks. We’ll become mothers together.”
Julie clamped her mouth shut. She wanted to remind Claire that two of Julie’s three miscarried pregnancies went to seventeen weeks. Claire wasn’t out of the woods. But let Claire do things her way. She always did.
Ethan and Claire must have timed it to break the news together because Mark’s congratulations echoed in the kitchen. “Good deal. Outstanding.”
“Once you relax, maybe it’ll happen for you,” Claire was saying.
“Well, now we have Felix.”
“I mean if you want your own.”
It was at that moment that Julie decided to stop talking about Felix until after he arrived. She couldn’t bear to be told what she was doing wrong, or that her son wouldn’t really be theirs. True, he’d look nothing like them, but so what? They lived in liberal Marin County, close to San Francisco. Julie was proud they’d create their own rainbow coalition.
Felix would grow up the big boy to his younger cousin, the way she was big sister to Claire. He would be their own.
*
With her three lost pregnancies, Julie had felt changes in her body, kicks and turns, her belly getting bigger with new life. With adoption, she felt nothing physical. No moving, no kicking, no tightening of the waistband to announce, Hey, Mom! Here I am, don’t forget me!
What she fixated on, instead, were her copies of their one photograph of their son. One copy hung on the refrigerator door, where it greeted her every morning. Another lived in a Ziploc bag in her purse. A dozen times a day in her office at the Orrin Clay Museum she peeked at the Ziploc to study the details—his curly black hair, his round cheeks. What was Felix doing now? she wondered. Newborns slept and they ate and they slept and ate some more. A co-worker just back from maternity leave informed everyone who would listen about her breast milk: pumping it, banking it, its vitamin and mineral content. How much healthier breast milk was for babies than God-forbid-formula. Julie had to walk away whenever the conversation started or else she’d hyperventilate. With no breast for Felix to nurse, did he get enough nutrition? Did one particular nanny give him his bottle, or did the task rotate? Julie struggled to forget the image from Kate’s presentation of an assembly line of babies with bottles propped beside them. Were infants even strong enough to hold onto a bottle and suck?
Daily, Julie emailed for updates. “He’s thriving,” Kate wrote. “Don’t worry!”
But Julie did worry and couldn’t wait to visit so she could hold him herself and never put him down. Kate forbade the first meeting until after the test to ensure a DNA match. That was when birth mother and relinquished child were reunited in an office in Guatemala City, a photo was taken of the pair, and the inside of their cheeks were swabbed for tissue samples. Kate guaranteed DNA within one month. But a month was so far away.
After DNA, everything was simple. The social work report, the review by the Guatemalan attorney general’s office, the rubber stamp by the U.S. Embassy—none of it was going to present a problem. Until they got a positive DNA match, Julie should hold off booking any flights.
*
Fifteen days later, Mark stood at the kitchen counter in front of two bowls of homemade granola. “Bananas, strawberries, or blueberries?” he asked.
“Blueberries,” Julie mumbled from her chair at the table, opening her laptop screen as she waited for messages to appear. “Interview and DNA,” read the subject line from Kate. “About time she got it done,” Julie said.
“That’s why we pay her the big bucks.” Mark set down Julie’s bowl of granola and walked over to the sink while she skimmed the page.
“This is impossible.” She sat up straighter.
“What is it?” Mark was beside her, reading over her shoulder. A red flag by the U.S. Embassy. Based on the agent’s observations during an interview, DNA was not done. The agent believed the woman was not Felix’s birth mother.
“Not Ida Manuela?” Julie said. She read the sentences over and over, but the words didn’t change. “Now what do we do?”
Mark looked resigned. “We walk away. It’s over, Julie.”
“It’s not over. Felix is our son.”
“He’s not our son. He’s a baby we saw in a jpeg. We never even held him. For all we know, he’s not even real.”
“Felix is real, Mark. Trust me, Felix is real.”
She turned back to Kate’s email. This sometimes happened, Kate explained. Rarely, but it happened. They tried to be careful, but people occasionally slipped through. Blah blah blah blah. Excuses. Kate ended by saying they’d returned Felix to the lawyer, hoping caring relatives would raise him.
“The relatives are the ones who gave him away in the first place,” Julie almost screamed. “He’s going to wind up in an orphanage.”
“Maybe they’ll give him back to his birth mother. The real one.”
How could he just walk away? Julie knew she’d never forget Felix, or the way, for a few weeks, he had been her son. She grazed a finger over the print-out of Felix’s photo on the refrigerator door, a wave of sadness rising. “What are we supposed to do with this? Tear it up like he never existed?”
Mark walked over, removed the magnet, and took down the picture. He stared at the likeness for a long moment before folding it into quarters and slipping it into his shirt pocket. “I’ll put it somewhere.” His voice caught. “For the record, I thought Felix was a fine name.”
Julie bit her lip, grateful for this small acknowledgement. If Felix wasn’t real, why did it feel like somebody died? Why did her heart feel empty? She dreaded opening her purse to find his photo in the Ziploc, which she’d placed with such optimism. She asked Mark to fish it out and hide it with the other one. There was no ceremony to mourn a child who was never theirs in the first place.
Hours after losing their referral for Felix, they got a follow-up email from Kate. Forget Felix, she wrote. Focus on finding the child meant for you. Julie hoped they gave him back to Ida Manuela, or whoever his mother was. She hoped Ida Manuela loved and cared for him, always, the way Julie would have loved and cared for him, if she’d been given a chance.
That night Mark and Julie lay in bed with the windows open. They had debated whether to switch agencies and countries and start the process over again from the beginning. Everything about that plan exhausted Julie. Another country might be worse.
Mark folded his