The adoption caseworker’s cubicle is festooned with evergreen boughs and reindeer cards on a string. She wears peppermint barrettes in her hair. “How was your Yuletide?”
“Fine,” says the biographer. “I made this appointment because—Sorry, how was your Yuletide?”
“Super fun. We went up to my sister’s in Scapoose. I drank way too much spiked nog, of course, but when in Rome!”
This caseworker is the biographer’s fourth; turnover is high at the agency. She is straight out of college and has a tiny attention span and thinks “Fer sher” is an appropriate response to an emotionally charged disclosure. But she’s better than the one who asked the biographer if she knew that a child is not a replacement for a romantic partner.
“Next week is January fifteenth. I am here to quite literally beg you to get me matched before then.”
It takes the caseworker a few frowning seconds to grasp the date’s significance. “I understand your concern,” she says. “Let’s see what’s been happening in your file.” She types, waits, stares. The screen is hidden from the biographer. “Okay. Since you last updated your profile, on September second, your landing page has received six views and zero Tell Me More clicks.”
“Six? Jesus.”
“It’s difficult for some birth mothers to get past the age. You’re older than some of their own parents, which—”
“Okay, yeah, thanks, I know. But you guys said if I played up my teaching career, and the fact that I’m about to finish a book, I’d have more hits?”
“I thought it would help, fer sher. We notice, though, that status and income associated with occupation can make a difference, which for you would not necessarily be great? Compounded with the singleness.”
“What if you only showed them one profile?”
“What do you mean?”
“The next birth mother. You could show her my profile and no one else’s. Those married people on the wait-list, they’ve got plenty of time ahead of them, but I only have a week left.”
The caseworker smiles. “What you’re suggesting is unethical.”
“It’s very ethical, actually. You’d be bending the rules in a minor, temporary way to create an opportunity for someone who is worthy but otherwise wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance. You’d be making a moral choice. Think of all the change makers throughout history who—”
“I’m not one of your students, Ms. Stephens.”
“What? Sorry. I wasn’t trying to lecture you.”
“Well, you kind of were.”
“I apologize. It would just be such a microscopic drop in the—”
“A drop I could lose my job over.”
“What if …” The biographer has no idea how to phrase this, so she grabs language from the movies. “What if I made it worth your while?”
“What does that mean?”
“If I offered you an incentive to take the risk.”
“Sorry, what?”
“As in, a financial incentive.”
Light of no understanding on the caseworker’s face.
“What if I gave you, personally, a thousand dollars,” whispers the biographer, naming a sum she could realistically borrow. Her father, Penny, Didier—
“Oh my God, are you bribing me? This is my first bribe! I’m the only person in the office who hasn’t been offered one. Until today.”
Heartened by the lack of outrage, the biographer says, “Congratulations?”
“That’s wild. I mean, of course I can’t take it, but thank you.”
“Why not? Nobody would find out. I give you cash, you show my profile to a birth mother before the fifteenth, I get matched with a baby, you get on with your life.”
“Ms. Stephens, I totally sympathize with your situation, but I can’t take part in an illegal transaction.”
“You can, you just don’t want to.” The biographer is trying to breathe normally, but her lungs feel damp and fibrous, like rained‑on wood. “Please? It would—it would change my life. I would never tell anyone. I’d lie on the stand if it went to court.” Wrong thing to say: the caseworker’s eyes crinkle up. “Which it wouldn’t, of course, it never would, nobody will find out, I don’t know why I said that but I guess it was to emphasize how much this would mean to me, and to the baby, who would have a good home with me, a really good home.”
The black silver, flecked with ocean.
On a train to the Gunakadeit Light.
“Please?” she says. “Please?”
Breathe, Stephens.
“My supervisor’s out today,” says the caseworker, slowly, carefully, “but would you like me to have her call you?”
“Can she give me an extension on the deadline?”
“Every Child Needs Two is a federal law. Even if we made exceptions for unmarried applicants, the adoptions wouldn’t be valid. Which would create more misery for all involved.” She adds, “But you can stay on the fostering wait-list, fer sher.”
The biographer’s sodden lungs fight to take a full breath.
She drives back to Newville, gasping.
On the beach the wind drives hair into her eyes. She hurls a sneaker at a low-flying gull. Curses her aim. Retrieves her shoe. Jumps on an old log. The beach is a good place for rage: the sky and sea can take it. Her screams are absorbed by the booming waves, the heaped fields of oyster cloud. Because this is Oregon in January, nobody human is around to hear.