Gute_9780307271068_3p_all_r1.qxp
6/3/11
5:45 PM
Page 31
31 but we’re owning up to it together, and so far, I’ve been proud to stand beside you while you stay the course with so much . . . is the right word ‘courage’? Look, I’m sure it isn’t easy to be alone on the island day in and day out, especially at your age, but we have to bear up, and we’re getting there.” “It’s not just that it’s a baby,” Diane said, “it’s that it’s my baby, growing inside of me.” Then she cried while her Rocky Road ran down the cone onto her hand.
Walter convinced Diane to opt for an induced birth. She was to say that she lived on San Juan Island and was afraid of having her baby on the ferry, but the real reason, of course, was that an induced birth meant Walter could schedule. One week before the day he’d marked on his calendar as travel to baltimore, they had to listen to a lecture from the adoption agency’s director. By law, Diane would have forty-eight hours following the birth of the baby to change her mind. After that, there would be a third day for the baby in the maternity ward, to make sure it was healthy. If there was anything wrong, if the baby didn’t meet certain standards, the new family wouldn’t come for it, as stipulated in their adoption papers. If nothing was wrong, as everyone expected, then, on the fourth day, the new family would take the baby without seeing Diane, or Diane’s seeing them. Thereafter—out of this the director made a full-blown disquisition— Diane should think of herself as having done the right thing, as having provided love and a good life for her child by relinquishing it to adoptive parents, who subsequently would in fact be the sole parents in all legal regards. Was that understood? Did Diane know what she was doing? Did she get the nuances, the legal principles, the injunctions? Odds were that she did, thought Walter, because it had all been plodded through with Biblical depth and thoroughness. There it all was, a lot of spelled-out mumbo-jumbo, no doubt arrived at by lawyers and politicians and, he hoped, irrelevant in his case. Let the counted-on scenario begin, he thought, with no “if ”s intruding. The appointed day arrived. For the trip to the mainland hospital, they took two cars, Diane in her beater without a license or insurance, and Walter in his workhorse Lincoln-cum-taxi, so that afterward they could