The Mothers: A Novel Read Online Free

with more time than I would ever have again in my life, and so I did obsessive obedience training with her—sitting, staying, handing over the paw, a game where I shot her and she played dead—all to prepare her for future visits to sick children in cancer wards, places she would never go because I could never go back.
    Commands aside, it had been important to me to raise a puppy as my companion, and I felt similarly about a child. I could let go of the genetic link quite easily, and with it release a child from inheriting my mighty nose, my proclivity toward migraines, my rash rush to anger, but I could not let go of the prospect of mothering an infant.
    Given my family, a heady combination of Eastern European Jews, I was inclined to choose a child from Russia. When the criteria for adopting a Russian child went up on the screen at that first meeting at Smith Chasen, we found we made the cut—bravo!—but what the country was offering was hard to bear. Children in orphanages, the environments unclear, and I thought of a child perhaps untouched from infanthood. The long wait for a Russian child flashed on the screen, along with a chart of how orphanages tried to adopt those children out first locally, in the town or village, and then state-wide, and then nationally. So by the time the possibility of that child arrived here, she was often three or four, and, I could not help but wonder, passed over why ?
    I could not have known at that introductory session that two weeks later, Russia would put a ban on U.S. adoptions as a result of an American woman who placed her adopted Russian child alone on a one-way plane to Moscow with a note that said: This child is mentally unstable. He is violent and has severe psychopathic issues. The child was dropped by a hired driver at the Russian Education Ministry in Moscow.
    I thought about the woman who sent that child back to Russia as we drove south, where babies—babies available for adoption—came from. Because of religion, I thought, remembering the fanatics in front of the abortion clinics we defended in college, who held Life magazine’s blown-up pictures of fetuses in uteri, the same photos my mother had shown me when trying to explain how babies were made.
    Ramon had spent several years in Argentina and Venezuela, and so a South American child made sense to us. He was a native Spanish speaker, and Guatemala seemed a viable option until we were told that night at Smith Chasen that Guatemala had also recently closed to Americans. The Hague Convention, which prevented organizations from paying women to have children, as well as the trafficking of babies over international borders, had been signed into U.S. law. Of course I didn’t want to take someone’s baby, someone who was being forced into placing their child up for adoption. I didn’t want to buy a child. And yet, I couldn’t help but think of getting here before those laws had started to affect intercountry adoption, in the golden age, when you lined up and paid your fees and got your fingerprints taken and your HIV tests, and then you got in a queue and when it was your turn, you left that country with an infant. And then that infant became your baby. And that baby grew into your child.
    We had been cut off from Asian countries, where one was not to have ever had a mental illness—no antidepressants, not a single therapy session, not a one. But for me it was not reasons of mental health that precluded Asia; it was cancer. No. Cancer. Never. None. We were ineligible to become parents of children from an entire portion of the world.
    Now Ramon and I passed through Richmond, its factories billowing black smoke, the large buildings almost New England looking in their stoic red-brickness, and I remembered a couple who sat next to us on that row of chairs at Smith Chasen, two men in beautifully tailored suits, crisp shirts with the faintest blue stripes, pastel ties. One was dark—Latino, I think—and the other looked as