Chapter 5
Lily's attorney made the arguments available to him. Patricia answered each one with something from the record.
The judge terminated parental rights on a Thursday morning in November, which was a gray, cold day with rain moving in from the bay, and I sat in the family court hallway afterward with Patricia while she explained the next steps and Donna called to say she was on her way, and I thought about Emily breaking a cracker in half at four fifty in the morning and giving the larger piece to Jack before she ate anything herself, and I thought about Jack and his dinosaur, and I thought about the purple backpack with the folded birth certificates inside it, and I thought about the sentence she always needs to be the responsible one, and I decided that if being the responsible one had led me to this hallway on this gray Thursday morning with two children waiting for me at home, then I would take it.
I would take all of it.
The adoption was finalized eleven months later, on a Friday afternoon in September, in a room that had a balloon arch someone on the clerk's staff had put up and a judge who had been doing adoption finalizations for six years and still smiled at every single one of them like it was the first. Emily wore a dress she had chosen herself, green with white flowers, and Jack wore a small button-down shirt he had agreed to under the condition that the dinosaur could come. The dinosaur came. It is in the photograph on my phone's lock screen, slightly out of focus in Jack's hand, behind the two of them and me and Patricia and Donna, all of us in a room with a balloon arch on a Friday in September.
Lily was located in Los Angeles four months after the hearing, enrolled in the program she had been planning for. She did not contest the termination. Patricia said this was not unusual, and that the record had not left her much to contest with, and that people who document their own intentions as thoroughly as Lily had documented hers tend to understand, eventually, that the documentation is the thing that decides the outcome.
I kept the note in the plastic sleeve. It is in a folder in my desk with the rest of the paperwork from that first morning, the photos the officers took, the social worker's intake form, the receipt from the pediatric appointment. I do not look at it often. But I have not thrown it away, because it is the document that started everything, and I have come to believe that the things that start everything deserve to be kept where you can find them, not as a wound, but as proof of the exact morning when the life you were already living became the life you had actually chosen.
Emily starts kindergarten next fall. She has strong opinions about backpacks. Jack has informed me that the dinosaur's name is Gerald and that Gerald will also be attending kindergarten, which we are still negotiating.
Some nights after they are asleep I sit in the kitchen with the light low and think about the woman I was at four forty-seven in the morning on that first day, with my work shoes on and my keys in my hand, trying to understand why there were two children on my welcome mat.
May you like
I understand now.
They were always going to be mine. They were waiting on that mat in the pre-dawn dark because the life I was supposed to be living had finally run out of patience with me and decided to knock.
