Fresh Kills Read Free Page A

“just keep in mind the only thing I know about Family Court is where they keep the juvenile delinquents.”
    â€œThat’s the beauty part, sweetie. I’ll teach you everything you need to know. For starters,” she added, dropping her butt to the floor and crushing it with a black and silver pump, “we’re not in Family Court. That’s a poor people’s court, and adoptive parents are used to better. So in the City we do adoptions in Surrogate’s Court. Much nicer atmosphere. You’ll see.”
    If memory served, Marla had taught me everything I needed to know about wills in one long all-nighter just before the exam. I got a D in the course.
    Marla’d said a D was no big deal.

C HAPTER T WO
    I felt as if I’d been listening to Marla talk for a month. I’d begged her not to smoke in the car, so she lit up and held the glowing cigarette out the window, in the fond belief that the smoke would waft into the damp March breeze instead of back inside the vehicle.
    â€œâ€¦ hope nothing’s really wrong with her,” Marla said. She’d heard that the doctor who was scheduled to deliver Amber’s baby was making a house call. “I mean, the last thing we need is a defective baby, right?”
    â€œWhat happens if—”
    â€œDepends,” Marla replied, her eyes fixed on the road. We were on Victory Boulevard, a main highway on Staten Island, an uncharted wilderness to an Ohio girl transplanted first to Greenwich Village and then to brownstone Brooklyn. From the window of Marla’s cream-colored Beemer, it looked a lot like Cleveland, even down to the depressing St. Patrick’s Day rain.
    â€œWhen people adopt through an agency,” Marla explained, “they fill out a form listing what defects are acceptable and which are deal-breakers. Like they could handle a kid with a missing finger, but not a Down’s syndrome baby. I thought it was a good idea, so I lifted a copy of the form when I left the agency, modified it a little, and now I get all my adoptive parents to sign it.”
    I pondered this in silence, tired of punctuating everything Marla said with incredulous exclamations. You mean people actually choose between cerebral palsy and cystic fibrosis? If the kid’s got a defect, they send it back to the manufacturer? What is this, adoption or buying stereo equipment, for God’s sake ?
    And I’d thought criminal practice was cold.
    Marla took a left off Victory Boulevard, and we sped past the infamous Willowbrook State Hospital, euphemistically renamed the Staten Island Developmental Center—where Junior Greenspan might end up if he was lacking in the brain department. We then passed a giant enclosed mall, the first I’d ever seen inside the five boroughs.
    â€œLooks a little like Cleveland,” I remarked.
    â€œGod, yes,” Marla agreed. “Depressing, no?”
    Actually it made me feel slightly—very slightly—homesick for a place I hadn’t lived in twenty years. And I cheered up a little, thinking that at least Amber, the birth mother, wasn’t living in some hole waiting for her baby, but had a nice suburban home.
    â€œTell me again why Amber’s in this group home,” I asked. “I mean, it’s a private adoption, right? The agency has nothing to do with it, so why—?”
    Marla shook an exasperated head. “God, Cass, if you’d just listen . I told you, Doc Scanlon thought she might have a little trouble with her pregnancy; she was behind on her rent and couldn’t work, so he agreed to let her stay at the home until she gave birth. The agency’s charging her for the room, but it’s a lot cheaper than an apartment. It’s all perfectly legal; every penny the adoptive parents spend on her support has to be documented in an affidavit before the court, so there’s no hanky-panky. Just a logical solution to a simple problem.”
    The