The Search Angel Read Free Page A

races beyond her mother’s unusual background.
    With only a disabled aunt as a family member, the infant was declared an orphan and placed in an already crowded foster home with five other children. There, she shared a room with two other babies. Eleanor and Jonathan saw her photo at Back Bay Adoption here in Boston. Eleanor took one look at the girl’s cute-as-a-button face, stunning eyes wide with wonder, tulip-bud mouth half open, impossibly tiny white teeth, and fell hard.
    They met all the requirements through the partner agency in California, including the paperwork and a home visit by the Boston branch to save precious agency dollars. Everything is finally in place. They’ve been approved and will finally have their little girl.
    Now, two beeps from outside have Eleanor racing to the living room window. There on the sill sits a fat wooden picture frame she bought specifically for the stock photo it camewith. A photo of a toothy family, all windswept and bare-toed and brunette, all in jeans and black T-shirts on the grass in front of a lake. Not posed stiffly either. This is no boring family. These people frolic, laugh, piggyback. As if this is life all the time, not just when a professional photographer is poised to immortalize them on a stock photo website.
    This family is either whole, or doing a damn good job of pretending. Which is fine. She’ll replace them with one of her own family soon. Herself, Jonathan, and Sylvie. And Angus, of course.
    She leans over the photo to look down at the street. There, double parked, is a yellow Boston Cab glistening in the rain. “Car’s here.” She rushes to the kitchen to make sure the window is locked tight, then to turn off the lights throughout the apartment. “Jon!” She drags all the bags into the outer hallway. Another beep from the street. “It’s rush hour. And we have to stop at the vet’s first. Then we check in. Fight our way through the lineup at check-in …” One quick stop in the bedroom to make sure she hasn’t left anything on the bed, to find she left something on the bed. She grabs the car seat and rushes it to the door. “Then the plane. Then the mile-high make-out because we’re going to be parents but we’re not going to be dull. Jonathan, hurry.
Sylvie
!”
    A click. A thunk. The bathroom door creaks open. Her favorite room in the apartment. Deep porcelain tub, black and white hexagon floor tiles, many of which are cracked from a near century of use. The freestanding sink still has separate hot and cold faucets—a feature Eleanor finds charming and Jonathan does not. Keeps burning his hands, he says. He steps out from behind the door wearing nothing but boxers.
    She stares at his bare feet, arms, chest. “You’re not even dressed!”
    He leans against the door frame. He doesn’t speak.
    “Hurry. Throw on some pants. We have to go.”
    A movement so small she doesn’t realize right away that he’s shaking his head.
    “What? What’s wrong?”
    More honking from outside.
    “Jonathan. Talk to me.”
    “I just. I can’t do it.”
    “Can’t do what?”
    He doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. She doesn’t breathe. For what seems a lifetime, he stares at a spot on the wall just over her left shoulder. The front door is wide open and a chill from the stairway makes her shiver. A series of clicks as the heat kicks on inside the apartment. The honking has stopped.
    Finally, Jonathan motions toward the bags and car seat in the doorway, the airline tickets on the hall table, the bedroom awaiting their adoptive daughter. “Any of it.”

Chapter 3
    H er first instinct is to bolt. To get on the plane without him. Without a word she grabs her purse, her passport, the car seat, then her bag and Sylvie’s, and heads down the narrow staircase. She trips halfway down and her suitcase and the car seat somersault to the bottom, where the seat lands on its yawning face and the bag bursts open. Ignoring her T-shirts and panties splayed out on the