The Search Angel Read Free Page B

tiny landing beneath the row of mailboxes, she rushes out onto the street to stop the driver from leaving.
    The cab is gone.
    It’s okay. She’ll repack her bag. Hail another cab. She’ll get to the airport if it kills her. She marches back into the building to stuff sundresses and flip-flops and a tampon box back into the suitcase as Jonathan tries to stop her.
    “Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t just show up as one half of the adoptive couple and take her with you.”
    “Oh yes I can.”
    “Eleanor, be real. We need to talk about this.”
    “I’ll go get her, bring her back, then we can talk.”
    The case won’t zip up. Eleanor shoves sleeves and straysocks back inside the bag and leans her weight onto it. Tugs on the zipper.
    “Eleanor. Forget it.”
    She tugs harder and harder on the zipper until part of it breaks off in her hand. Dropping back onto her heels, she sinks to the floor and stares accusingly at the metal slider on her palm. The scream inside her head comes out as a whisper. “How could you?”
    A half hour later, they’re back upstairs. Jonathan lowers himself onto the bed and leans over his thighs, rubbing his jawline. “Cassie Shreve from ICU’s been telling us all these stories about her sister. Adopted a boy from Russia. Now the kid’s a tween and a total horror show. Shoots coke, smokes in the house. He’s barely fifteen and grabbed the car keys one night. Took off until the next day; they had no idea where he was. It’s a nightmare. They have two other kids and thought they’d give back by taking in this orphan. Now their lives are ruined. Cassie said specifically:
don’t do it
.”
    Eleanor sits on the other side of the bed. Reaches for a pillow and presses it into her abdomen.
    This bed, king-size. She didn’t say anything about children when they picked it out; there’d been too many miscarriages at that point and Jonathan had placed a moratorium on baby talk. “Every conversation doesn’t have to be about how great our lives would be with kids,” he’d said. When they lay side by side on the display mattress, he spoke about the way the pillow-top sunk down just enough that it felt like a full-body hug. He asked the salesgirl if it came witha warranty. If it was included in the Spring Price Wars promotion.
    Eleanor didn’t care about the price. She was busy imagining their baby on a Saturday morning, all fed and changed and happy, crawling around between them and giggling when the downy surface knocked him off balance. Or her. She hadn’t shared her fantasy with Jonathan until the bed was delivered. He kissed her hand then and said they were going to have that one day. They were going to have it all.
    “That’s one case,” Eleanor says now. “One boy. We don’t know how they raised him. What mistakes they made.”
    “Their other two are honor students. Dream children. But their lives are being completely messed up by this Pavel kid.”
    “When did this conversation with Cassie even happen?”
    He shrugs. “A while ago. Couple of weeks.”
    “And you’ve gone along with everything. Painting her room. Booking the flight. Letting me think you were onside.”
    “I guess I thought … I don’t know what I thought. I’d change my mind or something. Getting this baby seems like it will fix everything. Like it will be the same as our own child, but it won’t.”
    “Of course it will.”
    “You don’t know what you’re getting. It’s too risky. The attachment bond is broken at the infant stage. Once that’s severed, there’s no repair. Not even with years of therapy.”
    She says nothing.
    “The child can grow up to have difficulty forming meaningful relationships,” he says. “They can reject those who love them and chase down those who don’t in an attempt to win back the mother who rejected them. The damage can last a lifetime.”
    Sylvie’s curly pigtails. Those sweet, streaky pom-poms above the tiny whorls of her ears. Eleanor will never get to touch