Page 8 of Promise

The baby was one month old.

I vaguely remember a young woman recently having a child. No family present. No partner at her side. She didn’t visit the baby in the NICU, at least that I’d noticed during my shifts, and we were on the verge of calling child protective services when someone came to claim the newborn. I was not on duty that day.

Apparently, the mother saw how deeply I cared for the infant from the start. She felt confident I was the right person to take her child.

She also recognized my last name and produced an ancestry report showing we were somehow fifth cousins. I haven’t been able to process the chart.

I still couldn’t quite process what was happening.

Was I being cruelly punked? Or had I been dropped into a scene from Baby Boom?

I was no Diane Keaton. And I definitely did not have a Sam Shepard in my life.

The letter included with the birth certificate further explained how Marissa Olsen was a college student, twenty-one years old, and on the cusp of a bright future. Her parents were dead, and she didn’t want to raise a baby. She wanted the sweet thing to go to a family member, albeit a distant one. The baby had been delivered to me by a former nanny trusted by the co-ed.

“Is any of this legal?” I direct my question to the case worker.

She shrugs, though the motion is not dismissive. “At this point, the situation is considered abandonment. With consent to offer her up for adoption.” She nods toward the envelope on the low table in front of my couch.

“With your background, and our area’s lack of baby placements, I’d appreciate if you could keep her here with you for a few days while I sort everything out. If you’d like to proceed with adoption, the process can take up to twelve months in West Virginia.”

“Adoption?” I roll the word over my tongue.

The option was one Dart wanted to consider when the doctors told me the older I got, the harder it would be to conceive, even with medical assistance.

Geriatric pregnancy. What a term for a woman over thirty-five having a baby. Insulting, and surprising, when over thirty percent of current pregnancies involve women over thirty, some well into their forties.

It’s still possible, I’d argued with Dart. I could still get pregnant. Having faith in science and biology and anything else that gave me hope. But after three miscarriages, the last one nearly killing me, Dart had had enough of trying.

I almost lost you, Trin.

I didn’t see how it mattered. He’d left me anyway.

I look down at the sweet, cherub-faced baby swaddled tight in a pink blanket. The wrap tucked around her gives her a sense of security as she dozes on my lap.

I’ll keep you safe, too. It shouldn’t be a thought.

Yet, something deep within the well of my gut says this little one belongs with me. We’ve both been abandoned. We both have so much love to give. We both need love in return, and I’m open to sharing my heart with her.

All the stored-up heartbreak shatters just by looking at her round cheeks and button nose. Her little lids are closed and flutter. She shudders a wispy breath like she can hear my thoughts, and agrees.

We need each other.

Hope rushes up my sternum, settling behind my ribs, constricting my airway, and yet wrapping around me, like the security blanket around this child.

Hope is literally in my arms. All my dreams, right in my hands.

Still, I say, “Let me think about it.”

The current situation is dangerous. The risk of attachment is great. Hope is a risky pill.

Yet, I stare down at the sleeping babe.

What a gift.

A baby.

Delivered by a giant stork, who looked like a bear, dressed in a black pant suit like a modern-day Mary Poppins.