Page Seven

by Alan Ginsberg-Cobden, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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Lorna from the agency called at 7:40 on a Tuesday morning, and adoption caseworkers do not call at 7:40 in the morning with good news.

"Owen. Is Gabe with you?"

"He's on a ladder in Stockton," I said. "Is it the baby?"

"It's Kenzie." A pause, the kind they must teach in a seminar. "She missed her appointment yesterday. Her phone goes straight to voicemail. Her roommate says she packed a bag on Saturday and took the bus."

"The bus where?"

"She didn't say."

I was standing in the nursery. I don't know why I'd gone in there with my coffee; I went in there a lot. We had painted it a yellow called Butter Rum, which Gabe said was a dessert, not a colour, and which I said was the only yellow that didn't look like a hospital or a duckling. The crib was from a farmhouse sale in Ringoes. The mobile was five tin fish I'd bought from a dealer in Frenchtown who swore they were Portuguese. Seventeen days to the due date.

"Lorna," I said, "is she changing her mind?"

"Birth mothers sometimes need to go quiet near the end. It doesn't always mean anything." She had the voice of a woman who had said this to a lot of men standing in a lot of nurseries. "I'll call you the minute I hear."

I'm six foot five. I spent my twenties being asked if I played basketball and my thirties explaining that I sell antiques on Bridge Street in Lambertville, which nobody believes, because apparently antique dealers are supposed to be small and dusty. I put the coffee down on the changing table and found that I couldn't pick it back up.

---

Things I knew about Kenzie Kowalczyk, twenty, thirty-seven weeks pregnant:

She was from Pittsburgh. She'd moved east last winter and worked the counter at a coffee place across the river in New Hope. She didn't name the father and the agency didn't push. She had picked us out of forty-one family profiles. Lorna told us, the first time we met, that the profiles with two dads in them got looked at last. Kenzie had asked for ours first.

At the match meeting, in the agency's conference room in Princeton, with the muffins nobody ate, she had looked at Gabe a long time. Not at me. People usually look at me first; it's the height. She looked at Gabe the way you look at a painting you've been told is valuable and can't see why.

When she said Pittsburgh, Gabe set his coffee cup down on the table without a sound. I noticed. I filed it under Gabe hates Pittsburgh, which was a thing I had never heard him say.

And at the end, when Lorna was gathering up the papers, Kenzie had held up her copy of our profile book. Fourteen glossy pages. Gabe and me at the shore, Gabe and me at his sister's wedding, the dog we used to have. "Can I keep this?" she said. "Page seven, especially."

Page seven was a photograph I'd chosen myself.

And this is the part I didn't tell Gabe. In June, Kenzie had texted me. Only me. Does Gabe have friends from college? He never talks about it.

I'd written back: He doesn't keep in touch with anybody from Rutgers. Not even his best friend. Something happened, I don't know what.

She'd written: What was her name?

I hadn't thought it was strange. I'd thought: she's choosing parents for her baby, she wants to know who we are. I'd written Ask him sometime, with a smiley face, God help me. And I'd never mentioned it, because Gabe gets quiet when you bring up Rutgers, and I've spent fourteen years stepping around his quiet the way you step around a soft board in an old floor.

---

I walked across the bridge to New Hope. It was faster than finding parking on the Pennsylvania side, and I needed to be moving.

The coffee place was called Ferry Street Beans, though it wasn't on Ferry Street. The kid behind the counter had a ring in his eyebrow and a name tag that said THEO.

"She quit," Theo said. "Friday. Didn't even finish the week." He looked at me harder. "Wait. Are you the tall one?"

"I'm a tall one."

"She said if the tall one came in, give him this." He went into the back and came out with a manila envelope, the kind with the little red string you wind around a button. "She said not the other one. Just you."

I didn't open it at the counter. I went outside and stood by the canal with the ducks and the tourists, and I unwound the red string.

It was page seven, torn out of the book along the binding, a little ragged.

I knew the photograph better than I knew most photographs of myself. Gabe at twenty-five, in somebody's apartment kitchen in New Brunswick. It's his birthday. He's wearing a paper Burger King crown, which nobody has ever explained to me, and there's flour on his cheek because he'd tried to bake his own cake. He's laughing at whoever is holding the camera, his head tipped back. I've known him since he was thirty-two and I have never once seen him laugh like that. That's why I put it in. I wanted the girl, whoever she turned out to be, to see that man.

At the left edge of the frame, half cut off, there's a woman. Dark braid. A Rutgers sweatshirt. She's laughing too, but not at the camera. She's laughing at Gabe.

Somebody had drawn a circle around her in blue ballpoint. Gone round twice.

On the back, in the same pen, in a round careful hand:

Ask him who she is.

---

Gabe was at the kitchen table when I got home, eating soup out of the pot. There was glazing putty under his thumbnails. He restores windows. Old ones, wavy cylinder glass from before 1900, the kind you can't buy any more and have to save one pane at a time. He told me on our first date that you hold old glass by the edges and you don't let it know you're scared. I thought it was the most romantic thing a man had ever said to me. I still do.

I put page seven on the table, picture side up.

He looked at it for a while. Then he put the spoon in the pot and left it there.

"Margo," he said.

"Who's Margo?"

"Where did you get this?"

"Kenzie left it for me. She circled her." I turned the page over so he could read the back. "She asked me about your college friends, back in June. I should have told you. I'm telling you now. Who's Margo, Gabe?"

He read the six words on the back about ten times. Then he got up and went to the window over the sink, and he put his hand flat on the glass, the way he does when he's checking a pane for a draft, and he talked to the window instead of to me.

"Margo Reyes. She was my best friend. Freshman year to — to about twenty-six." He breathed. "She wanted a baby. She was thirty, she was single, she said she didn't want some catalogue donor, she wanted to know where her kid's nose came from. She asked me. 2005. We were — it was a kitchen thing, Owen. A mason jar and one of those plastic syringes, no needle, from the vet supply on Route 1. Four months of it. We used to laugh so hard she'd get the hiccups."

"Okay," I said, because I didn't know what else to say.

"In August she called and said it had worked. I cried in a Wawa. Two weeks later she called back and said she'd lost it. And she'd met somebody, Dana, and they were moving to Pittsburgh, and she didn't want to try again. Not with me. She said it was too much, it had gotten too — " He stopped. "She stopped answering. I sent her a birthday card for three years. Then I stopped too."

"You never told me."

"Our second date. The Italian place in Doylestown. You said, I'm going to be honest, I'm never doing kids, so if that's what you want, tell me now." He finally turned around. "So I didn't want it. That was easy. I'd had practice."

I remembered saying it. I remembered being proud of saying it, the way you're proud at thirty of every door you've slammed on yourself. It took me nine years and a nephew to change my mind. When I finally said what if we adopted, Gabe had gone outside and cut the grass, which didn't need cutting, and I'd thought he was against it.

"I didn't want you to think I'd been waiting," Gabe said. "All that time. Like I'd been sitting there with a jar."

I did the arithmetic standing up. Then I went and got the agency folder off the sideboard, because I wanted to be wrong, and I found the line. Birth mother's date of birth.

March 30, 2006.

Gabe read it over my shoulder. August of 2005, just pregnant. March of 2006. He didn't need a calendar. He'd been counting it for twenty years and pretending he wasn't.

He sat down on the kitchen floor. Not on the chair. On the floor, with his back against the dishwasher, his long legs out across the tiles, and I got down beside him because there was nothing else to do with a man that size except sit next to him.

"She's my daughter," he said. "Owen. We were going to adopt my granddaughter."

---

He still had Margo's number. Of course he did. It was still in his phone under Margo R., twenty years and four phones later, carried over from phone to phone like a spare key you never use and never throw out.

He put it on speaker. It rang four times. Then a woman's voice, older and lower than the girl in the sweatshirt, said: "Gabe."

Not hello. Not who is this. She had his number saved too.

"Is she there?" Gabe said. "Is Kenzie with you?"

A long breath on the line. Somewhere behind her a television was going, a game show, people clapping.

"No," Margo said. "She's not with me. I haven't seen her since February. She called Sunday."

"Margo, she's —"

"I know what she is. I know what she's doing. I know whose name is on her paperwork." Her voice cracked and set again, fast, like ice on a puddle. "She found you herself. Four years ago. I'd kept your name in a shoebox with her birth certificate, and she was sixteen and nosy, and she wanted to know why I'd written GABE on the inside of the lid."

"What did you tell her?"

"I told her you knew about her. I told her you'd said you didn't want to be anybody's father, and you'd walked away." Margo said it flat, all at once, the way you pull a splinter. "I needed her not to go looking. Dana didn't want a third parent in the picture. And you would have wanted to be her father, Gabe. You'd have been good at it. And I'd have had to share her with you, every Christmas, every birthday, for the rest of my life. I was thirty-one and scared and I made you a miscarriage. It took me one phone call."

Gabe had his hand over his mouth.

"She told me on Sunday what she'd done. That she picked you. That she was going to hand her baby to the man who didn't want her, so you'd have to look at her face across the breakfast table every day and know." Margo laughed, and there was nothing in it. "My kid. Twenty years old and she builds a thing like that. I wonder where she gets it."

"And you told her the truth," I said.

There was a little silence while Margo worked out there was a third person in the room.

"Is that the husband?"

"I'm the husband."

"I told her the truth," Margo said. "First time in twenty years. I told her you never knew. That you cried in a Wawa. She hung up on me, and she hasn't —"

My phone buzzed in my pocket. I almost didn't look. Then I saw the screen: a 908 number, and under it, in the little grey letters phones use when they're guessing, Flemington, NJ.

"Mr. Bartek?" A woman's voice, brisk, with the hum of a corridor behind it. "This is labor and delivery at Hunterdon Medical. We have a patient, a Mackenzie Kowalczyk. She was admitted at three this afternoon. She listed you as her contact."

"Is she all right? Is the baby —"

"Mom and baby are fine so far. She's six centimetres." A pause, and I heard the nurse decide to tell me the next part. "She's asking for her father. She gave your number. She said you'd know who she meant."

---

It's twenty minutes from our house to Flemington if you take 179 up to 202 and don't stop for the lights. Gabe drove it in fourteen. I don't think he blinked.

The nurse at the desk was named Bernadette, and she looked at the two of us, the two biggest men she'd seen all week, and said, "Which one's Dad?"

Gabe opened his mouth and nothing came out of it.

"Him," I said.

She took him back. I stayed in the family lounge, which had a fish tank, a vending machine that sold only Fritos, and a framed print of a covered bridge that I would have priced at forty dollars and let go for thirty. I sat there for nine hours with page seven on my knee.

I'm not proud of the first two of those hours. In the first two hours I thought about the nursery. I thought about Butter Rum and five tin fish from Portugal, and the box of newborn diapers in the hall closet, and the fact that under New Jersey law, in an agency adoption, a birth mother can't sign the surrender until seventy-two hours after the birth. Lorna had explained it to us at the very first meeting, gently, the way you'd explain to a man that the house he's bidding on might have termites. Seventy-two hours. Then it's signed and it can't be undone. Before that, nothing is anybody's.

In the third hour I thought about the second date in Doylestown. I'm never doing kids, so if that's what you want, tell me now. I'd thought I was being honest. I'd been handing a man a door and watching him shut it on his own hand, and then I'd ordered the veal.

After that I mostly watched the fish.

At 2:50 in the morning a nurse I didn't know came out and said, "Girl. Seven pounds one. Everybody's fine." She looked at me, at the page in my hand. "She wants to see you. The tall one, she says. Is that you?"

---

The room was dim, lit by the monitors and a strip of light from the hall. Kenzie was propped up in the bed, grey and sweaty and twenty years old, with her hair stuck to her forehead. The baby was asleep in a plastic bassinet on wheels, wrapped in one of those striped hospital blankets, a card taped to the end. BABY GIRL KOWALCZYK.

Gabe was in the glider by the window. He looked as if somebody had taken him apart and put him back together slightly wrong.

"You came," Kenzie said to me.

"You asked."

She looked at page seven in my hand. "You picked that one," she said. "Gabe told me. He said you put it in because he looked happy."

"He did look happy."

"Mom used to tell me one thing about him. Only one, when I was little, before she decided he was a jerk. She said, your donor could fix any window in the world." Kenzie's mouth went crooked. "I used to stand at our windows in Pittsburgh and look at the glass. Like he might've been there."

The monitor went on beeping, slow and bored.

"I wasn't going to give her to you," she said to Gabe. "Not really. I mean I was. I was going to sign. But that wasn't why." She pulled the blanket up. "I just wanted to see your face when you figured it out. And then at the meeting you looked at me like I was a stranger. And I thought, okay, he really doesn't care. He's really that guy. So fine. He can raise her and never even know."

"I didn't know," Gabe said. His voice was all gravel. "Kenzie. I swear to God, I didn't know you were alive."

"I know. Mom told me Sunday." She turned her face to the wall. "And then I didn't know what I was doing at all. So I got on a bus to Atlantic City and sat on the boardwalk for two days and ate fudge. This morning I got the bus back, because my doctor's here, and she started coming somewhere around Hamilton, and I didn't have anybody else's number. I'd blocked Mom. I had Lorna's, and I had his." She tipped her head at me. "Lorna would've brought forms."

I looked at the bassinet. I wanted that baby so much my teeth hurt.

"Kenzie," I said. "You've got seventy-two hours before anybody can ask you to sign anything. You know that?"

"Lorna told me."

"Then take all of it. Take longer. Take as long as you want." I put page seven on the blanket, by her hand, picture side up. The man in the paper crown, the woman in the sweatshirt at the edge of the frame. "Whatever you decide about her, that's on the form. He's not on the form. You've got him either way."

She looked at the photograph for a long time. Then she looked at Gabe. Then she looked at the bassinet, and her face did something I won't try to describe, because it belonged to her.

"I don't know how to hold her," she said. "They showed me. I'm scared I'll drop her."

Gabe got up out of the glider. It took him a second; he'd been sitting in it since they brought him in. He went to the bassinet and slid his big hands in under the striped blanket and lifted the baby out, and I watched him do what I had watched him do a thousand times with a pane of glass older than both of us.

He held her by the edges. He didn't let her know he was scared.

Then he crossed the room and bent down and put her in Kenzie's arms, and he didn't let go right away. He kept his hands over his daughter's hands and moved them, a little lower, a little firmer, until they were right.

---

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ab Alanō Ginsberg-Cobden per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Alan Ginsberg-Cobden, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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