"Eventually." Natalie looked at her hands. "I didn't tell them until I was five months along. I wore my brother's sweatshirts. When I finally told them, my mother didn't say anything at all. She just went into the kitchen and started cleaning the oven. At ten o'clock at night. My father prayed over me. Right there in the living room, with his hand on my head. He prayed that I would be forgiven, and that I would make the choice that was best for the child, and I knew what he meant by that. Everybody knew what he meant."
She did not go back to school in the fall. Her parents did not want her in Sterling, where people would see, and so an arrangement was made through the church with a small adoption agency in Denver called Harbor Family Services, which had a residence for young women, a converted Victorian on Gilpin Street with a porch swing and a curfew. Natalie lived there for the last four months of her pregnancy with five other girls, who smoked on the back steps and watched talk shows and braided one another's hair and talked, at night, in the dark, about the babies as if they were already gone.
"I want to be clear about something," Natalie said. She looked at Adam directly for the first time since she had sat down. "Nobody forced me. That's what I tell myself, and it's true. Nobody held a gun to my head. I signed the papers. I chose. But I was twenty years old and I had four hundred dollars in a checking account and no car and no degree, and my father had told me, very kindly, that I could come home afterward, and I understood that meant I could only come home afterward. And the social worker at Harbor was a wonderful woman, she really was, and every week she would sit with me and say, You're giving your baby a gift. You're so brave. You're giving her a life you can't give her. And after you hear that enough times, it stops being something someone is telling you and starts being the inside of your own head."
She had picked the Hollises out of a binder. That was how it was done then, she explained; perhaps it was still how it was done. There were profiles in plastic sleeves, couples photographed in front of their houses with their dogs, letters that began Dear Birth Mother and used words like blessed and forever. She had read them all three times. She had picked Ruth and Martin Hollis because their letter was the only one that did not say they would give the baby everything. Ruth had written instead: We can't promise you she will have an easy life, because no one has one. We can promise she will always know where she came from and that she was wanted by more than one family. We would like her to know you, if you're willing.
Ruth was a middle school science teacher. Martin repaired pianos. They lived in a narrow brick house in the Baker neighborhood with too many bookshelves and a piano in every room, including, Ruth told her at their first meeting, the kitchen, which was a terrible idea and they were very proud of it. They had been trying for a child for eleven years. Ruth had had four miscarriages. She said this flatly, over coffee in the agency's conference room, and then she reached across the table and put her hand over Natalie's and said, I want you to know I'm not going to pretend I don't know what this costs.
"It was going to be an open adoption," Natalie said. "That was the agreement. I would get letters and pictures every year, and there would be visits. On her birthday, or close to it. As many as I wanted. Ruth wanted that. She was the one who pushed for it. The agency was a little old-fashioned, they weren't sure about it, but Ruth said if I wasn't allowed in the baby's life they didn't want to go forward. She said that in front of me. I'd never had anyone fight for me like that. I don't think I'd ever had anyone fight for me at all."
The baby was born on the eleventh of August at St. Joseph Hospital, after nineteen hours of labor. Ruth was in the room, at Natalie's request, holding her left hand; a nurse held the right. Natalie had been told by the other girls at Gilpin Street not to look at the baby, not to hold her, that it would be easier. She looked. She held her. She was a small, furious, red-faced person with a full head of dark hair and long fingers, and she screamed until she was put on Natalie's chest, and then she stopped screaming and looked up with the unfocused, oceanic eyes of the newly born, and Natalie felt the floor of her life give way.