Nick kicked the tiled floor. “Well, that sucks.”
“No kidding. Look at all that hair product you wasted.” I smirked at him.
Nick smiled and shook his head but didn’t speak.
“We should reschedule. Maybe next week?”
His face sagged. “Yeah. I’ll need to check our game schedule.”
“It must have been something really important,” I said.
“I guess.”
We walked silently out to the parking lot together, our Friday euphoria diluted.
Nick waved toward me. “See you on Monday.”
I stood next to my car and watched him climb into his battered pickup truck, rev the engine, and squeal away.
A few minutes later, my Prius glided into the driveway of our shoebox-size house on the west side of town, sliding past Craig’s car and into our garage. In a parallel universe, I envisioned us living here with both sides of the garage cleaned out, but in my current world, Craig stored all the tools and supplies for his handyman business on his half, his car permanently parked in our driveway. Our black lab mix, Moose, poked his nose out as I opened the door into our cramped laundry room. I gave him a few good pats on the head, his tail wagging wildly.
“I’m home.”
“Hey. Down here.”
I dropped my bags on the kitchen counter and followed Craig’s voice down the basement stairs. He leaned to the side, smiling up at me. His T-shirt sagged against his concave body and sweat reflected beneath his stubby goatee.
“I thought you were going to happy hour with the lovebirds.”
“Something came up. Elena canceled. I think Nick took it hard.”
“Ouch.”
“Have you sold your idea to Apple yet?” I asked, repeating my daily joke.
“It’s probably going to happen tomorrow.”
My husband didn’t have the physique of a bodybuilder or a professional soccer player like Nick, but he had some formidable brain cells. He was determined to invent the next big app, and his work ethic was second to none. And because we also needed to pay the bills, he ran his own handyman business on the side. He didn’t always love the manual labor, especially when it came to toilets, but the freedom made up for it.
“What are you going to do with all of your newfound time?” Craig asked, now entranced by something on his computer screen.
Moose panted and scratched at my leg.
“I was thinking of taking Moose for a hike by the river. Want to come?”
“Oh. I would, but I’m moments away from a really big breakthrough.”
“Come on.”
“I had to paint trim all morning. I want to do this for a while.” He looked up at me, the crease in his face softening. “I’ll go with you tomorrow, I promise. How about we order Chinese later and watch Netflix?”
“Deal.”
Wandering into the bedroom, I kicked off my work shoes and pulled thick cotton socks onto my aching feet. I shed my work clothes, replacing the stiff pants and shirt with leggings and a sweatshirt. An elastic headband restrained my chin-length hair. I dabbed sunscreen on the point of my nose, hitting my forehead and cheekbones and thankful for the organic compounds known as zinc oxide and titanium dioxide. Damn you, UV rays.
Fifteen minutes later, the earthy scent of trees and damp soil surrounded me. My feet hustled faster, eager to escape the hum of the nearby highway. Moose pulled me down the steep incline. We’d hiked the same route so many times since he was a puppy, I trusted him to lead me. It took about five minutes of hoofing it to get far enough into the forest to no longer hear the cars. After shuffling down the second hill, my eyes flitted toward the late-afternoon sun filtering through the treetops.
Last winter, a bald eagle had swooped past me in this very spot. At first, I thought I was hallucinating. It had been a stressful few weeks at work, and my caffeine addiction had been messing with my sleep. When the bird circled back and perched on a tall branch, its golden eyes peering straight through me, long reeds of grass hanging from its beak, I realized the majestic creature was real, that I’d experienced something rare. Now I felt like a six-year-old looking for Santa Claus every time I entered the woods.
As I surveyed the treetops for birds of prey, a man with a golden retriever jogged past and raised his hand in a wave, a Patagonia hat shielding his face. My chest expanded in solidarity with him—a fellow lover of dogs and nature. There was comfort living in a place where people fought to protect the environment. In the world outside our bubble, it felt more like the Dark Ages lately.
For the first few years of our marriage, Craig and I had agreed we wouldn’t bring any children into this world. We’d been satisfied to call Moose our baby. We agreed the planet was doomed, stretched to the brink to provide for the humans that multiplied exponentially and ate away at the very earth that provided for them, whittling it down to nothing, like termites. The ice caps were melting, the ocean temperatures were rising, and the rainforests were burning. The blue macaw went extinct last week—wiped from the face of the earth. The story hadn’t even made the nightly news. I’d stopped eating meat three years earlier to reduce my carbon footprint, but teaching was the only thing that really made me feel like I could make a difference, maybe even save the planet. Teaching was my superpower. My profession gave me hope that I could spark knowledge for some unsuspecting kid. Maybe something I said or taught would inspire them to go on to stop climate change, to clean up the plastic in the ocean, or find the cure for cancer. That was why I wouldn’t trade teaching science for any other job, despite my underwhelming paycheck. And for a long time, that was good enough for me.
Then last June, I’d been volunteering on this very trail with a local preservation group to remove invasive species. I’d met a woman whose brimmed sun hat wasn’t wide enough to hide the bags under her eyes. As we knelt beside each other, pulling up garlic mustard and Japanese knotweed by the roots, she told me how she’d left her two new babies at home with her husband for a few hours so she could get out of the house. I admired her slim waist and wondered how she’d done it, with twins no less. She smiled, explaining they’d adopted the babies from China. Removing her phone from her pocket, she angled the screen toward me, sharing a photo of two squishy, round-faced girls with the largest brown eyes I’d ever seen.
“We adopted them from the orphanage,” she said, shaking her head. “There’s so many more who need homes.”
I couldn’t stop thinking about those doughy, saucer-eyed babies as I tossed the weeds into my bag. Their faces had permeated my head, displacing all my previous anti-human sentiments. I wondered what their lives would have been like if wealthy do-gooders hadn’t traveled overseas and plucked them from their baby prison. I thought about the ones who remained. There were probably more abandoned babies arriving every day.
For the first time, the biological urge to become a mother, the desire to care for a child of my own, panged through my core. I googled Chinese orphans as soon as I returned home, finding disturbing images of malnourished babies crying from beneath their shocks of black hair. Others showed fat, happy babies being carried away in fancy car seats by American, European, and Australian couples. I tugged Craig’s arm and pulled him over to the screen. We submitted an online request for more information a week later.