Thomas Hoover: Life blood

"What are you saying?" It was unsettling to see David turning so serious. "Are we-?"

"I'm saying we can cover the payroll here, all our fixed nut, even Nicky's vig, for maybe six more weeks, if you and I don't pay ourselves. Of course, if we can get an advance on some kind of cable deal, that would tide us over more comfortably till this thing is in the can. But right now we're sailing pretty close on the wind. I've bet Applecore on your picture, Morgan. We can't screw this up."

I swallowed hard. I knew we were working on the edge, but I didn't know the edge was down to six weeks.

"David, I'm all but ready for postproduction. I'm just thinking I may need one more interview. Just a one-day shoot. I'm going to make this picture work. You'll see."

He sighed. "All right, if you think it's essential, get the footage. Maybe I can even shake another fifty out of Nicky, if I string him along about the distribution deal-don't look so alarmed, I won't go through with it. Anyway, I can tell he's impressed with the picture so far. Happy now?"

No, I wasn't happy. What was I going to do if Hannah Klein had bad news? Adoption? I finally was facing the fact I'd possibly been making a movie about myself all this time. Like Yeats, penning his own tombstone. "Cast a cold eye, on life, on death.."

So why not give him the whole story?

"David, if it turns out Steve and I can't have a baby, I've begun thinking about trying to adopt." There it was. More pain. "Maybe I'm about to become the heroine of my own picture."

He stared at me incredulously.

"Morgy, you of all people should know by now that adopting would take up all your energy, like a giant sponge. Come on. I've seen your dailies. I got it, about how hard it is. You telling me now you didn't get it?"

He was right. Righter than he realized. But then I thought again about Carly Grove, who'd found Kevin in no time at all, with zero hassles. The only troubling part was that it was all so mysterious…

After I left David's office, I remembered I hadn't actually had lunch, so I grabbed two hot dogs with sauerkraut (okay, it was junk, but I secretly loved kosher franks) and a Diet Pepsi to go, from one of the striped-umbrella vendors, then hailed a cab clutching the grungy brown bag.

I was heading for Hannah Klein's office on the Upper West Side. And now I had another clock ticking in addition to the biological one. The big money clock in the sky was suddenly on final countdown.

It took only a few minutes for Hannah Klein's assistant, Lori, to run the pregnancy test that confirmed my suspicions and settled my future. Steve's and my final attempt, another intrauterine insemination (IUI, med-speak for an expensive "turkey baster") with the last of his deposit, had failed. The end. The bitter end.

"Morgan," Hannah declared, staring over her desk, her raspy New York voice boring through me like a drill, "given how this has all turned out, maybe you ought to just start considering adoption-if having a child still means that much to you."

Hannah Klein was pushing seventy, a chain smoker who should have been dead a decade ago, and she unfailingly spoke the truth. Her gaze carried only synthetic solace, but I was probably her fifteenth patient of the day and maybe she was running low on empathy. Oddly, though, sitting there in her office, miserable, I felt strangely liberated. I adored the woman, a child of the Holocaust, with layers of steel like a samurai sword, but I also loved the thought of never again having to go through the humiliation of cowering in her straight-backed office chair, like a so-so student on probation waiting to receive my failing grade.

It was now time to come to grips with what I'd known in my heart for a long time. God had made me a theoretically functional reproductive machine that just wouldn't kick over. Translation: no cysts, fibroids, polyps, no ovulatory abnormalities. My uterus and Fallopian tubes were just fine, Steve's sperm counts were okay, but no baby was swimming into life inside me.

Sometimes, however, reality asks too much. It's not easy getting your mind around the idea that some part of your life is over, finally over. The baby part. To admit that it's time to move on to Plan B, whatever that is. Such realizations can take a while, especially if you've been living with high-level hope, no matter how irrational.

"I frankly don't know what else we can do," she went on, projecting through my abyss of gloom. She was shuffling papers on her ash-strewn desk, white hair in a bun, fine-tuned grit in her voice. Upper West Side, a fifty-year fixture. She never wore perfume, but to me she always smelled faintly of roses mixed with smoke. Earthy. "Aside from trying in vitro."

We'd already discussed that, but it was definitely the bottom level of Hell. Besides, I was running out of money, and spirit. And now, with Steve gone, the whole idea seemed moot anyway.

"So," she concluded, "barring that, we've done everything possible, run every test there is, both on you and on your…"

"Steve," I inserted into her pause. She seemed to deliberately block his name at crucial moments. Maybe she thought I could have done better. Maybe a nice solid dentist who owned a suit instead of some freelance photo jock who showed up for his sperm counts wearing khaki safari shirts. Well, let her deal with it.

"… and I can't find anything. Sometimes, the body just won't cooperate. We may never know why. You've got to face that. But still, adoption is always an option."

Adoption. All along I'd told myself I didn't have the courage, or the heart. Making movies is a full-time job, not leaving time to go filling out forms and jumping through hoops for years and years. And to cap it off, I was just two years short of the big four-oh and financially struggling-hardly an adoption agency's profile of "ideal."

But now, now I'd just discovered Carly Grove and the miracle of Children of Light. So maybe there really could be a way to adopt a beautiful child with no hassles. Maybe it would simplify everything to the point I could actually pull it off. Could this be my Plan B? Then what if Steve came back? Could we be a family finally?

I wasn't used to being that lucky. And I still wanted Hannah Klein's thoughts, a reality test, which was why I pressed her on the point.

"Truthfully, do you think adopting is really a workable idea for somebody like me? Would I-?"

"Morgan, I know you're making a film about the realities of the adoption process. We both realize it's not easy." She must have seen something needful in my eyes, because she continued on, adding detail, letting the well-known facts convey the bad news. "As you're well aware, finding a young, healthy, American baby nowadays is all but impossible. At the very least it can take years." She was fiddling with some papers on her desk, avoiding my eyes. Then she stubbed out her cigarette in a gesture that seemed intended to gain time. "And even if you're willing to take a baby that's foreign-born, there still can be plenty of heartbreak. That's just how it is."

"I'd always thought so too," I said. "It's actually the underlying motif of my picture. But today I had an incredible experience. I filmed an interview of a single woman, early forties, who just adopted a baby boy. It took less than three months and he's blond and blue-eyed and perfect. I saw him, I held him, and I can assure you he's as American as peach cobbler. The way she tells it, the whole adoption process was a snap. Zero hassles and red tape."

"That's most exceptional." She peered at me dubiously. "Actually more like impossible. Frankly, I don't believe it. This child must have been kidnapped or something. How old, exactly, was he when she got him?"

"I don't know. Just a few weeks, I think."