James Siegel - Detour

Eventually, their long road of futility inexorably led them to the new great hope of infertile couples everywhere. In vitro fertilization, otherwise known as your last chance . It was a kind of roulette wheel for high-stakes gamblers. After all, it was ten thousand dollars a spin. And Paul could’ve recited an entire actuarial table on its success rate—28.5 percent, with the odds getting lower with each attempt.

They took Paul’s sperm. They took Joanna’s eggs. They formally introduced them. They sat back and hoped the romance would take.

It didn’t.

They tried once.

They tried twice.

They tried three times.

They were up to forty thousand and counting when a remarkable thing happened.

It came the morning after a particularly bad night.

All their thinly nuanced charges had finally turned the air poisonous and explosive. Perhaps that wasn’t surprising given that all exhalations are made of carbon dioxide; it had just been waiting for a match. In this case, a shouting match where they both said—okay, screamed —things better left unmentioned. Joanna had dissolved into tears, and Paul had sullenly disappeared into the den to watch some b-ball, which, given the general state of the New York Knicks, hadn’t improved his mood any.

They were walking it off the next morning in Central Park, neither one saying much to the other, when they passed the playground off 66th Street. The sound of laughing children was particularly hurtful that morning, a lacerating reminder of what they couldn’t have.

Paul was about to execute a detour when a small girl wandered past them in the futile process of capturing a runaway pink balloon. She was dark, Latin, and impossibly cute.

“Where’s your mother?” Joanna had asked her.

But the more interesting question would have been, who’s your mother? The woman who came breathlessly running up to them just a few seconds later, gently admonishing her daughter for running away. This woman was blonde, pale, and about their age. She picked up her giggling daughter, nuzzled her neck, smiled at Paul and Joanna, and retreated back to the seesaws.

Up to that moment they hadn’t thought about it.

Adopting.

Maybe they’d just needed to see it in the flesh.

That afternoon when they got back to the apartment, Joanna asked Paul to take out the garbage. Surprisingly, this garbage consisted of syringes, thermometers, various fertility drugs, dutifully recorded journals, and everything else they’d accumulated in an effort to have a baby. Paul gladly dumped it all into the incinerator room.

When he got back inside, they’d ended up making love the way they used to—which, all things considered, was pretty terrific.

They went to a lawyer the very next day.

Now Paul could hear Joanna next to him in the dark. And the soft, soothing sound of Joelle’s breathing. He rolled over and kissed his wife on the mouth.

“Next time I’ll support you. Okay?”

He could sense her smile in the dark.

All systems were go for reentry into the land of Nod.

Except Joelle woke up.

And screamed.

SEVEN

It began the next afternoon.

Galina put Joelle in for her afternoon nap. She hummed a plaintive lullaby over the crib. Paul cocked his head from the bathroom, listening to Galina’s lilting voice. When he came out, freshly shaven and only slightly sleep-deprived, Galina suggested that he and Joanna get some fresh air. The baby was asleep. Galina would be there for another few hours.

It was technically winter in Colombia, but even mountain-bound Bogotá was close enough to the equator to retain a dreamy warmth. Joelle was sleeping—a walk seemed like just what the doctor ordered.

They turned right out the hotel lobby and soon passed the kind of stores only tourists and one percent of the Colombian population could afford to walk into.

Hermès.

Louis Vuitton.

Oscar de la Renta.

They walked hand in hand, and Paul congratulated himself on his tactical maneuver last night in bed. Things were clearly fine between them.

Joanna had fed Joelle this morning, while he’d pulled diaper duty. They’d taken turns babbling nonstop baby talk at her. That is, when they weren’t telling each other how remarkably gorgeous she was. How unbelievably expressive her face seemed. What an unusually sweet disposition she had. Obviously, some natural law was at work here, able to turn two reasonably intelligent people into love-struck idiots.

Paul, though, was kind of enjoying idiothood.

Now he squeezed Joanna’s hand as they waited at a curb. He kissed her neck when they stopped and lingered before an art gallery window. A Botero exhibition, the Latin American painter who portrayed everyone as grossly distended, fat, and swollen, like Thanksgiving parade balloons.

After they had strolled a few more blocks, he found he missed his daughter. This was a new experience—going somewhere and leaving a piece of yourself behind. He felt . . . incomplete. The circle needed to be closed again.

“Want to go back?” he asked Joanna.

“I was about to say the same thing.”

“I think I’m going to call her Jo,” Paul said after they had crossed the street and turned back toward L’Esplanade. Two couples on mopeds gunned their engines and surged past them, spitting out a thin cloud of blue exhaust.

“Ugh,” Joanna said; evidently, she wasn’t referring to the noxious fumes.

“Something wrong with Jo ?”

“When you tried to call me Jo, I threatened you with bodily harm. I think I did you bodily harm.”

“Yeah. Why was that again?”

“I dated a Joe, remember? He was unemployed and psychotic—not in that order. So all things being equal,” Joanna said, “I’d prefer that you not call her Jo.”

“Fine. What about Joey ?”

“Like in Buttafuoco?”

“Like in Breidbart.”

“How about we start with Joelle ? Just so the poor kid learns her name.”

They were passing a toy store, its window stocked floor-to-ceiling with dolls, trucks, video games, stuffed animals, soccer balls, and some things he honestly couldn’t recognize.

“What do you say?” Paul said.

“Sure,” Joanna said. “Let’s go buy some toys.”

WHEN THEY ENTERED THE HOTEL LOBBY, THEY NEEDED THE doorman to help them make it into the elevator. They’d gone a little overboard— they’d been like kids in a toy store.

There seemed to be so much more to buy than when they were children. It was pretty much G.I. Joes, Barbies, and Slinkys back then. Now there were vast new categories to contemplate, numerous subcategories too. Things that talked and walked and beeped and flashed and zapped and pirouetted and sang.

All of them seemed to have Joelle’s name on them.

The doorman managed to get them into the elevator without a major mishap.

When they opened the door to their hotel room, Galina wasn’t there.

“She’s in the bathroom,” Joanna said.

Paul opened the bathroom door, stuffed giraffe in hand, but Galina wasn’t in there either.

When Paul turned around with his hands up, Joanna turned an ugly shade of white.

It wasn’t just Galina that was missing.

It was their daughter.

She was gone too.

“NO, MR. BREIDBART, I DIDN’T TALK TO YOUR NURSE.” THE concierge retained his air of helpful solicitude, but up against Paul’s full-blown panic, it seemed woefully inadequate.

“They’re not in the room,” Paul said. “Do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir. I understand.”

Paul had come down to the lobby—after checking the rooftop pool, the restaurant, the hair salon, the game room. Joanna had remained up in the room in case Galina called.