Other People's Children: A Novel - Hardcover

Hoffmann, Jeff

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 198215909X ISBN 13: 9781982159092

Verlag: Scribner, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

An “engrossing debut” novel (Laura Dave, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Thing He Told Me) about a couple whose dreams of adoption push them to do the unthinkable when their baby’s birth family steps into the picture.

HOW FAR WOULD YOU GO TO SAVE YOUR FAMILY?

As soon as Gail and Jon Durbin bring home their adopted baby Maya, she becomes the glue that mends their fractured marriage.

But the Durbin’s social worker, Paige, can’t find the teenage birth mother to sign the consent forms. By law, Carli has seventy-two hours to change her mind. Without her signature, the adoption will unravel.

Carli is desperate to pursue her dreams, so giving her baby a life with the Durbins seems like the right choice—until her own mother throws down an ultimatum. Soon Carli realizes how few choices she has.

As the hours tick by, Paige knows that the Durbins’ marriage won’t survive the loss of Maya, but everyone’s life is shattered when they—and baby Maya—disappear without a trace.

Filled with heartrending turns, Other People’s Children is a riveting page-turner you’ll find impossible to put down.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jeff Hoffmann was born and raised in St. Louis and received an MFA in fiction from Columbia College Chicago. Hoffmann’s writing has appeared in Barely South Review, The Sun, Harpur Palate, The Roanoke Review, Booth, and Lunch Ticket. He is the winner of The Madison Review’s 2018 Chris O’Malley Prize for Fiction and a finalist for The Missouri Review’s 2019 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors Prize. He lives in Elmhurst, Illinois, with his wife and two children.

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Gail Gail


Gail didn’t usually drink, but she stood on the patio and took a long sip from her third glass of pinot. It was disappearing quickly, evaporating, maybe. The first-birthday parties always cut especially deep, and this one proved no exception. There was a jump house, of course, and a section of the backyard had been fenced off for a petting zoo. Relatives had flown in from both coasts. A creepy clown was tying balloon animals that all looked like crickets. The birthday boy wouldn’t stop crying, so he was sent upstairs with an aunt for a nap. But first-birthday parties were for the parents, not the babies, and certainly not for infertile women in their early thirties.

Gail searched in vain for someone she knew. A few faces seemed vaguely familiar from her husband’s holiday party, but sorting the relatives from Jon’s coworkers proved difficult. She spotted Jon standing by the jump house, the tallest in a cluster of men whose scruffy jeans and T-shirts marked them as programmers. Jon swiped his dark, shaggy bangs out of his eyes and laughed. They were probably talking sports or music or databases. Gail envied him—men floated upon the surface of their conversations, while women always insisted on diving so deep.

Days like today made Gail’s lungs hurt. She had just fled the kitchen, where she was helping the baby’s grandmother slice vegetables and heat up the chicken nuggets for dinner. The kitchen usually proved a safe haven at first-birthday parties—mindless tasks, no children. But the grandmother knew about Gail and Jon’s situation and was asking all the wrong questions. How long will it take? Is there a lot of paperwork? International or domestic? How much does it cost? Have you heard anything lately? How can you stand the waiting? Stories always followed the questions—stories about adoptions that fell apart at the last minute and women who got pregnant soon after they adopted—because they finally relaxed and stopped trying so hard. Gail answered the questions vaguely, with the fewest words that politeness allowed, and then she set down her knife and walked out, before the stories came, and before she gave in to the urge to tell Grandma about the girl in Morris.

Now Jon spotted Gail and waved her over, but she just smiled, waved, and looked away. She couldn’t go back to the kitchen, but she also couldn’t summon the energy to fabricate an opinion about the Blackhawks defense or the best Modest Mouse album. The wine made everything slant a bit, and the yard swarmed with children she didn’t want to look at, darting around adults she didn’t know. She could go help with the three-legged race, but it seemed well staffed with mothers. Heidi and Colin were already surrounded by strangers. She could go to the bathroom again, but she’d already been twice in the last hour. She’d probably be discovered if she hid in the car.

Finally, Gail stepped off the porch and drifted toward the petting zoo. She leaned against the fence erected around the animals and tried to focus on the rabbits and goats and chickens. She tried to ignore the children chasing them, and she mostly succeeded. She tried not to think about the book that went out to that nameless, faceless pregnant girl in Morris, and she failed miserably. Paige from the agency had told Gail nothing about the girl but her hometown. She never shared more than that, and she always reminded Gail to manage her expectations. That girl would be sorting through a stack of books, and there was no way to guess how she would decide.

Getting your hopes up in the early stages too often leads to disappointment, Paige always said.

The first three times the book went out, Gail had mostly managed to heed Paige’s advice, but those first three times had been easier. The answer had come quickly, a quiet no from Paige, in two days, in four, in three. This time, though, after a week passed without a word, Gail had begun to imagine that girl in Morris thumbing through their book. Gail tried to guess what she saw in the carefully curated pictures, what conclusions she would draw from the painstakingly crafted sentences. She knew that she should think about something else. She shouldn’t get her hopes up. And she should have told Jon about sending the book to Morris.

A little girl wedged in the corner of the petting zoo caught Gail’s attention. She wore a frilly dress and couldn’t have been more than three, maybe four years old—about the same age as Gail’s child would have been if her first pregnancy stuck. The girl sat in the grass and held a chick in her lap. When it tried to escape, she scooped it back up. When it pecked her, she giggled. The chick settled into the folds of the girl’s dress, and she bent over it, her hair draped down the sides of her face, murmuring to her little friend.

As Gail watched, she considered the minimum required stay at a first-birthday party. There should be a formula, a spreadsheet. She could imagine the inputs: The number of your friends in attendance; the length, in years, of your relationship with the parents; the number of your own children writhing in the jump house. If you brought no children, the number of times you miscarried would serve as a key variable. The time elapsed, in months, since your last miscarriage might complete the algorithm. You could display the output in minutes or seconds.

“I hate these things.”

Gail turned to find Jon next to her, his brown, almost black eyes scanning the yard. His hair was tousled—he usually didn’t touch a comb on weekends. He stood a foot taller than her, lanky in a manner that didn’t appeal to many other women, but all his parts fit together in a way that had always seemed just right to Gail.

“Why can’t they just invite their family and call it a day?”

“They’re testing our fealty,” Gail said. “Heidi’s mom is probably tracking attendance.”

“Seems like we should be able to buy our way out of this. A more expensive present? Maybe some savings bonds?”

“That’s not how these things work. Tribute must be delivered in person.”

“How are you doing?” Jon asked.

Gail leaned into the fence again and studied the girl. She’d have three children, two walking by now, if she had never miscarried. She indulged this math too often, and the equations never balanced.

“I’m OK,” she said. The wine helped. That book in Morris helped. The little girl with the chick helped. Gail watched as a man wearing leather loafers, a deep tan, and expensive-looking sunglasses walked up to the fence behind the little girl.

“Time to go, Taylor,” he said.

The girl looked up from the chick, stricken. “No, Daddy. Not yet.”

Jon took another swig of beer and leaned his elbows against the fence, his back to the zoo. “Where were you? Earlier.”

“In the kitchen. Slicing celery and getting grilled by Heidi’s mom.”

Jon raised his eyebrows. “About?”

He knew the answer to that, of course. “Heidi must have told her.”

“Shit. I’m sorry.” Jon’s forehead wrinkled as he glared across the yard at Heidi. “She’s got loose lips for somebody in HR.”

Taylor’s dad checked his enormous watch. “We...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Scribner
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 198215909X
• ISBN 13: 9781982159092
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande