A.J. rinses her hair, and Maya begins to sing.
“What is that you’re singing?”
“Song,” she says.
“What song is that?”
“La la. Booya. La la.”
A.J. laughs. “Yeah, that’s gibberish to me, Maya.”
She splashes him.
“Mama?” she asks after a while.
“No, I’m not your mother,” A.J. says.
“Gone,” Maya says.
“Yes,” A.J. says. “She probably isn’t coming back.”
Maya thinks about this and then nods. “You sing.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Sing,” she says.
The girl has lost her mother. He supposes it’s the least he can do.
There is no time to Google appropriate songs for babies. Before he met his wife, A.J. had sung second tenor for the Footnotes, Princeton’s all-male a cappella group. When A.J. fell for Nic, it was the Footnotes who had suffered, and after a semester of missed rehearsals he had been axed from the group. He thinks back to the last Footnotes show, which had been a tribute to eighties music. For his bathtub performance, he follows the program pretty closely, beginning with “99 Luftballons” then segueing into “Get out of My Dreams, Get into My Car.” For the finale, “Love in an Elevator.” He only feels mildly foolish.
She claps when he is finished. “Again,” she commands. “Again.”
“That show runs one performance.” He lifts her out of the tub and then he towels her off, wiping between each perfect toe.
“Luftballon,” Maya says. “Luft you.”
“What?”
“Love you,” she says.
“You’re clearly responding to the power of a cappella.”
She nods. “Love you.”
“Love me? You don’t even know me,” A.J. says. “Little girl, you shouldn’t go throwing around your love so easily.” He pulls her to him. “We’ve had a good run. This has been a delightful and, for me, at least, memorable seventy-two hours, but some people aren’t meant to be in your life forever.”
She looks at him with her big blue skeptical eyes. “Love you,” she repeats.
A.J. towels her hair then gives her head an appraising sniff. “I worry for you. If you love everyone, you’ll end up having hurt feelings most of the time. I suppose, relative to the length of your life, you feel as if you’ve known me a rather long time. Your perspective of time is really very warped, Maya. But I am old and soon, you’ll forget you even knew me.”
Molly Klock knocks on the door to the apartment. “The woman from the state is downstairs. Is it okay for me to send her up?”
A.J. nods.
He pulls Maya into his lap, and they wait, listening as the social worker ascends the creaky stairs. “Now don’t be afraid, Maya. This lady’s going to find a perfectly good home for you. Better than here. You can’t spend the rest of your life sleeping on a futon, you know. The kind of people who spend their lives as permanent guests on a futon are not the kind of people you want to know.”
The social worker’s name is Jenny. A.J. cannot recall ever having met an adult woman named Jenny. If Jenny were a book, she would be a paperback just out of the box—no dog ears, no waterlogging, no creases in her spine. A.J. would prefer a social worker with some obvious wear. He imagines the synopsis on the back of the Jenny story: when plucky Jenny from Fairfield, Connecticut, took a job as a social worker in the big city, she had no idea what she was getting into.
“Is it your first day?” A.J. asks.
“No,” Jenny says, “I’ve been doing this a little while.” Jenny smiles at Maya. “What a beauty you are.”
Maya buries her face in A.J.’s hoodie.
“You two seem very bonded.” Jenny makes a note in her pad. “So it’s like this. From here, I’ll take Maya back to Boston. As her caseworker, I’ll fill out some paperwork for her—she obviously can’t do that herself, ha ha. She’ll be assessed by a medical doctor and a psychologist.”
“She seems pretty healthy and well adjusted to me,” A.J. says.
“It’s good that you’ve observed that. The doctors will be on the lookout for developmental delays, illnesses, and other things that might not be obvious to the untrained eye. After that, Maya will be placed with one of our many preapproved foster families, and—”
A.J. interrupts. “How does a foster family get preapproved? Is it as easy as, say, getting a department store credit card?”
“Ha ha. No, of course, there are more steps to it than that. Applications, home visits—”
A.J. interrupts again. “What I mean to say, Jenny, is how do you make sure you aren’t placing an innocent child with a complete psychopath?”
“Well, Mr. Fikry, we certainly don’t start from the point of view that everyone who wants to foster a child is a psychopath, but we do extensively vet all our foster families.”
“I worry because . . . well, Maya’s very bright, but she’s also very trusting,” A.J. says.
“Bright but trusting. Good insight. I’ll write that down.” Jenny does. “So after I place her in an emergency, nonpsychopathic”—she smiles at A.J.—“foster family, I go to work again. I try to see if anyone in her extended family wants to claim her and if that’s a no, I start trying to find a permanent situation for Maya.”
“You mean adoption.”
“Yes, exactly. Very good, Mr. Fikry.” Jenny doesn’t have to explain all this, but she likes to make Good Samaritans like A.J. feel like their time has been valued. “By the way, I really have to thank you,” she says. “We need more people like you who are willing to take an interest.” She holds out her arms to Maya. “Ready, sweetie?”
A.J. pulls Maya closer to him. He takes a deep breath. Is he really going to do this? Yes, I am. Dear God. “You say that Maya will be placed in a temporary foster home? Couldn’t I just as well be that home?”
The social worker purses her lips. “All our foster families have gone through an application process, Mr. Fikry.”
“The thing is . . . I know it’s not orthodox, but the mother left me this note.” He hands the note to Jenny. “She wanted me to have this child, you see. It was her last wish. I think it’s only right that I should keep her. I don’t want her moved into some foster home when she has a perfectly good home right here. I Googled the matter last night.”
“Google,” says Maya.
“She’s taken a fancy to that word, I don’t know why.”
“What ‘matter’?” Jenny asks.
“I’m not obligated to turn her over when it’s the mother’s wish that I should have her,” A.J. explains.
“Daddy,” says Maya as if on cue.
Jenny looks from A.J.’s eyes to Maya’s. Both sets are annoyingly determined. She sighs. She had thought the afternoon would be simple, but now it’s starting to get complex.
Jenny sighs again. It is not her first day, though she only finished her master’s in social work eighteen months ago. She is either bright-eyed or inexperienced enough to want to help them. Still, he’s a single man, who lives above a store. The paperwork is going to be ridiculous, she thinks. “Help me out here, Mr. Fikry. Tell me you have a background in education or child development or some such.”
“Um . . . I was on my way to a PhD in American literature before I quit that to open this bookstore. My specialty was Edgar Allan Poe. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is a decent primer on what not to do with children.”
“That’s something,” Jenny says by which she means it’s something entirely unhelpful. “You’re sure you’re up to this? It’s an enormous financial and emotional and time commitment.”
“No,” A.J. says, “I’m not sure. But I think Maya has as good a chance with me as with anyone else. I can watch her while I work, and we like each other, I think.”
“Love you,” Maya says.
“Yes, she keeps saying that,” A.J. says. “I warned her about giving love that hasn’t yet been earned, but honestly, I think it’s the influence of that insidious Elmo. He loves everyone, you know?”
“I’m familiar with Elmo,” Jenny says. She wants to cry. There is going to be so much paperwork. And that’s just for the foster placement. The adoption proper’s going to be murder, and Jenny will be the one who has to make the two-hour trip to Alice Island every time someone from DCF has to check on Maya and A.J. “Okay, you two, I have to call my boss.” As a girl, Jenny Bernstein, product of two stable and loving parents from Medford, Massachusetts, had adored orphan stories like Anne of Green Gables and A Little Princess. She has recently begun to suspect that the sinister effect of repeated reading of these stories was what led her to choose social work as a profession. In general, the profession had turned out to be less romantic than her readings had led her to believe. Yesterday, one of her former classmates discovered a foster mother who had starved a sixteen-year-old teenage boy down to forty-two pounds. All the neighbors had thought the teen was a six-year-old child. “I still want to believe in happy endings,” the classmate had said, “but it’s getting hard.” Jenny smiles at Maya. What a lucky little girl, she thinks.