Ed King by David Guterson Page B

be counted on as parents anyway, and if they were going to complain, as Dan was complaining, about the “home study,” if letting someone in the door to poke around a little was going to be treated like a deal breaker, well, said Alice, there were plenty of other people who wanted kids. Dan, demurring, left the details to Alice, except for the writing of checks, which he complained about, too. The whole thing was one big ongoing eye opener, but he felt vindicated when, in the same hour Alice pricked her finger on a rosebush in front of the Aid Society Home, he, like his wife, fell in love with their adopted son.
    Driving home from Portland with their miracle child, Dan and Alice had fun with names, then chose Edward Aaron King, after her mother, Eidel, and his grandfather, Avrom, but also, just between the two of them, because the middle name was Elvis’s middle name, and Dan, especially, was an Elvis fan.
    The next day, at the hospital to which he was attached in Seattle, Dan took the elevator up to Maternity and dug out a blank Certificate of Live Birth. He filled it in to convey that Edward Aaron King was the son by birth of Alice and Daniel King, and forged the unreadable signature—approximated from one that was prevalent in the files—of an attending obstetrician. After putting this in the mail to the Seattle–King County Department of Public Health, Vital Statistics Section, he called Alice, who told him that she was “busy, busy, busy.” First thing that morning, she’d done what a friend advised, which was to dribble warm formula from a baby bottle onto her breast and let it roll toward her nipple for Eddie. Eddie had taken from a bottle with greed, but during lulls she’d doused her areolas with formula and encouraged him to latch on by pokinghim with her nipple. The sequence—she didn’t tell Dan this—gave her gooseflesh. It was like trying to catch a nibbling fish. She said, “Come on, come on, that’s right, good boy,” and “Mama’s so sorry she doesn’t have her own milk for you,” and “Look at you, such a handsome, handsome boy,” and “Do you know Mama loves you and will always love you, my baby Eddie, no matter what?”
    It surprised Alice to discover that she enjoyed changing Eddie’s diapers. What a pleasure it was, after wiping him clean and dusting him with Johnson’s, to coo at Eddie while he aired out on the changing table, and to tell him how beautiful he looked. Tidying him up, taking care with the pins, nosing his belly, and smelling his skin—it was thrilling and a little bit addictive. At the first sign of rash, Alice was there with ointment; at the first cough or cry in the night, she popped up. How quickly the meaning of her life changed from staffing issues at the mayor’s office to every new wrinkle, each fresh manifestation, of Eddie’s needs. And what a revelation it was to find that she enjoyed this more than anything else, the faux suckling, the wiping, the rocking, the holding, the scent of him, the miracle of Eddie, especially when he gazed into her eyes, curiously at first, as if studying her essential mystery, but then to behold her with what she knew was a deep, maybe even a spiritual, sense of who she was, at a level so basic it was beyond what words could express. There was no point in trying to explain it, except to say how much she loved their adopted boy, what a miracle he was, how devoted she felt, and how unexpected this all was, this change in her from one person to another, one woman to another; still, none of these avowals got to the heart of it, which was the feeling she had when Eddie looked her in the eye as if to close an unclosable gap.
    Her days now passed in a succession of achievements—not her own, but Eddie’s. Eddie discovered his thumbs, which was astounding. Then he squeezed Alice’s finger, smiled—or maybe smiled—lifted his head, and got the hang of a pacifier. Then his eyes followed the little monkeys, elephants, giraffes,