The Goodbye Quilt by Susan Wiggs Page A

of partying every weekend, making love before dinner, staying up late and watching edgy movies.
    Then Molly came along, and nothing was ever the same. We thought, at first, that nothing would change. Our denial ran deep; we walked around with her in a Snugli or stroller, pretending she was a fashion accessory.
    Of course, she was so much more than that. She had the power to turn us into different people. Wewere no better and no worse, but different. She was our happiest, most blessed accident.
    All of which goes to show what can happen when you talk to strange men in bars.
     
    In the middle of the night, I wake up and blink at my surroundings, my sleep-blurred gaze tracking the seam of the drapes, glowing amber from the lights of the motel parking lot. I hear Molly breathing evenly, sweetly, a sound that catches at my heart now as it did the first time I ever heard it and thought, My God.
    Emotion and memory chase away sleep and I get up, shuffling over to the laptop computer. I touch the keyboard and it wakes up, too. Little boxes tile the screen; Molly was IMing with Travis late into the night. I quickly close the IM windows without reading the text.
    It’s 3:00 a.m., and the internet is there, waiting for me. Following the stream of my own thoughts, I click to site after site, surfing from link to link as though pulling myself along some invisible, unending chain. Ultimately, it’s unsatisfying, filling my head with too much information. Yet it’s given me a huge idea.
    Slipping on a light jacket, I step out into the parking lot with my cell phone. The whole world is asleep. There are no cars on the street, no critters rooting in the trash, no breeze stirring the tops of the trees. I punch in our home number on the cell phone.
    “It’s me,” I say when Dan picks up on the second ring.
    “What?” he asks, grogginess burgeoning to panic. “Where the hell are you? Are you and Molly all right?”
    “We’re fine. We’re in…” I think for a moment. “Ohio. She’s sleeping.”
    “So what’s the matter?” In Dan’s book, if everything is fine with Molly, everything is fine, period. I can hear the bed creak, can picture him rolling over, pulling up the covers. “What time is it?”
    I’m not about to tell him. “Late,” I admit. “Sorry I woke you. I couldn’t wait. Dan, I just thought of something.”
    “What did you think of, Lindy?” He never gets mad when I wake him up out of a sound sleep. I wonder how that can be. Suddenly I wish I was there with him, rubbing his warm shoulders with gentle persistence.
    “We need to get an orphan.”
    “A what?”
    “An orphan. You know, adopt a child.”
    “Huh?” Another creak of the bed, or maybe it’s the sound of Dan, scowling.
    “From Haiti.”
    “Linda, for Chrissake—”
    “No, listen, I found this site on the internet. There are thousands of them, waiting for families. We have so much, Dan. We’re still young. We could give some poor child a chance.
    “There’s one I found named Gilbert. He’s six. He lost his family in the earthquake.”
    “Go back to bed, Linda. It was hard enough raising our own healthy, well-adjusted child.”
    “It hasn’t been hard at all.”
    “Speak for yourself.”
    His comment reminds me of their struggles. His frustration, Molly’s tears, the long silences and the breakdowns I used to feel compelled to fix. “We did a great job.”
    “I’m not saying we didn’t. But we’re done. It’s our time now, Linda.”
    “And I want to do something with it, somethingthat matters. Think about it, Dan. These kids…they’re not sick or abused. They didn’t grow up in institutions. They’re kids like Molly, except they had the bad luck to come home from school one day to find that their families were gone.”
    “I’ll send a check to the Red Cross.”
    “They need families. We could—”
    “We could do a lot of things, but adopting an orphan from Haiti isn’t one of them.” He must know how that sounds,