Chapter One This happened when Adam was about three years old.
I was sitting in a small apartment with a woman I had barely met, talking to her about her life. I'll call her Mrs. Ross, because it isn't her name. I had been doing similar interviews for months, collecting data for my Ph.D. dissertation. Mrs. Ross was a scrawny forty-five-year-old with a master's degree in art history and a job as an elementary school janitor. I was taking notes, considering what this woman's experience had to teach about the real-world value of the more refined academic fields, when she suddenly stopped talking.
There was a moment of silence, and then I looked up and said, "Yes?" in a helpful voice, which was normally enough to keep an interview rolling. But Mrs. Ross wasn't acting normal. She had been sitting on a straight-backed wooden chair, both feet set firmly on the floor and her hands resting primly on her knees. Now she was curled into an almost fetal position, forearms crushed between the tops of her thighs and her chest, her eyes tightly closed.
I became alarmed. "Are you all right?" I said, trying to sound politely but not overly curious.
Mrs. Ross waved a hand at me. "I can't ... quite ... make it out," she said.
I just stared at her.
"Usually," she gasped, her eyelids clamping down tighter, "usually I can tell which side of the veil it's coming from ... that's usually the first thing I can tell ... but this time I ... can't."
"Uh-huh," I said cautiously, glancing toward the door, wondering if I could get to it before Mrs. Ross leapt upon me like a mad dog.
"It's like ... he's not really on one side of the veil or the other ... maybe he's on both." She shook her head, troubled. "At least I know it's a he."
"Uh, Mrs. Ross," I said, gathering my notes together for a quick exit.
At this point Mrs. Ross's eyes flew open wide, fixing me with a bloodshot stare.
"You know who it is!" she said in a low, accusing voice. "You know who it is, but you're blocking!"
At this point my curiosity began to get the better of me. "I know who?" I said.
"That's right!" Mrs. Ross uncurled a little. "You see, I have this ... well, it's a gift." She sounded as though she wasn't quite sure Santa had gotten her letters.
"Gift?" I repeated.
She nodded. "I get messages for people." She sighed and sat up. "There was a point in my life when I stopped talking about it, you know, because it's very embarrassing."
"Oh," I said.
"And then, you know," Mrs. Ross continued, "I began to lose it. It was getting fainter, and sometimes the spirits would be angry at me, because I wouldn't help them get through to people."
At this moment, I swear to God, a large green parrot walked out of Mrs. Ross's small kitchen and into the living room. It paced slowly across the carpet, peered at me suspiciously with one flinty eye, then proceeded on foot up the leg of Mrs. Ross's chair and onto her shoulder. She's a witch, I thought. I'm sitting here talking to a genuine witch. The parrot was obviously a familiar. I would have been willing to bet it was her husband.
Mrs. Ross kept talking, stroking the bird absentmindedly. "So I promised God that I would always deliver the messages as soon as I got them. No matter what."
"No kidding." I said this without any sarcasm. That's how much I had changed. Four years earlier I would have dismissed Mrs. Ross and her "gift" immediately. Back then I had known exactly how the world worked. Back then I had been sure of my own intellect, sure of the primacy of Reason, sure that, given enough time and training, I could control my destiny. That was before Adam. But now it was four years later, and Adam was at home with the baby-sitter, and I had learned a lot about how much I had to learn. So I sat still and waited for Mrs. Ross to go on. She did.
"The messages are usually from the other side of the veil-I mean, from the spirit world," she said. "Sometimes they're from living people who are far away and need to get a message through immediately. But that's always the first thing I can tell-which side of the veil the message is coming from." Her brow furrowed. "And this time, I can't tell"
By now, I admit it, I was hooked. I wanted my message.
"Just relax," I suggested helpfully.
Mrs. Ross shot me a glance that would have pierced steel, a glance designed to shove me off her turf.
"Or not," I said.
"We should pray," whispered Mrs. Ross.
"Uh, okeydokey," I responded. I mean, what would you have done?
So Mrs. Ross and I bowed our heads, and I drew a deep breath and relaxed for just a second, and then her head snapped up like a Pez dispenser and she said, "All right, you stopped blocking. It's your son."
"My son?" Even after everything that had already happened, this surprised me. I had been hoping the message would be from my guardian angel, or perhaps a stray ancestor with an interest in my career.
"You have a son who's halfway between worlds," stated Mrs. Ross.
I felt the hair go up on my arms. You see, no matter how much evidence you have, over time you tend to block out the experiences that aren't "normal." Who wants to turn into a Mrs. Ross, blurting out gibberish about spirits and veils? How much of that sort of conversation are you allowed before people stop inviting you to parties, and you end up pushing a mop in an elementary school?
"Well" I said to Mrs. Ross, "maybe I do have a son ... uh ... like that."
She gave me a withering look. "You do," she said flatly. "And he wants me to give you a message." The parrot nibbled tenderly on her ear.
By now my whole body was bristling with a strange electricity. The sensation had become familiar to me over the past few years, yet it was always a surprise. At least I kept my mouth shut.
Mrs. Ross closed her eyes again, gently this time. "He says that he's been watching you very closely from both sides of the veil."
The veil again.
"He says that you shouldn't be so worried. He says you'll never be hurt as much by being open as you have been hurt by remaining closed"
She opened her eyes, scratched the parrot's head, and smiled. She didn't look like a witch at all anymore.
"That's it?" I said.
Mrs. Ross nodded, smiling.
I didn't return the smile. "What the heck is that supposed to mean?"
She shrugged. "Beats me."
"Oh, come on," I pleaded. "There's got to be more. Ask him." This is not the way I was taught to behave at Harvard.
"I don't ask questions," she said. "I just deliver messages. Like Western Union. What the messages mean is none of my business."
And that was all she had to say.
After a pathetic attempt to pretend I was still conducting an interview, I raced home to confront Adam. He was in his crib, asleep. He was about half the size of a normal three-year-old, had barely learned to walk, and had never spoken an intelligible word. I reached down and poked him in the tummy, and he woke up with his usual jolly grin on his face.
I looked into his small, slanted eyes. "Adam," I said seriously. "You've got to tell me. Are you sending me messages through Mrs. Ross?"
His smile broadened. That was all. And he hasn't said a thing about it since.
So here I am, still wondering what the hell happened that day, wondering whether Mrs. Ross was really channeling my three-year-old, wondering what he meant. I wonder a lot of things, since Adam came along. I wonder about all the strange and beautiful and terrible things that accompanied him into my life. My husband, John, knows about my wondering-shares it, in fact, since his life, too, was changed when we were expecting Adam. But when I wasn't talking to John, I learned to keep it all to myself. I learned to ignore the miraculous in my life, to pretend it didn't exist, to tell lies in order to be believed. In short, I kept myself closed.
This has not been easy. It is difficult not to tell people when one of your interview subjects turns out to be Parrot Woman. The strangeness, the curiosity, the wonder keeps pushing outward, begging to be communicated, needing air and company. On many occasions, I have tried to talk about Adam without letting on that I actually believed in everything that happened to me. I have written this book twice already, both times as a novel, to wit: "This is the story of two driven Harvard academics who found out in midpregnancy that their unborn son would be retarded. To their own surprise and the horrified dismay of the university community, the couple ignored the abundant means, motive, and opportunity to obtain a therapeutic abortion. They decided to allow their baby to be born. What they did not realize is that they themselves were the ones who would be `born,' infants in a new world where magic is commonplace, Harvard professors are the slow learners, and retarded babies are the master teachers."
You see, by calling it a novel, I could tell the story without putting myself in danger from skeptics, scientists, and intellectuals. "Fiction!" I would assure them. "Made it all up! Not a word of truth in it!" Then they would all go away and leave me alone, and perhaps a few sturdy souls would be willing to believe me, and I could open up in safety to them.
It hasn't worked out that way. The editors and agents and writers I respect most have always come back, after reading my "novel," with the same question: "Excuse me, but how much of this is fiction?" And I would hem and haw a bit before admitting that aside from making John and myself sound much better-looking than we are, I didn't fictionalize anything. It's all true, I would say. Then I would sink into my chair five or six inches and wait for them to call security.
So far, that hasn't happened. It has been five years since Mrs. Ross reared back against her parrot and delivered Adam's message, and in all that time my favorite people have continually repeated his advice. Open up, they say. It will feel better than remaining closed.
I am none too sure about this. I am very much afraid of being caught in the firestorms of controversy over abortion, genetic engineering, medical ethics. It worries me to think that I will be lumped together with the right-to-lifers, not to mention every New Age crystal kisser who ever claimed to see an angel in the clouds over Sedona. I am reluctant to wave good-bye to my rationalist credibility. Nevertheless, the story will not stop unfolding, and it will not stop asking me to tell it. I have resisted it for what feels like a very long time, hoping it would back off and disappear. But it hasn't.
So, Mrs. Ross, wherever you are, thank you for delivering my son's message. After all these years, I've finally decided to listen.
--From Expecting Adam : A True Story of Birth, Rebirth, and Everyday Magic, by Martha Beck. (c) August, 2000 Berkley Books used by permission.
