Hideaway

undergone an emotional sea change together.
    The long, smothering tide of despair, which had rolled over them upon Jimmy's death, abruptly abated. They realized they were still together only by virtue of a medical miracle. Not to be thankful for that reprieve, not to fully enjoy the borrowed time they had been given, would have made them ungrateful to both God and their physicians. More than that—it would have been stupid. They had been right to mourn Jimmy, but somewhere along the way, they had allowed grief to degenerate into self-pity and chronic depression, which had not been right at all.
    They had needed Hatch's death, reanimation, and Lindsey's near death to jolt them out of their deplorable habit of gloom, which told him that they were more stubborn than he had thought. The important thing was that they had been jolted and were determined to get on with their lives at last.
    To both of them, getting on with life meant having a child in the house again. The desire for a child was not a sentimental attempt to recapture the mood of the past, and it wasn't a neurotic need to replace Jimmy in order to finish getting over his death. They were just good with kids; they liked kids; and giving of themselves to a child was enormously satisfying.
    They had to adopt. That was the hitch. Lindsey's pregnancy had been troubled, and her labor had been unusually long and painful. Jimmy's birth was a near thing, and when at last he made it into the world, the doctors informed Lindsey that she would not be capable of having any more children.
    The Nun with No Name stopped pacing, pulled up the voluminous sleeve of her habit, and looked at her wristwatch. “Maybe I should go see what's keeping her.”
    “Give the child a little more time,” Sister Immaculata said quietly. With one plump white hand, she smoothed the folds of her habit. “If you go to check on her, she'll feel you don't trust her to be able to take care of herself. There's nothing in the ladies' restroom that she can't deal with herself. I doubt she even had the need to use it. She probably just wanted to be alone a few minutes before the meeting, to settle her nerves.”
    To Lindsey and Hatch, Father Jiminez said, “Sorry about the delay.”
    “That's okay,” Hatch said, fidgeting on the sofa. “We understand. We're a little nervous ourselves.”
    Initial inquiries made it clear that a lot—a veritable army —of couples were waiting for children to become available for adoption. Some had been kept in suspense for two years. After being childless for five years already, Hatch and Lindsey didn't have the patience to go on the bottom of anyone's waiting list.
    They were left with only two options, the first of which was to attempt to adopt a child of another race, black or Asian or Hispanic. Most would-be adoptive parents were white and were waiting for a white baby that might conceivably pass for their own, while countless orphans of various minority groups were destined for institutions and unfulfilled dreams of being part of a family. Skin color meant nothing to either Hatch or Lindsey. They would have been happy with any child regardless of its heritage. But in recent years, misguided do-goodism in the name of civil rights had led to the imposition of an array of new rules and regulations designed to inhibit interracial adoption, and vast government bureaucracies enforced them with mind-numbing exactitude. The theory was that no child could be truly happy if raised outside of its ethnic group, which was the kind of elitist nonsense—and reverse racism—that sociologists and academics formulated without consulting the lonely kids they purported to protect.
    The second option was to adopt a disabled child. There were far fewer disabled than minority orphans—even including technical orphans whose parents were alive somewhere but who'd been abandoned to the care of the church or state because of their differentness. On the other hand, though fewer in number, they were in even less demand than minority kids. They had the tremendous advantage of being currently beyond the interest of any pressure group eager to apply politically correct standards to their care and handling. Sooner or later, no doubt, a marching moron army would secure the passage of laws forbidding adoption of a green-eyed, blond, deaf child by anyone but green-eyed, blond, deaf parents, but Hatch and Lindsey had the good fortune to have submitted an application before the forces of