Free Other Resort Cities by Tod Goldberg

children in Russian orphanages. By the film’s conclusion, Tania decided to make something of her life, to put her royal winnings to good use, give someone a chance at a better life, allow that money to be more than just a house she’d struggle to pay for night after night. She’d found the perfect place in Summerlin—a three bedroom with a little lap pool out back, Corian counters throughout, a view of the Red Rock Mountains—and was preparing to make an offer, though she didn’t even know what that meant. Either she’d buy or she wouldn’t, and she hadn’t.
    No, she didn’t need a house. Tania knew her life was disposable, as if someone could cut her head off and paste it on another girl’s body, and the world wouldn’t notice at all. She needed to become . She would adopt a child from Russia. She would look into dental hygienist school—several girls she’d worked with at the Mirage were studying at the community college during the day to become hygienists, and it sounded like a good job, albeit one spent on your feet all day bent over people, which in concept sounded not much different than cocktailing.
    She’d always had maternal instincts. Tania had even been pregnant once, if only for a few weeks. Her boyfriend Clive got her pregnant—this was when she was thirty—and
Tania spent an entire long weekend off from work shopping for baby clothes at Target, rummaging through garage sales for baby carriages and strollers and figuring out how to decorate the baby’s room. It was too soon, she knew that, as she’d only just missed her period, but she’d taken an at-home test and had an appointment to see her gynecologist for the following week and felt a great desire to begin this new phase of her life, sure that being a mother wasn’t so much a calling for her now as it was a station: a chance to be a better person. She was certain she’d need to move in order to get away from Clive, who, while he was a fun guy to waste time with, would be a terrible father. It wasn’t that he’d ever hit her or even been particularly cruel, only that he was stupid, and stupid would not do as a role model. No, she decided, she’d just move up to Spokane with her child—who she thought she’d name Corey no matter the sex—and her own father could play that positive role until she found someone smart, someone who didn’t work at a restaurant or bar. When she miscarried a few days later, she broke up with Clive to pay penance for her own conceit; to bring a child into this world, when they couldn’t even save the dolphins or blue whales or whatever, well, it was just silly. A dog would do. Yes. A dog would be enough until things felt more stable all around. But even now, in the small storage locker she has in her building in Desert Hot Springs, there’s a box marked “Corey” that she’s hauled around across two states and several years.
    When she woke up the morning after seeing the documentary and couldn’t get the idea of adopting a Russian child out of her mind, couldn’t stop thinking that her life had been lived in service, strictly service, and that this was her
chance to actually be a real human, to get off her ass and make something stable for someone else, she knew she had to act. She had to learn to keep something, to not spontaneously rid herself of responsibility.
    What Tania didn’t realize was how long and arduous and pricey the whole experience would be. It took just over a year between the day her dog died and the exact moment she stepped off the airplane in Las Vegas with her daughter ( her daughter! ) by her side. She spent eleven months searching for the right child, filling out the paperwork, getting the approvals, paying the fees—it was $20,000 to the Russian agencies, another $5,000 for lawyers and paperwork stateside—until, in the end, she had to ask her parents if she could borrow another $5,000 just to get to Russia, where she’d need to stay for a month to attend adoption