Free The Girls from Ames by Jeffrey Zaslow Page B

“She kept looking at me and looking at me,” Karla recalls. Everyone noticed. Finally, Cathy broke the silence by saying, “Hey, maybe that’s your biological mother!” There were laughs all around after the mystery woman left, though Karla’s laughter was more self-conscious. The woman never showed up there again.
    Karla knows little about her biological mother, except for tidbits shared by nurses on duty the day she was born. They said the woman was a doctoral student at a college out of town; she came to Ames because her sister lived there. Her pregnancy was the result of an affair with a married professor who was Catholic and had several children. On the night Karla was born, the professor came to the hospital.
    Whether or not the woman was also Catholic is unclear, but the professor had asked that she not have an abortion. It was important to both of Karla’s birth parents that they find adoptive parents who were college-educated. The professor had some kind of double doctorate.
    The day before Karla was born, the phone rang at the home of Barbara and Dale Derby. Mrs. Derby recalls the moment with remarkable clarity, right down to the type of cookies she was baking when the call came: chocolate chip. The birth mother’s doctor was on the phone. He said he had talked to a local attorney, who knew that the Derbys had been looking to adopt. The doctor explained that an available baby would be born, possibly within hours, at Mary Greeley Hospital. But this offer, out of the blue, came with a stipulation. “We can only give you ten minutes to decide,” the doctor said. After that, he’d offer the baby to another couple.
    Unable to have children of their own, the Derbys had just adopted a little girl the year before, from an orphanage. Did they really want another baby so soon? Mrs. Derby hung up the phone and ran outside to find her husband, who was weeding in their garden. She told him about the surprise phone call, the ten minutes to decide, the urges within her to have another child.
    “Well, we’d want a boy,” Mr. Derby said. “How do we know this baby will be a boy?”
    “I don’t care,” Mrs. Derby said. “I want this child. Girl or boy, I know this is our baby.”
    Mr. Derby took a breath, told her that if she wanted another baby, girl or boy, then so did he, and sent her running back into the house. Perhaps seven minutes had passed. Mrs. Derby called the doctor back. Yes, she told him. Yes, they’d take the child.
    She was so nervous that she could hardly hold the receiver in her hand. It was shaking against her ear. She asked if the birth mother had been getting prenatal care.
    “Do you want this baby?” the doctor asked. “If you do, don’t ask questions.”
    In terms of education, the Derbys fit the criteria requested by the biological parents. Mr. Derby, being a bridge designer, was a civil engineer. Mrs. Derby had a business degree and worked for the phone company. And because this was an adoption that wouldn’t be going through an agency, it was put together without great formality, in the small-town way that things were done then. The nurse who brought Karla to the Derbys’ home had no paperwork. She just handed Mrs. Derby the baby and one extra cloth diaper, then wished her well and drove off. Karla was wearing a thin little dress she’d been given at the hospital. Mrs. Derby stood there, tears running down her cheeks, holding tight to Karla and that extra diaper.
    It would take a year for the adoption to be legal. So for twelve months, Mrs. Derby feared that the biological mother would return and take Karla away.
    During her childhood, Karla felt comforted to know that several of the Ames girls had a connection to her adoption. There was Marilyn, whose dad, as Karla’s pediatrician, helped facilitate the paperwork that permanently placed her with the Derbys. There was Jenny, who was born at Mary Greeley Hospital the week before Karla. In those days, new mothers remained