Ten minutes had passed since Midnight in the city of Hillwood, Washington. Yet one citizen stirred about the living room of her house. Lila Sawyer alternatively stared out the window, gazed at the ceiling while flopped on the couch and thumbed listlessly through the photo album on the coffee table while emitting a deep and occasional existential sigh.
"Lila, is everything OK?"
The redhead stirs for a moment, breathing a sigh of relief as her beautiful wife Olga Pataki calls to her from the stairwell. Looking at the clock by the television, Lila drops the photo album in shock and gives a worried gasp seeing the 12:11am staring back at her.
"Oh, honey. Let me get that for you." Says Olga as she nimbly descends the steps and joins her on the couch after resetting the scrapbook in its rightful place.
A memento of this caliber seemed pointless in the day of photos being stored digitally, yet something about keeping a photo album on the coffee table felt comforting. Embossed on the cover of the bulky book were the words 'Our Loving Family' and the contents therein further attested to this motif. The first few pages were shots of Lila and her wife outside city hall on their wedding day nearly a decade ago, followed by snapshots of their life both momentous and mundane; a good deal of globe-trotting from the Alps in Switzerland to Yellowstone National Park, local date nights at Azeri restaurants and the Civic Opera, and of course photographs of their domestic life such as the two of them in matching holiday pajamas cozying up by a roaring fire with a mug of cocoa, or simply taking their nieces Eleanor and Cecile to the playground as infants.
Much of the photo album had over the years come to feature a third family member; a preadolescent girl named Kamala Ellison Love who came into their lives via Olga's brother-in-law Arnold Shortman, a child psychologist who lived in Boston Harbor. The girl originally lived miles and miles away in a shorefront town by the name of Spencer Beach, yet despite the distance, Arnold was assigned to help the girl with her behavioral problems and antisocial tendencies. Ultimately, Lila and Olga decided to adopt Kamala as their own daughter after her mother Summer Love was arrested for murdering/dismembering Sandy Colfax (her on and off boyfriend and Kamala's biological father) ON TOP OF attempting to set Dr. Shortman and his wife on fire.
"I can't sleep Olga. I'm ever so restless." Lila sighed forlornly. "Kamala's SAT scores are going to be coming in at some point this week-"
"I know Lila." Olga beamed. "To think it was but only yesterday we bought our little girl home for the first time from Spencer Beach. Now she's taken her SATs, then in June she turns seventeen. September is her senior year and then comes the college applications, the road trips as you and I take her on campus tours, the actual ceremony…"
Olga's voice suddenly goes silent as she and her wife look at each other in fear for what felt like eons. Like any set of parents, there was always the underlying fear of aging that came with each milestone Kamala made towards adulthood, but their anxieties went deeper than that. The decade-or-so-wide age gap separating Olga and Lila was often an elephant in the room, but for the most part, the love and commitment they had for each other went a long way in bridging it. Nonetheless, there were always going to be moments every now and again where this contrast between the two women's lifespans felt like a yawning and unavoidable chasm.
"Oh, Lila…sweetheart…"
"I'm ever so not ready for this." The redhead continued.
"Nor am I." Olga said. "But we knew this day would come sooner than later going in. We adopted a teenager after all."
"I know, I know…but…"
"But what, Lila?"
Lila took a deep breath. In many respects she lived a life that by all outward appearances defined "fulfilling" and "complete": she made her living as a Hostess for the Washington State Lottery, and while there had been others before her, few if any had a name or face that had become synonymous with the nightly drawings as she had. Being married to Olga was by-and-large blissful and together they made a lovely little home in Hillwood. As far as teenagers go, Kamala was well behaved and well adjusted, especially given her turbulent upbringing. Nonetheless, a part of Lila (having grown up an only child) always imagined herself having a large family upon adulthood. And while she wouldn't trade being Kamala's mom for the world, the fact that she and Olga never made any real attempts to adopt more children afterwards would gnaw at her every now and again like an itch that couldn't be reached.
Maybe because the Hillwood School System initially tried to hold Kamala back a grade when she first moved to the city, and rather than use that to their advantage in terms of keeping her under their roof, Lila and Olga fought tooth and nail to rectify this oversight. Or, maybe it was because her guidance counselors kept overplaying this moment as their "first steps into adulthood". Nonetheless, for whatever reason, Kamala taking the PSATs proved in time to be the moment where pacifying these sensations was going to get increasingly difficult for Lila who was still at a point in her life where the entirety of her college years remained a not-too-distant memory. Finally no longer willing to fight these burgeoning maternal instincts, she takes a deep breath and minces no words to her wife.
"I want to be a mother again Olga. To a baby. A son.