Vanilla Dreams

A woman's dreams become reality after an unlikely source intervenes.

Original art by Brian Reindel

The only thing I ever wanted to be was a wife and a mother. A homemaker. While my sisters set their sights on careers in nursing and teaching, I wanted to care for little babies. Lots of them. But my mother told me I had to go to college. Relying on a man to provide for all of my needs would lead to disappointment. I wondered how my father felt about that, the disappointment part, since we were never in need.

“Erin, sweetie, you need to dream big,” Mom said.

I did, but my dreams were of a big house and big family. Apparently, that wasn’t big enough. Big meant a lady of ambition and drive, financially independent, never requiring an allowance from her husband. I guess Mom was on a short leash from Dad, which might be the reason we were never in need. 

I went to college to become a librarian. Dad paid, reluctantly. He knew I would quit as soon as I met a man, which I did. His name is David, and he was the perfect addition to the equation, wanting nothing more than to work a desk job and come home to a wife and kids. We joked about me becoming his “trad wife”, a term that made the hair on my mother’s arms bristle. The only thing that would placate her would be grandkids, and that’s where the situation got worse.

We discovered David can’t have kids. It took a lot of expensive doctors to tell us that, and then finally to tell us we should pursue another avenue since biological children were impossible — adoption. I wanted healthy babies and didn’t care where we got them. If there were baby vending machines down the street, I would have plunked in as many dollar bills as it took to get one. It turns out it’s a lot of dollar bills.

They arrived shortly after in their giant ships, a series of flying cities, hovering metallic homes with no windows or doors. We didn’t know who lived there, but they certainly weren’t human, and that put everything on hold, including the adoption. The world stopped moving, like we were all at a fast-food drive through, and someone was holding up the line because they couldn’t decide what they wanted.

After six months the adoption agency finally called and said they were resuming the process because the spaceships weren’t doing anything. We were thrilled, but then discovered nobody wants to give up their baby to a couple, especially a mother, whose only ambition was to care for babies. What an odd contradiction.

Our caseworker said it could be years before we’re chosen. She asked if there was anything we could do to spruce up our profile, to make us appear more interesting. David looked at her with a straight face and said, “We were thinking of starting a garden.” She gave us a look back that sweet old ladies give to children who say something stupid. I half expected a “that’s nice dear” to come out of her mouth. She said she’d be in touch.

There were a lot of nights we spent eating in silence, or trying to make conversation about how the universe had gotten a little smaller with the spaceships’ arrival, and how life for our children would be much different. It was an unconvincing self-delusion, and I finally broke down crying one evening.

“All of these interesting things are happening around us, but it’s like we’re anti-gravity. Nothing sticks. My mother was right,” I said.

“Don’t ever say that, not ever. My daddy used to say that the rain falls on the righteous and unrighteous alike. We just have to wait our turn,” David said.

“Maybe that’s it. We might not be bad people, but we sure aren’t righteous. We should be asking The Man Upstairs,” I said.

It was the only way I knew how to refer to God, which is how my father referred to God, as the man on the very top floor, an executive who gives out bonuses when the company is doing well. I prayed every day, down on my knees at my bedside, like when I was a little girl. I prayed for lots of babies, trying to be ambitious this time because if I asked for something greater, then The Man Upstairs would get tired of me asking and give me just one baby.

It’s hard to know if it was God who answered. A part of me believes that those spaceships were making a plan all along, which involved listening to our prayers by snatching them out of the air before they escaped to heaven. A month later we had a baby as best I could tell, along with several thousand other people across the globe. 

When David left for work in the morning, he didn’t make it off the front porch, seeing as how there was a white egg floating there, about one hundred sizes too big. He yelled for me to come see, not knowing if it was a doomsday device like the news speculated, or some contraption that would take over our bodies. I knew differently. I reached out to touch it and a seam where there wasn’t any opened up to reveal a naked baby girl nestled into a soft cushion. 

By all accounts she was a perfectly healthy baby, the only difference between us being her light powder-blue skin. She cooed and smiled, a perfect introduction, and I grabbed her and nestled her to my chest. My baby.

“What are you doing? We can’t keep this thing!” David exclaimed.

“It’s not a thing. It’s an answer to my prayers,” I said.

“How do you know they want us to keep it — her?”

“A mother knows.”

The next day the Men in Black showed up and told us we couldn’t keep Sky. That’s the name I gave her. That’s where she came from, the beings in the sky, and it fit perfectly. They weren’t all men that arrived. One woman, a representative from social services accompanied them, probably for optics. You can’t have three men show up and take a baby. Somehow including a woman in the mix makes it okay.

All of the agencies were represented, the CIA, NSA and FBI, and they tried to explain every which way from Sunday why they had to take Sky. My screaming and crying didn’t help and no amount of careful negotiation from David could change the stoic looks in their faces. The woman held Sky in her hands as though she was a sack of flour or a science experiment, with no explanation about where they were headed or truthfully why this was necessary. After the door shut, I crumpled down in front of it and cried.

“We’ll find another way,” David said.

“No, this is us now. We’re meant to be childless because we didn’t dream big enough,” I said.

My cries were loud, but not loud enough to drown out the screams we heard outside. I thought maybe another mother had her perfect powder-blue baby stolen and couldn’t restrain herself. David gave me a quizzical look and told me to step away from the door, which he opened to a frightful scene. The woman holding Sky disintegrated into tiny flashes of brightly colored lights, wisps of twinkling blue, green and red fading up to the intercessors in the clouds.

One of the Men in Black took hold of Sky before the woman disappeared, but those lights were contagious and took hold of him as well. All he could do was say no, no, no, over and over. The other two men weren’t willing to risk touching Sky for fear she caused the whole thing. I ran out quickly and snatched her out of his arms before he disappeared completely. Sky didn’t seem fazed at all by the commotion and looked up at me with the most beautiful emerald-green eyes. 

David came out and put his arm around me. The other two men stood fearfully still, contemplating their next move, unable to figure out what their secret manual had to say about disintegrations or interstellar adoption.

“Gentleman. I’m sorry about your colleagues. Sky is our baby girl, and she’s not going anywhere,” David said.

I liked the way David said Sky’s name. It made me warm and fuzzy, and all I could think was that I wanted to bake him an apple pie, his favorite. We finally had our traditional family, and the guardians above were going to let us keep it. We walked inside and closed the door, letting those men unhinge themselves from our front lawn on their own time.

“I think I’ll BBQ for dinner. We’ll go out later and do some shopping for baby stuff,” David said.

“Maybe my mother will throw us a baby shower,” I said.

We laughed at the idea.