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Sid could probably arrange a private adoption, or know lawyers who do. Money would be no object and they would have their baby. It will be all right, Karen told herself.
    She wouldn’t take “no” for an answer.
    The approach to the Midtown tunnel was utter chaosţKaren imagined it looked like the final evacuation of Saigon. The cabbie lurched behind a huge eighteen-wheeler and jockeyed into position. The fumes were unbearable. Karen watched as all that metal tried to insert itself into the narrow tunnel opening. It was a lot like the medical procedures she’d been through lately, she thought with pain. Not that they’d done any good. She sighed. As the taxi began to inch its way into the mouth of the tunnel, the radio with its ghastly music cut off.
    Karen, grateful, closed her eyes against the glare of the tunnel lights and waited while the double-lane procession of vehicles made their escape from New York.
    At last the cab surged out of the Midtown tunnel toward the L.I.E. The misty rain was turning to a deluge, and in less than twenty minutes Karen knew that the VanWyck Expressway would be flooded, as would the B.Q.E. The infrastructure of the city was falling to shit. “Hurry,” she told the driver, trying to beat both the rain and the rush hour.
    “Hurry,” she said aloud again, and tried to believe that once she got to her mother’s it would all be all right.
    Karen Kahn, nee Lipsky, had been adopted by Belle and Arnold Lipsky when she was already three-and-a-half years old. That was late for an adoption. She had very few memories of her early childhood and none of that time before she lived at 42-33 Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn with Belle and Arnold. She wasn’t sure if that was normal or not, but she figured that the trauma of leaving one home for another would be enough to produce early amnesia in any child. She knew, vaguely, that she’d been fostered out, but her real memories began with Belle: Belle pushing her down Ocean Avenue toward Prospect Park in a stroller. At almost four years old, Karen must have been too big for one, but perhaps Belle had wanted to pretend that Karen was still a baby. Perhaps Karen herself had wanted to pretend it.
    What she could remember clearly was the stroller, its blue and white stripes and the silly bobble fringe on the sunroof. With it, she remembered the bells of the Bungalow Bar ice cream man, and the fascinating little houseţ complete with shingled roofţon the back of his truck. She remembered her mother handing her that first creamsicle, and the pleasure she got not just from the taste but from the contrast of the bright orange ice and soft, white creamy center.
    From around that time she could also remember an early morning visit to the Botanical Gardens: the lilacs had just come into flower and she had darted among several enormous bushes, delighted by the smell of the flowers and the exquisite colors that the purple fountain of blossoms made against the satiny green leaves. She had laughed and run from bush to bushţuntil she glanced around and noticed that Belle was nowhere to be seen. Alone, Karen remembered how the bushes took on an ominous look, hunching over her menacingly, and she had begun to cry.
    When Belle found her, she had scolded Karen both for running ahead and for crying.
    Belle Lipsky was not, perhaps, the ideal maternal figure. Small-boned and thin, she was always immaculately groomed and dressed in coordinated ensembles. She wasn’t prettyţher features were too sharp, too pinchedţbut she was what people back then called “well put together.”
    Karen had always been proud of how Belle looked, her attitude. Karen particularly remembered Belle’s hatsţalready de trop back in the fifties, Belle had been loathe to give them up, and Karen, back then, had thought they were the height of elegance. But the hats, like all of Belle’s clothes, were “for looking, not for touching.” From her earliest years, Karen knew that she was expected to keep