by Leslie Gould
Mother took Lan’s hand. “When will Quan come to help us? When will your brother take care of his old mother?”
“Shh,” she said. “Go back to sleep.”
“Maybe Cuong will marry you. It’s been three years since you’ve known him.”
Lan shook her head. “No. He’s going to the city. I may never see him again.”
“Who will take care of us?” Mother pulled Lan’s hand to her old, wrinkled face.
“I will. I will take care of you, of all of us.”
Chapter 19
Gen stood by the loading dock as Jeff moved the crates of cherries onto the truck with the forklift. Marta’s youngest daughter, four-year-old Melissa, held her hand. Jeff smiled at Gen as he turned off the motor. “It’s all yours.” He walked toward her and kissed her on the lips. The little girl climbed into the truck. “I think ice cream is in order,” Jeff said in a stage whisper. Melissa giggled.
Gen pumped the brakes slightly going down the drive to the main road. After all these years the heavy loads still made her nervous. As she turned toward town, her cell phone rang. She fumbled it from her belt, thinking it would be Jeff with an errand he needed her to run in town. It was Aunt Marie. “Genevieve, your fathers in the hospital.”
“He’s on his way to Kazakhstan,” Gen said, glancing at Melissa in the booster seat beside her.
“He had an attack last night,” Aunt Marie said.
“A heart attack?” Gen tried to keep her voice steady. Her father’s health had seemed so much better in the last few years.
“No. Some other kind of attack. You need to get to the hospital.”
“Is it serious?” Gen needed to get the cherries to the plant. They had their home study for the adoption tonight.
“Why would he be in the hospital if it wasn’t serious?”
Gen turned the pickup around and headed back to the orchard.
Aunt Marie met Gen in the lobby of the hospital. “Panic attack,” she said. “That’s what the doctor called it.”
“A panic attack?”
“Good thing he had travel insurance. He’ll get a full refund.” Gen checked her watch—one thirty. She could still make it back in time for the home study. She hadn’t called the social worker yet to cancel. “Genevieve, I want to talk to you before you go to see him.” Aunt Marie stepped toward two chairs grouped around a small table. They both sat. “It’s probably none of my business, but what’s this nonsense about you adopting from Vietnam?”
Gen lifted her eyebrows.
“Your father is distraught. Really, Genevieve. What are you thinking, going to Vietnam?”
Gen crossed her arms over her chest, realized she appeared defensive, and then clasped her hands over one knee. She examined her dusty khaki shorts. “I should go see Dad.” She started to stand.
“I have more to say.” Aunt Marie locked eyes with Gen. Gen sank back into the chair. “You may not realize this, but your mother and I were friends. Despite the age difference, she reached out to me in her endearing way. I couldn’t, as you’ve probably guessed, have children. In some ways your mother was like a daughter to me. And then when you were born, I finally had a baby in my life.” Aunt Marie looked tense, the cords in her neck bulged. “When your mother couldn’t get pregnant again, she became obsessed with having another child. She spent your father’s money on specialists, to no avail. Then she decided to adopt. I warned her not to. Warned her of the heartache. Told her to accept God’s will. She had one beautiful child already. Why would she risk so much for another?”
Gen crossed her arms again and left them that way.
“Before she flew over there to pick up that little boy, I called, begged her one more time.” Aunt Marie scowled. Gen shivered as her aunt continued. “Now I’m begging you, because I love you, to learn to be satisfied with what God has given you. I learned to be content with not having children. Your mother should have learned to be satisfied with one.” Aunt Marie gazed at Gen intently “You can learn to be content. Don’t go tramping off across the world. You’re father’s terrified of losing you.”
“And that’s why he had a panic attack on the night before he was supposed to fly to Kazakhstan?”
“He never should have planned to go on that trip. His intentions were good, but it was foolishness. But to have you planning to go to Vietnam is too much. He’s an old man now.” Aunt Marie shook her head. “There’s a reason, one you may never know, why God has closed your womb. You should accept it.”
“I have accepted it.” Gen rose. “I’m not going to birth children of my own. That doesn’t mean God doesn’t have children for us to raise. I’ve wanted to be a mother for as long as I’ve understood what a mother was.” She paused and then added, “I think I’m beginning to understand why Mom went back to Vietnam for Nhat.”
Aunt Marie started to speak and then stopped.
Gen continued, “I think it’s great you accepted what God had for you. That’s exactly what I’m doing too.” Gen peered intently at her aunt. “If God doesn’t make a way for us to adopt, I know we will eventually come to peace about not having children. Right now, though, that doesn’t seem to be where God is leading.”
Gen waited for her aunt to answer. Aunt Marie opened her mouth and then closed it.
“I’d better go see Dad,” Gen finally said.
“He’s in 412.” Aunt Marie looked away from Gen and crossed her arms.
Gen’s father wore slacks and a short-sleeved cotton shirt and sat on the edge of the hospital bed. He turned as she came through the door. “What are you doing here?”
“Aunt Marie called me.”
“I asked her not to, not with you in the middle of harvest.”
“I’m glad she did. Are you okay?” She sat beside Dad and took his hand.
He laughed a little. “I’m a little embarrassed. I was sure it was another heart attack. I must have been more stressed about the trip than I realized. I guess I’m older than I thought.”
“Oh, Daddy.” Gen kissed his cheek.
“I’m ready to go home,” he said. “Will you take me?”
“Why don’t you come home with me? You can ride with me in the truck while I haul cherries to the plant.”
He shook his head. “I’d just be in the way.”
What was I thinking to schedule the home study during harvest? Gen pulled the brush through her short wet hair with one hand and ran a washcloth over the bathroom counter with the other. The social worker would arrive in fifteen minutes. Jeff still needed a shower. Gen rushed into the bedroom and slipped her feet into her sandals. She had planned to move her school boxes from the baby’s room, cut stargazer lilies for the table, and bake chocolate chip cookies to make the house smell good. Instead, she hurried around the living room and dining room collecting junk mail and shoes.
Jeff came through the kitchen door. “Ten minutes,” she barked, dumping the shoes onto the floor of the mud porch. Surely the social worker wouldn’t look in there. Jeff took off his baseball cap and ran his hand through his curls. “Yes ma’am!”
“Hurry.” She heard a car in the driveway. Oh, no. She can’t be early. She glanced out the window. It was her father. “Dad?” she called from the porch.
“I decided to take you up on your offer.” A white sedan turned toward the house. “Who is that?” he said.
“Probably our caseworker.” She was early. Was Jeff even in the shower?
“Caseworker?”
Gen chuckled. “For our home study, for the adoption. No, we haven’t done anything bad.”
“Then I’m intruding.”
“No, you’re—” Gen stopped in midsentence as José, driving the old pickup, tore up the drive.
He shouted out the window. “Where’s the boss?”
“Inside.”
“Tell him Matthias fell from a ladder. He’s unconscious.”
Gen caught sight of a middle-aged woman climbing from the white sedan and then turned and hurried into the house,
calling for Jeff as she ran.
Gen looked at her watch and then at the caseworker. They’d just finished a tour of the house. “Would you like to see the yard?”
The woman shook her head, sat down, and straightened the papers on the table in front of her. “I really just need to chat with your husband for a few minutes.”
“I’ll call him. I hope he won’t be much longer.” At least she’d had the foresight to toss the cell phone at him as he rushed through the door, his hair dripping wet. They’d heard the siren of the ambulance. Gen was sure Jeff had followed it into town.
He didn’t answer the phone. She left a message and hurried back into the dining room.
“What do you think of your daughter and son-in-law adopting from Vietnam?” the social worker asked Gen’s father. Oh, no.
“I think they’ll make wonderful parents.”
“What do you think it will be like to have a Vietnamese grandchild instead of a biological one?”
He nodded in a noncommittal way and coughed a bit. “Excuse me,” he said, standing. “I need to get a drink of water.”
Tires rolled over the gravel drive. It had to be Jeff. Gen rushed to the window and watched him pull his weary body from the rig.
“Matthias is going to be okay,” he said, walking into the house. He stopped when he saw the caseworker. “The home study. I’m sorry. I forgot all about it once Matthias got hurt.” He strode over to the table and extended his hand. “I’m Jeff. Jeff Taylor. I’m so sorry to keep you waiting.”
Relieved, Gen sat back down in her chair.
The next day Gen drove over the bridge across the Columbia River to the cherry plant. The wind whipped at the truck. She felt it sway back and forth, under the weight of the crates. “Dad,” she said.
He didn’t answer.
“Dad,” she said again, “did you want to adopt Nhat, or was it all Mom’s idea?”
Her father glanced quickly toward her and then back at the bridge. “It was your mothers idea, and, yes, I wanted to adopt him. I wouldn’t have gone along with something like that if I didn’t want to, no matter how much I loved your mother.”
Gen held the steering wheel tightly. She didn’t entirely believe her father, but it was clear he didn’t resent her mother for wanting another child. At the end of the bridge, just as the back wheels rolled over the end of the metal grating, she asked, “Were Mom and Aunt Marie friends?”
“Your aunt was very fond of your mother, but I don’t think your mother trusted Marie. She was hurt by Marie’s criticism more than once.”
“What kind of criticism?”
“Oh, everything. Housekeeping, parenting—all that.”
“Aunt Marie told me she accepted not being able to have children, that if God wanted her to have kids she would have gotten pregnant.” Her father didn’t respond. They started up the hill toward the plant on the highway that ran above the river.
“I’m trying to remember exactly what your Uncle Bert told me all those years ago when we decided to adopt Nhat,” he finally said. “It was right before Bert died.” Her father stared out over the river. A train, tiny in the distance, sped by on the other side. “I think he said that he was surprised I was willing to take in someone else’s child, to raise a child that wasn’t my own.” He paused. “As it turned out, I guess he was right. I wasn’t willing to raise someone else’s child, not on my own.” Gen stole a look at her father. He stared straight ahead now. “It’s one of my biggest regrets,” he added softly.
“What is?”
“Letting Nhat go.”
Chapter 20
Mother lit the three sticks of incense and then knelt and whispered the grandparents’ names, Father’s name, and Second Brother’s name. She folded her hands in front of her chest and invited the ancestors to eat with them, commune with them.
Then she said the Tet blessing. “Happiness as vast as the southern sea, longevity as lasting as the southern mountains.” Lan tried to smile. It was the New Year, time to be positive, to believe the coming year would be better than the last. If only she could feel even a glimmer of happiness, a wave of peace. She had cleaned the shack. She had bought a new shirt for Hang and sugared fruits and New Year’s rice cakes wrapped in banana leaves as treats. Mother had steamed crabs and prepared fried rice and spring rolls.
They sat to eat around the low table in the shack below Truc’s home. Lan had moved the family seven months before. Truc supplied Lan with cigarettes and souvenirs to sell. Cuong hadn’t returned to see Lan’s belly grow bigger and bigger with his baby.
“I hope the little one is a girl,” Hang said.
“Hush,” Mother said. “It’s Tet. Talk about good things.”
Binh held his chopsticks over his bowl, waiting for his food.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s a girl or a boy.” Lan handed her daughter the plate of spring rolls. “This baby will have to go to the orphanage.”
Hang slept on the grass mat with one arm draped over Binh. The younger child had rolled onto the dirt floor, pulling the mosquito net off his sister. During the day Binh tormented Hang with his constant motion, but at night he wanted nothing more than to cuddle with her. Lan squatted by the open fire and watched her two older children through the open doorway.
The nine-day-old baby girl lay on the mat beside Lan. The water for Mother’s tea began to boil. The baby, Mai, began to fuss. Lan tried not to call the little one by her name. Hang called her Thi, “little girl.” Altogether the name was Tran Thi Mai. Lan opened her blouse to nurse the infant. Today she would take the baby girl to the orphanage.
They had no more rice, Mother claimed to be sick nearly every day, and Hang needed new schoolbooks. Lan had taken a few days off work when the baby was born, and now they were down to nothing.
She would take Binh to the orphanage too. He was skinny, too skinny, and sick nearly every day. She had been stubborn long enough. His ear infections lasted through the rainy season; he wheezed and coughed at night and sometimes when he played too hard.
The baby began to cry. Lan’s milk wasn’t enough to feed her. She put Mai back on the mat, stood slowly, and wearily slipped into her flip-flops. Because she was taking Binh, too, she would go up to the door of the orphanage, introduce herself to the director, give her the names of the children. If she were only taking the baby, she would simply leave her inside the gate.
The infant pushed her tiny hand into her mouth and sucked, her eyes shut against the rising sun. Hang and Binh came out of the hut. “Wash up,” Lan said. “Get ready for school, Hang.” The baby began to cry again. Lan motioned to Binh. “Come here, little one.”
She sat again, pulled her only son onto her lap, and ignored the cries of his baby sister. “Would you like to have enough to eat?” she said. Binh nodded. “Today I will take you to a place where you will have plenty of food. I will take Baby Sister, too.”
Lan brushed her hand across her eyes, pushed Binh off her lap, and stood. She felt lightheaded and waited, standing perfectly still, for it to pass. “Hang, go ask Truc if we can borrow her basin.” She would bathe the children before taking them to the orphanage. When Hang returned, Lan filled the container with cold water from the spigot in the yard as Binh pulled off his clothes. He climbed into the basin, splashing water onto his mother. For months he’d bathed himself under the spigot, but this last time Lan would wash him.
Lan said the prayer out loud, saying the last line slowly. “Car c’est à toi qu’appartiennent le règne, la puissance et la gloire, pour les siècles des siècles.” She repeated it. “For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory for ever and ever.”
Hang glanced up from her bowl of rice. “Mama, don’t. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Lan rubbed the soap in Binh’s hair and shivered. It had made sense all those years ago, but maybe Hang was right. Maybe it didn’t make sense anymore.
The orphanage director turned her back to them as Lan said good-bye to Binh.
“I will
come visit you,” Lan said, kneeling down on the concrete floor.
“Mama, what are you doing?” He clung to her neck.
“Shh. You be a brave boy. Do you hear? You must stay here and take care of Little Sister.”
“I want to go home with you.”
She pulled away from him and hurried down the stairs.
“Mama!” His cries followed her and rang for hours in her ears.
“What will happen to the baby?” Hang said that evening. Lan bowed her head. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t tell her oldest that the baby would be adopted. Hang went on to her next question. “When is Binh coming back?”
“I don’t know,” Lan said, feeling Hang standing over her. She had her father’s good heart. Lan could not bear to tell her that she planned to give Binh up for adoption, that a better life awaited him.
“I can take care of him.” Hang crouched on the floor. “Let me take care of him. I can take care of the baby, too.”
“No, you must finish school.” Lan observed it again and again, the oldest girl raising the younger children, having no opportunities of her own.
Hang shook her head. “Mama, how can you do this? How can you do this to our family?”
Lan stood and walked into the yard without looking back at Hang. She didn’t expect her daughter to understand, not now.
That night Lan reached for the baby in her sleep, then woke. The baby was gone. Moonlight filled the space between the frame and the door. She crossed her arms over her tender breasts as tears slid from her eyes. Stop, she chided herself. It’s for the best. It’s what’s best for them. A mother has to put her children before herself That was what Mother had told her all those years ago. All I’ve wanted, really, is to take care of my children.