by Mary Jaine
We left in good spirits; Louis was confident that all would be well. He explained that this wasn't unusual, and he expressed his hope that we'd soon be on our way. Nia hugged and thanked him, which brought a delighted smile to his rumpled face. I saw his hands twitch to go around her; however, he also saw me watching him, and he'd obviously taken my quiet word with him the previous night to heart, as his hands stayed firmly by his sides...
We spent the next two days sightseeing in Toronto, as suggested, and lazing in our room, feeling useless but waiting for that word that meant we could finally go and see if this was over, at last. It had taken three years of our lives, and to be honest, it was starting to become wearisome and depressing; a resolution one way or the other would have been welcome, whatever the outcome.
I was really starting to feel like we'd come as far as we ever would; perhaps she really was gone forever, and we'd followed a dud clue to the wrong person? The fact is, I'd lost hope, and I'd lost faith in Nia's certainty that her sister as somehow still alive, happy, healthy and rarin' to find her real family; supposing she was happy in her family here; had Nia considered that? I didn't think so...
++++
Wednesday, 12th May, 2012
10th & Anza, San Francisco
Bethany and Cory were sitting in the kitchen, chatting about work and drinking a coffee while they waited for the lasagne to finish, when there came a ring at the doorbell. Bethany looked accusingly at Corey.
"If that's your mother again, I swear, I'm driving her up to Marin Headlands and kicking her off! Every time one of her 'relationships' implodes, she comes here, loaded, and then I have to explain to the kids, again, why Gramma's crying. And she won't leave! She drives me batshit and she won't go home, and that drives me even more batshit!"
Corey grinned ruefully as he headed for the door.
"She doesn't mean anything by it; she's just trying to be part of the family!"
Bethany snorted. "Why can't she be part of Jo and Eric's family, or Carl and Lena's family? I'll tell you why; it's because Eric and Lena both put their foot down, that's why. Visits I don't mind, turning up unannounced and loaded is becoming a regular thing, like it's some kind of right. Your family saw me coming, that's the problem; your sister and your brother don't have any problem keeping her and her drinking away, why don't you?"
Bethany turned and went back into the kitchen to check on the lasagne; despite her objections, she knew she wouldn't turn Corey's mother away, she never had, no matter how scary drunk she'd been in the past, so she contented herself with muttering darkly about the family members who lived inconveniently far away and so had a perfect excuse not to take on Maureen Warren and her relationship issues. Bethany heard the sound of voices, male voices, not Maureen's slurred tones, Corey speaking with however it was, and the sound of the door closing, and him asking someone to take a seat.
Corey appeared in the kitchen doorway.
"Babe, turn that off, someone's here to see you."
His tone and the expression on his face told her something was up, so, setting the oven timer for another 20 minutes, she wiped her hands and followed him into the living room.
There were two men standing up as she came into the room, and they introduced themselves as Detective Harry Regan, of the SFPD Special Victims Unit, and FBI Special Agent John Davison.
Bethany moved closer to Corey, unnerved by having the police and the FBI in her home.
"Corey, what's this about, why have...?" she began, but Regan was quick to ease her fears.
"Mrs. Warren, we belong to a Task Force that's been investigating child trafficking and babies for cash dealers, both here in the continental United States, and in conjunction with other National, federal and local police and law-enforcement bodies worldwide. One of the items that came up was the matter of your own adoption. The Agency that arranged the adoption with your parents was a front for an international criminal enterprise selling babies on the black-market for legitimate adoption. We believe you yourself were obtained in this way, from an agency in Vancouver, smuggled into the US, and passed off as another child, with falsified birth records. Special Agent Davison has been in contact with a team in Canada investigating the same organisation in Canada and worldwide."
Special Agent Davison spoke up now.
"Mrs. Warren, the team in Canada were able to track you across Asia and into Canada, thence to California due to the cooperation of several dedicated and motivated teams in various countries. A female child closely matching your description, including the birthmark on the left side of your neck, was stolen from a subdivision of Da Nang known as Hoa Hiep."
"That child subsequently surfaced in Vancouver less than a month later, and promptly disappeared, the child that was listed under that name and adopted in Vancouver was the wrong gender and age, and then a child closely matching the original description from Vancouver was adopted by John and Phyllis Keyes of Pleasanton. I understand your adoptive parents have passed away, please accept my condolences. I want you to understand, they did nothing wrong; all the paperwork was correctly filed and notarized, and they took delivery of what they had every reason to believe was an orphan legitimately placed for adoption."
He stirred, looking closely at Bethany.
"Mrs. Warren, your real family have never stopped hoping for news of you. They have been searching for you, and it was them who alerted us to your case through their own investigations conducted in Vietnam, in Hong Kong, Thailand, Laos and Singapore. I was asked to show you this."
He took out a photograph and passed it over to Bethany who looked at her own face, her hair, even her birthmark, but it wasn't her, it was an older woman. She wordlessly passed the photograph to Corey, who whistled at the resemblance.
"Special Agent Davison, who is this woman?" she asked, her voice low and steady.
Davison looked at her steadily. "This is Anh Thienh Lo, your birth mother," he said, gauging her reaction.
"I see. Will you excuse me please?" said Bethany in that same low monotone, rising and walking away into the kitchen, mechanically checking the lasagne and getting the plates and glasses out of the cabinet.
Corey apologised with his eyes and slipped into the kitchen.
"Babe, don't you want to know more, anything else they might have to tell you?
Bethany looked at him steadily, and slowly shook her head.
"I had a mom, and a dad, they're gone, but they were my mom and dad, not some face in a photograph!"
Corey tried a different approach.
"Don't you want to know about the rest of your family, who and where they are?" and again Bethany shook her head.
"My family are here, and I know who they are!" she almost shouted, lowering her voice to tell him, "I don't want to talk about it, Corey; I just want to have dinner!"
Corey nodded assent and rejoined the two men in the living room.
"She's a little shaken by all this just now, let me have some time with her, I'm sure I'll be able to get her to come round."
The two men agreed, and left their cards with him. As they were leaving, Special Agent Davison added one thing.
"Mrs. Warren's younger sister is the one who finally helped us track her down; she put the final pieces together, she's been looking for her older sister for years; you might want to let your wife know that there are others in this who are hurting as well, who want to see her again, perhaps it may help her see things differently."
Corey came back into the kitchen to find Bethany sitting at the breakfast bar with tears in her eyes, the photograph of Anh on the counter in front of her.
"Why did I have to find out, Corey, why now? I only just got over losing her, now I have another one, when does this end, who else am I supposed to lose before it stops hurting and just becomes normal? How many mother's do you have to lose?"
Corey hugged her, understanding what she was saying, but his eyes kept being drawn back to the photograph on the counter. The woman in it was definitely Bethany's birth
mother, there was no doubt about that, the resemblance was startling, with even the same quirk in her smile.
Bethany noticed the direction of his gaze, and grimaced.
"I know, and I accept she's my real mother, but if I accept that, then what about my mom, where's she supposed to fit in all this? She was my real mom too, and I loved her, no-one's going to replace her!"
Corey soothed her as she began to cry.
"It's all right, it's OK to feel like that, mom brought you up, not this woman, but she's also hurting. You were stolen away from her, she didn't give you away, and she's been hoping and waiting for her girl to come back as well. You have a sister, did I tell you? She's the one who found you, and she wants to meet you, just to know her sister is alive and well I suppose. How much could it hurt to meet this girl, your kid sister?"
Bethany stopped crying to look levelly at him.
"I have a kid sister? Really?"
Corey nodded.
"That's what the FBI said. She's the one who's been digging around the world, looking for you, trying to trace you; are you sure you want to tell her to go away? Whether you accept her or not, she's committed herself to finding you; you owe her something for that at least!"
++++
I woke in the middle of the night, thinking Nia had called me, but she was fast asleep, her breathing slow and deep, so I dismissed it as a dream. As I drifted, Nia suddenly spoke, but she wasn't speaking to me; she was dreaming, and talking in Ting Viet, or so I assumed for a second, then years of listening to mum kicked in, and I realised it wasn't Vietnamese, it was some other language. I'd heard something like it once before, and I struggled to think where, then an image of Nia kneeling, hands clasped in prayer popped into my mind, and I knew where I'd heard this before. It was Cham, the Vietnamese Latin, and Nia had told me she didn't speak it, she only knew the prayers. Now she was having a conversation in her dreams, and she was speaking Cham like a native tongue, having a long and involved discourse with...someone.
Whatever this conversation was, it was beginning to have an effect on her; she was speaking faster, almost desperately, and her head began whipping from side to side. I switched on my bedside lamp, and reached over to touch her, and her eyes snapped open, staring at me, but they weren't her eyes. Gone were her sapphire blue doll's eyes, now her eyes in the muted golden light from the lamp seemed to flash light smoky amber, golden and sharp. Her eyes narrowed, and she said something to me, still in Cham, then she smiled, and closed her eyes, her face relaxing as she dropped back into deep sleep.
I the morning, I asked her casually if she'd had a good night. She looked at me and pursed her lips, debating whether or not to share with me.
"Jamie, I had the strangest dream. I dreamed of Hu'e, but that's not her name; her name's ...I can't remember. In my dream, she had a husband, and a little girl, and maybe a boy. She lived...somewhere with lots of wires overhead, I could see them in shadows on her face. She looked just like mum! She asked me for my bracelet, and I gave it to her, and she gave me a little coin in return, a red coin with a golden...thing on it, then I was in the Linh Son Temple in Upper Norwood with mum, and I was looking at the big statue of Hu Ye, and he spoke to me; he said 'You must go to her, now she is ready'. And I asked him where I was supposed to go, and he said 'You will know when you know'" and I woke up. I tell you, when I have weird dreams, I have world-class ones! I suppose I'm just lucky it wasn't carrots with teeth and an overwhelming fear of boots!"
I looked at her, relieved she wasn't reading portents and omens and God knows what into it. She accepted it was just the usual type of hugely significant dream that means so much while you're having it, and fades to nothing after you waken.
"You were talking in your sleep last night, which is a first, you were gabbling away in Cham, long involved and noisy!" I grinned, and she grinned back.
"Bullshit, I don't speak Cham, and neither do you. It was just garbled dream nonsense! What are we doing today?"
We spent the morning poking around various markets and little shops, not finding anything particularly unavailable in London, but Nia's addicted to street markets, so we poked and prodded and rummaged, looking through 'genuine' Native American handicrafts with the 'Made in China' printing still just visible, wobbly Mexican pottery from Taiwan, and bootleg CD's by the box-load.
When we finally got back to the hotel at lunchtime, Nia's appetite for pawing through cheap tat finally sated, there was a message asking us to call Louis at Toronto Police HQ.
When I'd finished speaking to him, Nia looked at me questioningly, so I grinned at her.
"Let's get packed, we're going to San Francisco!"
Nia squealed and jumped on me, then calmed down as we started to work out the logistics of this. I had a date and a place to meet this woman, Bethany Warren; Friday, May 14th, at the FBI building on Golden Gate Avenue. We were meeting Agent Davison, and a policeman, Detective Harry Regan of the Special Victims Unit, at three p.m. that day. I had the front desk arrange our booking for the Radisson Hotel on Fisherman's Wharf, not a million miles from Golden Gate Avenue, and asked them to arrange flights for us for that afternoon or early evening to San Francisco. They had our card details, and there was a knock at the door before we'd even finished packing, a Customer Assistant with our flight details for later that afternoon and ticket claim checks.
We arrived at the hotel at seven p.m. to be met by Detective Regan, a pleasant man in his mid-thirties, who briefed us on what the meeting was about.
"Bethany Warren was not too happy about this meet," he explained, "she grew up the daughter of a family from Pleasanton, in the East bay, Alameda County, so she was understandably more than a little shocked to hear what we had to tell her. I showed her the picture of her birth mother, and I have to say, the resemblance is startling, as it is with you, Miss Morrison; there's no doubt in my mind that you and she are siblings, the resemblance is extraordinary!"
Nia wanted to know if Bethany would be amenable or hostile, and Detective Regan shrugged.
"I...think she'll be...approachable. This is all a great shock to her, but she's handling it as well as could be expected; just don't get your hopes up that she'll run into your arms; she's still not comfortable about how this has all come about."
We had a quiet dinner at a superb place on Fisherman's Wharf, just a few minutes' walk from the hotel, and watched the seals basking in the last of the evening sun as we chatted about what the next day would bring. Nia was excited but pragmatic. I thought she'd had some unrealistic expectations from the start, but Detective Regan telling us that this Bethany wasn't exactly straining at the leash to meet us had wound Nia down several notches.
After a restless night, Nia finally fell asleep in the early hours, waking again with a start at nine o'clock, jittery and unable to relax. She paced, twiddled, chewed her lip and whistled tunelessly until I could take it no longer. As we had several hours to kill, and we were in San Francisco, I decided that we might as well do some touristy things, so we rode a cable car and a Muni train, took pictures of the city from Marin Headlands, strolled back across the Golden Gate Bridge and took pictures of the double-decked Bay Bridge. We wandered down Market Street for Nia to buy something for mum and dad, and by then it was time to go to our meeting.
At 2.45 p.m. we were waiting in the lobby of the FBI building for Special Agent Davison and Detective Regan. We'd been given to understand that Regan was here at the request of Bethany, which seemed odd, but it was her choice.
Agent Davison came and retrieved us and took us to his office, where we waited for Bethany and her husband to arrive. Eventually here came a knock at the door, and Regan came in followed by two people. As he stepped out of the way, Nia gasped, as did the woman standing there. I was speechless. She looked exactly like mum, her expression, the way she held her head, everything. Nia was half standing, her hand pressed against her lips, and we all stood there in silence. Eventually, Bethany's husband gently nudged her, and she gave a start, tearing
her eyes away from her rapt study of Nia's features.
Once we were all seated again, Agent Davison introduced us all, and I learned that the man with Bethany was her husband, Corey, Nia's brother-in-law.
Bethany began by asking us how we'd traced her, never once taking her eyes of Nia, and Nia just sat there transfixed, so I made all the running.
"Your mother, Anh lives in England now. She escaped to Laos after you were stolen, to get away from a police captain, a man named Thuyet. He wanted your mother to pass around among his friends, and he'd decided that he'd had enough of waiting. Mum went to the market one day, and when she came back, you were gone, and so was your father, Vienh. A neighbour smuggled her into Laos after your father's body was found; he'd been murdered, and you'd disappeared without trace. Your name was Hu'e Vienh Lo, and mum has never forgotten you, and never stopped wanting you back."
I paused, trying to gauge her reaction, but Bethany's face remained impassive while I unreeled what we'd been doing over the past few years
"Nia and I first learned about you three years ago, just before Nia went to university. While she studied Law, I've been digging around in Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, and Hong Kong, using my connections, and friends, and friends of friends, to try and get a line on you."
"A little while ago, we caught a break. I work in the Oil industry, and while I was on a survey in Vietnam, I managed to find some records that led me to Laos, then to Hong Kong and a gang of people traffickers. My friend in the Thai Border Force gave me some records and details, which I'm sure Agent Davison here has copies of."
Special Agent Davison nodded in affirmation.
"The records and information we obtained from Mr. Morrison and his contacts have been invaluable in closing several other cases of this nature here in the US and in Canada." he asserted. He nodded at me to go on.