Daughters for a Time

by Handford, Jennifer

  Dear Claire,

  All of the babies have just been blessed by a monk and now Sam’s asleep and Tim’s scaling a pagoda. I’m sitting on a bench. It’s cold, but the sun is out. Really, it’s just a beautiful day. Anyway, there’s a woman, a few tables away from me: head of brown wavy hair that looks like it’s been inflated with an air pump, eyes so blue I can see the color from here, and cheeks that rise and fall with her infectious laughter. You can see where I’m going with this. Mom.

  This woman reminds me so much of her, but of course, this lady is in her sixties and she’s sitting with her two daughters who are clearly in their forties, and this is the thing that strikes me: the mom is the one who is divvying up the picnic of cheese and nuts and fruit, sliding portions onto their plates, securing a napkin underneath so that it doesn’t fly away, refilling the glasses of wine. Do you see what I’m saying, Claire? This mom is feeding her daughters. Her forty-year-old daughters.

  That’s a mom, right? Wouldn’t Mom have been the same way, still wiping our mouths, offering us the food off her own plate? I was just thinking: you’re that way, too, Claire. Maura’s lucky to have you as a mom. I really mean this: if I’m half the mom to Sam that you are to Maura, we’ll be in good shape.

  For some reason, looking at these women made me think of how you used to stop by every Sunday. I was in college and you were in grad school, and even though you were so busy, you’d bring me my “food money” for the week. I remember thinking, why don’t you just send it or put it in my account, but of course, once I was older I knew that you were just checking up on me, always slipping an extra carton of milk in my fridge, a loaf of bread in the basket. You’d walk around the apartment and check the locks on my windows, make sure that I had my Mace on my keychain, my cell phone charged.

  I can see Tim spiraling down the pagoda now. I wonder what he saw up so high. I can’t wait to see you next week. Of course, we’ll be home before this letter even makes it to you, assuming I actually find an envelope, a stamp, and a post office. Maybe I’ll just give you this in person.

  Anyway, you were right. I am dreaming about that day at the spa, sprawled out on a massage table, candles flickering. But this is pretty awesome, too!

  See you soon!

  Love you! Helen

  At dinner, Max surprised us with big news.

  “The orphanage director has invited your group to tour the grounds,” he said.

  Seldom were adoptive parents able to see the inside of the orphanage where their daughters lived, so when Max told us that our group had been invited to take a tour, we jumped at the opportunity. The next day, we boarded a bus and headed for the mountainside. With horns blaring, we bumped our way through the traffic, throngs of bicyclists, pedestrians, and taxicabs until we were outside of the city and heading in the direction of Sam’s birthplace. As a group, we gasped as the bus skidded precariously around cliffhanging precipices and dodged farmers leading oxen and a family of four stacked high on a scooter. We held on tightly to our new babies, many of whom, Sam included, were more calmed and lulled by this carnival ride of a trip than they’d been in our arms in the quiet of the hotel room. We passed countless rice paddies, drove alongside the Yangtze River, saw lotus blossoms and water lilies. At one point, our bus drove onto a ferry that crossed the river.

  We reached the Children’s Welfare Institute four hours later. Sam had fallen asleep and didn’t budge from Tim’s shoulder when we exited the bus. I was glad about that. Sam had just left this place, entered our lives, and now we were back? It seemed like we were doing our best to confuse these poor children.

  The orphanage building was no-nonsense, white cinder block. It easily could have been a prison, a bureaucratic building, a warehouse. I shivered when I realized that, really, it was all of those things. We were greeted by the middle-aged orphanage director, Mrs. Lu, whom we had met just a few days ago when she delivered the babies.

  “Follow me,” she said, walking us through a concrete hallway. “The playroom,” she indicated, pointing to a bare room with very few toys. “The kitchen,” she pointed to a room with pots and kettles and glass baby bottles stacked neatly next to the sink.

  Along one wall was a bench—a potty for the babies—to sit on. Holes were cut out and porcelain chamber pots were underneath. The toddlers wore “split pants” so that clothes needn’t be taken off, just pulled aside when necessary. There was a coal stove in middle of the room, which seemed to be the only heat source.

  We continued to follow the orphanage director.

  “The baby room,” she said, pushing through the double doors to an enormous open space of concrete walls and floors. Two rows of at least a dozen cribs each stood in formation. In each crib, four babies lay on their backs, heavily bundled in quilted bunting, with their arms haloing their heads as if signaling surrender. An additional quilt was placed over each set of babies, with a thin elastic bungee cord holding it in place. I looked up to see what the babies saw. Just a plain ceiling full of meandering cracks and splotches of water stains, a crude sketch of paths leading nowhere. I looked around to see what else the babies saw. No pastels, no nursery-rhyme decorations, no farm-animal mobiles. Nothing to reach for. Nothing to want.

  “Brand new,” the director said, pointing to the tiniest baby I’d ever seen. Maybe she was four pounds. But her furious cry was that of a giant, her little face purplish-red, and her fists cutting through the air like a meteor shower.

  “A newborn!” one of the other women said.

  “This morning she come,” the director said.

  In the time that we’d showered, fed Sam congee with pork and a warm bottle of formula, eaten breakfast ourselves, and bumped along on our bus ride, a baby had been born. Born. Abandoned. Found. Appropriated. All in a matter of hours. It was not lost on me that Sam had had that same exact day only a year earlier.

  “She wants to be picked up,” I said, knowing that I’d overstepped my boundaries. Max had told us to nod politely at just about everything. Compliment everything. Criticize nothing. But I didn’t care. This baby needed to be held on her first day of life. “May I?” I asked.

  “No, no,” the orphanage director said with a wide smile. “She will just want more hold.” As if granting a newborn comfort would be the first step toward a spoiled existence. And then she walked away, indicating for us to follow, leaving a day-old baby crying, and many others, months older, to soothe and entertain themselves, day after day.

  As we turned the corner, the director pointed out a large room with a window facing the hallway. “Hard to place children,” she said. There were a handful of older children sitting on a bench, staring aimlessly. A few others were wild, pressing their faces against the glass, knocking to get our attention. Some were clearly mentally challenged. One was plagued with a pigment problem that left his brown skin splotched with white patches. A few others had cleft lips. One was missing an arm. And then there was a perfectly beautiful toddler, maybe three years old.

  “Oh God,” I said. I looked up at Tim, who seemed to be holding tighter to Sam than he’d been a minute ago. His face was bright red and his eyes had welled up and all he could do was nod. For the minute that we stood there, my eyes remained fixed on the little toddler girl. It was hard enough to swallow the fact that most of the children in that room would never have parents, but why on earth was this little girl hard to place? Was she the one-hundredth-and-first baby out of one hundred adoptive families? Was being adopted just a game of symbols and chance, like baby mahjong? Was a girl’s fate as random as a slip of paper in a fortune cookie? For whatever reason, would that poor baby grow up in an orphanage or be sold to a labor camp, or worse, when she—as easily as Sam—could have been placed with a loving family in the States? I reached up and rubbed Sam’s back, wanting her to know that we knew what a miracle it was that she was in our arms. A now familiar pang of guilt stabbed at me, thinking of all the time, money, and insistence I had put into having a baby of my own, when there were thousan
ds to be had right here.

  The orphanage people had prepared a nice lunch for us. Tim bravely tried marinated duck tongue, sweet-and-sour chicken feet, and salted bird gizzard. The rest of us gravitated toward a tasty pork and rice dish and chicken-and-corn soup.

  “How often do the babies get out of their cribs?” I asked in my sweetest voice, hoping to sound perfectly innocuous.

  “One time per day,” she answered. “They eat in their cribs and play in their cribs, but their nanny takes them out one time per day.”

  I looked down at Sam, who seemed, for once, to be happy in my arms, and spooned a scoop of soft egg into her mouth. I put my face to her ear and whispered, “Take your time, baby. I’m not going anywhere.”

  Afterward, we took pictures of the buildings, the babies who had yet to be adopted and the poor ones who would languish inside for years, and the road leading up to the orphanage where so many of the newborns earned their first official document—a certificate of abandonment.

  Hours later, we were back at the Holiday Inn. Sam had fallen asleep as we were walking up to the room. Tim and I—exhausted and dizzy from the bus fumes—took the opportunity to lie down ourselves, to sleep for a few minutes. When we woke two hours later, it was ten o’clock at night, the room was dark, and Sam was wide-eyed, sitting up, and busily playing with her toes—a part of her body that was usually covered up in the orphanage.

  We fed Sam, ate some dinner, and watched some television. It was becoming clear that allowing Sam to sleep so late in the day was going to make it nearly impossible to get her down for bedtime. We walked her through the hotel and at eleven thirty, when Sam was still awake and showing no signs of sleepiness, I joined some fellow parents in the hotel hallway, a group of weary moms and dads who had congregated while they tried to get their babies to sleep. I was happy to see Amy swaying against the wall with Maria in her arms. By nearly one o’clock, Amy and I were the only two left. The other parents either had succeeded in lulling their babies to sleep or had moved their efforts into their rooms. Sam was getting close to nodding off, I could tell by her writhing, mad-as-hell, last attempt to get me to cry uncle. Sleep tended to follow this last hurrah. While I jiggled Sam, Amy bounced Maria.

  My new friend awed me in the same way Claire did, with her coolness and ease with motherhood. The night before, we had stood in the hallway rocking our babies while Amy threw a ball to her four-year-old, Angela, who was happy as can be to play fetch. I was managing with Sam, but Amy was a natural, the way she measured out the Enfamil one-handed, unscrewed and poured boiling water from the thermos, and punched the nipple through the ring like it was nothing.

  After midnight, I was feeling a little punchy and was tired of talking about diapers and rashes and teething and toileting.

  “I love your hair,” I said, commenting on Amy’s short blonde cut. It was spiky and tufty and made you want to give it a scruffy, Dennis the Menace rub. “I wish I could wear my hair short,” I said, pulling at my tangle of curls.

  “You can!” Amy said, shaking her head back and forth. “But first you’ll need to take six months of chemo.”

  “Oh my God!” I said. “I’m such a jerk. I’m so sorry, Amy.”

  “Oh, please,” she said. “I’m through with it now.”

  “Are you better?” I asked, not knowing what to say.

  “The doctors say I’m clean,” she said out of the side of her mouth. “But believe me, once you’ve had cancer, you’re never completely better.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “This just happened. My last treatment was just six weeks ago. This hair you love is brand new! I didn’t even know if I’d be able to make the trip. Tommy was prepared to come alone.”

  “What kind?” I asked, because it was late and Amy didn’t seem to mind.

  “Breast,” she nodded. “Of course. It’s as dominant in my family as brown eyes.”

  Family history. Claire and I were at an increased risk because of Mom’s ovarian cancer, a silent killer that rarely announces itself until it’s hovering over you with a gun at your head.

  Amy proceeded to tell me how she’d found the lump while in the shower soaping up. How she had just known that it was cancer because her sister had had the same experience.

  “What did the adoption agency say when you told them?” I asked. “Did they care?”

  “Oh, I’m sure they would care plenty,” she said. “But there was no way I was going to say a word. They don’t know.”

  “Why? You think they wouldn’t have let you come back for another baby?”

  “I have no idea what they would have done. All I know is that I couldn’t take the risk. I needed to get a sister for Angela. Especially after having cancer. If something were to happen to me, God forbid, she would need a sister. It was now or never.”

  I knew what she meant. God, did I know what she meant. I wanted to tell her that my mom died of cancer and my sister nearly saved my life, but I didn’t want to depress her with talk of dying. It was hard not to tell her that her instincts were right, that losing a mother nearly killed me, but having a sister saved me.

  “How do you keep such…” I searched for the right word. “Perspective,” I said. “You seem so together, so unfazed.”

  “This is my new reality,” she said simply, shrugging. “You adjust to reality very quickly, I’ve found. I’m here now. And while I’m on this earth, my job is to take care of my girls, plain and simple.”

  While I was imagining her two little girls growing up without their mother, my mind drifted to Claire, how on the morning of Mom’s funeral she brushed my hair back into a ponytail and blotted my cheeks with a cold washcloth. Larry sat across the hallway, sitting on the edge of the bed, his face in his hands. “She loved you so much,” Claire had said to me back then, letting me off the hook for months and months of my crappy behavior. “And she knew that you loved her, too.”

  “Looks like you did it,” Amy said, pointing to Sam, who had grown limp with sleep, slouched in the crook of my arm.

  Chapter Fifteen

  On our tenth day with Sam as our daughter, she woke in the night with a deep, wet cough that sputtered and spat, like coffee pushing up into a percolator. Her face was beet red and tears coursed down her cheeks. Her hands and feet were as hot as coals. I lifted her, propped her high over my shoulder, and pounded on her back, where it seemed I could almost feel the crackling of wet lungs.

  “Let’s call Max,” Tim said.

  “Should we?” I asked. “Or do you think we should call Amy? She might know what to do.”

  Amy rushed over and listened to Sam. “I’d get her to the hospital,” she said. “That doesn’t sound too good. Could be pneumonia.”

  “Okay,” we said, walking in circles in our panic.

  “Bring your own medicines,” Amy said. “Bring your antibiotics, your baby Tylenol, everything you have. Just in case.”

  Claire and her pediatrician had helped me compile such a first aid kit. Tonight I was grateful for it.

  So, in the black of the night, Max ushered us into a taxicab and down the wet slabs of asphalt to an all-night hospital. It was down a road that looked more like an alley, bookended by a video rental shop and a grocery store. While I knew that the hospital wouldn’t be modern and well lit like in the States, I hadn’t considered that it would look like this. I almost wondered whether we were better off back at the hotel.

  “Tim?” I asked nervously.

  “It’ll be okay,” he said, helping Sam and me out of the taxi. Max trailblazed ahead of us. He talked to the receptionist, slipped her some Chinese money, was given a slip of paper with a symbol on it. Maybe it was a number, like waiting your turn at the deli counter. The waiting room was packed. The row of plastic chairs were filled. Mothers paced with their screaming, coughing, wailing babies. Grandmothers shot us disapproving glares: Sam wasn’t bundled; in these women’s minds, I was neglecting my new baby.

  Max assured us that they would get to he
r as soon as possible.

  I leaned against the wall, swaying back and forth with Sam pulled tightly into my chest. I nuzzled my nose into her shiny buzz cut and breathed in the faint smell of the apple shampoo we’d washed her hair with the night before. She melted into me, dozing off and then waking with a start when a bout of coughing overtook her. As I stared at the receptionist, willing her to call our name, I had the discordant feeling that time was standing still and whizzing by at the same time. Or maybe it was more the feeling of déjà vu—though, clearly, we had never been in this situation before. All those months leading up to the adoption, I had sat in Sam’s empty room, imagining the weight of her in my lap, her breath on my neck, her tender arms wrapped around me. And now, here she was, clinging to me in the way—the singular way—that I had been waiting for a child to cling to me all these years. She clung to me as if I were the only person in the world who could make the hurt go away.

  Another wave of déjà vu. That’s when it occurred to me: even seven thousand miles from home, hospitals all smelled the same.

  I looked around the ER. All around the world there were emergencies. Always a kid with a raging ear infection, a toddler with a marble stuck up his nose, a grown man clutching his chest, a child testing the nerves of her brand-new parents.

  My mother was in and out of the hospital for nearly a year. The cancer ward, where she spent weeks of her life, was a quiet story of rooms on the third floor. Family members floated in and out like ghosts, tiptoeing through the halls with their flowers and books and balloons. Nurses and doctors slipped in and out, their heads down, scribbling on charts. The whole place just seemed dark and gray, and breathing the air was like trying to get a good breath with a plastic bag over your head. I remember how restless I felt back then, like I just wanted to open all of the curtains and windows, and play something upbeat on my Walkman, like Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” I imagined my mom and all of the other patients miraculously hopping to their feet and dancing in circles like it was all just a mistake that they were there.