Of course we don’t. We were both raised to be good boys, to follow directions. This whole process has turned us back into children, taking away our sense of our own agency.
We eat. We pay. We drive back to the B&B.
We’re both nervous, although we try to hide it from each other. We want this to go well. We want, I realize, not to be disappointed or terrified when the boy meant to be our son looks into our eyes, or when we look into his.
MONDAY
After breakfast we go for a walk, trying to kill time until the hour appointed for our arrival, once O— has returned from nursery school. The sky is matte grey, the air close to freezing, and a northwest wind whipping off the sea makes it feel even colder.
We will have to keep coming back here so that O— can see his foster parents, and then, later, to visit his siblings and help him remember where he came from. While the countryside is beautiful, this village is not. Geographically and architecturally different though it is, it might just as easily stand in place of the small California towns where my parents grew up, from which they both escaped, or the dingy Oklahoma town where my grandmother was a girl, or the tiny farming community that my other grandmother fled to escape the Dust Bowl in the years of the Great Depression.
Perhaps, at some point in the future, O— will no longer want to return to this part of the world. And then he, and we, might be free of the past.
Like so many other consoling narratives, I recognize that this too is fantasy.
T— answers the door when I knock. He looks past me to the street, to Andrew, to our car. There’s the sound of thudding feet, and then all at once, like a jack-in-the-box, O— springs into the doorway.
At first, he doesn’t seem to know who we are.
Who’s that then? O—’s foster father asks him.
Two daddies, the boy says, grinning, puckish.
As he hugs us each in turn, I think, yes, this is right. The smell of floral fabric softener hits me again, as it did on our previous visit. I am eager for this to go well, for every moment in these first hours to be perfect.
Then joy comes rushing, watery, submerging most of the anxiety and frustration of the past months. Would it have felt the same if we had been able to do this six weeks ago? What if the ADM had said yes in September? What if we had not lived through two months of uncertainty? How might it all have been different?
Where’s my Romeo? K— calls out to O— as he runs to hug her.
The sound of that name is a blade that sinks deep in my chest. How could she call him Romeo? Has she read my story? Is it remotely possible?
I do not believe I might have written this child into existence, although the coincidence strains plausibility. What are the chances that O—’s nickname in the home of his foster parents should be the real name of the wild child character I invented a year earlier?
I try to set this to one side, not to make too much of it. Focus instead on what is before you, on K— hugging the little boy, wrapping him warmly in her arms. He has been loved, that is clear. He is loved. That is obvious, too.
Although the plan has been for us to be alone, there are other members of the family present, K— and T—’s adult daughter and her husband and their two toddlers. O—’s focus is as much with them as with us. The television is on, volume loud. This could have been my grandmother’s living room when I was a child, the television always playing, a baseball or football game or news filling the silence.
I suggest that I try to read O— a book we have brought him. We sit on the floor, Andrew next to me, and O— scrambles into my lap. I start to read, but after three pages O— loses interest. He’s up and playing with K—’s grandson.
Marla suggests we go for a walk, just us and T— and O—. Outside, on the front step, she apologizes about the presence of the other family members. That was not the plan, she says, not the way it was supposed to be.
Tell them to go away, I want to say. We need this to work on our terms. Too much has gone wrong already.
But even now, when it seems as though power might be shifting back in our direction, I swallow my words.
We head towards the centre of the village, O— holding our hands, walking between us as I imagined he might. Then he wants to get up on my shoulders, and we walk like that for a stretch, Andrew making me stop so he can take a picture.
You’re being a baby, T— says, you don’t get carried.
Let him be a baby, I want to say. Who has ever carried him like this? Why shouldn’t we carry him for as long as we can?
When O— gets down from my shoulders, he makes a dash ahead, running pell-mell towards an intersection. T— does not react.
Do we need to stop him? I ask.
He’ll stop, T— says.
In a village this small, where everyone knows him, where he seems to know his way to and from his foster parents’ house to any number of local landmarks, running away is not a serious matter.
But in London, I think, he cannot run away from us in London. In London, if he stepped off the kerb without looking, if he did not listen to our instructions, he could be dead in an instant.
We end up at a deserted playground. While T— stands watching, Andrew and I play with O—. Andrew is better at this than I am. I can chat and read to a child, but stepping into a world of pirates or dragons or warrior robots no longer comes as naturally as it once did. To perform like this requires a forgetting of the self that feels like a struggle.
As I watch Andrew playing with the boy, I feel myself turning into the person who polices limits, who worries about injury and transgression, while Andrew becomes the pirate or the astronaut or the dinosaur with such apparent ease that I begin to feel myself failing at this before we have even started. What if I can’t have fun? Or, what if I can’t have the kind of fun that this boy needs? I recall my mother telling me when I was a child how my father used to laugh, how much fun he was before I was born. What if I become the same? What if my own sense of fun, of being funny, evaporates the moment I become a parent? What would that mean for all of us?
A father and son arrive at the playground. The little boy is younger than O—, perhaps only two, three at most. O— runs over to the boy, takes him in his arms, and kisses him. The other boy goes rigid and looks as though he may burst into tears. We rush to apologize, cautioning O— that other people might not want to be kissed and hugged.
If he did this in our local London playground it would not go down well.
We take a different route back to the house, walking out of the village and around its perimeter through farmland and fields, with a view of the sea in the distance. Will O— miss the sea, I wonder?
T— is loosening up, telling stories about a bonfire that got out of control one year, a flood another year, all the cycles of rural seaside life. It’s like listening to my uncle, or other relatives I haven’t seen in years, slipping back into an older way of relating to people, one based on an exchange of stories rather than questions – a series of monologues instead of dialogues. One person tells a story for as long as it takes and then goes silent, waiting for the other person to reply with a different story, which may or may not speak to the first. Dialogue, when it actually happens, remains about the weather or food, about what is immediately to hand. It is focused on the tangible, the visible, the empirical.
O— starts asking us questions and we soon realize that he thinks he’s coming home with us today.
No, we say, only on Thursday. Today is Monday. Another three sleeps before we go.
And K— and T—?
No, K— and T— will stay here.
And my friends?
No, you’ll be going to a new school where you’ll make new friends.
His face crumples. His chin wrinkles. He starts to cry. We try to reassure him but all I can think is, if Marla sees this she’ll say that the Introductions need to last longer, and that is something I cannot bear. We have to keep things upbeat and make sure that he sees it all as a big adve
nture. The delays we have already experienced make the threat of any further delay unthinkable.
As we turn towards home, O— darts back in the opposite direction, running so fast I have to sprint to catch him and then he scrambles away from me, giggling and dashing into a thicket of trees. Testing us already, because we have disappointed him so many times, for so many months. Perhaps he needs to see whether we’re here to stay.
Eventually I catch him, pick him up, carry him back to where Andrew and T— are waiting, but he wriggles so wildly in my arms that I can’t hold him and he slips to the ground and darts away again. It takes almost an hour to get back to the house because he keeps running off (always away from the house), giggling, his eyes narrowing. I see the face of his mother superimposed on his, her features developing out of his own.
It is not an easy test to pass. At this first small hurdle I already find myself thinking, he is lovely when he is sweet, but what happens when the sweetness goes?
When we finally arrive back at the house, it is lunchtime. K— has made sandwiches.
I’ll feed you, she says, but you’ll not get whatever posh London food you’re used to.
Would it surprise her to know that my father grew up in acute poverty, often half-starving, moving between motel rooms and apartments above garages and short-term rentals before his family finally bought a house that was then lost to foreclosure, or that my mother survived a semi-itinerant childhood, living in seven states by the age of seven, or that her father had grown up in a sod house and migrated West, one of the numberless ‘Okies’, a man who might as well have been Tom Joad in the flesh? Would she still think us posh if our histories were more legible upon our faces or audible in our voices?
O— has been her child for more than three years. Imagine what it must feel like to see strangers arrive and take him away. Perhaps it is even more difficult when those people appear to be so different to herself or her family. It seems impossible to tell her that Andrew and I come from families not so different from her own, that my parents were the first in their families to go to university, that poverty and precarity are proximate to my and to Andrew’s life in ways that may not be apparent. But none of this can be said, not now, not least because I can find no way of expressing it that would not sound patronizing.
In his bedroom after lunch (what little he had eaten: a few bites of sandwich, more of some meringue éclairs), O— shows me his toys, gives me a tour, chatters at such speed that I struggle to follow the sense of his words. Whole sentences are unintelligible, some of them lapsing into what sounds like a local dialect or another language altogether.
Since we were last here in August, a teddy bear has appeared.
Who’s this? I ask.
O— punches the bear in the face. It’s horrible, he says.
Poor bear, I say, cuddling it. Why do you think it’s horrible?
He hits the bear again. It’s horrible.
He decides we should go back to find Andrew. On the way, out of nowhere, he suddenly turns to me and hisses, You’re horrible.
And then he punches me in the gut. He’s surprisingly strong.
That’s not very nice, I say. I don’t think you’re horrible.
He sticks out his tongue.
There are photos of his mother on her social media pages making exactly the same face. O— seems, in this moment, to be a duplicate of her.
I hope you took a good long look at your lovely home before you left, K— says.
Why’s that? I ask her, laughing nervously.
Because it won’t look like that for long with him in it. She nods at O—, who is sitting on the couch mesmerized by a chat show.
I laugh again, even more nervously, then suggest we try again to read a book.
Mostly interested in his catalogues, K— says. He’ll look at them for hours.
Catalogues?
Show your new daddies, she says. O— runs over to a crate full of toys in the corner of the living room from which he fishes a glossy toy catalogue.
He likes looking through that most of all.
O— starts flipping through the toy catalogue, one eye on the television. The catalogue is nothing but advertisements for cheap toys, colour-coded by gender. He flips faster through the pink pages.
Slow down, aren’t those interesting? I ask, trying to draw his attention away from the screen.
No, he says, firmly shaking his head. Those are for girls.
Dolls are not for boys. Anything cute or soft or cuddly is not for boys. Even a teddy bear is not for boys. Toys for boys are hard and shiny. Most have to do with fighting or speed or war or robots or the medieval past, which is also about war and fighting and speed and machines of a more primitive kind.
When it’s time for dinner he decides he wants soup. Tomato soup. Out of a tin. T— heats it up on the stove and we keep O— company while he eats in the kitchen, compelling us to blow on the soup to cool it.
We take it in turns. All day I have been conscious of the way he tries to be even-handed in his affection, equal in his requests to us. Andrew opens one yogurt, I open the other. Where has this sense of – what? empathy? – come from, and does the boy see it that way? Is it that conscious?
As the time comes for us to leave, he seems to trust that we will return. He transfers his affection back to T— for the evening. Healthy, I think, for how can he be certain that we will return? Do children his age have a sense of certainty? Do they understand what it means, or how uncertain certainty can suddenly become?
*
As we get into the car, I am knocked backwards by a quick and total fatigue.
How do you think that went? I ask Andrew.
I think it went well, he says. What about you?
There were moments when I wondered what we’re getting ourselves into, but on the whole, I guess it went well.
It occurs to me that I felt no sense of disgust today. I was not disgusted by the runny nose that needed wiping, or O—’s sudden need to urinate out on the walk, or by the sandwichy hands wiping bread and butter on my jeans, or the chocolatey hands wiping chocolate on my sweater.
And yet there are elements of behaviour, a tendency towards gruffness and roughhousing, which I had not anticipated. Is it too late to redirect these energies or refashion them into a playfulness less hard-edged and aggressive, even less boyish? I want to give him a world where he does not need to be hard, where he does not have to turn away from pink things and soft things, where he can hold the bear and cuddle it when sad or anxious, as I suppose he must have been in that moment, instead of hitting it in the face, or deciding that the bear was not enough and hitting me instead.
Over the years, I have only been a very intermittent diary keeper. I start off determined to write every day, even just a record of minor events, and laboriously record whatever feels like a ‘major’ event in more detail, but then inevitably abandon the habit. At my mother’s prompting, I start again. She says that when I was born she began writing about me every day, recording what I did and how she felt. I think this will be important, too, to look back on the days when we are getting to know O—. I sit down and most of what I write is full of excitement and surprise at the way he smells, how very differently he smells compared to Andrew or me. There is nothing bad about it, but the scent is present, distinct from the pervasive perfume of K—’s fabric softener. I write that I am surprised by my ability to incorporate O—’s scent into my sense of myself, and of Andrew and me as a unit. It is just another facet of the child, something to accept along with other invisible qualities.
TUESDAY
Today, we are going to the nursery school. It’s O—’s last day in attendance. There is a small room for younger children that adjoins a much larger one where the older children play, and where the whole nursery comes together for song time and snacks. Although strictly one of the older children, O— leads us to the smaller room which has a play kitchen with wooden food and plates and pots and pans and utensils. He cooks some
wooden eggs on the plastic stove and serves them to us on a plate. We mime eating, making sounds of pleasure and appreciation.
When we have finished, I suggest we could go in the other room and look at the books, but no, O— wants to stay here and play with a boy who is disabled, who cannot speak, who sits in a tiny wheelchair at a table, continuously monitored by one of the teaching assistants and helped to play with clay, although this ‘play’ is little more than smacking his palms on the table. The boy blinks, he looks happy, he makes indistinct noises.
O—, I can see, is content in the boy’s presence.
When we finally come together for song time in the large room, O— wants to sit at my feet. After turning on me yesterday and telling me I was horrible, he seems to be bonding more quickly to me than to Andrew, or perhaps this is only my desperately selfish misimpression.
One of the teachers leads the children through a repetitive song that allows one child to stand up and sing a brief solo and then choose another child to do so in the next verse and so on. The first children who sing solos know the words even if they cannot carry a tune, but when it comes to O—’s turn, he gets out only the first few words, so that the other children have to finish the solo for him.
Perhaps on another day, when his new parents were not there to help him say goodbye to his classmates, he would be able to sing the verse without error. Because the other children – some younger than he is – are able to do it, and because it is not a difficult song, this small failure, which I try not to blow out of proportion in my mind, settles in my heart as a piercing bright pain.
As parents arrive to collect their children and O— says goodbye to each of his friends, the head teacher, who was so reassuring back in August, takes us aside to speak privately.
He always wants to be in the room with the younger children, she says to us now, staring at the floor, as if there is more that she wishes to say. And then she does say other things. In London… she says, trailing off, as if ‘London’ signifies a space in which we might achieve a kind of clarity about the situation that we did not suspect we would need. The difference in the way she is now characterizing O— seems to come out of nowhere, but I understand that she is trying to help, to say what perhaps she could not say when we first met. Our anxieties begin to acquire a different sense of scale.
The Ginger Child Page 21