The Exact Same Moon

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

“Wal-Mart!” I say. “Wal-Mart is open twenty-four hours! I’ll run to Wal-Mart, get a new suitcase.”

  “They’re not going to have good-quality suitcases at Wal-Mart,” Alex says, all defeated. “This is the top-of-the-line suitcase!”

  “Maybe the middle-of-the-line suitcases work better?” I venture.

  “I can’t believe this,” he says.

  “Right.”

  “Let’s go,” he says, grabbing his keys. “We need a suitcase.”

  Well, if he’s going to go to the store for a new suitcase, shouldn’t I stay here? I should stay here and clean up and organize. But this is how he deals with anxiety—he needs a lot of togetherness. And his times of anxiety, I have to say it’s not when I most want his togetherness. But I’ve learned. I’ve learned to GO WITH THE FLOW. I’ve learned to STAY CALM. I’ve learned to NOT GET WORKED UP WHEN I FEEL LIKE I AM A TRAIN WITH TOO MUCH STEAM BUILT UP AND ABOUT TO EXPLODE. Yes indeedy, GO WITH THE FLOW.

  We trudge out. Trudge out in the snow. We have to clean off the car from all the snow. It’s, wow. A lot of snow.

  It takes us a good ten minutes to drive as far as Daniel’s Run Road, which is technically just around the corner. The snow is surprisingly deep. When did all this snow fall? And why hasn’t the township plowed? We have to drive maybe fifteen miles an hour, it’s so hard to see, the snow is blowing in fits.

  “This is ridiculous,” Alex says.

  “It is,” I say.

  “At this rate it’s going to take us an hour to get to Wal-Mart,” he says.

  “And an hour back,” I say.

  “Forget it,” he says. He’s right. We turn around. It’s funny how neither of us is saying anything about the snow as it might pertain to our ride in the morning to the airport. No, we are just talking about how to use a broken suitcase. It still has wheels, just no handle. We’ll concoct something. When we get home, we concoct something. We concoct a theory that the only way we can take this suitcase, which neither of us can lift, is if we remove forty pounds of stuff. All my Ziploc bags that I sucked down to Ziploc bricks. I am too good at packing. See, you can be overprepared.

  We open the suitcase, reach in, pull out, pitch. We pitch out bricks of clothes. Pitch and pitch and pitch, reconfigure, pitch, pack, repack, zip. It goes on and on. I mean, on and on. It is three in the morning by the time we are finished. Our flight is at eight. They say to check in two hours early for a transatlantic flight, so that means we should be at the terminal by six. It takes an hour to get there. We have to leave at five.

  We have to hurry up and sleep with our remaining two hours.

  We can’t sleep.

  We lie here with our eyes wide open, holding hands, wondering what it is that just happened and what-all is about to happen. Is this, I wonder, what it feels like to begin giving birth, to lie waiting for that first contraction that signals the end of the waiting and the end of the planning and the beginning of being an actual mom?

  Outside our window, where the moon is still hidden, I can see the glow of the porch light. And I can see that the snow is now falling in sheets. And it’s funny the way the word blizzard has not even once occurred to me.

  Huge transitions in your life never go the way you think they will. Huge transitions are like tunnels you walk through in which, for a time, you are not quite you and your mind is not quite yours and your heart is definitely experiencing some serious reformatting. You can never predict any of this, and while you are in it, you can’t begin to understand it. I am in it. I am stuck in it. I am in … Chicago? Well, look at that, we made it as far as Chicago. We got on one of the very few planes to leave Pittsburgh and one of the very few planes to actually land in Chicago during this blizzard. Yeah, blizzard. Everyone you meet is using the word: blizzard.

  We are in Chicago, but we aren’t going to Beijing today. No more planes leaving Chicago. Hello? This is a blizzard. This is a blizzard in Chicago. And all the nearby hotels are filled with other stranded passengers. So we find a spot, somewhere between Gates 71 and 72. We find a spot on the floor to curl up. To stretch out. To curl, stretch, curl.

  That would be: night number two of no sleep.

  And so now it is tomorrow. Or maybe yesterday. When you travel over the international date line, there is no telling. We are just now coming out of the vacuum-packed tube that flung us for fourteen hours through the air and over the sea to this, the other side of the world.

  So, then. Here we are. Does this mean it’s time to sleep? We have not slept for days.

  Here, anyway, is how it was supposed to go: We were supposed to have a day to sleep. The adoption agency schedules a day of rest in Beijing. We were supposed to have a whole day. Then after that we were to fly to Nanjing and meet Anna.

  But no. We are here in Beijing a full day behind schedule. The blizzard that now seems light-years away has stolen our day of rest.

  This is becoming an increasingly hideous reality. If we don’t soon get sleep, we may, in fact, start screaming and spitting and foaming at the mouth.

  In the Beijing airport we are met by a representative from our agency, a very sympathetic woman who nonetheless whisks us ruthlessly onto a plane to Nanjing. In Nanjing we are greeted by another guide, Sophie, who will be in charge of us the rest of the time, poor woman; she kindly makes no mention of the foam coming out of our mouths. She is in charge of us and five other families traveling to get their babies, five other American families who apparently have come from states well west of that blizzard. They had their day of rest in Beijing; they are looking so rested, I feel the urge to put my head in their laps and cry. I am delirious. Or I might be. China, from the window of the van we are now riding in, is not real. It is a sunny, tiny place on the other end of a tunnel. Barely visible from behind my blurred eyes. It is, I think, Planet Bicycle. Swarms of bicycles weave in and out of the congested traffic with a graceful assurance that defies logic and good sense and everything that ever flashed through your mind the first time you decided to wear a bicycle helmet. Some bicycles carry more than one passenger; some appear to carry entire families. Some balance crates stacked six high, all of them brimming with fruit. The man pedaling beside our van is dressed in a business suit, and strapped to his handlebars is what appears to be a seventeen-inch television set.

  I elbow Alex to show him the man with the TV. Alex has his head tilted back, his mouth hanging open like melted cheese. His head is jiggling. I think he may have passed out.

  “Gu Yu Qian?” says Sophie, from the front of the van. “Whose baby is Gu Yu Qian?”

  Alex pops into consciousness. “Our baby!” he says to me. “Isn’t that our baby?”

  “PRETTY LIKE JADE?” I shout.

  Sophie smiles. “Pretty Like Jade,” she says. “She is yours?”

  “She is ours!” I say.

  Sophie is holding a cell phone. Um. Anna is on the phone?

  “I just got word she is waiting for you in the hotel lobby,” Sophie tells us. “She is there right now.”

  Oh.

  There right now.

  Right up the road.

  Oh?

  BUT WE HAVEN’T SLEPT IN FOUR HUNDRED DAYS AND WE ARE FOAMING AT THE MOUTH.

  Doesn’t she realize this? Doesn’t anyone realize this?

  And, um, couldn’t we change our clothes or something first? At least brush our teeth with one of our twelve toothbrushes?

  “Camera!” Alex says to me. “Film in camera? Battery?” He has stopped speaking in complete sentences, having discovered several time zones ago that verbs are a waste of energy.

  The van stops. We are … at the hotel? Yes, we are told, this is the hotel. There are big banners outside, and golden dragons climbing a pillar as if slithering toward Heaven. Everyone is jumping out of the van, jumping out as if, ho-hum, here we go into a hotel, jumping out as if this were not the most important hotel anyone in the history of mankind ever was about to enter. Anna is in that hotel. Anna is in that hotel even as we speak, waiting. Waiting for he
r foamy-mouth parents to appear.

  Alex and I lag behind. We are trying to load our cameras. Plus, I am somewhat frozen with the knowledge that we are about to do it, we are about to enter the most important hotel anyone in the history of mankind ever entered.

  We enter the hotel.

  We don’t see anybody.

  It’s a huge lobby, shiny and gleaming. Glorious cascading water spits out of fountains beneath enormous ficus trees.

  There are big fish tanks. Fish tanks? There is a sign pointing the way to the bowling alley on the second floor. A bowling alley?

  “I’m pretty sure I saw Sophie and the group go right,” I say to Alex. He’s got the video camera rolling. He wants all this on tape.

  “They must be just around this corner,” I’m saying to Alex, as I go right, wander through the lobby, and he follows like an Action News Cameraman who still believes in truth.

  What a huge lobby. And what huge legs I have. My legs are heavy with exhaustion. I do not feel entirely human. I may, in fact, have turned into an ape.

  “They must be just around this next corner,” I’m saying to Alex. We keep going around corners. No Sophie. No group. Soon we are entering a coatroom. Lots of hangers everywhere. No Sophie. No group. Just a woman with a mop, mopping the coatroom. She is looking at Alex, who has the video camera rolling.

  “Um—cut,” I say to him.

  “Oh,” he says to me. “Sorry,” he says to her.

  “We took a wrong turn?” I say to her.

  She stares at us, her mop still going back and forth, sloshing.

  We leave the coatroom.

  We are lost. We are apes. We are lost apes in the land before time. We may soon start grunting.

  Just then Sophie appears. She grabs my arm. “This way! This way!” she is saying, pulling me. (The group had gone left.) Soon she is running. We run behind her. Alex is rolling again.

  “Your baby!” Sophie is saying. “Your baby!”

  I see a baby. I see a baby in the arms of a Chinese woman. The woman has on a black leather coat with a brown fur collar. She has wide cheekbones. And yes, she is holding a baby.

  Anna.

  Pretty Like Jade.

  Oh my God.

  I can’t hear anything. I can’t feel my feet or my legs or my toes. I am an ape. I’m an ape just barely smart enough to have made it through a maze.

  Anna.

  She’s in a big orange snowsuit with stripes and little cats all over it. She has the same intense eyes she had in the picture, the same gigantic cheeks, and her hair has grown full and rich.

  Oh, Anna.

  I approach her. I am actually tiptoeing. I don’t want to … charge her. I don’t want to scare her.

  I am a giant, awkward, exhausted ape. I am her mother. She is looking at me. It is not a look of “Well, hi, Mom!” No, it is not. It is more a look of “What the heck?” It is a look of “Can I help you?”

  Alex is rolling. I wish he would turn the camera off. I wish he would get over here. But behind the lens seems to be his safe zone, and Anna is in hers, and it seems that it is up to me now to make the introductions, to make this family … happen.

  “Hi, baby,” I say, finally. And I reach out with my index finger and touch her hand.

  She has no reaction.

  The woman jiggles her.

  Nothing.

  I look at Alex. “She’s afraid,” I say to him, to the camera, to all the folks back home, to Anna at age twelve seeing this video. “Give her a minute.”

  “Hi, baby,” I say again. And again. I am not sure what else to say. “Um. I usually look a lot better than this,” I say. “You know, I haven’t slept … And my hair is, well, I have a lot better hair days than this. But your hair, well, honey, wow!”

  Oh my God. I’m doing hair talk?

  “A toy!” says Mary, one of our fellow travelers. She and the others have formed a circle around me and Anna and the fur-collar woman and Alex with the video camera. She and the others are still waiting for their babies to arrive. “Give her a toy!” Mary urges.

  A toy! Of course, a toy! The toys I brought, which, yes, were most certainly on my packing list, the toys are all in Ziploc bags deep in the suitcase.

  Um.

  Mary passes me a pink rattle. I offer it to Anna. She takes it into her hand and studies it quietly. She’s so … gentle. She’s so peaceful. She’s a lamb on George’s hill, distant and unknown.

  The fur-collar woman lifts Anna higher, holds her out to me.

  I look at the woman. I look back at Alex. Right. I know what to do. Of course I do. Here goes. This is what a mother does. I open my arms, and she falls in.

  Oh, Anna. Her body is soft, light, calm as the breeze that holds all quiet answers.

  Oh, Anna, so this is it. So this is what it feels like to hug the wind.

  “She’s so … calm …,” I’m saying to Alex, to the camera, to all the folks back home, to Anna at age sixteen or eighteen or twenty-one. “She’s so calm she’s calming me down.” Maybe that was the whole idea anyway. Or half of it.

  “Come meet your daughter,” I say to Alex. “Come hold your baby girl.”

  He takes the camera away from his face. He is white as paste. I’m handing her to him. “Here you go,” I say. “Here’s your baby girl.”

  He opens his arms, and she eases right in. His eyes are wet and full. His chin is quivering.

  She glares at him. She grabs his nose. She strokes his chin stubble. They are just barely getting acquainted—but then Sophie interrupts.

  “Please,” she says. “We must move upstairs.”

  Move? I don’t want to move, ever.

  “We must hurry,” Sophie says. There are others with her. A man and two women with pleading eyes.

  We follow blindly. We are led up to our hotel room. The man and the women chatter excitedly. They give us pens. They ask us to sign things. We sign blindly. Alex does not let go of Anna. Then they lead us outside. We follow blindly. What-ever. Nothing matters now that we have Anna. We take turns carrying her. We complain that our turns don’t last long enough. They whisk us to a notary or some such place, then to a store for a photo to be taken, then to another notary or some such place, it is one blur beyond the blur I’m already in, circles and more circles, deep into a whole new tunnel, but now with Anna in my arms, a person to protect and guide through.

  Night falls. My exhaustion now beyond exhaustion, something so very far beyond. Back in our hotel room at last, I put Anna into the crib beside our bed, a blue metal crib with crisp white sheets lovingly pressed.

  I turn to find that Alex has flopped on top of the bed and is already asleep—still in his clothes. I take his shoes off. I pull at his big toe. Does he really want to sleep in his clothes? I pull his toe again. Nothing. I kiss his cheek and put a blanket over him.

  I climb into bed. My head falls onto the pillow like an anchor dropping into a most willing sea.

  The weight of the world, off for now. Off.

  Anna is watching me. Her head is just inches away from mine. It’s just the two of us now, for the first time just us. Her cheeks are flushed, her hair slightly moist from her hat. I want to tell her about hat hair. I want to tell her that her father gets hat hair, too. But I suppose there will be time for that. Instead, I tell her she smells like rain. Summer rain on the porch at Sweetwater Farm.

  “Well, good night, baby,” I say. “We’ve earned a good sleep.” I turn off the light and darkness comes, and she doesn’t cry.

  I close my eyes.

  In a moment I peek, just to make sure it’s all true.

  It is. She is. She has closed her eyes.

  In a moment she peeks, catching me peeking. Or I’ve caught her.

  We do this again. And again, back and forth. In the darkness we are playing an eye game, we are doing a first-you-blink-then-I-blink dance.

  Eventually, I break the rhythm with a double blink. And this is when, for the first time, I see my daughter smile.


  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  They are taking us somewhere. They are taking us to the orphanage, Kunshan Welfare Institute, so we can see how Anna lived and so we can meet some of the people who cared for her.

  Everyone in the van is eerily quiet on this ride. We are down to three families now—our original group has splintered and splintered again, according to the regions where our babies are from and where each family is required to travel and complete paperwork with local officials. And so we are with Ken and Debbie, from Buffalo, New York, and their baby Emily, who, like Anna, is from Kunshan. And we’re with Mary and John, from Austin, Texas, and their baby Amy from the orphanage in Suzhou, just east of Kunshan. We’ve just spent a few days in Suzhou, a small city known for its gardens and silk. Sophie toured us through some of the gardens and took us to a silk factory where we watched four women in white hats take seventy cocoons from seventy worms and stretch them and stretch them and stretch them into one layer of silk, adding it to seventy such layers, and thus creating one heavenly quilt.

  And now we are back in our rickety white van. It smells of diesel fumes and doesn’t take bumps too well; with each of the road’s considerable wallops, it squeaks as if complaining of arthritis.

  Anna is on my lap, limp as a rag doll. We’re eating Cheerios. I give one to her, one to me, one to her, one to me. The Cheerios help counteract the diesel fume smell, which, if left unchecked, would make me carsick.

  “You sure you don’t want some?” I say to Alex, offering him a handful.

  “No thanks,” he says. He’s looking rested, finally. We’ve been here five days, and I think both of us are on China time now.

  “Then how about some of those pretzels I lovingly packed?”

  He shakes his head no.

  “You sure are not a car eater,” I say.

  “A car eater?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  He’s not a snacker, like Anna and I are. Nor does he go for nibble food, as Anna and I do. Well, you can see already how this family is dividing up. There are things Anna does that remind you of her mother and there are things she does that remind you of her father. We’ve been her parents for just five days, and already there are these things.