Comfort

by Ann Hood

  BUT DO NOT be fooled. I am not fooled. Even though I am here, I know that the smallest thing—a song, a sound, a smell—can send me back there.

  I DO NOT live here. I only visit. Even as I stand here, charming, confident, smiling, I glimpse that other place. I stand always perched at the edge. I live in fear of the times when, without warning, I lift one foot, step from here, and go there, again.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Annabelle’s Laughter

  GRACE WAS BORN in the Year of the Rat. “Very clever,” our Chinese nanny, Ju Hua, told us. “Very special.” Those born in the Year of the Rat are sharp-witted and funny. They are charming too, and considered good luck. The Christmas Ju Hua was with our family, she had her husband in Beijing send Grace a gold charm of a small rat hanging on a chain. “Very special,” Ju Hua explained. “Special present for a special girl.”

  Four months later, Grace died. Ju Hua and her daughter had moved into their own apartment by then. When they heard the news, they came immediately. Ju Hua’s face was stricken, her crying uncontrollable. “That girl,” she said. “So special.”

  Grace was studying Chinese at school, and even after Ju Hua left us, Grace would visit her and practice Chinese. “Her pronunciation so good!” Ju Hua would tell me when I picked Grace up. They had cooked together, fried rice and dumplings and the pork dish Grace liked so much. Smelling of garlic and sesame, Grace would wave goodbye to Ju Hua as we drove away. Then she would sing me a Chinese song, or count to twenty in Chinese.

  That April day when Grace got sick and I rushed her to the emergency room, as they whisked her to the ICU, the doctor ordered me to help keep the oxygen mask on her face. “Grace,” I said, trying to hide the fear that had gripped me, “count to ten and then you’ll be in a room where the doctor can make you better.”

  Squirming under the oxygen mask, Grace began to count: “Yee, uhr, sahn,” she said in perfect Chinese, “sah, woo, lyo…”

  When Ju Hua visited us after Grace died, she told us that her own mother had lost a child, a six-year-old boy. He got sick very suddenly, like Grace, and he died in her mother’s arms as she walked miles to the doctor. “My mother never forget this,” Ju Hua said. “But if he didn’t die, I would never be born.”

  There are so many cruel decisions parents have to make when their child dies. The funeral director requested a sheet for the coffin, and I sent the cozy flannel one, pale blue with happy snowmen, that had just been put away with the winter linens. They needed clothes to bury her in, and I carefully removed the tags from the new capri pants with the ruffled hem and the pink shirt Grace had picked out but never got a chance to wear. We could, we were told, place anything we wanted in her coffin, so Lorne and I gathered her favorite things, the things that comforted her: Biff, her favorite stuffed animal; Cow, the green blanket decorated with cows; her purple leopard lunch box; her glasses; notes from each of us; crayons and paints; and the gold rat on the chain that Ju Hua had sent for her from China.

  I CANNOT SAY for certain when the decision to have another child happened. I do remember sitting alone on a summer afternoon in the room we called the Puzzle Room, a room where Grace and Sam and I spent many afternoons listening to Nanci Griffith CDs and working on jigsaw puzzles, sitting there as the hot afternoon stretched endlessly and hopelessly before me, and thinking about how my arms ached to hold Grace and my entire body longed for the buzz of activity that used to surround me just a few short months earlier.

  That first summer after Grace died, Lorne and I held each other through the seemingly endless nights and cried. But when morning came, I made myself get up, get dressed, and be the mother Sam had always had. I remembered when my own brother died and I felt I lost my mother as well. For the hours when Sam wasn’t at camp or playing at a friend’s we went on picnics or to the beach together. He held my hand extra hard during that time. Always theatrical, I watched him emerge as a clown, making me laugh even when I thought it was impossible, practicing his magic tricks on me, and crooning Broadway show tunes as we drove. When I did cry, he held me in his arms and cried with me, whispering, “I know, I know, I know.”

  It was that same summer that my husband and I camped out together on a beach in Maine and he said, “I have the craziest idea.” “So do I,” I told him. That was when I put words to it. “Let’s have another baby,” I said. And he said yes. Then we cried. Not a baby to replace Grace. Losing her had made it clear that she was, indeed, irreplaceable. But a baby to bring us joy again. To fill the long, sad hours when Lorne was at work and Sam was at school and I was left alone with my grief.

  A light from a lighthouse kept swinging past us, illuminating everything.

  FIRST, MY HUSBAND had to have his vasectomy reversed. Then, I had to have my hormone levels checked. I was forty-four years old, and I did not expect good news. But the doctor who everyone told us could help make it happen said that although I might need a little hormonal help, I could indeed get pregnant. When we told Sam what we were trying to do, he whooped with joy and gave me a fierce hug. Even at his age, he understood that we were trying to feel hope again.

  Once a month, my husband and I drove to New York City to the doctor’s Park Avenue office where Lorne masturbated into a cup and I was then inseminated with his sperm. Each time, the doctor was optimistic. Lorne’s sperm were great—good swimmers and plentiful. I ovulated on schedule and had good mucous. We’d had babies before. We could do it again.

  But after four months without a pregnancy, the doctor added Clomid to the protocol. I went for an intravaginal sonogram, my follicles were counted, and then we went to New York. Four eggs. Six. But no baby.

  By March, I was having tests to see if something was going on. In June I had surgery to remove a benign polyp. By fall Lorne was injecting me with Pergonal at almost two thousand dollars a month, and it was producing fewer follicles than the Clomid, and I wasn’t getting pregnant. Everyone has read about or knows someone who has gone through fertility treatments. It is an emotional nightmare, fueled by false hope and the promise of a treatment that will work. Add grief to that and the cycle gets even worse. By this time, I knew that bringing a baby into our household would help all of us. It would help ease the burden of our grief on Sam, who was only ten years old and read our emotions each morning like barometers. It would bring back the noise and laughter our house had lost. It would fill my empty hours. Babies make you do things for them. They get you up and they get you moving. A baby’s smile, I knew, could change everything. But having a baby was beginning to seem unlikely.

  One day, a friend told me that she knew how to get a baby in Russia, fast. It involved spending time in Finland. It would cost around forty thousand dollars, before bribes. The baby was a girl. She had red hair.

  Another friend stopped by and told me that she could get children from Hungary. Not babies, but two-or three-year-olds. She could even get twins. Or siblings. It would cost sixty thousand dollars, plus donations to various people who would help along the way.

  Some people urged me to give up the idea altogether. I heard stories of women who had a child after losing one and forced that new child into the roles of the dead one. I heard of mothers dressing their new baby in their dead child’s clothes, making them swim or dance or whatever the other had done. It isn’t fair, I was told. Fairness was not something I believed in very much then. If things were fair, a healthy, intelligent five-year-old girl wouldn’t die. If things were fair, a family who helped others, who lived a good life together, who loved each other, wouldn’t be torn apart like this.

  I had spent almost twenty-five thousand dollars and I was out of expendable income. I realized that in this time that had passed and with the money I had spent, we could already have a red-haired baby from Russia, or three-year-old Hungarian twins. Lorne and I decided to stop the fertility treatments and focus on adoption instead. What I knew as soon as we made that decision was that in a year we would have a baby. By this time, grief had settled into our routine. We cried les
s, but the pain and Grace’s absence loomed as large as ever. I could go out with friends and laugh at their jokes and foibles. I could sleep through the night most nights. But it was as if grief floated around us constantly, like Pigpen’s cloud of dirt in the Peanuts cartoon.

  Our talk turned to adoption. Again, Sam agreed readily. “Who cares how we get a baby,” he said. “Let’s just get one.” Still, there were a few nights when, crying, he said what we all knew: “This baby won’t be Grace. No one will.” We talked about the idea of subsequent children, not replacement children, how this little person would be her own wonderful self and Grace would always be special, irreplaceable.

  Once we began researching our possibilities, something settled in me. Somehow, this felt like the absolute right path for us. After talking to friends, and friends of friends, about their experiences adopting, we decided to adopt a baby girl from China. It is hard to explain how, in the midst of such overwhelming loss, I somehow knew that finally there was hope waiting for us again. Even knowing this was restorative after feeling so hopeless for so long.

  FOR THE NEXT few months, I had coffee with women who had battled Central American governments, rescued children languishing in Russian and Romanian orphanages, lied, borrowed money, corrected cleft palates and crossed eyes and weak hearts, lost babies they had held, named babies they never got to see, traveled thousands of miles more than once, all in pursuit of a baby.

  “I don’t know if I have the emotional stamina for this,” I told Lorne after hearing my friend’s story about three failed adoptions in Guatemala and over a hundred thousand dollars spent. She did, finally, have her daughter. But still.

  “China,” Lorne said. “Everyone I talk to who adopted from China, it went like clockwork.”

  One afternoon I watched a mother at Sam’s school pick up her daughter whom she had adopted from China. I sat in my car and watched that little girl leap into her mother’s arms and I drove home and e-mailed that woman. As it turned out, she lived two blocks away from us. “Come over for coffee,” she said, “and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  Walking home from her house, Lorne squeezed my hand. “Let’s start,” he said.

  Within a week we were sitting in a crowded room in an adoption agency office in Boston, signing papers, collecting information, beginning the journey that would lead us to China and a baby girl.

  I spent the month of April 2004 filling out paperwork for the adoption. It was exactly two years since Grace had died. This process—collecting legal documents and getting fingerprinted and asking friends for recommendations—was the calmest, and most focused thing I had done in two years. I had a purpose, and I moved toward it with a doggedness I had forgotten I possessed.

  What I didn’t know was that while I filled out papers in triplicate and made appointments and arranged for a home study, a woman in Hunan, China, was giving birth to a baby girl she could not keep. Over a hundred thousand baby girls are abandoned every year in China. Some place the number at even higher than that. In Hunan, as in other provinces, infanticide is not uncommon. Some women give birth with a bucket of water by their beds, and if the baby is a girl, she is drowned. Other women walk for miles from their village to have their baby somewhere no one knows them. Baby girls are left on footbridges and in parks, at police station doors and orphanage entrances. They are left where their mothers know they will be found. It is illegal to abandon a baby in China, so they are left with no notes or pertinent information. In Hunan, a family who has a girl is allowed to have a second child. But that second child has to be a boy. Therefore, most of the abandoned baby girls in Hunan are second or even third daughters.

  THE CALL WE waited almost a year for came on a rainy January morning. I was in Boston, comforting my lovesick cousin, when my cell phone started to ring. I ignored it. It rang some more. After a few rounds of this, I gave up and answered.

  “Hon,” my husband Lorne said, “Stephanie from the adoption agency is on the phone and she has news for us. I’m going to patch her in.”

  For the first time in almost three years, something like joy was creeping at the edges of my heart. I started to cry.

  “I’m looking at a picture of your daughter,” Stephanie said, and I cried harder. “She’s adorable. And she looks really healthy.”

  By now, I was outright sobbing.

  “She’s nine months old,” Stephanie said, and Lorne and I both managed to express delight and surprise; we had thought we might get an older baby.

  And then Stephanie said: “Her birthday is April 18.”

  One of us gasped. I’m not sure which one. I think I said, “Oh no.”

  “Is there a problem?” Stephanie asked us.

  I couldn’t speak, but Lorne was able to tell her that, no, there was no problem. Everything was just fine, he said.

  We made arrangements to go to the office and sign papers that very afternoon. Outside, cold rain pelted the windows.

  “That birthday,” I said when Stephanie was off the line.

  “I know,” Lorne said.

  We were still both crying. But we made plans for Lorne to pick up our eleven-year-old son Sam at school and for us to meet at the adoption agency. Then I hung up the phone and turned to my cousin. “We’ve got our baby.”

  Her Chinese name was Lou Fu Jing: Lou was the last name given to all the babies in her orphanage, which was in the city of Loudi; Fu was the name given to all the babies in her orphanage because it meant luck, and it was given to counter their bad luck; Jing was the name the orphanage gave her—bright. She lights up a room, an orphanage worker wrote on her referral papers.

  Lorne and I had enlisted the opinions of both Sam and Lorne’s fifteen-year-old daughter Ariane in the selection of the baby’s name. I was leaning toward Tallulah and Lorne liked Lily. Somehow we had come up with a compromise of Mamie when Sam asked why we couldn’t use Grace’s middle name, Annabelle. “It’s the prettiest name in the world,” he added. “I want to name my own daughter Annabelle.” Ariane agreed that it was her favorite name too. A name to honor Grace, a name we all loved. I looked at that face looking back at me and saw that she was, indeed, Annabelle.

  When that call came on that rainy January day, my broken heart cried for my wonderful lost daughter, and for the new daughter I would hold soon. The agency gave us a picture of a beautiful round-faced baby wearing a pale pink sweater. Our Annabelle.

  SEVEN WEEKS LATER, Lorne, Sam, and I flew to China to bring Annabelle home. Over the course of waiting, we had talked about this baby, how she was not ever meant to replace Grace. Rather, her arrival would herald a new beginning for our broken family. Since we had lost Grace, we had still found joy in each other: in Sam’s many acting roles in theaters in our area; in Lorne’s triumphant climb to the top of Mount Kiliminjaro, and in my own return to writing and teaching. But Annabelle, in that way that babies have, would open our hearts again.

  Annabelle had been found in a box at the orphanage door, early in the morning of September 6, 2004. They estimated her age as five months. Most of the babies found abandoned are under two weeks old. Many of them still have their umbilical cord stump. No one will ever know what led Annabelle’s mother to leave her there after five months. Perhaps she had not wanted to give her up at all. Perhaps a male relative waited until the baby was not nursing as much as a newborn does and then took her from her mother. Perhaps they tried to hide her in the system—a forbidden second or third daughter—and were caught. The penalties for this are huge, often involving many years’ salary or loss of medical care for the entire family. Perhaps her mother died. Perhaps her mother got pregnant again and hoped for a boy.

  We will never know what led to Annabelle being dressed in blue pants, white socks with blue flowers, a thin coat, and put into a cardboard box in a city that was most likely not her own. Around Loudi, there are dusty roads and fields of kale and sweet potatoes. Women walk with a bamboo pole across their backs, and one head of kale or a sweet potato in a basket at the ends.
They take this meager yield to a market miles away to sell. It is not green or beautiful there. No mountains or sea, no glittering architecture. It is not the China in glossy magazines. It is poor and rural and the women there sometimes abandon their baby girls rather than drown them.

  We will never know Annabelle’s story. We only know this: the date they gave her as her birthday—determined by the age they guessed her to be on September 6, 2004; chosen as an even number because even numbers are lucky—that birthday, is April 18, the same day that Grace died. Annabelle, like me, was born in the Year of the Monkey. Monkeys are intelligent and are known to have a great sense of humor. Monkeys and rats are said to be the best of friends.

  “THEY MARK THEM, you know,” someone told us before we left for China. “The mothers brand the babies they abandon. It’s a sign of love.”

  We had heard stories about babies being found with a yam, a sign of how valuable the baby was. We had heard of a note left that simply said: This is my baby. Take care of her. We had heard of one baby found with a bracelet around her wrist, and another with a river rock to indicate she was from a town near water. But this branding was something new.

  The group of ten families with which we traveled to China all got our babies at the same time, in a nondescript city building in Changsha. Changsha is the capital of Hunan Province, and it is four hours from Loudi and the orphanage. Soon, people were lifting pant legs or the cuffs of sleeves to show the small scars on their babies. “They mark them,” one mother said, spreading her new daughter’s fingers to reveal a scar in between the index and pointer.