by Janet Dawson
“Leave it to Claire to reduce everything to business,” Annabel said. She pulled the cork from a bottle of Chardonnay and refilled the glasses.
“The business supports you, dear cousin,” Claire retorted, “in the manner to which you have become accustomed.”
“The manner in which I’ve always lived. Yes, I know.” Annabel leaned back in her chair. “I’m surprised Gretchen and Doug were able to adopt him so quickly. Claire saw him at the orphanage this spring, and he got here in time for the Fourth of July. I thought the paperwork took longer than that.”
Gretchen nestled the little boy in the crook of her left arm. “Doug has a friend from law school who works in the State Department. That helped with the visa. As for the paperwork on the other end, Claire’s friends in El Salvador smoothed the way.”
“Of course. Cristina’s husband is in the government and they give that orphanage lots of money, so everyone was eager to oblige.” Claire rubbed her fingers against her thumb. “When all else fails, there’s la mordida. The bite.”
“Bribery?” Lindsey asked.
“Let’s not be squeamish, ladies,” Claire said. “That’s the way business is done in Latin America, and most of the world. You get used to it. Come now, Lindsey. The academic world has its share of tit-for-tat. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. I’ll support your grant proposal if you’ll give me tenure.”
That hit home. Lindsey was in the middle of the tenure process herself, and it had caused her anxious moments during the past year. “Yes, academic politics can be fairly ruthless, even at a smaller school like Cal Poly.”
“Just think how bad they’d be if you’d gotten that job at UC Berkeley,” Claire said. “Anyway, what does it matter where he came from? He’s an orphan. He needed a home. Gretchen needed a baby. Now he’s got a home. Gretchen has a baby. Everyone’s happy.” Claire kissed the little boy on the forehead. He reached up and grabbed a handful of her blond hair. She laughed and pulled away.
Gretchen stroked the little boy’s cheek. “The woman at the orphanage told me their children’s parents get killed in the fighting, or kids are abandoned because their parents can’t take care of them. She said he’d been left at the orphanage in April, and she acted as though it didn’t really matter to her. She had so many children and she was glad to find a home for this little guy.”
“In any case, he’s lucky to be here.” Lindsey smiled at the toddler. “He’s very quiet. I don’t think he’s made a sound since I got here.”
“He’s really shy.” Gretchen sipped her wine. “This must be overwhelming, all these people, speaking a strange language. He must miss his birth mother. I think about his mother sometimes. Maybe she’s dead. Or she couldn’t take care of him and that’s why she left him at that orphanage. We saw so much poverty and strife down there.”
“Give him plenty of love,” Annabel said, “and he’ll be just fine.”
“I intend to. I’ve saved up lots of love for him.” Nathaniel Douglas Segal took his thumb from his mouth and reached for Gretchen’s wineglass. “No, Nat love. Mommy drinks wine. You have apple juice. Here’s your cup.” Gretchen set the glass on the table and picked up a plastic child’s cup with handles on either side. The little boy grasped the handles and drank, several drops of pale gold juice dribbling from the corners of his mouth. Gretchen pulled a crumpled paper napkin from her pocket and gently wiped his face.
Now that Nat’s thumb was out of his mouth, Lindsey saw a crescent-shaped mark on the little boy’s chin. “He has a scar. I hadn’t noticed that before.”
Gretchen nodded. “He had a bandage on it when we first saw him at the orphanage. The people at the orphanage said he fell and cut himself. My doctor says as he gets older the scar will be less visible.”
“I can still see mine.” Lindsey’s fingers moved to her own forehead, where a childhood accident had left its mark.
Claire squinted. “I can’t. All those wrinkles get in the way.”
“Thank you very much,” Lindsey said. “Is that a silver hair I see among the gold?”
She stretched her arms above her head, relishing the warm afternoon sun in the Segals’ backyard. The mouthwatering aroma of barbecued meat wafted from the patio grill. Doug Segal used tongs to turn chicken and ribs. Hal Norwood sprawled on a lawn chair, beer bottle in one hand, his face in profile. The picnic table was loaded with food. Nina and Sharon hovered at one end, filching deviled eggs. Adam, telltale smears of avocado green on his face, had been at the guacamole and chips. Tess was holed up somewhere, Annabel said, with her nose in a book.
Gretchen called to her husband. “Hey, what’s the story with the chicken and ribs? We’ve got hungry people over here.”
“Grab a plate,” Doug said. “It’s ready. Of course there may not be any deviled eggs left.”
Sharon giggled and dodged away from the picnic table, but Nina remained, licking egg yolk from her fingers, looking unrepentant. “If you didn’t want me to eat them, you shouldn’t have left them out.”
“Did you leave any for the rest of us?” Lindsey glanced at the platter. Nearly half the deviled eggs were gone. “You’re going to make yourself sick.”
“Mom.” Nina turned one syllable into two. “You sound like Grandma.”
“God forbid I should sound like my mother,” Lindsey said as Annabel came up behind her. “I’ve got to watch that.”
“It goes with motherhood,” Annabel said, and called, “Tess, wherever you are, we’re eating.”
Lindsey picked up a plate and claimed one of the remaining deviled eggs. Then she helped herself to everything else, including potato salad and baked beans. Doug had transferred the meat to a platter, setting it at one end of the picnic table. “What the heck, I’ll have both.” She took a rib and a drumstick.
“Been marinating in my special sauce for days,” Doug boasted. “You’ll be back for seconds and thirds.”
Lindsey laughed. “Just let me get through the firsts.” She carried her plate to one of the tables on the lawn. She gnawed on the rib, then wiped barbecue sauce from her hands and reached for her glass, smiling at Annabel. “Gretchen is over the moon. I haven’t seen her this happy for a long time.”
“I’m pleased for her.” Annabel bit into a chicken breast.
“I hadn’t been keeping up with the adoption saga,” Lindsey said. “The past year has been hectic. I’m up for tenure.”
“Don’t worry, you’ll get it. You’ve certainly published enough.”
Tenure wasn’t the only reason Lindsey hadn’t been paying that much attention. Nina was a handful and it got worse when she became a teenager. Lindsey’s father was growing older, getting more forgetful and irascible. He’d had a bout with pneumonia that spring. One of her brothers had separated from his wife. And Lindsey had extricated herself from a relationship that wasn’t working.
“Serendipitous,” Lindsey said, “that Claire should visit that orphanage and see that boy.”
“Yes, she was in El Salvador right after my father’s funeral.”
“I was sorry to hear that he’d died. It was rather sudden.” Lindsey hadn’t really known Mr. Dunlin. Her concern was for Annabel, who’d lost her mother at an early age, and now her father. Annabel didn’t say anything about missing him. Their relationship had been formal and distant, so different from Lindsey’s own rambunctious family where emotions were warm and on the surface.
Annabel picked up her fork and drew a pattern in the baked beans on her plate. “The heart attack? He’d had warning signs—his cholesterol level, blood pressure, chest pains. He ignored them. Typical of him. Now he’s gone. His birthday would have been next week.” She smiled. “Remember, we went to his birthday party back in the Seventies, that fancy catered affair, with the pianist murdering pop tunes in the hotel ballroom. That’s where we met Hal.”
“The food was spectacular,” Lindsey said with a smile. “And the people who were there. I had no idea your father was so connected. He left the Pacif
ic Heights house to you?”
“Oh, yes.” Annabel’s smile disappeared. “He left it to me. Along with all the ghosts.”
Lindsey looked at her curiously. “Is the house haunted?”
“In a manner of speaking.” Annabel shivered, but it might have been the summer fog creeping across the bay from the Golden Gate, gray-white wisps now feathering across the blue sky like tendrils of ivy.
“Are you going to move?”
“I like our house in Noe Valley,” Annabel said. “It’s sunny in that part of town. Pacific Heights is cold and foggy. Hal wants to move. It would be closer to work for him. We could use more room. When Tess was a baby, our house seemed big enough, but with three kids, we’re bursting at the seams. Now that Hal is CEO we’ll need to do more entertaining.” She made a face. “Not that I’m all that interested in playing hostess.”
“But you’re good at it,” Lindsey said.
They talked about houses and children while they ate, going back, as Doug had predicted, for seconds. As the fog moved in they put on sweaters. Afternoon gave way to evening, the sky darkening. Doug went inside and changed the music, from the rock and jazz that he’d been playing all afternoon, to something more appropriate for the Fourth of July. Lindsey smiled as she heard the opening bars to “Stars and Stripes Forever.”
The four friends pulled their chairs into a circle and sat, talking, drinking wine, nibbling brownies. Fireworks started in the distance, a few pops here and there, then rapid and loud, a constant barrage. Nathaniel Douglas Segal, sleepy and full of food from his first American Fourth of July, had been drowsing in Gretchen’s lap. Now he woke up, eyes wide as he looked for the source of the bangs. Then he began to cry, his frightened wails drowning out John Philip Sousa and the fusillade of fireworks.
12
Electric guitars screamed overhead. Gretchen called, “Nat!” The dark-haired teenager with the scar on his chin appeared on the stair landing. “We have guests. Crank down the volume on that noise, please.”
Nat rolled his eyes. “Music, Mom.”
“The jury’s out on that. Your old mom’s ears can’t handle it.” Gretchen smiled at Lindsey and Nina. “I miss the Beatles. Those were the days. Am I an old fogey?”
“It can’t be helped,” Lindsey said. “Happens to all of us. Hey, the Rolling Stones are still out there touring. Who would have thought Mick and Keith would be strutting their stuff for forty-plus years?”
Gretchen laughed. “Looking like forty-plus miles of bad road. Sex, drugs and rock and roll will do that to you.”
The electric guitars abated and Nat returned to the stairs. “When do we eat? Remember, I’m a growing boy.”
“Soon.” Gretchen led the way through the living room. “That kid is a bottomless pit. You know the stereotype about the teenaged boy with his head in the refrigerator? You just met him.”
“I brought strawberry shortcake,” Lindsey said. “Not the usual Sunday brunch fare, but we love it.”
In the kitchen Doug was assembling ingredients and utensils on the counter. He waved his whisk. “I’m making my killer buttermilk pancakes, renowned around the world. Very popular here in Berkeley, anyway.”
“I’ve got a frittata and sausage warming in the oven. And I made a big fruit salad.” Gretchen pointed at the glass bowl that held a mixture of bright red berries and melon. “Claire’s late. We’ll start without her. Coffee, juice, mimosas?”
“I’ll have a mimosa,” Lindsey said.
“Coffee for me.” Nina filled a cup from the coffeemaker on the counter. Gretchen poured Champagne and orange juice into a glass for Lindsey.
There were too many people in the kitchen, so Lindsey went out to the backyard, site of that long-ago Fourth of July barbecue, when Nat was a toddler newly arrived in the United States. He’d cried when he heard the fireworks. At the time she thought it was because he was startled by the noise. Now she wondered. If Nat was Efraín, did he remember what happened at San Blas? Flor’s son had been four months shy of his second birthday when he’d been kidnapped.
Lindsey’s fingers moved to her own forehead, as they had the day of the barbecue. Her own scar was still there, very faint. She’d been two years old, jumping up and down on her bed, when she lost her balance and fell, forehead hitting the corner of the nightstand. She recalled her two-year-old self, looking back at her from the bathroom mirror. Mama, a cold, wet washcloth in hand, wiped away Lindsey’s blood and tears. Daddy held her tightly, murmuring reassuring words in her ear, as he held up a square of Lindsey’s favorite candy, the Hershey bar peeking from the waxy white wrapping on the bathroom counter.
Lindsey blinked and the image vanished. A child remembered, even if the trauma occurred at an early age. Efraín would remember San Blas—his father’s murder, and being torn from his mother’s arms.
Lindsey looked out at the yard. On the patio were a low round table, a chaise longue padded with faded floral fabric, and four metal chairs. Lindsey set her glass on the patio table and stepped onto the grass, walking toward the back fence, which was covered with abutilon, its bell-shaped flowers bright red, orange and yellow.
Twelve-year-old Amy Segal sat cross-legged on the grass near the vegetable garden, leafing through a book. Her glasses were perched on her nose and her straight black hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Amy came from an orphanage in China, where infant girls were commonly abandoned.
It was Nat’s story, though, that raised questions in Lindsey’s mind. Yesterday, after returning from the Farmers Market, Lindsey had gone to the Internet, searching for the missing children of El Salvador, abandoned, orphaned, and stolen. She discovered an article about a woman whose infant son had been taken during “scorched-earth” counterinsurgency operations, when the army targeted villages suspected of being sympathetic to guerrillas. The frantic mother had been told that her child would now serve the government, not the rebels. The boy, along with other children, was loaded onto an army helicopter. He was found twelve years later in an orphanage near San Salvador.
The Asociación Pro-Búsqueda de Niños y Niñas Desaparecidos, the Association for the Search of Disappeared Children, was using DNA testing to aid Salvadoran parents in reclaiming children. The University of California at Berkeley had even gotten involved, as the Human Rights Center on campus worked with a state lab to create a DNA database. The association had dealt with hundreds of requests by parents for information on abducted children, and had resolved about a third of them. Some children were dead, others adopted by families in Europe, Latin America and the United States. Some lived with the families of Salvadoran army officers. Others were found in orphanages or in street gangs, still in El Salvador. Birth certificates were falsified, changing dates and places that might link the children to their real families. Selling babies and children who were purportedly abandoned or orphaned had proved lucrative.
How had the toddler with the cut on his chin arrived in that orphanage in El Salvador?
“Hello, Amy,” Lindsey said now. “You have a big garden this spring.”
“I picked out some of the herbs and veggies. Early Girl tomatoes, lemon cucumbers, chives and basil. But we really have to watch the basil. Snails love it. They just mow it down.” Amy got to her feet. “Daddy’s making buttermilk pancakes.”
“I’m looking forward to a great big stack of those pancakes, with lots of butter and maple syrup.” They walked back to the patio. Lindsey sat in one of the chairs and sipped her mimosa. “What are you reading?”
Amy showed Lindsey the paperback on birds of the San Francisco Bay Area. “We have finches and sparrows and Stellar’s jays. Hummingbirds, too. They like red flowers. The kind we have are called Anna’s hummingbirds. There’s a picture right here.” Amy held up the book so Lindsey could see the illustration.
“I’ve seen them at my hummingbird feeder,” Lindsey said. The Segals’ black-and-white tom ambled across the grass with his rolling, fat-cat gait, his tail straight up in the air and a placid look on
his face. “Does Moby Cat try to catch the birds?”
“He’s too fat to catch anything.” Amy sat on the chaise and patted her lap. Displaying surprising agility for a big-bellied cat, Moby Cat wiggled his rear end and launched himself onto Amy’s lap. He purred loudly as he butted his head against Amy’s chest and kneaded his paws on her legs. “Oh, Moby Cat.” Amy hugged the cat and stroked him under his chin. He purred even louder, tilting his head up for a better angle.
“This cat doesn’t miss any meals,” Lindsey said.
“Indeed,” Gretchen said from the patio door. “His Rotundity loves to eat. Speaking of eating, it’s pancake time. Get ’em while they’re hot.”
Lindsey and Amy joined the others in the dining room. Nat slathered his pancakes with butter, added syrup, and passed the pitcher to Lindsey. “Who was that lady you were with at the market?”
“Her name is Flor,” Lindsey said. “I interviewed her for my book. Why do you ask?”
“Just curious.” He lifted a forkful of pancake toward his mouth.
“Mom.” Nina gestured at the pitcher. “If you’re not going to use the syrup, pass it over.”
Lindsey poured syrup on her pancakes and handed the pitcher to Nina. She served herself frittata and sausage. They ate, the only sounds the clink of forks on plates. Nina got up to get more coffee. “Refills, anyone?”
“Just bring the pot,” Gretchen said as the doorbell rang. She pushed back her chair and headed for the front door, returning with Claire, who carried a square pink bakery box.
“I’ll trade you these scones for a mimosa,” Claire said. “Light on the orange juice, heavy on the Champagne.”
Gretchen took the box. “One mimosa, coming right up.”
Claire’s eyes widened as Nina carried the coffeepot into the dining room. “Nina. What a surprise. Here for a visit?”
Nina filled Lindsey’s cup, then her own. “I’ve moved back to the Bay Area.”
“Welcome home, then. Staying with your mother?”
“Temporarily.”