Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other

by Scott Simon

  I know that at some point our daughters will figure out that they were born to Chinese dynastic princesses. They will get angry and ask why we ever plucked them out of rich, burgeoning China to take them into the desperate hurly-burly of the declining urban West. They’ll whine to their friends (who will be studying Mandarin in all the best schools), “Can you believe my parents? They took us out of the fastest-growing economy in the world! To drag us to this dead-broke back water!”

  I’m sure I’ll be hurt. I don’t know what I will say. I hope I’ll remember to acknowledge the obvious: Yes, there was something utterly selfish in what we did. We wanted a child. We heard you needed parents. We wanted a miracle in our lives. Darlings, it was you.

  WE LIKE TO SPEND a few weeks in the summer in a small village in Brittany where Caroline used to go as a child. We have relatives there. When we’re back, we’re the family with the glamorous French girl who went to America and came back with a half-Jewish husband and two full-Chinese daughters. Typical American family, we tell them.

  One night, we went to a circus. A small family circus that moves from one small town to another over the summer, with two miniature horses, two threadbare llamas, two spitting camels, six little dogs, and four dogged chimps who ride them all while jumping rope.

  A Roma family from the Czech Republic ran the circus. The father was the ringmaster, leading the horses, llamas, camels, and dogs around the ring. The mother wore a spangly red suit as she swung from the trapeze and slithered up twisting ropes. A teenage daughter stood tippy-toe and did backflips on the backs of the horses as they cantered in a circle. Their young son—eight, nine years old—was a little clown who took tickets, sold popcorn, and put on a red ringmaster’s jacket himself for the last act. With his small face still sooty from his clown’s cosmetic stubble, he announced, “The circus will live as long as there are children.”

  PETA and the child welfare authorities would never permit this circus in America. But we loved it. The animals seemed well cared for. The little boy looked happy and healthy, and was learning about the world.

  And we found the circus family to be an irresistible little reflection of our own. The graceful mother with her death-defying swings, the blurred line between animal and human relatives, and the little boy blaring, “Ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages! And now …”

  Elise had just started saying that. She’d pull on one of her ballet costumes, snap Lina into a pink princess dress, dangle a ribbon in front of our cat’s nose to lead them all into the living room, and announce, “Ladies and gentleman! And now, our cat, Nana, will … run after this ribbon!”

  Our cousin Camille was with us. Our daughters scrambled onto her lap, whispered breathless, cunning little requests for popcorn, and smoothed the scarf that she was wearing over her smooth head.

  Camille, at twenty-one, was dying from the cancer she had battled for several months. She was a French girl with American moxie. She wanted to see London, Washington, Chicago, Las Vegas, and New York. She was bold, striking, kind, and funny. She wanted to finish school in small-town France and come to America, where she believed people could become whatever they wanted to be. We were going to help her. Elise wanted a bunk bed so that Camille could come to America and sleep above her. We wanted that, too.

  Camille had always been drawn to our daughters. She loved their difference, their assertiveness and spirit. When they sat in her lap, they seemed to draw calm from her while she breathed in their spunkiness. When she’d come to our place after a round of cancer treatments—nasty, nauseating treatments—I think she treasured their fits of pique and crankiness as vital signs of life. Camille may have been too tired to complain. Our girls lent her their voices.

  I caught sight of Camille and our daughters during intermission at the circus that night. Fearlessly they held out their hands for a camel’s kisses. It was a night to cherish and marvel at how sometimes the earth spins to let three fierce and funny souls from different places on earth find each other.

  A few months later, my wife and daughters were able to spend one of the last days of Camille’s life with her in her apartment in the center of town. There was little doubt that this would be the last time they would see each other, but Caroline says that the day was truly blissful. The cancer had clawed into Camille’s bones and brain; she was profoundly tired. So they all curled up on her bed in the afternoon sunlight and spread out a map of where we live. Lina dozed. Caroline and Elise showed Camille the river that runs by our apartment, Elise’s school, their favorite cupcake shop around the corner, and all of the most fun places they would take her.

  It was a show, of course. But I am from a family of troupers who believe in the power of good shows to divert and enchant. My wife and Camille both knew by then that she would never be able to join us. But I think that when you know in your bones and heart that you may have only a little left of life’s blessing, you want to spend it in hope, not despair. Hope is what you want to share with the children around you.

  Camille died a few days later. Our daughter’s hearts bear the first real cracks they have had to endure since we came into each other’s lives. Our girls had a lot of laughs to give Camille in the years ahead; she had a lot of love for them. But I think that some lives are like diamonds. They pack a lot of light and brilliance into a small space. I remember seeing the three of them stick out their little pink tongues as the camel slurped water with his huge rubber band of a tongue. The girls giggled together and I thought, “Oh my God. They’ve adopted each other.”

  I APPRECIATE the majesty of the universe, even as I do not understand it. I have wildly inconsistent ideas about God and religion. Because I want our girls to know that they can tell me the truth, whatever it is, and should expect it from me, I cannot bring myself to tell them that Camille, or my father, or our beloved fish Salman Fishdie (we are on Sammi IV at this writing) watches over us in heaven and someday I’ll be there, too. I cannot tell them why a just God would let millions of little children suffer while a scintilla of others are swept to survival and comfort across the ocean.

  Call if you know the answer; our operators are standing by.

  Yet we all devoutly believe in the Tooth Fairy. When our girls lose a tooth, she wafts in through our balcony door, gently slips a coin and a candy beneath their pillow, and drinks a glass of pomegranate juice, thoughtfully leaving a wash of pink at the bottom of the glass to substantiate her visit.

  Those of us who have been adopted, or have adopted or want to adopt children, must believe in a world in which the tumblers of the universe can click in unfathomable ways that deliver strangers into our lives. The tectonic plates shift, the radiation belt springs a small hole, and children from the other side of the world, or the other side of the street, can wind up feeling utterly right in our arms.

  ONE NIGHT in Brittany, some relatives and friends decided to set off fireworks along the beach. Camille had just had a round of chemotherapy and went to bed. The sun doesn’t set until ten during summer in the northern climes, and ordinarily Elise would have gone to bed, too. But hearing her older cousins rave about all the twizzlers, firecrackers, and Roman candles they were about to light only made her ornery and determined to stay up; and what Elise wants, so does Lina.

  Their older cousins romped down to a clearing along the beach. A couple of uncles helped them light the long string fuses. By the time the fifth and sixth Roman candles had burst in the sky, Lina was already drowsing on Caroline’s shoulder, and Elise was beginning to fade. I opened my arms. Elise turned around to climb into my embrace. She knew exactly where her knees would fit on top of my thighs, where her hands could wrap around my neck, where her head could rest along my shoulder. I slid one arm beneath my daughter, flattened the palm of my other hand on her back, and squeezed lightly: our signal that I had her, all was well, we’re all here, we’re all safe, you can drift off now. You can be sure of us.

  My wife’s deep brown eyes were alight. I felt Elise exhale lightly a
cross my ear, and I clutched her just a little more tightly. I whispered to all of us the very first words that came to me when I decided to try to tell our story: “Baby, we were meant for each other.”

  Acknowledgments

  FIRST AND LAST: my thanks to all the people mentioned herein who opened their lives to me—and now to you.

  Also to Susan Alvarado, Han Feng, Mary Glendinning, Jennifer Hershey, Kee Malesky, Adam Pertman, Kelly Straw, and Ed Victor. All mistakes are mine.

  This book is dedicated to my wife, Caroline Richard. So is my life.

  I don’t have a talent that is adequate to return a favor to skilled neurosurgeons. But I hope that Dr. Edward Benzel, Dr. Neil Cherian, Ann Henwood, and the rest of the staff at the remarkable Cleveland Clinic will accept our family’s thanks for giving me a new lease on life, and filling an anxious time with caring, laughter, and warmth.

  Every year, the five families who all had children put into our arms at the same time at the adoption center in Nanchang get together for a weekend. At a recent reunion, the older girls ran off into Elise’s bedroom. We heard giggling, rustling, and lots more giggling. Elise finally emerged to instruct the adults, “Look at here, everybody. And now, you will see something very beautiful.” We sure did. Our girls came clip-clopping into the living room in crinkly gowns and plastic heels taken from Elise’s ample store of costumes. Their younger brothers and sister joined us to clap and laugh.

  This book is also for Clara June, Elise, Elizabeth, Jasmine, Polly, Daniel, Lina, Wade, Leighton, and Lucy. You gave us new lives. You will rock the world.

  About the Author

  SCOTT SIMON is the host of NPR’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon. He has reported stories from all fifty states and every continent, covered ten wars from El Salvador to Iraq, and won every major award in broadcasting. He also hosts shows for PBS and appears on BBC TV. He is the author of the novels Windy City and Pretty Birds, the memoir Home and Away, and of Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball. He lives with his wife, Caroline, and their daughters, Elise and Paulina.

  www.scottsimonbooks.com

  Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

  Copyright © 2010 by Scott Simon

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Pink Martini/Heinz Records: Excerpt from “Hang On Little Tomato,” lyrics by Patrick Abbey, China Forbes, and Thomas Lauderdale. Reprinted by permission of Pink Martini/Heinz Records.

  The Producing Office and Paradigm: Excerpt from “Seasons of Love” by Jonathan Larson. Reprinted by permission.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Simon, Scott.

  Baby, we were meant for each other: in praise of adoption / Scott Simon.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-60416-7

  1. Adoption. I. Title.

  HV875.S565 2010

  362.734—dc22 2010005887

  www.atrandom.com

  v3.0