Daughters for a Time (16 page)

We sat nervously on the edge of our bed, tapping our feet and bouncing our knees. We checked the batteries in the camera and video recorder. I double-checked the gift bags. It was customary for the adoptive parents to bear gifts for the orphanage director and her people. A few knickknacks from the nation’s capitol to accompany the sizable cash donations we had handed over to Max.

As each minute passed, waves of acid splashed in my stomach. While Tim picked at a leftover muffin, I gnawed on a pack of Rolaids.

“When’s Max going to call?” I asked.

“Soon,” Tim said. “It’s just a matter of waiting our turn.”

“I’ve been waiting for my turn for five years,” I said.

“He’ll call,” Tim assured me.

Finally, the trill of the phone stood us both up straight.

Tim answered, then hung up after a short conversation and nodded at me. “They’re ready for us.”

My hand and Tim’s were gripped together in a tight-knuckled mass as we walked the hall to Room 304.

“Oh my God,” I kept repeating, squeezing Tim’s hand, my heart hammering in my chest.

“I know, right?” he said, giddy, looking more boyish than ever.

Max opened the door. There was a baby in the arms of a young woman, and an older woman standing near the desk in the corner of the room. Sam, her caregiver, and the orphanage director, I presumed. Sam looked at us, then back at her caregiver, then clutched defiantly to the woman’s necklace. Sunlight haloed her shaved head. She had petite features, and though she was bundled like every other baby in thick layers, it was evident that she was tiny. The other babies we’d seen were stout, sturdy little firecrackers; Sam looked as if she were a different breed, something delicate, something to be worshipped. When she pursed her lips, the dimple deepened in her cheek, the dimple that I had been staring at for the last month, my screensaver and salvation.

Clutched in her left hand was a torn piece of satin, like the soft top of a baby blanket that had been ripped off. Was it from the orphanage or from her mother? If so, did it carry her scent?

“Sam,” I whispered, lurching in her direction, my arms reaching for her, tears pouring down my face. The caregiver placed her in my shaky arms, and the enormity of her being there, after such a long wait, left me breathless. Once, when I was a child, Claire had pelted me with a volleyball, hitting me square in the chest. There were a few brief moments when I literally couldn’t breathe, the
heaviness
. “I thought you were ready,” Claire had said. That was how it was now. I thought I was ready, but the panic surging through me was making me think twice. A metallic taste pooled in my mouth. I looked around for Tim, but he was talking to the orphanage director in the corner.

“Hey, little girl,” I said, stroking the apples of her cheeks, trying for Claire’s cool confidence, trying to find that perfect fit in the nook of my arm, thinking that if I acted comfortable, I would
be
comfortable. But Sam shook her fists at me and lurched for her caregiver, as unhappy as a child could be. I dangled my necklace in front of her like bait, but Sam wasn’t biting. She wanted what she knew, and that something wasn’t me. I suddenly felt like an imposter, like I was taking something—
someone—
who wasn’t mine.

We were once told that the babies were matched up with their adoptive families thanks to the divine wisdom of the “matching ladies.” These old women supposedly sat in a room, read prospective parents’ applications, and then matched them with the just right baby. This was probably more myth than reality. The matches were most likely generated by computer as part of the bureaucratic behemoth Chinese adoption had become. But I liked the idea of the matching ladies. There was some comfort in the notion that a group of sage old ladies with the experience of many lifetimes had had a hand in the selection of my daughter.

I cradled Sam’s little body, a tableau of perfect beauty, staring into her almond-shaped eyes. “It’s okay,” I told her. “I’m not so bad.” Sam looked at me, then at her caregiver, took an enormous breath, and began to squall like I had never heard a baby do before.

My confidence plummeted. For a second, I wondered whether the infertility was a sign that maybe I wasn’t made for this.

“Do you want to ask her caregiver any questions?” Max asked.

“Yes,” I said, though I couldn’t think of one of the questions I had thought up days earlier.

The caregiver told me that she was a good baby, smiled a lot, and ate all her meals.

“She’s small,” I said. “The referral said that she was twenty-four pounds. This baby weighs much less. Is she okay?”

“She’s strong baby,” the orphanage director piped in. “Weighs twenty-four, eats her meals.”

“Anything else?” Max asked.

“Did her parents leave her anything—a note?”

The orphanage director read from the file that, when Sam was abandoned, she was left in a shopping bag, swaddled in one blanket, with thick newspapers tucked around her little body.

“More questions?” Max asked.

Will she love me? Will she leave me? Will she fill the hole in my heart?
I wanted to ask, but instead I said, “She’s beautiful. Thank you.”

Back in our room, we couldn’t take our eyes off Sam, our idealized baby personified in flesh. After wanting—
waiting
—for so long, my brain was struggling to process the reality of this moment.

I held her on my lap, gingerly grazing my palm over her stubbly buzz cut, allowing my senses to take in that she was really here.

“Sanitary reasons,” Tim said, pointing to Sam’s nearly shaved head. “She smells like Ajax.”

“What could you be thinking of all this, peanut?”

As if in answer, Sam began to cry. I suspected that she was wet. So, layer by layer, I gently undressed her. All of the Chinese babies were bundled like little Michelin men. By now, we had become used to it, seeing little ones bundled in multiple layers wherever we had gone. Sam’s outer layer was a quilted cotton smock with an apple pattern. It covered two wool sweaters, which covered a gray sweatshirt, and finally, a blue Pepsi T-shirt. The orphanage received a large number of donations, including clothing, from the West.

“Feel this!” I held up Sam’s diaper. It must have weighed a pound. I filled the bathtub with warm water and lavender bubbles, so sure that a nice bath would soothe her after the long bus ride from the orphanage in the countryside. I had helped Claire bathe Maura a dozen times. I knew how much babies loved the water.

“Maybe we should just hold her a while,” Tim suggested.

“She’ll love it,” I insisted, but Sam recoiled, screaming and crying, as if she were being set into a pot of scalding water. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I cooed. I sponged her body and head with the sweet smells from home, but Sam didn’t relent until I removed her from the tub. While Tim bundled her in a soft hotel towel, and I got myself dried off, the sudden quiet startled my heart. In her father’s arms, she was finally contented.

I stared at myself in the mirror: my mouth pressed too tightly together, my eyes held open too wide, my jaw clenched too firmly. When finally I made eye contact with myself and saw me—so scared and unsure—I knew that this was going
to be hard. Taking care of Tim and myself, even those months helping Claire care for our dying mother, was
nothing
compared to what it was going to be like to take care of Sam, my new daughter who wanted to be anywhere but in my arms.

I dressed her in the same type of footed pajamas that Maura wore when she was a baby. As I cradled her, I looked into her eyes, expecting to see the rich history of an ancient civilization, the look of a little baby who had endured twelve months without parents, yet was still hopeful. I wanted to see her soul, her personality, something that would reveal her nature to me, but instead, I saw just an endless flow of tears from a baby who was sad for reasons she didn’t understand. Her bottom lip jutted out and her cheeks shone red and her fists were balled like a prizefighter’s, as if to say,
Who do you think you are?

I now wondered if the matching ladies—or the computer—had made the right match. As I juggled Sam in my arms, trying to soothe her blistering tears, staring at her beguiling beauty, I knew that she wasn’t some pushover who could be coaxed easily into a smile, soothed with a lullaby, or captured with a new necklace.
Thanks for the vote of confidence
, I wanted to yell to those women,
but I’m not really an Advanced Placement type of person! That would be my sister, Claire. Go ahead and give me an average child, one of those jolly, chubby-faced babies with an easy disposition!
Somehow, I knew that Sam was rare, that in her exquisite beauty she would somehow come to resent my lack of it, that her temperament would be too much like my own.

“Remember what Amy said,” Tim reminded me. “It takes time. Patience.”

A few hours later, our group congregated in the conference room on the ground floor of the Holiday Inn. We were to meet
with the notary, a Chinese official who would ask us questions and then stamp our paperwork, making the adoptions official. From there, papers would be filed and we would wait while Sam’s passport and visa were processed. As we walked into the conference room, the first thing I noticed was that all of the babies were still in their orphanage clothes. I found Amy and asked her what was up.

“Oh,” she said, pulling back her mouth as if she felt badly for not warning me. “Bath time at the orphanage is dreadful,” she said. “A matter of logistics, it’s just too difficult to bathe so many babies in a cold-weather environment where heat is scarce. Cold air to hot water to cold air again.”

“Oh,” I said mournfully, cringing at the wrongness of my decision to bathe Sam right away. How was it that Tim knew better? Where was my store of maternal instincts? Just then, my left ovary twinged, as if the smart-aleck, big mouth couldn’t keep from commenting on my incompetency as a mother so far.

When it was our turn, the notary official, a stout man with a whiskery beard, asked us if we wanted to keep the baby we had been given.

“Yes,” we said, “of course.”

“Is there anything wrong with her that you want to report?” He had his pen poised over his clipboard like the guy at the rent-a-car place, jotting down any dings and dents.

“No,” I said defensively, clutching Sam tighter, “She’s perfect.”

That night, Tim and I tried for hours to get Sam to sleep. I walked the halls with her, bouncing her in my arms with a rhythmic jiggle-jiggle-pat-pat dance that I’d seen Claire do a
hundred times. Tim sang to her in the rocker. We fed her bottles, spooned her congee, changed her diaper over and over again. We burped her, held her high up on our shoulders, low in our laps, bounced on our knees for horsey. But our new baby was full of panic and dread and uncertainty. Her only instinct was to cry, arch her back, writhe as if she were tethered in chains, and lurch for the exit. It was midnight before Sam finally issued her last battle cry, a whimper that fell flat in mid-roar.

The hotel had devised a makeshift crib out of two upholstered armchairs facing each other, their front legs secured tightly together with rope. But from our bed where the three of us lay, the crib looked miles away. Exhausted, worn to the bone, Tim and I lay on either side of Sam, staring at our new daughter.

“Should we put her in her crib?” Tim asked, the weariness dripping from his voice matching mine.

“I can’t move,” I said. “And if we touch her, she might wake up.”

“And then she’ll start crying again,” Tim said, finishing my thought.

“This is really, really hard.” I thought back to over a year before, when Elle Reese interviewed us and wrote our home study. In that report, we had made a lifetime of promises: to love Sam, to educate her, to provide her with health care, food, clothing, and shelter. But absent, it seemed, from our discussions was the fact that this was going to be hard. That parenting was hard—I now knew, only hours after becoming a mother—was the starting point, the
given.
It was the white on the paper that held the promises and proclamations. If separated and weighed, it would undoubtedly be heavier than the words themselves.