Daughters for a Time (17 page)

Parenting a baby who had been left and then found and then given again might be even harder.

“But are you happy?” Tim asked. “Or is it too soon to tell?”

“I’m happy,” I said. “I’m definitely happy. But one thing is for sure: she didn’t get the memo that we were coming.”

“It’s only the first day,” he said, rubbing my back. “We’re just another bunch of strangers to her.”

“Why did I think she would know us?” I asked, remembering the romantic union I’d imagined, where our lives blended into each other’s like the many rivers of her native homeland.

“Starting now,” Tim said, “we’re all she’ll know.”

“I wonder what she thinks about that?”

“She probably thinks that we’re very strange looking.”

I smiled, looked at Sam, the way her fists were still balled and a little line of anger was still pinched between her eyes.

“You better call Claire,” Tim said. “The time is right. It should be morning there, now.”

I rolled over and reached for the cell phone. Dialed.

“Tell me everything,” Claire said eagerly, as if she had been pacing with her phone all morning.

“I can’t,” I stammered. “Too tired to talk. Every bone in my body is tired. Even my jaw. But I just wanted to let you know that all is well, that Sam is adorable, but I’m pretty sure that she hates me.”

“Do you remember when Maura was born?” she asked. “She was pretty hostile, if memory serves.”

“Yeah,” I recalled. “She was mad.”

“Anyway,” Claire said. “It’ll be good practice for when she’s a teenager.”

The next morning, at breakfast, we served Sam an endless bowl of congee, pieces of a steamed bun, and a soft egg.

“She’s ravenous,” I said to Tim. “I can’t imagine why she’s so small.”

“She won’t have to worry about food anymore,” Tim said.

“You hear that, Sammy?” I said, tickling the bottom of her chin. “Mom and Dad will always give you lots of food. What do you think about the fact that both your parents are chefs?”

She looked away, still refusing to make eye contact with either Tim or me, and rolled her hands in the high chair tray of food, enjoying the bounty.
The food’s good
, she seemed to say.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Afterward, Tim and I buckled Sam into a stroller and ventured out. We pushed her through narrow streets lined with vendors selling everything from clay teapots to dried beans to rice, eels and frogs in buckets, a variety of insects. Intermittent smells of laundry and sewage and fried foods filled the air. Hanging laundry and hanging poultry dangled and bobbed above us. Sam was dressed in a snowsuit and wool cap, but even so, an elderly Chinese lady stopped and admonished us for not having Sam bundled in enough layers.

“Yes, ma’am. Yes, ma’am,” Tim said as the woman shook her finger at us and yelled and yelled. We promised to dress her more warmly and then walked away and burst into laughter.
When we looked at Sam to see what she thought of all the commotion, she seemed to shrug as if to say,
Yeah, the old ladies are like that here.

In the afternoon, our group took our babies to the clinic for their physicals. The doctors weighed and measured them; looked in their eyes, ears, and throats; pulled on their limbs; tapped their knees for reflexes; and then unequivocally pronounced every single one of them “perfectly healthy.”

“How much does Sam weigh now?” I asked, knowing that she was nothing near the twenty-four pounds they claimed her to be.

“Six and a half kilograms,” the doctor said. “Fourteen pounds.”

“Why do you think she is so small?”

The doctor shrugged. “Some babies get fed more than others.”

A shiver slid down my spine thinking of a bigger, more vocal baby taking Sam’s share, like a bully on the playground.

“And, Doctor,” I asked, “what does this say?” I pointed to a string of numbers on Sam’s report.

“How much she weighed when born,” he said.

I tapped Tim’s arm, widened my eyes at him. “How much did she weigh?”

“Almost two kilograms. Four pounds,” he said.

“Four?” I looked at Tim and our eyes locked. Then I put my mouth on Sam’s forehead. Four pounds, less than a bag of flour. Four pounds, two days old, alone outside in the elements, crying for her mother. How could abandonment in this country be two things at once—the ultimate act of benevolence, yet so wrongheaded in its execution?

A few days later, Max loaded us on the bus and we headed to Liu Rong Temple, the Temple of Six Banyan Trees, where Buddhist monks would bless the babies.

We followed Max into the Temple of Tranquility and kneeled in front of three gigantic saffron Buddhas. Then a monk, a thoughtful-looking believer cloaked in a brown robe, started to chant and gently bang a little gong on the altar. Sam, who we had dressed in a traditional Chinese dress, a satiny thing we bought on the street, sat in front of me, transfixed by the monk. When I hoisted her onto my lap, she pulled away.
Too close, woman.

Once we returned home to the States, we would have Sam baptized. For my mother’s sake, because it had been important to her. For Tim’s parents, too. And because if any soul deserved to be infused with the grace of God, it was an orphan who had been left on her second day of life. For as much as I grumbled over God’s will and what I had had to endure in my life, it was hard not to believe in God on a day like today as I looked around and saw maybe one hundred Chinese baby girls being loved in excess by their new parents who wanted more than anything a child to cherish. We would give Sam the faith we grew up with, for the same reason we would feed, clothe, and educate her: because she was now a member of our family and what was ours, was hers. But as we were lulled by the monks’ soothing tones, I couldn’t help but think that international adoption alone was proof that many gods were working together to bring these babies home.

After the blessing, Tim wanted to climb the seventeen-story flowering pagoda. Once he walked away, I carried Sam inside, changed her diaper, and fixed her a bottle, which she gulped and gulped, always hungry for more. Now that Sam was drinking an unlimited amount of fortified formula, her cheeks
already seemed plumper. In no time, she would be gaining weight. When she was finished with her bottle, she wiggled to get out of my arms, so I set her in the stroller with her piece of satin blanket top and pushed her back outside. With the cool outside air and sun on her face, she fell fast asleep.

Much of the literature on Chinese adoption referred to the “red thread,” an invisible string that connected an adoptive baby to adoptive mother, as if there were never any doubt that the two were meant to be together.
Maybe
, I thought. I definitely wanted more than anything to protect her from more hurt. But I couldn’t yet admit to feeling that our union was predestined. That that sense of fate hadn’t yet infiltrated me didn’t surprise me much. The spools of thread in my life were always snagged and tangled, never neatly wound. It would take some time to pick at the knotted ball, to loosen just the right one.

Contrarily, it did make me think. If I hadn’t been so resistant to adoption, if the paperwork had been completed and submitted six months, a year, earlier, we would have been matched with a different baby. The thought of that alone made me reach for Sam, as if I knew that she was the one I was meant to get. Only two days into this, I couldn’t imagine a baby other than Sam.

“Hmm,” I thought, happily satisfied with my epiphany. Maybe I did feel the sense of fate. A red thread as strong as rope.

I looked at Sam, considered our future together. I thought of her when she was older, cooking with Tim and me in the kitchen, traveling overseas, and returning to China to visit her homeland. I smiled at the thought of Sam fifteen years from now, turquoise braces on her teeth. I lifted Sam from her stroller and held her in my lap. In just the last few days, I had learned that she slept soundly, that once she was five minutes into a nap, not even a marching band would rouse her. These
were the times when I stole her affection. I nuzzled my face into her sweet-smelling neck, cupped her small hands in mine, and whispered to her: “I know you were given to me and you had no say in it, but I promise you, I’ll love you so much that someday you’ll choose me on your own.”

I made a visor with my hand, looked up at the pagoda for Tim, snapped a photo with my phone. Then I snapped a photo of Sam, asleep in the crook of my arm, contented in her deep slumber. I pulled up Claire’s name and texted the photo of Sam to her. I slid the phone back into my coat pocket and then, just as quickly, pulled it out again. I pulled up the photo of Sam, and before I lost my nerve, I sent it to Larry, too.

Then I looked around at the countless Caucasian couples from America and Europe tooling around with their new Chinese babies. I spotted Amy and Tom in the gift shop, little Angela holding tight to her mother’s blouse tail, new Maria in Amy’s arms.

Then I saw a woman with her two grown daughters. Clearly, one of the daughters must have come to adopt a baby, and she brought her sister and mother with her. It made me wish that Claire were with us on this trip, though she never would have left Maura for so long. I couldn’t take my eyes off these women. The resemblance. My heart warmed as I thought of Mom and Claire. I gently placed Sam back in her stroller, pulled a notepad from my backpack, and started a letter to Claire:

Dear Claire,
All of the babies have just been blessed by a monk and now Sam’s asleep and Tim’s scaling a pagoda. I’m sitting on a bench. It’s cold, but the sun is out. Really, it’s just a beautiful day. Anyway, there’s a woman, a few tables away from me: head of brown wavy hair that looks like it’s been inflated with an air pump, eyes so
blue I can see the color from here, and cheeks that rise and fall with her infectious laughter. You can see where I’m going with this. Mom.
This woman reminds me so much of her, but of course, this lady is in her sixties and she’s sitting with her two daughters who are clearly in their forties, and this is the thing that strikes me: the mom is the one who is divvying up the picnic of cheese and nuts and fruit, sliding portions onto their plates, securing a napkin underneath so that it doesn’t fly away, refilling the glasses of wine. Do you see what I’m saying, Claire? This mom is
feeding
her daughters. Her forty-year-old daughters.
That’s a mom, right? Wouldn’t Mom have been the same way, still wiping our mouths, offering us the food off her own plate? I was just thinking: you’re that way, too, Claire. Maura’s lucky to have you as a mom. I really mean this: if I’m half the mom to Sam that you are to Maura, we’ll be in good shape.
For some reason, looking at these women made me think of how you used to stop by every Sunday. I was in college and you were in grad school, and even though you were so busy, you’d bring me my “food money” for the week. I remember thinking, why don’t you just send it or put it in my account, but of course, once I was older I knew that you were just checking up on me, always slipping an extra carton of milk in my fridge, a loaf of bread in the basket. You’d walk around the apartment and check the locks on my windows,
make sure that I had my Mace on my keychain, my cell phone charged.
I can see Tim spiraling down the pagoda now. I wonder what he saw up so high. I can’t wait to see you next week. Of course, we’ll be home before this letter even makes it to you, assuming I actually find an envelope, a stamp, and a post office. Maybe I’ll just give you this in person.
Anyway, you were right. I am dreaming about that day at the spa, sprawled out on a massage table, candles flickering. But this is pretty awesome, too!
See you soon!
Love you! Helen

At dinner, Max surprised us with big news.

“The orphanage director has invited your group to tour the grounds,” he said.

Seldom were adoptive parents able to see the inside of the orphanage where their daughters lived, so when Max told us that our group had been invited to take a tour, we jumped at the opportunity. The next day, we boarded a bus and headed for the mountainside. With horns blaring, we bumped our way through the traffic, throngs of bicyclists, pedestrians, and taxicabs until we were outside of the city and heading in the direction of Sam’s birthplace. As a group, we gasped as the bus skidded precariously around cliffhanging precipices and
dodged farmers leading oxen and a family of four stacked high on a scooter. We held on tightly to our new babies, many of whom, Sam included, were more calmed and lulled by this carnival ride of a trip than they’d been in our arms in the quiet of the hotel room. We passed countless rice paddies, drove alongside the Yangtze River, saw lotus blossoms and water lilies. At one point, our bus drove onto a ferry that crossed the river.