The Sum of Our Days (6 page)

During the long night at Tabra's, with the whispering of the trees and hooting of an owl, it occurred to me that the Sisters of Disorder might be able to help me. We met for breakfast in a restaurant filled with weekend sports enthusiasts, some in running shoes, others disguised as Martians to go cycling. We sat at a round table, always respecting the concept of the circle. We were six fiftyish witches: two Christians, an authentic Buddhist, two Jews by birth but semi-Buddhists by choice, and me, still undecided, all united by the same philosophy, which can be summed up in one sentence: Never do harm, and whenever possible do good. Between sips of coffee, I told them what was happening in my family, and ended with Tabra's words, which kept echoing in my head: Sabrina needs two mothers. “Two mothers?” repeated Pauline, one of the semi-Buddhists and a lawyer by profession. “I
know
two mothers!” She was referring to Fu and Grace, two women who had been together for eight years. Pauline went to the phone and made a call—at that time there were no cell phones. At the other end of the line, Grace listened to her description of Sabrina. “I'll talk to Fu and call you back in ten minutes,” she said. Ten minutes . . . either they are unbalanced or they have hearts as big as the ocean to be able to decide something like that in ten minutes, I thought, but before the ten minutes were up, the restaurant's phone rang and Fu announced that she wanted to meet the baby.

I went to pick them up, driving along the rims of the hilltops in the direction of the ocean, a long, curving road that led to a poetic rural setting. Nearly invisible among pines and eucalyptus rose several Japanese-style wood constructions: the Buddhist Zen Center. Fu was tall and she had an unforgettable face: strong features, with a cocked eyebrow that gave her a questioning expression; she was dressed in loose, dark clothing, and her head was shaved like a draftee's. A Buddhist nun, she was the director of the center. She lived in a little dollhouse with her partner Grace, a physician who was irresistibly congenial and had the face of a mischievous child. In the car on the way back, I filled them in on the calvary that had been Jennifer's existence, the harm to the baby, and the specialists' dark prognosis. They did not seem daunted. We picked up Jennifer's mother, Willie's first wife, who knew Fu and Grace because she'd attended ceremonies at the center, and the four of us drove on to the hospital.

In the section for newborns we were met by Odilia, she of the thousand curls, with Sabrina in her arms. She had already hinted, during an earlier visit, that she wanted to adopt Sabrina. Grace held out her arms and Odilia handed her the baby, who seemed to have lost weight and was shivering even more than before. But she was alert. Her large Egyptian eyes gazed into Grace's and then focused on Fu. I don't know what she told them in that first glance, but it was definitive. Without discussion, with a single voice, the two women declared that Sabrina was the little girl they had been waiting for all their lives.

I
HAVE BEEN ONE OF THE
Sisters of Disorder for several years now, and during that time I have witnessed a number of the marvels they have wrought, but none had such far-reaching effect as Sabrina. Not only did they find two mothers, they sorted out the bureaucratic tangle and facilitated Fu and Grace's being able to keep the child. By that time the judge had put his signature on the pertinent documents and Rebecca, the social worker, had declared the case closed. When we went to tell her that we'd found another solution, she informed us that Fu and Grace had no license, that they would have to take classes and go through special training to qualify as foster mothers; she added that they were not a traditional couple, and that they lived in another county and “the case” could not be transferred. Although Jennifer had lost custody of her daughter, her opinion still mattered, she added. “I'm sorry, but I don't have time to spend on something that's already been decided,” she said. The list of obstacles continued, but I don't remember the details, only that at the conclusion of the interview, when we were about to leave in defeat, Pauline took Rebecca firmly by one arm.

“You have a very heavy caseload, and you are paid very little. You feel that your work is pointless, because in all the years you've been in this position you've not been able to save the wretched children who pass through this office,” she said, looking deep into the woman's soul. “But believe me, Rebecca, you can help Sabrina. This may be your one chance to work a miracle.”

The very next day Rebecca turned the bureaucracy upside down. She recovered all the paperwork and modified what was necessary, and she convinced the judge to sign again, to transfer the pertinent documents to another county, and to certify Fu and Grace as foster mothers . . . all in the blink of an eye. The same woman who the day before had been so indignant about our persistence had been converted into a radiant whirlwind who swept aside every obstacle and with the stroke of her magic pen determined Sabrina's fate.

“I told you, this child has an ancient and powerful soul,” Odilia commented a couple of weeks later when she handed Sabrina over to her new mothers. “She touches people and they change. She has incredible mental power, and she knows what she wants.”

So in the least expected manner, the monumental battle between Willie and me was resolved. We forgave each other, as much my dramatic accusations as his stubborn silence; we were able to put our arms around each other and weep with joy because that granddaughter had found her nest. Fu and Grace carried away their little mouse with the big wise eyes, and the circle of my friends set in motion the apparatus of their positive intentions to help her live. A photo of Sabrina sat on top of each home altar, and not a day went by that someone did not send up a thought for her. One of our sisters moved to another city, and we invited Grace to replace her in the group—after a period in which we verified that she had a sufficient sense of humor. In the Center of Zen Buddhism at least fifty persons prayed for Sabrina during their meditations and took turns rocking her while the two mothers struggled with her health problems that seemed never to end. During those first months it took five hours to give Sabrina two ounces of milk from an eyedropper. Fu learned to divine the symptoms of each crisis before it surfaced, and Grace, being a physician, had better resources than any of us.

“Are those women gay?” Celia, my daughter-in-law, asked. She had warned me more than once that she could not be beneath the same roof with someone whose sexual preferences did not coincide with hers.

“Of course.”

“But one of them is a nun!”

“A Buddhist nun. She didn't take a vow of celibacy.”

Celia said nothing more, but she was so impressed with Fu and Grace, whom she came to know very well, that she ended by questioning her own views. She had renounced religion long ago, and had no fear of the devil's cauldrons, but homosexuality was her strongest taboo. With time, however, she called them and asked forgiveness for the snubs of the past, and often visited them at the Zen Center, taking her children and her guitar to teach her new friends the rudimentary skills of motherhood and to cheer them with Venezuelan songs. Fervent environmentalists, the new mothers had planned to use cotton diapers for Sabrina, but before a month was out they had accepted the disposable ones Celia brought as a gift. They would have had to be demented to go back to the old system of diaper pails and washing by hand. There is no washing machine in the center, everything is organic and difficult. The three became fast friends, and Celia began to show an interest in Buddhism, something that alarmed me because she tended to swing from one extreme to the other.

“It's a cool religion, Isabel. The only strange thing about those Buddha people is that they eat nothing but vegetables, like burros.”

“I don't want to see you with your head shaved, or meditating in the lotus position, until you finish raising the children,” I warned her.

I
N
S
EPTEMBER
C
ELIA GAVE BIRTH
to Nicole as calmly as she had welcomed Andrea sixteen months before. She endured ten hours of labor without a whimper, held by Nico, while I watched, thinking how my son wasn't any longer the boy I kept treating as if he were mine, but a man who with great composure had assumed the responsibility of a wife and three children. Celia, silent and pale, walked around between contractions, suffering before our helpless gazes. When she felt it was time, she lay on the bed, covered with sweat, trembling, and said something I will never forget: “I wouldn't trade this moment for anything in the world.” Nico held her as the baby appeared, her head covered with dark fuzz, followed by shoulders and the rest of her body, wet, slippery, and streaked with blood, and once again I experienced the epiphany I had the day Andrea was born and the unforgettable night you left us forever. Birth and death, Paula, are so similar . . . sacred and mysterious moments. The midwife handed me the scissors to cut the thick umbilical cord and Nico placed the baby on her mother's breast. Nicole was a plump packet of reinforced concrete that avidly latched onto the nipple as Celia talked to her in that unique tongue a mother, hazy from her ordeal and her sudden love, uses with her newborn. We had all been waiting for that child; she was a gift, and with her she brought a breath of redemption and joy. Pure light.

Nicole started screaming the instant she realized that she wasn't in her mother's womb any longer, and she never stopped for six months. Her shrieks peeled the paint off the walls and frayed the neighbor's nerves. Abuela Hilda, that beloved adopted grandmother who had been at my side for more than thirty years, along with Ligia, a Nicaraguan woman who had looked after you and whom I had hired to help with my grandchildren, rocked Nicole night and day, the only thing that quieted her for a few minutes. Ligia had left five children in her country and had come to work in the United States and support them from afar. It had been several years since she'd seen them and she had no hope of rejoining them anytime soon. For months and months those good women installed themselves and the baby in a rocker in my office, as Celia and I worked. I was afraid that from all that cradling and rocking my granddaughter's brain might be loosened from her skull and leave her impaired. Nicole calmed down the minute they began to give her powdered milk and soup. I think the cause for her despair was pure hunger.

In the meantime, Andrea was compulsively arranging her toys and talking to herself. When she got bored, she picked up her revolting
tuto
, announced that she was leaving for Venezuela, crawled into a cabinet, and closed the door after her. We had to bore a hole in that piece of furniture to provide a ray of light and breath of air, since my granddaughter could spend half a day without a word, locked in a space the size of a chicken coop. After Andrea's operation for strabismus, she had to wear glasses and a black patch that was changed every week from one eye to the other. So she wouldn't pull the glasses off, Nico dreamed up a contrivance made of six elastic bands and that many safety pins that crisscrossed over the top of her head. Some of the time Andrea tolerated it, but other times she flew into fits of exasperation and yanked the elastic bands until she managed to pull the whole thing down to diaper level. Incidentally, for a short while we had three children in diapers, and that is a
lot
of diapers. We bought them wholesale, and the most convenient system of changing the three was all at one time, whether they needed it or not. Celia or Nico would line up the opened-out diapers on the floor, lay the children on them, and wipe bottoms in a row, like an assembly line. They were able to do it with one hand while they talked on the telephone with the other, but I lacked their skill and always ended up plastered to my ears. The children were fed and bathed using the same one-two-three method. Nico got into the shower with them, soaped them, washed their hair, rinsed them off, and handed them out one by one for Celia to towel dry.

“You are a very good mother, Nico,” I told him one day with sincere admiration.

“No, Mamá, I'm a good father,” he replied, but I had never seen a father like him, and to this day I can't explain how he learned those skills.

At that time I was putting the final touches on my book
Paula
, struggling over the last pages, which were very painful for me. The memoir ended with your death, there was no other way it could end, but I was hazy on the details of that long night, it was swathed in a dense fog. I thought the room had been filled with people, and that I remembered seeing Ernesto in his Aikido whites, my parents, Granny, the grandmother who loved you so much, dead in Chile many years before, and others who could not possibly have been there.

“You were very tired, Mamá, and very sad. You can't remember the details,” Nico excused me. “I don't remember them myself.”

“What do those details matter? Write with your heart,” Willie added. “You saw what we couldn't see. Maybe it's true that the room was filled with spirits.”

I often opened the clay urn in which they had handed us your ashes. It is always on my writing table, the same table where my grandmother conducted her spiritist sessions. Sometimes I took out some letters and photographs of you before your illness, but I left those from your last year, when you were tied to your wheelchair, inert. I have never touched those again, Paula. Still today, so many years later, I can't look at you in that state. I read the letters, especially that spiritual will with instructions to be followed in case of your death, which you had written on your honeymoon. You were only twenty-seven years old at the time. Why were you already thinking of death? I wrote that memoir with many, many tears.

“What's the matter?” Andrea asked sympathetically in her quasi-language, scrutinizing me with her cyclopean eye.