A Southern Girl (21 page)

“Yes, I was. I told you she had been ill but had recovered. That is true.”

“You failed to mention surgery.”

“The scars are mere imperfections unrelated to the health of the child. They appear as surgical scars only because the testing was done badly.”

Faith Stockdale crossed her arms. “That is for the adopting parents to decide after a review of the records. They are surgical procedures which you know full well must be reported so an Alert can be issued.”

“I discussed her health at length with Dr. Kim.” I glanced at him for confirmation.

“That is so,” he said. “She was most concerned.”

“It was my judgment that such a cosmetic flaw did not require a report.”

“This child spent a month in the hospital. At the moment her new parents examine her all hell will break lose. I would say your judgment was very poor in this instance. I need to wire the States for instructions. In the meantime, let’s get this baby back up to the ward. She’s not going anywhere today.”

12

Elizabeth

Did Coleman really suggest we move to Charleston? And was I actually considering it? Not that night, the night he agreed to the adoption, but in the days following I found myself contemplating something I never thought I’d even consider. But in fairness, hadn’t he agreed to something
I feel certain he didn’t see coming? So maybe it balanced out. The offer from Barron Morris promised to put Coleman years ahead of where he stood in New Hampton, even as a new partner. In our married life he had never once suggested moving back, but somewhere in the recesses of my intuition I sensed he wanted to. Sarah would certainly need him now, as none of the reports of his father’s condition contemplated a full recovery. So will we relocate from the South to the Deep South? I need to decide in the days ahead. There better be no white wine shortage down there.

Coleman mentioned inviting Sarah to visit, but it didn’t occur to me that she would accept until the day she called to let us know she was coming. She arrived in New Hampton in the late afternoon, tired from her nine hours on the byways of the Carolinas and Virginia, because despite the luxury of interstate highways she doesn’t like them and will add hours to a trip to avoid them. Josh and Steven saw her from a window and rushed to greet her. Coleman and I followed, instructing the boys on her luggage. There were so many bags I wondered if she was moving to New Hampton just as we were heading to Charleston, a move she knew nothing about and wouldn’t until the time felt right. We hadn’t even told Josh and Steven because kids at that age think a secret is something you keep if you just whisper the information. She went immediately to her room, to “freshen up.” The boys lingered, knowing that she would have gifts for them as always.

The first days of her visit passed pleasantly. While Coleman worked and the boys were in school, we had long conversations about her new life, and there was no doubt, even to her, that is what it was; a life transformed. She told me that when she wasn’t at her husband’s bedside, she kept busy with garden club, bridge club, Bible study circle, Daughters of the American Revolution. Three afternoons a week she went swimming at the YMCA. She served as hostess for the Society for the Preservation of Charleston. Just listening to her schedule exhausted me, and I was less than half her age. Many women dropped in, she said, alone or in pairs, for coffee or just to chat. Friends invited her to dinner, urging upon her a second glass of wine if she felt like it.

But the stillness of the house loomed undeniably each evening. She resolutely rejected invitations to “stay over; it’s so late anyway.” She kept lights on, more than before, so the house was never dark when she turned the corner of Church Street and rumbled over the cobblestones to the
driveway. She locked her car, walked to the side entrance, and entered the house without fear. A couple of her friends, widows, reported feelings of a presence in their houses, wraiths they thought they sensed—sometimes even saw—which, they insisted, deepened their nostalgia for loved ones who were, at such moments, close enough to touch.

Sarah told me she sensed the opposite. If any apparition inhabited the house on Church Street, it came to her, stole silently in and out of rooms, hovered over her as she slept, as a ghostly absence of anything she recognized as connected to her husband or their life together. This was not to deny the reminders; the leather chair in the den where he had religiously perused the
Post and Sentinel,
his slippers in their closet, his old Navy uniform still suspended in the attic. When she saw these and other countless relics of his existence, she longed for, cried herself to sleep for, a wraith, for any corporeal presence however flimsy or ephemeral, to relieve the unmitigated emptiness of that house.

The fact that her mate of five decades required skilled care in perpetuity became clear. Watchful hours at the bedside made her ready for it to be over, for Coles to rise from his bed, reach for a cane or perhaps a walker, and announce that he was ready to go home, to mix a cocktail in time for the evening news. Instead, he drooled, and while she wanted to believe his efforts at speech intensified while she visited, she couldn’t be sure. She knew his mind was still there as he became more proficient at the blinking code that forced her into questions answered yes or no. His left hand became more active, allowing him to return the affectionate squeeze she greeted and left him with. His physical therapist suggested a computer might be feasible, which fostered in Sarah both encouragement for better communications and the pessimism of endless paralysis, a prognosis Dr. Adams refused to rule out. At one visit, she asked if he would mind her visiting Virginia. No, he blinked.

Sarah slept a little later than was her habit, and Coleman had usually left for his office by the time she arose to have coffee with me. She dutifully phoned the nursing home to get a report. She asked the nurse to place the receiver at her husband’s ear, into which she reported news of their grandsons, some funny comment Coleman or I had come up with, or perhaps world news filtered through her peculiar lens. If she asked a question, the nurse reported the answer. She ended each call with assurances of her love and her return to him as soon as she wore out her welcome.

Sarah seemed to derive comfort from reminiscence, so I encouraged her recollections. Always fascinated by genealogy, particularly her own, she seemed to relish it all the more, telling stories of her youth surrounded by eccentric aunts, tormenting siblings, and memorable cousins. “Coleman’s great grandfather on my side,” she reminded me, “was the youngest full professor in the history of the University of South Carolina,” while I, washing dishes or attempting to stay ahead of the ironing, would prod her to tell more, and she did.

On the evening of the fifth day, just before Coleman’s arrival home, the telephone rang. Sarah knitted at the breakfast table and I had just gone into the basement to see why the washing machine emitted the high-pitched squeal which often signaled an unbalanced load. Sarah answered, a fact I learned only later, and not from her. Sarah hung up as I came upstairs. “Did I hear the phone?” I asked as I entered the kitchen. “You can’t hear over the racket in the basement.”

“Yes,” said Sarah, her eyes downcast at her knitting on the table. “A sales call … I told them to try back.” She lied.

“You should have told them ‘no,’” I said. “That’s what I’ll tell them.”

Sarah gathered up her knitting. “I’m not feeling quite myself this afternoon,” she said. “I think I’ll lie down for a time.”

“I’ll check on you for dinner,” I offered.

Sarah did not appear at dinner. Later that evening, Coleman and I prepared for bed.

“She just said she wasn’t feeling well,” I told him.

He dropped one shoe to the floor. “She told me the same thing when I called through the door. It’s odd; she has the constitution of a horse.”

In my nightgown and robe, I sat at the edge of the bed. “I’m surprised I haven’t heard from Open Arms. When we called to tell them, they said we would be getting confirmation in two weeks. It’s been three. I think I’ll call them tomorrow. And incidentally, have you told your mother what’s about to happen?”

Coleman, in shorts and T-shirt, his standard sleeping attire, pulled back the covers. “I was going to ask you the same question?”

“Not in this lifetime. You’re going to handle that one.” I paused. “Coleman, what are we going to do if this baby arrives while your mother is here? Where will we put her?”

“The baby or mother?”

“I’m being serious. We have one guest room …”

“And two guests, potentially.”

“I’d hardly call our new daughter a guest. Do you have any ideas?’

“I suppose they could be roommates,” he said, climbing into bed.

“Do you have any serious ideas? Has your mother said how long she’s staying?”

“Not to me, but I don’t think it’s fair to put pressure on her. She’s been through a lot and I want her to feel like she can stay here for as long as she wants.”

“I do, too,” I said, setting the dial on the electric blanket. “I’m enjoying her company. I just worry that we’ll get a phone call and have two or three days to sort out where everyone will sleep.”

“Well, I know where I’m going to sleep,” he said, snuggling into his pillow.

I turned off the last lamp by the bed. “Good night. You’re hopeless.”

“I know it,” he said. “I’ll break the news tomorrow. Good night.”

When I called Open Arms the following day, they put me through to someone named Benita Mallory, who seemed puzzled to hear from me. “I left a message yesterday,” she reminded me. “I gave the person who answered the news. About 4:00 in the afternoon. I’m sure of it. I have a line through your name on my call list.”

“No,” I said, and then it hit me what must have happened. “I want to make sure I have the details right. Can you repeat them for me while I write them down?”

“Of course. Your application for Soo Yun has been approved and she will be arriving on Monday, the thirty-first of this month, at Kennedy Airport in New York. I’ll be calling you back later this week with the flight number and the arrival time, but I knew you’d want this news as soon as possible so you could make your plans to meet the plane.”

When I told Coleman the news, he said his mother probably forgot. “Forgot?” I said. “No way. When you break the news today, ask her how something like that slipped her mind. Coleman, she said it was a sales call. What would have happened if I hadn’t called the agency? We don’t have much time as it is.”

“Maybe she was just waiting for the right time to give you the message.”

My doubts got the better of me. “And maybe the Easter Bunny will stay for dinner.”

I wasn’t there the next day when his mother confronted him. He swears she told him about the Benita Mallory phone call before he asked, and I’d like to think that is true. He said she made a pitch to call off the adoption; that she got emotional about it. All I know for certain is that when I walked in from shopping on that dreary Saturday afternoon, Sarah had retreated to her room and didn’t come out until the next morning, when she went to church. Perhaps she was embarrassed. She should have been. Church must have done what churches do for some, because when she returned she apologized for not telling me Benita had called. I accepted the apology, as it seemed heartfelt.

That made the week that followed less tense, although I held no illusion that she had given up. When she didn’t return on time from church the next week, Coleman went looking for her, and sure enough she made a final plea to stop what to us now seemed inevitable. She still had not said how long she intended to stay, and it wasn’t until the next week, a mere two days before Soo Yun was to arrive, that we learned her plans.

I spent that morning in the attic, where I found the crib in which Josh and Steven had slept and which would now hold Soo Yun. Dusting it, cleaning it with a strong solvent, and painting it in the green and white I had selected for the nursery filled me with nostalgia for those prior pregnancies. I marveled at the coincidence of emotions and sensations welling up inside me following the confirmation of arrival details by Benita Mallory, like I was actually pregnant again. I could almost feel in my legs the swelling I endured in the final throes of my eighth and ninth months with Josh and Steven, and one night I woke up giggling at an imagined elbow or knee in my pelvis. The crib, we had decided, would be set up in our room until Sarah’s room became available.