Can You Keep a Secret? (14 page)

‘Why exactly do we have to attend this thing?’

Colby was behind the wheel of his luxury car, headed for what Caitlin had called a compulsory information night, related to their adoption. It had been organised by their attorney but was being held in a classroom at the Larchmont elementary school. Caitlin sat in the passenger seat, chewing her fingernails.

‘It’s just part of the process. They have a speaker who is adopted, or else they have people there who have adopted children, and they teach you about the adoption book you have to make.’

‘We have to make a book?’ It seemed to Caitlin that Colby hardly ever listened to what she had to say.

‘I told you about this. We have to make a book for the child that we’re going to adopt. We’re supposed to explain how we aren’t his birth parents – or her birth parents – and how we got him from the orphanage.’

‘Right,’ said Colby, ‘like the kid won’t know that? Sounds like bullshit.’

‘Everything that isn’t related to Carnegie sounds like bullshit to you.’ Carnegie had been taking up more and more of Colby’s time, or at least he’d been spending more and more of his time at Carnegie, and Caitlin didn’t like it. ‘The point is, we have to do it or they won’t send our file through to Russia.’

‘Right.’ Colby parked, and they made their way through the school grounds, following arrows that had been drawn on sheets of A4 paper, towards a room that had a giraffe poster on one wall and crayon drawings of elephants suspended from the ceiling. They were a touch late, and the room was already quite full. The facilitator was a chubby woman in stretch jersey, with hair that had been dyed burgundy, and timber earrings. Her shoes were Birken-stocks, and she wore them with toed socks.

‘Well, welcome! I’m your host, Mavis-Marie,’ she said, after everyone had taken their seats. ‘I guess I don’t need to tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you’re all through the first stage of the adoption process. Your paperwork is in. I know, hooray, right! Now you’re working on your adoption books. I’m going to tell you about how that’s got to be done.’

There were eight couples in the audience, all of them man-and-wife and all of them Caucasian – this was Larchmont, after all. They sat in school chairs, facing Mavis-Marie. There was a table set up with a percolator, jugs of milk and packet sugar.

‘But, before we get to the business of making your adoption book, I’d like to introduce you to our guest speaker,’ Mavis-Marie said. ‘I won’t say too much – I will let our guest tell her own story – but my feeling is, the adoption books that you make are going to be very different after you’ve heard her speak.’

A slim woman sitting up front had been waiting for this moment. She got to her feet and gave a little wave. She had some Asian features, but she had African American ones too, including tight dark curls, which had been cropped short.

‘Please say hello to our guest, Lisa-Anh,’ Mavis-Marie said, and after the light applause had faded she added, ‘Lisa-Anh has come here this evening to speak to you from the perspective of somebody who’s already been through the adoption process. Not as a parent. Lisa-Anh is an adopted child.’

Some in the group clapped again. Lisa-Anh took the floor. She wasn’t even a little bit shy.

‘Hello, and thank you all so much for coming,’ she said. ‘As Mavis-Marie has just said, my name is Lisa-Anh and I’m an adoptee. I was born in Vietnam, probably in 1968, and I came to America at about the age of two.’

Colby thought, ‘She was
probably
born in 1968?’ but Lisa-Anh read his mind.

‘You’ll notice that I’ve said I was probably born in 1968,’ she said. ‘The truth is, we don’t know – nobody knows – exactly how old I am, or when I was born. I was dropped
at an orphanage, and that’s all I really know. But I still feel very lucky. My parents – the American couple who adopted me – are fantastic. I couldn’t love them more. But I’m not here to tell you how wonderful it’s been to be raised in America! I’m here to share some of what it’s like to be an adoptee, to not know anything about the woman who gave birth to you, and to not even know your own birthday. And I’m also here to tell you that my most treasured possession when I was growing up was this.’

Lisa-Anh held up a battered exercise book. ‘This book is my adoption book. My parents – my adoptive parents, the people I call Mom and Dad – made this for me. You’ll notice the first picture, on the inside cover here – this is me. It was taken when I was still in the orphanage in Hanoi.’

The group strained forward to see the photograph. Lisa-Anh paused, so everyone could get a good look. The picture was black and white, with a printed white frame, and it showed a small child with dark curls and dark skin.

‘If her mother was Vietnamese, I guess we know who the father was,’ Colby whispered. ‘Look at the skin! The hair! He’d have to be US military.’

‘Shhh …’ Caitlin was shocked.

‘No, it’s okay, your husband’s right,’ said Lisa-Anh, nodding in Colby’s direction. ‘In all likelihood, my father was a US soldier. Looking at me, people can tell: I’m Vietnamese, but I’m also African American. And the only African Americans in Hanoi in 1968 were servicemen. And some of them had relationships with local girls. So, sure, my
father was probably a US serviceman. But I don’t know why my mother decided to give me up. I don’t know whether she did that after I was born and she saw how I looked. I don’t know if it was because my father raped her. I don’t know if he had to leave Vietnam after the fall of Saigon. Maybe he was one of those men put onto helicopters and my mother was one of the women left below, screaming for him. Those are just some of the scenarios that I’ve played out in my mind, but the truth is, I just don’t know.’

She was still looking at Colby – not in a cold way, but with an expression that hinted at her hope that he, as a prospective father of an adopted child, might understand the confusion and uncertainty that had been her companions all her life.

‘I apologise,’ said Colby. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude.’

‘It’s fine,’ said Lisa-Anh smiling. ‘The questions you’re asking – how did I come to be born, and to whom – are the questions I’ve asked about myself. And now you are all in the process of adopting a child just like me.’

Colby nodded.

Lisa-Anh held up the book again. ‘I’m going to pass my adoption book around. You’re all free to look through it. But please be gentle with it. It’s the most precious thing I own.’

Caitlin studied the book carefully. Besides the photograph of the baby Lisa-Anh, it had photographs of the orphanage where she’d lived as a child, and of her new American parents – her father in a fringed vest, and her
mum in flared pants with embroidery down the leg – not in Vietnam, but on the tarmac in Minnesota.

‘Americans couldn’t go to Vietnam to pick up their children in those days,’ Lisa-Anh said as the book went around. ‘There were a number of agencies working in Saigon to bring unwanted children – in particular, unwanted children of American servicemen – to the United States. We were handed to our new parents as we came off the plane.’

Caitlin shook her head, disbelieving.

Colby put up his hand, and said, ‘That’s actually what we want, to have our child brought here rather than having to go there. It actually sounds like a better idea. Empty out an orphanage in Russia, send all the kids here, and we go and pick them up. One flight instead of all of us having to go there.’

Mavis-Marie frowned and rose from her seat. ‘We don’t do that anymore,’ she said. ‘That was a wartime situation. Where are you going? Russia or China? Doesn’t matter. That’s not a wartime situation. You can make the flight.’

‘My wife has a fear of flying.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ said Caitlin. She was conscious of the other couples looking at her.

‘Well, it doesn’t matter. You have to go to the orphanage. That’s something for the two of you to work out, obviously. But they don’t just send the babies here anymore. No, no, no. But anyway, it doesn’t matter. That’s not why we are here today. We are here today to talk about the kind of things you might want to put in
your adoption books. Thank you, Lisa-Anh, for showing us yours.’

The group clapped. Lisa-Anh bowed her head and swept her skirt under her bottom as she sat down again.

‘I’ve got some other examples here, including some examples of what
not
to do,’ Mavis-Marie said, popping the lid off a plastic storage container. ‘These are some of the books that were started in one of the classes I had last year.’ She began passing out exercise books. Most were covered with photographs of little Chinese girls, with their hands clasped under their chins.

‘Just to be clear, these aren’t real children,’ Mavis-Marie said, ‘these are practice adoption books, made by people like you who were waiting to adopt.’

Colby looked at the book he’d been given. Somebody had drawn a picture of an empty crib on the opening page, with a sad mum and dad standing beside it. The dad character also had a speech bubble. He was saying, ‘But look – there’s no baby in the cradle!’

Colby leaned over and whispered in Caitlin’s ear, ‘Look at this! So depressing!’

Mavis-Marie had been walking around the group, handing out books. She looked over Colby’s shoulder. ‘Yes … that book you’ve got … hold it up for the rest of the group,’ she said. Colby held it up. ‘Show the picture that person has drawn. That’s exactly the kind of thing we don’t want to see. We don’t want sad faces in the adoption book. And we don’t want the focus so much on the parents, either.
Remember, adoption isn’t about getting a baby to make the parents happy. Adoption is about making sure that every child is given the opportunity to grow up in a loving home. Think about the difference.’

Colby couldn’t really see the difference. Caitlin put her hand up, like a child in school, and said, ‘Excuse me, Mavis-Marie, but when do you recommend starting these books? Should we be making one already, or do we wait until after we’ve had a child allocated to us?’

‘Good question!’ said Mavis-Marie, nodding. ‘My advice is, the day that a child is allocated to you, that’s the same as finding out that you’re pregnant. It’s not the end of the process. It’s the start of the process. And that’s the day you start the book. You’ll be given a photograph. That photograph should be in the book. You might also be given a report on your child, from the orphanage, with things like the baby’s name, the baby’s gender, size, hair colour, any health concerns. That report should go in the book. And then, when you travel to pick up your child, you make sure you take a good-sized padded envelope with you, so you can collect things for your adoption book. Have a think about what you might like to keep: copies of your airline tickets, the bit of the boarding pass they let you keep, your receipt from the taxi to the orphanage if you have to take a taxi. All of those things can go in your book. Plus, you’ll be taking photographs. Take one of the hotel where you stayed before you met your child. Take one of the orphanage. Your child won’t remember any of those things. You have to
capture those memories. Then, when you get home, take a photograph of the home-coming. You’ll have people at the airport ready to see you off the plane. Grandma, Grandpa. They might have balloons saying “Welcome Home!” and “It’s a Girl!”, just like if you were bringing a baby home from hospital. Take a photograph of all of that. Keep the old balloons. Deflate them, put them in the adoption book.’

‘It’s like scrapbooking,’ one of the other wives said.

‘Exactly,’ said Mavis-Marie.

Caitlin looked down at her feet. She couldn’t stop smiling. ‘Can you see Pearl doing that?’ she whispered to Colby. ‘Standing at the airport holding a Welcome Home balloon?’

‘No chance,’ said Colby.

They had spoken to Pearl just once about the idea of adopting a child from Russia, on one of the rare occasions they had gone to visit her since the wedding. Pearl had been leaning down to feed a doggy treat to Miffy, and she was so startled she almost got her fingers bitten.

‘What kind of fool idea is that?’ she responded. ‘Those children are abandoned for a reason. They either have something wrong with them or else their mothers are prostitutes, and apples don’t fall far from the tree.’

Colby said, ‘Really, Mom. They’re little kids who need a home.’

‘Are you sure about that?’ said Pearl. ‘Or are they abandoned because they’re mentally defective? The ones I’ve seen on TV don’t look good. They roll around on their mattresses. They’ve got fingers in their mouths. They dribble.’

‘That’s because they’ve been neglected,’ said Caitlin. ‘What they need is a loving home. We’ve asked for a little boy – a toddler as opposed to a baby. A little boy who needs a home.’

‘And the boy we adopt, he’ll be your grandson,’ said Colby.

Pearl picked up Miffy and said, ‘Not in my lifetime he won’t.’

‘We must remember to put a photograph of Pearl in our adoption book,’ Caitlin whispered to Colby, ‘and she can be saying, “Who is this mental defective? He’s no grandchild of mine.”’

Colby nodded, grinned and said, ‘Shhh …’

Mavis-Marie was still pacing the room, and as far as Colby was concerned, she was also droning on. ‘One of the things I like to emphasise is the importance of making sure everything that goes into your adoption book is 100 per cent true,’ she said. ‘You don’t want to assume, for example, that your child’s biological parents are dead. I’ve seen that done. I’ve seen the adoptive parents put down “You were an orphan”, but you can’t put that down unless you know that, and that’s very hard to know for sure.’

‘But the kids come from orphanages – aren’t they orphans?’ asked Colby.

‘Not all of them.’ Mavis-Marie shook her head. ‘Some of them have biological parents who can’t look after them. That’s the majority, probably. Like Lisa-Anh here, we don’t assume that your birth mother is dead, do we, Lisa-Anh?’

Lisa-Anh stood up again and shook her head. ‘Oh no,
I think there’s a good chance that my mother is alive, actually. Let’s say she was twenty-something when she had me, she’d only be in her late fifties or maybe in her early sixties now. But we don’t know for sure. All we know is that she dropped me at the orphanage. So, she was definitely alive then. And unless something has happened – maybe in the war? Or in the unrest, after the war? – unless something’s happened, there’s no reason why she wouldn’t be alive now. My mom has always made a point of not saying that I’m an orphan. We don’t know if I’m an orphan. I was placed in an orphanage, but that’s not the same thing. My mom says, “We don’t know for sure why your mom gave you up,” and that’s fine. That’s the truth.’