If You Lived Here (24 page)

We take seats around a large conference table. The room is musty, yellow, in need of paint. A young woman appears, sets a tray on the desk, and begins pouring tea. Mai and I face the windows along the back wall, which overlook a stand of palm trees and, beyond that, a rice field where two boys coax a water buffalo along a path. A slight breeze ruffles the field, but the air in the room doesn’t move at all. The girl switches on a TV in the corner. One of the Americans murmurs, “World Cup.” Another adjusts the time on his watch. John Elder leans forward in his seat, his wife’s hand resting on his back. A woman with a ponytail pulled high and perky—Eleanor Survey, I think—pushes aside her tea, fishes through her purse, and pulls out a lipstick.

In the doorway, Mrs. Huyen and a bespectacled woman in a white medical jacket talk animatedly, like neighbors gossiping on a porch. The

rest of us will the day forward. Finally, the two women break off their conversation and, still smiling, amble into the room. “Ladies and gentle-men,” Mrs. Huyen says. “I would like to introduce you to Dr. Le Bich Thuy, who is not only the director of this home for children, but also the person responsible for founding it over twenty years ago. Today you will meet your healthy babies, and you have the dedication and determination of Dr. Thuy and her staff to thank for that.”

Mrs. Huyen pauses, gazing out at us. We take the cue to clap. The doctor grins and raises her hand in modest acknowledgment.

For the next half hour, Mrs. Huyen translates a welcome speech by Dr. Thuy that not only includes the story of the founding of the orphanage, but also thanks everyone from the Communist Party of Vietnam to the Hanoi People’s Committee to the Ha Dong District official who, twenty-one years ago, first agreed to turn over this small plot of hospital land for use as an orphanage. Over the past two decades, she tells us, the orphanage has taken in over six hundred infants, most of whom have been adopted by Vietnamese families, and some of whom have been adopted by foreign families like ourselves.

I drift in and out. It feels ridiculous, now, to be so close to my baby and not rush directly toward him. I manage, I suppose, through some combination of willpower and a suspicion that I couldn’t move even if they let me. Beyond the trees outside the window, the two boys turn at the edge of the rice field and drag the water buffalo back in our direction. The smaller boy pulls it forward by the rope hanging around its neck; the taller one holds the other end of the rope and whacks the animal on the rump. Their skin, in this heat, must be slick from sweat, their breathing heavy. Had his mother not abandoned him, my child might have lived a life in which water buffaloes and rice fields were as familiar to him as cocker spaniels and swimming pools are to the children of Wilmington.

Somewhere out there, maybe just beyond these rice fields, that mother lives. Later, I suppose, I will call her by other names—biological mother, birth mother—but I haven’t even met him yet, so she’s still more his “mother” than I am. What’s she doing now? I imagine her in some cramped house, cooking lunch for a family of ten. Or maybe she’s a fifteen-year-old country girl, doing

what she needs to do to stay in school. Or maybe she’s lying beneath some stranger who will give her a dollar or two for sex. Here’s what I’m doing: offering a home to a child who needs one; feeling grateful that her decision led me to my son. Here’s what I’m also doing: building my family on someone else’s pain. How did that woman feel when she gave him up? I’ll always wonder. Poor Hai Au. He’ll always wonder.

It is nearly one o’clock when Dr. Thuy finally explains the procedure for meeting our babies. To avoid overwhelming the children and the staff, parents will enter the dormitory one couple at a time. Once each set of parents meets their child, the new family can go into the garden or out onto the porch, making way for the next introduction. The families can stay until four o’clock to give the children a chance to acclimate, and then they can take the children back to Hanoi.

What?

I raise my hand to Mrs. Huyen. “We’re taking the children back to Hanoi?”

The other Americans stare at me. “Nobody told me that,” I say.

Mrs. Huyen puffs up with pride. “Oh, yes, of course, dear. I have a very good relationship with my orphanages. Your agency should have explained. Or, would you like to wait until after the giving and receiving ceremony tomorrow?”

Mai and I glance at each other. I wave my hand energetically. “Oh, no.

It’s great. I’m ready.”

Dr. Thuy calls the Elders first. They stand up quickly, then follow Dr. Thuy and Mrs. Huyen. They look graceful and light, dancers leaping across the stage. I cannot move. I cannot walk. I cannot, maybe ever, hold a baby.

Ten minutes later, Mrs. Huyen appears in the doorway and motions to me.

Mai stands and takes my hand to help me up. “Come,” she says, smiling.

We follow Mrs. Huyen outside and down along the porch. The Elders sit on a small bench under a tree in the garden. She holds a baby in her lap, its body turned to face her. She speaks softly, smoothing the child’s hair back with her fingers. Her husband wipes his eyes.

Dr. Thuy stands in front of the wooden gate that separates the main porch from the mat-covered area inhabited by the children. The mats are empty now, except for a couple of barefoot staff members standing to the side, observing the foreigners. Before allowing us inside the enclosure, Dr. Thuy motions for us to slip off our sandals and leave them outside. Barefoot, I step through the gate. Mai follows. We walk to the second of the three rooms and pause at the door. The dormitory is narrow, with two cribs, head to foot, along the wall on either side and a single one at the far end in front of the window. The space in the middle of the room, covered with mats, is no wider than a double bed. An old metal fan makes slow, creaky turns on the ceiling.

Two toddlers occupy each crib, some awake, some dozing, a few watching the door. One stands, hanging on to the railing, just as Hai Au does in my photo. But it’s not Hai Au.

Dr. Thuy walks to the second crib on the right. “
Con
ê
i, con
ê
i,
” she coos, leaning over the crib and looking down at someone inside. Then, without looking up, she motions with a finger for me to come closer.

My legs feel heavy, as creaky as a hinge that needs oil. I’ve spent so much time preparing for this moment, but I never imagined that these last few feet would be the hardest. When I fail to move, Dr. Thuy walks over and takes my arm, then leads me to the crib. Two children lie side by side on a thin gray mattress. One is curled up asleep, its face turned toward the wall. The other lies on his back, his hands resting on his cheeks, looking up. His eyes are large and impassive, the same eyes that I memorized in my photograph, only older now, more well-defined. Beautiful? I couldn’t say. Perfect? Yes.

I’d prepared myself for screams and terror. Mine might be the first Caucasian face he’s ever seen. But he doesn’t scream. He doesn’t seem afraid. He doesn’t smile, either. For a long time, his eyes move slowly over my face, like someone paging through a book. I don’t want to move or scare him, and so we remain in this position, one staring up, the other staring down, until Dr. Thuy finally scoops him up and sets him in my arms. I hold him awkwardly, one hand pressed against each side, maintaining a distance between us. He feels solid. Something in

his expression keeps me from pulling him closer. He lifts his hand and touches my face.

Within two minutes of driving away from the orphanage, the Elders’ new son—a dark-skinned and sinewy eighteen-month-old they call Granger— dirties his diaper. The van, twenty degrees cooler than the air outside, starts to smell like a Porta Potti. But Granger and his parents don’t seem to care. He has a brand-new brightly colored set of PlaySkool keys and he perches on Posie’s lap, examining them and cooing amiably.

At least, I imagine him cooing. I can’t actually hear anything over the sound of Hai Au’s screams. They are livid and ferocious and they tear through his body as he tries to squirm away from me. The two of us had nearly three hours of peaceful coexistence, sitting in the shade in the garden, sometimes alone, sometimes with his caregiver, a sweet and brawny girl named Minh. We played “This Little Piggy,” “Pat-a-Cake,” “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” and a game that Minh taught me where I wiggled my fingers against Hai Au’s tummy. He smiled and laughed through all of it, his giggles as fine and precious as works of art. Then it was four o’clock, time to go, and Minh began to cry. I think she tried to hide it, but Hai Au noticed right away and cried, too. He wrapped his arms around her neck and she gently pried him off. Panicked, he grabbed her hair, thick handfuls of it, jerking her head this way and that to hang on. She laughed, which seemed to relieve him, as if he decided she’d only been joking when she tried to hand him off to this stranger. His laugh was loud and strained, half comforted, half anxious. But I still had my arms around his body and he knew it. Minh whispered to him in Vietnamese, serious again and softly urging, and his cries began again, despondent.

Mrs. Huyen hustled up to us from behind. “Come on, dears,” she said, her voice cheerful and tidy. “This is the hard part. We make it fast so they don’t have time to cry.”

Too late for that. Hai Au and Minh and I had nothing in common but tears. Why didn’t anyone tell me that, in order to have my son, I would have to break his heart?

Somehow, before we even realized what she was doing, Mrs. Huyen lifted Hai Au out of Minh’s arms and out of my grip, then strode away with him. “Shelley, Mai, let’s go!”

Mai appeared in the doorway of the conference room, where she’d been stretched out on a wooden couch, napping. She walked over, looked at me, then at Minh, then at Hai Au, his little head peeking over Mrs. Huyen’s shoulder, bouncing toward the van. And that was the moment he became real to me, particular, not just some random child assigned to me on a form. A real person, with a real name—Hai Au—that actually does fit him. Would it take any less time to feel that way if he had emerged from my womb?

But the look on his face—both furious and terrified—made me feel like a criminal. “I can’t stand this,” I said. The caregiver’s eyes rested on Hai Au and it seemed she couldn’t stand it, either. For some reason, I took her hand and held it in both of mine. I looked at Mai. “Is it wrong? Please, ask her. Is it wrong for me to take him?”

The two of them talked for a moment. Minh gripped my hand, knead-ing it between her fingers as she spoke. Mai looked at me. “She says he’ll be okay. You’ll give him his real home. In a few days, he’ll get happy.”

I read somewhere that infants perceive abandonment. The smells change. The sounds of people’s voices shift. On some level, even newborns feel it. And so Hai Au, who had lived through the experience one time already, now faced it again with the loss of Minh. I felt cruel, given his obvious love for her, to torture him this way. I thought of asking, Will
you
take him instead? But she had released me. She had handed me, the thief, the goods.

Now, in the van, between one scream and the next, his head rears back and he throws up. The adults yelp in dismay. I feel the wetness seeping through my shirt, but I refuse to take my eyes off him. He looks so scared. I hold him. From the front seat, Lap, the driver, laughs and explains that the babies, most of whom have never traveled by car, often get nauseated. With Hong Ngoc out of the van (she rode home with her mother), he has become garrulous and demands that Mai translate everything he says. Lightly resting one hand on the steering wheel, he uses the other to point

to spots in the van that have, at one time or another, been splattered with vomit.

And so we suffer back to Hanoi. I grip Hai Au while Mai wipes up the vomit with one of Lap’s rags. “See if there’s anything interesting for him in my purse,” I venture. She bends down to the floor and brings up object after object from our bags—a credit card, lipstick, crinkled receipts from the newsstand at the Los Angeles airport—but he doesn’t even look at what she offers. My child, my son, just screams and screams, utterly alone in his grief.

Mai refuses to take him. While I sit on a chair, holding Hai Au, now sleeping in my arms, she gets organized. She seems to have abandoned her hope of finding a better hotel, probably because, now that there are three of us, she knows we couldn’t manage it. She unpacks my bags, finds ways to fit our belongings into the various shelves and cupboards of the tiny room, supervises three young hotel workers who remove the big bed and replace it with two twins, one on each wall with a narrow path to the balcony between them. Following my instructions, she assembles the portable crib I brought from home, covers the crib mattress with a sheet, fluffs the suitcase-smooshed baby pillow, and sets a Mickey Mouse and a plastic train down inside. Then she sets up a little changing area on the other side of the crib, stocked with piles of Pampers, wipes, and ointments. She handles everything, but she won’t hold Hai Au. She barely pauses to look at him.

“He got enough problems without thinking about this Vietnamese lady in the room,” she says. “He need time to get to know you.” She’s right, I suppose. But I wish she wouldn’t steer so clear. I want a partner sitting next to me, cross-legged on the floor, someone also anxious and willing to spend hours staring at this little boy. Mai won’t do that, and I’ve had to abandon an older fantasy, the idea that Martin would do that. No one else will do that. Okay, maybe my mother will.

A few minutes before six, Mai decides to go out to buy us some food.

I cradle my sleeping boy, lean close to inhale his sweet, milky breath. His face is strong and sturdy, not at all delicate, expressive even when he’s sleeping. He shrugs, sighs, yawns, taps his fingers to the air as if he’s playing piano. His lips are full, the color of plums, and his wide, flat nose gives him an expression that is both pouty and determined. He is not yet two, but so substantial. I doze, then wake again when Hai Au stretches, whimpers, opens his eyes. We look at each other. He furrows his brow with mild concern. “What’s next?” he seems to ask.