Moving Forward in Reverse (28 page)

The woman glanced at her watch then said something in Romanian. I
turned to Ellen, whose understanding of Italian had been our only connection to
Romanian (thankfully an Eastern Romance language that bore similarities to
Italian). I waited for Ellen to piece together the words she could understand,
all the while thinking,
Maybe if we pretend we don’t understand she’ll let
us stay. Let’s just stay. Let us stay.

‘She says it’s time to leave,’ Ellen told me somberly. I looked
crestfallenly at the soft, little head cradled in my arm and had to fight a
bitter battle against the emotions burbling up inside of me. Carefully, I slid
one myo, then the other under each of Danny’s arms and helped him wobble to his
feet. Once stable, he made his way over to his sister who let Ellen retrieve
her sunglasses. Ellen lay a gentle kiss on the top of Nadia’s  head then
did the same to Danny’s. I stooped over each child and kissed their silken hair
in turn.

‘I’ll see you soon,’ I said, even though I knew they couldn’t
understand the English words I spoke. The woman stepped forward and opened the
door fully, allowing us to depart. Ellen and I skulked from the room, all the
while keeping one eye or both on the round faces of our children. Nadia and
Danny watched us retreat from the middle of the room. As the woman came to
stand beside them, I felt a stabbing pain at the knowledge that she would get
to stay here with our children while we were forced to leave.

The woman leaned down and whispered something in Nadia’s left ear.
Nadia brought her right hand to her mouth, turned slightly to her left, then
spun forward as she threw her right arm out in our direction, blowing us a kiss
good-bye.

I melted. Whatever resolve I had been clinging to vanished as if
blown away by her tender breath. I looked to Ellen, weak at the knees and
aching with longing. Ellen looked back, bleary-eyed just the same. She grabbed
my arm and pinched hard.

‘This is going to be a looong time to wait,’ I whispered as
another female, Romanian voice summoned us from down the hall.

31

We descended through the fog skulking across Puget Sound and into
western Washington, sinking towards the earth as if falling from a convoluted
dream.  On Monday, things resumed their usual humdrum routine: Ellen
worked and I was bored. I shuffled slowly to the loft-office and sank into the
personalized butt-shaped indentations in the office chair. I began to poke and
prod around the internet with no real intention other than to wile away the
hours. I knew what I wanted to do: make phone calls, plan trips to visit my
kids; heck, I’d even fill out more paperwork if it meant getting Nadia and
Danny home sooner. What I didn’t want to do – what I loathed having to do – was
wait.

On Tuesday Barb emailed to promise that we could ‘expect things to
be finalized by Thanksgiving’. I tried to reassure myself that Thanksgiving was
only four months away, but all I could think was what those four months meant:
Four months apart from Nadia and Danny; one-hundred and twenty days spent
knowing they were trapped in that dank little building masquerading as an
orphanage while Ellen and I were here; two thousand eight hundred and eighty
hours of waiting, endless, unendurable waiting.

To thwart the helpless despondency and restless anxiousness that
crawled under my skin, I delved into fantasy baseball. It, at least, served as
an outlet for the competitive energy that seemed to be a permanent constituent
of my genetic make-up and as a buffer of sorts against The Fog, which waded in
inch-by-inch when I was stranded without a purpose to anchor myself to.

The weekends were the only mild reprieve from the monotony of
waiting; the only time we could pretend we weren’t victims to the whims of the
Romanian court system and our hands weren’t tied until they decided to cut us
free. We would spend hours upon hours shopping for children’s clothing and
toys, gathering furniture and cheerful decorations to prepare the bedroom Nadia
and Danny would share come Thanksgiving. If we weren’t out accumulating
supplies, we were holed up in the bedroom across the hall from the master,
putting everything in place.

‘We should hear from Barb soon,’ Ellen commented as we were
installing the finishing touches on the kids’ room: stick-on frogs and
butterflies and various framed colorful drawings for the walls. I was lining up
a nail to hang a picture of a rainbow and glanced over my shoulder to find
Ellen smoothing the comforter on Danny’s bed after standing on it to paste a
blue and purple butterfly to the wall. Her hands floated across the ripples in
the bright blue fabric dotted with green leaves and orange and red flowers like
a crane skimming over a river. Gingerly, she stroked each wrinkle from the
bedspread, petting the blanket with such devotion and care you would think
there was a child sleeping beneath it. She straightened up gradually but
continued to gaze longingly at the empty bed for a few moments before reaching
down once more to adjust the small cluster of Teddy bears nestled around the
pillow.

We need those kids home,
I thought with such profound desperation I could barely keep my
knees from buckling. I hated the helplessness of waiting, all too reminiscent
of the helplessness I’d felt after waking from the coma.

‘Mm-hm,’ I cleared my throat, turning back to the nail and closing
the fingers of the right myo around a hammer. ‘Yup. Any day now,’ I said,
checking my alignment and lifting the hammer. October would be over before the
week was out, which meant our kids should be home four weeks from today. I
closed my eyes briefly, pinching my mouth shut on the whimper that threatened
to escape.
Only four more weeks.

Opening my now bleary eyes, I refocused on the task at hand,
hoisted the hammer over my shoulder, and swung for the nail. I had been
expecting the satisfying clunk of the hammer striking the head of the nail,
sinking it into the plaster and wood of the wall, but what I got instead was a
crrraack
that drowned out any more gratifying sounds.

I grimaced.
I must have hit the left myo,
I thought and
lowered the hammer to survey the damage. As I peered at the fingers and thumb
of the left myo, noting in the meantime that at least the nail was nicely dug
into the wall, I heard a thump and clatter from beside me. I looked down. The
hammer lay on the floor at my feet.

‘Scott? You okay?’ Ellen asked from across the room.

‘Yeah. Fine,’ I told her distractedly as I raised the right myo to
my face. I pressed the hand against the wall and watched the fingers flex
against the surface when they should have held firm.

Damn! They must have broken when I swung the hammer.
There always seemed to be
something wrong with the myos: a finger, a motor, a transmission.
Apparently
hammer-swinging requires the flexion of a wrist,
I realized too late.

My lips pursed in frustration, I looked from the hand to the
hammer to the nail sticking out of the wall.
To hell with it,
I thought
and bent down to retrieve the hammer with both hands. I had a job to finish.

‘Did I tell you I learned the Romanian for father is “Tata”?’ I
asked to keep Ellen distracted from my minor struggles. No need to cause alarm.

‘You didn’t tell me. How sweet!’

‘Yup. I think I’ll use that to help ease the transition.’

‘Definitely,’ she replied encouragingly. I peeked over my shoulder
and saw her distracted with rearranging the toys on the bookcase.

A few hours and thankfully only the one broken hand later, Ellen
and I stood together in the middle of the room, surveying the fruits of
three-months’ worth of labor. Against one wall stood a bookcase filled with
picture books, a decorative vase of bumble-bee flowers, and stuffed animals.
Along the opposite wall, two little beds with medium oak frames and a set of
matching dressers and side tables were carefully aligned.

Through a double window between their beds, the orange light of
sunset cast a dream-like glow over the lily pads and flowers of their bed
spreads and the dark wood shelves above the beds. Each shelf bore the name of
the child to whom the respective bed belonged, painted in pastels then carved
from wood by our own hands a few weekends back.

The walls were dappled with vibrant butterflies, leaping frogs,
and colorful pictures. A second window overlooked the backyard below where we
had erected a wooden swing set. It, too, bore their names along the roof of a
wooden fort, accessed by a rope ladder or green plastic slide. There were two
swings hanging off of the solid wood beams. A tire swing hovered just above the
ground beneath the fort.

It’s all here, ready and waiting
, I mused as we gazed at our handiwork. But
without the children to climb the ladder and swing on the swings; without their
warm little bodies to curl up in the beds and cuddle with the stuffed animals,
it all felt empty. It was like the rooms of children long since grown, still
preserved behind doors always kept closed; the outdated toys abandoned and
collecting dust, cobwebs creeping down from the ceiling. It was the mere
essence of childhood, a stage perfectly set, and oh so lonely.

When the sun sank below the tree line and the bedroom fell into
shadow, we crept from the room we’d so painstakingly prepared. I reached for
the doorknob, pulling the door shut behind us, but paused before the latch
could slide home. Glancing back at the sliver of room visible in the crack left
between the door and frame, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I eased the myo
away from the doorknob and inched back from the door, leaving that sliver of
space, a glimpse of the room beyond.

As I trailed after Ellen, my footsteps scuffing along the concrete
hall, she called over her shoulder, ‘You should have let me hang those
pictures.’

~~~

When November cast its foreboding chill over the landscape and
Barb had yet to contact us to prepare our travel arrangements, I decided I
could wait no longer. I hit the button for her agency, the number long since
saved to our phone, and waited for Laura to connect me to her office. I was
expecting an excuse; hoping that the cause for the delay was simply a backlog
of cases at Barb’s office. I hadn’t dared to think of worst-case scenarios or
play the what-if game. Such dour speculation would lead me nowhere good. So
when Barb answered in a slightly weary tone, I smiled brightly and told myself
it was a good sign – she was probably so swamped at work she hadn’t had time to
call, as I had hoped.

‘Hi, Barb,’ I greeted her brightly. ‘Ellen and I were just
wondering how things are progressing with our adoption.’

When all I got in response was the sound of her drawing in a
prolonged breath, my optimism began to waver. When she sighed my name like a
woman about to break up with her boyfriend, it took all my willpower not to
slam the handset back into its cradle.

No more bad news,
I pleaded silently.
Please, don’t give me any more bad news.
All I want is my kids to be home for the holidays.

‘It’s taking a little longer than anticipated. I’m sorry. Please
be patient. It’s a complicated process.’

Longer than anticipated. Complicated process. Please be patient.
I tried to wrap my head
around what she was telling me.

‘So they won’t be home by Thanksgiving?’ I asked bleakly.
It
was going to be their first Thanksgiving.

‘I’m afraid not,’ she replied, an audible wince cringing behind
her words. ‘But,’ she continued, her tone rising in exaggerated sanguineness,
‘I do think things should wrap up before Christmas.’

‘Mm-hmm.’ I didn’t want to doubt her word. I tried to believe in
what she said, but we had already waited nearly four months and she had made a
promise like this before. In the end, it was with pure resignation that I
thanked her and asked her to stay in touch. I hung up the phone, dreading the
task of breaking this news to Ellen. But what choice did I have? I was
powerless. I could feed myself, dress myself, walk and function like a normal
man, but I couldn’t bring my kids home on time.

~~~

Two weeks before Christmas, when I received no word from Barb yet
again, I gave her another call. This time when I asked after the progress of
our case, it was with wary anticipation, my gut clenched like a fighter ready
to take a hit. No news had come to mean bad news where our adoption was
concerned.

This time it was Easter. We could expect the kids home by Easter,
she said.
Please be patient
– those three little words every adoptive
parent dreads to hear. I gritted my teeth, broke in my new right myoelectric
hand, and finalized a trade offer for my fantasy baseball team.

As the snow began to melt and the beginning of April presented
promises of Spring, I called Barb once more. I wanted to scream at her through
the phone; wanted to demand that she tell me what was going on.,
Where are
my kids?!
I wanted to yell across the line.
They were supposed to be
here five months ago!

But instead I simply mumbled the same query I’d asked in each of
the preceding calls: How were things progressing with our adoption now?

When she begged for me to be patient yet again and couldn’t even
give me a definitive date or holiday to pin my hopes to, I decided it was time
to make my own waves.

It had been nine months since we spent those precious forty-five
minutes with Nadia and Danny, and from that day forth I had been living as if
afflicted with some degenerative ailment. The flesh-eating disease felt alive
and well within me, eating away at my heart with the passing of each day. I
couldn’t wait anymore. Someone had to do something – there had to be someone I
could reach out to who could
do something.

So I couldn’t count on Barb any more. As she had said herself, her
hands were tied. She had several cases she was managing, I was sure, so what
more could I expect? I, on the other hand, had only this one case and endless
hours to dedicate to it. I was a problem-solver, I reminded myself, and this
was just another (big) problem to be solved.

I emailed the trade offer and opened a new webpage, typing the URL
for Google.com, the newest bright star in the search-engine wave. I clicked the
rectangular search box beneath the blue, red, yellow, and green letters and
watched the black line of my cursor wink at me from the page.

Okay.

I was ready to get to work. Adrenaline pulsed through my veins,
fed by determination and grit. I was going to do this. Whatever it took;
however long it required, I would sit here until I had found the answers I was
after. I was going to bring my kids home if it was the last thing I did.

Okay.

I looked at the keyboard, the right and left myos open and
hovering over the keyboard. Thumbs ready to press the keys, and…

Nothing. No great idea. No spark of brilliance. No shining light
bulb to show me the way. Nothing. I had no idea where to even begin. Barb was
my only real connection to the courts in Romania and she had already made it
clear she was out of her depth at this point. I grimaced at the familiar words
that echoed through my head:
Please be patient.