Moving Forward in Reverse (34 page)

We were approaching a building no bigger than a tool shed from
which wiry lines of rope had been strung and clothes hung. Two boys, one in his
mid-teens and the other no older than Nadia’s five years were laughing, bent over
something in a corner too shady for me to see. As we drew nearer I saw that
across from the small shed was a lean-to made of sheet metal built around the
long trunk of a grey tree. A pile of old tractor tires were scattered in front
of it, lying over a layer of broken rubble that was probably the remnants of
when the wall was built.

Waste not,
I thought as I eyed a set of unpainted, metal monkey bars, rusting
and held together with twine. A yellow-and-purple plaid blanket was flung over
the top as if to create a patch of shade below, a function it wasn’tt
accomplishing very well at this midday hour.

I peered at the boys as we drew nearer. They were playing with a
couple stones, giggling, as they squatted by what I now saw was a small doorway
into the shed-like building. It was such a small opening, I almost felt
overzealous in calling it a door and not a window, but the boys could have
slipped inside if they’d chosen to. I supposed in a compound of children, it
was a door.

‘Eet’s lunch time for dee children,’ Gail said as she led me
around to the other side of the squat building where a more adult-sized door
was propped open by a portly clay pot. We were instantly assaulted by a gust of
hot, smoky air as we stepped into the adumbral interior of the building.

In the middle of the room, a woman in a blousy green dress with
white daisies smattered across it and a pink scarf tied over her hair was
squatting beside an open fire. She had a large bowl of some light brown batter
beside her left knee and was holding a flat, round pan constructed like a
circular griddle over the edge of the fire as she slowly rotated a layer of the
batter across the pan’s surface. I watched, mesmerized as her wiry arms dipped
frightfully close to the flames. Her arms never once wavered in their motion
until the batter coated the entire pan. When it was finished, at which time she
rested the pan with its crepe-like concoction atop a rack over the fire pit.

‘She ees making injera, a traditional bread of Ethiopia,’ Gail
explained, her eyes fixed on the woman by the fire. ‘Eet ees a mixture of a
grain, water, salt, and oil. They use eet to scoop their food.’

I glanced back to the elderly woman in time to see her carefully
lower a lid over the pan. A few moments later, she lifted the lid and tenderly
pinched one of the curled corners of the injera to pull it onto a blue and
yellow woven plate much like a hot pad. She set the flat, pancake-like bread
aside and the process began again.

Behind her, another woman was collecting the cooled injera and
rolling them like carpets to be stacked on yet another of these colorful, woven
plates. When a pyramidal pile had accumulated on a plate, she set it in the
hobbit-sized doorway on the other side of the hut where it was promptly
retrieved by the two boys.

‘Shall vee go find Michias?’ Gail asked, indicating the door with
an open arm. A part of me wanted to stay, too fascinated by the cooking process
to leave, but it was minute in comparison to the part of me which longed to see
my son.

‘Absolutely,’ I told her and turned to duck out the door. I
trailed behind Gail as she wound her way back to the white building with a red
chimney. Inside, we emerged into a narrow hallway with pea-green walls and
another border of red paint along its base. As we turned into the first room
off this hallway, my eyes fell on Michias.

He was sitting at one corner of a wooden table accompanied by six
other children about his age. They each had plates covered with three
different, saucy-looking dishes: one a golden brown; one yellow and clearly a
derivative of corn; and one a dark, succulent green. A plate of the rolled
injera sat in the middle of the table with only a few rolls of the bread still
remaining. All around the table, the kids were using the injera like tortillas to
scoop the food off their plates, pinching chunks of this or that between
torn-off pieces of the fluffy wrap and stuffing it into their mouths.

They glanced at Gail and me a little suspiciously, but were too
intent on eating to pay us much mind as we hovered in the background of their
meal. I could barely see the other children with Michias so close. He eyed me
with the same expression I had seen in many of his pictures: the watchful
uncertainty that held a tender note of confusion and hope. If he recognized me
from the photograph we had sent, he gave no sign of it. Like the adoring and
sentimental parent I was, I felt perfectly content to simply stand there in his
near vicinity and watch him eat every dollop of food, snapping a picture of his
distrustful gaze for memento’s sake.

When he had finished and was beginning to wriggle out from behind
the table, Gail called out something in Amharic, issuing a quick barrage of
sharp consonants and short vowels, the only part of which I was able to discern
being Michias’s name. He looked at her, wide-eyed, his mouth slightly parted,
then slowly tottered over to us.

39

Gail took us back to the bright blue building with red trim inside
of which were enclosed a series of dim rooms branching off from an even dimmer
central hallway. I followed her and Michias into the first room on our right
Beige carpet with green geometric designs in the rough shape of turtles’ backs
covered the floor; a red, yellow, and green rainbow was painted across a bright
blue background on the far wall; eight bunk beds lined the walls –
sixteen
beds in all
– and a small chest of blankets and toys nestled in the far
corner. This was Michias’s room..

I scanned the small crowd of children presently gathered there. A
group of six boys I gauged to be in their early to mid-teens were clustered in
the far corner, splayed across bunk beds or posed nearby in calculatingly
casual stances. One elbow resting on a headboard or footboard, legs crossed and
hips cocked, they stood wavering in the mock confidence of the pubescent.
Behind us was another group: three boys all nearer Michias’s age, clustered
together as they took surreptitious peeks at the older boys in the opposite
corner.

Amharic is a very difficult language, so I couldn’t understand any
of the words Michias was murmuring to Gail. She had told him that I would like
to be his father and was here to take him home to America, to ‘hees new home of
a mother, a sister, and a brother –  dee family in dee photo,’ to which he
had stared blankly at his feet. I wasn’t bothered by his lackadaisical response
to my introduction. This was a child who had watched both his birth parents
wither away and die at the merciless hands of AIDS; concepts of fatherhood were
unlikely to be synonymous with amorous feelings.

Gail straightened from her stooped posture bent over Michias’s
head as he spoke now, and looked to me. ‘He says dat another boy has taken hees
Mariners baseball cap.’

I looked at Michias, who was watching the both of us expectantly,
waiting for a response to his admission. When his eyes tracked back to me, I
held his gaze and said, ‘Let’s get your cap.’

A smile flickered on Gail’s lips. ‘Dat may be goot to build trust
between you.’ She turned to Michias.

I didn’t need words to understand when my son pointed at one of
the older boys across the room. He appeared to be at least fifteen. As I strode
into his vicinity he shot a glance my way: a flash of fear quickly masked by
defiance. I locked my eyes on his round face, a bobble atop his stick-figure
torso with hair shaved nearly to the scalp. He wore a faded blue shirt and
shorts which ended a few inches shy of his knees.

‘Can you understand English?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ He eyed me with an upward tilt to his chin. Ignoring the
boys around him who had gone wide-eyed and silent, I moved forward and stepped
to within inches of his face. I saw the cold confidence in his eyes falter when
he realized he could no longer even attempt to look down his nose at me. His
pride prevented him from backing away, though, so I spoke into his face in a
calm, quiet voice as he stared up at me.

‘Give. My son. His hat.’

He pursed his lips and for a second I worried he would force me to
go farther.
This isn’t about you,
I silently vowed.
This is me and my
son. Please don’t get in the way.
I had only wanted enough of a scene to
make Michias proud and hadn’t decided how far I was actually willing to go.

I stared hard into the boy’s slanted eyes, willing him to give in
and not make this a bigger issue than it needed to be. His eyes flicked to over
my right shoulder where Michias waited beside Gail. I stayed where I was,
nose-to-nose, barely breathing, until he slid half a step back then reached for
the mattress of the top bunk nearest us. Tracking his movements with my eyes, I
watched one wiry hand slide between the bunk and the bed then snake its way
back out, a smashed, navy baseball cap now clutched in its grasp.

With a flighty glance at my face, he moved around me and deposited
the cap in the hands of my son. I swiveled on my feet, waiting until the
exchange had occurred, then made my way back to Michias and Gail. The boy
shuffled back to his friends, his head stubbornly held aloft but eyes watching
the floor before his feet. He didn’t meet my eyes as we passed each other, but
Michias did. He looked up to smile at me as he put his Mariners cap back on.

‘Mariners,’ I said, beaming at my son, Andy Martin. ‘Seattle
Mariners.’

Andy’s grin broadened and I reached down to push the bill of the
hat playfully. As we left the room, Gail turned left but pointed us to the
right and out the other side of the building.

Andy stayed by my side without being told. Together we emerged
onto a wooden porch painted sky blue with two steps leading to the concrete
below. We were suddenly bombarded by small bodies of various ages with big eyes
and curious fingers reaching towards me, the myos, and my camera. I laughed and
said hello, following their questing hands to the camera.

‘Camera,’ I said and lifted the lanyard from my neck to show them.
They oo-ed and ah-ed, tittering in Amharic as I turned the camera on and let
them watch the miniature version of their world illuminated in the viewfinder.
I leaned back and snapped a shot of two girls of nearly identical height and
stature but with starkly different features, then turned the camera around so
they could see themselves. They gasped and giggled, pointing and chattering to
each other then to me in an eager, frenzied rush.

‘Again? Okay, again.’ I photographed each of the children in
groups of two or three then took a panning video of them all. They cheered at
the sight of their recorded selves.

‘What are
dese
?’ a boy in his early teens asked from my
left. The t was so enunciated in ‘what’ it sounded like two words.
Wha t are
dese?

He was pointing to the left myo, his thin finger hovering just
above the plastic as if hoping for permission to touch it. I waited for the
tensing to come; the wince and tautness across my upper back that usually
accompanied any confrontation regarding the myos. But there was none. Instead,
I flashed back to images of withered men with no more than half of each thigh
to fill the torn legs of their pants as they paddled their way down the side of
the road. What right did I have to feel shame for my condition?

‘They’re prosthetic hands,’ I told him with a smile and turned to
sit on the top step of the porch. Each of the half dozen or so kids was watching
me with hawk-like intensity as I drew the sleeve of my left shirt up to show
where the plastic casing of the myo ended and my forearm began.

‘Can you translate for the others?’ I asked the boy who had spoken
English. He nodded and stepped closer to my side, likely to prevent anyone else
from encroaching on his view.

‘You can see my arm through this hole here,’ I announced in an
encompassing voice so the others would know I was speaking to them as well. The
boy issued a self-important babble of words, then snipped at a question or
comment from another boy at the front of the pack on the ground.

I used the right myo to point to the hole two inches above the
wrist of the left myo where I would tug the pull sock through when donning the
prosthetics.

‘Look in here,’ I told them and held the left myo up for my young
translator to peek inside first.

‘Oooh,’ the boy gushed then spoke animatedly to another boy a few
years his junior who had crept up beside him. The smaller boy quickly stepped
up to look inside the myo as a jumbled line began to form in front of my left
arm. Andy pushed forward with surprising insistence and took the next glimpse.
The rest of the kids stepped up one at a time for their turn after he was done.

‘There are two receptors here –’ I turned the arm over to indicate
where the receptor controlling how I close my hand was on the inside of my
forearm – ‘and here.’ I pointed to the top of my forearm where the receptor for
the open-hand signal was hidden beneath a layer of plastic. ‘Your arms send
electrical signals to trigger your hands to open and close. Mine work the same
way, using these receptors to read the signals.’

Upon translation, they all jabbered about this for a moment, a few
turning their forearms over as if looking for their own receptors. I smiled,
suppressing a laugh and asked the boy who spoke English to tell them all to
open and close their hands. As they were making fists then splaying their
fingers, I did the same, opening and closing the fingers of the myos to the
extent the prosthetics would allow.

‘Cool!’ the English-speaker said, looking from his human hands to
the prosthetics I wore and moving sideways so our hands could hover beside each
other, opening and closing in unison like mirror images.

‘Does it hurt?’ asked a small girl whose sharply defined features
hinted that she may have been older than her petite stature would suggest.

‘Not really,’ I told her truthfully, tipping my head to one side
like a shrug. ‘But they’re uncomfortable to wear.’

‘Is he your new father?’ another girl, taller but with a smaller
voice, asked Andy a moment later. I turned my head to the right slightly so I
could see Andy from the corner of my eye and watched him nod his head
affirmatively.

‘Yes,’ he said, stepping forward to pointedly plop down beside me
on the wooden step as another group of children scurried over to see my robotic
hand demonstration.

Andy remained glued to my side for the rest of our time at Layla
House, staking proprietorship of me with his proximity. When it came time to return
to our hotel, he clambered into the back of the blue Fiat taxicab without a
second’s hesitation. As the driver navigated us over the bumps and crannies of
the road, I felt the overpowering enchantment and happiness that could only
come from knowing I was finally a part of his family, as he was of mine.

~~~

They spotted us first, but not by much. My eyes found the giant,
yellow, smiley-face Mylar balloon drifting on the end of a string above Nadia
and Danny’s heads just as Ellen was reaching up to point. I followed the string
down and down to the small, pudgy hand wrapped securely around its end. Danny’s
small, pudgy hand. He was grinning vivaciously and pointing to us, beginning to
bounce with excitement. Beside him stood Nadia, a home-made sign half as big as
she held before her legs.

‘Welcome Home, Andy!’
it said in a hodgepodge of
colors. I could see where the coloring had drifted beyond the outlines drawn by
Ellen and felt my knees begin to give out. Home. We were home.

Nadia bolted in our direction, Danny hot on her heels. I felt Andy
begin to balk with uncertainty. Then they were upon us. Nadia and Danny each
threw an arm around Andy and each other, jabbering with exuberance and
laughter. Andy’s arms inched up to fall across his brother and sister’s backs
and I caught site of his cheeks beginning to bulge at the sides of a smile.
There they were: all my children in a welcoming huddle, heads bobbing above
linked arms as they laughed and chattered gaily. There was little shared blood
between them but already an abundance of love.

I felt my knees crumple as the tears began to fall. Suddenly Ellen
was there, her arms engulfing me and squeezing my ribcage to keep me upright. I
leaned into her embrace, tears trailing down the creases of my smile, sobs
caught in relieved laughter quivering inside my chest.

I felt Ellen’s nose as she turned her face towards my ear. Her
warm breath wafted across my neck as she whispered, ‘Well done.’