“How are you doing?” Alissa gave Genevieve a hug. “I didn’t get to talk to you much on Sunday. Brad and I appreciated you and Steven being there. It meant a lot to us.”
“I’m glad we were there, too.”
“What’s been happening with the café? Brad said they haven’t done much work yet.”
“No, it’s been a long process. All that’s happened so far is that the builder has torn out everything that was damaged. None of the rebuilding has started. I thought someone would begin on the cabinets this week, but it looks as if they’re not ready for him yet.”
The older girl, Beth, squirmed in the grocery cart. She patted Alissa on the arm and spoke to her in Romanian.
“Are you ready to go home?” Alissa asked her.
“Home,” Beth repeated.
Alissa smiled at her and held up her finger. “Okay. One minute.”
Beth responded by holding up one finger.
“What are you doing after you finish your shopping?” Alissa asked.
“Picking up my girls and going home.”
“Do you have time to come over to our place? Brad and I wanted to talk to you and Steven about something.”
“He’s flying this week,” Genevieve said. “He won’t be home until the twenty-sixth.”
“Could you and the girls come by? I’d love to have the three of you stay for dinner. We’re just having chicken, but we have plenty.”
“You don’t have to make dinner for us.”
“No, I’d like to. This will be a good chance for us to talk.”
“What can I bring?”
“How about a salad? And come over as soon as you’re ready. Don’t wait for dinnertime.”
“Okay, we’ll be there in about an hour.”
“Good,” Alissa said. “We’ll see you then.”
Genevieve gathered some fresh ingredients for a salad and picked up her girls from school. They were excited about the chance to see Beth and Ami.
With a large bowl of salad and two types of dressing, Genevieve and her daughters arrived at Brad and Alissa’s home around four-thirty. Their small house was tucked into a glen of sheltering cedar trees. At the edge of their property in the back was a creek.
Genevieve and the girls followed the sound of voices around to the back of the house and found Brad building a playhouse for his new daughters. Beth and Ami seemed to be enjoying every minute of the construction.
“Hello!” Genevieve called out.
“Hey, glad you came over,” Brad said. “Alissa is inside. How are you girls doing?”
“Fine,” Anna and Mallory answered in unison.
Beth and Ami stood still, watching the older girls with huge eyes and curious expressions. It took only a few moments before each of them selected her “big sister” for the evening. Beth went to Mallory, and Ami, the littler one, went to Anna. Genevieve knew her girls would love playing the role of nanny to these sweet little ones.
Genevieve entered the back door into the kitchen where Alissa was loading the dishwasher.
“I’m so glad you guys came over,” Alissa said. “I’ve been wanting your girls to spend time with Beth and Ami. This is perfect.”
“Thanks for inviting us.”
“I just put the chicken in the oven,” Alissa said. “It’ll be an hour before we eat. Would you like something to drink?”
“No, I’m fine. Thanks.”
“I have to show you what we did with the girls’ room.” Alissa motioned for Genevieve to follow her down the hall.
Brad and Alissa’s house had been custom built more than a decade ago. The finer touches were seen in the mantle on the wood-burning fireplace and the skylights above the entryway. The house was small and efficient with three, good-sized bedrooms. Alissa ushered Genevieve into the room they had fixed for Beth and Ami and stood in the doorway.
The twin beds were against opposite walls that were painted a pale blue. The carpet was green like grass, and all around the room were a dozen bright sunflowers painted on the walls, transforming the room into an indoor summer garden.
“This is adorable!” Genevieve said. “I didn’t know you painted.”
“I didn’t do the painting,” Alissa said. “Your daughter did. Didn’t Anna tell you about painting this room?”
Genevieve tried to mask her surprise. “Anna said she helped to paint, but I thought she meant painting with rollers and brushes.”
“No, we had the base coat on the walls already the night she came for the sleepover with the girls from church. Then she stayed with us for the rest of the weekend while you and Steven were at the coast.”
“I remember,” Genevieve said.
“Anna came up with the idea for the sunflowers on the walls when she saw the pillows I’d bought for the beds. We were going to paint just one big sunflower in the corner, but once we started, we couldn’t stop. Beth and Ami were so cute when we first brought them into their room. They kept touching the flowers. Ami still stands on her bed and pretends to sniff them.”
“It’s wonderful,” Genevieve said. “I hadn’t realized Anna did this. It’s darling. How are you and the girls adjusting to this new life all of you suddenly have?”
Alissa leaned against the wall and smiled softly. She had on a sunny yellow T-shirt and jeans, which blended nicely with the room’s décor. “I think we’re doing okay. It’s a big adjustment for all of us. The girls still sleep together in one bed. I don’t think they quite understand that they each have their own bed. The language barrier is the biggest problem. We’re noticing they’ve only picked up about five or six English words in the weeks they’ve been with us. I know it will take a while.”
“I noticed at the grocery store that Beth knows the word home,” Genevieve said.
“Yes. They both know the word home.”
“Do they seem to understand that you’re their parents now?”
“I don’t know. They’ve been through so much. They don’t have names for Brad and me yet. They just pat us on the arm when they want something. It’s still sinking in for both of us that we have two daughters.”
“A double blessing.” Genevieve smiled. “The only thing better than two daughters is three daughters.”
A wistful shadow of something painful seemed to brush across Alissa’s expression. “I actually do have three daughters. I don’t know if you knew I had a baby when I was a teenager. I had a baby girl.”
Genevieve tried to control her surprised expression. “No, I didn’t know.”
“It’s taken me years to get to the point I can mention it so openly. Brad has really helped me to see that Shawna was a gift from the Lord. She’s almost fifteen now.”
“The same age as Anna,” Genevieve said.
Alissa nodded. “When I first met you in Pasadena, Anna captured my heart.”
Genevieve nodded. She remembered the bond that had blossomed between Anna and Alissa. Anna was around eight at the time and always finding excuses to visit Alissa at the duplex next door.
“I wish I had been strong enough to tell you then. It would have helped you to understand why I had such a need to shower attention on Anna. I guess I thought that I could give to Anna a little bit of the love I had never been able to give to Shawna.”
Lowering herself to the edge of one of the beds, Genevieve said softly, “Tell me about Shawna.”
Alissa didn’t sit. She stood beside the door. Her countenance remained steady and peaceful. “I had some pretty wild teenage years. By the time I was sixteen, I had lived on air force bases around the world. I think I told you that before.”
“Your father was an air force pilot, wasn’t he?” Genevieve asked.
Alissa nodded.
“So he was never home,” Genevieve surmised.
Alissa nodded again. “I was an only child, and my mom spent more time drinking than she spent with me.”
Genevieve didn’t blink. She understood what it was like to be an only child. She knew what it was like to live
in a pilot’s home. Fortunately, she hadn’t turned to alcohol in her stretches of loneliness.
“I was so full of anger.” Alissa sighed. “No one knew it because it didn’t show on the outside. But after my dad died, my heart was stone. I’m not sure exactly why, but my mom decided she and I should spend the summer at a beach house in southern California. She had been to Newport Beach when she was a teenager, and I guess she wanted to relive happier memories or something.
“I was seventeen that summer. When I look back now, I see that I was pretty cold, hard, and empty. Of course, at the time I didn’t realize it. I met this guy on the beach. He was cute. Daring. Younger than me.” Alissa shrugged. “I had nothing to lose, you know? I had no feelings left for anything or anyone. Shawn and I had a few intense days together, and then I couldn’t stand the thought of him. I remember going to a party at his house one night and taking off with another guy right away because I didn’t want to see Shawn.”
Genevieve had never heard Alissa talk about her past this much before. She was surprised at how open Alissa was. It seemed she was different. More at peace, even with such painful memories.
“Shawn died the night of that party. He was stoned and tried to bodysurf near the jetty. I remember feeling like this fortress I had built around my heart was beginning to crumble. For the first time, I think I was worried about what God might think of me. If I died, I was worried about what God would do with me.
“We left Newport Beach right after that. Not because of Shawn, but because my mom had gone overboard again with her drinking and became violent. I was frightened and called the police. Right after that I flew back to Boston where I moved in with my grandmother. I was living with her when I found out I was pregnant.” Alissa shook her head. “If you can imagine, there I was, living with my proper Bostonian grandmother; my father was dead, my mother was in rehab, and I was carrying the child of a guy I had only spent a few days with before he died. Talk about hitting rock bottom.”
“Alissa,” Genevieve said sympathetically, “you’ve been through so much.”
Alissa nodded silently. “It took a lot before God got my attention. We can be stubborn sometimes, can’t we?”
Genevieve didn’t answer. She clenched her teeth, determined not to show any of the stubborn bitterness she knew was stuffed down deep inside her.
“You know what?” Alissa said. “I want to show you something.”
Chapter Ten
Genevieve followed Alissa to the room at the end of the hallway that had been converted into an office for her Wing and a Prayer Travel Agency. Alissa seemed so calm and composed even in the midst of her incredible story. She reached for an ornately decorated wooden box on one of the bookshelves and pulled it down.
“Some of my favorite customers from Pasadena brought this box for me from Italy,” Alissa said. “Do you remember my ever telling you about Chet and Rosie?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe.”
“Well, they have quite a story. They are the cutest, most in-love couple I’ve ever known. They taught me so much about romantically loving my husband for the rest of my life. The two of them must be in their eighties now, but they still hold hands and whisper little love messages in each other’s ears.”
Alissa laughed. “Except the last time we saw them, they were both getting so hard of hearing that even when they thought they were whispering sweet nothings, everyone in the room could hear them.”
Lifting the lid of the beautifully crafted box, Alissa removed a small stack of folded papers. “These letters changed my life. It’s possible that they even saved my life. I’ve read them a hundred times. Especially this one.” She lifted what looked like about five sheets of ordinary notebook paper that had been folded four times.
“This one is from a guy named Todd. He was one of Shawn’s closest friends, and Todd was a strong Christian. Even at sixteen he had an incredible understanding about God. The other letters are from a girl named Christy. I met her on the beach the same summer I met Shawn and Todd. Christy was the first person who ever explained to me how to become a Christian. She was pretty shy in person, but in these letters she said what she felt and what she believed. These words changed everything.”
“That’s amazing.” Part of Genevieve wanted to reach for the stack of letters, sit in a quiet corner, and read them. But they were Alissa’s private letters, and she wasn’t offering to share them.
“One of these letters actually prompted me to give Shawna up for adoption. I was going to try to raise her on my own, but giving her over to the couple who took her was definitely the right thing to do. I remember the day I took Shawna to the legal offices and signed the papers. The couple held her in their arms and prayed aloud, right in front of the lawyers and everyone. They thanked God for her. I wasn’t a Christian yet, and I thought they were gutsy to do that. But when Brad and I went to the orphanage in Basel to get our girls, we did the same thing.”
“Basel?” Genevieve asked. “I thought the girls were from Romania.”
“They are. They had been transferred to a large orphanage in Basel. That’s where we went to pick them up.” Alissa put the box of letters back on the shelf and reached for a photo in a large frame from off her desk.
“I hadn’t realized that you and Brad went to Switzerland,” Genevieve said. “You knew that I grew up in Zurich, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I knew that. Brad said you were from Lucerne, but I thought it was Zurich. We had a wonderful time in Basel. Short but very sweet.” Alissa held up the photo for Genevieve to see. “This is what I wanted to show you.”
Genevieve smiled. Alissa and Brad apparently were in a hallway at the Basel orphanage. Each of them held one of the girls while receiving a huge hug around the neck. The look of tearful joy on their faces was priceless. Whoever took the photo certainly captured just the right moment.
“This is the amazing part.” Alissa pointed to something else in the photo. “After we got home and had this enlarged, I noticed we were standing right up against the wall. Do you see this picture? It was hanging on the wall, but I didn’t notice it when we were there.”
“It’s too bad you were so close to the picture,” Genevieve said. “The way you and Brad are standing, it almost looks as if the young woman in the picture is standing in between the two of you.”
“Exactly,” Alissa said. “But the strangest part is that the young woman in the picture looks so much like Christy, the girl I was telling you about.”
Genevieve looked closely. Since the photo was so large, it was easy to see the face of the young woman on the wall. She was bent over one of the children from the orphanage who appeared to be working on some sort of embroidery or sewing. The young woman had looked up with an open-hearted expression that made it appear as if she were smiling her warm blessing on the new parents.
“That’s amazing,” Genevieve said. “It’s angled just right, isn’t it?”
Alissa nodded and took the picture back to stare at it again. “I told Brad I wanted to e-mail the Basel orphanage and ask if by any chance the young woman in the picture was named Christy Miller. It would be so fitting for her to be there at that moment, smiling on us when we got our daughters. But I didn’t e-mail them because Brad kept teasing me, saying I was looking for an angel behind every bush.”
Genevieve laughed. “Did your friend Christy ever go to Switzerland?”
“I have no idea. Christy and I lost contact with each other years ago.”
“Did you lose contact with Todd also?”
“Yes. I always hoped the two of them would end up together.” Alissa sighed and lifted her chin as she glanced out the window. “I guess I also hoped for a long time that I could redo something of my stormy past. But we can’t go back, can we? After we get our hearts right with God, we can only go on and be thankful for what we have.”
“And now you have two beautiful daughters.” Genevieve fished for something to say. She knew that probably wasn’t what Alissa meant about red
oing her stormy past, but it was the first thing that came to her mind. It also kept the topic on Alissa and didn’t leave room for Genevieve to think about how hard she had tried to convince herself that she and Steven couldn’t go back and do anything about the lost inheritance money.
“Yes, I have two daughters in my everyday life. They are a beautiful gift from God.” Alissa pressed her lips into a wobbly smile and met Genevieve’s gaze. “But I will always have three daughters in my heart.”
A space of silence encompassed the two women, as Genevieve tried to take in what it must have meant for Alissa to give up her firstborn daughter for someone else to raise.
As if Alissa could predict the route Genevieve’s thoughts were going, she offered, “I think that something deep inside of me needed to respond to God when Brad and I found out about Beth and Ami. I needed to adopt these girls perhaps more than Brad did.”
“I don’t know about that. Your husband is about the most attentive, adoring father around.”
“He is,” Alissa agreed. “He was so ready to have kids. For me, it was more than just the longing to start a family. Maybe it’s because I understood the other side of adoption. Do you know what I mean? I knew how important it was for a mother to know someone else was eager to love and care for her daughter when she wasn’t able to fulfill that role. I wanted to be to Beth and Ami’s mother what Shawna’s adoptive mother had been to me so many years ago in that lawyer’s office.”
“You are amazing, Alissa.” Genevieve took in the young woman standing beside her. “You have such deep understanding and such a gentleness about you. I’ve never seen you so at peace. These are huge issues. This is all life changing for you and Brad.”
“I know,” Alissa said. “God has been working in my life. I had a lot to work through. The biggest step for me was learning how to forgive from my heart.”
Just then the sound of a little girl’s wail was heard followed by a slamming door.
“Mom,” Mallory cried out. “Mom, where are you?”
Alissa and Genevieve rushed to the kitchen. Mallory stood by the sink, running cold water over Ami’s hand.
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