by Michel Stone
Héctor nodded, wondering if anyone in this room harbored any doubts as to what would be best for Alejandra.
“I’ve looked over the paperwork, the documentation from her adoption, and everything looks in order in terms of the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, particularly since the adoptive parents maintained dual citizenship.”
What was he saying?
“In other words,” Eloy continued, “this orphanage did everything within its power to locate the parents, to find you, of course, and they disclosed everything they knew to the adoptive parents.”
Héctor eyed him, listening, trying to follow the man’s line, to predict where he was headed with his words, but he didn’t speak or respond in any way to affirm or deny what the man said.
“Maybe I should back up. The Hague Convention…are you familiar with this?”
“No,” Héctor said.
“No worries,” the lawyer said. “It’s just something to protect children regarding international adoptions. We all recognize children need families, loving homes, happiness, etcetera. So guidelines, rules, were established to govern adoptions, to make sure the best interest of the children will always be considered. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I think so. My daughter’s best interest is to be at home with her mama and me. With our family.”
The legal man cleared his throat, and seemed to be on the cusp of getting stern with Héctor, but Karolina said, “Okay, now. Here we go,” as her computer seemed to come to life and chirp and whir strange sounds. Eloy turned his attention there, toward Karolina’s computer, away from Héctor.
Héctor, too, turned toward the computer. On the screen he saw a man, his hand up against the corner as if he were inside the screen looking out, as if he were in a television set moving about, adjusting it from the inside. And Héctor wondered if they were going to watch some legal program so that he might learn about international adoptions or this convention the legal man had mentioned. But then the strangest, most unexpected thing happened, and for a moment, Héctor thought he’d begun to lose his senses. Karolina spoke at the computer screen, to the image of the man, and the man responded! He’d heard her.
“Hello, sir. Thank you for agreeing to Skype with us.”
“Yes, hello. Certainly,” he said, sitting in a chair and looking serious in front of the screen.
“I’m Karolina, the one you spoke to on the phone. I’m here with Eloy Castillo, an attorney, and with Esther’s…I mean with the child’s birth father, Mr. S.”
The man nodded a greeting to which Eloy said, “Hello.”
“You mean Alejandra,” Héctor said. “You’re talking about my Alejandra?”
“Pardon?” Eloy said.
Before Héctor could speak, Karolina said, “The child was named Alejandra by her birth parents. I apologize, Mr. S. Her adoptive father knows the child only as Esther.”
The image on the screen moved with jerks and every few seconds appeared as if someone had tossed a fistful of sand across the camera lens.
Karolina glanced at Eloy and Héctor and sat up straight. “I’ll begin,” she said, shuffling papers in her lap. “To be sure we’re all equally informed and at the same spot with all this, I’ll summarize the situation. I understand this is an emotional issue, a difficult one.”
Neither the man behind the gritty-looking monitor nor Héctor spoke, but Eloy said, “Yes, certainly, yes.”
“According to our documents, the child was adopted by Mr. and Mrs. H. when she was seventeen months old. The child is now…” She looked over her papers for Alejandra’s age.
“Esther is four,” the man in the computer said. “And she’s healthy and thriving and happy with her mother and me.”
Héctor dug his nails into his palms. He wanted to punch the computer screen with his fist, to harm the man behind that glass, the man who possessed Alejandra but called her Esther, who dared to tell him, Héctor, Alejandra’s father, her age.
Did that man just call himself and his wife Alejandra’s parents? Héctor leaned closer to the desk that held the computer. He slid to the edge of his chair. Could the man see him?
“So the child has been in your custody for two and a half years. During that time, her birth parents have searched for her, according to Mr. S. here, her birth father. Her whereabouts were unknown to them, but they never stopped questioning or looking. A while back I received a call from their priest, which ultimately brought her birth father here to discuss this matter with me and to submit to a DNA test, which confirmed his paternity.”
“Yes,” Héctor said. Karolina was finally starting to sway this in his direction. No one would refute his rights to his child after hearing about the DNA test. He looked to the legal man for affirmation, but Eloy had his head down, scribbling notes furiously on a thick yellow pad.
“So I thought what we’d do is give each of you, Mr. S. and Mr. H., the opportunity to speak, after which we’ll have Mr. Castillo weigh in with his legal thoughts on this issue in terms of Casa de Esperanza’s role in all this. Does that sound okay with you all?” Karolina said, looking to each of them for approval.
They all nodded.
“Very well, then,” she said. “Mr. S., will you begin?”
Héctor cleared his throat. Their curious regard for him burned into his face, and heat rose under their collective gaze. For some reason the image of bundled parrots flashed in Héctor’s mind, their black, terror-filled eyes staring up at him from the cooler on his last job on the Gabriela.
“You’ve stated what happened,” he said to Karolina. “My wife, Lilia, and I love our daughter and we want her to come home to us.”
“How did you lose your daughter?” the legal man said.
Héctor inhaled and let the air out with a long sigh. “I left my village for the border. I hired a coyote to help me make the journey. My wife and my baby, Alejandra, stayed behind. Our plan was for them to wait until I could find work and save enough to secure their safe crossing, to join me.”
Eloy continued to scratch notes on his yellow paper, but Karolina, despite having heard these details previously, stared at Héctor with such compassion etched into her face that he had to look away before he continued. He focused on his hands, clasped in his lap.
“I found work in South Carolina on a tree farm, and my employers were fair and good to me. Before I had enough money saved to get my family there, an opportunity presented itself to Lilia in Puerto Isadore. Her grandmother died. She’d raised Lilia since birth, and at that point Lilia was ready to leave our village. I cannot know exactly what was in her head, you understand, because I was not there.”
He lifted his eyes briefly to be sure they were following him.
“So,” he continued, “Lilia and Alejandra traveled to the border with a bad man. An evil coyote named Carlos who did bad things to my wife. When they reached the border he made her hand Alejandra to a woman. This smuggler, she crossed with babies all the time, Carlos said. So Lilia handed Alejandra to this woman and then departed for the border with her coyote. Lilia was told the woman would meet her in Texas, in a place called Brownsville, in a safe house at the border. My Lilia swam the big river and got to the house, but the woman failed to show.”
He had never told the whole, painful story aloud like this to strangers, and the recollection of it sickened him, and his chest ached as if his heart were bruised anew and his windpipe were shrinking. “Do you want to hear this?” he said to them all, still staring into his lap.
“Yes, please continue,” Eloy said.
“I have little left to tell you. I drove to Texas and retrieved my wife. We looked as long as we could in Brownsville for this woman. What else would we do? We had no way of knowing if Alejandra remained in Mexico or if she’d crossed the border into America.” He paused and took a long, slow breath before continuing. “One thing we knew for certain: Our money would run out. We had to return to South Carolina, to my job. Eventually we learned that Lilia’s coyote, Carlos, had b
een killed in a car accident.”
“And how did you verify that?” Eloy asked.
“Because Carlos was the uncle of a man Lilia knew in Puerto Isadore. Only recently were we able to track down that man, Emanuel, the one my wife knew from our village. He’d moved up to Acapulco. I found him and through him I pieced together the rest of the details, that a woman and a baby had been in the car with his uncle Carlos, that the woman died, and that the baby, a girl, had survived. You know the rest. That baby was my Alejandra. And now I’m here and ready to take her home to her mama, baby brother, and her baby brother or sister to be born in a few weeks.”
Like the tides from two fast-moving rivers colliding in a violent confluence, so did Héctor’s emotions of anger and despair, and he clasped his wet palms together in a tight grip to conceal their shaking. He could not look up for fear the man inside the computer would sense his powerlessness and consider him weak or effeminate.
“Thank you,” Karolina said. “Mr. H., would you like to speak?”
“Yes, of course,” the man said.
When Héctor felt certain the others’ eyes were on the monitor, he lifted his face so he, too, could watch Mr. H. speak. What could he possibly say that mattered, that bore any weight whatsoever in this case?
“My wife and I each come from large families, and we have always dreamed of having children of our own. But for reasons only God knows, conceiving a baby of our own never happened. We’ve tried to guess why this is so. Maybe we should have tried when we were younger, but our schooling delayed us. I have a PhD in literature, and I teach Latin American studies at the university here, and Alicia, that’s my wife, she’s an accomplished artist and a teacher. Anyway…my goodness…I digress. I’m so nervous, please, pardon me,” he said.
They watched the screen as Mr. H. pulled a handkerchief from a pocket and wiped his brow.
“It’s just that…” His voice stalled and for a moment Héctor thought the sound on the computer had failed.
“I don’t know what Alicia and I would do without Esther. She is the greatest joy in our lives, and a day doesn’t pass we don’t thank God for her. Every Saturday, you know, I let her choose what kind of breakfast we should have, American or Mexican. We want her to know her heritage, the culture from which she and Alicia and I come, but we want her to embrace her Americanism as well. She likes pancakes,” Mr. H. added, with a strange, awkward laugh. He dabbed at his face again with the handkerchief. “Blueberry pancakes are her favorite food in all the world.”
All eyes were on Mr. H. now, and Héctor studied him more closely than he had when his image first appeared on the screen, when Héctor had felt all eyes on himself.
The man wore a dress shirt and a jacket, very much in the style of a wealthy American. Behind him were bookshelves filled with books, and pieces of pottery and framed photos, though they were too far away for Héctor to make out the pictures.
Somewhere offscreen, a conversation began, muted but with feminine voices. Or maybe what Héctor heard was not the voice of a woman but that of a child. A girl child.
Mr. H. turned and spoke to whoever stood off camera, but his words were indecipherable to Héctor.
“Is that her?” Héctor said, his voice hardly above a whisper. “Is that Alejandra, there with you now?” he said more loudly, his voice quivering in a way he could not steady.
Mr. H. turned back toward the screen, visibly disturbed and indecisive, and opened his mouth to speak but stopped himself.
“Is she there?” Héctor repeated.
Neither Eloy nor Karolina spoke, as if the entire world had faded into nothingness save for the line connecting Héctor and Mr. H., as they looked into each other’s faces from a thousand miles apart.
“Yes, she and my wife just arrived home from Esther’s ballet class,” Mr. H. said, wiping his left cheek as if a tear were there, though the screen went grainy at that moment, making such details impossible to see.
Oh, dear God in heaven she was there! Right there! Héctor leaned just a few centimeters from the computer’s glass and said, “May I see her? Please, sir.” He realized Mr. H. had the power, the choice, whether or not to grant his request, and a chill like he’d never known traced his spine.
Mr. H. stood and motioned toward someone offscreen, and to Héctor’s surprise spoke English. He’d not considered that this man, this Latino, could so fluidly switch languages.
What happened next occurred so quickly and without warning that even years later the memory of the impact stalled Héctor’s breath in his windpipe, leaving him dizzy and downhearted for days.
A girl, a beautiful black-haired child, dressed in pink with pink ribbons in her hair, rushed forward, jumping into Mr. H.’s lap, and in English, shouted, “Hi, Daddy!” Followed by a string of English words Héctor could not understand. The man embraced the child as she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed his face three times, unaware her actions were being watched by three people far, far away in a country she may not even recollect.
Mr. H. said to the child in Spanish, “Speak Spanish, my love,” and to Héctor’s amazement and anguish, the child, in the voice of heaven’s sweetest angel, told Mr. H. in perfect Spanish with great joy about her dance class and an upcoming performance for which she would wear the costume of a flower.
The child could speak two languages, yet she was so small, so young!
“I get to be a pink flower, Papa! And I get to be in the front, and you and Mommy will come watch me. And Mommy says she will sit in the first row and clap for me. Will you, Papa? Will you sit in the first row to watch me dance in my pink flower costume?”
Mr. H., for a moment, seemed to forget all about the computer screen and Héctor and that he was being observed. “You know I will, sweetheart. I’m so proud of you! The buttons may burst from my shirt I am so proud!”
“You’re a silly goose, Papa. That is so silly! Your buttons won’t pop off your shirt,” she squealed in a torrent of giggles, before slipping from Mr. H.’s lap and darting out of sight.
Mr. H. watched her go before returning his attention to the group assembled on the other side of the computer screen.
Unexpected emotions engulfed Héctor, rendering him ill. He stood and walked to the back of the small office and gripped the doorframe with shaking hands. He didn’t trust himself to attempt speaking for fear he’d be unable to utter a sound, or that he’d vomit, or that he’d break down in such consuming and horrific wailing that those observing would declare him cracked in the head, insane.
“Alicia and I had been working to adopt for several years,” Mr. H. continued, as if he were oblivious to the world snapping into a million jagged shards at that moment.
“We’d begun the process, doing all the legwork in as timely fashion as possible. We’d already completed our home study and passed that step when the priest at our church announced a mission trip to Matamoros. Alicia and I decided to go because, you know, of course, we love our home country and we adore children and helping those less fortunate. She and I volunteer with our church when our schedules allow, and this mission trip coincided with a break from the university, you see. We didn’t go with the intention of adopting a child, I assure you. In our minds the process was unfolding through the usual channels. But then we saw Esther…We fell in love with her,” he said, as if that were that and no more explanation was needed.
Héctor’s back remained to the computer. He wiped his dripping nose on his shirtsleeve and tried to keep his crying silent.
“When we left the orphanage, on the flight back home, we talked about her the entire journey, and we both knew we already loved her, that we would do all we could to be her parents, to love her and raise her knowing love and God and goodness. I assure you, she has brought far more to our lives in the time we have had her than we have brought to hers. She is our greatest blessing.”
Mr. H. adored her, and as hard as that acknowledgment kicked him in his gut, Héctor knew the man’s love for Alejandra, fo
r Esther, was painfully genuine. And what ground his heart into his breastbone was his realization that Alejandra loved Mr. H., that she recognized Mr. H. and his wife as her papa and mama. What sickened him and brought bitterness rising in his throat was that the beautiful little girl he’d glimpsed on the computer had no recollection of him, no concept of the agony, the tears, the wretchedness of his very existence without her. Suddenly he realized his crying had become audible, and he clamped his palm to his mouth and clenched his teeth.
“Alicia’s brother is a deputy in Mexico’s lower house of Congress. We requested he write a letter on our behalf, and he graciously obliged. Because we’d long begun our Hague work and completed our home study, and because my brother-in-law’s support carried significant weight, we were able to bring Esther home with us to Colorado six months later.”
Héctor tried to piece together all Mr. H. said. If he’d adopted her at seventeen months, and he’d first met her six months prior to that, then he’d met her soon after Lilia and he had lost her.
He realized Eloy was speaking now, though he wasn’t sure when he’d begun and Mr. H. had stopped.
“So you all see, nothing improper or illegal has occurred here, though this situation certainly is unfortunate for Mr. S. and his family, and in many ways for Mr. H.’s family. We must all remember, however, that the little girl at the center of this discussion is loved by many people, and she has not suffered in any way but rather has been very well cared for her entire life.”
Héctor nodded, because yes, for the first time in over three years, he now knew this to be true.
“Let’s cut to the reason we’re gathered today,” Eloy said. “Mr. S.’s family would like to regain custody of this child. Am I correct that this is your desire, Mr. S.?”
Héctor, still standing at the doorway, his back to them all, nodded weakly, but couldn’t muster his voice.
“And you, Mr. H., wish to keep the child in your home in Colorado, in the United States, and raise her as your adoptive daughter, yes?”
