Moving Forward in Reverse

by Scott Martin

  I looked at Ellen who looked at me. I wondered if she was thinking of checking the lock on the door as well. I was feeling edgy and distrustful in this strange little room. Why on earth would they have prospective parents wait in here? I asked myself, not wanting to voice my concerns lest they become reality. It felt like we were being stored; hidden away where we couldn’t get into trouble.

  To distract myself from the ominous sense of unwarranted (probably) foreboding writhing inside me, I let my eyes wander over our surroundings. For a medical room it was rather meagerly stocked. I was pretty sure there were people in the States who had medicine cabinets with more supplies than this room held. The shelves, like the rest of the building, were more empty than full but meticulously clean. The white walls were polished to a near shine and I was relatively certain running a finger over the laminate counter would produce no residue.

  ‘They have so little,’ Ellen whispered from beside me. She was gazing despairingly at the exiguous supplies lined up on the shelves in far-removed rows. I recalled the desolate front rooms and barren yard and nodded in wholehearted agreement. We have to get Nadia and Danny out of here.

  Feeling the urge to test the door rising up within me again, I hopped up on the brown leather exam table, letting my legs hang over, feet nearly touching the floor. A few moments later, Ellen sighed despairingly and lowered herself onto the edge of one of the two plastic chairs against the wall opposite me. She cast one more disconsolate glance at the shelves, then looked up at me. I opened my mouth to say something, anything, to fill the silence and ward off the anxious anticipation we both were feeling, but no words came. The only thoughts my mind seemed capable of engendering centered around my less-than-favorable impression of this place. I figured those thoughts were best kept to myself. Instead, I gave her a half-hearted, sympathetic smile and looked away.

  Luckily, we had only to wait a few minutes before the doorknob turned portentously. The door creaked inwards. My breath caught in my chest as all signals from my brain suddenly ceased. I stared at the woman framed in the doorway, the same curt woman from before. A little girl in a faded, blue jean jumper with a frilly white shirt underneath clung to the woman’s right hand. The girl’s head barely stretched above the woman’s knee.

  Nadia. I had to stifle the urge to rush forward to shower her with hugs and kisses. Ellen and I had decided that it would be best for the kids if we weren’t emotional. The orphanage staff probably hadn’t described us to Nadia and Danny as ‘parents’ because they wouldn’t understand the concept. Their world revolved around the orphanage; the closest things to parents they’d ever known were the women who staffed it.

  Attached to the woman’s left hand, a boy with pudgy cheeks and narrowed eyes peered at us from behind his left fist as he sucked reassuringly on his thumb. He looked from me to Ellen and back again like an outnumbered fighter trying to decide who was likely to attack first. An adoring smile developed on my face and I felt pinpricks behind my eyes at the puerile beauty of them both.

  Our kids.

  I slid from the exam table with excessive care, sinking onto the beige tile floor like a handler desperately trying not to startle a frightened animal. The woman disentangled her fingers from the children’s grips and turned to push the door closed, leaving it slightly ajar. She stationed herself against the wall at the kids’ backs.

  Nadia and Danny hovered side-by-side where the woman had left them, staring at us with wide, uncertain eyes. After a few moments of silence, Nadia clambered onto the exam table where I had been. Her little legs dangling over the edge barely reached below the bottom of the mattress. She hunched her back, arching over her knees and stuck her lips out in the universal language of a pout.

  Danny tried to follow suit, waddling over to the table in a pudgy-legged hustle. He stretched his arms up towards the top of the table as if hoping to magically fly up to join his sister. When he realized he was still two feet shy of reaching the top, he bobbled back around and, much to my astonishment, plopped himself into my lap, thumb securely back in its place inside his mouth.

  I stared in baffled wonderment at the fluff of brown hair now nestled against my stomach and smiled unabashedly. I felt like The Chosen One, blessed by the Powers that Be to watch over this child. I wanted to wrap my arms around him and never let go. I wanted to kiss that bulbous, round head that was exuding such a disproportionate amount of heat, the warmth of him radiating inside me to join forces with my own joyous flame. I could scarcely breathe for fear of disrupting this momentous juncture in our relationship.

  Father and son.

  Me. He had chosen me, The Man with No Hands, as the person whose lap he felt safest in.

  Motion to my right drew my eye from Danny’s tiny form in my lap. I glanced up to see Ellen holding her sunglasses out to Nadia. Nadia climbed down from the table, inched towards Ellen’s outstretched hand, and cautiously took the wire-framed glasses. She fumbled them around in her plump little hands until they were facing the right way then slid them onto her face. They stuck an inch out on either side of her head and their dark lenses shielded everything from her eyebrows to halfway down her cheeks. The bridge of the nose bar hovered across her tiny, button nose, the nose pads closer to her eyeballs.

  She looked so stern, staring at Ellen and me through the obscure lenses; I couldn’t help but laugh. Ellen joined in. Even the woman still standing in the corner began to chuckle. Nadia looked around at each of us, a proud smile lighting up her face. She modeled the glasses for us with a baby-toothed grin, her fat fingers regularly pushing the frames back up her nose as she teetered around the room.

  Danny watched her be the center of the attention from the sanctity of my lap, where he contentedly remained for the entire forty-five minutes of our visit. Even when I shifted position slightly, reaching back with my right arm to take the strain off my back, he stayed where he was, simply readjusting his own position to nestle into the crook of my left arm. There was no question about it: these were our kids.

  Forty-five minutes never passed so quickly. Before we knew it, the woman unpeeled herself from the wall and made her presence known once more. Ellen and I looked up at her and I felt my left arm subconsciously draw Danny a little deeper against my chest. Not yet, I pleaded with her silently. It can’t be time yet.

  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

  Romanglish

  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.