Moving Forward in Reverse

by Scott Martin

  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.’

  40

  Our Full House

  A typical Saturday in the Martin Family Home:

  ‘Nadia have you seen your brothers?’ At the sound of my voice, Nadia glanced up from the easel where she had been very carefully painting something which may have been a horse, but could also easily become a dog or a deer or pretty much anything with four legs.

  ‘Outside, Tata,’ she told me with a staid expression. Painting was serious work. I nodded to her but she had already turned back to her easel, dabbing her brush in brown then blue then red paint with painstaking care. My last encounter with Danny and Andy had been as they were hastening towards the door, locked in hushed conversation. They were about to ‘go exploring,’ they’d said. With Andy having been home for only a couple of months, Danny appeared to have taken the lead on this expedition.

  ‘Wow! Look at this,’ Ellen gushed from behind me. I glanced over my shoulder to see her bending down to gaze at the bruise-colored construction taking shape on the page.

  ‘It’s a giraffe,’ Nadia proudly declared. I could now see that the line at one end of its body was not, in fact, the trunk of a tree but rather the very elongated neck of a giraffe.

  ‘Very beautiful,’ Ellen praised her before straightening to follow me outside. We cut through the mudroom then emerged from the garage to search for our boys.

  The air was be
ginning to whisper with the sharpness of Autumn. Surrounded by evergreens as we were, though, you would never know the seasons were changing. I scanned the nearest wall of forestry, idly skimming the vicinity for colors which didn’t belong – the bright yellow of Andy’s t-shirt or the orange and white stripes across Danny’s – as we navigated around the back of my new, bronze Chevy Trailblazer. The Trailblazer was an upgrade from the CRV; a necessity to accommodate the three car seats it now carried.

  As we crossed behind the SUV, my eyes caught on something lying on the driveway. Roughly the size of a twig but with angles too sharp and material too black to be natural, I stooped to retrieve the mysterious object with pursed brows. As I bent nearer, I realized the left myo was closing around the wiper blade of a car – or of an SUV, I thought and swiveled my gaze to the Chevy. There, just right of the keyhole on the back of my new Trailblazer protruded the jagged piece of fractured plastic where a wiper arm used to be.

  Frowning, I looked to Ellen who looked to me, our eyes locking with new understanding. This wasn’t the work of dogs, nor that of the industrious beaver family living in the creek ten yards away.

  I leaned towards the back of the Chevy to gauge the extent of the damage. Ellen’s hand on my arm stilled me before I could get close enough to make any determination, though, and I turned back to look at her. She had one arm extended, her index finger pointing towards the cedar fence obscuring our propane tank to the right of the driveway. Following the line of her finger to the eight-inch gap between the bottom of the fence and the bark-covered ground, I could just make out two pairs of tennis shoes peeking out from behind the fence: one black set and one red, each attached to a pair of blue-jean-covered legs. Smirking at Ellen, I cocked an eyebrow at her in silent commentary. Looks like we’ve found our offenders.

  Together, Ellen and I crept up to the gate, moving slowly, deliberately, and just loud enough to be heard over the pounding of guilty hearts. We skirted the edge of the fence and came face to face with the alarmed faces of two gaping four-year-olds. They stared up at us in terror, guilt for what they had done written all over their panicked expressions. I held out the wiper arm for them to see and watched as they debated the reaction most likely to get them off the hook. I could all but see the options being weighed in their mind: to cry or not to cry? To point the finger elsewhere and deny or not to deny?

  As Danny’s brows started to turn to remorseful peaks above his nose, his lips beginning to quiver with a contrived whimper, I burst into a broad grin. He froze mid-blubber and stared uncertainly at my expression.

  ‘Come on, you knuckleheads,’ I jested. ‘Let’s eat lunch.’

  While Ellen and the kids – now content that they had been absolved of their sins – were busy making grilled cheese sandwiches, I slipped away to make a quick phone call. I tipped the desk chair back and swiveled gently from side to side as I listened to the line ring. After a click, a familiar voice ask, ‘Hello?’

  ‘Mom,’ I said, fighting to keep the laughter from my voice. ‘I am so sorry.’

  ‘Sorry? For what?’ A note of concern crept into her voice: ‘Scott, is everything okay?’

  ‘For everything,’ I told her, ignoring the last question. ‘For all the mischief Jeff and I must have caused growing up. I think I can finally understand what we must have put you through.’

  ‘Oh, Scott,’ Mom replied, beginning to chuckle. I could picture her perfectly in my mind: short, light brown hair curling above her ears; wire-rimmed glasses and red lipstick; the sharpness of her high cheekbones softening as she smiled. ‘You know nothing, yet.’

  ~~~

  Things settled into a perpetual state of chaos in our home. Nadia opened her mother-hen wings to include Andy in her protective embrace and Danny continued to show his new brother the lay of the land. With Andy it was all new again: new sights, new smells, new adventures in a new life. I received the chance to re-live a lot of the joys I’d first experienced with Nadia and Danny: teaching him how to swing, introducing him to the rhythms of rock, blues, soul, reggae, and disco, and educating him in American culture via PBS cartoons. It was all there, just waiting to be discovered again by new eyes. And discover we did.

  We discovered that where Nadia and Danny were outgoing and effusive, Andy was shy and reserved. Everything I had inferred from his headshot in Kathy’s packet was verified in knowing him. Life had not been kind to Andy and he was long overdue for a break. Every day his smile grew, though, and each week we saw more of it.

  I discovered that as Andy began to open up to us and to trust that this was his home, my own sense of self gradually took root and grew. I could feel myself mending – rebuilding – like a trampled bush: every day growing a little higher, a little firmer, a little more solid as branch-by-branch it regained some of what it used to be.

  I discovered that with my kids I was able to find myself beyond the prosthetics and handicap. They knew me only as Tata – no Old Scott or New Scott; no pre-illness and no post-illness; just the man I was that day, in that moment, with them.

  We discovered that two adopted children were a joyous wonderment and three were unrivaled felicity. So what, we wondered, could four bring?

  ~~~

  There was still a need for adoptive parents and our hearts and home were more than ample to provide for another. So I returned to Ethiopia for a second time and found that I had arrived during an African National Conference (ANC) that brought various political elite to Addis Ababa. Thankfully, with my two-year-old daughter, Kalista Kidist (pronounced Kid-ist) Martin, nestled against my side, I was allowed to pass through the hotel entrance without being frisked. We were not, however, welcome inside the same store as the high-ranking officials sharing our hotel. At least, that was how I interpreted the upraised hand which the rather large man in a dark, plain suit and sunglasses presented to me at the open doorway to the shop. Beside him was another large, suited man in sunglasses. They were each standing with their legs spread and elbows protruding from their sides as if to take up as much of the entrance as humanly possible.

  As the guard on the right raised his hand, I caught a glimpse of the black gun holstered to his side. I had Kali’s hand gently cupped in the left myo as she waddled beside me so our approach was slow and far from threatening. As we sidled closer, I glanced inside the store but could see only the clean lines of wood and glass shelves layered with the usual gift-shop paraphernalia. There was no sign that said ‘Important People Only’ or anything to indicate that this should be off-limits to the general public. I continued to guide Kali towards the gilded wood arch of the shop’s entrance.

  This earned me a disapproving frown from the guard with the uplifted hand. I could almost feel the condemnation of his glare seeping through the black lenses of his sunglasses. When we were close enough to see the discreet, plastic wires of earpieces curling behind their ears, I stopped and peered around them.

  From this angle I could make out the VIP occupant slowly meandering along the back of the store. He was flanked by four suited- and ear-pieced bodyguards and dressed in a beautiful, multi-colored robe. Russet browns, golden yellows, rich ambers, and bright whites were painted in triangular and diamond patterns across the robe’s front and back, outlined with thick, dramatic streaks of black. It fell across his wide shoulders with the majesty of a cape, blanketing him in an air of regal elegance. I watched him glide along the rows, pausing to slide his spectacles down his triangular nose as he examined something on one of the shelves.

  Well, well, I thought and turned back to the guards barring my way. They seemed to have grown in the few seconds I had been eyeing their charge, expanding to take up even more of the space in the entryway. Perhaps they possessed a superhuman ability to swell in open spaces like those expandable water toys that balloon to five-hundred percent of their original size in bathtubs. I wasn’t foolish enough to challenge these rhinoceros-sized men, but I was still me and felt rather important myself with my daughter’s hand clinging to the fingers o
f the myo; I had to say something.

  ‘I’m just buying gifts for my kids,’ I told the man on the right. His eyes were obscured by the sunglasses, so I stared at the bridge of his nose which was being rather severely pinched by his glasses, bulging around the plastic of his glasses like fat spilling out of a corset.

  ‘When is he going to be finished so we common folk can shop?’ I asked his scrunched nose.

  With a dour turn to his wide lips, the fat-nosed guard lifted his left arm and issued a series of clicks and grunts into his sleeve. And here I thought only Hollywood could be this dramatic.

  After a momentary pause and then another short burst of dialogue with his cuff-link microphone, the guard lowered his arm and narrowed his mouth at me.

  ‘The president will be finished shortly,’ he snapped monotonously. ‘Please be patient.’ I suppressed a snarl at the three little words which only a few years ago had been the bane of my existence.

  ‘I’ll wait.’

  Kali and I turned away from the store. We cut across the glistening, golden ivory marble of the floor to an open café with a clear view of the store entrance. I lowered myself into one of the chairs, sinking into the dense, burgundy cushion, and hefted Kali into my lap. A waiter in a blonde vest with a burgundy collar to match his burgundy slacks seemed to materialize out of the rectangular pillars supporting the two-story roof. He drifted over to us on silent feet and softly inquired if we would like to order anything.

  ‘Yes,’ I told him, knowing full well we could be here for a while. ‘Two Cokes and an order of French fries, please.’ I looked pointedly at Kali as I emphasized the word ‘please’, never one to miss an opportunity for a lesson in etiquette.

  The waiter slipped away as silently as he had come and no more than five minutes later a small, wicker basket of fries and two tall glasses of Coke were placed on the glass table in front of us. The good waiter had even had the forethought to secure Kali’s drink in a plastic cup with a lid and straw. She greedily trapped the glass between her plump hands and began sucking the sweet carbonation into her mouth. I guess this isn’t your first Coke, I thought at her content expression and helped myself to a few fries.