Daughters for a Time

by Handford, Jennifer

  The nurses ran the show. They were the ones who worked around the clock, taking vitals, making sure Mom was comfortable, sneaking me sodas from the nurses’ lounge. One nurse, Tammy, always had Hershey miniatures in her pocket. She’d see me sitting next to Mom’s bed and she’d open her pocket for me. Sometimes Tammy would let me fool with her stethoscope, anything to make the time go by. There was always so much waiting—waiting for the doctor to come, waiting for the next meal, waiting for Mom to get her next chemo treatment. Waiting for it all to be over. One way or another.

  My mother’s doctor, Dr. Sam Goldberg, checked in once in the morning and once in the afternoon. He had kind eyes, and his bedside manner was so good that there were times when I wondered whether he had a thing for Mom. He’d sit on the edge of her bed and put his hand over hers, and talk to her about the options that were left, the course of treatment he recommended. Mom was such an agreeable patient, the type who accepted her fate as if it were predetermined and any fight or fuss she waged would just be a silly attempt to move mountains. He’d say that there was still hope, and Mom would nod and smile, saying that she knew he was doing his best, that she felt that she was getting excellent care. I remember feeling sick every time she let him off the hook like that, thinking, Shut up, Mom, let him talk, let him explore every possible option.

  I was a brat back then, thirteen years old and all attitude and self-pity. Claire was so involved in Mom’s treatment that she could recite the significance of every blood test and blood count; she could tell you why the chemo wasn’t working, why radiation wasn’t an option, how it was basically just management of the disease at this point. I knew “management” was just a euphemism for keeping her comfortable until she died.

  “Come sit with me,” I remember Mom saying, patting the side of the bed.

  “I’m fine,” I said, slumped in the hard corner chair, my legs hanging over the side.

  “Gin rummy?” She pulled the deck of cards from her end table and waved them at me.

  “Not in the mood.”

  “What’s new at school?”

  “The same.”

  “What’s new with Lisa? Ellen?” she listed my best friends’ names.

  “They’re not my friends anymore,” I said in a pitiful voice. “They said it’s no fun hanging out with me because I’m always gloomy. You know, because of you.” It was a lie; Lisa and Ellen never said that. A shudder of betrayal sent a chill down my back.

  “Oh, honey,” she said, seeing right through me. “I know you’re sad. And I know you’re mad, but this is just the way it is. It’s just part of life. No one’s to blame—not me, not God,” she said, defending her one true love.

  “How could there be a God?” I said, almost too quietly for her to hear, though I knew that she had heard my defamation. Then I looked out the window that overlooked the parking lot, put on my earphones, and started my music, wondering why I was worrying Mom so. Like she didn’t have enough to deal with. Maybe I thought that if she had something other than cancer to worry about, she’d fight harder. Maybe the idea of her daughter having no friends was just the fuel she needed to kick herself into remission. Maybe Claire was making it too easy for her to let go, with all her proclamations of responsibility and accountability. Her to-do lists. Mom knew Claire would look after me, she knew she’d make me go to college, she knew Claire wouldn’t let me end up in the gutter. Fight, Mom! I thought. It’s not Claire I want. It’s you.

  You don’t get back those moments, that’s what I know now. I think of what it would have meant to her if I had just crawled into bed and hugged her, cried on her chest, looked her in the eyes and told her how much I loved her. I didn’t, though, and she died without having heard the words come from me. My withholding must have caused her great pain. And now I had a daughter of my own, and even though I had only known her for a little more than a week, I already knew that I would be devastated if she ever treated me that way.

  “Triage is ready for you,” Max said, and led us back. “The nurse will check your daughter.”

  I looked into Sam’s charcoal eyes and cupped my hand around her porcelain face. “We’re going to see the nurse, okay?” Sam looked at me, coughed in my face, and then looked away.

  We sat on the folding chair next to the triage nurse, who pulled the curtain behind us and wrote on her pad. She took Sam’s temperature, height, and weight, and then asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “She’s coughing,” I said. “And has a fever.”

  Max translated in Chinese, prattled on for minutes when it seemed like it shouldn’t have been taking that long to say that she had a cough. It made me wonder if he was giving the nurse information about Sam that I hadn’t been told. Maybe she had a condition that had not been disclosed to us.

  The nurse listened to her chest, called for the doctor. He, too, listened. An X-ray was taken.

  “Her lungs are filled with fluid,” Max said evenly. “The doctor wants her to stay the night.”

  “How did her lungs get filled with fluid?” I wanted to know. “Has she had this problem before? Is there something wrong with her lungs?” Were her lungs even fully developed when she was born, a bruising four-pounder?

  Max shook his head and the doctor shrugged. Neither knew what had happened or what we should expect. When the babies got sick at the orphanage, they were treated, but rarely was a report written.

  I looked expectantly at Tim, and he shrugged as if this was our only option.

  “Can we trust these doctors?” I asked Max. “Is this our best route to go?”

  Max assured us that he had been here before with many babies, that this hospital was not modern like those in the States, but that the care was good.

  The nurse administered the IV and Sam shrieked like she was being flayed. I pressed my entire body weight into her, turned my face in the opposite direction so that she wouldn’t see the tears pouring down my face, and held her still while the nurse poked and prodded and taped her tender little arm. I whispered apologies into her ear and swore that it wouldn’t always be this bad.

  Later, after Sam had forgotten about the IV and was used to the respirator, she twitched and kicked and whimpered until, finally, she gave in to sleep. Her swath of satin blanket was in one hand and mine was wrapped around her other. With Tim positioned at her side, I stepped out into the lobby and called Claire. I explained what was wrong with Sam: the fever, the congested lungs, her birth weight. She took down as much information as I had to give and then hung up to call her pediatrician, who now was also ours. When she called back, she requested Sam’s X-ray report and hospital input form, so I walked down the road to a storefront that advertised a fax machine. With a string of international codes, I sent the fax. An hour later, Claire called back. She and the pediatrician had discussed Sam’s case. The Chinese doctors were doing what would be done in the States. The course of treatment was good. By the time Claire and I hung up for our last time, it was three o’clock in the morning.

  When I went back to Sam’s room, I found Tim asleep, his hand covering Sam’s.

  Dear Max, in his Levi jeans and leather jacket, was still with us, punching on his BlackBerry, solving problems for all of his parents. He sat down next to me, handed me a Coke from the vending machine, and said, “There is an old folktale about a breed of wasps that was said to steal baby bollworms off the mulberry trees, take them to their own nests, and raise them as wasps.”

  I listened, nodded.

  “Sometimes these girls—Chinese girls who get adopted—are called that: children of the mulberry bug.”

  “So us parents, we’re like abductors?”

  “No, no,” he said. “You parents, you’re more like saviors. Saving these girls from an unpleasant life.”

  “That’s nice of you, Max,” I said. “But I think most of us—well, at least speaking for myself—didn’t adopt out of pure benevolence. We just wanted what we couldn’t have, you know?”

  “Perhaps,” Max said. “But the
re are unintended consequences to everything we do in life. And I happen to believe that parents who adopt not only gain a life, but save one.”

  I considered his folktale, thought it through. In a way, each of us had been abducted or robbed of something precious. Sam had been taken from the life she’d known and enveloped in mine, through no choice of her own. My mother had been stolen from me when I was far too young. God, it broke my heart to recall all of my mother’s promises of forever: “You’ll always be mine,” “Forever, my love,” “‘til the end of time.” She’d meant them all; she’d believed it. There was no way for her to have known that promises made of gold could so easily melt to nothing. Everything that mattered, it seemed, was out of our control: whether we could bear a child, bestow upon that child a life; whether life, once given, ever truly belonged to us.

  The following forty-eight hours passed with a disorienting sense of dislocation. The low light of the fluorescent bulbs gave no indication of whether it was morning or night. At some point, I had lifted Sam into my arms and positioned myself along the length of the hospital bed. When I woke, the light seemed more pronounced, a golden glow, and I was certain that it must be morning. I reached over Sam’s tender wing of an arm, still strapped to the IV, and pushed the button on my cell phone. It registered as five in the morning. Only a few hours had passed. Sam had since sunk lower in my lap. Her legs curled between mine; her head rested atop my stomach. A pool of drool puddled around her mouth and through my pants.

  Tim was asleep, slouched in the corner chair, his head pitched at an unnatural angle. He would hurt when he woke. I thought of the Advil in my purse.

  I tried to close my eyes, to get a little more sleep, but my lids stung as if they were being forced against their will. I ran my finger down Sam’s arm. Indignation threaded up my back. Why was Sam sick, damn it? Was she sick because we adopted her? Because these days with us had proved to be too taxing for her tender constitution? The many long bus rides, the change in diet, the recirculated heat in the hotel room. Would she have been better off left alone? Or would she have gotten sick anyway? And if she had, who would have cared for her at the orphanage? What if I weren’t here yet? What if this bout of sickness had consumed her last month? Whose arms would she have snuggled in, Goddamn it? Who would have cared for her in my stead?

  I wanted to kick my feet against the hospital bed’s metal railing, scream at the top of my lungs, and beat a pillow with my fists. The thought hit me hard: I almost wasn’t here for her! I almost missed being a mother to my sick daughter. No more, never again. Sam would never be alone again! As I wrapped this conviction in my fist, I thought of how loosely we all played with our relations. How we took for granted that they’d always be there. Look at Claire and me with our own father. Estranged. What were we all waiting for? Damn it all.

  “When we get home, peanut,” I whispered to Sam, “we’re getting this family together once and for all. You and Daddy and me and Aunt Claire and Maura and Uncle Ross and Grandpa Larry.”

  By the next morning, Sam’s fever had broken. As she drenched her sleeper suit and regained her strength, I swabbed her forehead with soft washcloths.

  “Good girl,” I cried. “Good, strong girl. I knew you’d get better.”

  The doctor examined her. Her lungs were clearing, her breathing had moderated, and some color had returned to her face. After I fed her a bowl of congee and a bottle of formula, I changed her diaper and held her in my arms.

  “You’re okay, pumpkin,” I whispered in her ear. “You’re going to grow up big and strong, don’t you worry.”

  “Look what I found,” Tim said, holding up a yellow paperback he had fished out of a basket in the lobby. It was Curious George Goes to the Hospital—in English! Tim scooted his chair next to mine and read the book aloud. When we got to the part where George passed out from sniffing ether, Tim and I laughed—real laughs—and hugged Sam tightly.

  “When was this book written?” Tim asked as he wiped his eyes.

  I looked at him and smiled, remembering my Norman Rockwell dream of a family just like this, a family with enough love to have fun even in a Chinese hospital. Enough love to pull the joy out of suffering.

  After a while, Sam grew sleepy. Tim urged me to take a walk down the street, to get some fresh air.

  “Fresh air?” I said with a smile.

  “Well, air, anyway.”

  I exited the hospital, made a visor with my hand, and looked around. This part of town didn’t look as seedy as it had in the middle of the night. There were businesses and storefronts with their doors open, groups of men huddled around a tree smoking cigarettes, mothers pushing strollers with heavily bundled babies. I stretched my arms above my head and arched my back. All sorts of pops and cracks. I leaned over and touched my toes. I wandered down the road, swinging my arms, turning my neck, trying to loosen up.

  I cut through a city park and wound my way down a path lined with benches and flowers. Nestled among trees backlit by sunlight, boulders glistening with their natural glitter, and gigantic pots of flowers was a Buddhist temple. Though apprehensive, I inched my way up to the ornately carved red wood door and peeked in. Near the door was a pile of shoes. I slipped mine off and quietly eased my way in. The incense, the candles—the scents of my childhood, only Buddhist, not Catholic; only in China, not the States. At once, the differences seemed irrelevant. The brown-robed monks were going through their prostrations. When they were finished, I kneeled down and put my hands together. The prayers and gongs and recitations and bells. A soothing calm warmed me, like swallowing a spoonful of butternut squash soup, feeling it coat my throat and slide down to my belly.

  I stared at the statues of Buddha. I thought of Sam, a child I hadn’t known existed until recently, hadn’t touched until eleven days ago, and now who occupied my every thought. I squeezed my eyes shut, and at first I saw Sam, but then I saw Mom. I smiled to myself because seeing her was always a rare treat, like slipping into an old-fashioned diner on a rainy day to find a chocolate cake frosted with boiled icing, the kind Mom made for every one of my childhood birthdays. But I also felt a tug of sadness, imagining how she would love being here, her pride in my adopting Sam, her head pulled forward from the weight of her 35 mm camera hanging around her neck, documenting every step of our journey.

  Locals and tourists came and went, prayed and offered. I, too, was preparing to leave when I noticed that there was a group of ladies near the front of the temple. I had been watching them bowing and chanting, and now they were lighting incense. They appeared to be in a group and when they kneeled down, they spoke together, reciting the same prayer. They reminded me of Mom. She had been part of a group called the Legion of Mary; it meant that she would say the complete rosary every day. Once a week, she said it aloud with her group, in the front pews of St. Mary’s.

  With a thumping heart, I inched my way up toward the women, kneeling behind them and putting my hands into prayer position. For the next twenty minutes, while they chanted their prayers in Chinese, I whispered my prayers in English, a metronome of pleases and thank-yous and never-agains and forevers. When the Chinese women finished, they rose quietly, but stirred enough to knock me from my own meditations. One, a kind elderly lady, looked me square in the eyes, reached for my hand, and squeezed it.

  She said something to me in Chinese that sounded a lot like, “It was nice having you here, dear.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and a shiver tingled throughout my body.

  Afterward, I lit some prayer candles and then went outside into the garden, where I sat on a concrete bench and stared at a statue of Buddha.

  I took a deep breath, looked to the sky, and knew that it was time to have a conversation with my mother, my dear sweet mother, whom I hadn’t addressed directly in twenty-two years.

  “Mom,” I said, testing my voice, my ability to actually say her name. “I’m here in China. Are you watching? Do you see that I have a daughter now? Isn’t she adorable?” I reached into my
purse and rooted around for a tissue but only came up with one of Sam’s socks. I remembered how Claire used to stick her hand in a jacket pocket and come up with a binky. This sock made me feel like my sister, like a legitimate mom. I dabbed my eyes with it and swiped it across my nose.

  “Mom,” I said. “I’ve thought this a million times and I’ve felt the shame and regret of it every day of my life, but I’ve never said it. So I’m going to say it now: I’m sorry, Mom. I’m sorry that I wasn’t the daughter you needed me to be when you were sick. I’m sure, knowing you, that you’d say, ‘Oh, honey, you were sad. It’s okay. You did your best.’ All that’s true, but if there were a way that I could go back, I would have been exactly what you needed. I would have loved you with such honesty there wouldn’t have been any doubt in your mind as you left this world. Your heart would have been overflowing. That’s what I wish. I’m sorry that I wasn’t that way. I’d do anything to hug you and tell you how much I loved you. How much I still love you. I love you, Mom. I really, really love you. And I’m sorry.”

  By the time I got back to the hospital, Tim was holding Sam, who was cheerful and rested. When she saw me, she smiled and reached in my direction. A sense of pride and propriety filled me. Our red thread seemed to be reinforcing itself with a material that could not be breached.

  After seventeen long days, we said good-bye to Max, our fellow adoptive parents, their beautiful new daughters, and the region of China that bore Sam. Amy and I promised to e-mail each other often. The husbands took photos of us holding Sam and Maria, little Angela between us. Then Amy took one last picture of Tim and me with Sam, and we did the same for her family. When Amy hugged me, I cried because I couldn’t have made it through these last weeks without her. She was my surrogate for Claire, a version of my older sister, seven thousand miles from home.