The Best of Us

by Joyce Maynard

  It was unnervingly easy, getting approved as an adoptive parent for an Ethiopian child. Nobody seemed to care that I was fifty-five years old, unmarried, living on the undependable earnings of a writer. I had made a lot of money that year, and almost none the year before. Good enough.

  A number of close and wise friends attempted to discourage me. My friend Becky, who remembered well how hard I’d struggled all those years as a single parent, shook her head. “You’ve finally got a little space in your life to take care of yourself for a change,” she said to me. “If you take this on, all that is gone.” My daughter Audrey, who worked with troubled adolescent boys, knew firsthand how many of them still struggled with issues of adoption. “Please, Mom,” she said, “don’t.”

  No one could talk me out of it. In the spring of 2009, I received an e-mail containing two JPEGs, each showing a pair of girls, dark-skinned, bright-eyed, and full of life. Two different pairs of sisters, in which the older looked to be nine or ten and the younger one around five.

  I had thought initially that I’d adopt one child. But here were these beautiful sisters, and it seemed to me, studying the pictures, that if a child had to do this terribly hard thing—leaving her country and what was left of her AIDS-ravaged family, giving up her language, even, and coming to an unknown place where every single thing (the food, the religion, the music, the climate, even the alphabet) would be unknown to her—that she should have somebody at her side: somebody known to her, and loved, to support her in the journey.

  Something in the gesture of the older sister in one of the two JPEG images—the way she draped her arm around the little one, suggesting not only love but fierce protection, spoke to me. She was not smiling in the picture, though her little sister (who had no doubt been told to do so, as they both had) was.

  “I’d like to adopt those two girls,” I wrote back. Simple as that.

  In the summer of 2009, I traveled to Addis Ababa to meet my future daughters. I will speak of them as Layla and Adenach, but those are not their real names.

  They were very beautiful, and very thin, no doubt from years of deprivation. Though the particulars of their lives up to that point remained unclear, I knew they had endured more hardship in their few years on the planet than many people do in a lifetime, but they had not lost the capacity for joy. It was only later that I’d learn the other part—the depth of sorrow that a child must navigate when she has endured as much as my girls had.

  The moment we laid eyes on each other, in the hard dirt yard outside the orphanage, the younger sister, Adenach, leapt into my arms and pressed her face against my chest. Layla held back, with a tight, slightly worried smile. I had been told their ages were five and nine, and Adenach seemed like a five-year-old all right—just a very small one. But I knew right away that Layla was not the age the agency had told me in their letter. Tiny as she was, there was a kind of wisdom in her eyes. If I were to guess, I would have said she was twelve, though she herself might not have known the answer, it had been so long since anyone was there to keep track.

  I took the girls’ hands, one on each side, and we headed inside the orphanage—a cinder-block structure filled with cribs and one sparsely furnished room offering a couch, a television set, pictures taped on the walls of Americans who’d come to bring children home, and a few coloring books. The sound of babies crying never let up.

  For five nights I slept at the orphanage and shared my meals with the girls—enjera and doro wot, which we ate with our fingers, gathered around a low little table with the two other older children at the orphanage and the nannies, and sometimes another American, come to bring home a baby. The girls spoke almost no English then, but we found plenty of ways to learn about each other. I had brought crayons and markers and card games and a ball. For Adenach, it was enough just to sit on my lap, her arms around my neck, mine around her. Layla sat a little ways off, watching.

  The day before I arrived in Ethiopia, I had learned about the death of Michael Jackson, whose music I had brought with me to entertain them over the course of our visit, knowing we would not share language. After I played them Thriller, and all the other Michael Jackson songs on my laptop, all they wanted to do was dance to his music. They were wonderful dancers and they loved his videos. I didn’t have the heart to tell them he’d just died.

  America, they said, over and over. Michael Jackson. Hamburgers. Barbie. Mom.

  One night I brought them to a restaurant where a live band would be performing traditional Ethiopian music. When the music started, Adenach rose from her seat like a person in a trance and made her way to the front of the room, right beside the drummer. She began to dance, moving her hips and arms in a way I could not have replicated if I’d practiced all week—a five-year-old with the moves of a grown woman. I should have recognized it then: She had a history and culture that went beyond the orphanage. And I was taking her away from it.

  As she always did, Layla hung back. She was a wonderful dancer too, but she was wary in ways her little sister was not. No doubt there were reasons.

  This was not the trip in which I’d be bringing the girls home. I had made this journey so they would know there was someone looking out for them now, ready to be their mother once the paperwork was completed.

  On my last day at the orphanage, we lay snuggled close on the bed where I slept—not just Adenach this time, but Layla too. They were braiding my hair. Adenach was begging me not to leave, and crying. She was holding on to me so tightly her fingers left a mark on my arm.

  I made them a calendar and told them to cross off the days, one by one. I had an idea—just a guess—of how many days it would take before the documents would be filed and I’d come back for them.

  As it turned out, the adoption moved faster than we’d expected. Layla and Adenach were legally my daughters by that November, and in January I returned to Ethiopia to bring them home with me.

  There was a party for them at the orphanage the night before I took them away. Their older brothers came. Watching them say good-bye to those brothers, whispering in Amharic words I would never know, dancing in the firelight to beautiful, haunting songs we would not hear again, spinning around the orphanage yard with their friends, the other children still waiting for someone to come for them—I wondered if I was making a terrible mistake taking them away. When the girls said good-bye to their brothers and their friends that night, we spoke of returning one day for a visit, but everyone knew the truth: They might never see each other again.

  They entered a different world then. They loved the hotel swimming pool and the elevator, and the breakfast buffet where they piled on so much food that pancakes tumbled onto the carpet. They thought the airport escalator was the plane.

  Every single thing was new: the seat belts, the food, the vast landscape out the window as we made our long journey. Home in Mill Valley, California, after twenty-six hours of travel, I tucked them into their bunk beds and kissed them. They called me Mom. Later, Adenach climbed upstairs to join me in my bed—but because she had almost never encountered stairs before, she took the steps on all fours, like a kitten.

  For the first few weeks, they were not yet enrolled in school as they would be soon, so we stayed home a lot, drawing and watching movies that didn’t require so much language—Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy—and dancing. I learned to put berbere spice in every food I prepared. They were ravenous for meat. “I love you I love you I love you,” they told me.

  This was the honeymoon period, when they recited those words at three-minute intervals—the first words of English they’d been taught at the orphanage.

  It was a good and necessary step, when they got beyond this and their truer feelings emerged concerning what they had gone through. These included a lot of grief, and for Layla, a great deal of understandable anger. A depth of pain so vast it seemed to have no end.

  The fact that this was so was terrifying to me. From the outside, we seemed to be managing. The girls learned English, learned to
read, to swim, and then to ride a bicycle (with me running behind, out of breath, until they got the hang of it—as they swiftly did). They were wonderful athletes who picked up every new challenge as effortlessly as breathing. The first time Adenach saw the monkey bars at school, she climbed to the top and flipped upside down. She swung back and forth, laughing, for an hour, then jumped off and performed a cartwheel.

  But later, home again, there was a manic wildness to our nights. Adenach loved everyone, but especially men, and boys (my sons, when they came to visit, or any pizza delivery boy). And Adenach was, from the first, unfailingly affectionate with me.

  Not Layla. There seemed to be a stone pressing on her heart. There was nothing more beautiful than her smile, when you got to see it. But you might wait a long time.

  I spent my days that year attending soccer games and volunteering at school and bringing the girls to birthday parties—especially Adenach, who was queen of her kindergarten class—and to the houses of friends, whose mothers all looked around the age of my daughter Audrey. I was living the life of a thirty-five-year-old suburban mother, only my children’s story was nothing like the stories of those women’s children, and my life was nothing like theirs.

  One day I listened as a young mother told me about breaking the news to her daughter that her fish had died—an experience that had prompted her to consult a therapist. The daughter I was waiting for, outside her fourth-grade classroom, had sat on the dirt floor of a hut with no running water at age four, watching her mother die of AIDS. She hid bread in her pocket—the tiny portion allotted to her—to give to her baby sister, Adenach.

  We struggled daily over the girls’ hair. At first I had tried to help them comb it myself, but one day a Haitian woman stopped me on the street and kindly asked (no mystery as to why) if I needed some help with my daughters’ hair. All she had to do was look at them to know I did.

  After that, I drove to Jasmine’s house every Sunday while she worked first on Layla, then Adenach—one knot at a time. The job took so many hours that we got through two movies on DVD every trip, and when Jasmine got to the braiding part, their eyes filled with tears. But they didn’t want her to stop.

  They wanted to be American girls, and they wanted me to be their all-American mother. So we went to the Justin Bieber movie twice, and to the mall, and to Oakland, where I spent three hundred dollars at a beauty parlor because there was nothing they desired more than to have their hair straightened, even though one week later it would be back to how it was before—which I thought was more beautiful, if only they could have felt that way too.

  For hours every night, I worked with Layla on her reading: She didn’t want to read Hop on Pop, though that was her level. She wanted to read a real fourth-grade book, Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Every night we made it through a paragraph, a process that took hours, and generally involved bitter tears.

  It was a big moment when Layla performed in a school talent show to a song picked out for her, and written by, my son Charlie. Her dancing was so good she brought down the house. From my seat in the audience, with tears in my eyes, I watched her radiant smile as the crowd cheered. But at home, dark clouds enveloped us.

  All my life, I had counted on my abundance of energy to get me through difficult times, but suddenly I was exhausted all the time. Always before, however bad things might have seemed, I had managed to summon optimism about the future, but now hope abandoned me. All I could see ahead was an endless series of lonely struggles and failures.

  I called up my son Willy’s best friend from his school days in Mill Valley, Bridget—now completing her studies to become a social worker—and enlisted her help, and as the weeks passed, I relied on Bridget more and more. The girls adored Bridget. The trouble was mostly reserved for times with me.

  We started every day, often before sunrise, with battles—over hair, over clothes, over food, but they were never about any of those things, really. One of our battles left Layla and me on the floor together, our arms and legs wrapped around each other in a wrestling match. I wept but she was silent as a stone, her jaw set, her eyes looking through me.

  “I love you,” I told her, through tears, but what did that mean anymore?

  “I hate you,” she told me.

  With an ignorance that staggers me now—ignorance, and some arrogance no doubt—I had believed my love would be there like an eternal flame, and that this love of mine could fix whatever had been broken in my daughters’ lives. When it became apparent, as it swiftly did, that they would have miles to go before they trusted me (let alone loved me)—and that I would somehow have to keep going this way, for months and maybe years, with only the barest sign of affection coming back—I was filled with the most profound sense of despair I had ever known.

  None of this should have been surprising. The two girls I called my daughters were bright, funny, strong, tenacious, brave. I also saw them as wary and hurt, and wisely defended against future loss, distrustful, and angry. They had not asked for some woman old enough to be their grandmother, who couldn’t even provide them with a father, to show up at their orphanage and take them away from their homeland, to Marin County, California, of all places. Why should they love me? And here came the hardest, most shameful and terrifying question I asked myself, alone in the dark: How long could my own love endure?

  Visits to a therapist did not help. We’d sit in her office, week after week, as Layla said nothing. Finally the therapist told me there was no point bringing her back. “Just come on your own,” she told me. “You could use some help.”

  I had always believed my stores of energy and devotion to children to be inexhaustible, but as the days wore on I could feel my reserves disappearing. I was sick with a sense of my own inability to be for my daughters the mother they had dreamed of finding in America, the mother I had always believed myself to be.

  Six months into our time together I developed pneumonia and it hung on for months. I couldn’t work. I could barely climb the stairs. I couldn’t work.

  I couldn’t meet the mortgage payments on our house, and called a Realtor about putting it on the market. I looked at apartments, debated moving back east where life would be cheaper. But moving would not address the real problem. The problem was not the house, but the homeowner.

  The first time the therapist suggested that I consider relinquishing the girls, I had put my hands over my ears and told her never to suggest this again. I talked with my other children—the ones I’d given birth to—who had their own grief to deal with over the girls. My sons, who knew them best, had loved them. They just weren’t around all that much. My daughter Audrey—the one who’d never believed this was a good idea—sighed deeply and long. “I don’t know what to tell you, Mom,” she said. Too kind to add, “I told you so.”

  Then something happened that was, for us, the breaking point.

  Layla was a beautiful natural runner, and with her long legs and graceful stride—and her fierce tenacity—she could run forever. For months, I’d brought her to the track in our town to run with her—in my old sweatpants, out of breath, with my knees aching, Layla in a purple tutu she loved, sailing past me on the track, effortless as a gazelle. The fact that I would even try to do this, as a fifty-six-year-old woman who had never been a runner, no doubt served as indication of my desperation.

  The idea had come to me that maybe, if I could find someone to run with Layla—if, in the company of a real runner, she could run far enough and hard enough—things might go better for her. English was frustrating to her. The alphabet was frustrating. Reading was frustrating. My presence infuriated her.

  But for Layla, running was as natural as breathing, and so I allowed myself to imagine that if she could just keep running, she might actually find a way to gain her footing in America.

  I went on Craigslist, not even sure who I was looking for, but the person I found there seemed, briefly, like the answer to my prayers.

  Ashley was a distance runner, training for the Olympics on th
e trails of Mt. Tamalpais and looking for a place to stay rent-free. I called her up and offered her a room in our house if she would run with my daughter every day. Miles, if possible. The faster, the better.

  Ashley moved in with us, and every day she took Layla running with her. But it had been a naive and foolish idea on my part to suppose that somehow Layla could run her way out of the place where we found ourselves. Her troubles just followed her onto the trail.

  It turned out that Layla hated running with Ashley. One afternoon on the trail, the two of them got in a bad fight. When Layla started screaming, something terrible happened. The muscles in one side of her face suddenly froze. When Ashley brought her home that day—neither one of them speaking—she looked like a stroke victim. This would have been hard for anyone, but for a twelve-year-old girl who already felt out of place at school, it was a disaster.

  Every day now—to address her medical condition—we were making visits to doctors, to the emergency room, the acupuncturist, the therapist. Layla hated this, of course, but she hated what had happened to her face even more. And so she visited those doctors, and subjected herself to their tests, her eyes brooding, her jaw set. On the ride home after, she seldom spoke to me.

  Whatever else was true of Layla’s condition, I knew she was deeply unhappy, and terrified by the idea that her face would look this way forever. I wanted to help her. But I was part of her problem.

  The freezing of my Ethiopian daughter’s face gradually resolved, but the medical crisis became, for me, a stark message. I needed to find a better home for Layla and Adenach with two parents who could give them what I had failed to provide.

  One night a couple of weeks after the running incident—with Ashley gone now, and Layla’s running shoes put away—I suggested to the girls that the three of us get in the hot tub and talk. It was a kind of conversation no parent I’d ever known could imagine having with her children, and one I would once have viewed as unthinkable. Now, though, we sat together in the bubbling water under the night sky, and I began, slowly, to speak the words.