“Before we left Ethiopia, to bring you home with me,” I told them, “I made a promise to everyone who loved you there that I would make sure you have a good life in America.” Silence then. The girls studied my face. The water swirled around us. “And you will have a good life here,” I said. “The best way for you to get that is for me to find you the right family.”
They needed a different mother, I said. They needed a father.
Of the many people I would encounter who would later judge me harshly for the decision I made to relinquish the girls—both strangers and those who knew me well, or supposed they did—there were two people at least who did understand, at least some ways, or did on that night anyway, my choice to relinquish my daughters. Those two were Layla and Adenach.
They sat very still in the hot tub as I talked to them that night, but for once there was no argument. They asked if they could bring their bicycles and their American Girl dolls to their new home. They asked if, in their new family, there would be other kids. “That would be a good idea,” I said.
There was no website to go consult to locate a new family for Layla and Adenach. The agency that had been so ready to accept my checks two and a half years before had nothing to tell me now beyond the suggestion that if I broke the girls up, and made them available separately to different families, they were more likely to be re-adoptable.
“The little one in particular should be easy,” a woman at the agency said over the phone. “She’s so cute.”
“The girls stay together,” I told her. “There can be no question about that.”
On that first trip I’d made to Addis Ababa a year and a half before, I’d met a woman named Rachel, much younger than I—around the age of my daughter, in fact—who had come from Missouri to bring home a baby. She and her husband, Henry, had three birth children and were also raising a foster child, but they had made the decision to adopt an Ethiopian baby. Rachel had made the first visit to meet him at the orphanage. Later, Henry would be making the trip to bring him home.
These people were not even close to wealthy. In so many ways—religion, politics—we differed. But their decency and commitment was never in doubt, and neither was their strength. It had been clear to me, meeting Rachel, that for them a big, diverse tribe of a family was the most natural and right thing, not only for them but for the children.
Back before the girls came to live with me, when I used to get reports from the orphanage telling me how they were doing, the director had written to me about something that had happened after the visit of Henry, Rachel’s husband, when he’d come to bring home their infant son. After Layla had met Henry, she came to the orphanage director with a suggestion. Not having understood that Henry was married to Rachel, and taking a great liking to Henry, as anyone meeting him would, Layla suggested that I should marry Henry. That way we could all be together as a regular family with a mother and father.
Maybe I saw even then, in the innocent fantasy of a twelve-year-old, an underlying wisdom. Though I had the heart in me for loving two more children, I did not possess the rest: I had no husband, no father to offer them, and at least for these particular girls, with their particular stories, that was crucial. More than this, I lacked the stability within my own life that would have allowed me to help them build stability in theirs.
In February of 2011, just thirteen months after the bright, hope-filled day I’d brought my two girls home to begin our life together in Mill Valley, I wrote an e-mail to Rachel and Henry to ask whether they would consider becoming parents to Layla and Adenach.
Within hours, they wrote me back. They had never stopped thinking about the girls, they told me. They had loved Adenach and Layla the minute they had met them so long ago back at the orphanage, even though they had traveled all those miles to adopt a different child.
Their house was small, but they had room in their lives. Their other children would love having two more sisters, and I knew my girls would feel good about the idea of living in a home bursting at the seams with children and grandparents—with a mother and father who seemed born for this.
Over the days that followed, Henry and Rachel and I spent hours talking over what it would mean for the girls to leave the home where they had lived with me and come to theirs, and to become their legal daughters.
At the time, I held out hope that we might carve out a way I could continue to know the girls; but we all knew better. If they were to make a life with their new family in Missouri, they would need to separate totally from me. Once I said good-bye to them, we would not see each other again or communicate. Not for a long time anyway.
I’d met Rachel in Addis, but I wanted to meet Henry. I told him that I’d recently taken a speaking engagement in Aspen, to which I was bringing the girls. It was a job I signed on for specifically because it would allow Layla and Adenach to spend three nights at a condo on the mountain there and see snow, which they loved. Because my sons, as well as my daughter’s boyfriend, Tod, were snowboarders, they wanted to be snowboarders too.
It was a fourteen-hour drive all the way to Aspen from the Missouri town where Henry and Rachel and their family lived, but Henry said he would come—not to check the girls out, but to give them a chance to see him again and make sure they felt good about what we proposed. He would bring along his two sons. If anyone was on trial that day, it would be Henry’s family, not the girls.
By the time Layla and Adenach and I made the trip to Aspen in early March, the situation at our house had become almost unbearable for us all. Though that night in the hot tub they had seemed to accept the reasons for my choice for us, by this point the girls had pulled away from me to the point where, when I spoke to them, they often didn’t answer. They did not look at me. It was simply too hard, I think, for them to hold two different families in their hearts at one time. They had to let go of someone. That person was me.
“I feel as though I’m suffering from a terminal illness,” I told my friend Becky. “The girls and I have no future together, and we know it. How do you go through the days when you know you’re about to say good-bye forever?”
The trip to Aspen made for a good distraction. The girls loved snowboarding. I had told them about Henry and his sons coming to meet us there. They may have pretended as though this was no big deal, but we all knew it was.
I was with the girls at the top of a ski run at the moment Henry and his two sons arrived after their fourteen-hour drive. Even from high above the base and the lodge, I could make out the three of them. Something in the way they stood there—three solid-looking figures in brown work jackets, nothing like the brilliantly colored ski ensembles of everyone else on the mountain that day—made me know that they were not skiers or snowboarders on vacation, out for an afternoon’s recreation. This was a father of five who worked as a plumber, who had set out in his truck before dawn on his day off with his eleven- and fourteen-year-old sons to meet his future daughters, their future sisters.
After two days with me in Aspen, the girls were much more skillful on a snowboard than I was on my skis. Now, having caught sight of the man who would be their father, I watched them tear down the mountain ahead of me, snow flying behind their boards, headed for the three waiting figures—one big, two smaller—who represented their new family.
When they got to the foot of the slope, Adenach did not even stop. She plowed right up to Henry on her board, flung it aside and leapt into his arms. Layla hung back a little more, but the boys took care of that. From where I watched as I made my way down the mountain, snowplowing most of the way, I could see the brothers in their puffy jackets, encircling Layla. She was a girl who had left three brothers back in Ethiopia she might never see again, had fallen in love with two brothers in Mill Valley who were never around as much as she and her sister longed for them to be. And here she was, meeting the two who would be brothers to her now.
Because Henry had to be home for work the next day, the visit back at our ski condo lasted no more than two hours
, just long enough for everyone but me to get in the hot tub while I ordered pizza. Already, Adenach was settled into Henry’s lap. Layla was playing with her future brothers and laughing in a way I had not seen her do in months.
I might have been invisible. If I had any doubt, it was clear to me then that they weren’t my daughters anymore. There was relief in this, and a world of sorrow.
Three weeks later, heading to the airport with their possessions packed up and shipped to Missouri ahead of them, my Ethiopian daughters walked out the door of our house for the last time. They did not look back.
My younger son, Willy, flew to the airport in Kansas City to make the three-hour drive with us to the girls’ new home and to say good-bye. The girls spotted him all the way down the long airport corridor and went running toward him—their handsome, funny brother who had played soccer with them and swung them in the air. Adenach pulled Willy’s hat off his head and stuck it on her own, laughing. Layla just smiled, but that was a lot.
We had a long drive ahead of us. Somewhere along the highway we stopped at a restaurant and ordered hamburgers for everyone. Just as the girls started to eat—all of us still laughing over something Willy had done—a man stopped by our table on the way to his own.
“I just had to tell you,” he said to me. “What a beautiful family you’ve got there.”
I made no effort to correct him. In his way, he was right.
Just before dinnertime, we reached the town where Rachel and Henry and their cheerful, boisterous family lived. Rachel had a big pot of chili on the stove, the table set with places for seventeen; the relatives were coming. Many times over the course of the meal, from my seat at the far end of the big table, I watched the girls laughing and smiling and reaching for seconds. Watching them, you might have thought that they’d lived here their entire lives.
Willy and I had planned to come back the next morning for one last visit, but that night I knew there was no point in staying longer. When we set out for the hotel after dinner was over, I told Henry and Rachel that come morning we’d be heading straight to the airport. “I’m going to say good-bye now,” I told the girls. My daughters. But not anymore.
My son got down on his knees to hug both girls, one at a time. His sisters, he called them still. They stayed that way, with their arms around each other, for a long time.
Then it was my turn, but I knew it would be different for me, and it was. Their bodies, which had melted into mine all those months before at the orphanage in Addis, were stiff now, arms limp at their sides. I placed my hand on Layla’s hair, that I had spent so many hours trying to tame, and then Adenach’s, and told them I would always love them. Then I walked out the door.
After, in the parking lot of our hotel, my son sat in the car for an hour with his head on the steering wheel, weeping. The next morning we got up and made the long drive in silence back to the airport. Willy got on his plane back to Los Angeles. I boarded mine. Of all the losses I’d known, this had been the worst.
After I left the girls that day, and said good-bye to my son at the airport, I flew home. Once I landed in San Francisco I made my way back from the airport, alone as usual. I walked back in the door of my empty house and turned on the lights. No more Justin Bieber music blasting, no more scattered Barbie shoes or the smell of berbere spice. Nobody there but me.
And who was I? Those fourteen months had shaken me to my core, to the point where I no longer knew anything for sure except that parents should not look to their children to meet their needs. You don’t adopt a child because you need more love in your life. You had better have the love part figured out already. As I did not.
7.
This was the other story I told Jim that night we met. After the part about the bad trip to Italy and the Breathalyzer and the handcuffs—stories that seemed meaningless in comparison to this one.
“The woman you are sitting across from,” I told him, “relinquished two adopted children who’d already lost one mother. Many people have concluded that makes me a terrible person.”
“That’s not how I see it,” Jim said.
After it was over, I told him, I lost faith in myself. I had always believed that if there was one thing I could do well, it was loving someone, a child in particular. After I said good-bye to the girls—and it had been good-bye all right; there had been no further word from them or their adoptive parents (nor would there be, I now believed, and I understood this)—I wasn’t sure anymore what kind of a person I was. I no longer trusted the steadiness of my own heart.
“You’re very hard on yourself,” Jim said. Later, when we left the restaurant, we stood together in the parking lot. It turned out that when I had arrived all those hours before, I had pulled my car into the spot next to his. His, a silver Porsche Boxster with the top down. Mine, a 1995 Honda Civic I’d bought a dozen years before when I first came to California, for $1,500.
“I’m not a very good driver,” I told him.
“But I am,” he said.
8.
The next morning I rose at six to find an e-mail already waiting from Jim. “That was one of the best times ever,” he wrote.
That night I was back on the sailboat with Martin. Not because I was in love with Martin. I wasn’t sure I should try love anymore.
Still, I invited Jim to dinner at my house—the place I’d chosen for my children and me when I moved to California fifteen years earlier, which looked out at Mt. Tamalpais. He studied everything closely—the art on my walls (paintings by my father mostly, gone from my life longer than he’d been in it, but a daily presence through the paintings he left me). He studied the CDs and books on my shelves, the bedroom I’d fixed up for the girls, empty now, though there was a Disney princess sticker on the window still. Jim didn’t say a whole lot, but I could feel how intently he was taking everything in. He particularly loved my father’s artwork, he said. Then he told about the huge new addition to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art just getting under way. “It won’t be open for years,” he told me, “but I’m going to be there when it is.”
What kind of man got excited about an art museum still under construction? This one.
He kept me company in the kitchen while I cooked. I set our plates kitty-corner on the table, not across from each other. I liked being close to him.
Though I would not normally have done this with a man I’d just met, I took his hand before we started to eat and closed my eyes—the grace I liked to say, in my head mostly, before the start of a meal. As I picked up my fork, he reached over for my arm and brought my elbow to his lips.
“You have a little food here,” he said.
He licked it off.
“I am a very messy person,” I told him. “I don’t know how it happens but I’m always getting food on myself.”
“I don’t mind,” he said. I still hadn’t kissed him.
The next night I headed to the sailboat again. My son Charlie was in town, and Martin had invited the two of us to come out in the bay to sail under the Golden Gate Bridge. I sat on the prow of the boat, thinking how lucky I was—to have gotten all this way from New Hampshire, to find myself and my son on a beautiful boat on a perfect late-summer day sailing under the vast span of this great red bridge.
Later, I would say good-bye to Charlie and spend the night on the boat with Martin. I realized I missed Jim.
That weekend Jim came to see me at my house in Mill Valley again. We had made the plan to go hiking in Point Reyes, one of my favorite places, and a favorite of his too.
He showed up in the Boxster—top up this time, on account of the weather. The day had turned out to be foggy and cold, but we went ahead with our plan anyway.
In the seat next to him I studied his fine profile and the easy, assured way he shifted around the sharp curves of Highway One. Even before I learned how much he loved James Bond movies, I recognized the James Bond quality in Jim, and not only because he was a bold, self-assured driver. He wore a beautiful jacket that day—c
asual but perfectly fitted, immaculate. This too I didn’t know yet, but all his clothes were like that: good shirts, silk ties, soft leather shoes, a Rolex watch. When he dressed as he did that day for a casual afternoon of hiking, he was equally well turned out, whereas my own outfit had come, as they nearly always did, from a Mill Valley thrift shop, the castoffs of some woman who (more like Jim) probably replaced everything every year or so at the first sign of wear.
But I knew by now that the Eddie Bauer jacket and the Patagonia hat and the expensive sunglasses were not the truest measure of Jim. He had interesting music on his iPod that day—Curtis Mayfield, Bill Evans, Nine Inch Nails, Chet Baker, and a band I’d never heard of called Camper Van Beethoven, and the sound system in the Boxster was great, thanks to a subwoofer in the trunk.
He turned the music off. “I’d rather listen to you,” he told me.
It was too cold for hiking. This didn’t matter. I was happy to be sitting next to him in the car.
For the many years I’d lived on my own, except for when some man or other took me out, I had been the one at the wheel, though I was never a natural driver. I used to say when people asked me why I’d left New Hampshire for California that if I’d stayed there one more winter I would probably have died on the road, I’d had so many accidents driving in winter. California presented no issues with snow and ice, but I still clutched the wheel tightly and felt anxious on the highway, especially at night, though I was more careful now about wine, and no longer drove if I’d had anything to drink.
Jim loved to drive, and I loved being his passenger, with my feet on the dashboard, the position I’d assume every time we got in the car together from that day on. With Jim at the wheel—music playing, some that I knew and a lot of it unknown to me, but singing along anyway—I was no longer in charge, and I knew I was safe with the person who was. I could have stayed in that spot forever.
The Best of Us Page 6
