Comfort

by Ann Hood

  On Annabelle’s neck I found a thick rope of scar tissue, round and small. The pediatrician examined it and frowned. “Don’t get upset,” he said, “but this almost looks like a burn that has healed.”

  Gingerly, I touched that small scar. If it was true that her birth mother had marked her, I felt only a kinship to that woman I would never know. We had both loved our daughters intensely. We had both lost our daughters. Annabelle’s scar was visible, but her birth mother and I carried scars no one could see.

  A few nights later, we flew from Changsha to Guangzhou for the final leg of our journey. Here, we would get the visa that would allow us to bring our babies into the United States. We would go to the American consulate and stand with our Chinese daughters as they became American citizens. On the bus from the airport in Guangzhou to our hotel, I held Annabelle in my lap. It was late. Many of the babies and the adults had fallen asleep. But Annabelle was still awake, smiling at me and tracing my face with her fingertips.

  In the silence, she leaned back slightly and looked right at me. Then she tossed her head back and began to laugh. This was not the ordinary laughter she had been freely giving us. This laughter came from somewhere deep inside her. If joy has a sound, it is the sound of Annabelle’s laughter. That night, it was as if Annabelle realized that she had found the right family. And for me, holding her, listening to her laughter, it was as if the entire universe was telling us that we had found each other.

  WE ARRIVED BACK home to Providence on April 6, 2005. It was the Year of the Rooster. In Chinese astrology, there is an improvement in difficult situations during rooster years. They are a time to seek emotional solace. One of the hexagrams of the I Ching that symbolizes the middle third of a rooster year—the time when Mother’s Day falls—is the image of a small trickle of water flowing from a rock as a container below it slowly begins to fill. It is called “the humble power of the smallest.”

  BACK IN MAY OF 2002, a month after Grace died, I had my first Mother’s Day without my daughter. Sam and Lorne carved a heart out of wood, sanded it smooth as if they could ease the pain in my own heart this way. They threaded the wooden heart on a dark red ribbon, and it still hangs from the rearview mirror of my car. But Lorne also gave me a book he made, with pictures of Grace and descriptions beneath them of what Grace and I did together: cooking, reading, laughing, walking hand in hand. It was the worst Mother’s Day I could imagine. Here was Sam, my son, offering me a heart. And here was the empty chair, the silence, my own heart, broken.

  Each subsequent Mother’s Day brought a new pain—the passing of time without watching Grace growing up, the burst of spring blossoms in our garden mocking my loss. I was a daughterless mother. I had nowhere to put the things a mother places on her daughter. The nail polish I used to paint our toenails hardened. Our favorite videos gathered dust. Her small apron was in a box in the attic. Her shoes—the sparkly ones, the leopard rainboots, the ballet slippers—stood in a corner. I kept her hairbrush on a shelf in my closet, and the fine strands of her pale blonde hair were still tangled in it. As I walked out the door, I still sometimes paused to bury my nose in her powder blue jacket, as if I might find something of her there.

  Three Mother’s Days later, I am sitting in my kitchen singing to Annabelle. It is raining, and I am singing an old Lovin’ Spoonful song…“You and Me and Rain on the Roof”…I am singing to Annabelle and she is grinning at me, a big toothless grin. When Annabelle laughs, my heart soars. When she presses her hand into mine, or rests her head against my chest, or falls asleep in my arms, I feel myself slowly, slowly coming back to life.

  Sometimes I touch that small round scar on her neck and I wonder about the woman who might have put it there. I wonder if she walked down those dusty roads I saw in China, past the endless fields of kale, cradling her daughter in her arms. I wonder if she cried when she placed her in that small box. I wonder what words she might have whispered to her. They were, I imagine, no different from the words I whispered to Grace in that ICU.

  IT SOUNDS CLICHÉD to say that after having Annabelle for only a few months, it feels like forever, but that is truly the way it feels. When Sam walks into the room, she lifts her arms toward him so he can swoop her into his own. She flirts with Lorne, and places wet kisses on my cheeks.

  “How does it feel to have a daughter?” people who don’t know me well ask.

  I swallow hard. I want to scold them, to make sure they know that I had a daughter, an amazing, funny, smart girl named Grace; that Annabelle is my second wonderful daughter. But usually I just smile and tell them it’s great. Because it is great.

  One afternoon, as I strapped Annabelle into her car seat, a feeling of overwhelming grief filled me. I missed Grace, just like I do every day. Even as tears sprang to my eyes, I was smiling, happy at the sight of Annabelle grinning up at me, showing off her two new teeth. The feelings of grief and joy live side by side now in my heart. I did not know that they, such opposites, could coexist.

  But they do. Perhaps never more so than this year on April 18. Just as I have for the past three years, as the day approached, I began to remember all of the small things that led up to it. As I walked down our street, lined with dogwoods in full bloom, I could almost picture Grace skipping ahead of me, Sam on his scooter beside her. “Stop at the corner!” I always called after them, afraid of cars darting out of alleys, or the mean pugs from the house on the corner running loose, or any of the dangers that threatened them. Or I see the purple blanket of myrtle, the slender stalks of chives, and picture Grace’s head bent, her glasses slipping to the tip of her nose, as she picks them for me. I remember how hot it was that year, Grace’s delight that I let the neighbor’s orange cat come in for a nap, her throaty laughter as she ate thin rounds of cucumber, fistfuls of blueberries, and guzzled milk from her baby bottle still.

  I cried when I woke up that morning, the ache for Grace like a hole punched in my heart. At the cemetery, we brought pink flowers to her grave, and sat on the green grass crying together.

  That evening, Annabelle sat in her high chair, grinning as we raised a cake high, a big colorful 1 ablaze in the center, and sang “Happy Birthday” to her. Afterward, she lifted her arms to me. I picked her up and pressed my nose into the nape of her neck, the place where babies smell best. I held her close, letting joy slowly, finally, fill me. I held her, oh, so close.

  I HAVE HAD five Mother’s Days without Grace now. And on each subsequent one, I think of her. And I think about this woman I will never know. I, of course, thank her, and I praise her strength in doing this seemingly impossible thing: giving her daughter to me. She will never know that I have her daughter because I lost Grace. She will never know the road I traveled to get her.

  This Mother’s Day, I lay in bed feeling that strange mixture of grief and joy. Down the hall, I heard Annabelle’s high, squeaky voice and Lorne’s lower one. I picture Grace in her smudged glasses, her tangled hair, her wry smile. I feel tears building in my eyes, even as I hear Lorne and Annabelle’s futile efforts to make Sam wake up. Then there are footsteps, and Annabelle is at the side of the bed, clutching a pink rose.

  “Happy Mother’s Day,” she says, grinning.

  Annabelle lifts her arms to me, and I pick her up.

  “Mama,” she whispers.

  “Daughter,” I whisper back.

  EPILOGUE

  Today

  TODAY IS MAY 19, 2006, four years, one month, and one day since Grace died. I used to wake in a panic that I had forgotten even one detail about her, or that I would forget someday. Now I know that will not happen. I remember everything. I remember how she used to yell at Sam when she was angry with him: “Sorry isn’t good enough, Sam!” I remember how she felt climbing into my lap after she finished dinner, sitting there while I finished mine. I remember everything. It is all I have of her. I remember.

  It seems like as soon as she died, people were urging me to write about her, about losing her, about grief. People told me I could help oth
ers. People told me that I could make sense of loss. But, of course, I can’t. No one can. There is no sense to it.

  People send me names and addresses and details of horrible losses, children drowning, dying in car accidents, getting unnamed viruses that ravage them. I write them notes. I offer help. I cook them dinner. I listen. I feel guilty that in the end, I don’t feel like I have helped them. How can I? How can anyone? Their child is dead. What can I do or say to change that? I teach grieving mothers to knit. I let them tell me in excruciating, painful, and desperate detail what happened that afternoon, that night, that snowy day.

  I only know this: someday they will find themselves, as I do today, four years, one month, and one day later living life without their child. At some distant point in the future, they will find themselves sitting at a table looking out at a rainy May morning, drinking coffee, noticing how green everything is, delighting in a glimpse of a bright red cardinal, getting ready to peel a ripe orange and enjoy each juicy wedge.

  Today I will drive my car to the grocery store and buy milk and coffee and fruit. I will browse in a bookstore. I will sing along with the radio. Someday, all of these parents will find themselves doing these ordinary things too.

  I remember when I used to pick up Grace from kindergarten every day at two o’clock. She went to a school called the Montessori Children’s House and it was, indeed, an old Victorian house on a tree-lined street with a big front porch. Parents parked in front of the house and then waited on the porch for their child to emerge. One of the teachers stood in the open front doorway and called to each child as her parent appeared. “Grace Adrain,” she’d say over her shoulder, and that was Grace’s cue to put on her coat and grab her lunch box and backpack and run to me. Whenever I saw her coming through that door, my heart skipped a beat, and I opened my arms and swooped her up; she was still little enough for me to hold her easily in a hug.

  In the car, she slid into the backseat, fastened her seat belt, and handed forward all of her papers, her careful practicing of writing letters and numbers, her Weekly Reader all filled in, a piece of art. I watched her from the rearview mirror as she unloaded that big leopard backpack of hers. She’d catch my eye and grin at me. “Learning to read is hard work,” she told me one day about a week before she died. She would then reach forward to the spot where I kept a baby bottle of warm milk, an indulgence of hers still. As we drove toward Sam’s school, I’d glance in the mirror, laughing to myself at this girl, so grown-up in so many ways, enjoying a bottle with such relish. Once, a boy from school spotted her and shouted: “You still drink from a bottle!” And Grace only smiled at him and waved happily, unaffected by his disdain.

  I realize now how often I picture her that way, sweaty and tired from a long day of kindergarten. Happy to be in the car with me. Happy to be picking up Sam. Happy to be headed home. I realize that this is how mothers see their children: through the rearview mirror. We are moving forward, but watching them behind us. Not growing smaller, but smiling, happily, at us.

  At Grace’s school every morning when the teacher took attendance, the children responded to their names with: “Here I am!” The teacher would say, “Grace Adrain,” and Grace would call out: “Here I am!”

  I sit here today, four years, one month, and one day since Grace died. Since I’ve seen her. Since I’ve held her. Since I’ve heard her funny, throaty voice. I have a broken heart. I am writing a book. I am drinking my coffee. It is raining outside. The grass is very green. A cardinal flies away. I think of my daughter, my Gracie Belle. I say: “Grace, here I am.” I say, “Here I am.” And I hope, I pray, that somehow she hears.

  acknowledgments

  With gratitude and love to all those who offered—who still offer—comfort: my mother, Gloria Hood; my aunts, uncles, cousins, and niece; the Adrains; the Bourgeois/Stenhouses, the Coopers, the Cox/Russows, the Emmonses, the Foxes, the Greens, the Handys, the Ingendahls, the Lietars, the Lupicas, the Majorises, the Minkin/Stones, the Neels, the Pines, the Rosenbergs, the Schulman/Handys, the Sloane/Wallersteins, the Thachers; Matt Davies, Hillary Day, Elizabeth Gregory, and Heather Watkins; Jill Bialosky, Paul Whitlatch; Diane Higgins; Gail Hochman; FOFA; Dr. Therese Rando; Sam and Pat Smith and June and Ray Vincent; Joanne Brownstein, Marianne Merola; Maya Ziv; The Corporation of Yaddo; the teachers and families at the Gordon School and the Montessori Children’s House; the families of Compassionate Friends; everyone at Sakonnet Purls, especially Jen Silverman; everyone at the All Children’s Theatre; Poo White and Karla Harry; the Wildacres community; my wonderful editors at Alimentum, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, More, the New York Times, O, Parents, Real Simple, Redbook, and Tin House where many of these words found early homes; the editors of the anthologies where much of this appeared; and of course my husband Lorne Adrain and our wonderful children Sam, Annabelle, Ariane, and Grace.