by Mac Pope
Tom and Janet signed preliminary papers for the twins that were not binding on either party. They were able to speak with the grinning kids briefly. Anastasia was in the background, watching, serious as a chaperone, but she seemed pleased. There was a smile trying to show itself on her soft-featured, pretty mahogany face.
Janet would have bundled Paul and Sara home that night. Tom was cautious though and persuaded her to help him investigate because the thing looked a little too good to be true.
“Dahlin,” he said, “We don’t know what kind of trauma, child-abuse history, or mental illness might have become part of those kids’ make-up, remember all those adoption horror stories in the newspapers about people who stuck themselves with monsters? We want ours to go to Howard—not to jail or state psychiatric.”
Their investigation took them into the heart of the Black districts around Hartford, Connecticut, where the children had been raised. They knocked on doors on streets Janet had only seen on television news and bad movies. People were close-mouthed and suspicious, but they all knew the children’s history and some were talkative. “Shameful woman, that mother,” a West Indian neighbor said through an inch of open door, “kept those children in that nasty apartment when her man left her. Didn’t have nothin’. All of them would have starved except for the Welfare an’ that ’Nastasia…”
“Tell me about her—Anastasia,” Janet said.
“Oh! Now, that’s an old child,” the woman whispered. “An old child, I seen her back at nine years old, that girl didn’t blink an eye that she was in charge of all their lives, the mother sick and raving, the father gone. I watched her—she dressed them and fed them all. You’d see her pushing a big cart across town loaded with laundry and two big garbage bags of bottles and cans she gathered from the streets to redeem at the market, with those two bad kids kicking her and running off as they pleased. She kept it together though, got them to all the clinic appointments, pre-school, everything! She still made most of her own classes at school, wearing her ma’s old dresses…” The woman laughed. “In the Caribbean towns, we know an old child when one comes along; you people don’t even recognize them here… very rare to see one here.”
Others they met bored out the West Indian woman’s story. One man had seen Anastasia out at night in freezing weather, focused on collecting enough cans and bottles to exchange for food, soap, and Laundromat coins. Another person recalled that she carried on her routine for a month after the mother died, before social workers stepped in and placed the twins and Anastasia in separate foster homes. Everyone said the twins were spoiled rotten, but they had at least been able to grow up happy kids.
Janet and Tom went home satisfied. Both liked the aggressive spark people saw in the kids—they’d need that in the competition with ‘The Others.’ The children only needed a few months of loving and a little work on good manners and they’d soon be ready for nice schools and nice weekends on Martha’s Vineyard or Sag Harbor.
A week later Janet and Tom had their ‘dark night’ as they sat, open-mouthed, staring at the adoption agency manager, Ms. Dunning, who was telling them that the agency board had decided to place the twins with another young couple.
“Why?!”
“The board took everything in consideration,” she said. “It was very close! The other couple were also professionals, and of course, they were satisfied with our investigation of the kids’ background…” She was examining her nails as she said the last bit.
“In any event, the placement is final and I know you’ll wish the children a good future,” she said. “And don’t worry, I’m sure there will be a perfect placement for you in our network. There have been some good finds in Guatemalan and Brazilian babies…”
“If we can’t have our own child,” Janet said shakily but defiantly, “At least we’ll have our own kind—or nothing!”
Tom was on his feet. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, lifting Janet into a hug as he led her out without looking back.
He took her to a brightly lit restaurant with super-happy waitresses, the same place they went after they received bad news from one of the specialists a few years before.
Janet snapped, “We should have taken them—made a binding contract the day we saw them…”
“It was spite! I, I can’t believe that woman!” Tom threw up his hands.
“What do we do now? Guatemalan babies! Oh, Tom, I feel insulted… cheated! I feel less than a woman!”
“Can I be your baby… a little bit longer?”
She stared at him for an instance before she went unfocused and smiled back at him, melted. “Always… you know that!”
“We could go back for the twin’s half-sister—Anastasia,” Tom said, nervously, half-joking. “Not quite the child I had in mind for the little pastel party dresses I’ve been designing in my head,” she smiled, “and what would she look like dressed up in my old wedding gown someday?”
“Like the picture of the Black Madonna in that Black church in Chicago.” Tom’s voice was thoughtful now.
“Umm, the earth mother, I remember it… that child does have a lot of character in that sad, strong, yet young face. Did you notice how satisfied she looked when she thought we were taking the twins? Even though separation from them will leave her alone in the world…”
“She’s learned to be realistic,” Tom said. “She was hoping for the best practical solution. If she’d been on the Titanic, she would have worked until she had her people on a lifeboat and launched. Then she would have sat back in a deck chair looking content the way we last saw her.”
“She’s more practical than I am, and organized! That young lady could organize the both of us. She wouldn’t believe I can’t cook!”
“I’m still adjusting…” Tom grinned back at her flat stare. “Just kidding!”
“Tom, what are we talking about? Can we get serious? That girl is half-grown! We’d have to spend months getting her to trust us—to like us. Tom, do you really think she’d let me help her get a nice wardrobe, let me teach her new things? Do that hair?”
“I think she’ll flip when she knows we want her and I think she’ll like us and appreciate everything we do for her—like starting early to get her prepared for Howard.”
“Spelman, Spelman College for her,” Janet said, almost to herself. “She’s a Mary McCleod Bethune type. She’ll pledge alpha, I know. Sand and olive green would be good colors on her. Did you notice she has a dimple—left side?”
Tom called for their bill even though their meal was half finished. As they hurried out of the restaurant, he said, “Let’s go shock those hustlers at the agency. And no private investigation this time.”
They jammed together at the doorway in their haste, and Janet warned Tom, “Lets calm ourselves down. If my child sees us wired like this, she might turn us down! You know Anastasia.”
