A Southern Girl (20 page)

From Faith’s summary, the Carters of New Hampton, Virginia appeared to have been ordered from a catalog. Upper income, biological sons, stable marriage. I stared at the photo of them in their den, the boys seated on a sofa with the parents standing behind. I projected Soo Yun onto the sofa as a child of four or five, seated between her brothers, her hair in ribbons and her dress crisply ironed, with puffed sleeves at the shoulders. The terrible scars would have faded, and her health would be good, and neither boy flanking her and neither parent overlooking their three children would have given a thought to those inept invasions in years. Soo Yun would be lucky to call this home. I closed the folder, left my office, and walked toward the cafeteria. My recent headaches had cost me an appetite, but now I had to eat.

In a remote corner of the dining area, I tasted soft noodles from a white ceramic bowl. At least the uninspired concoction was hot. I almost dropped my chopsticks when I saw Faith striding toward me. She knows, I thought, diverting my eyes to the mass of noodles from which steam arose. Faith stood over me.

“Just the person I need to see,” she said. “Have you had a chance to look over the matches?”

“Yes. Seven leaving my ward on the March flight.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk with you about. May I sit down?”

“Of course. Forgive me.”

Faith pulled out a chair. “The problem is Open House. They’ve scheduled the March flight for the same day. I tried to get my people in the States to move it because it will create so much confusion, but they have already made arrangements with the airline and it will cost too much money to reschedule.”

“Perhaps the home can move Open House.” I breathed again.

“Tried that, too. No way. Too many churches have already made plans to visit. We’ll just have to make it work.”

“How many children leaving from the home?”

“Twenty-three. Quite a large group. You look worried.”

“I have reviewed the matches you left on my desk.”

“And?”

“I face a problem with one of my children; one selected for the March flight. I need your guidance.”

“I’ll help if I can. Is there a problem with the child?”

I hesitated. It was time for me to get that shot. Time to look the medic in the eye. Again, the words formed on my lips. “Yes,” I said. “Her mother came to see me. I think she wants the child back. Do you think it is right to send an infant still wanted by her mother?”

“Has the mother applied for custody?”

“No. The woman is poor and uneducated.”

A look of mild bewilderment formed on Faith’s face. “Then I think we have no choice. We have to honor the match.”

“I thought so, too.” I paused. “I remembered the form we must sign just before the children depart. We have to certify that we know of no reason the child does not qualify for adoption, and I worried that this knowledge might be such a reason. I feel much better.”

“Good,” said Faith, watching with curiosity as I stared into my bowl. “But you don’t look relieved.”

“I am tired. I do not sleep well these nights.”

“That’s a shame. Try to get more rest. This group of matches leaves in three weeks, and getting twenty-three of them on that plane will take all our energy.”

I returned to my ward, turning inward the contempt I felt for my indecision. I entered the nursery and walked to Soo Yun’s crib. The child slept, covered to the neck by a blanket with her head turned toward me. The edema of birth had completely subsided, deflating her eyelids, forehead and cheeks to permit her skin, soft and smooth, to adhere faithfully to her delicate facial structure. As a physically plain woman, I knew only too well the components of appeal. I had spent painful periods as a young girl in front of mirrors in a silent prayer that what I saw could be otherwise, that the box of my face would elongate with adolescence, that the cheekbones would assert themselves to assume some dominion over the jowls and that the chin would emerge to take its proper, classic proportion to a mouth which would surely, with any luck at all, widen with age. In Soo Yun, I
saw or imagined the beauty I lacked, and as I stared I pictured the child as I had projected her into the photograph, blooming into my unanswered girlhood prayer.

In days that followed, I suffered for my deceit. While not a perfect human being, I had managed to avoid many of the vices plaguing my siblings and friends. During a brief fling in my early twenties, I offered up my virginity to a boy who did not deserve the gift. But I did so honestly, as I hoped I had done all else since. Now, having passed up yet another opportunity to level with Faith Stockdale, I was trapped in an irrefutable deception, and for me to deny it, even to myself—especially to myself—would be to make worse a shame I could relieve only at the price of Soo Yun’s continued residence in the home.

To quiet my fears of exposure on restless nights, I pulled a pillow over my head and around my ears to insulate against impending disgrace. I imagined Soo Yun in America, as an educated young woman with a constant stream of glamorous boyfriends all competing against the demands of her career as a journalist, a doctor, a university professor, a clothing designer. When her job and the demands of men grew too great, she would slip home, to parents who loved her as their own and whose pride in her she held like a trophy. At some point during these dawnless nights, I must have slipped over an edge, no longer focused on risks to myself but instead making positive plans for this infant; plans which, with my help, could be realized. Leaving things up to fate was not enough, because the visit from her mother, Jong Sim, told me all I needed to know about her chances. I thought back to that woman’s peasant dress, her disorientation in Seoul, her teeth in need of dentistry not available in the countryside. That was Soo Yun’s birthright, her past and almost certainly her future. Had Jong Sim not given her up, she would have grown into not just her mother’s love but into some variation of her mother’s life as well, and her odds of shaping a destiny different from her mother’s were at least as great as those she now faced in leaving the home. In altering that destiny, I risked much, for how could I be certain that destiny was not the one for which the child was best suited? Suppose the child’s talents and temperament matched instead the very future from which I was now determined to divert her? Did I do such a child any favor by sending her to a foreign land, to be raised in affluence but also with the pressure to bloom into the
rose her new family expected? Merely transplanting a weed would make it no less a weed; was that what I was risking my career to do?

Possibly, but there were other things to be considered. First, Jong Sim’s decision to give up her daughter. A mother in love with her own fate does not put that fate beyond the path of those who follow her. Jong Sim would have had only the dimmest vision of what lay ahead for Soo Yun following her afternoon in the doorway, but she knew with murderous certainty what future she left behind in their squalid village. Perhaps Jong Sim herself possessed talents and a temperament ill suited to the prison in which she found herself, and had watched such talents, like parched barley, dry up and drift uselessly to earth.

Then, there was the infant. She had seemed to me from our first contact in the police station to be struggling toward something. I could not give a rational explanation for this impression, nor could I totally discard the notion that I myself had ennobled Soo Yun’s distemper as some kind of telepathic communication when objective evidence pointed to nothing more than the ranting of a tired, wet soul abandoned in a doorway. Still, the child had calmed immediately in my grasp, as though in approval of this step in the proper direction. At the home, in her crib, she took little interest in her surroundings, even for an infant, and this indifference I took as evidence of her determination to remain in this way station for the minimum time required to recover her health.

I suspected that my embroidered interpretations of habits and disposition projected onto the child ambitions purely of the my own creation. As a test, I challenged myself to answer whether, given the chance to walk into a nursery containing one hundred newborns, I could have singled this one out as possessing qualities lacking in the others. No, I could not, but neither did life play out in such sterile laboratories, stripped of the very scents and tracks which led to my divination. I responded to a call from Jongam for Soo Yun, not some other abandoned baby. I found the named pinned to this infant. The mother of another child could have arrived at the home seeking that child, but it was Soo Yun’s mother who actually made that trip. These incidentals and others, so benign in isolation, together formed in my mind a composite image of a child with a destiny calling from beyond the home; indeed, from beyond the borders of her own land. But, as a helpless presence not yet weighing five
kilograms, she could answer that calling only by bending those around her to her will. In me, it seemed to be working. Events, not words, came to me as the monosyllabic uttering of a tongue too freshly formed to speak, but directed at me, as though I alone could translate this unspoken but loudly and insistently broadcast infant language.

Well, I thought, you really have slipped over an edge if you have come to believe your time on the ward permits you to hear sounds inaudible to others, or to read invisible signs, or to speak in tongues. You might just as well call yourself a gypsy and purchase tarot cards. You need a vacation.

Yet, upon deeper reflection, I felt less certain there was anything abnormal or paranormal at work. Those who spent all their time with animals, for example, claimed a rapport with them produced by extensive contact. Mi Cha had hinted at such communications with her lost dog, Mojo. Was it not equally possible that my experience on the ward had honed some instinct within me into a finely tuned receptor of sorts? I chose to believe so, and in the days following I held tightly to my new religion.

As the departure of the matched children neared, I carried Soo Yun to Dr. Kim, who again reassured me that the child bore no ill effects from her hospitalization save the ugly scars, all the more savage now in their florid convalescence.

With the dual challenges of Open House and the March flight upon me, I overslept on the last Saturday in March. I had tossed fitfully until almost dawn, falling soundly to sleep only when it was time to get up. I rose, counting on raw adrenaline to carry me through the emotional day ahead. As I washed my face, I noticed the rash on the back of my hands. It began earlier that week, with a splotching around the knuckles that gradually spread. I am certain it is caused by nerves; my decision to withhold from Faith the information on Soo Yun’s scars.

I dressed in semi-darkness, fixed hot tea, and bundled myself in my warmest undergarments, sweaters, muffler, and coat. Several inches of snow had fallen during the night, with winds gusting at a single plow attempting to clear the roads. I wondered if the weather might close the airport, delaying the 7:30
P.M.
flight which would carry the matches to Hawaii for refueling, then on to New York. At the very least the bitter temperatures foreshadowed a reduced attendance at Open House. I cleared the snow from my doorway and went out into the cold.

I arrived at the home as the children were preparing for visitors. The atmosphere on the ward was different this morning, as I recognized at the moment I stepped from the elevator. The texture of this difference I attributed to the simultaneity of Open House and a departure, a coincidence unprecedented in my time here. Possibly, I reasoned, the distraction of Open House would prove a merciful blessing to those left behind. If so, I was thankful for it—for it and any other ally in steeling myself against both the loss of the seven children from my ward and the reactions of those remaining as well.

As I made my morning rounds, I witnessed sights to which no frequency of departures could accustom me. Something in their nature triggered a denial of sorts by those for whom this would be just another day. Such denials explained why the remaining children gave circumspect glances to the six beds on which suitcases lay open. As they set their Projections on the navy blue and white bedspreads, those old enough to appreciate the significance of the small travel bags outwardly reflected a stoic indifference, the way children can do when sides are chosen and they reckon their team by walking in the opposite direction from the last one selected. On my way to the nursery, I spotted Eun skipping rope near the cot of her best friend. The two girls had been like sisters, arriving at the home within a month of each other three years before. As her friend emptied her few personal articles into the travel bag, Eun chatted excitedly over the “thwapping” of the rope on linoleum. Her friend seemed to have trouble lifting her smocks, her jeans, her underwear from the locker, as though some glutinous force held them. She was matched to a childless couple in their late thirties, and I knew from our talks that the secret of her heart was a melancholy fear of loneliness.

In the nursery, I walked first to the crib of Soo Yun. “Where is she?” I inquired of an aide.

“That woman from the agency, the one with the short hair, came for her a short time ago.”

I felt my chest compress. I glanced again at the empty crib and heard myself say, in a voice I did not recognize, “Where did she take her?”

“To the infirmary.”

I ran to the stairs, my pulse racing but my legs encased in the concrete of impending doom. At the door to the infirmary I paused to catch my breath, then pushed through.

On a gurney at the far end of the room lay Soo Yun. Dr. Kim stood over her, speaking to Faith Stockdale. Both turned as I approached. Dr. Kim lowered his eyes as those of Faith Stockdale narrowed.

“I was just coming to see you,” she said. “It seems our recent discussions have not been detailed enough. In checking the immunization records for our matches, I came across a very disturbing chart.” Dr. Kim took a step back as Faith advanced.

“I can explain,” I said.

“You weren’t honest with me.”