If You Lived Here (6 page)

ere’s one more
indication of the arbitrary nature of the adoption business: Carolyn Burns, who could wait only five days for us to accept our referral for Sonya, has now given me a month to decide about

this child from Vietnam. She calls the sudden change in policy “an understanding of the situation,” but, of course, it’s guilt.

I appreciate the extra time, though. This referral, for a twenty-month- old boy from somewhere near Hanoi, not only represents a sudden shift in age, gender, nationality, and ethnicity, but also presents a new problem particular to us. Years ago, I tried asking Martin about his experience in Vietnam, but he would only tell me, “I don’t have any interesting stories,” and leave it at that. In the past few weeks, I’ve heard more about that country from Mai Pham at the Asian grocery than I’ve heard from Martin in twenty years. I expect that Martin will say no when I finally approach him with this news, but I’m not certain enough to reject it out of hand. You never know. Maybe he’ll see the child as an opportunity to replace his bad memories of Vietnam with something joyful. But maybe not.

I’m so reluctant to hear his response that I’ve waited nearly two weeks

to bring it up. Things haven’t exactly been quiet lately, anyway. In fact, we’ve had to deal with one catastrophe after another. A pipe burst in the funeral home’s upstairs bathroom and caused a hideous leak in the front-hall ceiling. A member of the city council collapsed from a heart attack, prompting a standing-room-only service and three days of nearly constant interaction with the press. A day later, Rita’s sister Helen passed away at hospice. Then Martin’s son Abe broke his arm in a bike wreck and Martin had to race up to Chapel Hill. Everyone’s felt the strain of recent weeks and so, as a sort of bonus for the staff’s hard work, Martin gave them all the day off. When he’s done that in the past, some employees have come to work anyway, banking the time to use later for vacation, but today, with no cases on the schedule and beautiful weather, everybody stayed home.

I’d like to go to the beach myself. We haven’t been once this spring, not even for a walk. I could go alone, I guess, but I’d feel too guilty leaving Martin at the office. He refuses to take a break. Apparently, when he told me that he would pull himself together, he took himself more seriously than I did. Over the past few weeks, he has shown more commitment to our business than I’ve seen from him in months. In addition to the unusually heavy workload, he dealt with fixing the plumbing, took out a lease on a new Town Car, and visited two church groups to talk about end-of-life issues. Today, with no one in the building, he’s done everything from filling out Rita’s phone logs to changing lightbulbs in the bathrooms. He hasn’t said anything about the way he faltered over the Rivenbark boy, but his behavior serves as a constant reminder: “Look at me. I’m better now!”

I spend the morning in my office. Around noon, I go downstairs and, following the noise, find him in the main chapel, vacuuming.

“Mauricio did that yesterday.” I have to yell for him to hear me.

He turns the vacuum off and looks uncertainly around the room, apparently unwilling to accept that the carpet is clean enough. His face looks haggard and thin.

“Can I talk to you for a minute?” I ask. He looks down at the vacuum.

if you lived here
33

I take his hand. “Leave it.”

We walk out into the meditation garden that lies in the courtyard between the reception rooms and the chapel. When Martin and I first got married, the courtyard contained nothing but a patch of lawn and a couple of forlorn-looking benches. No one ever came out here and its only value lay in the fact that it offered a swath of dull green as a view outside the windows. Within a year, I had constructed deep beds around the edges and filled them with so many plants that we get blooms all year long now. Today, the Carolina jasmine blossoms cover the trellis and magenta tulips crowd beneath the chapel windows. At the end of the summer, when the lantana grows huge and the swamp sunflowers begin to bloom, the gar-den becomes a reminder of the lushness of life. Occasionally, I even grow tomatoes. People don’t expect to see anything so wild in the courtyard of a funeral home, but they wander outside anyway. Some mourners will spend hours here.

Within these walls, the traffic on Market Street becomes a distant hum. I lift my face to the sun and close my eyes, pretending that we have, in fact, ended up at the beach. “What is it?” Martin asks.

I open my eyes. He looks impatient. Despite yesterday’s rain, the patch of grass is dry and inviting, so I take his hand and make him sit down with me. I keep his hand in mine. “We have a new referral,” I tell him.

He looks more pleased than I expected, but I haven’t told him everything. “It’s a boy. From Vietnam.”

The range of expressions that cross his face is brief but vivid: surprise, anxiety, and, then, resolve. “That’s great,” he says.

“If you can’t do it,” I tell him, “we’ll wait for another one.”

His tone turns irritable. “Why should it matter where the baby comes from?”

“It might matter.”

Martin says, “I don’t have anything against Vietnamese people.”

I would like to believe him. I’ve read and reread the information that came with this referral. The boy’s name is Nguyen Hai Au. The staff of the Ha Dong Children’s Center outside Hanoi found him in a box near the orphanage entrance when he was a few days old. He’s nearly two now

and he’s suffered more bad luck in his adoption saga than I have in mine. First, when he was still a tiny baby, a Vietnamese family filled out the paperwork for him and then decided to adopt a girl instead. Six months ago, an American family chose to adopt him, then got pregnant themselves and changed their minds. Most adoptive families want newborns and babies, not a child who has lived long enough to develop fears, and opinions, and memories. Nguyen Hai Au has reached the threshold of the age at which it will become ever more likely that he will spend his entire childhood in an orphanage. He needs a home now. I want Martin to be able to love this child. I say, “I talked about Vietnam with Mai at the Asian grocery. I bought some guidebooks.”

Martin’s face looks strained, but he’s trying. “The food is delicious there,” he asserts.

“How about I learn to cook it?”

“Fantastic.” He lies back against the grass, his eyes closed now. I’m pleased to see him rest, but he doesn’t look relaxed. He looks like someone brooking no distractions.

I slide my hand beneath his shirt and let it rest on his warm belly. I can remember, early in our marriage, when I found this part of his body so attractive that I would have to put my mouth to it. At moments, I felt like an animal operating on nothing but instinct. Now, though, his body just looks delicate and sad. What are bodies, really, but sadness, bone, and tissue?

“Well, I guess I’ll tell them yes, then,” I say, offering one last invitation for him to change his mind.

Martin sets his hand on top of mine. “Say yes,” he tells me. “I was about to give up hope,” I whisper.

Martin’s voice is almost inaudible. He says, “Me, too.”

4
‌

Xuan Mai

ne Tuesday, after
I finish selling the lunches, I get Marcy to watch the register. “I gotta make a phone call.”

“Take your time.” She goes to the counter and pulls out a heap of diagrams she has stashed in a drawer for moments such as this one. She’s taking a class in quilting.

My purse hangs on a hook behind the kitchen door. I unzip the change pocket and pull out a business card from among the coins. Yesterday, one of my lunch customers, Captain Weatherbee of the Wilmington Police Department, scrawled a name on the back of his card. Hannah Ellis. And her phone number.

For a moment, I hold the card, looking at the rough handwriting, the scuff of the pencil marks on the ivory paper. Then I pick up the phone and dial.

“Hello?” The voice sounds old and feeble.

“Hello. Yes. Uh, I’m looking for Hannah Ellis. You Hannah Ellis?” “That’s me, duckie.”

Who’s duckie? “My name Mai Pham. Captain Mark Weatherbee give me your name.”

“You need a picture?” “That’s right.”

“Come on over this afternoon. Say, about three o’clock. I’m at 417 Nun Street, downtown. I can’t hear too well on the phone, so come on over and we’ll talk. ’Bye.”

She hangs up before I can say another word. “Marcy,” I call out, walking to the front of the store. “I got errands. I’ll be back in a couple hours.”

Marcy’s abandoned her quilt and now sits paging through a
Real Simple
magazine, the cover of which shows a scratched metal bucket with azaleas stuck in it. People live in America for this? “Okay,” she says. She doesn’t look up.

Gladys appears from down one of the aisles. “Mai, tell her she’s mak-ing me miserable,” she says in Vietnamese.

“You tell her, Gladys,” I pull my keys out of my purse and step out into the heat.

Hannah Ellis’s house is a pale green cottage set between two larger homes. The tiny front yard consists of two flower beds, divided by a path down the middle. Spring roses fill the beds, their blossoms in shades of pink and yellow. An elderly woman, not much bigger than some ten-year-olds, sits in a flowery housedress on a rocker on the porch. I stand on the sidewalk looking up at her.

“You my three o’clock?” Her voice sounds stronger than it did on the phone.

I nod.

Hannah Ellis gestures with her hand for me to come up. “Can’t even see you down there, duckie.” I walk up the path. “Where you from? You Chinese?”

It isn’t a very promising question from a person I plan to commission to draw two portraits, but I push myself up the stairs anyway. Hannah Ellis lifts her hand to shake. Her fingers feel like brittle sticks in mine. “Vietnamese,” I tell her. “Vietnam. My name Mai Pham.”

She chuckles, rocking her chair back and forth as if it were exer-cise, then motions for me to sit in an armchair beside her. “Well, welcome to America, I guess.” I perch on the edge of the chair while Hannah Ellis reaches over to a TV table on the other side of her rocker, pours two glasses of iced tea, and hands one to me. “Now, why are you here?” she asks.

Because I have nothing, and if I lose my belief in the spirits, I’ll have even less. “I need pictures,” I say.

“What kind of pictures?”

I take a sip of the tea. “Captain Weatherbee say you can make pictures.

Like in court. I just tell you about the person and you make picture.”

Hannah Ellis runs her hand around the wet sides of her glass, then dabs her forehead with the moisture. “It’s damn hot, but I feel sick if I stay in the house too long,” she says. “Besides, sometimes a breeze comes up and I can smell my roses.” She glances at me. “I imagine it gets pretty hot over there in Vietnam.”

“Real hot.”

“I like the way you say that, ‘make pictures,’ ” she says. She rubs more water on her forehead. “Hey, smell them? You smell my roses?”

A faint breeze wafts through the bushes. I do smell the roses. Hannah Ellis rocks. “Are these crime pictures?”

“No.”

“How you know Weatherbee, then?”

“I do a lunch business. He’s my customer.”

“I spent fifty years drawing crime pictures. I don’t want to think about another criminal for the rest of my life.”

“These aren’t criminals.”

She sets her tea down on the TV table and starts rocking again. After a while, she asks, “Who you need pictures of?”

“My mother,” I say. “And a little girl. My niece.” “You don’t have photos, I assume?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s why people come to me.” She rocks for a while longer. “Are they dead?”

“Yes,” and then, because the word sounds abandoned in the empty air, I tell her, “I’m Buddhist. We use pictures to honor our love ones.”

She nods. “Nothing wrong with that.”

The rocking slows. Hannah Ellis leans over and picks a black canvas bag off the floor, pulls out a drawing pad, a charcoal pencil, and a tattered copy of a book titled
Law Enforcement Facial Classification Catalogue
. “You’ve got to describe them to me in detail. I’m going to ask you a bunch of questions about both of your people, starting with your mother. We’ll work on these pictures for as long as you like and then you’ll have to wait a few days, or even a week, before I’ll have anything to show you. Even if you’re never satisfied, I still gotta be paid. So let me ask you: You sure that you got their pictures in your head?”