Winter's Child (4 page)

They might have
been any family on the reservation. At the powwows, tribal meetings, celebrations at Blue Sky Hall, dozens of get-togethers. A serious look about them: responsible, involved. Good people, Vicky would have said if anyone asked, the best of her people. The man in a parka, blue jeans, boots. The woman in a red flower-print dress, coat hanging off her shoulders. A little girl, about five years old, with hair the color of sunshine and eyes like blue ice.

“Eldon Little Shield.” The man advanced across the office, hand extended, a warrior leading the way into unknown territory, his wife and child a couple steps behind. He was tall, a little paunch above a silver buffalo belt buckle, a cowboy hat clasped against one thigh. He tossed a backward nod. “This here is my wife, Myra. And this is our daughter, Mary Ann.” He reached over and placed a protective hand on the child's head.

Vicky came around the desk and shook the man's hand first, the
palm roughened and wind-seared. His wife's palm was softer, the grip surprisingly strong and resolute. “Hello, Mary Ann,” she said, leaning down toward the pretty little girl, who lifted a hand and gave a little wave.

Vicky gestured toward the chairs in front of her desk, then took her own seat and waited for the family to settle in. Mary Ann had a small bag, beaded and quilled, which she spread on her lap. She removed a pad and pencil and set about drawing something.

“Clint's secretary mentioned you might call,” Vicky said. An awkward beginning, an awkward circumstance.

Myra Little Shield pulled a tissue from the woven bag on her lap and began dabbing at the corners of her eyes. She glanced over at the child, who looked up and gave her mother a reassuring smile, then went back to her drawing. The smile seemed to fortify Myra, who straightened herself against the chair and drew in a long breath. Thirtyish, black hair brushing her shoulders, no makeup or lipstick, and a take-me-as-I-am look about her. She was attractive, with traces of the kind of beauty that had propelled a number of young Arapaho women to the Miss Indian America crown. She gave Vicky a weak smile, squeezed the tissue in the fist she dropped on top of her bag, and turned toward her husband. Waiting. It was his place to lead the way.

Eldon took his time. Vicky could almost see the thoughts shadowing his face. Sun splashed the window behind the couple, and a column of sunlight illuminated the dust in the air. Finally Eldon said, “We were shocked when we heard about Clint. Never expected anything like that to happen. Talked to him yesterday, and he said he was going to meet with another lawyer. That lawyer being you, from what Clint's secretary told us. He sounded a little, I don't know . . .” He shrugged. “Serious.”

“Did he say why he wanted to bring me in on the case?”

The man gave another shrug, then gripped the armrests hard, knuckles popping white in his brown hands, like a cowboy steadying himself on the fence before the bronco hurtles out the gate onto the rodeo grounds. He glanced down at the little girl, then back at Vicky. “This isn't the time . . .”

Vicky came around the desk and smiled down at the child. “Mary Ann, would you like to keep Annie company in the outer office?”

“Who's Annie?” The little girl made several pencil swipes on the pad before she looked up, blue eyes filled with innocence and wonder in a heart-shaped face. There was a little dimple in her chin. Her fingernails were rosy pink.

“My secretary. You met her when you came in. You could show her your drawings. She would like that very much.”

The little girl gave her father, then her mother, a sideways glance. They both nodded, and she jumped up and started for the outer office. Vicky went with her. “Mary Ann has some drawings to show you,” she told Annie as the child sidled in next to Annie's chair and opened her pad.

Vicky closed the beveled glass doors behind her and went back to her desk. The Little Shields had angled their chairs toward the doors so they could keep an eye on Mary Ann and—more important, Vicky realized—so Mary Ann could keep an eye on them.

“Clint wasn't one to talk about his business,” Eldon said. “Went about doing what he had to do.”

“Never wanted to give us reason to get discouraged.” Myra's eyes locked on her husband as if they were the same person. His turn to speak, then hers; one story.

“Fact is,” Eldon went on, “Clint believed in our case. It was
obvious we were Mary Ann's parents. We raised her from the time she was no bigger than a puppy. We been worried sick some nosy social worker could show up on our doorstep and take Mary Ann away, despite the fact we take good care of her. I've got a steady job at the body shop in Riverton going on eight years now, and Myra works part-time at an insurance company. We see that Mary Ann has everything she needs. We talked to Father John at the mission. He's the one said we need legal papers saying she's ours so nobody can take her away. You can bring him in on this, if you want. He knows all about our case.”

“Why don't we start at the beginning?” Vicky said. Of course they had gone to Father John O'Malley. He was the man her people turned to for advice and consolation and help. “Tell me how you came to have custody of Mary Ann.”

Eldon swallowed several times, his Adam's apple bobbing. “Five years ago last week, March twentieth—what we call Mary Ann's birthday, 'cause that's when she was born to us—there was a knock on the front door. It was pretty late. We were just about to go to bed, and we sure weren't expecting company.”

“I remember being scared.” Myra squared herself to the desk and kept her eyes on Vicky. “I sensed something wasn't right. It was snowing hard, and nobody should've been out. I told Eldon not to answer.” She glanced at her husband. “Thank God he ignored me and opened the door. I was right behind him, and I saw a woman running toward a pickup parked out by the road. Her boots made holes in the snow, like post holes. She had on a black coat that came down to her knees. I remember the way her long, black hair swung from beneath the knit cap pulled low over her ears. Like a black shadow running through the snow. Eldon shouted, ‘What do you want?' but she jumped inside and the pickup took off. Bounced
down the road, taillights swirling in the snow, like whoever was driving couldn't get away fast enough. I was so busy watching the pickup I didn't notice the box until Eldon said, ‘What's this?' I looked down and saw the kind of brown carton you get at the grocery store. Stuffed with a pink blanket and the blanket was moving. We didn't say anything. We stood there like rocks.”

Eldon shook his head and smiled off into the distance. “It was like we were dreaming. Something moving inside the blanket? I thought it was a small animal. Maybe a puppy or a kitten. Well, we had a couple dogs and some cats that lived in the barn. We sure didn't need any more.”

“But the pink blanket,” Myra said. “I knew it was a baby. I lifted the box and took it inside. It was so cold out, and the blanket sparkled with snow. I could barely pull the blanket back, I was shaking so hard. A thousand thoughts went through my mind. How can this be? She was beautiful.” Myra stopped and drew in a long, shuddering breath. Her eyes were shiny. She seemed to make an effort to steady herself before going on: “A tiny pink face, just a wisp of hair, little clenched fists. She looked at me with the biggest blue eyes you ever saw, and it was like she knew I was going to be her mother.”

Eldon reached over and patted his wife's hand. “It was like a miracle,” he said. “Our little girl died at birth only five weeks before, and here was this perfect baby whose mother was giving her away.”

He looked sideways at his wife, who nodded, lips clenched. “I picked her up, our precious little baby, and held her close, and it was like . . .” The tears started as she mimicked rocking the baby back and forth. “Our own baby had come back to us. I remember saying her name: Mary Ann. Mary Ann, I said, over and over, and that became her name.”

Eldon waited a moment, before he said: “I figured the mother
must be in a terrible situation to leave her baby like that. I told Myra she was sure to come back. If not right away, she'd come back for her baby when she got herself into a better situation. I could see that Myra was”—he patted his wife's hand again—“falling in love, and after what we had been through, losing our own baby, I didn't want her to have any more grief. I tried to warn her . . .”

“It didn't do any good.” Myra flashed a sideways smile toward her husband. “I was already in love. All I wanted to do was take care of her. I felt she was mine, that for some reason the mother wanted me and Eldon to raise her as our own. She was white, but that didn't make any difference. We were going to be her parents. We still had everything ready for our own baby: crib, clothes, diapers, formula, all in her own bedroom. We had closed the door because I couldn't bear to look at it. All we had to do was open the door. Eldon had found a rocker at a secondhand store and painted it red, and I had made a bright, cheery cushion. I took Mary Ann into the bedroom and cuddled her in the rocker and I . . . I let her nurse. She had been breast fed, because she knew how to nurse. It was a miracle the way my milk started to come back. Not right away. I had to give her formula for a couple of days, but I kept offering my breast, and after a few days, I had enough milk for two babies.”

For an instant, the memories flooded back: her own babies tugging at her breast. Vicky swallowed hard and said, “Did you ever hear from the mother? Did you try to make contact?”

“Not a word.” Eldon gave a quick, dismissive shake of his head. “She abandoned her child, and that was that. As for trying to make contact, we had no idea who she might be.”

“Indian,” Myra said.

“Why do you suppose so? The child is white.”

“Half-breed, we decided,” Eldon said. “Father was probably white. I figure that's why the mother gave her up, because her daddy didn't want a half-breed kid. I guess the mother wanted him more than she wanted her own baby. It happens.”

Oh, yes, it happens, Vicky was thinking. A parade of clients, usually grandparents or aunties and uncles seated in the same chairs the Little Shields occupied, explaining how they had been left with a child, sometimes two or three children, because their daughter or sister or niece or even a close friend had run off with some man she couldn't live without, no matter the price.

“If you think the mother was Indian . . .”

“The way she ran away, the black hair, the pickup truck,” Myra said. “Everything about her said Indian.”

“You didn't see her face.”

The couple shook heads in unison. “We knew,” Myra said.

“I'm surprised she didn't leave the child with relatives. Is it possible one of you is a relative?” When neither spoke, she said, “Why didn't you call the police?”

They seemed to be struck dumb by the question, as if it were unfathomable. Finally Eldon said, “The police? We didn't even think about it. We called Myra's cousin over at social services and told her about the baby. She got us papers that said we could keep her while they investigated. The papers were notarized. Said we had temporary custody. We thought everything was okay, and we just took care of our baby.”

“She was our baby,” Myra said, “come to us out of nowhere. I couldn't bear the thought of losing her. We told folks she was our foster child, and nobody said anything. Then my cousin had a stroke and died, and we never heard any more about an investigation. I guess she knew we needed a baby. Pretty soon it was natural for
there to be three of us. Everywhere we went, powwows, Sun Dance, people knew Mary Ann was ours.”

“What has changed?” The case had fallen through the cracks. It should have been settled five years ago. From the outer office came the muted sound of the phone ringing. Both Myra and Eldon swiveled toward the beveled glass doors. Mary Ann was still at Annie's side, pushing the pencil over her pad. Annie picked up the phone.

The couple looked back at each other, regathering their thoughts. “We've changed,” Eldon said after a moment. “We want the legal papers that say we are her parents and no one can take her away. We have to register her for school. They're going to want her birth certificate.”

Myra pulled at the tissue in her hands. “Mary Ann worries. She looks in the mirror and sees she doesn't look like Mommy and Daddy. She wants to know who she is, where she came from, and we're afraid to tell her the truth about being left on our doorstep because there'll be an investigation for sure. We tell her she is our child and we couldn't love her more if I had given birth to her. She needs to know she is legally ours.”

“We found Clint on the internet,” Eldon said. “His Web site said he had experience with adoption cases.”

Vicky nodded. The adoption should have been easy, a clear case of abandonment. Nothing Clint couldn't have handled himself. “Did Clint mention finding anything that might have stopped the case from going forward?”

Myra was shaking her head, but her husband stared into the center of the room, a somber look about him. “When we hired him, he said the fastest way to finalize the adoption was to prove abandonment. It should be easy, given the facts, but the judge would want to make sure we had done everything to find the birth mother.
Clint put two ads in the
Gazette
, asking if anybody knew about an infant abandoned five years ago. We gave him a list of our relatives and friends that knew we'd been caring for Mary Ann. He went out and talked to people. Last time I asked him how things were going, he said he would get back to us. Like I said, he called the day he died. He didn't sound upbeat, like usual. Now he's gone.”

Vicky could picture the notes Clint had given her, the tight, hurried handwriting, the tension growing page by page. Newspapers. Interviews. The usual ways to obtain information that would support the clients' claim. “I'll need a copy of the list you gave Clint,” she said.