sally

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I've mentioned before that Sally, our youngest resident, is incredibly attached to Pippi. She adores her. She calls her "sister" and brings her presents and sets aside food for her at mealtimes. She does these things for me, too, but I suspect this is primarily because I am Pippi's friend.

For her part, Pippi treats Sally like a sister. She is endlessly patient with her, brings her ice cream from the city, takes care of her when she's sick. She lets Sally use her cell phone to call her mother, even though Sally always gets confused and ends up calling half a dozen of Pippi's family members and friends. She'll run back to our house, brandishing the phone like a hand grenade, tinny Australian voices whispering, "Hello? Who is this? Do you know what time it is?"

Pippi stayed with Sally at the hospital, drowsing in chairs and empty beds, long after Robin and Harriet had left for the day. She was the only one there when Sally had her baby, a teeny-tiny girl approximately half the size of a Cabbage Patch Doll. When they wheeled Sally out of the operating room after the c-section, she squinted up at Pippi with her brow furrowed and murmured drowsily, “Sister. Baby?”

"Baby," Pippi confirmed, stroking Sally's arm. "Baby OK."

"Oh," Sally said, as if she'd been expecting a different answer. "Baby."

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Sally was deeply unhappy in the week following the birth. She'd never wanted the baby, had tried valiantly to ignore her belly and pretend there would never be a baby at all, despite the growing evidence to the contrary. Faced with the reality of a flesh and blood child, her flesh and blood child, she sank into a deep depression. Her silly, impossibly wide smile disappeared, replaced by a thin grim line. She avoided touching the baby. She barely spoke, just lay there staring into space, eyes wet and unfocused.

"What if we've lost her?" Pippi asked me quietly, as we sat worrying together at the foot of her bed. "What if she never comes back?"

It didn't help that Sally had had a cesarean section, a necessity considering her narrow, childish hips. The doctors had decreed that she was allowed to take one acetaminophen every six hours to manage the pain. Fucking Tylenol for what amounts to a minor disembowelment. Say what you will about the U.S. health care system, but you can get enough codeine to dope a rhino if you stub your toe real bad.

From my journal, five days after Sally came home from the hospital:

If this were the end of a feel-good movie or paperback novel, [Sally] would probably have named her baby something nauseatingly touching, like Hope or Faith. Here in the real world, she hasn't named her at all. She also doesn't want to breast-feed, so she ignores the baby's cries until one of the other women forces her to feed her, generally by saying, "HEY [SALLY], CATCH," and launching the baby at her nipple.

Compounding the problem was that fact that Sally was in so much pain that she hadn't been eating, so even when she was forced to breastfeed, she had nothing to give. She wasn’t allowed to give the baby formula, though, and so her tiny, delicate little girl went hungry for a few days, dehydration evident in her dry, dry lips. The baby was quiet, unnervingly quiet, but she mewled occasionally for milk. Her complaints were soft and squeaky, like she was still figuring out how her lungs worked.

Powerless to give this fragile little doll what she needed, I spent a lot of time rocking her in my arms while Pippi tended to her mother, my little finger stuck securely in her mouth to keep her calm and quiet. I sang to her, off-key lullabies and Steve Miller songs, and she sucked ferociously on my finger for hours.

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Sally seems so small without the huge hull of her belly. She's a little wisp of a girl, short with a spare frame. She's been up and about for a while now, mostly recovered from the surgery and the depression. Some of her mischievous energy has returned, and she smiles and teases almost the way she used to.

She drops the baby off with me sometimes, when she needs time to shower or cook or gather mushrooms. She checks in every fifteen minutes or so, poking her head in the door and asking, "M, baby OK?" She's feeding the baby formula now, so mother and daughter are both happier. The baby is still tiny, a thin pink fairy girl turning her face into my shirt, pursing and pouting her lips like a little Derek Zoolander. She hasn't grown nearly as much as Fran's hairy baby Blue, though she's just one week younger. She smells like warm socks and garlic bread. My love for her is almost too big to fit inside my chest; it leaks out in embarrassing little dribbles, a kiss here, a tickle there. I understand now what my mother said about not coming home with a baby.

Sally has taken to studying English with me, or at least pretending to. "ABCD one o'clock, OK?" She's not the most diligent student, but she likes hanging out. I praise her on her stumbling recitation of the English alphabet, and she praises me in turn when I manage to name all forty-four Thai consonants. "M, very good!" she says, one of her standard lines. She doesn't speak or understand much English, but she is an extraordinary improviser, managing to communicate a multitude of ideas by cobbling together a mish-mash of pidgin Thai and English with her hill tribe language and a healthy dash of pantomime. For the first few weeks, it seemed to me as though she and Pippi were speaking in code, like little kids who had invented their own super-top-secret ninja spy assassin Navajo language. I understand it now, for the most part - sometimes I even correct Pippi when she misinterprets what Sally is trying to say - but I'm still on the outside, looking in.

I'm Sally's friend, a good friend - but Sally and Pippi, they're family.

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What Sally wants most in the world - more than most people want money, or power, or to meet the love of their life - is to go home to her mother.

She's something of an unreliable narrator. Every day she has a different story: when she’s going, where she’s going, today or next month or next year, back home to her village or to stay with her aunt in the city, with or without the baby. When she doesn’t want us to go to the city for the day, she tells us she’s going that very day and she’ll be gone when we get back.

The assistant director Robin says she's been working on it, trying to negotiate the terms of Sally's return with the village elders. As it stands, Sally might be allowed to go home as long as she doesn't bring the baby with her. The thought makes my stomach hurt, but Sally doesn't seem to mind. Her aunt is willing to take the baby, and Sally just wants to go home, to forget the whole terrible business ever happened.

๕

Sally is gone.

Pippi and I stumbled over to her room at six o’clock this morning to help her move her belongings, a seemingly endless number of black garbage bags stuffed with clothes, baby things, and God knows what else – a whole watermelon, knowing her, or five kilos of rice. The burdens of motherhood have not made her any less of a klepto.

We found a few of our things balanced conspicuously on top of the diapers and blankets: a Thai-English phrasebook, the flashlight Sally had borrowed to navigate the dark path between our houses. Even my camera, which had a habit of wandering off and reappearing loaded with dozens of grinning, out-of-focus self-portraits.

Sally's sister was there to pick her up, and her older brother, the one she's afraid of. Her aunt was there, too, the one who is reportedly adopting the baby. The aunt took the baby from Pippi and cradled her, swaying almost imperceptibly as anonymous family members moved around us, hauling Sally's things to the pick-up truck they'd borrowed for the trip. The baby was asleep, oblivious to the new set of arms. She had a name, finally, though the aunt would probably change it.

The departure was abrupt. One by one, they all climbed into the truck without saying goodbye - the sister, the brother, the unnamed cousins. Sally. The aunt, cradling Sally's baby, our baby, little Pippi Two.

And then, just like that, they left.

Pippi and I waved as they pulled away, but the truck's windows were tinted and dark. We couldn’t see if Sally waved back, couldn’t even tell if she saw us standing there, fixed smiles on our grimy faces, pockets weighted down with the hard lines of the things she'd left behind: a phrasebook, a flashlight, a camera.