the day of lost children

I’m practicing my alphabet when Sally comes looking for me. “M!” she says. She clambers up next to me, tugging at my arm. “M, come here!”

Man, this kid never quits. I don’t even bother looking up from my workbook. “What do you need, Sally?”

“M,” she says, hand clamping around my wrist. “My sister is taking the baby.”

Bombshell. Citizens are advised to stay indoors and panic. “What? When? Why?” One question after another. I sound like - well, like her.

“The baby,” Sally says again, calm as anything, right before her face shatters into a thousand pieces. She falls into me, face turned into my chest, fingers clawing for purchase at my waist. “She’s leaving, she’s leaving. M. The baby.”

After she calms down from her initial outburst, she drags me over to where her older sister is walking toward the waiting Jeep, Sally’s baby in her arms. The social worker, Agatha, is trying to convince Sally to go with them, to see where the baby will stay, but Sally ignores her. She stands just inside the office, clutching the doorframe, and the three of us watch her baby disappear into the car.

The door slams, the engine revs, and Sally collapses. Something has buckled, her knees or maybe her heart, and she goes down hard, boneless and flailing like someone falling from a great height. I drop down with her, instinctively pulling her toward me, but she’s dead weight in my arms. Five minutes ago she was clinging to me with all the desperation of a drowning man, but now I’m the one hanging on, afraid to let go.

I try to get the story out of Agatha. Apparently the idea has always been that Sally would give the baby to her sister. I protest that Sally has obviously changed her mind, and that we have no right to make such a decision for her, and Agatha further informs me that Sally has been hitting and shaking her baby whenever she has a run-in with one of the other women. Of course we have to consider the security of the baby, the baby I would take a bullet for, and yet I can’t help thinking of the other women here who have been known to hit their children. They have been cajoled and reasoned with, have been given chance after chance to redeem themselves. We claim to be teaching these women how to be mothers, to be empowering them. Not giving up on them. Not stealing their children.

Sally cries for three hours straight, though “cries” does not really do justice to the force of her despair. She howls and sobs, keens and wails, gags and hiccups through the long, wordless moans that fill the spaces between lamentations. She is in agony, tortured, dying in slow motion.

I speak to her, gently, struggling for the appropriate vocabulary, as if anything I say in any language would make a difference. I hold her close with an arm around her shoulders, tucking her against me, until she squirms away to lie in a defeated sprawl on the floor. I rub her back, squeeze her knee and shoulder. I wipe each tear as it comes, damp fingers catching roughly on her hot, tacky skin. I cup her jaw, cradle her head, stroke her hair over and over again until she finally surrenders to a restless, exhausted sleep.

My fingers keep moving over her hair as she sleeps, unsure what else to do. She’s laid out in such a way that I can see the pulse in her throat, the flutter of skin between her collarbones. “It hurts here,” she said before, digging her nails into her chest, but as far as I can tell, her heart is still going, beating strong and steady, though maybe not quite the way it used to.

&

The afternoon passes in a haze of misery. Sally sleeps for a while, one fat tear balanced precariously on the side of her nose, then wakes up and cries some more. She claimed around lunchtime that she would never eat again, but at about 1:30 she lets out a tremendous, stuttering sigh and says, “M? I’m hungry.” I take her back to my house and feed her some leftover sticky rice, convince her to drink some water. She follows me back to the office and sits with me for a couple hours, coloring pictures of Disney princesses. She doesn’t speak much, breaking her silence only to show me her finished products and to dismiss my lavish flattery.

Pippi finally arrives after dinner, another skipped meal, and Sally falls apart again. Even Pippi’s presence can’t make this better, and we’re all crouched together in a miserable huddle when the second bombshell hits.

“Look who’s here!” Elsa sings, an oddly cheerful tone, and I look up to see Alma standing in the doorway of Sally’s room.

Later on, I won’t remember letting go of Sally, or standing up. Elsa is beaming, eyes lit up with happiness at having her friend back. Alma is smiling too, playing along, but hers is horrible, small and eleven years old and so goddamn brave, the bravest kid in the world.

“Oh, kiddo,” I say, stupidly. I reach out for her, and she walks straight into my arms and starts to cry.

As I will discover later, things are not looking good. Our many attempts at bribery and persuasion have failed, and the Vietnamese have a court date scheduled for tomorrow. Conviction is inevitable, to be followed by a long stint in the Bangkok detention center and then a forced return to Vietnam, where repatriated refugees have a tendency to disappear or be accused of terrorism against the state. Somehow, though, Harriet and Albert managed to get the kids out, and now here they are, Alma and little Josiah. Free, safe, and orphaned.

Sally was brittle and unyielding in my arms, but Alma folds herself into me: arms locked around my waist, head tucked securely under my chin, face pushed hard against my chest. Her tears are quiet and breathless, little hummingbird body trembling so very slightly under my hands, and we stand there together for a long, long time.

&

Rosalind reaches out for me as soon as she sees me, bony hands latching on and pulling me close until we’re both pressed up tight against the cell door, arms wedged through the bars and folded uncomfortably around each others’ bodies.

It’s been a long time since the last time.

She’s always been skinny, our Rosalind, but ever since her appendectomy and the shit-storm that followed, she has been disappearing before our eyes. I too am a lesser woman than I once was, two hundred extra pounds of grief notwithstanding, but together we still bring to mind Herbert’s old assessment of a human 10: one sharp, one round.

“You look not well,” Rosalind says, pulling back far enough to examine my face. I don’t know what to say to that. I never know what to say to her these days, veering cautiously between distraction and comfort and questions. I usually try to make her laugh, but that’s a lost cause tonight.

She asks if we saw Josiah and Alma. “I always fight with them,” she says, “but now they are gone, I miss them.” And then she’s crying, hot and guilty, and I want to break apart the world and put it back together the right way, a way that makes sense.

We detach after a few minutes, and now it’s Winnie I’m holding through the cell door, Winnie’s tears I’m trying awkwardly to smooth away, all thumbs, as if I haven’t had enough practice today. Beautiful, gracious Winnie, a scant ten years my senior and yet somehow the epitome of motherhood in my eyes, flexible and strong. Winnie, who has tried to save her children at the expense of her own heart.

I can’t help her. I can’t give her children back, and I can’t save her from what’s coming. Barring divine intervention, she and Rosalind and Saul will be convicted as illegal aliens, and someday soon they will be sent back to Vietnam. Perhaps they’ll be arrested straight off the plane, disappearing like others have before them. Then, too, there will be nothing I can do for them, or for any of them. I can’t give Alma her mother, or Sally her baby. I can’t promise them anything or say one word that will soften that killing blow. I can’t begin to understand their pain. In the shadow of what they’ve lost, my love is a pale, insignificant thing. It is nothing at all, but it is all I have to give, and tonight in my sleepless bed, it will be all I can think about: the shape of their bones against mine, the damp salty heat, the bars between us.