A Book of American Martyrs(42)

“How much can the baby understand of what we say?”—Naomi was anxious to know.

“The baby understands feelingly.”

(This was a Shakespearean line, Naomi would recall years later. At the time it was uttered by Daddy as if it were his own and very likely, from Gus Voorhees’s perspective, it was his own.)


NOT UNTIL A FEW YEARS LATER, when Melissa was old enough to understand, or to understand partly, did Mommy and Daddy explain to her that she’d been adopted.

They told Melissa she’d been chosen. Unlike most children who are born to their parents—like Darren and Naomi, for instance—who’d come into the world as surprises—(“but very special surprises”)—Melissa had been freely and deliberately chosen.

In his serious-Daddy voice Daddy said:

“An adopted child is a chosen child. An adopted child is a very much-wanted child. An adopted child has two sets of parents, and is in the world doubly. There are the biological parents—whom she may someday discover, if she wishes—at least, the biological mother. And there are the adoptive parents—who have chosen her out of multitudes.”

The strange word was multitudes. We did not know what to make of it. There was something terrible in the thought—a vast sea of little babies, and Melissa among them, but hardly distinguishable from any of them. No wonder that she cast her eyes down, and waited for the ordeal to end.





THE WHITE BOX


Hey Nao-miii! Something for you.”

It was a white box. But not a clean white box.

One of those boxes for doughnuts, with grease stains.

This was not the Grand Rapids Montessori school now. We had moved to Saginaw, Michigan. With each school there were fewer names I would care to know and I did not know the names of these girls grinning at Melissa and me.

Afterward I would surmise that they were not the ones who’d prepared the box for us. Whoever had imagined this “gift” had to be older. In middle school or even in high school.

“Hey Naomi. You c’n take it, for your sister and you.”

(I did not want to think that the actual words were nasal-mumbled for your chink sister and you.) They were excited. Their eyes darted and glittered.

Yet I seemed to think—Do they like me? Really?

My hands were shaking with excitement, or with dread.

“Go on, open it Nao-miii. It’s for you.”

My heart leapt with hope. Lifted like leaves sucked by a sudden wind. For I was so lonely here wherever (most recently) here was.

As I unfastened the string crudely tied around the box, squatting over it, and Melissa staring silently at the box, I tried not to see how there were others, older children, boys as well as girls, standing at a little distance by the corner of the school wall, watching.

I opened the box. A nasty smell lifted.

I blinked, and stared. Melissa gave a little cry.

I kicked the box from me, and grabbed Melissa’s hand, and pulled her blindly with me, back into the school.

Hot clumps of bile rose into my mouth, I was stooped, gagging.

Vomit on the floor, and on my sneakers. And poor Melissa terrified asking what was it? what had it been?—for she hadn’t seen what was in the box, not clearly as I had.


THAT NIGHT Melissa woke screaming in the bed next to mine.

After Mommy had switched off our bedside light in the shape of a fuzzy sheep I had lain with my eyes shut tight trying not to see the box, and what was mangled and bleeding inside the box, and I had not been able to sleep.

“It was just a dream, honey. A bad dream.”

Mommy hugged Melissa who was whimpering and shivering.

Mommy asked me if I had any idea what it was that had so frightened my little sister—the “bad dream.”

No idea.

In Mommy’s arms Melissa quieted, after a while. I felt such jealousy seeing them, my mother who was so beautiful (I thought) and my little sister who was so pretty, huddled together. The white woolly sheep that was our bedside lamp cast a warm light outward but caused sharp shadows, shadows like knife-blades, in the folds of the bedclothes of both beds, and in the space beneath the beds where something might be hiding.

“It’s this place—Saginaw. We’re not wanted here. We don’t want to be here.”

Mommy spoke in a hoarse whisper. Mommy was hugging Melissa who clung to her panting. There was an air of reproach in Mommy’s voice that meant Your father is to blame. Not me!

“You’re sure that something hasn’t happened, Naomi? To Melissa? To you? At school?”

I shook my head no. I was not happy at being wakened even if, in fact, I had not been asleep.

And what could I have told my mother? There were no adequate words.


WHEN I ASKED DARREN, Does Daddy kill babies?—my brother grimaced and said loftily that wasn’t what they called them.

I did not understand this. What was them? Who was they?

Darren said, Feet-usses. They call them feet-usses, stupid.





“SO CLUMSY”


Another time on the stairs to the gym at Saginaw Elementary South the big Biedenk girl pushed me from behind, caused me to fall and turn my ankle. Trying not to cry, the pain came so hard.

See how you like it bitch! Your old man’s a damn fuckin baby killer.


IT HAD BEEN an accident on the stairs. I would explain to adults.