The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane(102)

What felt like a bomb going off obliterated Amy’s elation. Her father was right, and it was a huge disappointment. But then she realized . . . I always thought my birth mom was trying to send me a message. I was right. Goose bumps rippled along her arms.

“I’m sorry, honey,” Alice said, extending her hand.

Amy took it, because she didn’t want to hurt her mother’s feelings any more than she already had when what she felt inside was a buoyant thrill. Her birth mom was real to her in a way she’d never been before.

That night Amy dreamed about her birth mother and the map. In the morning, she tiptoed into the adjoining room and stood at the foot of the bed, waiting for one of her parents to wake up. Alice’s eyes flickered open first, and she startled when she saw her daughter staring down at her.

“What is it? Are you okay?”

“My real mom . . . I mean my birth mom, wants me to find her.”

Adam blinked awake. “What’s going on?”

“Let’s put up a flyer,” Amy announced. “Like for a lost dog.”

“Where would you put it?” Alice asked, doubtful.

“On telephone poles. In restaurants. Like what people do at home. Please.”

“What do you think, Adam?” Alice asked.

He sat all the way up and propped some pillows behind his back. He had the same grave look on his face as he’d had yesterday when he told Amy she needed a starting point for the map.

“We picked you up in Kunming, but you aren’t from here,” he said. “You were brought from another orphanage.”

“I know, but what if she’s visiting?” Amy wasn’t going to let this go. “We’re visiting. What if she’s visiting too? What if she moved here? What if she’s outside right this minute?”

“What if,” Alice echoed, shaking her head sadly.

“Please,” Amy begged.

“If we do this, we don’t want you to have false hope,” Adam said.

“We don’t want you to be disappointed,” Alice added. “You have to consider the odds.”

Amy went back to her room, opened her laptop, and signed in to the hotel’s Internet service. Numbers came easily to her so she expected to find a quick set of figures to noodle with. Except true numbers didn’t exist. The first 61 adoptees came to the U.S. in 1991. That number continued to rise—to close to 63,000 between 1991and 2005. After that, the stats were harder to find, with a steady decline in adoptions from China. But if there were something like 100,000 Chinese adoptees, and approximately 650,000,000 females in China, then Amy had a one in 6,500 chance in finding her mother. The chances got a lot better if you considered only women in their childbearing years.

“If the numbers on the Internet are accurate,” Alice said after Amy presented her findings.

Amy pulled up a story she’d once found and bookmarked on the laptop’s screen. “Look at this, Mom. Here’s an article about someone who found her mother! It says here that twenty families have been reunited!”

“How?” Alice asked as her husband picked up the laptop and began reading.

“She was on a trip like this with her parents. They were walking down the street when a total stranger came up and said, ‘You look like my sister’s daughter.’ And guess what. That woman turned out to be the girl’s aunt!”

“That’s a one-in-a-million occurrence.”

Amy leaned over her dad, hit a few keys, and pulled up a different story. “Then what about this one? Another family was on a trip, just like ours. Her family made a flyer to post. The first place they went in was a café. They asked if they could hang the flyer. The couple who ran the café looked at the flyer and burst into tears. It was their daughter! Now the two families spend every Christmas together.”

“Those sound like made-up stories,” Alice said. “There’s all sorts of nonsense on the Internet.”

Adam looked up from the laptop. “Actually, honey, what Amy’s telling you is from an article in The Boston Globe. The first one was in The New York Times.”

“But what are the odds?” Alice asked, repeating her earlier concern. “I don’t want Amy to be disappointed.”

“I promise not to be disappointed,” Amy said.

“Mom’s right, you know,” Adam said.

“Please, Dad, please,” Amy pled, turning all her focus on her father, because he rarely said no to her. “Will you let me do it? Please?”

But Alice gave in first. “There’s no harm in trying. Get some paper from the desk. Let’s figure out what you want to say.”

They spent the next hour working together, narrowing down the details and keeping the English simple:

My name is Amy Bowen. I was born on or about November 24, 1995. I am looking for my biological family. I was found in a cardboard box. I was wrapped in a blue blanket. There was a cake of tea in the box with me. I am short. My skin is dark compared to most Chinese.

In case you want to know more about me, I am good at science and math. I like to ski and ride horses. I also like to hang out with friends. I am very nice. I hope you would like to meet me.

To contact me, please e-mail my father at [email protected].

After breakfast, they went to the business center. They hadn’t brought the photo of Amy taken when she was first found or any of those that Alice and Adam took the day they got her. All they had was the fourth-grade school picture from Alice’s wallet and Amy’s current passport photo. She positioned them on the piece of paper with the note and pushed the button to make copies. Then they walked around the neighborhood where they were staying and tacked up the notices. By the time they were done, Amy knew that nothing would come of her plan: maybe her birth mother didn’t read English, maybe she didn’t have a computer to send an e-mail, maybe she didn’t know what a computer or e-mail were. And so many people lived here. What kind of coincidence could there be in the world for Amy’s birth mother to be walking down this particular street, see a picture of Amy in her school uniform, and think, Oh, there’s my baby!