These Dreams of You

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No white sentimentality invents, and no hard-nosed street wisdom disputes, the preternatural awareness of the four-year-old adopted child who shares with other abandoned children a perspective verging on the otherworldly. “Oh, yeah,” says another father at Sheba’s preschool when Zan identifies her as his, “the little girl who talks like she’s twenty.” The night that Zan takes Parker to the emergency room with a broken hand and loses his car keys, he’s still railing at the experience an hour later behind the wheel when, from her infant’s seat in back, Sheba advises, “Poppy, let it go,” before plopping her thumb back in her mouth.

Sheba dazzles everyone she meets. Eyes big enough to center whole swirling solar systems, her charismatic entrance into every room brings it to a halt. Not unlike her new brother she’s an irrepressible goofball, walking around with small stickers stuck to the end of her nose, spitting water across the dinner table in a stream like the stone water-breathing lion she saw in a fountain — a mimic who spins off her own original permutations. Lovingly seizing on a word like, say, buttocks, enthralled by both its emphatic sound and the unmistakable impact on those who hear it, soon she transforms everything into a variant. When her brother’s feet stink, they’re footocks.

Eventually the mimicry becomes not only more precocious but blacker, inevitable less because she herself is black than because her white brother — like all kids in the Twenty-First Century, or maybe all kids since the first white boy or girl heard Louis Armstrong blow his horn — is blacker: “Hey there, girlfriend,” or “What up, sweet cheeks?” to people who probably shouldn’t be greeted in that fashion. When she high-fives, she follows it with the sweep of her hand across her African head and declares, “Smooooth.”