These Dreams of You

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From the beginning Sheba has had an affinity for music. Because this is so much the stuff of racial cliché, Zan barely can tell people about the more earthbound aspects — the girl running for a piano like other kids to a scooter, warbling cheerfully in the yard of the orphanage back in Addis Ababa to the lightning in the sky — let alone that the girl’s small body literally hums with song.

Within a week of Sheba’s arrival, the family noticed it at the dinner table when everyone heard from her, barely audible, a distant music. “Sheba, we don’t sing at the table,” Viv gently tried to admonish her, until one day the mother is driving in Hollywood with Sheba in the backseat and picks up Zan’s broadcast from the canyon that usually she can’t get half a mile from the station. The girl transmits on Sheba frequency. Zan calls her Radio Ethiopia.