~ ~ ~



Zan rushed back out onto the deck of the house and peered over the rail at the car parked below, from where Sheba was extracting herself. The little girl glared back up at her father. “YOU LEFT ME IN THE CAR!”

“I’m sorry,” Zan sputtered, horrified, “I thought you were with Parker.”

“Thank you VERY much for RUINING MY DAY, parents!” she declaimed, and months later the girl still hasn’t forgotten. Wherever they are or whatever they’re doing, out of nowhere, in the middle of any conversation or some rare silence, she mutters, “You left me in the car,” and who knows what scenario she considered in those moments strapped in her booster seat, having been left at an orphanage by her grandmother when she was two years old, having been left by her mother at the grandmother’s door when she was four months old: Did she wonder, Is this where I wait for someone else to come take me? and as she waited, did she watch for that hawaiian tsunami to come roaring down the driveway?

Not until Viv got to Ethiopia to bring Sheba home did she learn the truth about the girl’s first two years. The second morning in Addis Ababa, she went to meet a woman who had been identified by the adoption agency as a kind of caretaker; the woman was in her mid-sixties but seemed older. She had blue cataract eyes and was dressed in traditional clothes, and accompanied by her grown daughter. When the women began to cry, Viv learned that the older woman was Sheba’s paternal grandmother and the younger was Sheba’s aunt, the sister of Sheba’s father.


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