These Dreams of You

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Relatively quickly, Sheba was assigned by the adoption agency to Viv and Zan, who had filed their papers some months before. Now the couple is amused by people who believe prospective parents saunter through orphanages choosing a child like someone picks a kitten at the animal shelter. The adoption process, involving medical tests, hours of online schooling, an impossible paper chase of countless forms and documents, and the scheduling of African court dates, was followed by Viv’s twenty-four-hour hejira to Addis Ababa by way of Chicago, London, Frankfurt and Cairo to get the girl.

I chose you, were the grandmother’s parting words before Viv left Ethiopia to return with Sheba to Los Angeles, I chose you through God to be her mother and only in the final moments did the girl’s father bring himself to admit that Sheba was his daughter, as though anyone looking at the two would have any doubt.

Given Viv, it’s not hard to believe she’s been chosen. Out of several billion women Sheba’s grandmother somehow plucked the truest heart, Viv who once wanted to bring to the house all the old homeless men of the canyon for a Christmas shower, Viv who will give away to the destitute whatever little money the family has left if Zan doesn’t stop her. Viv who would be field marshal of the world’s needing and needed as surely as she field-marshals the family priorities, when the family isn’t chafing at her command. “I’m a flawed human being,” she moans plaintively to Zan.

Fifteen years ago, before either of the children, a photographic series on church stained-glass windows led Viv to her great artistic endeavor. These were steel-framed recreations of the windows in the wings of butterflies that had died after their full butterfly-lives of several weeks; as Viv would have it, the juxtaposition of wing and steel is a metaphor for life, but Zan knows it’s a metaphor for the woman, the fragile and gritty joined in all five-feet-two of her. The pieces attracted attention as evidenced by their exhibition in a number of galleries and acceptance into the permanent collections of two Southland museums, but most prominently by their plagiarism: Over the past several years Viv has found herself at the center of one of the art world’s most notorious scandales, when both the idea and medium of the butterfly stained-glass windows were stolen by the world’s most successful artist — a man as well known for cavalierly “appropriating” other people’s ideas as for making tens of millions of dollars dipping elephants in plastic. While numerous people have pointed out the grounds for legal action, it sums up the Nordhocs’ lives emotionally as well as financially that they have nearly as little psychological wherewithal as they do financial resources to sue the bastard.

Rather Viv has poured her heart into Sheba’s adoption, which is less glamorous than television images of movie stars jetting in to scoop up African children. Months after the girl comes to live with them, Zan and Viv realize that the adoption they supposed might universally be regarded as a good thing is viewed as a gaudy display of trendiness. “We’re Brangelina!” Viv exclaims in dismay after watching a TV news story about an actress facing a public-relations backlash on the occasion of her third (or fourth) (or fifth) adoption.

“Well,” allows Zan, “the Brangelina of canyon dwellers about to be foreclosed on, anyway.” Viv remains in contact with Sheba’s family back in Addis, every month sending money to Sheba’s grandmother; almost two years after the adoption, Viv continues to ask about Sheba’s birth-mother. The more that the grandmother and aunt and agency respond, “No one knows,” “It’s not good to ask,” “It will make trouble,” the more determined Viv becomes.