These Dreams of You

~ ~ ~

Everyone at the orphanage is happy to see Viv but no one offers answers to her questions. No one to whom she speaks will claim or confess to remembering where Sheba’s father, aunt and grandmother live. The woman who runs the orphanage makes a phone call; though Viv can’t be certain, since the conversation is in Amharic, she supposes it’s to the administrator of the adoption agency. On hanging up, the woman tells Viv, not unsympathetically, “It all just makes trouble.”

“I’m afraid the mother may already be in trouble,” Viv answers. “I’m only trying to help her.”

“But do you understand,” the woman says, “that should you find her, she may not know of the adoption, and that while of course the adoption is legal and final, still. . ” and the rest trails off.

“Still?”

“She might want back her child.”

Ever since Sheba came to be part of their family, now and then her combativeness crumbles long enough for Zan to catch her in a private moment. In such moments there is about her the palpable conviction that she’ll never possess the same love of her parents that they have for her brother. That she’s been passed from one party to the next out of love — from a single mother who couldn’t care for her to a paternal grandmother too old, to the orphanage and then Viv and Zan — is too exquisite a thing for the child to understand, or maybe anyone; but there’s no escaping how Sheba is short-changed, and it breaks Zan’s heart.

The African woman standing across the road from the pub at Leicester Square wears a mix of traditional and western clothes, jeans with a shawl for her head. “Sheba?” Zan says to the girl, and though she doesn’t respond, the woman looks at him as though she heard him, breaks from the girl’s stare and picks up the shopping bag at her feet and walks on. Sheba doesn’t move or speak but follows with her eyes the woman’s retreat into the city bustle.