A Tiny Upward Shove, page 16
* * *
Marina would think about returning to Lola’s house each night before bed. Returning to a world and way of life that was familiar. In her first weeks there, Marina called her several times.
Reena, what are you doing there?
Well, I’m talking to you while the other kids are programming.
Programming, what is this programming?
It means they are going to group, like a group meeting, or going out to do physical education, or they have a one-on-one meeting.
Then programming is anything?
Yeah, basically anything but sleeping.
Why don’t they call it anything?
I dunno, Lola, they just don’t.
You talk to your mother?
No, Lola.
Why not? She misses you.
I know but I can’t talk to her right now, she has to finish some stuff before I can see her and so it makes it tough to talk to her.
She has programming too?
Kinda. I miss you, Lola, when can I come see you?
Oh, I don’t know. I have to finish these paperworks. I had to go to the police department the other day and get fingerprinted—just like a real bank robber!
Lola liked all the shows with bank robber drama, she used to get a thrill out of the westerns, Stick ’em up bang bang, she said with her little index fingers pointed. When the timer went off and they had to end their call, Lola gave her a hard time.
I gotta go, Lola.
Oh! So fast?
The timer went off and other people have to use the phone.
Oh, you don’t want to talk to Lola anymore?
It’s not that I don’t want to.
Marina usually returned to her cottage depressed and longing for Lola more. Explaining all the strange rules to someone else made it harder for Marina to make sense of them herself.
* * *
Lola Virgie hung up with Marina, she couldn’t tell her what she thought, maybe she should. She’d started to cry while listening to her—what a smart girl. She hid it from her.
Lola, are you okay? Marina had asked.
And she replied, Of course, I just have a cold. It’s so cold here since you and your mom left.
Lola! I don’t know why you don’t just turn on the heater.
She’d been complaining like that to Marina all these years, she said that Marina and Mutya provided body heat, warmed the house for free. She still refused to turn on the heater, afraid it’d raise the gas bill. She’d much rather invite her church friends over to pray the rosary.
Now she’d also run out of room. Room in her heart for all the feelings swirling around in there. She couldn’t forget the way Marina giggled when she was a child. How she was always so happy to spend time with her, go with her to the espiritista, promise to eat her vegetables, to be good, to be clean, to care for her. Oh, how Marina wanted to please her. If Lola told her to pray she’d pray. If Lola told her to comb her hair she’d comb her hair. The doctors said Virgie had to take all those pills and stop eating the sugar and the fat. The sisig, the kare-kare, the lechon. She was tired all the time.
She couldn’t bear the thought of it. So many years of not enough money and then dying alone; years of hospital visits and raising her kids, and now she was trying to get Marina. All those social worker interviews, and paperworks, all their nosy nosy. And now it was possible she couldn’t even care for Marina anymore.
And now here she was, she expected every symptom—she recognized them as they appeared. But for the first time she felt something else beneath the resignation and despair. She was angry. She was also exhausted, but she didn’t want to give up. She didn’t want to spend all her time in bed watching J.R. on Dallas with her pounding heart, with her long pajamas. She sat there and tried to imagine the rest of her life, a future of pills, and applesauce, and a nurse who let her sit there in her own mess, or worse one of those homes where she would rot away. Drool on herself, her teeth in a cup, one of those gowns that let her puwit hang out.
* * *
The girls in Marina’s little cottage girl army whispered gossip and giggled after lights-out. They lay down on their backs, then faced each other, then turned away, facing the walls, signaling it was time to sleep. They kept their talk quiet—a secret thing—about nothing too important, unless one of the girls was in love and then she was planning A Great Escape. And because they were teenagers, this happened often.
Perhaps O’Lord saw their late-night tears. Maybe he was present when they were last slapped by their parents, when Ma shook Marina by the shoulders and, later, Lola Virgie forgave the shaking and the screaming, swiped the crumbs of the day away, and proclaimed, Listen to your mother. She knows best. And as they lay there growing wilder, untrusting and running farther away from where they came, maybe O’Lord was there, stroking their heads at night as they dreamt of being loved. Above them were stars, the same stars for all the world, and down the block below was the highway that led anywhere, back to their mothers or away to their lovers, or farther even to the lives they wanted, and beside the highway were violent flurries of snow, unsafe and fierce and uncorrupted by the rules of this world.
* * *
The highway outside the barbed wire fence of the Pines stretched from the Valley to Portland to Vancouver to a place far north called Hope. This highway was most notorious for swallowing up the lives of Indigenous women. Some of them would hitchhike to the Downtown Eastside and stick the dream-weaving fluid gamot into their veins, and they forgot about the soldiers and their guns, and they forgot about the prunes they hate to eat, and they forgot about the blood on their achy feet, and they lived happily ever for the moment. Some of them wouldn’t get that far. Instead, they’d get picked up by someone, maybe Willie Pickton.
Lola tried to warn Marina that women were hunted in this world, and it’s true that along the Lougheed Highway that stretched from Seattle to Canada hundreds of women had been hunted, raped, tortured, killed. They were mostly dark-haired women, maganda like Marina. Some say 824 missing and murdered Indigenous women, others say 1,200, dating back to the 1980s. And then there are the kids who died in foster care. Hundreds and thousands in Los Angeles. When is a number high enough to care? People are strange about numbers. They will say that 109 is a small number or a big number depending on whether or not they know one of those Native women. They will say the murderer is a specific kind of predator, a sexual predator or a drug lord or a devil worshipper. Nobody misses nameless people. The Highway of Tears they call it. The highway has a name. But not many of the women have a name. Somebody missed one person. One face. One name. One daughter. One sister. One mother. People miss one person.
* * *
Aside from the CK One ads, Marina clocked that Alex’s sole possession was a heavy canvas bag that, when resting by her feet as she sat on Reen’s bunk, took on, with its worn and weighted life, the speckled contour of an old dog: fat and obedient. Inside the bag? A small knit hat with cat ears. And all of Alex’s attempts at finding her adoptive mother, Sabina.
There is no end to the forest of missing women. They’ve traveled this road, some of them have the memory of their Native ancestors, some of them have toyed with these lanes, nodding out being smacked back into the cruel world only to chase a visit once again. I see them travel sometimes. A woman spread flat against the stream in the river, finding her tiny way upward. I panicked the first time I saw this. Then I heard the voice of Maria Lobo. They are human. And this is the story of humans, this litany of violence, pakshet jobs, and land grab, boom bang wars, roar roar rape. I imagined their ghost-spirits fluttering through the forest at night like sets of butterflies.
SABINA
Winter in Seattle came with red and green traffic lights slicing beams through the icy layers across the city. The sidewalks were blanketed in snow, and a coat of fog billowed halfway up the storefront windows. Coffee smells and chicory and freshly baked loaves of bread, and for Alex, this may have been the perfect time to come into the world. Sabina, in town from Canada just for the occasion, was giddy for Alex’s arrival—pumping Christmas carols into her rental car, singing along (badly), stopping at shops along the way. There was always a thing (just one more thing) for her to buy. Her scalp freshly oiled, her afro picked out. A turquoise ring on her index finger, a big bright red coral pendant on her sweater. She’d read somewhere that these stones soothe the wearer, but that their colors, their textures, are stimulating for a child. Colors stimulating. Textures stimulating. The nagging question there at the back of her mind. Will she hate me for being Black? Will she resent me for being Black? Will she hate herself for being white? Will the world look at her like a wrong thing? Here in Seattle, she was so much more aware of herself. Her skin tone. Driving around with a white baby, would they think she was a nanny? A baby-napper?
Then with all this uncertainty swimming around in her head, she was at a stoplight and looked to her right and there in the store window was a lovely knit sweater with a matching hat, the dome of the hat adorned with the shapes of two pointed cat ears. And it was just darling. Just adorable, and it did not matter that her new baby, Alex, would not fit that outfit just yet. One day she would. It was the right size for maybe a two-year-old. Then she realized she knew nothing. Who knew what size a two-year-old wore? Maybe it was the right size for a five-year-old. Sure, she had seen both two-year-olds and five-year-olds before, but she never thought to ask them their size, and one really couldn’t size things by age because children varied, didn’t they? There were five-year-olds the size of eight-years-olds. She was so uncertain that morning, but then she looked at the hat with the knitted-on cat ears and it made her warm and happy. It made her feel confident. And then she went back to her rental car and put the two items in with all the other bags and the one thing that was most spectacular was that little empty baby seat. Oh no, take that back; the most most terrific was the plush virginal white blanket with satin edges. Organic cotton. Receiving blanket, it was called. Oh, what a wonderful name, she thought.
And there, as the white light from the streetlamps cast a beam across the wet pavement, she thought that maybe that whole road was like a receiving blanket. She pulled into the hospital parking lot and hesitated once more. Should she park in the emergency lot? For the emergency room? She had heard so many stories of women being in labor for ten, twelve, forty-eight hours. Maybe it’d be best if she parked in a paid spot. This was one of those many things that were not in the birthing plan. Where does the one with the receiving blanket, the receiving mother, park?
She parked in the paid lot and checked herself in the mirror once more. Smiled, put on some lipstick, coiffed her hair. Chuckled to herself. Since when was she so self-conscious? And remember, Sabina, children are not born with racism, they learn it. She was going to be wonderful. Any child would be lucky to go home with her. Look at the stuff in this car, for chrissakes, and I haven’t even picked her up yet. Then for the length of a hot flash, she felt a pinching in her heart. She envisioned Lauren, Alex’s birth mother, unable to give up the baby. What if she changes her mind? Lauren had signed the papers. Lauren was clear she needed the money. Sabina had asked her over and over and over again. Are you sure? But still, the panic gripped her heart.
Adoption was just this—a big gamble on heartbreak. She’d fostered before, and the child had to be returned to his birth mother, and it was maybe the best for everyone, but she was still so depressed afterward. She’d gained ten pounds and could only wear stretchy mom jeans (Ack! Mom jeans—how ironic!) and never went out, because what would she tell all those new friends she made? Parents of the kids who he’d played with? And she decided that maybe she wasn’t made for this heartbreak stuff. So that’s why she chose adoption rather than fostering. Something with more permanence.
A brand-new baby. In Canada, it was too complicated, too many hoops for her to foster to adopt. The lawyers and the paperwork and the background checks. So when her girlfriend called her and told her about this church program where she’d adopted her children that was based out of Seattle, just a car ride away, she jumped at it. Her girlfriend said that there were fewer hoops to jump through than traditional adoption agencies because it was from a church, and she adopted her son and after a few years it turned out his mother had another child and now she has that child too. The church was very open about keeping the relationship with the birth family. It seemed like a good program for everyone. Rather than just pay a flat fee like she was purchasing the child, she would pay for the biological mother’s doctor’s appointments and cost of living throughout her pregnancy. And then continue to offer a stipend one year following, as well as keep the channels of communication open. She was certain the birth mother needed the money and that the baby deserved a good home. But what if the birth mom gets too attached or wants the baby back? Sabina asked her friend. Her friend said there was a six-month window when the birth mother could choose to reunify with their child but they almost never did. She has been working with the agency for almost two decades and it had never happened.
But these feelings that came over her in the car were devastating. She didn’t have to follow through. She could just keep going. She could stop wanting. But she knew that the moment this child entered her life, she would not stop wanting; she knew that this new life would etch her out, erase her as she knew herself up until this point. She’d be a different person altogether. One who lived for someone else. She’d know patience, and compromise, and a new kind of fear, the fear of losing what she had.
She remembered first seeing young Lauren at the Starbucks. Lauren had walked in slowly, a white girl with long dark hair braided back in cornrows. She was pushing a stroller with her infant. From the first moment Sabina saw her puffy cheeks and crisp green eyes and round belly and the face of the child in the stroller, a mixed-race baby, she sighed in relief and knew this was the one for her.
Hello! Sabina had waved vigorously, then exclaimed, Oh, I hope you’re a hugger because I’m a hugger, and held Lauren close. Then she gestured for Lauren to sit down. Here, sit—sit.
Their conversation was constantly interrupted by the calls from the coffee shop barista. Double soy grande latte! Single tall mocha with whip for Karen!
Lauren did not even know who the father was and wasn’t sure whether or not the child would come out white or Black or maybe even Asian. Most of her friends were Black. She had gone to beauty school a long time ago and only knew how to do Black hairstyles because she grew up on the poor side of town. Later on, she ended up getting arrested for possession of drugs and continued to practice her braiding techniques on the other inmates. While she was in jail, she learned she was pregnant, and the other women told her about Seattle Crusade Church.
She was shy when she’d first met with the pastor. She never knew a woman pastor before. This pastor was beautiful with tan skin and dark hair and light eyes, and her eyes sparkled when they met, and when she saw Lauren for the first time, her face lit up. And Lauren felt okay confessing to her she was pregnant and she did not think she could care for the child. The pastor told her God had a plan. God had a plan for her, and that plan was for her to shine. And they held hands and cried together. But still, when she got out and went to the church for the first time, she was shy all over again. It was one of those megachurches with a big stage and ceiling lights, and the pastor who’d met her in the jail paced back and forth on the stage with a microphone and her hand in front of her mouth like she was singing. Like she was carrying her words high into heaven. Pastor Janice, she was called, met with her after and said, Well, looks like God’s heard your prayers. We found someone we want you to meet. And she told her about Sabina. Now she was here in the coffee shop sitting across from her.
It was a dream of Lauren’s to one day own her own salon. Sabina smiled at this and offered to maybe one day allow her to do her hair. Only she didn’t put it like that; she said something more like perhaps she would be so lucky as to one day have her hair done by her.
The next step was for Sabina to rent a house in Seattle so she could monitor Lauren’s health and drive her to medical appointments.
Lauren let her into the room during her ultrasounds, and while they looked at the screen that first time Sabina reached for Lauren’s hand; her hand was limp and clammy by her side, and finally Sabina decided to just take hold of the bed rail. She massaged the cold steel of the bed rail and looked at the bright flash of white floating around on the screen. It’s not an otter; it’s not an alien; it’s not a seal; it’s my baby. A girl. She would be having a girl! And the echo of the baby’s heartbeat rang deep in Sabina’s ears like the last sound at night before sleep finds you.
Over those four months, Sabina must have asked Lauren two dozen times if she was sure that she wanted to give the baby up, and each time she seemed more and more certain.
One day after an appointment, Sabina was driving Lauren back to the Empire View Mobile Home Park. The air between them was thick, both of them contemplating the figure they’d seen on the screen. Lauren was quiet and looking out the window and then said, I wanna keep her, but I just don’t have the money or a job right now. Startled, Sabina asked, Well, are you sure then you want to go through with this?
And again, she capitulated. No, no, I’m sure, it’s just that I think that people might think I’m bad for not taking her.
Of course, you’re not bad, Sabina said, then she thought about it some more. She went on, You know, sometimes people, especially men, especially men with money and power—they like to shame women into thinking that there is a right way and a wrong way to do things. It took me a long time to realize that’s not a true story. In the end, it is the thing that is best for everyone involved, and right now, you are not doing a selfish thing but doing a generous thing for yourself, for me too, sure, but mostly for the baby. What is best for the baby?
