Then he emerged from the boarding tunnel holding the baby, saw his mother, and they both burst into tears.
He eased his daughter into his mother’s arms. “Mom, this is Christina. Christina, this is—what is it, again?” Teasing her.
“Mimi!” She pressed her face close to the tiny girl and whispered, “I’m your Mimi!”
A tanned, smiling man with a tidy black goatee offered his hand. “Congratulations, LT. You’ve made your mother very, very happy.” This was Marcus, Mom’s brand-new husband, five years younger than her, at least. His mother at forty-six was still lithe and alarmingly sexy. LT hadn’t met Husband 3.0 before, didn’t know Mom was bringing him. He felt a flash of annoyance that he had to deal with this intruder at this moment—but then told himself to let it go. The day was too big for small emotions.
Doran, holding two duffel bags, one in each arm, said, “We made it.”
LT kissed him, hard. In New Guinea they hadn’t dared engage in PDA. “Eighteen years to go.”
Christina nestled like a peanut in the high-tech shell of the car seat. As Marcus drove them home, LT and Doran talked about how dicey the whole process had been. The orphanage, situated about thirty miles from Jayapura, was overcrowded, with hundreds of children left there by the crisis. The facility was nominally run by nuns, but most of the staff were local women who seemed little better off than their charges. LT and Doran had been practicing their Indonesian, especially the phrases involving gift-giving.
“We had to bribe everybody, top to bottom,” Doran said. “If it wasn’t for LT’s friend at the university yelling at them, they’d have taken the shirts off our backs.”
“It’s not their fault,” LT said. “Their agriculture is wrecked. The economy’s crashing. They’re starving.”
“Maybe they should stop chewing those sugar sticks.”
“What now?” his mother asked.
He told her how the locals seemed almost addicted to an invasive plant that tasted sweet but could not be digested. Gut bacteria couldn’t break down those strange peptides and so passed it along through the colon like a package that couldn’t be opened.
Doran said, “It would be great for my diet.”
A joke, but what Doran had seen there had scared him, and even LT, who’d spent months on the island doing fieldwork for his PhD, had been shaken by the rapid decline in the country. Thousands of alien species had been growing in the forests for two decades, ignored and unchecked, and suddenly some tipping point had been reached and those alien plants had reached the cities. The latest was a thread-thin vine that exploded into a red web on contact with flat surfaces. Villages and towns were engulfed by scarlet gauze. In the orphanage nurses scraped it from the walls, but that only made it worse, dispersing its spores. He and Doran were terrified it was in Christina’s lungs. Invasives might be indigestible, but so was asbestos. In the morning she’d have her first doctor’s appointment. Her papers all said she was healthy, without birth defects, and up-to-date on her vaccinations, but they weren’t about to trust an orphanage under duress.
Once they reached the apartment, LT still couldn’t bear to put down his daughter. While Doran mixed formula and made beds and ordered takeout, LT fed his daughter, changed her, and then let her fall asleep on his chest.
His mother sat beside him on the couch. “You’re going to have to let Doran do more parenting.”
“He can fight me for her.”
“Big talk for the first night. Wait till sleep deprivation hits.”
Christina’s eyes were not quite closed, her lips parted. Mom had to know that he’d strong-armed Doran into adoption. His last trip to New Guinea, LT had been haunted by the abandoned children. Doran had said, This is crazy, we’re not even thirty, and LT said, My parents were teenagers when they had me, and Doran said, You’re making my case.
But that argument was over forever the moment Doran met Christina.
“You used to look just like that,” his mother said. “Milk-drunk.”
She was four weeks old, living through the days of extreme fractions. In another month she’d have been their daughter for half her life. In a year she would have been an orphan for only a twelfth of it. And yet those four weeks would never disappear. There would always be some shrinking percentage of her life that she’d lived alone, a blot like a tiny spore. He’d read alarming articles about adopted children who’d failed to “attach.” What if the psychic damage was already done? What if she never felt all the love they were bombarding her with?
His mother called Marcus over. “Sweetie, show them what you brought.”
Marcus opened a wooden box lined with cut paper and lifted out a teardrop-shaped dollop of glass, about eight inches long and six inches wide at the base, purple and red and glinting with gold.
“A crystal for Christina,” he said.
“That is amazing,” Doran said. “You made this?”
“Marcus is an award-winning glassblower,” his mother said. She tilted her head. “He made me these earrings.”
Of course, LT thought. His mother had always loved bowerbirds.
The gift was very pretty, and pretty useless, too heavy for a Christmas ornament and not a shape that could sit upright on a shelf. They’d have to hang it, but not above her bed.
“Which ear is she supposed to wear it in?” LT asked.
Marcus laughed. “Either one. She’ll have to grow into it.”
When the food arrived, LT needed to eat, and he was forced to surrender Christina to Doran. His body moved automatically as he held her, a kind of sway and jiggle that soothed her. Where did he learn that?
Mom said, “Did you call your father?”
And like that, the spell was broken. LT said, “What do you think?”
“I think you should.”
“Fuck him.”
“Hey,” Doran said.
“Right. I gotta stop swearing. Eff that guy.”
“Your mom’s right. We should give him a chance.”
“He’s had six years of chances. Any time he wants to call, I’ll pick up.” There were a few years, after college, when they talked on the phone and his father would pretend that LT lived alone. He never asked about Doran, or about their lives. Then LT sent his father an invitation to the commitment ceremony. The next time LT called, his father said that he was disgusted and didn’t want to talk to him until he fixed his life.
His mother said, “This is different. Maybe it’s time.”
Maybe. He got up from the table.
Time itself had become different. He looked at Christina in Doran’s arms and thought, I’m going to know you for the rest of my life. The future had broken open, his week-by-week life suddenly stretching to decades. He could picture her on her first day of school, on prom night, at her wedding. He caught a glimpse of her holding a baby as tiny as she was at that moment.
Had his father felt that way too when he was born?
He kissed Doran’s cheek, then bent over their daughter. She was awake, dark-eyed, watching both of them. He thought, There’s no way I can go away for six months into the jungle and leave her. He wouldn’t make the choice his parents had made.
“We’ll give it a shot,” LT said. He moved his cheek across her warm head. Inhaled her scent. “Won’t we, my darlin’?”
He was reading to Christina and Carlos when the call came. Or rather, Christina was reading while LT held the book, because Christina said he was only allowed to do the Hagrid and Dumbledore voices. Carlos, five years old, lolled at the end of the bed, seemingly oblivious but missing nothing.