Red Butterfly Page 8
The room is packed
with people
watching,
elbowing.
We’ll find you,
Daddy calls
after me.
They won’t get away with this.
Who are they?
The police?
The law?
The policewoman
pushes me
ahead of her through
the crowd.
Jody’s wail
follows us to the elevator
and the door slides shut.
New Place
I slump in the back
of the police car
alone
listening to the two officers
discuss me
through the glass divider.
This is
Er Tong Fu Li Yuan,
says the woman
as we drive past
the guardhouse
through a silver gate
that folds back
like a hand fan.
I only recognize two words:
“children”
“garden”
I wish I could feel
something
to remind me
I’m alive,
but the only ache
remaining is a repeated memory:
the moment
when Daddy should have moved
to reach for me, but
didn’t.
It’s all
a slow-moving dream
as the gate creaks
shut
behind us
and I am
locked
in.
Miss Li
Miss Li
works in the office
on the second floor.
She is pretty
and young
and wears
tight pants
with high heels.
I sit in a wooden chair
waiting,
thinking
something is missing.
My foggy brain
can’t remember what.
There is a printer
and three computers
in this room.
The desk
at my elbow
has photos under the glass
of smiling babies,
all of them
with foreign parents.
Miss Li
nods at the pictures.
We’ll find you a new family
very soon,
she says in Chinese.
I already have a family,
I say.
Miss Li laughs
like I’ve made a joke
and goes back to
tap
tap
tapping
her keyboard.
I just remembered
what I forgot.
My heart turns hard as stone.
My backpack
at the hospital.
I have come here
empty-handed.
Chinese Name
I curl and uncurl my fingers
around my right hand.
Do you have a Chinese name?
Miss Li asks.
I shake my head.
Do you have an English name?
I nod.
You are fluent in English?
Again I nod.
Miss Li’s eyes widen.
You will be easy to match.
She pats my head,
writes quickly on a
pad of paper,
swift Chinese characters,
flowing and swaying.
This is your new name.
A gift for you.
I take the paper
although I can’t read
Chinese.
My Room
Miss Li takes me
down a long hallway
and up two flights of stairs
into a big room
with fluorescent lights
and red-and-blue squishy mats
tiling the floor.
We stand in the doorway.
Miss Li removes her heels.
I bend down
to untie my sneakers.
There are lots of kids here,
big kids,
and two older women who must be helpers
because they wear blue aprons
over their clothes.
In Chinese they are called
ayis—
“auntie” in English.
The two ayis stare at me
and throw out comments
to one another
across the room.
I can’t understand everything,
but I understand this:
I thought she was a foreigner.
No, she’s a Chinese girl.
I want to answer
the way Mama
always answered.
I’m both.
But Miss Li cuts in.
She is Chinese,
raised by foreigners,
so her Chinese is bad.
The ayis laugh at that.
I speak a little,
I say
then wish I’d kept my mouth shut
because they exchange
amused glances.
Even the kids
sitting at a big table
look back and forth at each other
like I’m a joke.
I don’t know where I am.
I don’t want to stand in the
doorway of this room
and let everyone stare at me.
Where do I go?
I whisper to Miss Li.
There are kids everywhere,
but they all seem to have problems—
they sit in wheelchairs
or lie on the floor mats,
their bodies twisted.
The room is filled
with the sound of funny breathing
and the faint murmur
of tinkling music
from a small CD player
plugged into the wall.
There are whispers, too,
always whispers
from the kids who sit
around the table.
One girl taps her pencil
in time to the music
while she watches me.
This is your room,
Miss Li says.
You sleep here
and study here
and go to the cafeteria
for meals.
I don’t see any beds,
only brightly colored floor mats.
Everyone watches
and I begin to wonder
if they’re waiting for me to cry.
What’s wrong with you?
one of the ayis asks,
a wide-shouldered woman
with large curls sprayed stiff.
Her way of speaking slowly
reminds me of Zhao Bin’s mother.
I don’t know what she means,
so I say,
Nothing.
Miss Li holds up my arm
and tugs back the sleeve
to reveal my
stub
hand.
Then she explains
my difference
to the ayis
using technical words.
All I recognize is
shou
shou
shou
the Chinese word for “hand.”
The ayis
nod
and say, Ah, ah, ah.
Miss Li releases my arm.
No problem,
she says in English.
The kindness in her smile
takes me by surprise.
Looking Around
There are three other kids
in my room
who can walk besides me.
One wears braces on his legs
and
staggers,
another is a gentle girl
with a round face
and constant smile,
who traces
simple characters
on paper
over and over,
but doesn’t speak.
There is also a boy
who howls,
breaks pencils,
throws himself
on the floor
until one of the ayis
agrees to take him outside
to play.
And there is me,
taking all this in
all this in
all this in.
Beds
It’s not yet dark
when the ayis
pull out fifteen beds
stacked five high
against the wall.
We have enough,
the ayi with the stiff curls
says.
Don’t worry,
you’ll sleep here.
I wasn’t worried about sleeping mats,
I was worried about sleeping
in this one room
with all these other kids,
even boys,
and all the noises.
The beds are small frames
low to the ground
with thin mattresses
covered in scratchy sheets.
The pillow slumps
hard and flat.
I sleep in my clothes.
The Same
I spend the morning
sitting at the table
with the kids who are
in wheelchairs
and the boy in leg braces.
The quiet girl with the round face
is also here,
and,
when he’s in the mood,
the boy who breaks pencils.
They all work,
writing characters
in thin books with
transparent
pages.
My hands
twist in my lap.
I don’t have a book
or a pencil
and I’m too afraid
to ask
if this is something
I’m required to do too.
The kids who lie on the mats
have problems either with their brains
or with their bodies so severe
the ayis don’t try to sit them at the table.
The kids at the table don’t speak to me,
though they speak to the ayis
and one another
just fine.
One of the ayis hands me a pencil
and a blank sheet of white paper.
She gives me no instructions,
so I draw Mama’s face.
Everyone must be watching
my tears drip, smearing
the gray pencil marks.
I cry stubbornly
refusing to look away
from Mama’s face
or up
at any of them.
This afternoon the foreigner comes,
one of the ayis says.
She might be talking to me.
None of the other kids respond.
I don’t know
who the foreigner could be,
so my stupid heart thumps hope:
maybe Daddy,
maybe Willard,
coming to take me away?
The Foreigner
The foreigner is
a man,
not Daddy,
not Willard,
but I am too weary
from the energy it took
to hope all day
to be disappointed.
He speaks English
and tells me his name is Toby.
He comes here
every afternoon.
He is short for a foreigner,
just a little taller than me
even though
he’s twenty-six years old.
He’s from
New Zealand,
but I don’t know what that means.
He talks a little funny,
but I can understand him
all right.
I’m a physical therapist,
he tells me,
squatting next to my chair.
I help with the CP kids in this room,
make sure they’re getting their exercise.
I like his voice,
the smoothness of it.
“CP” stands for
“cerebral palsy,”
he tells me,
children who walk with a stagger
and a jolt
or not at all,
who need help eating,
whose brains
were hurt somehow
before they were born
so they can’t move
like they want to.
Toby helps them learn
to sit,
walk,
feed themselves.
Toby speaks Chinese
better than me
even though he has
seaweed-colored eyes,
curly brown hair,
and skin lighter than Mama’s.
My New Name
Toby reads the name
Miss Li gave me,
the one she wrote
on the slip of paper.
Liu Xiao Ling
Nice name,
means tinkling jade.
It suits you.
I shake my head.
Am I green?
Do I tinkle?
How does that suit me?
Toby laughs.
I meant to be snotty,
not funny,
but Toby says,
Hilarious kid,
and ruffles my hair.
Translation
Toby tells me everything that’s happening,
all the things he learned about me
from Miss Li,
while he stretches a boy’s
curled feet
forward and back.
Since you’re an older child
Miss Li will put you on a list
to have you adopted quickly
to an English-speaking country.
Like Montana?
I ask.
Toby says,
Is that part of America?
It’s where my mama and daddy live,
I say.
My daddy’s
coming to get me
to take me there.
He said he’d find me.
Toby pauses.
I’m not sure.
He’s not looking at me.
I know
I’ve said something wrong, maybe
too hopeful?
I blurt out
about my backpack
with Jane Eyre
and the Jane Austen box set
left at the hospital.
Toby says,
That’s a shame,
and wags his head.
My eyes prickle,
because it’s more than a shame.
Those things,
from my toothbrush
to the books with Mama’s
curled writing inside,
were all I had left
to call my own.
Even today’s clothes came out of a bin
labeled with my size,
the character for “medium.”
I don’t know what happened to the ones
I wore here.
I push down the wish
I shouldn’t make—
that I’ll get my stuff back
somehow,
some way.
That unreasonable hope buoys
like an empty plastic bottle
floating on water.
But why do I bother hoping
when hoping never works?
Pretending
I lie flat on my bac
k
during rest time.
I haven’t had rest time
without books
since I was three, probably.
My heart keeps me awake.
(ba-bum)
(ba-bum)
(ba-bum)
If I close my eyes,
plug one ear with my finger,
and the other ear with the pillow
to block out the bellows of the boy who breaks pencils,
I can pretend I’m home
in my old bed
in my old room
before Jody
before sickness
before policemen
before the world cracked open
and took Mama away.
Evening
We eat dinner
as a group
in the cafeteria,
except for the kids
who are difficult to move.
Cabbage,
chunks of meat,
and rice
served on a silver tray.
Soup from a huge pot,
thin like water,
in metal bowls.
Toby arrives
just as I’m helping to stack the trays
at the end.
Thought you might need this,
he says
and winks at me.
There,
hanging from his hooked finger,
is my backpack.
I grab hold of it,
clutch it to my chest.
Thank you!
I met your sister,
Toby continues.
She’ll come visit
as soon as she’s discharged.
“Come visit”
doesn’t sound much like
taking me away.
But if a backpack can appear
when I least expect it,
maybe a miracle can happen too.
Tired
I should be tired,
but every time
I drift asleep
I’m falling
falling
falling.
I wake
with a jolt,
this new place
seeping again
into consciousness.
The smell here is similar to the hospital:
sickness,
medicine,
porridge,
disinfectant,
pee.
But the sounds are different,
everything closer,
more compacted:
the gurgles,
soft snufflings
without the bleep
of machinery,
a snore,
the far-away wail
of a baby
perhaps recently left
outside the silver gate,
still crying for its mama.
No relatives gather.
This is the home of lonely children.
Holding Pattern
Three more days
of sitting
while the kids at the table
learn.
Three days of drawing
everything from my memory
on loose pieces of paper