“Sheba,” he says.
“You can’t.” It’s not even an accusation. It’s worse, what the girl considers a realization.
“That’s not true,” Zan says.
“You can’t,” she repeats, as though begging him just to confirm it.
“It’s not true,” he says firmly, and bends down to pick her up.
~ ~ ~
For a moment he has her, pulling her to him, when she explodes and pushes him away. “It is true! It is true! Congratulations, Parker!” she calls into the dark of the next room, “bravo! They love you more! What the hell is wrong with you people? Why did you bring me from Thyopia,” as she calls it, the only thing she says now that remotely sounds like a four-year-old, “if you can’t love me as much as Parker? I want to be back in Thyopia where I was born and not here with some old family that’s just mean to me and rude. I would rather live in Thyopia for the rest of my life. Why didn’t you adopt a white daughter? This isn’t my real family, I was never in Mama’s fucked-up tummy! What the hell do you want from me? I hate you all! You don’t pay any fucked-up attention to me anyway! I know why Mama went back — to make them trade another kid for me! Some fucked-up white kid! What do you want with me anyway? I’ll put the hurt on you, young man!” she warns him. “You can’t tell me what to do! I’m a professional! You left me in the car! You can’t tell me. . you can’t. . ” and then, exhausted, “I’m sorry,” she begins to sob, “Poppy, I’m sorry,” pleading, “I’m only four, I’m not twelve like Parker, I act braver than I am. . I don’t. . ” and she speaks as though from somewhere out of time, from some vantage point out of age, seeing herself in a way that Zan never knew a four-year-old could see herself, talking about herself as Zan might or another grown up. “I’m sorry,” sobbing, “Poppy. . ”
~ ~ ~
Zan sweeps her into his arms more determinedly than any time since he first swept her out of the backseat of the car bringing her home from the airport, and says, “Shhh, shhh, listen to me,” he clutches her to his chest and she squeezes his neck, “listen to me. Are you listening?”
A muffled reply comes from his shoulder.
“I love you. You’re my little girl. I love you and Parker the same. Mama loves you and Parker the same. You’re a member of this family and always will be. It will never, ever, ever change.”
“Promise?” muffled from his shoulder.
“I promise. It will never ever change no matter what you do or say, you’re part of this family forever, whether you want to be or not,” he declares.
“What about my Thyopia poppy?” she peeps from his chest.
“He’s your poppy too. But so am I.”
“Two poppys.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry,” she begins to cry again.
“No, shhh. Nothing to be sorry for.”
~ ~ ~
Sitting up, Parker watches them from his bed. “Sheesh,” he says.
“YOU SHUT UP, PARKER!” Sheba bellows over Zan’s shoulder.
“Parker, go to sleep,” says Zan.
Parker plops his head back down on the pillow. “Who can sleep?”
~ ~ ~
Almost instantly Sheba is out, snoring in the other bed. Parker doesn’t groan in protest because he has a vested interest in his sister sleeping, and then from the bed he rises to retrieve his father’s laptop. “What are you doing?” says Zan.
“I want to film her sleeping,” the boy says. “She says she never snores. She’s got the zombie eyes, which creep me out but would be über-tight to have a movie of.”
“Go back to bed,” Zan says. For a few minutes the father and son sit watching the girl and listening; Zan looks at Parker. Hesitantly, sensing an opportunity in the quiet of the night, Zan begins, “Uh, Parker, listen. . ”
“The heck, Zan,” the boy says, “we’re not going to have the Talk, are we?” and retreats back to beneath his pillow.
~ ~ ~
They wait for Viv. It seems clear to Zan that something is wrong. From his cell phone, he never reaches anyone in Ethiopia, as if the country at the beginning of time is inside its own time; and whatever information Molly ever had about Viv only becomes more vague like the rest of Molly, who becomes more enervated and remote.
The morning after her midnight explosion, calmly Sheba tries to explain to her father. “I have to let out the fear. The fear comes in,” she inhales, “it must go out.”
~ ~ ~
Zan would fire Molly except that, besides the fact he needs a nanny, he can’t bring himself to sever the only person who’s claimed recent contact with Viv, however speciously. Moreover there’s Sheba’s growing attraction to her — a manifestation, maybe, of all the coming conflicts over identity. As the little black girl becomes more racially conscious in her white family, is it a function of a larger dislocation having to do with orphanhood, or in fact is there no dislocation larger than the racial, including orphanhood?
Zan feels a prisoner of mysteries he can’t name let alone solve, and implications of secrets so secret he barely knows they’re secrets. Calls to the bank about the mortgage, difficult enough back home, are impossible, particularly within constant earshot of the children; money dwindles. The £3,500 wired to his bank account by the university has been consumed by the cost of three extra round-trip tickets to London and Viv’s flight onto Addis Ababa. At the moment there isn’t enough available credit on the single remaining card to cover the hotel bill. Zan envisions a three-in-the-morning escape, involving suitcases hurled from the window to the street below, and shushed children as they creep downstairs past the front desk.
~ ~ ~
He takes the kids and Molly to Hampton Court outside London where the Thames turns south and west. It’s twenty minutes beyond the university on the same train out of Waterloo that they took to and from Zan’s lecture; on the way the nanny’s transistor plays yet another song by the girl’s favorite singer: Jasmine, I saw you peeping, and Parker rises from his seat and moves to the other end of the train.
~ ~ ~
Disembarking at Hampton Court, the four have lunch at a pub down the road. Parker listens to headphones plugged into the little green music player hanging around his neck; Sheba plays with Molly’s old camera. The group follows a small red bridge that leads to the palace. On this day the rare fine weather they’ve had in London finally succumbs to the norm, the palace’s bright sunlight-hued red and verdant rolling grounds clashing with the dark billows of gray rolling cross the sky.
Fully as Zan expected, the children’s fascination with the palace is minimal. Tales of wayward clergy and various kingly wives drugged or beheaded, or dying in childbirth, whose ghosts still reside only make Parker and Sheba uneasy or give rise to questions that Zan can’t answer. If he’s being honest, Zan’s interest in the palace isn’t so keen either, or maybe he’s just distracted; in any case the father, son, daughter and nanny move beyond the house onto the grounds where the court’s famous three-hundred-year-old maze rises against the blue and black sky in passages of brilliant foliage. Also fully as Zan expected, Parker and Sheba find the maze more interesting. The skies continue to threaten. “It’s starting to rain,” Zan says, as though the kids possibly would find this relevant; the boy and girl dash into the maze with the nanny behind. “Don’t get lost,” the father advises absurdly.