Vera would be arriving in three days, but her room had been ready since Sunday. When Andrew left for work in the morning, I climbed the stairs and stood in the doorway of her room to think about whether she needed anything more. Andrew had chosen the pink duvet, the antique white dresser with three drawers, the ceramic elephant with green eyes, the book shelves. I chose the shade of blue on the walls, the white rug in the shape of a rabbit. I wanted Vera to press her bare feet into the rug every morning and know she was home, that there was nowhere else to go.
In mid-July, Andrew and I had driven north of Toronto to Newmarket to visit Vera for the second time. Vera’s foster sisters, twins, were having a pool party; Vera didn’t want to miss it, and wanted us to be there. The social worker, Carol, called us early in the morning and told us she wouldn’t be able to make it—food poisoning.
We sat on the foster family’s back deck, eating rippled chips and drinking Pepsi with ice, except Vera, who had a chocolate milk on the go. Andrew held my hand as if I were about to be executed, or he was. For years, since we married, we endured one thing or another, fought for one thing or another.
Vera wore a red bathing suit and yellow flip-flops that were too small for her feet. Her thick, blonde hair touched her shoulders, and it looked as if it were tangled underneath. Her bangs hung in her eyes.
The twins and their friends—flashes of dripping colour—dove for rings in the pool or pushed each other’s heads underwater. Their voices were high and exuberant, and their concentration on the water and each other was so fixed, it was as if Andrew and I, Vera’s new parents, did not exist. Jim, the twins’ father, tossed rings into the pool.
Under the umbrella, Vera rested her hand on the arm of my chair, as if she were keeping the chair from lifting off into space. Then she touched my hair, the flat of her hand gentle, like an insect landing. I turned to her and smiled, but she was biting her bottom lip.
Her foster mother, Helen, tapped Vera on the shoulder. “Boundaries, Vera.”
“Watch me swim,” Vera said, and she walked stiffly across the deck, down the steps toward the water. She tossed off her flip-flops, then curled her toes over the edge of the pool. She watched the other girls. Vera’s psychologist told us she had trouble regulating her emotions, but she only ever seemed calm to me, as if she thought about everything before she actually did it.
Vera sat down and kicked her legs in the water.
“All right,” Andrew said.
He went inside the house for a few minutes and came out in his bathing suit. He did a cannonball into the water, causing the girls to shriek and thrash their way to the shallow end. Then he swam over to Vera. She climbed onto his back, and he swam in wide circles with her. Their voices floated to the deck, but I could not decipher their conversation. Lately, Andrew was as new to me as she was.
Later, we all went for lunch at the Dairy Queen. Every table but one was taken, and there was a din containing the low, steady words of adults and the thrown, wobbly chatter of children. Andrew took everyone’s order, happily and authoritatively, the way a president of a company would. Vera sat across from me, and the twins and their friends sat on the other side of Helen.
Jim sat down beside me. “I guess you’re not used to all these kids.” Then he said, “You two would have made the most adorable child.”
Vera unzipped her hoodie, then passed it to me, a red, soft, crumpled heap. I laid it across my lap, and the coat rested there like an extremely light child.
Andrew arrived with the first tray of burgers and fries, then went back for two more. Andrew was always the organizer, the leader. But when he returned, he looked too gleeful and anxious, his neck stretched oddly, his smile showing all of his teeth.
Andrew took a seat on the other side of Vera, and as he picked at his fries, which he always ate first when they were still hot, he asked Vera questions. The outside of her arm touched his, and I couldn’t tell if it was an accident, or if it was something they both wanted.
“What’s your favourite animal?” Andrew said.
“Rabbits,” she said, and dragged the tip of a fry through ketchup.
“Yeah? What do you like about rabbits?”
“They’re soft,” Vera said. “And they’re fluffy. And they’re cute.”
“What about elephants?” Andrew said. “What do you think of elephants?”
Vera looked off, chewing the french fry, then finally swallowing. “I think elephants are fine.”
“What’s your stand on giraffes?”
Instead of answering, Vera gripped his arm with both of her hands. “I like you,” she said.
“I like you, too,” Andrew said, and he spoke as if this were obvious information, old news. “But what’s your stand on giraffes?”
“Too tall,” she said.
“Maybe you’re too short. Ever think of that?”
“Then you’re too short, too,” she said.
“I know I am,” he said.
Andrew then ate his hamburger and Vera sipped her chocolate milkshake, picked the pickles off her hamburger, nibbled her fries. Her mother had overdosed on heroin when Vera was two years old. Her father lived on the East Coast but wasn’t interested in raising her or knowing her. One of her parents had given her smooth white skin and eyes that were almost a transparent blue.
“Why are you staring at me?” Vera said to me.
“I was just thinking how pretty your hair is.”
“Can I have my jacket back?”
Next to me, Jim laughed, a seagull sound, rippling high above all the other sounds.
I lifted the hoodie off my lap and handed it to her over the table.
During the car ride home, my legs were chilly. I was wearing a skirt, because I thought that’s what a potential mother should wear. Andrew wore his khakis and a short-sleeved white shirt. Before we left the house that morning, he scolded me for not bringing a bathing suit. “You mean you’re not even going to try?”
“Not a water fan,” I’d said.
“This isn’t really about you, though, is it?” I had gone outside and waited for him in the car.
He pressed the brake and then stopped for a red light—we were the only car at the intersection, a Petro-Can station on one corner, an IGA market on the other—the necessities. “What are you thinking about right now?” Andrew said.
“Nothing much,” I said.
“I know that’s not true. Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“You really want to know?”
“I really want to know.”
“She’s not what I thought we would have.”
The light turned green, and Andrew pressed the gas. Our conversation was on a loop—what we wanted, what we couldn’t have, what we could have, what we wanted.
“That’s obvious,” Andrew said. “How could she be?”
“You said you wanted to know.”
“I don’t see that we have a lot of choices anymore.”
“No,” I said. “No more choices.” After Andrew said he couldn’t bear to see me in the hospital again, we found a social worker, took the classes, passed the homestudy, then waited. After the first meeting with the social worker and psychologist, before we met Vera, Andrew and I had to make a profile book to give Vera an idea of who we were. We put in pictures of ourselves hiking at Rattlesnake Point, pictures of us at Andrew’s family cottage in Quebec, a place he couldn’t wait to bring Vera to, pictures of our wedding. In the pictures, we were different people, with names already picked out.
The first Saturday in August, Carol, the social worker, brought Vera to us along with her few possessions, her clothes, her stuffed animals, her pictures. We had our sleepovers and visits in late July, but it felt like babysitting: in the end, Vera always left.
After the papers were signed and Carol was gone, we sat with Vera on the back patio and ate hot dogs, salt-and-vinegar chips, and chocolate milk, at Vera’s request. Then Andrew and Vera went to the park across the street. Her foster parents had thrown her clothes in garbage bags, so I slid them onto hangers or folded them and placed them in her three empty dresser drawers. I brought her tops to my nose, and they did not have the smell I wanted them to have, a fresh summer smell.
That night, we ordered pizza and watched Anastasia, a movie Andrew and Vera picked up from the video store. We ate the pizza on the couch in front of the television, which Andrew said was the only proper way to eat pizza, though we’d always eaten it at the dining room table, Andrew using a knife and fork. Andrew and I sat beside each other and Vera sat on the other side of Andrew. She kept her red hoodie zipped up. She picked off the mushrooms, green peppers, and pineapples, and piled them on the side of her plate so that all she ate was dough, cheese, and tomato sauce. After pizza, Andrew tossed a Caesar salad, and Vera said, “I don’t eat salad.”
“Don’t eat salad?” Andrew said.
Vera shook her head. Then she pushed her bangs out of her eyes—wobbly, curious flickers of light.
Andrew forked the lettuce into his mouth. “Mmmm,” he moaned as he chewed. When he was finished with his bowl, he picked up Vera’s and started eating hers. But Vera didn’t fall for it.
After dinner, Andrew fell asleep in the chair, so when the movie was over, I told Vera it was time to brush her teeth and change into her pyjamas. She took in a deep breath and let it out sharply, but I couldn’t tell if it was because she was sleepy or because she was offended. I thought of all her other mothers, the ones who had passed her on, the one who died. On one of her overnight stays, Vera showed us the two sparkly birthday cards she kept from her.
Upstairs in her room, I pulled from the top dresser drawer the new pyjama set I’d bought. The pyjamas were light blue flannel with snowflakes on them—nights could be cold in August. Then I took the pink robe from a hook on the back of her door. I paid too much for all of them, on a high.
“Do I have to wear these?” she asked.
“I bought them for you,” I said. “I thought you would like them.”
“The colour I hate the most is pink. And the colour I hate the second most is blue and white.”
Andrew appeared in the doorway. He stretched his arms out, so that his hands pressed against the sides of the door frame. He looked so comfortable, at ease. Vera’s face went soft. She hugged his waist. “Can you tuck me in?”
Andrew cupped her head in his hands. “You have to change into your pyjamas first.”
Vera flung around and, without looking at me, grabbed the pyjamas and robe out of my hands. Then she skipped on her tip-toes into the bathroom.
Andrew and I waited for her to change. He sat at the foot of her bed, and I stood at the window. My back had been tense all day. Vera was seven, but she felt like a newborn, that demanding of my concentration.
“She’ll settle in,” he said.
“Yup.”
I pulled the white blind closed. As a child I had a white blind in my bedroom too, and the first thing my mother did before she tucked me in was pull it closed, keeping the night out, away from me. Then she chose a book from my bookshelf.
I stood in front of Vera’s bookshelf with my arms crossed, shivering, though I wasn’t really cold. I spent a month visiting bookstores in an attempt to fill the shelf. I slid out Charlotte’s Web.
The bathroom door swung open, and Vera came into the room and jumped onto the bed. “Tuck me in, tuck me in, tuck me in,” she said, her voice high, so that it seemed she was on the verge of having some sort of fit. She pulled back the covers and wriggled underneath them, even though she was still wearing her robe.
“How about a story?” I said. “Do you know Charlotte’s Web?”
“I don’t want a story.”
“What?” Andrew said. “What kind of kid are you?”
“I only like stories from you.”
Andrew told her to close her eyes. When she did, he began to read the first chapter. He got through three pages before, finally, Vera’s breathing changed. I leaned over her and brushed her bangs off her forehead. She had a small mouth, a nose that turned up a little, and wide eyes with light eyelashes, like Andrew’s. I turned off the lamp, and Andrew closed the door.
After we locked up the house, Andrew and I usually climbed the stairs to bed. But all day, we hadn’t had a moment alone together. Andrew brought a bottle of wine from the kitchen and two glasses. I sat on the couch holding a pillow against my ribs and belly. Andrew poured, then we both drank. Where usually I had coherent thoughts, I now had bubbles, dozens of small bubbles I couldn’t keep track of.
Then we heard Vera’s voice, plaintive yet insistent, the new voice in the house.
“Daddy,” she called.
Andrew went upstairs, opened Vera’s door, and they spoke a few words back and forth. Then Andrew turned the hall light on, and left her bedroom door open a crack.
He sat back down, heavily but not unhappily.
“Well,” Andrew said.
“Well,” I said.
“One day down,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Did you think it was weird when she wouldn’t take off her jacket?”
“She doesn’t feel safe.”
Andrew leaned back on the couch, propped his wine glass on his stomach, and closed his eyes. “She’s ours now,” he said, but he sounded doubtful, as if someone might have contradicted him. The long journey of classes, social workers, and homestudy—to make Vera ours—but when would it be true?
School would start soon, so we registered Vera in the one a block north of us, and on Saturday, I took Vera to Sheila’s Hair Salon, where I had been going for years. Whenever I had my hair cut, I sat in Sheila’s chair, watching in the mirror as mothers brought their daughters in and told the hairdressers what to do, how much to take off and where.
The salon was small and crowded. Women’s voices created a dense yet flexible music, the pitch rising and falling, warming, then separating into spare lines.
Finally, Sheila was ready; she led Vera to the chair and I followed.
Vera was squinting out from behind her bangs, looking in the mirrors at the other women, her head tilted. One woman’s long hair was separated by various angled sheets of foil.
“I was thinking to about here,” I said, and I put my hand level to my neck, just below my jaw. “With some soft, long layers.”
Then I sat back down and watched. Sheila led her to the sinks, and Vera sat in the black chair and allowed Sheila to pump the chair higher. Sheila helped her lean back and began wetting her hair, then lathering it. I thought that during the past week, with Andrew at work, we would have grown closer. On the second night, I asked Vera if I could brush her hair, and she said, “No thanks.” When I asked her if she wanted to go to the park, she said, “I only go with Daddy.” She wore her hoodie every day, watched movies she’d already watched. I tried to teach her how to make pancakes, but she dropped an egg on the floor and wanted to stop. At dinner, she asked Andrew to feed her, and he did, as if all seven-year-olds were delivered forkfuls of peas and potatoes and spoonfuls of pudding by their parents. She drank chocolate milk with every meal, even poured it on her cereal. We went through two litres every two days.
After Sheila shampooed and rinsed, she helped Vera sit up, then wrapped her hair in a white towel, so that Vera’s face became a surprising oval. Sheila led her back to the chair. Vera sat without moving her body or neck or head or eyes as Sheila pulled her hair into bundles, clipped, trimmed, bundled it again, clipped, trimmed. Vera’s hair fell to the floor around her until the tiles appeared to be covered in light, long brush strokes. Vera pressed her lips together tightly, as if she tasted something sour, and squirmed a little in the chair. Sheila worked foam through her hair, used a round brush with the blow dryer. Then she clicked the dryer off. Vera’s hair curled in around her temples and jaw; the ends flipped up. Her eyes were wider and more dramatic—she looked how a young girl was supposed to look, like she was proud of something inside of her. She hardly resembled the girl who had arrived at our house days before with her eyes hidden. Sheila unfastened the cape.
I went and stood behind Vera. “Vera,” I said. “Look at you.”
“Such beautiful hair,” Sheila said. “So thick and shiny.”
Vera reached around behind her neck and pulled her hood up.
“Why are you putting your hood up? Your hair looks so cute.”
“Pretty girl,” Sheila said.
“I want to go home,” Vera said and her voice caught me—it was a panicked sob. The music of the other women’s voices paused and my face and neck grew warm.
“Okay,” Sheila said.
At home, Vera climbed the stairs to her room, and I heard her trip. This past week, she tripped up the stairs twice, and banged into the living room wall, missing the doorway. Andrew thought she was uncoordinated, but I thought she wasn’t sure where she was in space, and where other things were in space.
From the kitchen, I heard her close her bedroom door. I expected a daughter who slammed doors when she was angry, but Vera slammed them when she was excited, when she was thrilled, when she and Andrew left the house to go down the slide at the park. The slide was Vera’s favourite, though the other kids who played on it were smaller than her. Sometimes, I watched them from Vera’s bedroom window. When I was seven, proud of my new height, I obsessed over the monkey bars.
I went downstairs and gathered Vera’s clothes out of the dryer, brought the basket upstairs, and set it on the living-room floor. I pulled out a pair of jeans—still warm—and folded them at the knees. Pink ice-cream cones were stitched prettily on the back pockets, but I noticed a belt loop was ripped. Then I plucked a yellow cotton top from the basket. The cotton was worn, and when I folded it in my lap, a chocolate milk stain near the neck caught my eye. Once all her jeans, shorts, and tops were folded, I carried the basket up to her room. Through the door came Vera’s humming, high, low, high, low.
“Vera?” I said.
The humming stopped.
“Vera,” I said, pushing open the door. “I have some clothes for you.”
Vera was sitting against her headboard with her knees up. She still had her running shoes on, and her hood was still up.
“Let’s put your clothes away,” I said.
Vera didn’t say anything. She looked out the window. There were the usual sounds of children’s voices in the park, a piano played by several hands.
I set the basket in front of the dresser. The two birthday cards from her mother were lying on top. I slid open the middle drawer where her tops and sweaters were folded.
“Vera,” I said. “I think your hair looks really nice.”
“I didn’t want it that short,” she said.
“It’ll grow back.”
Vera put her face in her knees. “I don’t like it,” she said. “And I don’t like you.”
“But why don’t you like me?”
She looked up, peered at me, lowered her eyelids, and stuck out her jaw.
I rested her pile of tops in the drawer, slid it closed, then opened the bottom drawer.
“Maybe you and Daddy can go to the park later,” I said.
Without replying, she leapt up off the bed and rested her arms on the sill as she looked out.
“You can go down the slide.”
I fit her two pairs of jeans next to her shorts, pushed the drawer closed—the bottom one stuck a little—then got up and stood beside her at the window.
“I really want to see your hair. It looked so nice at the hairdresser’s.”
Vera looked at me. The corners of her mouth were pulled down, and she was frowning at me.
“Stop trying to make me do things,” Vera said. Her fist hit my arm, sharp and hard.
Then Vera went over to the bed, lay down, and curled up. I held my arm. There was something not right, unsettling, about the sight of a child curled up with her jacket and running shoes still on. It made her seem like a runaway, someone staying only for a little while. The night before, she’d woken in the middle of the night and sat on the stairs. We both got up. Andrew sat beside her and Vera said she wanted to go back to Helen and the twins. Andrew put his arm around her and said that was nonsense, that he would never let her go. I squeezed in on the other side of her, stroked her arm, but she leaned into Andrew.
“Vera?” I said, and she curled up more.
I hesitated, then I left, closing the door behind me.
All afternoon, Vera stayed in her room. I couldn’t reach Andrew because he had forgotten to turn on his cell phone. I sat on the couch, reading but not understanding. I lay on my side. After the surgery, the blooming mass cut out and sent to pathology, I lay on the couch day after day watching Seinfeld reruns. The episodes offered a familiar, unthreatening world. Women from my office sent orange lilies, and even though they stood on the kitchen table, the flowers seemed to exist in another dimension. Even when I was still in emergency, and Andrew was sitting in a chair eating oatmeal cookies, and I was lying flat on my back, unable to move without deafening pain in my shoulder, Andrew said, “No more of this,” and I said, “We’ll see.” We didn’t have sex for months, first because of the bruising, then for some other reason, some brain exhaustion. We went on with our puzzle piece missing, the room empty, neither of us doing anything until there was only one thing we could do: Vera.
When Andrew finally did come home, I helped him put the groceries away, and I told him what happened.
“What’d you go and do that for?” he said.
“Because her hair was awful,” I said. “She was totally neglected. Obviously no one thought about what might actually suit her.”
“It was really that bad?”
“It just hung there. It was always tangled. I couldn’t see her eyes.”
“Still,” Andrew said.
Vera came down from her bedroom and sat on the stairs leading to the kitchen. The hood was up. She sat with her elbows on her knees, her chin in her hands.
“Is there a draft in here?” Andrew asked. “Should I turn up the heat?”
“No,” Vera said.
“Then what’s with the hood?”
“Hair,” she said.
“I heard it looks pretty good.”
Vera shrugged.
Even though it was colder than usual and would drop to twelve degrees overnight, Andrew barbecued chicken. Out on the patio, we sat at the round glass table. Vera looked too small for her chair.
She ate the asparagus by picking up one piece at a time and sucking the butter off. Then she ate the stem and saved the tip for last. Andrew ate his asparagus with his hands too, making a lot of noise as he sucked off the butter. That she was eating on her own was some kind of miraculous progress we hadn’t even asked for.
“She’s the only one not eating it properly,” Vera said, pointing. For the past week, I was she, or you, or her.
“That’s because she has no idea how to be a maniac.”
Vera laughed, sitting back in her chair and holding her stomach. Vera had different laughs. One was a breathless, whispery scream; the other was a guttural, low chuckle; another was a melodic, up-and-down sigh. This one, though, was thin and fluty, a delighted whine.
“When am I going to get to see this hair?” Andrew said.
She picked up her chicken with two hands and bit into it. Right away, she had barbecue sauce on her cheeks.
“So for the rest of your life, I’ll say, my daughter’s the one with the red hood?”
Vera stopped chewing. She squinted at him, suspicious of something. Then she put her chicken down and picked up her glass of
chocolate milk.
“You’re going to sleep in it, too?”
Vera gulped some milk, set the glass down. She picked up her chicken, took a deep breath and let it out, then took a bite. She chewed the chicken on one side of her mouth.
After she swallowed, she said to Andrew, “Did your baby die?”
Andrew looked at me, as if I knew the answer and he didn’t.
“I never had a baby,” I said.
Vera peered at me, as if she didn’t understand what I had said, and then she smiled.
“Did you want one?”
I took a breath in to speak, but no words came out.
“But we have you now,” Andrew said.
Vera giggled—she giggled at all kinds of things she didn’t understand.
“My tummy mummy wasn’t strong enough.”
For a moment, I tried to imagine her real mother. Even though she’d given birth to Vera, I couldn’t help but think that Vera was a complete stranger to her.
“I thought we should celebrate our first week together. And so I brought you a special treat. But you can’t wear a hood when you eat it.”
“What treat?” Vera said.
“It’s a surprise,” Andrew said. “For after dinner.”
“Tell me what surprise.”
“No can do,” Andrew said, and he leaned back in his chair. Vera gobbled up the chicken. Then she ate her corn with her front teeth, moving her mouth along the length of it, then rotating it and starting again. When she was finished, her mouth was shiny with butter.
“Okay,” she said.
“The hood,” Andrew said.
Vera leaned back in the chair and rested her hands on her stomach. Then, as if it were not a big deal at all and never was, she pushed back the hood. Her hair was a little messy, but she looked like one of the children in the park across the street. The layers were soft and the ends were wispy. Her hair was parted on the side, the bangs angled down her left temple.
“Holy cow,” Andrew said.
“I’m ready for my treat,” Vera said, stretching her neck, the neck we could finally see.
Andrew and I fell into the habit of sitting on the couch together after Vera went to bed. Tonight, Vera fell asleep on the couch in her pyjamas, her bowl of popcorn almost untouched, her glass of chocolate milk emptied. Andrew carried her upstairs, and she didn’t wake up, which surprised me, because Vera seemed like someone who was always awake in one way or another, in ways I never was. I pulled the blind closed in her bedroom and plugged in the blue night light I’d bought for her after her first couple of nights, when she was afraid of the dark. I pulled the blanket back and Andrew laid her in the bed, and we both pulled the blanket up. Then we stood and stared at her. The haircut had altered her. She looked cared for. She looked more like herself.
After dinner, Andrew and Vera had gone to the park to play on the slide because Vera wanted to see if her new friend, Lucas, was there. I cleaned up the dishes, watched from the window for a couple of minutes, then put on my long sweater and went over. I would go to the park whether she wanted me there or not.
Vera and Andrew were the only ones there. It was cold, but still light out. Vera climbed up on the slide and slid down over and over. She had probably played in so many different parks with so many different families, configurations of moms and dads and sisters and brothers, that it was impossible to know how she saw Andrew and me—as permanent or as full of promises. Our families and seminar leaders and social workers warned us how hard adoption was, how it was a life-long struggle, and when we got through one thing, there would be another, and how we would forever mourn the child I didn’t give birth to. It would wear us out—the child, the loss.
Now we sat on the couch, as we did every night after our day with Vera. There was something special about this day, though, because it was the seventh day, and there was no going back—to doubts, to what wasn’t.
“I want to take her go-karting next week,” Andrew said.
“I need to take her clothes shopping, too,” I said. “For school.”
“You could do that on Sunday.”
I didn’t say anything, which meant I agreed, that I was too exhausted to speak. In these late-night meetings, we spoke very little. I always felt stunned by the end of the day, but I was beginning to like feeling stunned, that the person I had been, who always knew what she could have and what she couldn’t have, was disappearing. Maybe we were all vanishing, and maybe that was love.