Tribal Complex, Flathead Indian Reservation, Pablo, Montana, 2008.
The hallways were labyrinthine, narrow passages that twisted first one way, then another, offices shooting off in various directions. I’d gone perhaps only thirty feet and already I was lost. I caught the attention of a tall man in police blues, his black hair salted with silver.
“Do you know where I could find Vern?” I asked.
He looked me up and down, expressionless. “Yeah, he’s here somewhere. Who’s looking for him?”
“His sister, Vicki Charmain,” I replied, giving him my birth name—a key to the secret society.
He disappeared behind yet another turn of the hall, and within moments Vern materialized from that same space, as if by magic, a genie from the lamp. “Hey, I heard you were looking for me.” He smiled beneath his mustache. We didn’t hug; it seemed too intimate for a person I’d seen only three other times in my life, times of uncertainty and stress, times when it would be relatively easy for him to forget that I’d ever existed. I’d been removed from my reservation family at the age of eighteen months and adopted by a white couple when I was two. He wasn’t born until I was ten and living a very different life with a very different family.
As we stood in the hall and talked the mundane, safe talk of people who are essentially strangers, I studied him, looking for the familiar. Although he was not much taller than my five-foot-six stature, his frame was large and intimidating. His skin was lighter than mine, something that confused me; I figured since we shared the same mother, we’d also share the same color of skin. Both of us had black hair, except mine was streaked with swaths of white, while only silver glistened on his temples. The rest of his hair was cut close to his scalp and stood at attention. I listened to his voice, the way he spoke. I watched his gestures and saw only one other familiar characteristic: each of us had brown eyes, but his didn’t blink as they studied me back.
I did much of the talking; he mainly listened. At one point he leaned back against the wall and hooked his thumbs in the pants pockets of his police blues, crossing one foot in front of the other. After a few moments of silence and that unwavering gaze, he said, “I used to dream of you.”
At once I was both intrigued and confused. “How old were you,” I asked, “and what did I look like?” I didn’t understand how he could dream of someone he’d never met, or what role I could have possibly have played in his life.
“About eight. You looked like my sister Robin.”
“What did you dream?”
He watched me for several moments before replying. “I used to dream that you would come back from wherever you were and take me away from all of this.” He paused, his gaze still on me. “I used to dream that a lot.”
My heart shattered, like ice on granite. It shattered for both of us, because what Vern didn’t know, couldn’t possibly know, was that I’d dreamed of this family as well. I dreamed that they hadn’t forgotten me. I imagine he wondered about the life I might have given him, just as I wondered about the life I sought, a life where I was “real” instead of “adopted”; a life where my skin color was the same as everyone else’s and I wouldn’t stand out, isolated; a life where “American Indian” meant something more than “I don’t know.”
So, as we stood in that hallway and regarded each other, deep in our own dreams, each of us was looking to be rescued by the other.