FU AND GRACE HAD NOT ADOPTED SABRINA, it hadn’t seemed crucial, but then Jennifer’s old boyfriend got out of prison, where he’d been serving time, and made clear his intent to see his daughter. He had never agreed to have a blood test to prove his paternity, and in any case he had lost his rights as a father, but his voice on the telephone put them on the alert. The man wanted to have the little girl on weekends, something the mothers did not want at all because of his police record and a way of life that they had little confidence in. They decided that the moment had come to make the situation with Sabrina legal. That coincided with the death of Grace’s seventy-five-year-old father, who had smoked his entire life; his lungs were destroyed and he had ended up in a hospital connected to a respirator. He lived in Oregon, the only state in the country where no one invokes the law when a terminally ill person chooses the moment he wants to die. Grace’s father had figured that to go on living in that terrible condition would cost a fortune, and it wasn’t worth it. He called his children, who gathered from around the country, and using his laptop explained that he had summoned them to tell them good-bye.
“Where are you going, Father?”
“To heaven, if they’ll let me in,” he wrote on the screen.
“And when are you planning to die?” they asked, amused.
“What time is it?” the patient wanted to know.
“Ten o’clock.”
“Let’s say about noon,” he wrote. “How does that seem?”
And at exactly noon, after saying good-bye to each of his astounded descendants and consoling them with the idea that this solution was best for all of them—especially him, because he wasn’t planning to spend years hooked up to a respirator, and besides, he had a burning curiosity to see what lay on the other side—he disconnected the respirator and died happy.
For Sabrina’s adoption, a female judge came from San Francisco, and we appeared before her in a family group. From the door of a chamber in City Hall, we could see coming toward us down a long corridor that miraculous granddaughter walking for the first time without the help of a walker. Her small figure advanced with difficulty along that endless, tiled hallway, followed by her mothers, right behind her but not touching, ready to intervene if it were necessary. “Didn’t I tell you I was going to walk?” Sabrina said defiantly, with the touch of pride that crowns each tenacious conquest. She was wearing a party dress and pink slippers, with ribbons in her hair. She told us all hello, ignoring Willie’s emotion, posed for photos, thanked us for being there, and solemnly announced that from that moment her name was Sabrina, plus Jennifer’s surname, followed by those of her adopting mothers. Then she turned to the judge and added, “The next time we see each other, I will be a famous actress.” And we were all convinced that she would be. Sabrina, raised in the macrobiotic, spiritual Zen Center retreat, aspires to be a movie star, and her first choice in food is a bloody hamburger. I don’t know how, but she is invited every year to the Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood. On Oscar night, we see her on television, seated in the gallery with a notebook in hand to keep count of the celebrities that parade down the red carpet. She’s in training for the time when it’s her turn to walk down that same red carpet.
Fu and Grace are not a couple any longer, after having been together for more than a decade, but they are still united through Sabrina and a friendship of such long standing that it doesn’t make sense to separate. They rearranged the little dollhouse they have at the center; as small as it is, it is greatly coveted because there are always postulants eager to live in that calm pool of spirituality. They divided the space, left one room in the middle for Sabrina, and live at either end. You have to jump over furniture and scattered toys in those tiny rooms, which they also share with Mack, one of those big canines trained to be a service dog. They acquired him for Sabrina and she loves him very much, but she doesn’t need him; she can navigate on her own. It took a year of rigorous negotiations to obtain Mack; they had to take a course in how to communicate with him, they were sent an album containing photos of him as a pup, and they were warned that they would have surprise visits from an inspector, and if they were not caring for him properly, he would be taken from them. Finally he arrived: an off-white Labrador with eyes like grapes, sharper than most humans. One day Grace took him with her to the hospital and he followed on her rounds; she noticed that even her dying patients perked up in Mack’s presence. She had a psychotic patient who’d been sunk in his personal purgatory for a very long while; he had a deformed hand he always kept hidden in a pocket. Mack entered his room wagging his tail; gently he rested his enormous head on the man’s knees and sniffed and nosed his pocket until the man pulled out the hand he was so embarrassed about, and Mack began to lick it. Perhaps no one had ever touched him that way. The sick man’s eyes met Grace’s, and for an instant it seemed that he had come out of the dark cell in which he was trapped into the light. From then on, Mack has been kept busy at the hospital; they hang a placard labeled “Volunteer” on his chest and send him on his rounds. The patients hide the cookies from their meals to give to him, and Mack has become rather portly. Compared to that animal, my Olivia is no more than a mop of hair with the brain of a fly.
While Grace and Mack are working at the hospital, Fu is in charge of the Zen Center, where one day she will be abbess, though she has never evidenced any interest in the post. That imposing woman with the shaved head and dark robes of a Japanese monk always produces the impact I felt the first time I saw her. But Fu is not the only notable woman in her family. She has a blind sister who has married five times, brought eleven children into the world, and been on television because at the age of sixty-three she gave birth to number twelve, a fine plump baby boy who appeared on the screen clamped onto his mother’s flaccid breast. Her latest husband is twenty-two years younger than she, and for that reason this daring woman called on science and became pregnant at an age when other women are knitting for their great-grandchildren. When reporters asked her why she had done it, she replied, “So my son will be there for my husband when I die.” To me that seemed very noble on her part; when I die, I hope Willie takes it very hard, and misses me a lot.