The Fortunes (33 page)

John himself has read accounts of babies being found outside stores, in marketplaces, at railway and bus stations, in the lobbies of hotels even. Foundlings, he thinks, the word so oddly Dickensian (and he suddenly recalls, as a child, wishing
he
were an orphan, telling his shocked mother,
They always have the best adventures
). The locations are taken as signs of love. The parents want the babies found quickly. Many are said to be rural women—it being harder to keep a pregnancy secret in the city—who take a risk coming into the city to leave the child somewhere where it'll be found, as opposed to abandoning it in a remote location to die. The mothers, it is surmised, must often wait, hidden, to make sure their babies are found. One account even has it that adoptive parents have had babies thrust into their arms in parking lots or come across babies under bushes.

And this, John realizes, stopping short, is what he's looking for, why he's out walking at this ungodly hour. He's hoping to catch a glimpse of such a moment . . . and then what? Claim the child? Pursue the mother? And ask her what, even if he could communicate with her? And yet he finds himself holding his breath as he looks into corners and shadows. It's like some treasure hunt. And then it comes to him that what he's really looking for is some sign. This whole process is so managed, so bureaucratic; he's looking for an accident, for fate to intervene. Not that he could even keep any baby he found; he knows that. But still, irrationally, he finds himself looking.

If a Chinese mother pressed her baby into his arms, even if he couldn't keep that baby, he'd feel chosen somehow, as if someone thought he could be a father.

But the only young women who beckon him from the shadows are hookers. One bares her breast as he approaches and he hurries on, floaty with tiredness.

On the way back to the hotel he begins to hear birdsong, the dawn chorus, even if he hasn't detected the change in the light himself. He tries to look for the birds, to identify the species, but the trees and telegraph lines are empty. And then he locates the sound, coming from the blocks of flats above him; each balcony he sees has a small cage hanging from it, and he remembers the songbird market they saw in Beijing, the tiny birds, little more than chicks, huddled in their bamboo cages.

The sun rises weakly. It seems smaller, more distant through the haze than at home, as if he's not on a different continent but on another planet altogether. In a park he glimpses old people practicing tai chi, singly and in pairs, between the trees, their slow movements so oddly intimate he feels as if he's intruding. A sound like firecrackers makes him jump, but when he looks he sees it's a man whipping a wooden top in a square. The streets begin to grow busy, and he feels self-conscious, like a thief revealed in daylight. He finds himself hurrying back to the hotel, relieved to see its neon signage. Near the entrance there's a row of shop-houses in an arcade. It's meant to look traditional, even though the goods on sale are souvenirs, Western snacks, the prices too high for any locals. A cleaner dozes on his broom in a doorway, and John feels a pang of envy. One of the stores is just opening and John sees the owner, a genial fellow he's heard others refer to as Charlie Chin, on account of the hairy mole sprouting there, setting out his wares. He's hanging packs of disposable diapers from hooks overhead with the help of a pole. Charlie has no English to speak of—he holds up a calculator to show people prices—but his sales pitch is a jovial
Adopt me!
(They've theorized that someone—some earlier new parent—explained their baby as an “adoptee” and he misheard.) He regales John with it now, a joke that also seems like a greeting, and before he knows it John has called back, “Adopt
me!
” and the man nods and smiles with delight.

John buys the English-language
China Daily
from him, flicks through it as he walks. A photo of a steam engine on page 3 catches his eye. It's a Chinese locomotive in Mongolia—the last steam train in passenger service in the world, apparently—which is finally being retired. It's being sold to the U.S. to run trips for rail buffs.
Must use that somehow,
he thinks, with a little spring in his step.

In the lobby he pauses to glance into the bar, looking for the girl. She's there—still, or again? he wonders, unable to judge from her pale, drawn face. He wants to tell her to get some sleep.

He slips into the room, undresses, curls up behind Nola, nestling his leg between hers, in her yielding bed-baked warmth. For a second he pictures Pearl in her micro-skirt, slender pale legs scissoring like chopsticks, imagines being pincered between them, shivers slightly.

A viscous shaft of daylight, faintly spangled, slips between the curtains, dust motes suspended like gold. He holds his hand in the beam, but they swirl from his grasp.

Memories of their tour slide through his mind, as if he were flipping through them on his phone. The way every building for miles around the Great Wall—gas stations, convenience stores, public bathrooms—was crenellated. The expats (or rather
half pats,
as he's learned they're called) overheard in an airport bar talking about how much longer they need to work in China before they can go home wealthy—a new breed of sojourners. The terra-cotta army, thousands, probably tens or hundreds of thousands, strong, rank upon rank of men, each with a unique face. “I guess we don't all look alike,” he'd whispered to Nola sotto voce, all the time searching for one that looked like him.

He might not know that much Chinese history or culture, but he knows something of the history of Chinese America: all the men without women, the women without husbands. The Chinese without Chinese. And yet he, and others like him, are somehow their descendants. Mongrels and bastards, orphans and warphans.
No wonder we put so much stock in family,
he thinks. We value nothing more than what we don't possess.

Now that it's morning, now that he doesn't have to sleep, he feels himself relax at last.

Nola is agonizing when he wakes up. What do you wear to meet your new baby? It's a moment of some ceremony, on the one hand. On the other, you're very likely to be spat up on. He blinks at her as she holds up blouses. Plus what would the Chinese approve of? Not white, of course, that impractical, funereal color. Probably red—always auspicious (though John views all the red outfits sported by the group as a kind of sucking-up). He kisses her, slips past to the shower.

There is a nervous breakfast, everyone excited, talking in hurried, hushed tones. Bev shows off a sign Lily has made—
HAPPY GOTCHA DAY LITTLE SIS
!!!, each letter clipped from a magazine. “She's into collage right now. Everything looks like a ransom note!” John smiles, sips his coffee, glances across into the dark bar, now cavernously empty.

And then Napoleon herds them into a plush function room, the kind of neutral space where business conferences are held, panels and symposia. Plastic chandeliers dangle overhead, clacking gently in the air-conditioned current. The group forms an excited ring around her, camcorders chiming to life and rising up as if at a press conference, and she explains that the babies will be brought in one at a time by their carers. Couples clutch hands; the singles among them clutch photos of their children. Alice performs a slow pirouette, as if dancing alone, to take a panoramic photo. Stan and Bev lean together, touching heads—in prayer, John guesses (it occurs to him suddenly that they're probably pro-life). He turns to Nola, squeezes her hand. “What?” she asks. “You look good,” he tells her, and she does, radiant, but her eyes are on the door. “All our lives are about to change forever,” someone murmurs, and John turns to see who—to argue the point, reflexively—and as a result he misses the door opening.

“Towson,” Napoleon calls. Stan and Bev. It won't be alphabetical, then. The baby is a tightly bound parcel, red-faced from the cold, probably, though for a moment John fears she's too tightly trussed. Bev bursts into happy laughter, folding her into her arms—“I could eat you up”—almost at the same moment that the baby begins to bawl and Stan, behind his camera, melts into snotty tears. Pandemonium. Flashbulbs, a smattering of applause. And then the next name, and the next. The babies are heavily dressed, as soft and plump as the plush toys they're soon to be surrounded by. If they don't cry, their adoptive parents do; often so do their carers. The room is dissolving in tears, John thinks, his smile of anticipation stretched tight. Already his lips and cheeks are starting to ache. Another and another. “Knowing our luck, we'll be last,” he tells Nola, and she nods stiffly. Jeannine presses her face to the bundle in her arms, croons, “Hi, Celeste.” (
Seriously?
John thinks.) Norman throws his new daughter up in the air like a football, catches her, and swoops her around the room while Amanda calls “Careful!” Eric makes unselfconscious baby talk while Scott wrings his hands.

And then everyone has a baby except them and the door is closed and they look at each other and then Napoleon. She's moving through the crowd, counting, lips moving, and then she's before them. A frown crosses her face, and she calls in Chinese for the orphanage official, who appears beside her. There's an animated conversation, Napoleon's voice rising. But in anger, alarm? Chinese has always seemed animated to John, an excitable language, but he's not sure how to read its tones. And then Napoleon turns to them. “So sorry,” she says. She takes a breath. “Baby sick this morning, fever. Could not bring. They should have telephone. I call at once and find out more.” Her hands rest lightly for a moment on her own stomach, and John has to tear his eyes away from it, look at her face.

“Is she all right?” Nola asks, stricken, and Napoleon gives a frail smile. Her hand hovers between them and she pats the air. “I find out more, okay? Promise.”

The news is filtering through the crowd. People have been looking wide-eyed at each other, eager to share their joy, as if to make it real, and now the giddy tide of feeling has washed up against the quiet couple in the corner. Video cameras, recording all this as if it were the birth itself, turn on them—accusingly, John can't help feeling, as if they've struck a wrong note on this celebratory day.

“It's okay,” he says carefully. “They say she wasn't too well this morning. Just a precaution, I expect. Probably didn't want to infect the others.” He's making this up, but it seems so plausible he's instantly relieved. Of course that's it. This must happen all the time. Babies get fevers all the time. It's
normal.
But even as he thinks it he sees the runny noses of half the kids, hears the colicky breathing. How sick must Mei Mei be?

They all take a moment to hug them tightly on their way out—Stan and Bev, Alice, Eric and Scott, Jeannine, Norman and Amanda—and by the end John is in tears. “Oh, you poor darlings. If I could give you ours . . .” Bev begins. An impossible, awful offer, but heartfelt, he knows. And yet he bristles at a hidden selfishness amid all the good wishes. They—he and Nola—are everyone's worst fear, he intuits. To come so far and be denied at the last. He detects in their faces some relief in having their fears come true—for someone else. Some things are too good to be true, unless something bad happens to make them real. You can't believe in your own luck unless someone else is unlucky. Some price must be paid to salve their consciences.

They sit with Napoleon in her room, watching her make calls. She barks into the receiver but translates for them in a mild undertone. “Country folks,” she says, pursing her lips, though she's told them the orphanage is only an hour away, on the outskirts of town. “Good with babies, though.” Someone at the other end of the line goes to fetch the orphanage administrator. Someone goes to fetch the doctor. Someone else is at lunch. Napoleon is dogged, indefatigable, and John feels a great love for her, wants to bring her a glass of water, make her sit down, ask about her own baby. Friends have told him about this, the deep gratitude to nurses and pediatricians, anyone who fights for your child.

At one point the phone rings and she speaks in unmistakably warm hushed tones that raise their hopes. When she hangs up she is smiling, and they lean forward. “So sorry. My husband,” she explains. “I told him call back later.”

She tries the orphanage again, and talks for what seems like a long time, angrily and then more softly, leaning into the phone, her hair curtaining her face. When she turns to face them she smiles weakly, holds up a finger.

“I arrange,” Napoleon finally tells them, hanging up. “This afternoon we go orphanage, collect her.” She nods. “Be resolute!”

This afternoon; they nod in turn. “
Still Gotcha Day,”
Nola says weakly. Just another lag, John tells himself.

They're out of Tylenol. They have plenty of baby Tylenol, but John isn't sure it'll do any good, and Nola doesn't want to waste it on herself anyway. There's so little he can do for her, so little to say (
Are you okay?
he keeps asking, but when she said,
Yes. What about you?
he almost said,
What
about
me?
) that John jumps at the chance to go out and find a drugstore, to enact his love for her. He can hardly stand to be in the hotel anyway. The building seems to hum with baby energy now. He pictures all the other couples in their rooms with their babies and he wants to get out. He tells her he thought he saw a pharmacy a couple of streets over, and she lies back and covers her eyes, without thinking to ask him when he saw the pharmacy.

In the little park old men play ping-pong on a cement table, across a metal net; old women stir mahjong tiles.

He amazes himself by finding the pharmacy again, but when he steps inside the shelves are lined with unfamiliar boxes with indecipherable labels. The jet lag is catching up with him again. He feels top-heavy with tiredness, brimming with exhaustion, as if he might spill into sleep. He studies the shelves for some clue, but the boxes, brightly colored and tightly packed, covered in Chinese writing, remind him of nothing so much as fireworks.