To Sing Frogs Chapter 19c

Marina entering the orphanage

I pretended to stare at the ceiling even though I couldn’t see through the darkness. It was impossible to wait any longer. “We can’t leave Marina and Yula here.” Amy didn’t answer. Was she asleep already? We were both exhausted after the long drive back from Partizansk. Even though we had dozed on the way back it wasn’t restful sleep. Still, we hadn’t been in bed for five minutes. “Are you asleep?” I knew if she were awake she’d answer. Amy thinks not answering the phone is dishonesty by omission.

“No.”

“We can’t leave them behind.”

“Do we have a choice?”

“There’s always a choice.”

“Our paperwork only allows us to adopt three.”

“Well, yeah. Three now. Of course we can’t do anything on this trip. We’d have to start over when we get home. We can’t leave them here, though.”

Silence.

“Amy?”

“What?”

“We can’t leave them.”

“Can we afford it?”

“We have to.”

“I want to,” she said after another long silence. “In fact, I’d been thinking about it myself and didn’t know how to tell you. I’ve been considering all of the difficulties in doing it; things I thought you might say would be unreasonable obstacles. The new SUV only has nine seats. Those two girls would put us at eleven. Adoption laws won’t let us do more kids in the house we’re in so we would have to move. Then there’s the time commitment. Again. Right after we have just done it. And the money. Again.”

            “I know.”

“Can we do it?”

Silence crept back from the walls and recaptured the dark room.

After a long delay she spoke. “We really don’t have a choice this time, do we?”

“For me the only choice is doing it or never being able to face myself in the mirror again.”

We decided we needed to accomplish the adoption of the three we had before complicating matters further. We talked about the “unreasonable obstacles” but Amy and I are a team that plays the perfect game together. The only close second is me with my brother/business partners and their wives. Together there was nothing we couldn’t pull off. I knew without asking that my brothers and sisters-in-law would be behind us all the way. Rather than weighing us down, the decision lightened our hearts. Sleep came easily after that. I didn’t have nightmares of misplaced cocoons and mutilated butterflies. I dreamed about three “Best Friends Forever.” I saw sisters, in a warm and happy home together with a family that loved and needed them.

It seemed too good to be true.

 

 

Amy burst into a round of applause but the musician was less than pleased. He turned, narrowed his eyelids and began to bark out Russian words while shaking an index finger at her like an angry schoolmaster. “Oh, excuse me. I didn’t mean to interrupt.” She folded her hands and sat up straight as if at a classical concert. The pianist scolded again but went back to his music on the glossy-black upright piano.

“Tchaikovsky?” I asked. It was a reasonable guess. He was playing classical music and we were in Russia, after all.

Amy rolled her eyes. “Beethoven. Fur Elise.” Okay, I tried. I would have nailed it had the music been from Tim McGraw or George Strait.

“He’s good. How old do you think he is? Five? Maybe six?”

“Definitely not older than five. He is good.” Several minutes later a woman came into the playroom of the Ussuriysk Baby Hospital and removed him. As is to be expected from so many eccentric musicians, he hollered and clawed to get back to his art while reality imposed its will. Another starving artist.

His forced exit must have had something to do with his mingling with adoptive parents who weren’t his own. “It’s kind of a law.” In the midst of such ludicrousness all we could do was wait for someone to bring Kirrill.

The room was not cold like it had been in February. Somehow the fairytale mural on the wall seemed merrier and the birch-bark puppet stage, happier. As the music left, the other features of the room slowly began to dim.

Soon Stass walked in followed by the small silver haired grandmotherly type woman who we recognized from our visit two months before. She was carrying Kirrill. She spoke in Russian baby talk and tried to get him to smile by tickling his cheeks before handing him to Amy. Kirrill wasn’t much on smiling. After holding him for a few minutes—following multiple attempts to get him to show interest—Amy carefully handed him to me.

I talked to him, smiled at him, tickled him, played peek-a-boo with him, and… nothing. He almost looked dizzy when I moved him too quickly. He acted like his head weighed twenty pounds. He looked… naw… couldn’t be.

 

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