To Sing Frogs Chapter 20b

Our room at the Vlad Inn

Those were among the first documents we ever received on the girls. We had screened them again and again, pulling out every bit of information we could get. Later, documents arrived in droves. It was easy to see how we had missed this one bit of information. One grain of sand on a beach of documents informed us there were far more cocoons on this tree than we had realized.

“Obviously they don’t intend for us to adopt the others,” Amy concluded while shrugging. “They didn’t include them in the paperwork.”

“That doesn’t make them cease to exist.” Amy turned white as snow. It was as if the magnitude of the whole thing had just hit her. “These are the siblings of children who will soon be in our family. Our girls will see the records one day. I mean, they’ll get curious. They’ll want to see everything. When they see this… then what?”

“We need to talk to Stass and Anya,” Amy said in a shell-shocked voice.

Tonya, at the front desk, told me she had Anya’s cell phone number and offered to call her for me. Anya said she and Stass were on their way to the hotel to visit with another of their families. They would be happy to tap on our door when they got there. I didn’t drop the bomb. I just told her we had some questions before we saw the judge.

 

“Oh, you don’t have to adopt the other siblings,” Anya said while Amy and I stood with her and Stass in our room. “That must have been quite a shock,” she chuckled. “No, you won’t be going home with eight more kids. If you needed to adopt more of the siblings it would have said so in the paperwork. They are already divorced, though.”

“Irreconcilable differences?” I asked sarcastically.

“What?”

“What do you mean, ‘they are already divorced?’”

Stass sighed and took a seat on one of the two messy beds while holding out his hand to the other. This would take a while. Stass was always the one who humored me. He seemed to understand my need for understanding and the part of me that doesn’t walk away simply because of inconvenience, whether mine or someone else’s.

He told us there were five older children removed from a situation of horrific neglect and abuse before Katya and Luba were born. He said the older siblings didn’t know about Katya and Luba. The two little girls were equally unaware of the situation. Really it was like they were two separate families. Apparently, the part about the divorce was factual. The paperwork had been completed long before. “You see,” he concluded, “Katya and Luba really don’t have siblings. Not legally.”

“Where are they?”

“Look, John. Don’t stress out over this. It’s not your responsibility. Everything isn’t your responsibility.”

“Whose responsibility is it?”

The coordinator sighed and looked at Anya. She sat next to him and continued the inspection of her perfectly manicured nails. She wasn’t going to offer any help to Stass on this one.

“Where are they?”

“Some of the children were already adopted. Those records are sealed. We couldn’t get to them even if we wanted to.”

“Where are they?”

“Some of the siblings are still in the area, in other orphanages.”

“How many?”

“I don’t remember. Either two or three were adopted. Two or three are in other orphanages.”

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