The Happiness Glass Read online

  The return to Chile was extraordinarily painful for all of us on many levels. At times it felt to me like being flayed alive and I cannot really imagine how it was for her. In Santiago, we checked into a hotel opposite the terraced gardens of Santa Lucia hill, where fifteen years earlier I had filled a lonely Sunday afternoon dodging the courting couples and families eating ice cream to reach the summit. Then I had gazed out across the city and wondered if some nook or cranny held a child in need of the love I was bursting to offer. And here I was again, this time stricken by the possibility that all the years of care had been for nothing.

  People in crisis look for omens everywhere. There was a lipstick kiss on the wall of our hotel room, the perfect imprint of a small mouth on the blue plaster. The height of it, and the size, suggested a child and it seemed to me symbolic, a reminder that our daughter wished to draw a line underneath her childhood and was determined to reject us. With my head on the pillow the kiss was level with my face and I woke each morning to its small, mute, yearning goodbye.

  It was a journey on which she expected to leave us and although this was not a realistic option, it was impossible not to feel her struggling to detach herself from fifteen years of loving. Our relationship was tested constantly and at times the tests were scary, like the moment in Santiago when she walked away into the crowd on a busy street.

  The only accounts that I had read of an adopted child’s return to their country of origin described it as emotional but rewarding. Reunions took place in a haze of goodwill, with the subsequent return home a forgone conclusion, and almost painless. Our angst-filled hours in various hotel rooms could not have been more different, but perhaps we are the kind of people who take such things hard.

  There were spears of gladioli standing in buckets outside the church on our last morning, brilliant green bayonets with blood red tips. I remember looking past the flowers to the worn face of a woman begging in the entrance, the rattling cup she held out and her cotton skirt hiding the stool she had brought to sit on: poor as she was she had come prepared while I had not and after three weeks in Chile it was impossible to tell what tests had been passed or failed, what peace of mind lost or won.

  On my first visit I had met a woman who fostered needy children. At least two of the children I had met on my first visit were still living with her and she had news of others. It was at her house that a five-year-old girl climbed onto my lap and pointed to a picture in the guidebook I had opened on the table. The picture showed a man and woman walking with a child between them. She ran a stubby finger across the faces and her own face grew wistful.

  “Una familia completa,” she said.

  We met kids with cigarette burns and other deliberate injuries, the damaged offspring of prostitutes and alcoholics, including a nineteen-year-old who, as a small boy, had been beaten so badly for crying that he still refused to speak.

  These were children who would not easily be kissed and made better.

  It is the random element of the attachment that adopted children find unbearable. And yet the profound and loving relationships that sustain and shape our lives most often spring from random collisions. In my own case I have always believed that synchronicity was at work when I found my daughter and that no other outcome was ever a possibility for either of us. Yet I can see what she has lost. In our affluent society there is a widespread view of children adopted from poorer countries as having hit the jackpot. But whenever I observe a mother bouncing a small baby on her knee and note their mutual absorption and delight, I am reminded that our child missed out on the one thing that most of us take for granted. Children like her need mothers, but in a sense they will always have one too many, for the biological mother is likely to become a ghost that haunts them.

  Seventeen years on from that first fateful meeting, my daughter would insist that she and I were close, closer than many teenage daughters and their biological mothers. And it was true. With her wicked sense of humour she could make me laugh more often and harder than anyone I knew. And she could make me cry, too. But that eleven-month gap remained a black hole in her life and therefore in mine. It had etched distinctive patterns into her. For an eighteen-year-old of considerable beauty she could never allow herself to be frivolous, even for a moment, and what she hated most of all was surprises. Yet somehow we battled through, and after a gap year she returned to full time education, with creditable results.

  Of the families whose adoptions I tracked through the teenage years, all experienced severe disruptions to family life. But was it any worse than might be expected with a biological child? Most think it was, because adoption magnifies the intense emotions of those years and offers an excuse for acting out. Of our six families, one appears to have broken down irretrievably while the rest have shown the same resilience and determination others muster for biological children in crisis, convinced that failure is unthinkable.

  While I am the real mother in the sense that I have raised this child, my daughter’s separation from her birth mother is a wrong that will never be put right. It saddens me, but I understand the sense she has that her life will never be complete. An ordinary birth is greeted with joy and once the baby is named, registered, and the birth certificate issued, there are no unknowns, no blind spots. Parent and child are certain of who they are. But adopted children have no clear linear narrative to support them and although adoptive families long to manufacture happy endings, the fact that we are doomed to fail is one of the unacknowledged tragedies of adoption. Curiously, my daughter has always said that she would like to adopt children.

  I am not a huge fan of the poet Khalil Gibran, but these lines from The Prophet seem to carry a special warning for adoptive parents.

  Your children are not your children

  They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

  There is no question that I would do it all again, but another time I would ask more questions, demand the kind of details that later might go some way towards satisfying the natural curiosity of a child. I would arm myself too, for what might come once the soft and fuzzy toddler years were over. Now that I have had time to reflect, I believe, as I did not before, that adoption is a terrible thing. But the truth is that more often than not the alternative is more terrible.

  For adoptive and biological families, good days arrive as well as bad and to the thousands of children and adoptive parents just starting their lives together, I wish only happiness. But I would urge them to bear in mind that the ride might grow rocky and that when it does the important thing is not to deny what the child has lost but acknowledge it. Above all, never underestimate the strength of the bond that has formed between parent and child in the growing years, because whatever the child may say or think when struggling with the question of identity, that bond is tough and it is a huge part of who they are.

  Only love is truly thicker than blood.

  A few months ago a friend gave me another of Gibran’s quotes, a grain of wisdom and common sense that might help adopted children when it comes to weighing up relationships.

  He who understands you is greater kin to you than your own brother. For even your own kindred may neither understand you nor know your true worth.

  The Borrowed Days

  There were spears of gladioli standing in buckets outside the church on that last morning, and a warm wash of traffic along the Alameda. I remember dragging in a deep breath, feeling an ache in my chest as I struggled to open the great wooden door of the church. It was the lost photographs that hurt at that moment, treasured images extracted from my wallet and torn into pieces. I had seen them as soon as I opened my eyes – mother and child in fragments on the bedside table. Gina had crept in and left them while we slept.

  When Tom and I came down from breakfast she was folding her clothes, the same ones, over and over, with a face as blank and distant as the sky. At the sight of those slender hands folding and refolding, flicking at imaginary specks of dust, I felt Tom’s exasperation, his lo
nging to bundle us into a taxi and head for the airport. But there was still an hour-and-a-half to fill.

  I told Gina I would return to the church. For a few minutes I would rest in that place where for centuries prayers have been said in her birth language, and where even my poor Spanish would be welcomed by the multitude of saints lining the walls. It was a pointless gesture, I supposed, but I would make it anyway. To my astonishment, she offered to go with me. I imagined she was feeling remorseful about the photographs, but now I wonder whether she planned to disappear in the crowds on the Alameda – perhaps she had forgotten it was a Sunday morning.

  Santiago’s streets were hot and empty as we walked along the edge of Santa Lucia hill. After ten minutes we arrived opposite the Iglesia de San Francisco, where the clock face on its tower had been stuck at ten-minutes-to-two since we arrived in Chile. Gina checked her watch as we waited for the lights to change. Avenida Libertador General Bernardo O’Higgins is so wide that we had to cross in two stages, and she slipped her hand into mine as we made the second crossing. The lower walls of Saint Francis’s church are painted a dark and ancient red, the colour of dried blood, the colour of the secret, inner chambers of the heart, darker than the flower vendor’s darkest gladioli. At the core of the church is a courtyard crammed with trees and birds, where the clamour of the city is all but inaudible. I saw it once, long ago, and so did Gina, but she was only a baby and cannot remember.

  “The garden belongs to the Franciscan monks. You have to be lucky and find the gate unlocked,” a woman at the church’s small museum told us when we visited three weeks ago.

  On this trip we had not been lucky.

  In the dim, wax-scented interior of the church, an organ groaned a few low notes before launching into a hymn, a psalm; blood streamed from the plaster knees of Christ on his cross; the blue-robed Madonna’s exquisite face looked frozen.

  We emerged with ten minutes in hand to walk back to the hotel, but Gina was so pale that on impulse I hailed a cruising taxi. The driver set off in the wrong direction – we were within walking distance of our hotel, and he turned the wrong way. Gina glanced sideways at me to see if I had noticed. We were moving fast through the light Sunday traffic, flashing past deserted offices, and shops with their shutters down, racing along a street I had never seen before. I leaned towards the front seat and repeated the name: Hotel Foresta.

  “I – ’ave – lived – in – Canada,” the driver said, grinning at me in the rear view mirror.

  Gina’s lips curved. Perhaps she thought he would take us lurching up a side street and, in the kind of swashbuckling manoeuvre we had grown used to over these weeks, pull up with a flourish outside our hotel.

  In five minutes we were due to leave it for the airport: Tom would be pacing in reception and checking his watch.

  “Where are you going?” I asked him in Spanish.

  “I – don’t – charge – you – any – more,” the driver said.

  He accelerated, carrying us deeper into a strange part of the city, while the meter ticked and ticked and a framed picture of Saint Teresa swayed on the dashboard. Gina leaned back and closed her eyes; her mouth was pressed into the satisfied little bow it can make when anything falls apart and it is my doing.

  “Mira…” I leaned close to the driver’s ear. I spelled out the name of the hotel and said to make it snappy because we were due to catch a plane. With barely a shift in tempo the driver swerved across three lanes of oncoming traffic, triggering a symphony of car horns, as we slewed away in the opposite direction.

  We were five minutes late, but Tom was so relieved to see us that he made no comment, just herded us from reception to the waiting car.

  Once we reached the airport we imagined we were safe, Tom and I; we were light-headed with relief as we clambered from the taxi and piled the luggage onto a trolley. We turned our backs on the snow-covered Andes that for once were not veiled by smog; we were too anxious to be gone; we were speaking too fast as we fumbled with tickets, with passports, and the last of the pesos. Mentally, we were already halfway home, halfway to Madrid – change for Barcelona, change for Manchester, change –

  For the first time in three weeks, we took our eyes off our daughter.

  Inside, the terminal was a great open pale-grey space of hard and shiny surfaces. Check-in was upstairs behind a long glass wall. Beyond the glass, taxis dispensed more passengers and luggage against a background of dry, tan, scrub-dotted hills where the heated air wavered and trembled. We wheeled the trolley to the Iberia desk, and joined a short queue. When we were waved forward, Tom leaned down to lift the cases onto the weigh-in belt. We were so close. I offered the tickets and passports, and that is when Gina touched my arm.

  “I’m going to cry,” she said.

  I turned from the woman holding our passports, and looked into her eyes. There were tears, and her mouth was crumpled, just as it had when she was a small child. I imagined she was crying because she was leaving Chile, but really she was crying because she was about to leave us.

  “I’ll go to the bathroom,” she said.

  I should have gone with her, but there was the hand-luggage, and the woman behind the Iberia desk was checking us against our passports. Gina had chosen the perfect moment.

  “Don’t be long, then,” I said, smothering anxiety.

  Within seconds she had melted into the crowd.

  Waiting for her, my mind rattled through the days we had just traversed, with their bizarre and endless clutter: the salesmen on the buses selling ice creams, wire strippers, gift tags, and the way bus drivers stopped to let them board; Pablo Neruda’s house in Valparaiso with its ships’ figureheads, its plates decorated with hot air balloons and women emerging Venus-like from sea shells, its jacaranda flowers that brushed the first floor windows; and his Santiago house below the zoo in Bella Vista, where his and Matilde’s initials were worked into the wrought iron window screens; it had a pewter bar, and a secret door that led up to the bedroom; there was a painting by Diego Riviera of Matilde, its two heads representing her public face and her clandestine life as Neruda’s lover during his marriage.

  A chunk of amethyst had been set into the wall of that house but it had failed to protect them; Neruda was brought there after his death for the final goodbyes, though by then the house had been vandalised by the military – in his study they broke the long case clock, and Matilde refused ever to have it repaired. And how those gypsy women in Valparaiso had frightened Gina by grabbing her in the street, wild-eyed creatures, with thin brown arms and long flowery dresses; schoolgirls with heavy eyeliner and black pencil around their lips; cold bottles of Escudo, and the dogs, and more dogs, and the fish vendors in the street bent over tables strewn with fish heads, fish blood, fish guts …

  “Where’s Gina?”

  I hurried to the public toilets to look for her, but she wasn’t there. She was nowhere. Gina had vanished. Panicked, I waited near the Iberia counter with our hand luggage while Tom went in search of her. Through the long glass window, I could see a line-up of buses for Santiago and Valparaiso: I tried to remember whether Gina had any money. Tom returned, shaking his head, and went away again to look downstairs.

  These were the borrowed days, I thought, what the Irish call Laethanta na riabhaí, the ‘days of the brindled cow’. Oh, I didn’t think it then, as I peered into the crowds for a glimpse of Tom or Gina walking towards me, because for those minutes that stretched like hours my dumb mind was incapable of thought. But later, on the plane to Madrid, and again between Barcelona and Manchester, with Gina sleeping safely between us, I ransacked my memory.

  It had been a school project on Celtic legends: it hinged on the month of March borrowing the first three days of April, with their fierce and spoiling weather. And these days in the Chilean spring, in which we had struggled to reconcile our daughter with her history, corresponded with those dangerous days in the north, that treacherous pocket of time between the first and second months of spring.

>   The legend went that the old brindled cow had boasted that March could not kill her, whereupon March borrowed three days from April – days of frost and snow, and a skinning wind – that had finished the poor old cow. In Northern Ireland the tale was more elaborate, with nine borrowed days – three days for fleecing the blackbird, three days of punishment for the stone-chatter, and three days to kill the poor grey cow. Hadn’t the first King James died in the last days of March during a lashing storm, ‘The Storm of the Borrowed Days’?

  As I had hovered near the Iberia counter, stiff with fright, Gina suddenly appeared at my shoulder. Her hair, dark and glossy as the wing of a young blackbird, was drawn back into a knot. Her eyes were freshly lined with kohl, and for a moment they held a cruel gleam that made of her a stranger, too knowing for her years. It faded as she looked at me, for what she saw was the face of the old brindled cow that had once been brave but had now been skinned.

  “You thought I had gone for ever,” she said.

  And it was true, although as soon as she had appeared I affected calmness.

  Tom returned then, and we moved together towards Immigration. But the borrowed days would come again.

  FIVE

  The Happiness Glass

  Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it’s smashed you have to move into a different sort of life.

  Unless, Carol Shields

  On a Friday morning in October, 2013, I was sitting in a café with a woman I had been mentoring through the writing of her novel. It was our final session, and towards the end of it she began to tell me the story of her family’s grief. At the heart of it was a daughter who had chosen to cut all contact with them, though she still lived in the same city. Distress flared in this whip-thin woman’s eyes and fluttered in her hands, as she confided the awful details of what by then had been a two-year separation. I can no longer recall what I said as I listened to her; I must have expressed sympathy, then finished my coffee and left. And then, that same afternoon, our own daughter left home without a word and vanished. In fact, by the time I returned from the café, the wardrobe and the chest of drawers in her room were already empty and she was walking away along some unknown street pulling a small pink wheel-along suitcase. You could not write this coincidence into a novel. As the Irish writer John McGahern has said of life: much of what takes place is believable only because it happens.