"I love your names," I said. "They're about the only thing you came here with that you've still got left. I think you should only be Steven and Hope when you need to pull the wool over somebody's eyes, but keep your own names with your friends."
Neither of them said anything, but they didn't urge me again to call them by false names.
Later we found a place that rented boats by the half hour and Estevan and I took one out onto the lake. Esperanza didn't want to go. She didn't know how to swim, and I wasn't sure about Turtle, so the two of them stayed on the shore feeding ducks.
Estevan and I took turns rowing and waving at the shore until Turtle was a tiny bouncing dot. By then we were in the very middle of the lake, and we let ourselves drift. The sun bounced off the water, making bright spangles and upside-down shadows on our faces. I rolled my jeans up to my knees and dangled my bare feet over the side. There was a fishy-smelling assortment of things in the bottom of the boat, including a red-and-white line floater and a collection of pop-top rings from beer cans.
Estevan took off his shirt and lay back against the front of the boat, his hands clasped behind his head, exposing his smooth Mayan chest to the sun. And to me. How could he possibly have done this, if he had any idea how I felt? I knew that Estevan had walked a long, hard road beyond innocence, but still he sometimes did the most simple, innocent, heartbreaking things. As much as I have wanted anything, ever, I wanted to know how that chest would feel against my face. I looked toward the shore so he wouldn't see the water in my eyes.
I pulled the wilted flower out of my braid and twisted the stem in my fingers. "I'm going to miss you a lot," I said. "All of you. Both, I mean."
Estevan didn't say he was going to miss all of me. We knew this was a conversation we couldn't afford to get into. In more ways than one, since we were renting by the half-hour.
After a while he said, "Throw a penny and make a wish."
"That's wasteful," I said, kicking my toes in the water. "My mother always said a person that throws away money deserves to be poor. I'd rather be one of the undeserving poor."
"Undeservedly," he corrected me, smiling.
"One of the undeservedly poor." Even my English was going to fall apart without him.
"Then we can wish on these." He picked up one of the pop-top rings. "These are appropriate for American wishes."
I made two American wishes on pop tops in Lake o' the Cherokees. Only one of them had the remotest possibility of coming true.
At dusk we found picnic tables in a little pine forest near the water's edge. Both Mattie and Irene had packed us fruit and sandwiches for the road, most of which were still in the Igloo cooler in the trunk. We threw an old canvas poncho over the table and spread out the pickle jars and bananas and apples and goose-liver sandwiches and everything else. Other picnickers here and there were working on modest little balanced meals of things that all went together, keeping the four food groups in mind, but we weren't proud. Our party was in the mood for a banquet.
The sun was setting behind us but it lit up the clouds in the east, making one of those wraparound sunsets. Reflections of pink clouds floated across the surface of the lake. It looked like a corny painting. If I didn't let my mind run too far ahead, I felt completely happy.
Turtle still had a good deal of energy, and was less interested in eating than in bouncing and jumping and running in circles around the trees. Every so often she found a pine cone, which she would bring back and give to me or to Esperanza. I tried very hard not to keep count of whose pile of pine cones was bigger. Turtle looked like a whirling dervish in overalls and a green-striped T-shirt. We hadn't realized how cooped up she must have felt in the car, because she was so good. It's funny how people don't give that much thought to what kids want, as long as they're being quiet.
It's also interesting how it's hard to be depressed around a three-year-old, if you're paying attention. After a while, whatever you're mooning about begins to seem like some elaborate adult invention.
Estevan asked us which we liked better, sunrise or sunset. We were all speaking in English now, because Esperanza had to get into practice. I couldn't object to this--it was a matter of survival.
"Sun set, because sun rise comes too early," Esperanza said, and giggled. She was very self-conscious in English, and seemed to have a whole different personality.
I told them that I liked sunrise better. "Sunset always makes me feel a little sad."
"Why?"
I peeled a banana and considered this. "I think because of the way I was raised. There was always so damn much work to do. At sunrise it always seems like you've got a good crack at getting everything done, but at sunset you know that you didn't."
Esperanza directed our attention to Turtle, who was hard at work burying Shirley Poppy in the soft dirt at the base of a pine tree. I had to laugh.
I went over and squatted beside her at the foot of the tree. "I've got to explain something to you, sweet pea. Some things grow into bushes or trees when you plant them, but other things don't. Beans do, doll babies don't."
"Yes," Turtle said, patting the mound of dirt. "Mama."
It was the second time that day she had brought up a person named Mama. I registered this with something like an electric shock. It started in my hands and feet and moved in toward the gut.
I kneeled down and pulled Turtle into my lap. "Did you see your mama get buried like that?" I asked her.
"Yes."
It was one of the many times in Turtle's and my life together that I was to have no notion of what to do. I remembered Mattie saying how it was pointless to think you could protect a child from the world. If that had once been my intention, it should have been clear that with Turtle I'd never had a chance.
I held her in my arms and we rocked for a long time at the foot of the pine tree.
"I'm sorry," I said. "It's awful, awful sad when people die. You don't ever get to see them again. You understand that she's gone now, don't you?"
Turtle said, "Try?" She poked my cheek with her finger.
"Yeah, I'm crying." I leaned forward on my knees and pulled a handkerchief out of my back pocket.
"I know she must have loved you very much," I said, "but she had to go away and leave you with other people. The way things turned out is that she left you with me."
Out on the lake people in boats were quietly casting their lines into the shadows. I remembered fishing on my own as a kid, and even younger going out with Mama, probably not being much help. I had a very clear memory of throwing a handful of rocks in the water and watching the fish dart away. And screaming my heart out. I wanted them, and knew of no reason why I shouldn't have them. When I was Turtle's age I had never had anyone or anything important taken from me.
I still hadn't. Maybe I hadn't started out with a whole lot, but pretty nearly all of it was still with me.
After a while I told Turtle, "You already know there's no such thing as promises. But I'll try as hard as I can to stay with you."
"Yes," Turtle said. She wiggled off my lap and returned to her dirt pile. She patted a handful of pine needles onto the mound. "Grow beans," she said.
"Do you want to leave your dolly here?" I asked.
"Yes."
Later that night I asked Esperanza and Estevan if they would be willing to do one more thing with me. For me, really. I explained that it was a favor, a very big one, and then I explained what it was.
"You don't have to say yes," I said. "I know it involves some risk for you, and if you don't feel like you can go through with it I'll understand. Don't answer now, because I want to be sure you've really thought about it. You can tell me in the morning."
Esperanza and Estevan didn't want to think about it. They told me, then and there, they wanted to do it.
SIXTEEN
Soundness of Mind
and Freedom of Will
Mr. Jonas Wilford Armistead was a tall, white-haired man who seemed more comfortable with the notarizing part of hi
s job than with the public. Even though he had been forewarned, when all of us came trooping into his office he seemed overwhelmed and showed a tendency to dither. He moved papers and pens and framed pictures from one side of his desk to the other and wouldn't sit down until all of us could be seated, which unfortunately didn't happen for quite a while because there weren't enough chairs. Mr. Armistead sent his secretary, Mrs. Cleary, next door to borrow a chair from the real-estate office of Mr. Wenn.
Mr. Armistead wore a complicated hearing aid that had ear parts, and black-and-white wires and a little silver box that had to be placed for maximum effectiveness on exactly the right spot on his desk, which he seemed unable to find. If he ever did, I thought I might suggest to him that he mark this special zone with paint as they do on a basketball court.
The silver box had tiny controls along one side, and Mr. Armistead also fiddled with these almost constantly, apparently without much success. Mrs. Cleary seemed during their working coexistence to have adjusted her volume accordingly. Even when she was talking to us, she practically shouted. It had an intimidating effect, especially on Esperanza.
But we all managed small talk while we waited. Which was all the more admirable when you consider that not one word any of us was saying was true, so far as I know. Estevan was an astonishingly good liar, going into great detail about the Oklahoma town where he and his wife had been living, and the various jobs he'd had. I talked about my plans to move to Arizona to live with my sister and her little boy. I think we were all amazed by the things that were popping out of our heads like corn.
Sister, indeed. I remembered begging my mother for a sister when I was very young. She'd said she was all for it, but that if I got one it would have to be arranged by means of a miracle. At the time I'd had no idea what she meant. Now I knew about celibacy.
Mrs. Cleary returned in due time, rolling a chair on its little wheels, and asked several questions about what forms would need to be typed up. We shuffled around again as we made room for Estevan and the new chair, and Mr. Armistead finally agreed to come down from his great height and roost like a long-legged stork on the chair behind his desk.
"It became necessary to make formal arrangements," Estevan explained, "because our friend is leaving the state."
Esperanza nodded.
"Mr. and Mrs. Two Two, do you understand that this is a permanent agreement?" He spoke very slowly, the way people often speak to not-very-bright children and foreigners, although I'm positive that Mr. Armistead had no inkling that the Two Two family came from any farther away than the Cherokee Nation.
They nodded again. Esperanza was holding Turtle tightly in her arms and beginning to get tears in her eyes. Already it was clear that, of the three of us, she was first in line for the Oscar nomination.
He went on, "After about six months a new birth certificate will be issued, and the old one destroyed. After that you cannot change your minds for any reason. This is a very serious decision."
"There wasn't any birth certificate issued," Mrs. Cleary shouted. "It was born on tribal lands."
"She," I said. "In a Plymouth," I added.
"We understand," Estevan said.
"I just want to make absolutely certain."
"We know Taylor very well," Estevan replied. "We know she will make a good mother to this child."
Even though they were practically standing on it, Mr. Armistead and Mrs. Cleary seemed to think of "tribal land" as some distant, vaguely civilized country. This, to them, explained everything including the fact that Hope, Steven, and Turtle had no identification other than a set of black-and-white souvenir pictures taken of the three of them at Lake o' the Cherokees. It was enough that I, a proven citizen with a Social Security card, was willing to swear on pain of I-don't-know-what (and sign documents to that effect) that they were all who they said they were.
By this point we had run out of small talk. I was over my initial nervousness, but without it I felt drained. Just sitting in that small, crowded office, trying to look the right way and say the right thing, seemed to take a great deal of energy. I couldn't imagine how we were all going to get through this.
"We love her, but we cannot take care for her," Esperanza said suddenly. Her accent was complicated by the fact that she was crying, but it didn't faze Mr. Armistead or Mrs. Cleary. Possibly they thought it was a Cherokee accent.
"We've talked it over," I said. I began to worry a little about what was going on here.
"We love her. Maybe someday we will have more children, but not now. Now is so hard. We move around so much, we have nothing, no home." Esperanza was sobbing. This was no act. Estevan handed her a handkerchief, and she held it to her face.
"Try, Ma?" Turtle said.
"That's right, Turtle," I said quietly. "She's crying."
Estevan reached over and lifted Turtle out of her arms. He stood her up, her small blue sneakers set firmly on his knees, and held her gently by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. "You must be a good girl. Remember. Good and strong, like your mother." I wondered which mother he meant, there were so many possibilities. I was touched to think he might mean me.
"Okay," Turtle said.
He handed her carefully back to Esperanza, who folded her arms around Turtle and held her against her chest, rocking back and forth for a very long time with her eyes squeezed shut. Tears drained down the shallow creases in her cheeks.
The rest of us watched. Mr. Armistead stopped fidgeting and Mrs. Cleary's hands on her papers went still. Here were a mother and her daughter, nothing less. A mother and child--in a world that could barely be bothered with mothers and children--who were going to be taken apart. Everybody believed it. Possibly Turtle believed it. I did.
Of all the many times when it seemed to be so, that was the only moment in which I really came close to losing Turtle. I couldn't have taken her from Esperanza. If she had asked, I couldn't have said no.
When she let go, letting Turtle sit gently back on her lap, Turtle had the sniffles.
Esperanza wiped Turtle's nose with Estevan's big handkerchief and kissed her on both cheeks. Then she unclasped the gold medallion of St. Christopher, guardian saint of refugees, and put it around Turtle's neck. Then she gave Turtle to me.
Esperanza told me, "We will know she is happy and growing with a good heart."
"Thank you," I said. There was nothing else I could say.
It took what seemed like an extremely long time to draw up a statement, which Mrs. Cleary shuttled off to type. She came back and was sent off twice more to make repairs. After several rounds of White-out we had managed to create an official document:
We, the undersigned, Mr. Steven Tilpec Two Two and Mrs. Hope Roberta Two Two, being the sworn natural parents of April Turtle Two Two, do hereby grant custody of our only daughter to Ms. Taylor Marietta Greer, who will from this day forward become her sole guardian and parent.
We do solemnly swear and testify to our soundness of mind and freedom of will.
Signed before witnesses on this ---- day of ----, in the office of Jonas Wilford Armistead, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
Mrs. Cleary went off once again to Mr. Wenn's office, this time to borrow his secretary Miss Brindo to be a second witness to the signing. Miss Brindo, who appeared to have at least enough Cherokee in her to claim head rights, had on tight jeans and shiny red high heels, and snapped her gum. She had a complicated haircut that stood straight up on top, and something told me she led a life that was way too boring for her potential. I wished she could have known what she was really witnessing that morning.
In a way, I wish all of them could know, maybe twenty years later or so when it's long past doing anything about it. Mrs. Cleary's and Mr. Armistead's hair would have stood straight up too, to think what astonishing things could be made legal in a modest little office in the state of Oklahoma.
We shook hands all around, I got the rest of the adoption arrangements straightened out with Mr. Armistead, and we filed out, a strange new combin
ation of friends and family. I could see the relief across Estevan's back and shoulders. He held Esperanza's hand. She was still drying tears but her face was changed. It shone like a polished thing, something old made new.
They both wore clean work shirts, light blue with faded elbows. Esperanza had on a worn denim skirt and flat loafers. I had asked them please not to wear their very best for this occasion, not their Immigration-fooling clothes. It had to look like Turtle was going to be better off with me. When they came out that morning dressed as refugees I had wanted to cry out, No! I was wrong. Don't sacrifice your pride for me. But this is how badly they wanted to make it work.
SEVENTEEN
Rhizobia
It had crossed my mind that Turtle might actually have recognized the cemetery her mother was buried in, and if so, I wondered whether I ought to take her back there to see it. But my concerns were soon laid to rest. We passed four cemeteries on the way to the Pottawatomie Presbyterian Church of St. Michael and All Angels, future home of Steven and Hope Two Two, and at each one of them Turtle called out, "Mama!"
There would come a time when she would just wave at the sight of passing gravestones and quietly say, "Bye bye."
Finding the church turned out to be a chase around Robin Hood's bam. Mattie's directions were to the old church. The congregation had since moved its home of worship plus its pastor and presumably its refugees into a new set of buildings several miles down the road. I was beginning to form the opinion that Oklahomans were as transient a bunch as the people back home who slept on grass-flecked bedrolls in Roosevelt Park.
The church was a cheery-looking place, freshly painted white with a purple front door and purple gutters. When Mattie used to talk about the Underground Railroad, by which she meant these churches and the people who carried refugees between them, it had always sounded like the dark of night. I'd never pictured old white Lincolns with soda pop spilled on the seats, and certainly not white clapboard churches with purple gutters.