Free These Dreams of You by Steve Erickson Page A

Viv’s first trip to Addis, one night she took all the children out for burgers and Cokes; some got sick. Viv also brought with her antibiotics that she persuaded a number of doctors in L.A. to prescribe before she left.
    There’s a dirt yard where the children play during the day within a surrounding fence and gate that’s manned by a guard, a quiet young man that the children love. When Sheba lived in the orphanage, in the middle of the night she crawled from her bed where two other children slept, left the building, ran on her little legs across the muddy yard through the night rain to the small outpost where the guard stayed, and slept at the orphanage gate. She would curl up on the guard’s chest and sleep through the night.

W hen Sheba left the orphanage, the guard couldn’t bring himself to say goodbye, and at first Viv felt it rude to press the matter. Twenty meters beyond the gate, however, the new mother stopped the car and led the girl by the hand to the gatehouse where the guard clutched her to him, tears in his eyes, and whispered goodbye.
    On her arrival at her new home in the canyon, when Zan took the girl in his arms for the first time and lifted her from the backseat of the car, he couldn’t know that, pressed against his chest, she was reminded of the guard at the orphanage. Though in Viv’s absence Zan prepared the girl’s room, painting it pink and yellow, those first nights she would leave the only bed she’s ever had for her own to cross the house like crossing a yard of black rain, stealing to her new parents to curl in their arms like she did at the orphanage gate. Now on Viv’s return to the orphanage, the young guard that was too embarrassed by his despondency at Sheba’s departure remembers Viv the moment he sees her and his quiet face breaks into a smile as they embrace.

E veryone at the orphanage is happy to see Viv but no one offers answers to her questions. No one to whom she speaks will claim or confess to remembering where Sheba’s father, aunt and grandmother live. The woman who runs the orphanage makes a phone call; though Viv can’t be certain, since the conversation is in Amharic, she supposes it’s to the administrator of the adoption agency. On hanging up, the woman tells Viv, not unsympathetically, “It all just makes trouble.”
    â€œI’m afraid the mother may already be in trouble,” Viv answers. “I’m only trying to help her.”
    â€œBut do you understand,” the woman says, “that should you find her, she may not know of the adoption, and that while of course the adoption is legal and final, still . . . ” and the rest trails off.
    â€œStill?”
    â€œShe might want back her child.”
    Ever since Sheba came to be part of their family, now and then her combativeness crumbles long enough for Zan to catch her in a private moment. In such moments there is about her the palpable conviction that she’ll never possess the same love of her parents that they have for her brother. That she’s been passed from one party to the next out of love—from a single mother who couldn’t care for her to a paternal grandmother too old, to the orphanage and then Viv and Zan—is too exquisite a thing for the child to understand, or maybe anyone; but there’s no escaping how Sheba is short-changed, and it breaks Zan’s heart.
    The African woman standing across the road from the pub at Leicester Square wears a mix of traditional and western clothes, jeans with a shawl for her head. “Sheba?” Zan says to the girl, and though she doesn’t respond, the woman looks at him as though she heard him, breaks from the girl’s stare and picks up the shopping bag at her feet and walks on. Sheba doesn’t move or speak but follows with her eyes the woman’s retreat into the city bustle.

I n the pub, one of Zan’s two remaining credit cards is declined. Later