Shayla looked suspiciously at Dana. “I had a dog called Shelby. My dad gave her to me.”
I felt the oxygen whoosh out of the room.
“Really?” Dana asked.
“Did you alweady know?” Shayla didn’t like the coincidence. She picked up a pink crayon and started on a cloud.
“I promise I didn’t.”
“She wan away.”
“Shelby?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m sorry, Shayla. That must have been sad for you.”
“Uh-huh.” Another cloud took shape in Shayla’s sky.
I cleared my throat and tried to sound natural. “Hi, Shayla. How are you?” Given the gravel-meets-phlegm texture of my voice, I half expected the beautiful child to grab her mountain and run.
Instead, she turned two of the largest blue eyes I’d ever seen on me and pursed her mouth in disapproval. “That’s a wee-ohd voice,” she said.
Dana covered a smile while I grasped at conversational straws.
“It’s not . . .” I cleared my throat, attempted a sound, then loudly cleared my throat again. “It’s not usually this bad. My voice, I mean.”
The blue gaze was still focused on me, though her eyes scanned my face without ever truly making contact with mine. She turned back to the stack of crayons next to her drawing and picked just the right shade of yellow for the sun.
“You don’t look like my dog,” she said seriously.
“Oh—well. That’s good, I guess. Isn’t it?”
“Uh-huh.”
Dana pushed up from her chair and arched her back. “I’m going to get some coffee, Shayla. Is it okay if I leave you here with Shelby for a few minutes?”
Absolute panic burned up my neck. “But . . .”
Shayla nodded, and Dana patted my shoulder as she walked rather stiffly toward the other end of the room. “You’ll be fine,” she said softly, closing the door behind her.
If “fine” meant dizziness, nausea, and mental paralysis, I was indeed going to be fine. I took a calming breath and instructed my heart to stop its nonsense. I think it laughed at me. Seriously. But I might have been hallucinating from all the “fine” going on, so I couldn’t be sure.
“Are you going to ask me a question?” Shayla asked.
I was stunned into silence.
“People always ask me questions,” she continued, extending yellow rays from the sun’s center. “Like my favowite color and my middle name and silly stuff like that.”
I attempted a casual laugh. “Those are rather stupid questions, aren’t they,” I said, trying desperately to come up with questions that involved neither colors nor middle names.
This time her gaze did meet mine, and so directly that I thought I heard an audible thunk as my future settled into place. That was all it took. One direct gaze from strangely familiar eyes and a reproachful “You shouldn’t say stupid. It’s naughty.”
As someone who had spent most of my adult life proclaiming that having children was a stupid idea, I realized I had a lot to learn.
2
IT HAD TAKEN two flight attendants and a wheelchair to get Bonnie off the plane. Whatever she had taken to help her sleep had all but knocked her unconscious. I’d stayed on board until a doctor had pronounced her alive (which the raucous snores, to my unmedical mind, had already confirmed), then helped Shayla into her pink backpack and pulled my own carry-on toward the exit.
Although I’d made a halfhearted pass at listening to language CDs in the weeks preceding my departure for Germany, the guttural sounds that assaulted my ears as soon as Shayla and I disembarked came as a nearly physical blow. The plane ride had convinced me that I was leaving the US, Bonnie had convinced me that I was in for some surprises, the landscape we had seen through the window had convinced me that this definitely wasn’t Kansas anymore, but it was the language and the impatient glares of airport personnel that truly brought reality crashing home. I was in Germany. Or Djoh-many. My four-year-old pseudo-daughter of six months and I had arrived in a foreign land where the language was as mysterious as everything else, including where I would live, what I would do, and how we would both survive the changes.
After a cursory glance at our passports and the luggage stacked on my cart, a portly customs agent motioned us toward electric doors that swooshed open and ushered us almost directly into the arms of a woman I had never seen before.
“Shelby, Shelby, Shelby,” she said, wrapping me in a bear hug that disconnected Shayla’s hand from