If You Lived Here by Dana Sachs Read Free Book Online Page A

yesterday.” I have to yell for him to hear me.
    He turns the vacuum off and looks uncertainly around the room, apparently unwilling to accept that the carpet is clean enough. His face looks haggard and thin.
    “Can I talk to you for a minute?” I ask. He looks down at the vacuum.
    if you lived here 33

    I take his hand. “Leave it.”
    We walk out into the meditation garden that lies in the courtyard between the reception rooms and the chapel. When Martin and I first got married, the courtyard contained nothing but a patch of lawn and a couple of forlorn-looking benches. No one ever came out here and its only value lay in the fact that it offered a swath of dull green as a view outside the windows. Within a year, I had constructed deep beds around the edges and filled them with so many plants that we get blooms all year long now. Today, the Carolina jasmine blossoms cover the trellis and magenta tulips crowd beneath the chapel windows. At the end of the summer, when the lantana grows huge and the swamp sunflowers begin to bloom, the gar-den becomes a reminder of the lushness of life. Occasionally, I even grow tomatoes. People don’t expect to see anything so wild in the courtyard of a funeral home, but they wander outside anyway. Some mourners will spend hours here.
    Within these walls, the traffic on Market Street becomes a distant hum. I lift my face to the sun and close my eyes, pretending that we have, in fact, ended up at the beach. “What is it?” Martin asks.
    I open my eyes. He looks impatient. Despite yesterday’s rain, the patch of grass is dry and inviting, so I take his hand and make him sit down with me. I keep his hand in mine. “We have a new referral,” I tell him.
    He looks more pleased than I expected, but I haven’t told him everything. “It’s a boy. From Vietnam.”
    The range of expressions that cross his face is brief but vivid: surprise, anxiety, and, then, resolve. “That’s great,” he says.
    “If you can’t do it,” I tell him, “we’ll wait for another one.”
    His tone turns irritable. “Why should it matter where the baby comes from?”
    “It might matter.”
    Martin says, “I don’t have anything against Vietnamese people.”
    I would like to believe him. I’ve read and reread the information that came with this referral. The boy’s name is Nguyen Hai Au. The staff of the Ha Dong Children’s Center outside Hanoi found him in a box near the orphanage entrance when he was a few days old. He’s nearly two now
    and he’s suffered more bad luck in his adoption saga than I have in mine. First, when he was still a tiny baby, a Vietnamese family filled out the paperwork for him and then decided to adopt a girl instead. Six months ago, an American family chose to adopt him, then got pregnant themselves and changed their minds. Most adoptive families want newborns and babies, not a child who has lived long enough to develop fears, and opinions, and memories. Nguyen Hai Au has reached the threshold of the age at which it will become ever more likely that he will spend his entire childhood in an orphanage. He needs a home now. I want Martin to be able to love this child. I say, “I talked about Vietnam with Mai at the Asian grocery. I bought some guidebooks.”
    Martin’s face looks strained, but he’s trying. “The food is delicious there,” he asserts.
    “How about I learn to cook it?”
    “Fantastic.” He lies back against the grass, his eyes closed now. I’m pleased to see him rest, but he doesn’t look relaxed. He looks like someone brooking no distractions.
    I slide my hand beneath his shirt and let it rest on his warm belly. I can remember, early in our marriage, when I found this part of his body so attractive that I would have to put my mouth to it. At moments, I felt like an animal operating on nothing but instinct. Now, though, his body just looks delicate and sad. What are bodies, really, but sadness, bone, and tissue?
    “Well, I guess I’ll tell them