Love in the Driest Season

An excerpt from Neely Tucker's memoir.

I wandered back over toward the door and down by the windows. There were four cribs. The only one that held a child was the second one. I reached under the clothes and picked up the infant, looking at the card on the wall to get her name.

“Chipo,” I said.

She was wrapped in a bundle of white cloths. She had dark brown eyes and delicately curled eyelashes that were so long she seemed to blink in slow motion. She kept three fingers of her right hand in her mouth. Her toes looked like little erasers on the ends of miniature pencils. She seemed to weigh nothing at all. I tickled her chin. Nothing. “Hey, pretty girl,” I whispered. She blinked. I playfully bumped the end of her nose with mine. She blinked again. Then she reached out with her left hand and, in a wobbling gesture, wrapped it around my little finger.

It was difficult to say what happened to me then. I had reported in a lot of places a lot worse than this one. I once spent the better part of a day in a slum hospital in Baghdad, a desperate place where the temperature soared above 120 degrees, the infants subsisted on less than 50 calories a day, there was no medicine, and a 52-day-old infant named Maram Hassan lay on a feed sack that passed for a bed sheet. She was starving to death, even as her mother waved flies away from her mouth and eyes. I held the child and talked to her mother, and wrote a story about the child’s doomed fate. I didn’t lose sleep over it. Nor had I worried about Esmet, a six-day-old infant in northern Bosnia whom I held briefly in a refugee camp. Beset by the subzero temperature, malnutrition, and the violence of the war, his mother had not bothered to remember his name.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s going to be dead in a few days.”

I handed the dying child back to her and filed a story about them that night. It was 800 words and no big deal. Before dawn the next morning, heading out in a driving snowstorm, John Pomfret, my colleague from the Washington Post, and I were driving back to Sarajevo, munching chocolate bars and bellowing songs along with the tape deck to stay awake.

These were two among dozens, if not hundreds, of similar experiences in dozens of countries across the years. Developing a detachment from the suffering you witness and write about is a professional necessity, of course, but it can also become a job hazard of sorts. You can just keep going for so many years, not allowing yourself to feel anything, until you arrive at a place where your emotional connections have gone dark, lights out, all blown fuses that don’t work anymore. It’s not like you know when it happens. It’s a steady erosion that diminishes your heart, drop by drop, bit by bit.

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Keep moving, I had told myself time and again. Don’t think. But when the child’s fingers closed over mine, some long-forgotten part of me seemed to stir. I didn’t know what it was. I just felt something. “Hey, baby, come here,” I called to Vita. “Lookit this little pumkin.”

Vita took her in her arms, rocking her, as enchanted as I was. She asked the staff about this little newborn. “Oh, Chipo,” they said. “She’s not a newborn. She’s more than three months old.” They recounted the story of her discovery and subsequent hospitalizations. They said she had a cold and was not feeling well.

She seemed to doze after a time, and Vita lowered her back into her crib. We were so taken with the children that we wound up staying for the afternoon.

We helped spoonfeed the other infants at noon and helped put them down for naps. With 16 children in such a small area, it seemed at least one was always crying, thus waking the infant in the next crib, and so on, until it went around the room like a chain of dominoes. We also noticed, as the day wore on, that the veneer of the place was thinner than a bad coat of paint.

Vita had gone to change one child with a young clinic worker, alarmed at the foul-smelling diarrhea. The child was not cleaned properly, and another washcloth, what passed for a diaper, was pinned on. The windows had no screens or screens filled with ragged holes. Flies settled onto children, the damp spots around their eyes and noses, the mush meal that was lunch. The adjacent kitchen was rusted. It had no hot water and no refrigerator. Uncovered baby formula sat on the counter, drawing more flies.

I spent most of the afternoon on the play mat with the infants, rattling toys, changing the occasional diaper—this astounded the all-female staff—but more and more often, I found myself drawn back to the little girl who had been abandoned the day she was born. “She’s so tiny,” Vita said, looking down into the crib.

I motioned to her to come outside. We stood in the empty playground, leaning against the red and yellow swing set. The sun was out, and the day was breezy.

“I like that little bitty one, Chipo,” I said, smiling.

Vita nodded. “Me too.”

“You want to ask the matron if we can do like Tony said, that program where we take her home for the weekend, maybe be her foster parents?”

“Of course,” Vita said. “I mean, she’s so sick. She’s not going to live without a lot of help.” “True,” I said, taking a deep breath, “but she may not anyway. I was talking to Mrs. Mesikano, the director. You know how many infants they’ve lost this year? Sixteen.”

Vita mouthed the number back at me. “Sixteen? She’s going to die if we don’t do something. She is, I know it.” Her face had a narrow tic by the corner of her mouth, and she had tears in the corner of her eyes, just that quick.

I found myself impatient, if not a trifle exasperated. Vita was a realist, but she had not been traipsing around refugee camps for the past several years. A lot of adorable little kids die, I was thinking, regardless of what we or anybody else does about it.

“And she may not make it anyway, sweetheart. Don’t get me wrong—I think she’s adorable. I think she’s the most gorgeous child in the sub-Sahara. I’m all for taking her home for as long as we can. But look at where you’re standing and let’s do the math. We are in Zimbabwe, ground zero of the deadliest epidemic known to mankind. We are at an orphanage in a high-density township. If AIDS were a bomb dropped out of an airplane, it would hit us on the head. This child is grossly malnourished, she has respiratory problems, she has little or no responses. I’ve picked grapefruit that weigh more than she does. The odds of her being infected with HIV, I would guess, run about 70 to 80 percent. Vegas wouldn’t put odds on her making it 12 months.”

“There are times,” Vita said coldly, “when you can be such a son of a bitch.”

“I’m having this conversation now so we don’t have it later on,” I hissed, suddenly angry. “I am not going to take this child home for weekends and then stop it if she’s got AIDS. I may be a son of a bitch, but I will not—under any goddamned circumstance—take this child home and then bring her back here because we don’t have the guts to watch her die.”

Vita turned away. She had had two miscarriages during her first marriage. The doctor had said the damage from those made it impossible for her to ever carry a child to term. That was why we couldn’t have children. It was something I knew about when we got married. I didn’t care then and I didn’t care now. I had thought we might adopt. But then Tony’s message at dinner shot down those hopes, the misery of the orphanages brought back unpleasant memories, the odds of the young girl were not making things better, and now the sunlight showed tears glistening on Vita’s face. I softened my tone, trying to remember that I wasn’t working in some refugee camp, where emotions were something that had to be curtailed.

“Listen, I just want you to think about what it would do to you, and to us, to get attached to a special-needs child,” I said. “Yesterday we were thinking about bringing a few needy kids over for a few weekends. Maybe even fostering. Yeah, hey, fostering, why not? We can still do that with any child we’ve met. But this, with this little girl, is very serious. I meant what I said. I will not take her home and then let her be abandoned a second time.”

“And what makes you think,” Vita said, brushing past me, “that you’re the only one?”

Reprinted from Love in the Driest Season, by Neely Tucker. Copyright © 2004 by Neely Tucker. Published by Crown Publishers, a division of Random House, Inc.

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