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15 ANN HOOD  Our lives had fallen into a new but now familiar routine. Once again morning meant the bustle of getting kids to school, packing lunches, finding hairbrushes and matching socks. I was still fragile enough to find these ordinary things extraordinary. Sometimes I stood in the basement, my hands pulling warm clothes from the dryer, and paused to marvel at how simple and satisfying this task was: the soft pink shirt, the twisted fairy underwear, my son’s size large T-shirt wrapped around his little sister’s Hanna Andersen striped pajamas. On this morning, the Monday after Thanksgiving, we were running late, as if our overload of turkey and pie still slowed us down. The house was littered with the damp towels and extra linens of too many houseguests. Homework had to be found, backpacks retrieved from under pillows. Exasperated by my slowness, Sam convinced his father to take him to school. “I can’t be late for Algebra,” he grumbled. That left just me and Annabelle, our two-year-old daughter. A year earlier, Sam and Lorne and I had traveled to China to bring her home from an orphanage in Hunan, a squat, bland concrete building overflowing with children. Our house, by comparison, had gone mournfully silent in April of , when our five-year-old daughter Grace died suddenly from a virulent form of strep. Since that warm spring day, our lives had been marked more by what used to be than what could be. Where there used to be four brightly colored Fiestaware plates on the dinner table, sat an awkward three. The backseat of my Passat used to be crowded with kids and dog, crayons and books; after Grace died, Sam sat alone back there, the black seat seemingly endless and empty as he hummed the songs from Oliver!. I used to run, from ballet to swimming, from art class to play rehearsals. Then I was suddenly still, my hands finding comfort in yarn and needles, my foot tapping restlessly while I waited for the clock to Holding a Little Girl’s Hand CH005.qxd 7/15/09 7:29 AM Page 15 16 ANN HOOD finally dip its hands toward the time I could pick up Sam and hear a joke or song, get a sticky hug. Until Annabelle. “Our family is revived,” Sam pronounced in our stuffy hotel room in Changsha as we watched our eleven-month-old daughter—daughter! Did I dare to even use that word again?—grin at us from the bed. Since she was unable to sit up yet, we placed pillows all around her like a princess on a puffy throne. We scattered books and toys, a cornucopia of baby things. What would catch her eye? She had already, immediately, caught our hearts. Back at home, strangers stopped me in the supermarket and on the street. “Your daughter is beautiful,” they said. She was, with her mop of black hair, her Cupid mouth, and dollish face. “Thank you,” I managed. Daughter. I was too afraid to believe that I was indeed the mother of this baby girl. For me, the word daughter was fraught with anxiety, even terror. How easily I had tossed it around with Grace. “My son is eight and my daughter is five,” I would say. “I can’t talk. I need to pick up my daughter at school.” “My daughter,” I would say proudly, and hold out a picture of Grace, a miniature of me with her blond hair and glasses. Then, on that night in April, a doctor looked at me hard and said: “Your daughter is not going to make it.” Within thirty-six hours, my daughter was dead. The word became sharp and painful. Friends uttered it with pride and exasperation about their own daughters as the months passed. And I, daughterless , smiled at the sports trophies and test scores, tried to sympathize with the hurt feelings and temper tantrums of all the daughters out there. Without Grace, hearing little girl stories or watching the proud or even exasperated expressions of mothers made my hollow heart seem even more so. Sometimes as I lay awake at night, I silently practiced the words that I couldn’t bear to say out loud: My daughter is dead. On that Monday after Thanksgiving, after Sam and Lorne left, I urged Annabelle onto the potty and left the bathroom. Her new favorite saying was, “I need privacy,” and that few minutes gave...

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