Wildflowers (14 page)

Alissa didn’t sit. She stood beside the door. Her countenance remained steady and peaceful. “I had some pretty wild teenage years. By the time I was sixteen, I had lived on air force bases around the world. I think I told you that before.”

“Your father was an air force pilot, wasn’t he?” Genevieve asked.

Alissa nodded.

“So he was never home,” Genevieve surmised.

Alissa nodded again. “I was an only child, and my mom spent more time drinking than she spent with me.”

Genevieve didn’t blink. She understood what it was like to be an only child. She knew what it was like to live in a pilot’s home. Fortunately, she hadn’t turned to alcohol in her stretches of loneliness.

“I was so full of anger.” Alissa sighed. “No one knew it because it didn’t show on the outside. But after my dad died, my heart was stone. I’m not sure exactly why, but my mom decided she and I should spend the summer at a beach house in southern California. She had been to Newport Beach when she was a teenager, and I guess she wanted to relive happier memories or something.

“I was seventeen that summer. When I look back now, I see that I was pretty cold, hard, and empty. Of course, at the time I didn’t realize it. I met this guy on the beach. He was cute. Daring. Younger than me.” Alissa shrugged. “I had nothing to lose, you know? I had no feelings left for anything or anyone. Shawn and I had a few intense days together, and then I couldn’t stand the thought of him. I remember going to a party at his house one night and taking off with another guy right away because I didn’t want to see Shawn.”

Genevieve had never heard Alissa talk about her past this much before. She was surprised at how open Alissa was. It seemed she was different. More at peace, even with such painful memories.

“Shawn died the night of that party. He was stoned and
tried to bodysurf near the jetty. I remember feeling like this fortress I had built around my heart was beginning to crumble. For the first time, I think I was worried about what God might think of me. If I died, I was worried about what God would do with me.

“We left Newport Beach right after that. Not because of Shawn, but because my mom had gone overboard again with her drinking and became violent. I was frightened and called the police. Right after that I flew back to Boston where I moved in with my grandmother. I was living with her when I found out I was pregnant.” Alissa shook her head. “If you can imagine, there I was, living with my proper Bostonian grandmother; my father was dead, my mother was in rehab, and I was carrying the child of a guy I had only spent a few days with before he died. Talk about hitting rock bottom.”

“Alissa,” Genevieve said sympathetically, “you’ve been through so much.”

Alissa nodded silently. “It took a lot before God got my attention. We can be stubborn sometimes, can’t we?”

Genevieve didn’t answer. She clenched her teeth, determined not to show any of the stubborn bitterness she knew was stuffed down deep inside her.

“You know what?” Alissa said. “I want to show you something.”

G
enevieve followed Alissa to the room at the end of the hallway that had been converted into an office for her Wing and a Prayer Travel Agency. Alissa seemed so calm and composed even in the midst of her incredible story. She reached for an ornately decorated wooden box on one of the bookshelves and pulled it down.

“Some of my favorite customers from Pasadena brought this box for me from Italy,” Alissa said. “Do you remember my ever telling you about Chet and Rosie?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe.”

“Well, they have quite a story. They are the cutest, most in-love couple I’ve ever known. They taught me so much about romantically loving my husband for the rest of my life. The two of them must be in their eighties now, but they still hold hands and whisper little love messages in each other’s ears.”

Alissa laughed. “Except the last time we saw them, they were both getting so hard of hearing that even when they thought they were whispering sweet nothings, everyone in the room could hear them.”

Lifting the lid of the beautifully crafted box, Alissa removed a small stack of folded papers. “These letters changed my life. It’s possible that they even saved my life. I’ve read them a hundred times. Especially this one.” She lifted what looked like about five sheets of ordinary notebook paper that had been folded four times.

“This one is from a guy named Todd. He was one of Shawn’s closest friends, and Todd was a strong Christian. Even at sixteen he had an incredible understanding about God. The other letters are from a girl named Christy. I met her on the beach the same summer I met Shawn and Todd. Christy was the first person who ever explained to me how to become a Christian. She was pretty shy in person, but in these letters she said what she felt and what she believed. These words changed everything.”

“That’s amazing.” Part of Genevieve wanted to reach for the stack of letters, sit in a quiet corner, and read them. But they were Alissa’s private letters, and she wasn’t offering to share them.

“One of these letters actually prompted me to give Shawna up for adoption. I was going to try to raise her on my own, but giving her over to the couple who took her was definitely the right thing to do. I remember the day I took Shawna to the legal offices and signed the papers. The couple held her in their arms and prayed aloud, right in front of the
lawyers and everyone. They thanked God for her. I wasn’t a Christian yet, and I thought they were gutsy to do that. But when Brad and I went to the orphanage in Basel to get our girls, we did the same thing.”

“Basel?” Genevieve asked. “I thought the girls were from Romania.”

“They are. They had been transferred to a large orphanage in Basel. That’s where we went to pick them up.” Alissa put the box of letters back on the shelf and reached for a photo in a large frame from off her desk.

“I hadn’t realized that you and Brad went to Switzerland,” Genevieve said. “You knew that I grew up in Zurich, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I knew that. Brad said you were from Lucerne, but I thought it was Zurich. We had a wonderful time in Basel. Short but very sweet.” Alissa held up the photo for Genevieve to see. “This is what I wanted to show you.”

Genevieve smiled. Alissa and Brad apparently were in a hallway at the Basel orphanage. Each of them held one of the girls while receiving a huge hug around the neck. The look of tearful joy on their faces was priceless. Whoever took the photo certainly captured just the right moment.

“This is the amazing part.” Alissa pointed to something else in the photo. “After we got home and had this enlarged, I noticed we were standing right up against the wall. Do you see this picture? It was hanging on the wall, but I didn’t notice it when we were there.”

“It’s too bad you were so close to the picture,” Genevieve said. “The way you and Brad are standing, it almost looks as
if the young woman in the picture is standing in between the two of you.”

“Exactly,” Alissa said. “But the strangest part is that the young woman in the picture looks so much like Christy, the girl I was telling you about.”

Genevieve looked closely. Since the photo was so large, it was easy to see the face of the young woman on the wall. She was bent over one of the children from the orphanage who appeared to be working on some sort of embroidery or sewing. The young woman had looked up with an open-hearted expression that made it appear as if she were smiling her warm blessing on the new parents.

“That’s amazing,” Genevieve said. “It’s angled just right, isn’t it?”

Alissa nodded and took the picture back to stare at it again. “I told Brad I wanted to e-mail the Basel orphanage and ask if by any chance the young woman in the picture was named Christy Miller. It would be so fitting for her to be there at that moment, smiling on us when we got our daughters. But I didn’t e-mail them because Brad kept teasing me, saying I was looking for an angel behind every bush.”

Genevieve laughed. “Did your friend Christy ever go to Switzerland?”

“I have no idea. Christy and I lost contact with each other years ago.”

“Did you lose contact with Todd also?”

“Yes. I always hoped the two of them would end up together.” Alissa sighed and lifted her chin as she glanced
out the window. “I guess I also hoped for a long time that I could redo something of my stormy past. But we can’t go back, can we? After we get our hearts right with God, we can only go on and be thankful for what we have.”

“And now you have two beautiful daughters.” Genevieve fished for something to say. She knew that probably wasn’t what Alissa meant about redoing her stormy past, but it was the first thing that came to her mind. It also kept the topic on Alissa and didn’t leave room for Genevieve to think about how hard she had tried to convince herself that she and Steven couldn’t go back and do anything about the lost inheritance money.

“Yes, I have two daughters in my everyday life. They are a beautiful gift from God.” Alissa pressed her lips into a wobbly smile and met Genevieve’s gaze. “But I will always have three daughters in my heart.”

A space of silence encompassed the two women, as Genevieve tried to take in what it must have meant for Alissa to give up her firstborn daughter for someone else to raise.

As if Alissa could predict the route Genevieve’s thoughts were going, she offered, “I think that something deep inside of me needed to respond to God when Brad and I found out about Beth and Ami. I needed to adopt these girls perhaps more than Brad did.”

“I don’t know about that. Your husband is about the most attentive, adoring father around.”

“He is,” Alissa agreed. “He was so ready to have kids. For me, it was more than just the longing to start a family. Maybe it’s because I understood the other side of adoption. Do you
know what I mean? I knew how important it was for a mother to know someone else was eager to love and care for her daughter when she wasn’t able to fulfill that role. I wanted to be to Beth and Ami’s mother what Shawna’s adoptive mother had been to me so many years ago in that lawyer’s office.”

“You are amazing, Alissa.” Genevieve took in the young woman standing beside her. “You have such deep understanding and such a gentleness about you. I’ve never seen you so at peace. These are huge issues. This is all life changing for you and Brad.”

“I know,” Alissa said. “God has been working in my life. I had a lot to work through. The biggest step for me was learning how to forgive from my heart.”

Just then the sound of a little girl’s wail was heard followed by a slamming door.

“Mom,” Mallory cried out. “Mom, where are you?”

Alissa and Genevieve rushed to the kitchen. Mallory stood by the sink, running cold water over Ami’s hand.

“She got a little cut on her finger,” Mallory said. “She wasn’t crying until she saw the blood. Then she started to wail.”

“Let me see it, Ami,” Alissa said.

Ami held out her small hand. Both the blood and the cut were barely visible.

“Would you like a Band-Aid?” Alissa opened the cupboard and pulled out an unopened box. “I don’t think the girls saw Band-Aids like this at the orphanage. I’ve gone through a whole box during the past two weeks. They wear them like badges of honor or something.”

Alissa wrapped the bright orange strip around Ami’s index finger, and a smile came to Ami’s tear-streaked face.

“Is your owie all better, Ami?” Mallory took her young charge back into her arms. “Owie, Ami? Is it gone now?”

“Owie-Ami,” the little girl answered.

They all laughed.

“Yes,” Alissa said, “you are my Owie-Ami. You get at least a bump or bruise a day, don’t you?”

“You’re not Owie-Ami,” Mallory said. “Your name is Ami. What’s my name? Do you remember? What’s my name? Can you say, ‘Ma-lo-ree’?”

“Ree,” Ami said proudly. “Ree.”

Mallory laughed. “Okay, you can call me Ree for now.

Do you want to go back outside to swing?”

“Sing,” Ami repeated. “Sing.”

“Not sing. Swing. Come on, let’s go swing.”

“Sing,” Ami said.

The two of them exited the kitchen, and Alissa reached for an oven mitt to check on the chicken. “Mallory’s last day of school is tomorrow, right?”

“Yes.”

“I wonder if I could hire her this summer to come over a few times a week to play with the girls and to work on their English? Ami seems to copy everything Mallory says. She doesn’t do that with Brad and me.”

Genevieve looked out the kitchen window and watched both her daughters playing with Alissa’s little girls. “I don’t think you’ll have to pay either of my girls to come over here any time you want them. They both seem to enjoy having
a new little sister to be with.”

“I’ll work something out with them.” Alissa motioned toward the lemonade pitcher. “Would you mind carrying that outside along with those plastic glasses? We’re just about ready to eat.”

Genevieve helped Alissa set up their summer supper on the patio. The group joined hands as they stood in a circle, and Brad prayed for them. Genevieve felt herself tearing up. This was the closeness she had hoped to experience when she had moved to Glenbrooke. But instead she had closed off herself and kept too busy to be included in quiet circles like this.