Alice crosses her arms over her chest.
“Alice, there’s something else. I was going to call you in a couple of days. It turns out we have compelling reason to file a motion to vacate this adoption.” She watches Alice carefully as she says this. “Someone has come to me asking that I help locate a missing relative who could be Turtle.”
She continues to look Alice in the eye.
“Oh,” Alice says, feeling her heart pound.
“You didn’t know about this?”
Alice’s mouth feels dry. “No. Nobody would think to tell me about it. Sugar wouldn’t, nor anybody, because there isn’t a soul except you that knows what I’m here for.”
“I see.” Annawake looks back at her hands. “Well, we don’t know for sure. All we have to go on really is the child’s age, and the circumstances of her being removed from the family.
The child they’re looking for might be someone else entirely.
But to tell you the truth, I think it’s likely to be Turtle. I have grounds enough to subpoena Taylor and require her to bring the child here for identification.”
Alice stares at the flat river where upside-down trees are dancing and cattails reach down toward the blue sky below them. There is a whole, earnest upside-down world around her feet.
“I thought you already told her she had to come here with Turtle.”
“No. I suggested it, but I haven’t filed the motion yet. What I’d like most is for Taylor to go ahead and do the right thing on her own. For the good of the child, I’d like to handle this with a minimum of antagonism.”
“Well, Taylor’s already done antagonized. She’s living on the lam. That’s the truth. I have to wait for her to call me. I don’t even know what state she’s in.”
Annawake shakes her head slowly. “I keep thinking there has to be a way to explain this so it doesn’t sound to you like we just want to tear a baby from a mother’s arms.”
“Well, what else is it?”
Annawake looks thoughtful. “Do you remember that sur-rogate baby case a few years back? Where the woman that gave birth to the baby wanted to keep it? But the judge awarded custody to the biological father and his wife.”
“That made me mad! I never did understand it.”
“I’ll tell you what decided it. I read that case. The biological father stood up and told the jury his family history. He’d lost everybody, every single relative, in concentration camps during World War II. That baby was the last of his family’s genes, and he was desperate to keep her so he could tell her about the people she came from.” Annawake looks sideways at Alice. “That’s us. Our tribe. We’ve been through a holo-caust as devastating as what happened to the Jews, and we need to keep what’s left of our family together.”
Alice watches the water, where dozens of minnows have congregated around her calves. They wriggle their tiny bodies violently through the water, chasing each other away, fighting over the privilege of nibbling at the hairs on her legs. It feels oddly pleasant to be kissed by little jealous fish.
“You think I’m overstating the case?” Annawake asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Have you ever read about the Trail of Tears?”
“I heard of it. I don’t know the story, though.”
“It happened in 1838. We were forced out of our homelands in the southern Appalachians. North Carolina, Tennes-see, around there. All our stories are set in those mountains, because we’d lived there since the beginning, until European immigrants decided our prior claim to the land was interfer-ing with their farming. So the army knocked on our doors one morning, stole the crockery and the food supplies and then burned down the houses and took everybody into detention camps. Families were split up, nobody knew what was going on. The idea was to march everybody west to a worthless piece of land nobody else would ever want.”
“They walked?” Alice asks. “I’d have thought at least they would take them on the train.”
Annawake laughs through her nose. “No, they walked.
Old people, babies, everybody. It was just a wall of people walking and dying. The camps had filthy blankets and slit trenches for bathrooms, covered with flies. The diet was nothing that forest people had ever eaten before, maggoty meal and salted pork, so everybody had diarrhea, and malaria from the mosquitoes along the river, because it was summer.
The tribal elders begged the government to wait a few months until fall, so more people might survive the trip, but they wouldn’t wait. There was smallpox, and just exhaustion.