Choosing to SEE - Mary Beth Chapman [43]
Jan was beginning to fall apart, and I wasn’t feeling much better. We were looking at three weeks, minimum, in this SARS-infested ghost town with chilled-out Ashley and tiny, sickly Stevey Joy, who pretty much did nothing but squirm and wriggle and yell and scream.
I finally got up the nerve to call home. Caleb and Will got on the phone. “Mom, we’ve been praying so hard,” Caleb said. “Is Stevey Joy all calm and chilled out?”
“Well,” I said, “uh . . . Ashley is.”
Caleb could hear Stevey Joy screaming bloody murder in the background. “Is that her I hear?” he asked.
“Well, she’s so sick – ” I started.
“Oh, no!” Caleb moaned. “But Mom, we prayed!”
Jan was still convinced we were all going to get SARS and die. At one point – though I didn’t know it at the time – she locked herself in the bathroom and videotaped a pitiful last will and testament message for her family in the event that we never made it home.
Meanwhile, our friend in D.C. had gotten the powers of attorney documents authenticated in Washington. Steven had checked on FedEx. Because of the SARS crisis, the overnight company could take three weeks to deliver a package. Our friend flew to Nashville, got off his plane and handed the papers to Steven in the terminal, and then turned around and flew back to D.C.
By God’s providence, Steven had the following week off, which was pretty unusual. Because he had his visa, he decided to bring the powers of attorney to China himself. So he booked a flight to China and took on a new job as an international adoption courier.
“You wait,” I said to Jan. “I’ll bet you anything that when Steven sees Stevey Joy for the first time and I ask him what pop star she looks like, he’ll say she looks like Phil Collins.”
“There is no way Steven will say Stevey Joy looks like Phil Collins,” Jan responded.
Steven arrived at the hotel late in the evening. I couldn’t believe he was actually there. Stevey Joy was asleep. I took him over to her little crib. He just stood there, staring in wonder at his newest baby daughter.
“What pop star does she look like?” I whispered.
He rolled his eyes at me and then gazed at Stevey Joy carefully for about ten seconds.
“Phil Collins,” he said.
Smile, the adoption consultant, came to meet with us the next day. He was still saying that we’d be in China for three weeks at least.
“At home we can get express passports if we pay extra money,” I told him. “Do you have anything like that here?”
“I don’t know what you talk about,” said Smile in broken English.
“Well,” I said, “usually there are lots of Americans here in Changsha, and that makes a big demand on the passport office and in all the government offices. So of course it makes sense that adoption groups usually need to stay in the province for five days to process everything.
“But because of SARS, there’s no one here. So it seems like there would be less of a wait for us to get the adoption papers signed and the passports processed quickly. Can you see about us getting our passports soon? I mean, we like you and all, but I’d love to go home sooner rather than later.”
Smile stood up. “You ask me to be Tom Cruise!” he said dramatically. “This is Mission Impossible!”
We all looked at each other, trying to figure out if this was Chinese humor or what . . . but we soon found that we had no problems finalizing the adoption papers at the provincial affairs office. They had not shut down yet because of SARS, and that part of the process went smoothly.
After that, Smile left us at the hotel and said, “You wait here, I see what Mission Impossible Man can do about passports!”
Within four hours he was back, holding two Chinese passports for the babies. “Ha!” he said. “I am Tom Cruise!”
We had been in China for only one week. This kind of paperwork turnaround was unheard of. Even an adoption under normal circumstances usually takes ten to twelve days. It was as if SARS