My story unfolded fifteen years ago, though it lingers in my mind as if it only happened last night. The memory shimmers in my sleep like lamp light through mist. A little girl at the orphanage stared deep into my soul with those unsettling green eyes of hersa gaze that lingered for what felt like hours before she suddenly blurted, Do you have a daughter?
Taken aback, I replied, No, I dont.
She drew in a long, dreamy breath and looked away, her face clouded with a sorrow so thick it seemed to tint the air. Wouldnt you like to? she whispered, as though speaking to someone inside a snow globe. Before I could find solid ground in my thoughts, she addedher voice light and strange, I could be your daughter, you know. If youd want me
My head reeled, flitting from memory to fantasy and back. I already had a sontwenty years old now, tall and grown. I wasnt looking for another child, but her words haunted the dusty corners of my heart: A daughter would never be superfluous. Her haunting eyes seemed to pull me into a world Id almost forgotten.
I had always dreamed, in the quietest part of myself, of a daughtera tiny lady to dress in ribbons and frills from the shops in Bath, to play with dolls, swap beads and imaginary crowns, giggle as we shared borrowed lipstick in front of the mirror; tea parties and secretive little-girl games. But it had always been only a wish, eclipsed by duty and the passage of years. Now, standing in the echoing hall of the orphanage, English rain ticking down the leaded windows, I thought: Im too old for this. A daughter was a secret wish, not a new reality. But she kept looking at me. I said, almost not meaning to, Of course I would like a daughter.
She threw her arms around me thenas if the whole of her lost world was being pressed into my back by her hug. In that wordless grip, she gave me all the love shed stored up since shed been brought to this place. Her name was Emily, she was five, and shed arrived at the home when she was eighteen months after her parents and five others vanished in a collision on a night thick with fog outside Bristol. Since then, Emily had spun dreams of family in her restless sleep, but the wheel of fate had kept her waiting, longer and longer, through new faces and old wallpaper.
You cant begin to imagine the wild glee in her voice as she whispered the names of each new family member to herself, repeating them until they became a magic spell. She bewitched everyone instantly, charming my aunts and cousins and my somber father with her generous smile. My husband, at first sceptical, was toppled within a sigh; before a week passed, Emily was calling us Mum and Dad, and he couldnt imagine her gone.
Everything came so naturally to Emily; she danced through her new life, matching her classmates note for note. On her very first day in Year One, her teachers remarked on the unearthly cleverness in her answers, the sharpness of her wita little philosopher in a gingham dress. These days, her favourite pastime is to scrawl wild little verses all over her exercise books. Shes become everyones darling, and every evening, just before waking, I thank my lucky stars I visited that odd, echoing orphanage on that ghostly morning in the heart of Wiltshire.
