Lovely Lady Liberty
They don't talk about kids.
They fall in love all over again. They move in together in a house the pick together on a Santa Monica beach, they wake up in the same bed every morning, fight over the paper and go to the philharmonic sometimes. They cook and eat and laugh and argue, and eventually, they get married. But they don't talk about having kids. Danny knows better then to ask, sort of, because a pretty big part of him is still afraid he's going to say the wrong thing, back her into a corner, and then the card house of this wonderful, unbelievably wonderful life they've built in the past year is going to be blown down by Hurricane CJ running for the hills. He's not about to risk that, even though he wants a family with her. Her brothers send their kids over for two weeks in the summer, and he watches her build a sand Mount Rushmore with eight-year-old Nicklaus and bake cookies with six-year-old Louise, his heart aches with longing. But he keeps his mouth tightly shut. She needs to want this. She will, one day, and then she can bring it up, and until then- until then, Danny Concannon knows better then to ask.
On a wet Wednesday night in late October, while she's spending a few weeks in Africa doing research work for the Hollice Trust and he's planning for the Politics and Media class he teaches at UCLA and wondering how it's possible for him to miss her this much, the phone rings.
And it's her. The phone line is terrible, and he's not sure where she is or what time it is there, but her voice sounds struck and agitated, but terribly excited alike.
And he knows, somehow, that their life is about to take a pretty remarkable turn.
--
"So, Buddy, have you thought about what you want to be for Halloween this year?"
Seven-year-old Amal Concannon's face lights up as she hastily swallows her Cheerios and beams at her Dad, who looks up from the Sunday section of the New York Times with an amused look on his face. "Uh-huh! I'm gonna be the Statue of Liberty!"
Danny laughs. "Yeah?"
Amal nods eagerly. "Yeah! We saw her when we went to New York to visit Huck and Molly!"
Danny nods, smiling at his daughter's never-ceasing love for exclamation points. "You liked her a lot, didn't you?"
"Yup," Amal nods, suddenly serious as she lowers her gaze to her remaining cheerios. "Cause she's got the American cookbook."
"The cookbook?"
"Like in the song, Daddy. Lovely Lady Liberty, with her book of recipes, and the finest one she's got, is the Great American Melting Pot," Amal sings, happily.
"Oh. That song." Danny makes a mental note to write Josh and Donna a very, very angry email for thinking that the Schoolhouse Rock Collector's Edition DVD would be a fun birthday present for his daughter. "You really like that one, huh?"
"Yup. It's my favorite one. 'Cause it says everybody belongs here, no matter where they came from." There's something in the way she's turning her cereal into an unrecognizable mush that makes him sense that this is something that's been bothering her lately. Wishing CJ was around, he pats his lap. "What's on your mind, Princess?"
Amal scrambles out of her chair and into her father's lap, shifting around to face him, but playing with the buttons of his shirt rather than looking at him. "Do I melt right in? Like in the song?"
"Do you melt…?" He scrunches up his forehead. "What do you mean, sweetie?"
"In the song, it goes that you jump right in, no matter where your from or what you look like," she explains. "I want to melt right. 'Cause… I don't look like you and Mommy. I didn't grow in Mommy's tummy. I wasn't born here. I'm like an immigrant. So I need to melt in."
Danny nods slwoly. They've talked about this best you can with a four, five, six-year-old. "That's true. You're not really an immigrant though, because we're your parents, and we're Americans, so-"
"But Daaaaddy, that's it," she points out, looking up at him seriously. He looks right back, at her inkly-black lashes and bright, espresso-colored eyes, her dark skin and fine features. She's so beautiful. "You and Mommy, you're American. But I'm American and something else. African, right?"
"Yeah. Remember, we showed you pictures of the village where you were born?"
She nods. He can sense that she's trying to wrap her mind around this thing, this thing that's so huge that he's barely even wrapped his mind around it, and he decides to give her a lifeline. If this is an easy way out, so sue him, but he wants his kid to be happy and to feel like she belongs, because she does. Of course she does. "Hey, Amal. When Huck and Molly took you to go see the Statue of Liberty, did you see the poem?"
Amal nods. "But I don't remember how it goes."
He clears his thorat. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free-"
"Daaaaadddy, I don't know what that means," Amal giggles.
"It's an invitation," he explains. "The immigrants in the song, they would sail over from Europe and the first thing they would see would be the Statue of Liberty with the poem, and it means that everyone is welcome. Poor people, sick people, people who don't have anything else in the world- they were all welcome in America." Every pore of his liberal East Coast education is screaming, telling him not to instill this mind-boggling nonsense in his helpless child, that she'll be devastated and disgusted both with him and her country a few years from now, when she's old enough to go to the Ellis Island museum and learn about families torn apart and people sent back home, but he cannot help himself.
"Everyone's welcome." Amal smiles, catching on quickly, because she's that smart.. "Like me! I came here, and I was welcome, even though I was tiny and poor and sick, right?" Because she's seen baby pictures, seen pictures of her baby self lying next to her new-born cousin, and being nearly the same size even though she's seven months older. And she's seen pictures of her baptism, when two presidents and a village worth of friends, family and fairy godmothers came to welcome her to America. She's heard the story of how happy everyone was, she's heard it from her Granny Ellen, and from Josh, who tells it like it's a super funny story until Donna punches his side and takes over, and from Jed President, who uses a lot of big words she doesn't understand and tells her story like it's something out of the bible.
"Yeah," he smiles, tapping her nose. "Just like that. Now listen, honey. Don't worry about melting, or the cookbook, or about fitting in. You don't look like us, but you've got your Mom's brains and my charm -don't tell her I said that- and you fit in perfectly. Look." He points at the way her hand just fits in the palm of his.
Amal smiles, and he hates to see that there's relief there. "How do I melt in, though?"
Danny laughs. "Listen to you. You don't have to melt in anywhere. You're as American as you could be- it doesn't matter that you weren't born here. You say the Pledge of Allegiance-"
"We don't!"
"Well, okay, you don't, because you're going to some flimsy hippie school, but you could, in theory, say the Pledge of Allegiance in school every morning. You sing along as loud as anyone when they play the anthem at Lakers games. You know all 50 States by heart, and you would live off Peanut Butter and Jelly if we let you. I think you've done enough melting for one lifetime." He presses a kiss on her forehead. "Don't worry about this anymore, okay?"
Amal sighs, cuddling up in his arms. "Okay."
"And if you do, talk to me and Mommy about it."
"Okay." She grins up at him. "Daddy?"
"Yeah?"
"Can we sing the Presidents song?" That's something that's not theirs, a gift from that far-off place she brought along with her, into their house, and made totally her own: her love for music, and her ability to hold a tune that far outranks the abilities of either parent. She sings constantly, under her breath and at the top of her lungs, and taps rhythms he could never even catch on the tabletop with her hands without even knowing she's doing it; she takes piano and loves it.
"I'm going to kill Josh and Donna, you know."
"Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison-" Amal trills, and Danny laughs as she elbows him in the side, gesturing for him to join in.
--
"Is it just me or does she look… tacky?" CJ whispers to him as they watch her daughter in her full Lady Liberty splendor parade up and down the hallway, trying to catch her reflection from different angles.
"She does not!" He protests, wrapping his arms around her.
"She's wearing styrofoam on her head."
"It suits her," he insists.
"I am so telling her you said that." When he opens his mouth to retaliate, she laughs, easily slipping into his embrace completely. "Yeah, yeah, go all protective Daddy on me." After a pause, she adds, "God. Look at her."
"I know."
"I mean do you remember…"
"I do."
"Weighed about the same as a package of brownie mix, and just looked at you with those sad eyes, do you remember?"
"I do." They both stand there for a moment, both remembering the things that seem like a distant and surreal nightmare, as they watch their spunky motormouth daughter with her lanky frame and bright, coffee-brown eyes prance and skip and run into the kitchen and turn up the radio because Mamma Mia just came on, and she loves, loves, loves ABBA to a point where both parents just want to die of the sheer humiliation. CJ looses it completely as she watches their daughter shimmy and sing along to "my-my how can I resist you", and turns her face into his shoulders to hide her not-so-kind laughter.
Apart from those lashes, long and tangled and beautiful, she bares almost no resemblance to the baby they met in an orphanage in Ethiopia seven years ago. The hollow convex curve of her tiny stomach, those spindly arms, the stoic looks in her eyes- all gone. Gone, together with the whispy hair and love for raspberries blown on her stomach, with the wailing in the middle of the night and the near constant stomach colics for the first few months of their lives together, and the exhausted why-did-we-think-about-doing-this-to-ourselves look on CJ's face, the fine fingers reaching clumsily for his nose as he bounced her on his lap, her refusal to fall asleep without a song. Gone, too, are the pink boots and subsequent obsession with puddles and earth worms from her early toddler years, her conviction of having monsters living under her bed that only go away when Mommy pulls a particularly ridiculous grimace at them, Where The Wild Things Are five nights out of seven and being able to sing along with the radio before she could even talk properly. Gone is the little hand that refused to let go of his on her first day of preschool and didn't even wave a goodbye on the second before joining the other kids in a circle-singing ritual she immediately understood, though he didn't. She still loves music, she still asks more questions than both of them can handle, and, by now, answers most of them herself. So he never got to feel her kicks against her mother's stomach, so he missed out on CJ pratically breaking his fingers mid-contraction and telling him she was never having sex with him again. It doesn't matter. It never did.
"Do you know something?" Danny says, watching his daughter grab her flashlight-posing-as-torch and the papier-mâché cookbook and yelling for parents to come on lest they be late for trick-or-treating, "That? That was hands down the best idea you ever had."
CJ, recovered from her fit of hilarity, beams at him as she watches her over his shoulder. "I know, I'm still pretty proud of that one myself."
"Calling me, in the middle of the night-"
"-it was not the middle of the night!"
"… being all, 'Danny, I've had an epiphany'…"
"I did not say that!"
"… and basically cajoled me into calling that awful lawyer -oh, you don't get to say she wasn't awful, I was the one dealing with her most of the time- and filling out fifty million forms and-"
"...and was it worth it, Mr. Concannon?"
He beams at her. "Oh, it most certainly was." Amal sticks her head back inside the front door, an impatient crease on her forehead: "Are you guys, like, coming or what?"
Danny bursts out laughing and tries to tackle her into a hug, but, with a shriek of pleasure she sneaks away from him, skipping outside on to the rainy street, They follow their daughter into the wet October night, not unlike the one when the idea of her, the possibility of her, first entered his life.