A Southern Girl by John Warley

marriage did not survive their first winter in Korea, as her wealthy parents had predicted. I was told her ex-husband, Anthony Stockdale, remained bitter over an evaluation from his commanding officer at Ft. Bragg. He drank too much and he blamed Faith because he said she did not love the military and did not do enough to help him become a general. It was not the military she did not love, but rather him. His tour ended at the officers’ club in an incident involving a captain’s wife and a scuffle in the parking lot. By then Faith had resolved to leave him, to stay in this strange country, and to learn its language. Her grandfather’s trust fund eased her transition to that of a single woman determined to prove to the people back in Connecticut that Choate and Vassar had been worth their investment.
    Open Arms approached Faith on her forty-first birthday, a coincidence she took as a good omen. In the fourteen years she has worked here, shediscovered much about herself. For instance, she realized with some embarrassment but no regret that her ex-husband had just cause to criticize her lack of commitment to his ambition. She also found within herself skills at organization and implementation that exceeded her own assessment of her abilities. My mentor said that on nights when Faith entertained herself with a book and a glass of sherry in front of a fire, she occasionally thought of her former husband and concluded that she stood the better chance of becoming a general.
    Faith’s career with Open Arms had been blemished by just two incidents, one minor. That incident, the minor one, caused only temporary embarrassment when a precocious three-year-old improbably escaped from a wristband identifying him as an adoptee who needed to be put on the bus, then the plane, for passage to America. The adopting parents stood expectantly at the airport gate while families around them greeted their new arrivals and the escape artist slept in Seoul. Faith, red-faced, made profuse apologies, offered to pay the child’s travel expenses from her own pocket, and ordered the child put on the next available flight.
    The other incident could not be remedied, by Faith or anyone else. Sohn was a bright-eyed toddler adopted by the Saunders, a couple in Nebraska who had no children. Sohn died within a month of her arrival in the home of parents who, in that short span of days, had made her the focus of their universe. When an autopsy disclosed a congenitally deformed heart valve, two doctors in Lincoln opined that the defect was detectable by routine x-ray, and that Open Arms’ failure to diagnose an evident flaw had caused needless grief.
    Open Arms anticipated a lawsuit, but the again-childless couple did not believe in compounding their pain by attempting to fill a human void with money. Faith’s investigation revealed that Sohn had, in fact, been x-rayed, but a blur had obscured the valve at the critical point of focus and the doctor had neglected to order another, assuming the best when the history of that luckless child dictated assuming the worst. Faith delicately approached the Saunders about another child, but they declined.
    I usually looked forward to these briefings, but I approached this one conscious of a moral dilemma. Soo Yun’s surgery, a mere whisper to the shouts of the scars, had come after her dossier had been forwarded. Open Arms’ policy required in such instances a “Medical Alert” be issued and forwarded without delay to the recipient of the dossier. Suchprompt notifications of altered status preserved the agency’s reputation for integrity in a business plagued by a history of lies, half truths and deceptions.
    But in my experience, such Alerts were nearly always fatal to the child’s hopes. The great distance between Korea and America forced prospective parents to rely solely on the information provided by Korean authorities through the agency. The Medical Alert bulletins screamed “trouble,” and despite artful