The Sum of Our Days by Isabel Allende Page B

easy, since the judge had ordered that Jennifer and her companion should not meet the foster mothers or learn where they lived. Fu and Grace would meet me in the parking lot of some mall and give me the child, with diapers, toys, bottles, and the rest of the paraphernalia babies need. I would drive her, in one of the seats I kept in my car for my grandchildren, to City Hall, where I would meet Rebecca and a policewoman—always a different one, though they all had an air of professional boredom. While the uniformed woman watched the door, Rebecca and I waited in a nearby room, enchanted with Sabrina, who had become very beautiful and very alert; she did not miss a single detail. She had caramel-colored skin, the fuzz of a newborn lamb on her head, and the amazing eyes of a houri. Sometimes Jennifer would show up for the meeting, sometimes not. When she did appear, with a bad case of jitters—a fox being chased by hounds—she never stayed more than five or ten minutes. She would pick up her daughter, but then feeling her light in her arms, or hearing her cry, she seemed confounded. “I need a cigarette . . . ,” she’d say, and she would hurry out and often not come back. Rebecca and the police officer would take Sabrina and me back to my car, and I would drive to the parking lot where the two mothers were anxiously waiting. I think that for Jennifer those harried visits must have been a torment; she had lost her daughter, and not even her relief at knowing she was in good hands could console her.
    These strategic appointments had been under way for about five months when Jennifer was again taken to the hospital, this time with an infection in her heart and another in her legs. She showed no signs of alarm, but simply told us that it had happened before. Nothing serious, she insisted, but the doctors were not so sanguine. Fu and Grace decided that they were tired of hiding and that Jenny had the right to know the women who were looking after her daughter. I went with them to the hospital, ignoring legal protocol. “If the social worker finds out, you all will be in a jam,” warned Willie, who thinks like a lawyer and still did not know Rebecca well.
    Jennifer was a pitiable sight; you could count her teeth through the translucent skin of her cheeks, her hair was a tangled doll’s wig, and her hands were blue and the nails black. Her mother was also there, horrified to see her daughter in that state. I think she had accepted the fact that Jennifer would not live much longer, but was hoping at least to reconnect with her before the end. She thought that they would talk and make peace in the hospital—after so many years of hurting each other—but once more her daughter would run away before the medications could take effect. Our difficulties made Willie’s first wife and me very close; she had suffered with her children—both of them were addicted to drugs—and I had lost you, Paula. She had been divorced from Willie for more than twenty years, and both of them had remarried. I don’t think there was any lingering bad feeling, but if there was, the arrival of Sabrina in their lives had redeemed it. The attraction that had brought Willie and her together in their youth had turned to mutual disillusion shortly after their marriage, and had ended ten years later in divorce. Except for their children they had nothing in common.
    During the years they were married, Willie was entirely dedicated to his career, determined to be successful and make money, and his wife felt abandoned and often fell into deep depressions. It was, furthermore, their fate to have lived in the turbulence of the ’60s, when customs were greatly relaxed in this part of the world. Free love was in vogue, couples swapped partners as a form of entertainment, at parties people bathed naked in Jacuzzis, and everyone drank martinis and smoked marijuana, while the children ran wild through the middle