Until at length they came down out of the skies, holding hands, to Cloud-Cuckoo-Land again.

The little country had a social welfare system it was proud of, especially the efforts it made on behalf of mothers and children, and in front of the modern building where Pierce and Roo went first to be greeted and (once again) interviewed and given forms to fill out, there was a great statue of a mother and child. The rules for foreigners adopting the country's abandoned or orphaned children were strict: whenever Pierce and Roo were asked for some further information, or made to vow some vow, or supply some required proof of their intentions or their identities, they were made to think of how many wrong things might happen; had happened no doubt in the past, not so long ago.

They were taken from there to a city orphanage to meet Maria, their prospective girl child. Her mother had died in giving birth to her, their guide said (black hair in a severe bun but her arms soft and plump). Toxemia, Roo said, you can never tell who'll develop it. Roo had admitted to Pierce that it was easier that the child was orphaned rather than abandoned or given up: she wouldn't at least feel guilty about stealing a mother's child, who might one day. Though she did feel kind of guilty, she said, that she felt that way. They drove through the grid of streets and out to the suburbs; their guide, in an English that she pronounced with a ferocious effort at correctness, told them other stories, of how the country's children came to be given up: the common panoply of human griefs and wrongs, poverty and drink and desperation and incompetence. So the country had changed, or wasn't just what they had thought it was before. That's what Pierce said. “Well, of course they've still got troubles,” Roo said. “They always did. All the usual ones. There's nowhere people don't. And this isn't nowhere."

"Just not extra ones."

"Yes."

"War. Tyranny. Displaced persons."

"Yes. That's all."

The place they were taken to—one of many to which the national placement agency was connected—was a Catholic orphanage, but as plain and white and simple as though run by Quakers; nuns in white smocks with only a workmanlike suggestion of a veil. They were given over to one, who took them inside. Soccer practice in the courtyard; the children stopped to watch them go by. In the nursery, Disney characters painted hopefully on the walls, the preternaturally quiet children of the country in a miscellany of chairs and cribs.

"Why is she crying?” Roo asked in undertone.

"Who?"

"The nun."

She was: a tear and then another formed in her eye and hung on her fat cheek; she looked devastated. “Maria,” she said, with a kind of sob, and picked out and lifted to them the child who would, or might, be theirs.

All infants, almost all, can do what this one did when Pierce and Roo looked down at her and she up at them with her great eyes: the thing they do to new mothers, but can also do to strangers, to flinty maiden aunts, to the crusty bandit or miser in stories who unwraps the mysterious blanket, looks inside. If they couldn't do it—most of the time anyway—we wouldn't be here.

"Ask her why she's crying,” Roo said sidewise to Pierce, who shook himself from Maria's eyes to see that yes, the nun was still brimming, unspeaking but uncomforted, and regarding them.

"Estas lagrimas,” Pierce said to her, guessing, and pointing to his eye. “Que esta es?"

She looked at them a moment as though in wild hope or fear, and turned away, and went out, and then in a moment she came back from the adjoining ward and in her arms she held another baby, wrapped in the same blue and white blanket, with the same huge eyes full of what surely seemed to be wonder and love and happy expectant need, that's the trick of it, and she brought this baby before them, and placed it in Pierce's lap, right next to the one in Roo's lap, Maria.

"Jesusa,” she said.

Any two babies can look very much alike. Roo and Pierce both thought that thought, for a moment. Very much alike. The nun wept quietly, her hands clasped before her.

* * * *

"I never thought of two,” Roo said to Pierce. “I didn't imagine. I never once thought of two. Did you?"

"No. Never.” He had not, in any practical way, been able to think of one; had dreamed and imagined, had seen himself in some conceivable future holding the hand of a small black-eyed girl—as though in a movie, himself and her, on their way to, oh, school or the candy store—but he knew this wasn't thinking of the way Roo meant it.

They sat with coffees in a soda, back downtown now. The place was open to the street like a stage set with the fourth wall missing. Ancient cars of kinds no longer made in the land they had come from, Studebakers, DeSotos, went by slowly; Utopia is a country of slow drivers. The table they sat at—had been sitting at a long time, stunned and silent mostly—was red, white, and blue enamel, with the word PEPSI written on it in swirling blue letters, a message from his youth.

"I don't know what to do,” Roo said, devastated. “I can't think. I can't take one and leave the other. I can't."

"No?"

She looked at him as though suspecting he could, and shocked by the suspicion. “No. No, I don't think I. I couldn't."

They sat silent. He thought of Jesusa appearing in her towel or wrapper. Was that even real?

"Maybe it was just a terrible dumb idea,” she said. “To come here to this country and dig around for what we want, not knowing anything. How could that go right.” She stared at empty futurity. “We should just go home."

There are some silences and stillnesses that we remember afterward with greater vividness than acts: as though even after a long time, after years, our souls can still flow out of us and into them. As Pierce's did then.

"No,” he said then. “We won't go home."

"Pierce."

"We'll take them both."

She clapped her hand to her brow, staring down at the coffee spill on the enameled table. “Pierce. Don't say that. You don't have to. You're a good guy, I know you want this for me, I know it. But don't be stupid. Don't."

"No,” he said. “Not for you. For me. It's what I want. I want this to happen, I want to take both of them home. It's the only way, and it's what I want."

"No."

"Yes."

"Pierce,” Roo said. She had grown still, ceased to comb her hair with her fingers and slap the table; was only regarding him. “Think about it. What it's going to be like. This is years and years of commitment. All your life. Two, not one but two, and it may be that even one you could be sorry about, and think later you'd made a mistake, in a way you never could if it was your own, you see? Have you ever thought about that?"

He hadn't, really; she could see that in his silence; and in his silence she could see him understand that she had thought about it, which she had never plainly said before.

"I mean can you see what this is going to take? Can you? I mean just the money."

"No, Roo,” Pierce said softly. “No, I can't see."

"Can't?” she said.

"I can't, no. I can't really imagine. You're right. I never have been able to imagine the future, or see what's going to come of what I do, or of what anybody does. I can't do it. I don't know why. I try to work it out, practically, but I never really can."