“Well, don’t. Do you want to make an issue of it? So what if they are watching? Assume they are. They don’t know you, and you’re asking them to entrust one of their charges to you for the rest of your life. Stop acting offended.”

I opened my mouth to snap back, then shut it. “You’re right,” I said. Danielle didn’t acknowledge my apology.

Kyle was silent, eyes locked on the door.

Maria reentered, with a young female nurse holding a pox-covered boy, nine months old, blond, frowning at all these new people.

“Sasha,” Maria announced unnecessarily.

I didn’t know what I expected when I first saw you. I thought my heart would feel overwhelmed with love and joy, but it wasn’t like that. It was something else, a slower burn. You looked confused and miserable, so in this moment it was no longer about what I felt, what I wanted, but what you needed. I stood and held out my hands, and the nurse, with a smile, handed you to me.

But you knew the nurse, and you didn’t know me, so you squawked and fussed, and that was all right. I rested you against my shoulder and I gently patted your back (not wanting to make your itching worse) and I thought of the first time I held Julia in my arms, freshly born, and this is different yet in a way it’s the same. I held you. I let you feel my heart beat and I felt yours.

I wondered why I didn’t think to learn a Russian song, a Russian lullaby. Something you would know. So instead I sang “Cotton Fields,” one of the first songs I ever learned, sitting at my grandmother’s piano, picking out the melody. I sang it softly, the way my grandmother sang it to me, thinking of all the times it’s been sung since Lead Belly wrote it: Odetta, Johnny Cash, Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters, the Beach Boys. But I heard my grandmother’s alto, strong and vibrant and soothing, and that was how I sang it to this Russian baby who was going to be my American boy.

I didn’t know if Maria or Pavel knew I’ve written songs for famous people. And I didn’t know if they’ve ever heard this old song. But Sasha fell quiet and still against me, and I kissed his splotchy little forehead for the first time and I kept singing.

Danielle was watching me like she’d never seen me. It was like she was measuring me as a mother, watching me as intently as the Russians.