“A blue moon,” Skip explained, “is the second full moon in a month. See, most months there’s only one full moon.”

My mother beamed at him. To her, Skip was the smartest, most handsome boy in town. Maybe even in the whole world. Her love for him was evident and enormous, and it always made me feel unimportant.

“I got a 100 in my spelling test today,” I told her hopefully.

“Mmmhmm,” she said, unimpressed. Her mouth was lined with straight pins. Once I was stuffed, she would pin the pumpkin suit closed. Before I stepped into it, she ordered me to go to the bathroom because I wouldn’t be able to go again for the rest of the night.

Like every kid, I had been looking forward to Halloween all week. In school, we made witches’ hats out of black construction paper, cutting triangles that we decorated with gold and silver glitter, orange pompoms, and pieces of orange bric-a-brac. My teacher, Mrs. Kennedy, handed out candy corn at the end of the day and told us to be safe crossing the street tonight and not to eat any apples we got trick-or-treating; apples, as everyone knew, harbored razor blades.

I never got to choose my own costume. Secretly, I coveted the princess costume at Ann and Hope, our local discount store. A long pink dress with a fitted bodice, stiff tulle beneath and lots of sparkles on top, it came with a plastic gold crown and a wand with a gold star at the tip. I didn’t bother to ask my mother to buy it. We were a family that made our Halloween costumes. Or, more accurately, my mother made them. She took no suggestions or advice. Halloween costumes were her territory. She was the brain behind my brother’s winning girl costume, stuffing her own bra with newspapers for him to wear under a cashmere sweater and smearing red lipstick on his lips.

This year, she’d made me this pumpkin suit. When she finished stuffing it with newspapers, she would bobby-pin a green felt hat to my long blond hair. The hat had a complicated stem made of real bark and wire. I wanted nothing more than to win first place at my Girl Scout troop’s Halloween party, which began at 5 p.m. sharp and let out in time for us all to go trick-or-treating. Oddly, first prize was dinner for two at the Club 400, a local place where everyone in town had their proms and weddings.

I imagined taking my mother there with my prize, eating ziti and baked chicken and string beans almondine while I told her about winning the spelling bee and reading every Nancy Drew book and how I would rearrange the television schedule each night, if I had the chance. I imagined how I would shine in her eyes if it were just the two of us, away from the dazzling brightness of my brother.

Stuffed and pinned and the felt hat fastened, I was ready to go. My cousin Gloria-Jean arrived, dressed as a tree. Her father, my mother’s brother Chuckie, also dominated costume making in their family. This year, he had dressed Gloria-Jean in a felt costume reminiscent of Peter Pan, except that he had wired her arms stretched outright and covered them with leaves. Unfortunately, she wouldn’t be able to lower them all night. But a tree didn’t lower its boughs, did it? Uncle Chuckie asked. On top of her brown curls, he’d bobby-pinned a nest made of straw. Inside the nest sat two eggs that he’d hard-boiled and dyed blue. “I can taste that ziti already,” he said, licking his lips.

Gloria-Jean and I were sent on our way to Sacred Heart Church, which sat at the bottom of the hill where I lived and which hosted all scout meetings. At 7 sharp, my brother and his friends would pick us up there and take us trick-or-treating in a neighborhood with houses newer than ours where we believed they gave better candy.

I waddled beside Gloria-Jean down the hill to the church. I was already on thin ice with the Girl Scouts. Our first merit badge had been in sewing, and Mrs. D had us bring in an empty plastic Clorox bleach bottle, cut it in half, and sew fabric onto it to make a bag for hair curlers. But I could not get the needle through the plastic. Who wanted a curler bag anyway? I wondered. I studied the handbook, fantasizing about all the merit badges I might get: archery, swimming, community service. And reading! I’d read every book in the school library. I read four books a week from the town library. I already had earned a reading merit badge.

But Mrs. D told me she would not submit the papers for reading until I finished my curler bag. “I ain’t gonna use up all my stamps mailing in your paperwork,” she said, taking a long drag on her cigarette. “Finish your curler bag like everybody else.” She exhaled a big stream of smoke, like an exclamation point. We were still at an impasse.

Gloria-Jean and I did not have any friends in the troop, so we stood together until finally Mrs. D announced it was time to reveal the winner of best costume. She wagged the gift certificate to the Club 400 in the air, then called for silence.

“The winner of best costume,” she said, chewing her gum fast and furious, “is …” She studied all of us, her eyes beneath their blue-eye-shadowed lids and mascaraed eyelashes seeming to settle on each of us, as if anybody might be the winner. “Is …” Mrs. D opened her arms wide and shouted, “My daughter! Ronnie!”

Veronica DiGregorio — Ronnie — shrieked with surprise and ran up on the stage.

I couldn’t believe what I saw. Ronnie was wearing the store-bought princess costume from Ann and Hope. My princess costume. I wanted to cry. I wanted to sink into a seat and bury my head. But my pumpkin costume would not let me.

“Who you gonna take to the Club 400?” Mrs. D was asking.

“Aw, Ma,” Ronnie said.

My brother and his band of hobos arrived, just in time to get us out of there.

“You should have won,” I told Gloria-Jean.

“One of us should have,” she said. “At least our costumes are original.”

My brother made us walk half a block behind him and his friends. “And don’t talk to us,” he ordered.

They went up to each house first, and got their treats. Then we were allowed to knock on the door and get ours. My pillowcase grew heavy with candy, but all I wanted to do was go home, get out of my pumpkin costume and climb into my bed with a book. Something had changed for me that night. All day, as I cut out and decorated my witch’s hat, as I nibbled candy corn, as I stood still while my mother stuffed me with newspapers, I had believed in possibility. In that church basement, I had believed I might win. I had believed that my mother and I would be together for that dinner, just the two of us, and that she might see me differently then.

But now, all that was gone.

Gloria-Jean and I knocked on a door, halfheartedly. It flung open, and a man dressed as Count Dracula greeted us. Behind him, grown-ups in Halloween costumes drank and laughed and shouted. Music played. I saw a woman dressed like Barbara Eden from “I Dream of Jeannie,” a man dressed as a pirate. I had never before seen adults dress up for Halloween, and it felt wrong somehow. They looked grotesque, frightening, all of those middle-aged people with their garish makeup, sexy costumes, bright lips.

I stepped back, afraid.

“Don’t you want my Tootsie Roll?” Count Dracula asked me drunkenly.

Gloria-Jean ran down the path, grabbing me as she did.

“Don’t you want my Charleston Chew?” Count Dracula called after us.

The neighborhood had curving streets lined with small split ranches. The trees cast shadows on us as we stood beneath that full blue moon. Somehow I knew that this was my last Halloween when I would go trick-or-treating. Something I did not yet understand was coming to an end. I lifted my face up toward that big moon. In the distance, I heard hobos approaching. I heard the music from that house with the adult Halloween party seeping out into the autumn air.

“My arms hurt,” Gloria-Jean whispered to me. “I want to go home.”

But still I stood in that spot, unable to move, afraid of what was coming next, of what lay ahead.

For eight years I walked the aisles of 747s and 707s and L1011s in my high heels, handing out menus and magazines, playing cards and stationery. Back then, cocktails came with a red stir rod shaped like a propeller and there were three choices of entrees on flights over four hours — in coach. We served after-dinner drinks on a cart topped with dry ice we’d sprinkled with water to create fog and passed pale green mints on a silver tray. In first class, we laid the linen napkins on tray tables, making certain the TWA logo was in the bottom right corner, mixed martinis and dressed lamb chops in gold foil stockings.

What we did not do, or even consider doing, was jump out the evacuation slide after a fight with a passenger, as Steven Slater, the JetBlue flight attendant, did. It wasn’t that the passengers back when I was asking them to stay seated until the plane came to a complete stop and the captain turned off the fasten seat belt sign were more compliant or better behaved than they are now. Nor was it that we flight attendants were more patient or tolerant. Passengers got up when they weren’t supposed to and yelled when we ran out of manicotti; flight attendants stood in the galley and rolled their eyes at the guy in 47F or got on the P.A. and demanded people obey the rules. But somehow, over the past three decades, all of us have grown tense and miserable — passengers and employees alike. It seems that every time I fly, I hear someone say out loud: Flying just isn’t fun anymore.

When I began my career as a flight attendant, I was a 21-year-old with a B.A. in English and stars in her eyes. I wanted to see every city in the world. I wanted to have adventures that, I hoped, would fuel a writing career some day. Flying was glamorous then, and as I wheeled my suitcase through airports from Chicago to Cairo, kids still pointed and adults still smiled at me. Deregulation had just passed, and I watched as fares began to drop and flying became more accessible to everyone. Yet that did not change our level of service or the passengers’ attitude. A mutual respect existed, and despite the occasional grumpy businessman or harried mother or someone who was just a jerk, I went to work eagerly and left happy. I think it’s fair for me to say the passengers felt the same way.

By the time I hung up my wings in 1986, change had begun. Corporate raiders were buying up airlines, slashing salaries and fares, and cutting amenities. Carl Icahn, who took over TWA, announced he was going to “de-cunt” and “re-cunt” the airline. His plan was to get rid of the flight attendants whom he saw as too old and overpaid and replace them with young, pretty ones who would work for half the amount and double the hours. Even the airlines that avoided the raiders followed them in changing compensation and workloads. I cannot deny that a job that combines physical labor, standing up for long hours, dealing with people, and jet lag is tiring. But the changes in work rules turned tired into exhausted, and the changes in pay turned comfortable into barely able to make mortgage and car payments. Smiling became harder.

But passengers still expected the service they’d grown used to. Simple pleasures like cream for their coffee and pillows on their seats disappeared. Before long, they were paying for food and to check their luggage. They sat in seats with less leg room and had fewer choices of flights, and those flights had more connections than ever before. Flight attendants stopped smiling and passengers started grumbling.

After 9/11, new security measures not only added longer lines and earlier check-ins, but took away our privilege of carrying knitting needles or our favorite moisturizer on board with us. Although we want to be safe when we fly, in some ways it all just adds to the misery of our experience.

Last summer, I used my hard-earned frequent flier miles to upgrade on a United Airlines flight from Honolulu to Chicago. For several years I’d endured long flights with no food, cramped seats, and some of the crabbiest flight attendants around just to keep adding up those United miles. When I sunk into Seat 4A, I expected that for the first time in many years I was actually going to have a great flying experience. Even when the flight attendant announced that the movie system was broken, I didn’t mind. Even when they ran out of pre-takeoff champagne at Row 3, I only minded a little. But by the time they ran out of first-class food, and brought me instead a coach meal still wrapped in that familiar foil, I minded a lot. I minded the way the flight attendants scowled, constantly. I minded that they didn’t respond to the call button. I minded that my seat got stuck and no one knew how to fix it.

I looked at my seat with its fabric worn in spots and I looked at the miserable flight attendants shuffling through the cabin. They were as unhappy as I was — unhappy with all of it, the bad food, the broken equipment, the unhappy passengers, their own crappy jobs. I remembered how, when I began my job at TWA, my cousin called me a glorified waitress. She had offended me with that description. Sure, I served meals, but to me that job was so much more. It was glamorous and fun and sophisticated. I learned about fine wine and gourmet food; I learned how to get around foreign cities alone, how to talk to strangers, how to get along in the world. Today’s flight attendants, selling pre-packaged food and explaining about ever increasing fees and cutbacks, are not even glorified waitresses.

So Steven Slater, a flight attendant for 20 years, the son of a flight attendant and a pilot, finally had enough. His dramatic exit from the airline business made a point that he probably didn’t intend. If we had the choice, we’d probably all evacuate these crowded no-frills planes. Those evacuation slides are meant to be used in emergency situations. When is the industry going to realize that we are all — flight attendants and passengers alike — in an emergency situation?

I understand that we can’t return to a time when flying was an unforgettable experience — for positive reasons. When girls like me imagined putting on a uniform and a mega-watt smile and striding down the aisles of a jet with pride and purpose. When the passengers on that plane felt coddled and safe and cared for, if even for just a few hours. On Dec. 17, 1903, the Wright brothers made their first flight, an amazing and celebratory achievement. Over a hundred years later, that sense of wonder and celebration is almost completely gone. Maybe Slater will remind us of that. Maybe he’ll remind us of a time not so long ago when the sky really did seem limitless, and those of us up there together still felt we were a part of something extraordinary.

“Cockteaser!” he yelled. “Bitch!”

I did not learn my lesson. Over the next few years, I drank too much and did risky things too often, things I hope my own daughter never does. I got in cars and beds with strangers. I traveled. A lot. In Brazil I met a man who said simple words like “bikini” and “Nivea” in such a way that I went to a voodoo ceremony on a beach with him, never pausing to consider the consequences. At one point, everyone got naked and ran into the dark ocean, chanting. I was terrified. And thrilled. In Lisbon, I met a stranger in a cafe, got into his car, and stayed with him for the next 24 hours, drinking wine and eating tiny clams. I went to his apartment, no one knowing where I was or with whom. In Cairo, in London, in Mykonos, a different version of the same thing. I saw it all as an adventure. It never occurred to me that harm might come to me. Or maybe it did occur to me, and that added to the excitement.

For most of the time, I was a good girl. But spirited. Straight A student. Yearbook editor. Student body treasurer. A sorority girl who often had a handsome boyfriend from a good family who dreamed of being a lawyer or a politician. I danced at proms, my slender black-gowned body held at a prim distance from his tuxedoed one. I ate dinner at country clubs with boys’ parents. I wrote thank you notes in purple ink. My forays into danger were interludes in a fairly ordinary life. But just as for the most part I was drawn to smart, quiet boys who wore khakis and polo shirts, who played tennis and liked to jitterbug, I also found myself drawn to sexy guys with something dark lurking behind their eyes. Looking back, I see that those guys and my attraction to them were fueled by being far from home, where I knew no one. There, I could do things, try things, unnoticed. I was a good girl with enough of a wild streak to make foolish decisions. I would walk off with a stranger. I would disappear into his arms, into the night, into uncertainty. And no one would ever know.

——

One morning I picked up the newspaper and read the headline: “Who is Amanda?” The story was about a grisly murder whose details are now familiar: On Nov. 2, 2007, police found the body of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher lying partially clothed under a duvet in her bedroom in Perugia, Italy, with blood on the floor, bed and walls. Her body had 40 bruises and scratches, plus knife wounds on the neck and hands, and evidence of sexual assault later thought to be drug-fueled. The crime was shocking, but perhaps even more surprising was the woman accused (and eventually found guilty along with two men, including her Italian boyfriend of two weeks): 20-year-old University of Washington exchange student Amanda Knox, whose case has reopened this week in Italy. Although she was originally sentenced to 26 years, the prosecution is now going for life.

The Amanda Knox case grabbed me, and I began to follow it almost obsessively. “Foxy Knoxy,” as the tabloids loved to call her, was characterized as both a pot-smoking, sex-crazed girl gone wild and a hardworking college student who saved her own money to study abroad. On the Amanda Knox Defense Fund website, she smiles out at me in her bright blue graduation cap and gown, clutching a bouquet of flowers still wrapped in cellophane. Her middle school science teacher recalls her love for bunnies and her big smile. “Our school gives out only one award each year, and it is to the graduating 8th grader who has most exemplified the qualities of community-building and citizenship,” she writes. “Amanda was deservedly the very first student to receive this award.” Beside testimonials from relatives and friends are photos of Amanda walking hand in hand with a small boy, playing the guitar with another. They are a sharp contrast to the drunken Amanda who appears on her MySpace page. But this dichotomy is exactly what intrigues me. Of course, Amanda is both of these young women: a good student, a good friend; a college girl who likes to party with her friends. In other words, a good girl very much like me.

In the past, I had shown only passing interest in sensational murder cases, but none had felt so strangely personal. Unlike Natalee Halloway, I was not a girl who would vacation in Aruba. Unlike Chandra Levy, I was never a striver on Capitol Hill. But to live in Italy? To date foreign, exotic men? To be both a good girl and a reckless one? The beautiful young faces of Amanda Knox and Meredith Kercher haunted me.

Two other faces haunted me too, and herein lies perhaps the thing that propelled my fascination with this case even further. In April of 2002, my 5-year-old daughter Grace died suddenly from a virulent form of strep. Although the circumstances of my loss are different from those of these mothers, what is the same is the powerlessness of that loss, the depth and strength of it. What I understand is how tragedy can rip apart your life, how it can leave a hole that seems impossible to repair. As a mother who has lost a daughter, I grieve for Meredith Kercher’s mother. But I grieve for Amanda Knox’s too. I have another daughter now, and I do not want her to throw herself into the path of danger, even as I stand by all the daring and naive indulgences in my past. In this particular tragedy, I am both mother and daughter, in a way. The mother who has lost her child, the daughter who traveled far from home, believing nothing truly dark could ever touch her.

Eventually, I found I was not alone in my obsession with the case. The night of the guilty verdict for Amanda Knox, I was at dinner with four women friends, all of us over 40, all of us mothers who had enjoyed youthful adventures in Europe. We ordered our chardonnay, and the conversation about the case began.

“I spent my junior year in college in Italy,” Elizabeth says. She sounds almost guilty. “Poor kid.”

“Yeah,” Maggie tells her, “but you didn’t murder anybody.”

Elizabeth looks surprised. “Neither did Amanda Knox,” she says with certainty.

The case itself has always been riddled with these contradictions, and picking sides has never been easy. Even in this most recent trial, in which the prosecution hopes to extend her 26-year sentence to a life sentence, a new witness has emerged placing Knox away from the scene of the crime. But we talk about the case as mothers, not lawyers. Divided over Knox’s guilt or innocence, we ignore the DNA and the fibers and the facts of the crime, instead only speaking to the way the case feeds something in each of us. What if our daughter was one of those girls? Is it possible? We know the answer is yes. And then the other realization: What if it had been us? We were foolish and naive and young. We had close calls and bad drugs and roommates who disappeared for a night with dubious strangers. But nothing bad really ever happened to young pretty girls who were basically good girls, did it? For us, that door always eventually opened and that roommate always returned, a little hung over or weary or in love. But just as we shaped the story we might have to tell the police or her unaware mother, she came home. As you grow older, you realize that not every girl is so lucky. And I believe luck has a lot to do with it.

For each of us sitting in this fancy Manhattan restaurant, sipping good wine, toasting all the successes we’ve had and the good choices we’ve made, toasting all of the things that made it possible for us to be sitting here, each of us made bad choices not so long ago. They are not adventures we would take back, but I shudder to think of them now. We fell for the wrong man. We took that extra drink. We turned our back, if ever so briefly, on what our own mothers had taught us was right and good and moral. We looked at danger, and smiling, we said yes.

Ann Hood’s new novel, “The Red Thread,” will be published this week by W. W. Norton.

Grace was studying Chinese at school, and even after Ju Hua left us, Grace would visit her and practice Chinese. “Her pronunciation so good!” Ju Hua would tell me when I picked Grace up. They had cooked together, fried rice and dumplings and the pork dish Grace liked so much. Smelling of garlic and sesame, Grace would wave goodbye to Ju Hua as we drove away. Then she would sing me a Chinese song, or count to twenty in Chinese.

That April day when Grace got sick and I rushed her to the emergency room, as they whisked her to the ICU, the doctor ordered me to help keep the oxygen mask on her face. “Grace,” I said, trying to hide the fear that had gripped me, “count to ten and then you’ll be in room where the doctor can make you better.”

Squirming under the oxygen mask, Grace began to count: “Yee, uhr, sahn,” she said in perfect Chinese, “sah, woo, lyo…”

When Ju Hua visited us after Grace died, she told us that her own mother had lost a child, a six year old boy. He got sick very suddenly, like Grace, and he died in her mother’s arm as she walked miles to the doctor. “My mother never forget this,” Ju Hua said. “But if he didn’t die, I would never be born.”

There are so many cruel decisions parents have to make when their child dies. The funeral director requested a sheet for the coffin, and I sent the cozy flannel one, pale blue with happy snowmen, that had just been put away with the winter linens. They needed clothes to bury her in, and I carefully removed the tags from the new Capri pants with the ruffled hem and the pink shirt that Grace had picked out but never got a chance to wear. We could, we were told, place anything we wanted in her coffin, so my husband Lorne and I gathered her favorite things, the things that comforted her: Biff, her favorite stuffed animal; Cow, the green blanket decorated with cows; her purple leopard lunch box; her glasses; notes from each of us; crayons and paints; and the gold rat on the chain that Ju Hua had sent for her from China.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

I cannot say for certain when the decision to have another child happened. I do remember sitting alone on a summer afternoon in the room we called the Puzzle Room, a room where Grace and my son Sam and I spent many afternoons listening to Nanci Griffith CDs and working on jigsaw puzzles, sitting there as the hot afternoon stretched endlessly and hopelessly before me, and thinking about how my arms ached to hold Grace and my entire body longed for the buzz of activity that used to surround me just a few short months earlier. It was that same summer that my husband and I camped out together on a beach in Maine and he said, “I have the craziest idea.” “So do I,” I told him. That was when I put words to it. “Let’s have another baby,” I said. And he said yes. Then we cried. A light from a lighthouse kept swinging past us, illuminating everything.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

First, my husband had to have his vasectomy reversed. Then, I had to have my hormone levels checked. I was 44 years old, and I did not expect good news. But the doctor who everyone told us could help make it happen said that although I might need a little hormonal help, I could indeed get pregnant.

Once a month, my husband and I drove to New York City to the doctor’s Park Avenue office where Lorne masturbated into a cup and I was then inseminated with his sperm. Each time, the doctor was optimistic. Lorne’s sperm were great — good swimmers and plentiful. I ovulated on schedule and had good mucous. We’d had babies before. We could do it again.

But after four months without a pregnancy, the doctor added Clomid to the protocol. Now I went for an intravaginal sonogram, my follicles were counted, and then we went to New York. Four eggs. Six. But no baby.

By March, I was having tests to see if something was going on. In June I had surgery to remove a benign polyp. By fall Lorne was injecting me with Pergonal at almost $2,000 a month, and it was producing less follicles than the Clomid, and I wasn’t getting pregnant. Everyone has read about or knows someone who has gone through fertility treatments. It is an emotional nightmare, fueled by false hope and the promise of a treatment that will work. Add grief to that, and the cycle gets even worse.

One day, a friend told me that she knew how to get a baby in Russia, fast. It involved spending time in Finland. It would cost around $40,000, before bribes. The baby was a girl. She had red hair.

Another friend stopped by and told me that she could get children from Hungary. Not babies, but two or three year olds. She could even get twins. Or siblings. It would cost $60,000. Plus donations to various people who would help along the way.

Some people urged me to give up the idea altogether. I heard stories of women who had a child after losing one and forced that new child into the roles of the dead one. I heard of mothers dressing their new baby in their dead child’s clothes, making them swim or dance or whatever the other had done. It isn’t fair, I was told. Fairness was not something I believed in very much then. If things were fair, a healthy intelligent five year old girl wouldn’t die. If things were fair, a family who helped others, who lived a good life together, who love each other, wouldn’t be torn apart like this.

By this time, I knew that bringing a baby into our household would help all of us. It would help ease the burden of our grief on Sam, who was only ten years old and read our emotions each morning like barometers. It would bring back the noise and laughter our house had lost. It would fill my empty hours. Babies make you do things for them. They get you up and they get you moving. A baby’s smile, I knew, could change everything.

I had spent almost $25,000, and I was out of expendable income. I realized that in this time that had passed and with the money I had spent, we could already have a red haired baby from Russia, or three year old Hungarian twins. Lorne and I decided to stop the fertility treatments and focus on adoption instead. What I knew as soon as we made that decision was that in a year we would have a baby.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

For the next few months, I had coffee with women who had battled Central American governments, rescued children languishing in Russian and Romanian orphanages, lied, borrowed money, corrected cleft palates and crossed eyes and weak hearts, lost babies they had held, named babies they never got to see, traveled thousands of miles more than once, all in pursuit of a baby.

“I don’t know if I have the emotional stamina for this,” I told Lorne after hearing my friend’s story about three failed adoptions in Guatemala and over a hundred thousand dollars spent. She did, finally, have her daughter. But still.

“China,” Lorne said. “Everyone I talk to who adopted from China, it went like clockwork.”

One afternoon I watched a mother at Sam’s school pick up her daughter who she had adopted from China. I sat in my car and watched that little girl leap into her mother’s arms and I drove home and emailed that woman. As it turned out, she lived two blocks away from us. “Come over for coffee,” she said, “and I’ll tell you all about it.”

Walking home from her house, Lorne squeezed my hand. “Let’s start,” he said.

Within a week we were sitting in a crowded room in an adoption agency office in Boston, signing paper, collecting information, beginning the journey that would lead us to China and a baby girl.

I spent the month of April, 2004, filling out paperwork for the adoption. It was exactly two years since Grace had died. This process — collecting legal documents and getting fingerprinted and asking friends for recommendations — was the calmest, and most focused thing I had done in two years. I had a purpose, and I moved toward it with a doggedness I had forgotten I possessed.

What I didn’t know was that while I filled out papers in triplicate and made appointments and arranged for a home study, a woman in Hunan, China, was giving birth to a baby girl she could not keep. Over a hundred thousand baby girls are abandoned every year in China. Some place the number at even higher than that. In Hunan, as in other provinces, infanticide is not uncommon. Some women give birth with a bucket of water by their beds, and if the baby is a girl, she is drowned. Other women walk for miles from their village to have their baby somewhere that no one knows them. Baby girls are left on footbridges and in parks, at police station doors and orphanage entrances. They are left where their mothers know they will be found. It is illegal to abandon a baby in China, so they are left with no notes or pertinent information. In Hunan, a family who has a girl is allowed to have a second child. But that second child has to be a boy. Therefore, most of the abandoned baby girls in Hunan are second or even third daughters.

A year almost to the day after we began our adoption process, we were on a plane to China to pick up our daughter. We had filed our documents with the Chinese government and then waited for six months to get the call telling us a baby had been referred to us. Her Chinese name was Lou Fu Jing: Lou was the last name given to all the babies in her orphanage, which was in the city of Loudi; Fu was the name given to all the babies in her orphanage because it meant luck, and it was given to counter their bad luck; Jing was the name the orphanage gave her — bright. She lights up a room, someone wrote on her referral papers.

The name we gave her was Annabelle, Grace’s middle name. We had briefly chosen Mamie, and Daisy, and argued over Talullah. But we loved the name Annabelle, and we had loved it enough to almost give it to Grace as her first name. It honored Grace, we decided, without burdening the new baby.

Annabelle had been found in a box at the orphanage door, early in the morning of September 6, 2004. They estimated her age as five months. Most of the babies found abandoned are under two weeks old. Many of them still have their umbilical cord stump. No one will ever know what led Annabelle’s mother to leave her there after five months. Perhaps she had not wanted to give her up at all. Perhaps a male relative waited until the baby was not nursing as much as a newborn does and then took her from her mother. Perhaps they tried to hide her in the system — a forbidden second or third daughter — and were caught. The penalties for this are huge, often involving many years’ salary or loss of medical care for the entire family. Perhaps her mother died. Perhaps her mother got pregnant again and hoped for a boy.

We will never know what led to Annabelle being dressed in blue pants, white socks with blue flowers, a thin coat, and put into a cardboard box in a city that was most likely not her own. Around Loudi, there are dusty roads and fields of kale and sweet potatoes. Women walk with a bamboo pole across their backs, and one head of kale or a sweet potato in a basket at the ends. They take this meager yield to a market miles away to sell. It is not green or beautiful there. No mountains or sea, no glittering architecture. It is not the China in glossy magazines. It is poor and rural and the women there sometimes abandon their baby girls rather than drown them.

We will never know Annabelle’s story. We only know this: the date they gave her as her birthday — determined by the age they guessed her to be on September 6, 2004; chosen as an even number because even numbers are lucky — that birthday, is April 18, the same day that Grace died. Annabelle, like me, was born in the year of the monkey. Monkeys are intelligent and are known to have a great sense of humor. Monkeys and rats are said to be the best of friends.

Annabelle arrived home on April 6, 2005. It was the year of the rooster. In Chinese astrology, there is an improvement of difficult situations during rooster years. They are a time to seek emotional solace. One of the hexagrams of the I Ching that symbolizes the middle third of a rooster year — the time when Mother’s Day falls — is the image of a small trickle of water flowing from a rock as a container below it slowly begins to fill. It is called, “The humble power of the smallest.”

- – - – - – - – - – - -

“They mark them, you know,” someone told us before we left for China. “The mothers brand the babies they abandon. It’s a sign of love.”

We had heard stories about babies being found with a yam, a sign of how valuable the baby was. We had heard of a note left that simply said: This is my baby. Take care of her. We had heard of one baby found with a bracelet around her wrist, and another with a river rock to indicate she was from a town near water. But this branding was something new.

The group of ten families with which we traveled to China, all got our babies at the same time, in a nondescript city building in Changsha. Changsha is the capital of Hunan Province, and it is four hours from Loudi and the orphanage. Soon, people were lifting pant legs or the cuffs of sleeves to show the small scars on their babies. “They mark them,” one mother said, spreading her new daughter’s fingers to reveal a scar in between the index and pointer.

On Annabelle’s neck I found a thick rope of scar tissue, round and small. The pediatrician examined it and frowned. “Don’t get upset,” he said, “but this almost looks like a burn that has healed.”

- – - – - – - – - – - -

A month after Grace died, I had my first Mother’s Day without my daughter. Sam and Lorne carved a heart out of wood, sanded it smooth as if they could ease the pain in my own heart this way. They threaded the wooden heart on a dark red ribbon, and it still hangs from the rear view mirror of my car. But Lorne also gave me a book he made, with pictures of Grace and descriptions beneath them of what Grace and I did together: cooking, reading, laughing, walking hand in hand. It was the worst Mother’s Day I could imagine. Here was Sam, my son, offering me a heart. And here was the empty chair, the silence, my own heart, broken.

Each subsequent Mother’s Day brought a new pain — the passing of time without watching Grace growing up, the burst of spring blossoms in our garden mocking my loss. I was a daughterless mother. I had nowhere to put the things a mother places on her daughter. The nail polish I used to paint our toenails hardened. Our favorite videos gathered dust. Her small apron was in a box in the attic. Her shoes — the sparkly ones, the leopard rainboots, the ballet slippers — stood in a corner. I kept her hairbrush on a shelf in my closet, and the fine strands of her pale blonde hair were still tangled in it. As I walked out the door, I still sometimes paused to bury my nose in her powder blue jacket, as if I might find something of her there.

Three Mother’s Days later, I am sitting in my kitchen singing to Annabelle. It is raining, and I am singing an old Lovin’ Spoonful song. We can sit and dry just as long as it can pour, cause the way it makes you look makes me hope it rains some more… I am singing to Annabelle, and she is grinning at me, a big toothless grin. When Annabelle laughs, my heart soars. When she presses her hand into mine, or rests her head against my chest, or falls asleep in my arms, I feel myself slowly, slowly coming back to life.

Sometimes I touch that small round scar on her neck and I wonder about the woman who might have put it there. I wonder if she walked down those dusty roads I saw in China, past the endless fields of kale, cradling her daughter in her arms. I wonder if she cried when she placed her in that small box. I wonder what words she might have whispered to her.

On Mother’s Day now, each year, I think about Grace. And I think about this woman I will never know. I, of course, thank her, and I praise her strength in doing this seemingly impossible thing: giving her daughter to me. She will never know that I have her daughter because I lost Grace. She will never know the road I traveled to get her.

Annabelle lifts her arms to me, and I pick her up.

“Mama,” she whispers.

“Daughter,” I whisper back.

Hell’s Angels and cross-dressers are not enough to keep me from an ordinary vacation plan. But this trip was different. Less than a year earlier my father had died, propelling me into a backward journey to find and claim pieces of my childhood. Since my brother died in 1982, my parents and I had formed a shaky tripod of a family; now that I’d lost my father too, it was too easy for me to glimpse a future point where I alone was the keeper of not just my own childhood memories, but of my family lore.

Sam groaned. “How many times do I have to tell you? I don’t want to go on that dumb boat.”

But a ride on a glass-bottom boat was important, even necessary, to me. I went back to the Florida Keys with Sam and Grace to try to capture some elusive part of myself, to preserve my family as I remembered it from my own childhood. Long before my brother’s fatal accident, before the lung cancer that took my father’s life, my family vacationed in Florida. Long before South Beach was South Beach, long before my college spring breaks in Fort Lauderdale, long before I rode an oversized tricycle through a boyfriend’s parents’ retirement village in Pampano, there was another Florida. In that Florida, there was no Disney World and Orlando was rural, a stretch of orange groves in the middle of nowhere. In that Florida, the beaches were deserted and the air smelled of citrus and Coppertone. In that Florida of my childhood, my father is young as he sits at the wheel of the car, directing us, my brother whispers in my ear and the world is happy and full of possibilities.

In the early ’60s, my parents packed us into our green Chevy wagon and headed south as the radio played: She wore an itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini. We ate chewy pecan logs bought at Esso gas stations along the way. We watched for South of the Border signs to see both how far we still had to travel and what Pepe had to say: Chile today, hot tamale! There was no Route 95 to take us there. Instead, we drove past tobacco fields, billboards, orange groves.

Florida was where you went for a family vacation then. And you did not fly; you drove. You drove through the night if you had to, stopping at Howard Johnson’s along the way for all-you-can-eat fried clams. You drove and you drove because there were no beaches more beautiful, no seafood tastier, no better place to get away. It was, I thought, a good place to go back to. Lacking the stamina of my once-young parents, I booked a flight to Miami for my kids and me, rented a car and went in search of some piece of me that I needed to find.

- – - – - – - – - -

My first clue that things had changed was when I heard myself shrieking to the rental car person: “No red car!” I had read somewhere that the attacks on tourists in the Miami area were always on red rental cars. Clutching my map, I stuck both kids in their rented car seats and headed for the Keys. I already knew that all of the places my family had visited, where my parents had sipped brightly colored tropical drinks and my brother and I had collected whitewashed seashells, were long gone, turned into condominiums or resorts. Refusing to be deterred, I had researched guidebooks before we left home until I found a place where a kid could still pet a dolphin — my own brother had done the Twist with one on a trip of ours — find shells and ride a glass-bottom boat.

However, my first attempt at getting Sam on one of those boats was not successful. “I don’t want to ride a dumb boat,” he muttered. I needed to ride one of those boats again — and to ride it with my own children. But it could, I supposed, wait. So we drove south, stopping to gaze at alligators, to sip Rum Runners at tiki bars, until we reached our first stop. Right there in the magical-sounding Key Largo was a huge sign boasting glass-bottom boat rides. The crowd depicted on the sign was cartoonish and happy. But when I turned, smiling, to tell my kids we had arrived, Grace was asleep and Sam, eyes glazed from a day of travel, wanted only to get to the hotel and a pool.

I had searched long and hard for the kind of place we used to stay at, where you drove right up to your room’s front door and parked there, where you swam in the over-chlorinated pool and ate a continental breakfast of doughnuts the next morning. In Islamorada, turquoise letters perched atop a rocket-shaped sign so large I could not manage to get it all in my camera without switching to panorama pointed us to the perfect motel. “Pool’s closed,” the woman told me when she handed me my keys. “And don’t throw lobster heads out the sliding door. OK?”

I tried to make up for the lack of swimming with a nice walk on the motel’s beach. But it was coral instead of sand and our bare feet couldn’t take it. By now I understood why my parents were always going off to tiki bars; after the flight, the drive, the tears, the unwalkable beach and unswimmable pool, a tropical drink sounded in order. I posed us all under the large plastic drink that sat at the entrance to the thatched-roof bar and got a snapshot before we went inside. I saw that people wore a lot more orange here than I was used to: tangerine, shrimp, coral, peach. Combined with the cherry red of Sam’s drink and the scarlet of my rum runner, it made me feel a little queasy. All of us were happy to go back to our motel and watch “Rugrats” before going to sleep.

The next morning, after our cellophane-wrapped doughnuts and another torturous walk on the beach, Sam still refused to go on the glass-bottom boat. “I look at fish every day,” he explained. True, on his bureau sat an aquarium that housed an ever-revolving cast of goldfish, all named Bob and Amy. “But these are different. They’re colorful,” I said. Sam just rolled his eyes. The good thing about the Keys, I reminded myself, is that you can find a glass-bottom boat almost anywhere.

By the time we reached Key West, I’d have him convinced. I’d fill him with stories of how coral looked when you floated past it, of how my mother — his Grandma Gloria — had jumped when a large whiskered fish leaped upward toward the glass, of how rock formations gave the illusion of many things: crosses, arches, castles. I knew it would take more than the promise of a few colorful fish to excite him. But I couldn’t let go of my own journey, of how it looked when I gazed down and saw not my own reflection, as I’d expected, but an entire new world. “Fine,” I told him as I pulled into the Theatre of the Sea. “We’ll go see the dolphins. Maybe even do the Twist with one.” “What’s that?” Sam asked, suspicious. I sighed. “Like the Macarena. But better.”

The admissions woman explained, however, that dolphin contact was limited. “Liability,” she said. I thought of my brother in his Madras shorts and beatnik sunglasses twisting so close to a dolphin that, he later told me, he could smell his fish breath. My Florida was slowly receding and this new one, the one of cross-dressers and liability, was taking over. Still, Sam got to pet a shark, group-hug a dolphin and get kissed by a sea lion. I snapped pictures like a crazy person. The farther south we drove, the happier we got. I taught Sam a few lines of “Margaritaville” and we sang it all the way to Jimmy Buffet’s restaurant.

In Key West a sign read: HAVANA 90 MILES. We pulled over and bought rings made out of seashells, took a picture of Grace at the southernmost point of the United States. “She’s the southernmost baby,” Sam said. I searched the horizon for a glimpse of Cuba, where my father had spent time in the Navy during the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis. He used to write letters home with pieces blacked out. That Christmas, he sent us baby alligators from Florida. I craned my neck toward Cuba, but it was impossible to see. Behind me, a man blew into a conch shell and sent its lovely notes drifting across the ocean. Another cut a coconut in half with a machete and I watched as Sam and Grace drank its milk through twin straws.

It was 85 degrees. The palm trees swayed. Even though I had never been to this exact spot, when I closed my eyes and inhaled, the air was familiar and sweet. We were somewhere good, my kids and me. At sunset we would watch a man swallow a sword, another walk on glass. We would eat conch fritters. We would find white seashells, perfect spirals.

“Mom,” Sam said, “if you really want to go on one of those boats, we can do it.” His hand in mine was sticky from coconut milk. I remembered the way things had looked through that glass bottom as my family glided away from the safety of the shore. My own 4-year-old self had stared down into the unknown waters, waiting for something, anticipating. I remember pressing my face to the glass, amazed at what lay beyond it, until my mother jerked me to my feet. “You don’t have to get so close,” she said. “What are you looking for anyway?” At 4, I didn’t know. But almost 40 years and another trip later, I was beginning to understand. The losses of the last few years had been hard on me, and sometimes the memories of my childhood, of a time that had seemed so “happy and full of possibilities,” overshadowed the happy optimism of my life now. Maybe that part of me I was searching for is, like my father and brother, gone, however etched it is in my tropical-colored memories. But this new, older part of me was able to see Florida once again through a child’s eyes. Looking at this other family, the one I was shaping now, I realized that we were making our own history, not just here, but every day.

“You know what?” I told Sam. “I don’t need to go on that boat either.”

We got back in our blue rental car, climbing over spilled Cheerios, guidebooks, maps. I strapped them both in and we continued, my children and I, on our way.