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is all he needs to hear. It is fuel. He leaps a few more times until he gets an idea. He’s going to outsmart that balloon. He calculates its direction, like a receiver estimating the trajectory of a touchdown pass, and he runs past it, up a little hill, to the top of a wall, off of which he can hurl himself and go for the grab.
    One, two, three—the timing here is critical—and he leaps! And don’t you know that darn balloon darts left. Left? The balloon is now over the wall, high in the air.
    To another father, that balloon would be a goner for sure. But not him. Not yet. He watches it. He shakes his head. He wonders how he might break the news to her. He thinks,
Life isn’t fair
.
    Just then the first real breeze of the day kicks in, and the balloon makes a U-turn, an absolute about-face. It drifts toward him, closer now, and closer. He hops at just the right moment. He feels the ribbon like a tickle between his fingers and so he grabs, he grabs happiness out of the sky.
    “Aaaah!” she says, her mouth dropping open. “You did it! Daddy did it!” She can’t quite believe it’s true. Her father has performed a miracle. Her balloon is back. And life, to her, but also to him, has plenty more fairness left.

meeting the ghost-mother
    When we were waiting to travel to China to adopt Sasha, I signed up for a Yahoo! group for people who had adopted or were adopting from the Huazhou Social Welfare Institute in Guangdong province, the orphanage in southern China where Sasha was living. The people at the orphanage knew her by the name they’d assigned to her—Ji Hong Bin—if they knew her at all, but Alex and I had already decided to name her Sasha Marie as soon as we got her home. We picked Sasha because it means “little Alex” in Russian and we loved the sound of it. At first I worried that a Russian name for a girl of Chinese ancestry would be somehow … crooked. But the truth of the matter was this girl from China was going to be the daughter of a Russian-Lithuanian Jew and a French-Irish-Lithuanian Catholic, so I figured we may as well just go ahead and enjoythe benefits of being a family of mutts, one of which surely must be you aren’t beholden to any particular rules of pedigree.
    At that point all we had of Sasha was a little picture, her date of birth, some scant medical information, a brief report about both the day she was found and her subsequent life at the orphanage.
She is gentle. She likes listening to music. If another child snatches her toy, she will look at the child but not cry, and pick another toy up. If you cuddle her, she will touch your face by her little hands
. The report also said that she weighed about six pounds when she was first found on the streets of Huazhou, on the steps of a pharmacy, lying in a paper box.
She was wearing a suit of gray dress, and covered with a hand-me-down cotton padded coat
.
    In her picture she was now twelve months old and she had a beautiful, dainty, heart-shaped face with fine features and an air of serenity. She looked to me like a little, exotic flower. The exotic part was due to her hair, which was dancing all over the place, confident and springy. My pediatrician got upset when I told her about Sasha’s head circumference, which the report said was only sixteen inches, and her body weight, which was only sixteen pounds, and her height, which was only twenty-six inches. The doctor, an international adoption specialist, was so upset she had me call our adoption agency and ask them to contact the orphanage and verify. When the stats were confirmed, the doctor had me ask for more photos. She said one way you could tell if a baby had fetal alcohol syndrome was by the vertical lines connecting the nose to the mouth. No lines was a bad sign; defined lines was a good sign. When I got the new pictures I blew them up gigantic on my computer and I studied and studied them for shadows that might reveal lines,but the photo resolution was so bad it was hard to