Abeba’s height, weight, and head circumference were recorded. Her nutritional status was noted as adequate and her developmental status as satisfactory. Abeba had an asymptomatic hepatitis B infection but was HIV-negative. She had not been circumcised. She was calm on intake, with no signs of anxiety. She was conversant in a logical fashion. She didn’t put up a wall against the social worker. She was willing and able to talk about how she felt. She said that she didn’t want to live in an orphanage but accepted it. She said that she had all manner of dreams about her future. She wanted to be a doctor, but then, no, she didn’t. She wanted to be a journalist or a diplomat. She’d gone to school off and on for three years, and liked to read when she had the chance. She had done well in math without enjoying it. She had friends she hoped to see again if circumstances changed and she was able to return home, which is what she preferred and the outcome she hoped for: a return to the life she had lived in Sebeta. Her uncle was kind, but he was sick a lot, and his sons, in her opinion, were shiftless and unmotivated, and didn’t take care of the chickens as they should, and didn’t try hard enough in general at what they undertook, if they undertook anything. Which made no sense to Abeba, because she believed in the importance of making efforts. She believed in doing what needed to be done. She was an Orthodox Christian, she told the social worker, who kept feast days and fast days and paid respects to all the saints but in particular to Saint Gabriel and Saint George, praying consistently for their intercessions on her behalf, but even with that she believed in taking initiative on every front, no matter what, always, in a determined way, and despite obstacles.

  The file I was looking at included a copy of the photo ID page from Abeba’s Ethiopian passport; a copy of the birth certificate she was issued by the City Government of Addis Ababa on the cusp of her adoption (whereon her name appears as Abigail Delvin Harvey); and a copy of a judicial decision rendered by a judge in the Federal First Court asserting that he was “convinced of the benefits the aforementioned child would enjoy if raised under the care and protection of adoptive parents rather than in said orphanage,” and “convinced that the Ministry of Women’s and Children’s Affairs has ascertained and confirmed the personal, social, and economic status of the adoptive parents as reliable to raise a child in a good manner,” and adding that, as “nearest kin has been summoned to court and agrees to such adoption,” he was now issuing an order pursuant to the matter, approving the contract between the petitioners. There was also a letter in the file from the minister-in-chief of the Ministry of Women’s and Children’s Affairs, notifying the agency that, “based on website information recently developed, we are aware that the child Abigail Delvin Harvey (named by adoptive parents) was found dead, and we hereby urge you to provide information concerning conditions, along with medical results, police investigation reports, as well as other essential information with tangible evidences.” This was followed by another letter, sent three days later by the same minister, stating that the agency was “urgently required to submit a death report with medical and police evidence,” and by a third letter, sent another three days later—this one from the director of children’s rights and safety—reminding the adoption agency that “a detailed report over the death of the child Abeba Temesgen was recently requested,” and that “accordingly it was found that a concerned staff member of our office shall, along with you, personally investigate the death of the child.” This was followed by a letter from the chief criminal deputy prosecutor of Skagit County to the adoption agency’s head office in Seattle, reading, in part, “Concerning the request for information regarding the circumstances of Abigail Harvey’s death, please be advised, and please relay to the appropriate Ethiopian authorities, that an investigation is currently ongoing, and as is the case with any other law enforcement agency and prosecutor’s office in this country, we will not reveal, or in any way discuss, facts, circumstances, suppositions, or anything else regarding the investigation until the investigation is complete.”

  I opened another file. There was a letter in it from the director of the Children’s Rights and Safety Office in Addis Ababa to the director of the orphanage, informing her that he was sending a representative to “undertake an investigation regarding the death of Abeba Temesgen, who was held in your care prior to release for adoption and subsequent death, the purpose being to determine if there exists relevant information on the premises to incorporate.” Like all of the administrative documents in every file, it had been translated into English by a private service that fell short, and stood behind a copy in Amharic.

  * * *

  —

  I could infer some things. One of the social workers on the premises of the orphanage, Elsabet Tesfaye, had been trained both to fulfill an administrative function and to interact with institutionalized children. It was her job not only to process the paperwork generated in volume by international adoptions, and to see to it that every requisite document found its way to the appropriate repositories, cabinets, ministries, offices, and authorities, but also to mill about in the orphanage’s play areas and in its dormitories and cafeteria, where she engaged children in conversation, invited them to her office for consultation, or sat with them in private corners for informal dialogue.

  The representative of the Ethiopian government’s Children’s Rights and Safety Office tasked with discovering if there was information on the premises pertinent to the death of Abeba Temesgen found his way to Elsabet Tesfaye and demanded a written report containing all relevant information. Tesfaye then duly reported that, as far as she knew “from consultation and social work with the deceased child,” Abeba Temesgen had been born in the province of Bale in 1998 to a mother who died eighteen months subsequent to her birth, leaving her in the care of her father, Temesgen Addisu. Temesgen Addisu had passed the bulk of his life in Addis Ababa but had fled to Bale after three of his sons were killed under circumstances that threatened to include him, too, if he didn’t leave. He’d gone to Bale because he thought he had a half brother there—a half brother who, it turned out, was dead—and eventually acquired, after years of making bricks in a factory and transporting, erecting, and dismantling construction scaffolding, a seven-room hotel that, in Abeba’s memory of it, was a slatternly hovel, and baked in the sun at an arid crossroads when it wasn’t inundated by floodwaters. Her father had added to this dilapidated hotel a dirt-floored terrace, shaded by lengths of corrugated tin, where guests and travelers were served tea, coffee, bread, bottled soft drinks, bottled beer, popcorn, and nuts, and where a television was always on.

  Abeba’s father hired a woman crooked toward the earth and canted to one side—a woman who’d run away from a husband in the countryside—who acted as cook and maid in the hotel, and with whom Abeba slept nightly. That woman moved on, and another one came, and then another and another, all of whom Abeba loitered with in the kitchen and followed about and assisted until harsh events, still vivid in her memory during her time at the orphanage, began to unfold. Shortly after the last of the hotel maids ran away, she told Elsabet Tesfaye, and near the start of the dry season, she began to hear gunfire sporadically in the distance, sometimes in staccato, isolated bursts, other times through interludes of hours—muffled reports or blasts echoing off the mountains or the noise of a cascading and then crescendoing fusillade. Over the course of weeks, this din drew closer, and a stream of people, including children, began to straggle past on foot, some of them blank-faced, some with their heads down and carrying loads so that Abeba couldn’t see their faces, some driving goats, some perched or slumped on the backs of trucks, some in carts drawn by donkeys, even a man pulling behind him a camel through whose lip a ring was threaded, the better to coerce the beast forward by the tensioning of a lead rope run through the ring at one end and, at the other, clutched in his fist. All who stopped outside the hotel’s gate were let in and allowed to sit on the shaded terrace, and given water at no charge, and injera and shiro as long as they could pay for it, and invited to rest before traveling on, but none were allowed to stay overnight who couldn’t pay the rate (anyway, the rooms were taken), and before dark they all had to move along, because, as Abeba’s father repeatedly told the people on the terrace, he would be overwhelmed otherwise and go out of business; there was no way around this, and it had to be understood. When night fell, he forced the last hopeless stragglers out under threat and locked the gate and the door to the hotel, and watched from a window suspiciously for hours. Maybe it was this locking of the gate, Abeba suggested to Elsabet Tesfaye, that angered people in the town two kilometers to the west and in the hamlet a kilometer and a half to the east, or it could have been other things, any number of things she would never understand, but at any rate, an anger toward her father developed with the coming of the refugees, and with it a current of threat that broke into open conflict, all this while the battles in the mountains went on, which meant her father had to stay up at night to confront enemies throwing rocks and shards of concrete, and yelling at him in the dark, and banging sticks against the walls of the hotel while Abeba lay awake in her bed.

  Days passed. News emitted from the television on the terrace until the television lost its signal and the gunfire was so close that Abeba slept, thereafter, under her bed and behind sandbags her father arranged in tiers, which turned out to be useless when men without uniforms arrived in a convoy of jeeps and trucks and appropriated the hotel simply by walking in with automatic weapons, either in their hands or on their backs, and with machetes and scythes, and telling Abeba and her father to leave, an eventuality or inevitability her father had prepared for by concealing his cash in intimate locations—some in his shoe, some sewn into his trousers, some sewn into his shirt, some in a suitcase tied shut with hemp twine. As they were leaving, Abeba tried to herd away their goats, but the goats were appropriated almost immediately by a man who kicked her in the small of the back so violently that, in falling, she struck the shardlike stub of what had once been a power stanchion, gashing her forehead open and instigating a headache that caused swimming vision in her left eye.

  Abeba was eight at this point. She scuttled away with a hand to her forehead while her father hauled the suitcase onto his shoulder. They made their way to the nearest town with the idea of catching a bus, it didn’t matter which one; the main thing now was to leave this area, her father said, before things got worse. As it turned out, places to stand or sit on buses were available, suddenly, only to those who could pay the most for them, which meant that Abeba’s father had to give up a lot of money; this happened again three hours later, in a larger town—an exorbitant price was demanded for a bus ride—but as they were farther from the trouble now, Abeba’s father elected to hold his cash in reserve and walk once more, which they did, at first through this town Abeba had never seen before, where the schools were still open, and the government offices and the police station, and where her father bought biscuits, which they ate in an alley against an embankment before turning northward, out of winding streets, into a dry waste of weeds and strewn garbage. Here Abeba saw the carcass of a goat with meager, gray strings of meat still on its bones. Wherever there was meat were massed green flies.

  Abeba’s head wound oozed as they traveled. She doused it when she could. They walked in the sun and rested in snatches. Four men surrounded them as they approached a hamlet, demanding payment of a toll, and scoffing at Abeba’s father when he claimed to have no money before throwing him to the ground and prying off his shoes, wherein they found the segment of his cash supply he’d concealed there and stole it, although one of the men took pity on them by dropping to the ground a flurry of small notes—enough, maybe, to buy some canned or packaged goods later.

  When they were gone, Abeba’s father rose from the dust with some of it coating his hair and one side of his face, where pebbles were embedded. He cradled his left wrist in his right hand, and said he thought that his arm had been broken when he’d been thrashed to the ground, and indeed, it appeared so, as if his wrist were held to his arm only by slack cords, and as if his hand no longer worked in cooperation or coordination with the rest of him and was instead a disjointed appendage. Abeba’s father splinted his fracture along two lengths of stiff plastic he found discarded on the road verge that might have once been chair parts, cutting free some of the twine that held the suitcase shut so that he had a length of it with which to bind these staves from his palm to his elbow, top and bottom both, and needing help from Abeba for this one-handed maneuver, during which he also used his teeth and a foot. Triaged sufficiently, he nevertheless could no longer raise the suitcase to his shoulder without Abeba’s help, or lower it to the ground again. He was anyway a man of fifty, with ropy cords in his neck, ears that stuck out of his skull, and joints swollen by a generalized arthritis and by fallout from youthful rickets. He weighed fifty kilos, spread out over a stiltlike frame of about a meter and three quarters. With one arm broken, and carrying the suitcase over his shoulder in humidity and heat, he was forced to rest often in shade with his bones against the earth, and in silence except for his breathing, and in stillness except for the rising and falling of his chest, while Abeba picked at grass, watched ants, scratched her mosquito bites, rubbed her gashed forehead, and, on one occasion, unknotted the cord that kept shut the suitcase and opened it on its corroded hinges. Inside, among the items of clothing, lay an envelope stiffened by water-bottle plastic cut and flattened to protect seven photographs. She examined these. They were photographs of her father’s family from when he lived in the capital. All of the people in them were gone now, he’d told her more than once. His wife, Amsala, had died of kidney disease. His youngest child, Mulumebet, had died from fever. Beyene, who worked on the Dire Dawa–Djibouti train, was killed when it derailed. Beruke, Fikru, and Itzak had been shot in the street. Abeba put the photos away and helped her father to stand. That night, a trio of robbers accosted them where they lay in a depression off the road and took the suitcase, inside of which, besides the seven photographs, was another portion of their money.

  Thereafter, Abeba’s father took little initiative beyond putting one foot in front of the other until, after three days of walking with little food, they neared a city whose name Abeba remembered while telling Elsabet Tesfaye her story, a name, Shashamene, that stuck in her head because, she said, it was pretty. On the verge of Shashamene, then, they rested beneath a tree by a cistern while on the road before them donkeys bore water in both directions, slapped on their hind ends by boys with sticks, one of whom stopped and gave them water when Abeba called to him pleading for it, and stayed with them while his donkey took the shade as well, and removed from his pants a wad of khat and poked it in his mouth and spit for a while, and then asked if they were hungry, following this by producing a pouch of boiled pasta alongside chunks of goat meat going bad, and giving them half of it and eating the other half before continuing on his way. This was proof, Abeba had told Elsabet Tesfaye, that not everyone is bad.

  She and her father took a room in Shashamene, where mosquitoes had their way with them, and where the electricity was jittery and intermittent, and where the cockroaches hardly skittered away when the lights came on. In the morning, they spent almost half of their remaining money for seats on a bus going north to Ziway, where they got off and, as luck would have it, almost immediately found a ride in the bed of a truck, sunk low under a heaped load, to which they clung alongside other riders. This load was composed of a powder of some kind that had been pressed into sacks so efficiently and tightly that the sacks would not deform when sat on. They emitted a caustic odor as the truck made its way over potholes underneath a sun that, as the hours wore on, drew from the powder, Abeba said, an odor that made her sick to her stomach. She and her father climbed off when the truck turned south, toward Butajira, and began to walk again, northward.

  They ran out of money. Her father became unsure of their location or direction, and suffered from dizziness and swollen lymph nodes. But at last, after walking for three days, they came into a fallow field of dry furrows where a man with a chicken under his arm said they’d indeed found their way to the vicinity of Sebeta, and coaxed them up and led them to a police station, where Abeba’s father inquired regarding the location of his brother, Solomon Addisu, who after a few hours came for them in a cart pulled by a donkey, bringing along a water jug and a bag filled with bananas, mangoes, eggs, biscuits, and a box of toasted corn.

  * * *

  —

  Abeba’s father died a half year later, after a period of lassitude and dry heaves. She’d noticed that he sat a lot, tired and short of breath, and got sick to his stomach easily, and then, during the rainy season, he’d complained of headaches, and woke one morning and couldn’t see straight anymore, and then he lost all feeling in his left hand—the one made useless when robbers broke his wrist—and went to bed in daylight. The next evening he curled on his left side, facing the wall, and died.

  Abeba told Elsabet Tesfaye that, for the next two years, her life was stable. In the compound where she lived with her uncle’s family, she chased after chickens and held pullets in her arms, or wrapped them in her shirt so that only their heads showed, or hung around the tap to help her cousins launder, or hung around the garden pulling weeds, or hung around the wood shop or the granary or the kitchen, which was out of doors, beneath a thatched roof. Sometimes she played with a neighbor boy named Tensaye. They knelt by the tap, rolling clay balls and lobbing them over a wattle fence. They visited neighbors, built dams across rivulets, kicked mud, raised dust, thrashed in brush, and booted a half-deflated soccer ball. They were bound by one rule—don’t cross the stream. They crossed it anyway, when the water was low enough, and wandered in hills where juniper, olive, and yellowwood trees stood in scattered groves, and where red acanthus and wild figs grew. Sometimes they tracked bushbucks through thick bands of acacia, mainly to hear them snort or watch them browse.