God and Jetfire (23 page)

“We spoke to Jevn a few weeks ago,” she said, “and we were a little worried—”

I reassured them that everything had worked out. I could give no life to their fears. I told them I'd just spoken to Paula, just heard my son's voice on the phone. I'd already made plans to visit. They were constantly sending e-mails and photographs, not just to me and Jevn, but to our extended families. All those good things were true.

“Well, this is such a relief to hear. You look so good. We'd been worried about you. We were worried about Jevn, too, but it's just different for the mother.” She pressed her lips together in a flat smile, and the kids began taking dishes off the table. “I'm so glad it's all worked out.” She held my eyes for a moment. “We'd been talking about renovating the attic, actually. We were thinking it might work for you—we weren't sure how definite the adoption was, or what other options you had, so we just didn't know, but we thought you might need a place where you could have the baby and finish school. I thought I might be able to help a little, but—” She smiled and shrugged, and I must have smiled back. My body had become an infinite receptacle for grief. “I'm glad to know you wouldn't have needed it. We might have just confused things if we'd mentioned it. And it wouldn't have solved everything, of course, it was just a gesture, but we just wanted you to know we were here to support you however we could.”

I walked home around the outside of the park. I walked fast. I could not think about what she'd said. I didn't want to have such a clear picture of how it might have worked. I didn't want to think about how I would have kissed him goodbye in the morning and handed him to her, leapt down those five porch steps and walked up the hill to class. How I'd have returned for lunch and to breast-feed. How their kids might have sung to him so I could take a shower, and I'd have done my studio work at the drafting table in their attic, trying hard to tear my eyes away from him. How I'd have told all my professors, and, recognizing the kind of motherhood they could easily make space for, they would have understood why I couldn't work as late into the night as the other students. I'd have had a million school loans and gotten all Cs, and it wouldn't have mattered. No other possibility would have even occurred to me.

I would never think about it. I only noticed the air was getting cooler, that summer was really over.

*   *   *

That night in my attic I collected songs for a mix tape to send to my son. I added “Wild Montana Skies,” the John Denver song we'd sung driving to the sand dunes in Colorado before I was pregnant. When we could see them on the horizon, just below the peaks of the Rockies, I wanted to jump out of the car and run for them.

“Guess how long that would take,” Jevn said.

“It feels like twenty minutes? I don't know, it doesn't matter!”

Mountains had an energy all their own; I felt propelled by them. When we finally got there, a couple of hours later, an enormous, shallow body of water was moving across the plain in front of the dunes. It was no more than an inch deep but it spread, searching for a container, and we walked across it like giants across an ocean. Jevn warned me to stay hydrated as we started up the face of the first dune. From a distance they looked like a single range of small mountains running in a row right in front of the Rockies, but it would take half a day to get to the top, and then you'd see that they extended far into the distance—infinite, disorienting piles of moving sand and shadows—to the base of the Rockies. You could easily lose your bearings once you lost sight of the parking lot.

Driving back, he read to me from
Einstein's Dreams
. He read like someone unaccustomed to his own voice, gentle on account of it. Laughing, he told me about how he used to soak his saxophone reeds in Kool-Aid so he could suck on them during band practice. That night, sunburned and exhausted, we stayed in a Wild West, one-story, cheap hotel, the sole thing standing in the desert. I remember thin, dirty walls and the sun setting long and late, unhindered by any obstruction, pouring through the windows till infinity. We were very young but our spirits were aligned. Driving home the next day, we sang along to John Denver. It was a prayer to the landscape to raise an orphan child, to give him a drive and a passion to carry him in the absence of a family. Now it had real meaning to me. I couldn't know for sure that Paula and Erik would provide my son with everything I wanted for him, but the beauty of the world was a teacher I could trust. The sky and the wind and the sunset would be his most important guides, even if I'd kept him. I comforted myself that giving him up and keeping him were exactly the same.

I added “Kan Guo Lai,” a song about unrequited teenage love that was popular in China when I was there with my sister. We had wandered the campus of her university and recorded ten or fifteen versions, sung by college students reluctant to admit they knew the words.

I added the song Sting was singing when my water broke and a version of “You Are My Sunshine,” the song I thought my mother would sing while washing the dishes, by Gene Autry.

But I couldn't decide on a Patsy Cline song. My favorite had beautiful, bird's-eye images of travel, the pyramids on the Nile, sunrise over the tropics, the market in Algiers. And it evoked the bittersweet conundrum: that to go anywhere, you have to say goodbye to somewhere else. I'd fallen in love with so many landscapes; I longed for everyplace I wasn't. I wanted my son to travel and fall in love, and have his heart broken by beautiful places, too.

But for all that, the song said the wrong thing.
Just remember when you're home again, you belong to me.
I didn't want to even hint at that less noble kind of love. Love that longs, and clings tight, and possesses. But without the refrain, the poetry of travel was just an endless stream of images. What made it a love song was that the love found its way back. That's what love does. Even Moses, released to the river, returned to his mother's embrace. Without the return, love was aimless, loosed like a balloon till it floats away and disappears. Was there any difference at all between love like that and forgetting altogether? No, a mother might let go of her child, but that couldn't be the end of the story. There was always that moment—when she dries her hands and peeks around the wall, and, seeing her, he smiles.

Without it, love was aimless. Love released like a balloon till it floats away and disappears. There seemed to be little difference between love like that and forgetting altogether.

I'd use “Walkin' After Midnight” instead.

 

NINETEEN

I arrived in Durham Saturday afternoon. I knew the house I was looking for, because Paula had sent me photographs right after they purchased it. There was a tiny stoop flanked by hydrangeas someone else had planted years ago. Tall pines made a light forest ceiling, and beneath it was an uneven lawn, littered with pine needles and occasional rhododendrons growing wild, with hostas and azaleas fading into the bare earth. A push toy sat in the driveway, where it had been deserted. There were no curbs because it wasn't a proper neighborhood, just a little lane through the woods off of a busy road that connected Raleigh and Durham. It looked like a home.

“Welcome!” Paula sang as she let the screen door slam and stepped off the stoop to greet me. She hugged me with one arm; Sarah smiled at me from within the other.

“Jonathan's asleep, come in! This is our house!” She laughed as she led me inside. She was so at ease that the question didn't occur to me, how do we do this thing, open adoption.

“Hello!” Erik emerged from the kitchen and hugged me. “How were the directions? Are you getting the tour?” His manner was more reserved than Paula's.

I'd been to several homes of prospective families, but because of their distance in Indiana, and then the move to North Carolina, we'd never seen Paula and Erik's home. It hadn't occurred to me until that moment—if things smelled wrong, it was too late. The living room had hardwood floors and a big window looking out to the front yard. There was a couch with a slipcover in front of the window and a couple of unmatched recliners. It felt recently moved into, not fully occupied yet. There were stacks of books that didn't have places. Move-in clutter. Down the hallway were a master bedroom and a small bedroom for Sarah and Jonathan to share. We walked through the kitchen, where Erik was refilling his coffee, to the very large playroom that had been added on to the back.

“And these are our luxurious guest accommodations!” Paula indicated the futon, which had been unfolded and made up for me in the playroom. “We had it in Indiana and, actually, according to previous guests, it's supposed to be quite comfortable!” Between the playroom and the kitchen, there was just an open threshold and a large window over the kitchen sink. Curtain rods had been installed in both openings.

Paula opened a door from the playroom onto a covered terrace. We stepped outside, and she pointed to the corner of the backyard, where there was a small storage shed.

“And
that
is where we'll keep the television!”

*   *   *

Just then, Erik stepped out through the screen door, holding Jonathan, squinting and blinking. I was surprised to see him in physical form. I'd almost forgotten he had a shape.

“Hello, Amy!” Erik spoke for Jonathan. “Can you say hello?” He brought Jonathan close to me. His head bobbed, and with his chin still low in Erik's chest, he caught my eye. I do not know what I expected in that moment.

“Hi, Jonathan!” I smiled at him and touched his hand. “How are you?” He looked back blankly, furrowing his brow at the sunlight.

Erik handed him to me, and as I took him I realized I'd forgotten his weight, how elbowy and hard he was underneath the coating of soft flesh. He was difficult to manage, bendy and rubbery, full of will, looking this way and that. But whatever my expectations—maybe that we would merge like liquids the moment we touched, maybe that everything I'd wondered about him would have some kind of fleshy answer, or perhaps that the seven pounds of deep mechanics removed from me a month ago would click into place and I'd operate normally again—I forgot them in that instant. I didn't feel anything more powerfully than Erik standing twenty-four inches away, observing us. He and Paula were both smiling as they watched me greet him, and their presence produced an almost physical constraint. I stiffened from the outside, and at the same time my interior weakened, emptied of conviction. I felt loosely confined, like a boat in a log flume, free floating till it bumps an edge and is dumbly realigned to the direction of travel.

Molly had wanted us to lay out our expectations in detail, but I don't think we would have been able to address the fine grain of this moment, when, taking him in my arms, all my impulses went to war: my motherhood against their Entitlement, my hunger to enjoy our old intimacy against the costs they might bear to see it. But I didn't allow the battle to rage on for a second. I had an instinct even stronger than all the others: to protect their newborn family. I shut everything down, turned myself off, and simply drove myself numbly like a vehicle from within.

“Wow, he's gotten bigger! He has so much color!” I said, my heart hollow. Jonathan blinked his eyes at me, and then at the sunlight. He arched his back and jerked his head to look over his shoulder. His whole body reverberated with every motion, muscles in his abdomen called into action by surprise to counterbalance the movement of his head. He was getting ready to cry.

“We're still dealing with the colic,” Paula said. I didn't want to think about what that might mean. Paula took him from me. “But I think the problem here is that he's extremely sensitive to transitions. Waking up, going to sleep, moving from one space to another, having someone new enter the room.” Paula touched her forehead to his. “It's all very difficult, isn't it?”

*   *   *

Paula had dissertation work to do, and so Erik suggested that we take the kids to a park about a mile down the road. I felt myself detached from desire, instinctively reducing myself to avoid those edges. I had no idea whether I wanted to go to a park about a mile down the road with a family that wasn't mine, but I knew that the answer was, of course, “Yes! That would be great!” Erik buckled the kids in the car, and we pulled out of the driveway.

“The nice thing about our location,” he explained as we drove, “is that we're just a ten-minute drive from the university, and there's a nursery school—that's it there—we think we'll put Sarah in next year. It's within walking distance of the house.” Erik pointed to the school on the corner with a pine-needle-covered playground, and we crossed the intersection. “So even though we're not in the university neighborhood per se, several of our colleagues live in this area, and there are a number of places we can get to on foot.”

We arrived at the park, and as Erik was unbuckling Jonathan, a woman with short black hair standing on the edge of the parking lot seemed to recognize us. Erik waved.

“I thought that was your car!” she said as she walked quickly up to us, crouching a bit to acknowledge the kids through the windows. Erik handed Jonathan to me and unbuckled Sarah from her car seat. Jonathan started squirming.

“Heather, this is Amy. Amy, Heather is in our department; we went to college together.” He took Jonathan back from me and turned to Heather. “I was just telling Amy that we have a few colleagues who live near here. Heather and her husband had a not-so-small influence on our decision to move to North Carolina. In fact, they were the ones who helped us find the house; I'm not sure if Paula told you about that.”

“Hi, yes, thank you very much.” Heather nodded. “I credit myself with bringing them here!” She paused, looking at me to tell her who I was.