God and Jetfire (27 page)

*   *   *

After dinner Paula surprised me by putting on the mix tape I'd sent in the fall. Sarah danced, and she even sang along to some of the songs. Jonathan joined in, bouncing on his rubbery legs, and Erik bounced on his own legs a few times as he passed through clearing dishes. Washing the dishes was one of his jobs. Paula grocery shopped and cooked; Erik did dishes and laundry. They both cleaned, and, because their teaching schedules were flexible, they shared child care without needing much additional help. Paula seemed to savor the after-dinner social time, when her chores were done. We were drinking wine out of big, round glasses, watching the kids, and when my mix tape ended, she surprised me more by playing a mix tape my mother had sent, filled with children's songs she'd taught her students in France and Germany.
“Sur le pont, d'Avignon, on y danse, on y danse!”
I was impressed that my mother had sent such a record, or knew how to make one, or had the same impulse I did, to share music with my son.

“I was starting to tell you before about Jevn's visit, because it's just—so funny how these things happen with adoption.” Paula sank into the couch, one leg folded underneath her, like it was a slumber party at midnight. I was a little sister, completely under her spell. “There's this little bagel shop we discovered; we can walk to it just down the street. Maybe Erik showed it to you; it's one of our favorite little places to go in the morning.”

“I don't think so,” I said, shrugging. I liked hearing about Jevn from them; Paula spoke of him like he was ours.

“Well, when Jevn was here, he and I took Jonathan there. We were sitting at a little table, eating our bagels. And one of my colleagues comes in. This is someone we know through school, and you know we just can't tell everyone the whole story, how the kids were adopted, what an open adoption is—most people know, but sometimes it's just easier not to get into it. And sometimes we forget who knows what. Anyway, so Jevn is sitting there with Jonathan on his lap, and I see this colleague taking a good look at them while she's in line. I wave hello, and I see the gears turning. She's looking from Jonathan to Jevn, who is of course like a perfect adult version of him, and I see what she's thinking.” She laughed and leaned forward. “I'm having a secret rendezvous with my child's real father! At the bagel shop down the street!”

She laughed. I laughed; the foibles of open adoption.

I told her my own story, about a woman I'd met at a dance who, after hearing about Jonathan's adoption, asked me if I might consider being a surrogate for her. I had a proven pelvis and a proven ability to give up my babies.

“Amy, no. You have got to be kidding me!” Paula laughed.

*   *   *

That night I passed the bedrooms on my way to brush my teeth. I wanted to say goodnight to Jonathan, but the bond we'd built in the afternoon felt tenuous. And he was so sensitive. Paula said his sensitivity was sometimes so extreme, he'd get upset when her coffee cup wasn't centered on the microwave turntable. I feared what that might mean—was he trying in vain to right a world that had wronged him? But Paula took it in stride. Part of his personality. I imitated her, taking things simply, and after I brushed my teeth, I peeked in. Paula was laying him down on the bed to change him, and he had already started to cry. I could kiss him then, because then no one would know whether he was crying because of me or because of the changing. Paula stood back as I kissed his forehead, and he paused to look at me. His eyes blinked to focus through his tears. And then he started to laugh.

The next morning, my parents arrived to pick me up. I'd flown down from Boston after my internship, and they'd be taking me back to Tennessee to retrieve my car and drive back to school. While my mother and I talked to Paula in the living room, my father took Sarah for a walk; he found a construction site, crossed the No Trespassing signs, and let Sarah climb on piles of sand and gravel between backhoes and construction debris. Sarah returned quietly smitten, with dangerous new knowledge of the world within walking distance.

We said goodbye, and I settled into the hard cushions of the backseat, the soft seal of the doors as they closed dividing this family from that one more cleanly than I knew how to. As we drove through the mountains into Tennessee, my parents talked about what good parents Paula and Erik seemed to be. My mother said she sort of felt she hadn't lost a grandson so much as she'd gained a son- and daughter-in-law in Paula and Erik. But after Mass the next morning, when one of her friends pulled out a photograph of her beautiful newborn grandchild, she said nothing about her own.

*   *   *

It was nice to be home, where family was easy. Family had always meant: eating supper together and going for hikes. It meant knowing exactly what one another will think is funny, what words make us cringe (
panties
,
chuckle
,
nibble
,
snack
); it was conversations that begin when you can't really talk because you're brushing your teeth and the recognizable weight of each person's feet going down the steps in the morning. It was knowing exactly what part of the creek has the most crawdads and hiking through the tall grass to get there. It was turnip parties in the garden, when we'd take a slice right off the edge of Dad's knife, still warm from the ground and the sun, and spicy. It was Dad making us gag by calling those sweet moments
togetherness
. Above all, it was being able to take one another for granted and taking the greatest imaginable comfort in that.

But with my son it was the opposite. I second-guessed every word; I doubted every touch. He changed radically every time I saw him, and I couldn't even assume he would know who I was, or what he would see in me if he did. I'd created a whole different kind of family, one that would never be able to take anything for granted. It was only through our loss that we would know each other, and knowing each other would require intention, and care, and effort. Time together wouldn't be easy and obvious; it would always be a kind of tending to our wounds.

*   *   *

My father cracked peanut shells in his pockets as we walked through the neighborhood, talking about my good time in Boston, the good parents I found for Jonathan, and the exciting things coming up for me in school. It was just like when I was little; sometimes I'd have trouble sleeping and he'd lie down beside me and set happy things afloat in my imagination, with no narrative to connect them.

Remember Prince? The horse across the field by the gas station? He loved those apples we brought him, even the wormy ones from the trees. And Topsy, she was your favorite horse to ride, wasn't she?

It was as though the mere existence of such good things around me meant their goodness somehow extended to me. But they always seemed alien, horses floating across the groundlessness of night, while the crickets and cicadas and buzzing insects gave volume to the darkness.

Ebony jumped the fence that day! She must have been very hot! But she just went back to her stall, didn't she?

Surf Song, and Sugar Foot, and every other horse in the stable.

 

TWENTY-TWO

It was almost Jevn's birthday when I got back to school. I hadn't seen him in months, but he had been present everywhere all the same: Jonathan was growing to look just like him, and Paula and Erik spoke of him easily and often. We were always going to be in each other's lives, and on good days I thought things could be simple with us. So that Saturday I mixed up nuts and flour and salt and cinnamon, my mother's recipe, and then I mushed the bananas, cooked and cooled everything, and I took it to his house. A loaf of banana bread to say that I was sorry for everything, or everything was forgiven, and I still cared about him and always would. Simple. I stood on the stoop, heart pounding.

He opened the door and slipped out, pulling it closed behind him so I wouldn't see or be seen or be inadvertently invited into the gathering of people inside. I said, “Happy birthday!” and handed him the banana bread wrapped in aluminum foil. He narrowed his eyes and exhaled sharply through his mouth. He took the loaf in one hand but did not receive it; he held it away from his body as though I'd asked him to carry it for me, and he continued to observe me, smiling skeptically, as if, given enough time, I might do something else absurd. “Thanks,” he said, as if to say,
It could never be simple with us
.

*   *   *

Years ago, during that phase of our relationship when we were deep in but still discovering so much about each other, Jevn told me about his father. He said when his father used to drink, he would look out the car window to see how swervy the lines on the road were getting, to gauge whether he might need to jump out. And he measured people like that; if they wavered, he fled. I wanted him to embrace the new me, who had come so far to get here, on his doorstep, saying, “Happy birthday!” but I had been so many things by then, so many unforeseen storms of rage, so many pitch-black midnights. How could he trust this system to stay? He put one hand behind him on the doorknob and stood, silent, letting the stillness expand between us.

I turned away and told myself I would never step on this sidewalk, walk turn down the street where he lived, ever again. What was wrong with making banana bread for someone's birthday?

I stormed home, abandoning my innocently contrived plans for peace; now I was fuming and felt ready for war. This bridge could not be built. He had always been my enemy. Why had I aligned myself with him for even a moment? Why had I let him weigh in on my pregnancy, as if he had as much to lose as I did? As if he had anything to do with me at all? I couldn't believe I'd let him make me feel guilty for my indecision about signing the papers. It was easy for him—there was no metamorphosis in fatherhood! No bloody extraction, no heartbreaking soul-splitting, no wrenching in two that might account for some duplicity. I emerged broken and torn, while he remained faultless, steady, and true. I couldn't help it if motherhood was messy, and I didn't care if he couldn't help it, either—I couldn't forgive him for being a father.

But then what was that moment, the labor and birth? A magical truce when we forgot our grievances. Jevn had been so present there, trusting my pain and leaping to help me, but he wasn't in focus for me, then. He was just a comforting figure on the distant horizon. When it was over and Jonathan was born, we'd been through something together that was bigger than both of us and our complicated relationship. It seemed it should change everything. Maybe I hoped he would ask me again, and, all our walls torn down, that I would find a way to say yes. It was days later, I was dropping tears on Jonathan's chest, when I realized that that distant figure had always, at least since last December, been walking away.

Seeing Jevn's distinctive features in Jonathan—in his eyes, in his smile, in his beginnings of a posture—made me hope there were other good things already built in, like Jevn's intelligence and care. But it wasn't fair that I had to let go of Jevn while experiencing a brand-new fascination for someone who looked just like him. Sometimes when Jonathan glanced at me with the same eyes as Jevn, I thought he somehow had the same legitimate complaints, too; the same well-founded suspicions, the same hurt, and the same unwillingness to let me get close. Sometimes I felt I was turning my back on both of them at once.

As I climbed the stairs to my apartment, I resolved never to reach out again. I'd take only what he would give me; I'd hold him only when he was handed to me.

*   *   *

One night, Sleepy Amy invited me out to play pool. She was insistent that I should get out of my apartment occasionally and do things. And that night I saw a boy. I didn't know I could do that anymore—see boys as anything but long labors and distant mothers' sons.

He was wearing dirty white overalls and plucking an upright bass underneath a spotlight on a small stage. Curly red hair slicked back with pomade. I saw him that night, and then I found out where he would be playing another night, and another. I made myself available but I didn't make any first moves. Finally we got squished together in the threshold of a door when he was between sets, and we met. I said I liked his music; it reminded me of home. It turned out he was from Tennessee, too. At the end of the show, he came over and asked how I was doing.

“I'm just,” I stammered. I already liked him. “I don't know, I'm just—” I didn't know where to start. My infinite guilt, my lost son. He didn't know anything about me.

He smiled. “Let's go outside, and you can tell me how
just
you are.”

I found out he had hitchhiked, homeless, through the South and up through West Virginia to the Ohio River Valley, following spirits, avoiding full moons, collecting songs and stories of early radio history along the way. Oversized and ghostly on the tiny stage, he sang sad songs; his voice was deep and low, uncertain and crackling. When he wasn't playing in bars, he would busk on the sidewalk. I realized it was him I'd heard howling on the street corner from the window of my new apartment near the university. Songs from the South that treated grief and joy with the same unsmiling reserve.

I had always tried to distance myself from that music, playing Beethoven and Liszt to escape Tennessee. But lately I was drawn to it. And Graham was an archivist of this old music; he had a tune for every tragedy.

*   *   *

One day we went walking around the pond where I had labored. There were ducks perched, teetering, just on the edge.

“We should kick them in,” I said, I'm not sure why. I wanted something simple like meanness to solve everything.

“But they just got dried off!” Graham laughed.

“But they're ducks; they don't mind the water.” I didn't really want to kick them in. We kept walking, silent.