God and Jetfire (31 page)

“It's not landscaping!” I insisted. “It's grad school. It's a really good program. I want to teach, or do research, or—”

“Tell me what you want, I'll tell you how you can live without it,” my grandmother said. “Now, you may have already told me this, but I'm in the over-eighty group; when was the last time you saw Jonathan?”

I sighed, but I was grateful for this question. My grandmother was the only one who asked about Jonathan. Not Paula and Erik, not North Carolina. Jonathan.

“Just a few weeks ago,” I told her. “He's walking and talking now. He turned three in July! Paula said they were making him a Spider-Man cake.”

Paula had written to tell me she was thinking about me on Jonathan's birthday. They had hosted a combined birthday party for Erik and Jonathan. Paula said, “He'll now tell you very proudly that he is
free
.”

“—but what a blessing they aren't possessive or feeling threatened,” Grandma said as she moved some of the pile of newspapers on her side table.

“There it is, did you see that one?” She handed me a photo Paula had sent her. Jonathan wearing a green Windbreaker. “A beautiful child.”

I handed it back to her. I knew that wasn't a compliment; she was saying it as a matriarch, her grandchildren her own accomplishment. Mick gave her a plate of food, and she positioned it atop her hernia like it was a table.

Her perspective about Paula and Erik had changed over time, as she'd gotten to know them through letters. They corresponded about theology and family, my grandmother's favorite things. After my uncle's death, she'd been looking for homes for his three youngest children because his ex-wife had been incarcerated. Grandma suggested that perhaps Paula and Erik might be interested in taking more Seek children, “seeing as they're doing such a good job with the one they have.” I knew they were considering a third child, but I thought it would be strange for Seeks to outnumber them in their own home. Then it really would be like we adopted them, not vice versa. I mentioned it to Paula in passing, but I didn't want to be involved in the adopting side of anyone's adoption.

“They're unusual for adoptive parents,” my grandmother said. “Most adoptive families are so on the edge of panic, they don't want contact. But so much can be added to the lives of those children if they don't build walls.”

Grandma looked down the driveway to see another truck pulling up. It was Tunie, returning from her day job at the library. She passed without turning her head, on her way up the driveway to her own house. Mick wished me luck in Philadelphia, pulling the door closed behind him. Grandma lifted her plate for a moment and tugged the afghan up to her chin.

“We'll get him back, don't worry.” She was not looking at me.

“What are you talking about?” I objected. “I'm not
trying
to get him back.” Was I supposed to be trying to get him back?

“We'll get him back.” She salted her sliced tomato. It was as certain as the sun would rise behind the dinner bell to her right and set somewhere over her left shoulder.

“He's legally theirs!” I was insistent. It had given me some comfort to know that my grandmother had come to terms with the adoption. If she, who had taken it so personally, could finally accept it, I could, too. My son one of the many things she could tell me how to live without. But if she'd only come to terms with it by telling herself it was somehow temporary or undoable, then there was no comfort at all. Getting him back could not be my only hope. I had to
not
get him back and keep going.
That
was the challenge. “I don't have any right to him. I signed away my rights! It's the
law
; it's not up to me!”

Grandma put her plate on the side table, where she kept a little bag of Dove chocolates, and settled herself to take a nap. I wondered about Uncle Johnny's birth mother, whether my grandmother knew anything about her, but I thought I knew the answer: he just showed up in the shed and stayed. Back then, there was no mother.

“Yes, but he is a Seek child,” she said, “and he belongs with the Seeks.”

“How would I even
do
that?” I scooted toward her in the squeaky metal office chair. She was folding her washcloth to put over her eyes. “Grandma! Do you understand that he's happy there? He has a sister; they're a family. I don't even want to take him back! It would be cruel.”

“I don't know any of the legal aspects. I'm in the over-eighty group. It's not that I don't love you, dear, I do, but it's time for my nap.”

She lay back in her recliner beside Grandpa, fast asleep in the places each of them would die. I was left alone in the silent, sun-drenched room, air conditioner feebly battling the heat stored deep in the red brick floor. A pack of my grandpa's yellow Carefree gum on his side table. Sheep baaaed in the pasture outside, and every now and then someone could be heard yelling over a tractor.

*   *   *

I rented the cheapest apartment I could find within walking distance of the design school, sight unseen and in a bad neighborhood of a city I'd never set foot in until that day. My sister drove up from her new home in Maryland to help me settle in. We shopped together and then cooked together, and by the time she left, I felt like that tiny apartment, so small I'd have to roll a futon onto the floor every night to sleep, was home. For my first few weeks, I'd return to the places we'd gone together, buoys of familiarity within the sea of the new city. Like the checkout area of the Trader Joe's, where we had laughed so hard we crouched over and cried, and I felt as a consequence that that checkout area belonged to us.

School began the day after she left. Our studio desks were arranged in cubicles beneath sawtooth skylights that framed the shadowless blue sky. Sometimes a cloud might pass to suggest the world was turning. We designed vast cityscapes, rethought waterfronts of well-established cities, made attractions of militarized international border zones, and transformed industrial wastelands into bird sanctuaries and parks. We did not speak of flowers or trees; our profession was public space: the plazas and parks and open spaces you think of when you think of a city. It was not what I imagined, but it was interesting, and still, my curiosity veered toward the actual city surrounding us, which I would explore on foot as often as I could get out of studio.

I ran through my neighborhood, across the bridge and beside the river. Along the way, there were bronze plaques in out-of-the-way places, cast in nondescript sidewalks and affixed to bench backs, that said
This space not yet dedicated
, as if to offer those places up, to say the city was ripe for the picking; every corner waited to be claimed. I began to feel I was doing that; being part of the city, making it mine.

For one thing, I got a part-time job at a radio station. Listening to local musicians' demo tapes and pulling the best for airplay. One morning, as I removed some folders from the file cabinet, the receptionist pointed at my waistline in the back. “What
is
that?” she asked. I was still wearing the undies that had stretched with my stomach when I was pregnant, and it appeared some of the extra fabric was hanging out of my jeans. The next day, and many days after, there were little gift bags of underwear greeting me at my desk in the morning. Tiny lace thongs and zebra-striped pink-bowed short shorts like I'd never seen. Another day, she told me I should go out with Thomas, the guy who ran the other radio station in the building. “He's hot,” she explained. I found out that on his off days, he was doing renovation work in a run-down neighborhood north of mine, and I offered to help him. We poured concrete and hammered shingles and lay wood floors and went swimming in the river farther north. After a few weeks of periodic manual labor, we were sitting side by side on his couch. I was wrapping my arms around my legs, folded into the hollow where Jonathan had been. Gingerly, he kissed my elbow and then apologized. He wanted to get close to me, but he sensed my reserve. I didn't have room for another person, another heartbreak.

I stayed afloat in school, but I fell in love with the city. As I ran, I stirred the big soup of me, all the things I loved and longed for, all the things I couldn't contain at once, embraced in the swinging of my arms. The city really began to feel like home when, like the Romans, I had augured a route around it, and for me that route became the city walls, as solid as stone, and everything within it I felt like I was somehow protecting.

*   *   *

Just as I was starting graduate school, Paula wrote to tell me that Jonathan had started preschool. She said he was reluctant to go, and so she read him a story about a raccoon mother who left a kiss on the baby raccoon's hand so that he could press it to his cheek if he felt lonely.

“I pulled out my lipstick,” she said, “and left him with a big ‘Sangria Sunset' kiss on his palm, and then he was happy.”

These images I had of Jonathan bore ever less resemblance to the shadow he cast in me. There was him beaming brightly up at the camera in the black-and-white photos Paula sent, and there was the numbness I carried around the design school and said nothing about. There was him laughing with Sarah as I chased them around the house during a rainstorm last time I visited, them skidding in their socks and shrieking with delight. And there was my ambivalence when Thomas tried to get close to me. As my grief sank to inaccessible depths, my son grew more and more self-assured. I didn't feel any need to reconcile them. I simply felt I was looking at my son from a great distance. I let things divide and separate; the real boy Jonathan couldn't teach my sadness to go away, and I tried not to bring my sadness to bear on my relationship with him.

*   *   *

I thought by then they had probably begun to tell Jonathan the whole story. Adding detail as he grew and as his curiosity and understanding allowed, the way they did it with Sarah. Hearing she'd come out of her birth mother's belly, Sarah became fascinated with childbirth itself, and maybe because she saw me more often than her own birth mother, Paula told me she'd suggested Sarah save her childbirth questions for me. She would put a doll in my lap and ask me to give birth to it. She couldn't frame her question. It wasn't, Did it hurt? It wasn't, How long does it take? She just wanted to see it, as if watching it happen might help her understand what it all meant. I'd put the baby under my shirt and moan and groan like they do on television. Sometimes I'd be sitting on the sofa, deep in labor and about to deliver the baby, and Sarah would leave the room altogether, her question, somehow, or at least for the time being, answered.

But Jonathan wasn't interested in those things. He knew I was his birth mother, and that made me somehow special and specially his; I just couldn't tell how much he understood about what that meant. But I didn't want to interrupt a story in progress, one that was Paula and Erik's to tell. They knew his sensitivities and the best words to explain it. And they'd be there to answer his questions or comfort him, hours, or days, or weeks later.

*   *   *

That Christmas, in an effort to understand what I was going to graduate school for, my father took an interest in a diagram he found in one of the books I'd left by the fireplace. When he was not tending to the fire, he read that all soil could be divided into varying proportions of sand, silt, clay, and loam. Doubting this, he went outside and took a shovelful of frozen earth. He put it on a cookie sheet and into the oven to dry, and then he spread it across the table where my mother would have very much liked to set Christmas dinner. He pounded it lightly with a hammer to break it apart. He planned to put it into a jar and shake it until the component parts layered themselves, but he left it there for days, pounding it occasionally until after I'd returned to school, where in fact very little of my work had to do with soil.

I never thought about actually getting Jonathan back, but I often wished he could be there when my family was together. I wanted him to join us on our hikes in the woods. I wanted him caught between my brother and me, stringing the lights; I wanted him sprinkling Christmas cookies with my mother and sister, or stocking firewood with my dad. I wanted him captured in our web, held tight by everyone. But since he had his own family to get tangled up in, I just wanted my family in Tennessee to miss him. Or at least notice that he wasn't there. But then he had never been there, except the Christmas he was still within me.

I visited his family instead, before returning to school. After three and a half years, my relationship with Paula and Erik hadn't changed, though their circumstances were always changing. With Paula no longer bound to North Carolina for her doctoral work, they'd started applying for jobs in Chicago and other cities. I knew they were working toward a third adoption, maybe sending their Dear Birth Mother letters and corresponding with potential matches, but I didn't ask about it. They stayed in touch with my family, and I'd even heard that my aunt and uncle had visited them after the wool festival in North Carolina. As it was relayed to me, they just showed up on Paula and Erik's doorstep and were welcomed in. I could imagine the way Paula would laugh in surprise, delighting in exactly the strangeness that might make another family uncomfortable about the whole situation.

I visited every three or four months; usually I initiated it, but if too much time passed, they would. The days I spent with them seemed to unfold largely as they might have without me. Everyone dispersed casually throughout the house, unless there was a church service or an event to pile into the car for. If we were home, I'd often spend hours sitting in the living room or standing in the kitchen talking with Paula. Sometimes I felt like talking to her was the best way to catch up with Jonathan. She was always giving me funny stories and insights into his personality, a long-exposure image of him I wouldn't get myself on a quick weekend visit. But I'd always ask just as many questions about Sarah, or about Paula's sisters and a few of her friends I'd met. Visiting meant reuniting with everyone.