God and Jetfire (32 page)

And I'd always spend a lot of time playing with the kids in the living room. Blocks or hide-and-seek, or anything we could come up with. I loved the moments Jonathan would inadvertently touch my skin, rolling a car over my arm or holding steady as he stepped over his toys. I'd keep still like he was a butterfly that didn't know it had landed on a person. I thought if I budged—it's
me
you're perched on—he might get scared and run away. His four fingertips on the top of my hand, the slight weight of his body against my upper arm. In those moments I'd remember there was a place only we had been and questions only we shared. But I was careful not to look at him in a way that bridged back to that place, and I was careful to make sure no one saw me thinking about those things. He'd go back to his blocks, always intent on his task, and I'd quietly catch my breath, there on the futon or cross-legged on the floor across from him. Then one of those times when we were playing in the living room, he crawled into my arms and said, “Amy, pretend I'm your baby.” He put his thumb in his mouth and waited, looking right up at me.

I trembled—helpless and terrified, wondering whether he knew, or what he was saying, or what it all meant. But there was no time for questions. I held still and listened, making sure no one was nearby before I indulged his request, pulling him close and gazing down at him like he was my baby, my entire body shuddering at the chance to hold him like that for the first time since his adoption.

I was pretty sure Paula and Erik knew about those moments, because so often they would retreat to their offices, or they'd have somewhere they had to take Sarah, or they'd send me off for walks in the woods alone with Jonathan. When I got back to Philadelphia, Paula wrote to say that after I hugged them goodbye, Sarah and Jonathan climbed onto the couch and stood on their knees, looking out the window and watching me go. Sarah said, “I love Amy,” and Jonathan responded, “No,
I
love Amy.” My son had never said that to me, so it felt like a big deal to hear about it, even if they were just kids. I could picture them there, noses pressed against the window, trying to make sense of the world together. It was funny to think of love that way, as if one person's love could inch over and threaten someone else's. Yet it was the very conception of love we had to overcome to do what it was we were trying to do—and I was still surprised Paula had shared that story.

 

TWENTY-FIVE

Days before my sister's first baby was born, she was consumed with housework, finishing the tasks she knew she'd find difficult after the birth, but over the phone I asked her to pause for a minute to think: she was about to become a
mother
. Everything she cared about—her values and priorities, her relationships to her friends and family, her capacity for love and sacrifice—was about to change. And not because of the new responsibilities of parenthood, but because of a physiological event. If she was vigilant, she might catch a rare glimpse of primordial motherhood at the moment it implants itself, or rips open her heart, rending new cavities to make way for an unwieldy and excruciating and impossible new love. But she could easily miss it amid the flurry of contractions, and pushing, and midwives, and gifts, and then caring for the new baby. I'd missed it because I wasn't expecting it, and now it was among my most pressing questions: What is motherhood, exactly?

My sister sighed and said she had to paint the picnic tables. Cyan blue because that's the only paint they had at the store, and then she was going to put in the lettuce, which meant getting out the rototiller, and turn the compost. But she said she might think about it after that if she had time.

Within a few days, a few hours before my final landscape paper was due, she went into labor. I packed my research materials and my laptop and drove down to Maryland to be present for the birth. I timed contractions sitting at the edge of her bed, laptop teetering on my folded leg. But I found myself wondering what I was there for. She was going to get to keep her child. She would have a beautiful birth and then a beautiful life as a family to follow. There were no comforts I could give her that weren't already hers. And then Jacob was born, pale and blond and skinny like Jonathan, my parents' first legitimate grandchild.

*   *   *

That summer, Jonathan turned five, the perfect age to start to really enjoy doing dangerous things, and that was why my father suggested we all meet in Virginia to take a ride in the glider. It would also be a chance for a Seek Family Wave-Off before my move to San Francisco, where I'd accepted a design job. I invited Paula and Erik, but they had a full summer ahead of them. They were relocating to Boston for new teaching positions in the fall, but before the move they'd be traveling to Florida to visit Sarah's birth mother as well as Paula's parents and to Indiana for “Cousin Camp,” where all ten or so grandkids canoed and swam and rode horses and otherwise hung out on Erik's parents' farm. And, the biggest event of all, they'd just finalized the adoption of their third child, Andrew, so they were busy getting him settled into the family. Between everything, they were packing and saying goodbye to their old home. It would be a lot to coordinate a trip to rural Virginia just to take a ride in a motorless plane. Nevertheless, they made it to the glider field.

My son was supposed to be the first passenger. He was beginning to look like a little boy in his red polo shirt. He was lanky and tall, white bangs trimmed straight across his forehead in a bowl cut Paula executed herself, using an actual bowl, but his head was always falling back in a wide, cheeky smile. In the shade of the open hangar, we unhooked the bungee cords that kept the cover tight over the curved glass of the canopy. The plane was seamless and smooth—bright white fiberglass, with long, narrow wings extending from the swell of the body at the middle. We rolled the glider by its wings onto the lawn, where my dad popped the latch, lifted the heavy glass lid by its frame, and began to show Jonathan the gears and sticks and knobs and pedals inside. My dad had learned to fly after returning from France in the sixties, and, fascinated with the pure physics of it, he joined a glider club in Virginia, where he and my mother first settled. The airfield was a three-hour drive from where they ended up in Tennessee, but flying was one of the few things my dad would take a whole Saturday off of work to do.

Under the bubble of the glass, the glider had a front seat and a backseat, enough space for a pilot and a passenger, but when we were little my sister and I would ride strapped together in the back, with pillows to elevate us so we could see. When Dad would tilt the wing, my sister would tell me it was because I wasn't sitting up straight enough, and I might make us go completely over if I wasn't careful. My father tilted one way, then the other, steeper and steeper, and asked me over his shoulder and over the noise of the air rushing through the windows, to stop leaning. I bore flying like many things my father exposed me to, with no certainty I wasn't going to get killed.

Sometimes, he would pull the stick straight back and ascend until the plane stopped, vertical in midair. The nose would turn down and free-fall fast toward the ground, spinning like a top. He'd have to pull back on the stick fast enough that he wouldn't hit the ground (certain death), but not so fast that the force of the change in direction would rip the wings off (certain death). Pilots had to be able to do this trick to maintain their licenses, but I begged my dad not to do it with me in the plane.

We finished the tour of the plane, but Jonathan, seated and strapped into the backseat, decided that he was too scared to go up. And to my surprise, my dad didn't push it; he must have been uncertain about his privileges as birth grandfather. I wondered if he considered himself a grandfather to Jonathan at all. Instead of flying, Jonathan sat in the back of the plane while my dad told him about how they would fly someday, and how he would let Jonathan take the controls when they did. Which was true. You'd be soaring over mountaintops and he'd wiggle his hands in the air unsettlingly, to say,
I'm
not flying this plane—I hope you are!

While Paula and Erik each took flights, Jonathan and Sarah took turns driving me and my mother around in the golf cart that was normally used to tow planes to and from the grassy runway. Jonathan couldn't catch his breath from laughing as he floored it across the open field. When the afternoon ended, I tried to convince myself that it was enough. Enough time with my family, enough contact with the thing my father enjoyed most in the world. Enough contact with my father, just to be there in the place he loved so much.

The next day, we took a walk in the woods before going our separate ways. Dad helped Sarah spatula a wriggling snake onto a stick to examine it. While everyone else stood in a circle watching, Jonathan gently took my hand and led me away, into the woods. He explained that what my father was doing was very dangerous, and he kept looking back to gauge our distance from them until he was confident we'd reached safety. Paula told me he sometimes wore a toy football helmet around the house, just because it made him feel secure. I didn't want him to feel so fearful, but I was happy to be rescued from my father, and I was honored it was me Jonathan chose to save.

When the snake got away, we all wandered down to the creek where I'd been catching frogs and crawdads between glider flights since I was born. It was wide as a street and shallow as a bathtub, and the clear water made hunting easy. Tall trees shaded the water, but there were generous openings where the sun streamed in and deep pockets in the creek farther down where you could swim. We all rolled up our pants and stepped in, and my dad showed the kids how to skip rocks.

“Pick a really flat one,” he told them, “like this one here.”

The kids stood on their tippy-toes to see what my dad had in his hand. He cast it across the creek, and it popped up one, two, three, four times.

“Here's one!” Jonathan handed it to my brother. Because he was a white-water raft guide through high school, my brother read rivers like my dad read skies, but it was my father who'd taught him how to skip rocks. My brother threw it. One, two, three skips. Jonathan went looking for more. When he reached his hand to the shallow bottom, he was almost completely submerged.

Paula and Erik let the new baby wade in the creek with the others. Andrew was big and heavy with tan skin and curly hair. He cuddled into you and didn't cry easily, and he had a satisfying give when you squeezed him. He looked perpetually just-woken and wide-eyed, perfectly unbiased and open to anything. They had adopted him at nine months old. I didn't know the details about the adoption: his birth mother's situation, how they found her, or whether it had been as hard for her as it had been for me. Paula told me, but I guess I didn't want to think about it. I was just happy my son had a little brother.

Even though they had a long drive ahead of them, Paula and Erik let the kids get completely wet, let them run on the rocks, get muddy and destroy their day's clothes. This gave my father so much satisfaction. He said his parenting philosophy had been: when in doubt, increase freedom. He didn't have a single piece of advice for improving Paula and Erik as parents. He noted this quietly from his lawn chair, planted right in the middle of the stream beneath the trees, while they skipped rocks in the creek beyond us. I sat beside him, beside my mother. His pants were rolled up and his feet rested on a rock, half in and half out of the water. He smiled as he watched Andrew creek-walk up to his waist, his diaper floating loosely behind him. Then he got up and took Jonathan's hand and led him up the creek, balancing on slippery stones. It looked very much like my dad was the one who might fall.

*   *   *

I flew to California in August, and for the rest of the summer I sat at the front of a vast open office with desks arranged like seats on a bus. Each landscape architect faced the back of the next one's head and only befriended them via e-mail. Taking lunch, social conversation, and hobbies were all frowned upon. Our work was so exactly not about horticulture, we weren't even allowed houseplants at our desks. There were no siestas or summer Fridays as you might have hoped, from the little you knew about California, and nobody left work early to go surfing. Happy hour was held in-house on Fridays and meant bottled beer in the windowless conference room, after which some people would go home, but many kept working. What was exciting was that I would be getting a paycheck on a regular basis, and I could start paying back several years of school debt.

I was introduced to the project I'd be working on by its project manager, who took over my very large desk with drawings and folders and trace paper. Over his shoulder the windows faced south and the hill rose along the side of the building. As people walked by, the long, horizontal window framed first their heads, and then their coffees, and then their knees. The project was a five-hundred-acre decommissioned military air base we would be converting into a park. We were competing against other design firms to win the project. I asked if we had any particular concept, some kind of an angle.

“Blue.” Mark put a few sheets of trace paper down on my desk, diagrams drawn in marker. Red scribbles to indicate a circulation system, paths and trails and roadways and plazas, across the park. Blue scribbles for lakes and canals. Green scribbles for landscape typologies—woodlands, meadows, lawns. I was to make the scribbles into digital lines.

“Here, start with that.” He began to walk away.

“Wait, but blue is the idea?”

“It's about water.” He turned back around. “Recycled stormwater, recreational water, water for wayfinding. Yeah; blue. I think Hong Joo has space for an exploded axon, so build the diagrams as layers in one Illustrator file.”

He disappeared up the stairs. Upstairs was where most of the senior people worked. Out their windows, you could see the round peak of Potrero Hill, and you could easily slip out the back door to get a coffee, and everyone would think you were just going to the bathroom. Unless you turned left, in which case the downstairs staff would see your knees, and your waist, and then your head, and know you'd probably be coming back with a coffee.