God and Jetfire (14 page)

*   *   *

But the moment I felt I might have found them, my guard returned. What about how different we were? Even with Robert and Deb, with whom we had much more in common, we'd struggled to reconcile our differences. They'd told us they simply couldn't conform perfectly to our standards. We'd never achieve some kind of perfect eclipse, with them as parents giving our son exactly what we'd have given him. They warned us we would have to relinquish control when we relinquished the baby and “step aside” to let them move into the parenting role.

Paula and Erik addressed our differences in a similar way, but with an entirely different emphasis. They said they couldn't be held to our standards, standing in for us and performing as us. But they didn't see why they should have to—not when we could be there, standing in for ourselves, performing as ourselves, giving him all the things they knew we had to give him.

We continued to correspond and speak on the phone, unearthing not sameness, but sympathy. They were not the image of what Jevn and I might have become, ten years down the road. It seemed they spent most of their time drinking decaf coffee and reading theological texts from the thirteenth century, two things I'd never done. But they were in fact not like any image at all; they were constantly moving, thinking, and recalibrating—where they would live, how they would parent, where the money would come from. We couldn't know exactly what kind of life they would provide, and they didn't make promises. What mattered wasn't the shape of the movements, or where it took them. What mattered was that we had a good feeling about the place they originated.

*   *   *

They had adopted their daughter, Sarah, a few days after her birth and had initiated contact with her birth mother, who had planned to have a closed adoption. Over time, they'd developed a relationship. Even so, they wanted to avoid modeling our relationship on that one. Our relationship would, naturally, be unique, and we began practicing it. We practiced telling each other incidental stories from our days and sharing our biggest sadnesses and hopes. It felt like when I got my first lunchbox, before I started kindergarten. The only thing I knew about the whole world ahead was what I witnessed every morning, my older brother and sister leaving home with lunchboxes in hand. So I practiced that. I put an apple, a banana, inside, closed the clasps, and carried it into the living room, dreaming of the future. I sat down on the cold brick of the fireplace and opened it. I loved the security of those varied things carried safely within the simple turquoise box, and I toted it around to every room in the house. I knew I couldn't know anything about what the future held, but I knew I was somehow equipped for it.

And now, as then, I tested my relationship with Paula and Erik, experiencing the weights and movements of the interior stuff as I practice-carried things in it, into this and that space of my life, having no actual idea what open adoption would hold. I practiced calling them, practiced talking about them, practiced telling them hilarious stories, telling them sad ones, practiced imagining where they would fit—before the weights became real. Soon everything would depend on those dynamics, the sadness and loss and pain, the relationship with my unknown son, with Jevn, being able to fit within some new and clean and unfamiliar turquoise box, the confines of our relationship.

*   *   *

But we hadn't met them in person yet, and as we drove west toward Indiana over ever flatter terrain, I prepared myself to be disappointed. We had been in this place so many times before.

On our way, Jevn and I argued about our recycling project. We were still collecting cans and taking them to be recycled every few weeks. Jevn thought we should abandon it. Let kids who drink Coke deal with their own waste. We were busy enough as it was, and I shouldn't be carrying bags of cans up and down the stairs anymore. I totally disagreed. If we weren't willing to do it, who would be? And then what? Just let the aluminum go into the landfill? And figure out how not to care about it? And then what else might we teach ourselves not to care about? He thought my extrapolations were absurd.

We maneuvered around the tiny, flat, empty downtown of Fort Wayne to the restaurant where we'd agreed to meet for lunch. Just outside, we saw Erik standing on the sidewalk. We recognized him from the photos, and that early Sunday morning, our car was the only animate thing in what might have been a stage-set city. Erik turned toward us, and just like love, it happened in an instant: Erik's hand shooting skyward, honest as a rocket, to say hello, here we are, and to direct us where to park our car. Like falling in love, time was split in half in Fort Wayne, Indiana. It was a fine edge; I barely noticed it, but everything that followed fell to one side, and everything before fell to the other. One look, and somehow I knew he was my son's father.

We continued around the block and parked the car. We got out and approached him, and we walked together to the restaurant.

“Paula's inside, trying to persuade them to seat us. A small technical difficulty: the place we chose for lunch is a bar, and Sarah is, of course, a minor!”

We joined Paula, who was chatting with the staff. She was smiling, touching the hostess on the arm, both of them laughing, even as we were refused seats. A manager decided that we could be seated outside instead, and we arranged ourselves around a table on that sunny day that was not quite warm enough for sitting out there.

“Before you got here, we were talking about how not to have a second car,” Erik said. He said they wanted to end up in a place where public transit would give their children freedom and independence and would allow them to remain a single-car family. Ideally somewhere like Chicago. They asked us if we had any ideas. It was a problem we couldn't imagine, but we thought it was great—public transit was great; living in a city was great; thinking about reducing your environmental impact was great. That they were talking about second cars instead of second babies was great.

After lunch, we walked around Fort Wayne, and Sarah wandered ahead or fell behind, inspecting things in the grass beside the sidewalk. Her eyes were dark under the canopy of her long eyebrows, which tilted at their ends in a smile. She was curious; she studied everything around her.

“Sarah loves animals—all animals!” Paula told me as we both watched her.

“I loved animals when I was little, too,” I said, and I felt I wasn't just making conversation. I was giving Paula information I hoped she might someday share with my son. I told her how my dad would rescue turtles from busy roads, sometimes snakes and frogs, and he'd bring them home in a box and surprise us; we'd keep them for an afternoon before we'd hike over to the creek to find a home for them. Those rescue missions could have been the origin of everything I felt about justice, and love, and beauty.

“That was why I became a vegetarian, initially,” I added, and Paula said she was a vegetarian, too.

As I watched Sarah crouching at the edge of the sidewalk, I realized I wanted her for my son's sister. And as Jevn pointed toward a cornice and told Erik something about the architecture here, I turned back to my conversation with Paula and realized I wasn't waiting to be disappointed.

*   *   *

Driving back to Cincinnati, Jevn and I were silent. I think we both felt something big had happened. Finally he spoke.

“I had such a strong instinct to trust them, if they did something I doubted—I think I would question myself.”

I held still, as I sometimes did when Jevn spoke openly. Those moments felt precious and delicate. I wanted to preserve his fragile feeling and my own. It had been building slowly, as detail by detail we'd grown to trust them, and it happened fast, Erik's arm in the air. It happened as magically as I have ever fallen in love. And that I knew, though I couldn't know enough to know, was exactly what gave substance to my knowing. Erik's hand reaching unself-consciously skyward, generous and firm, loosed my imagination. An honest gesture that split the sky and freed me from my own formless and uncertain desires.

Jevn dropped me off at my apartment. Before he left, he reminded me once again of the river, and for the first time I could imagine letting go.

 

THIRTEEN

When I was little, I kept a list of the things I loved. I rewrote it every night. It included my pets and my family, but knowing that even the loss of a creature as insignificant as an ant would cause the world to collapse, I always ended by writing that I loved everything else, too, even those things I hadn't mentioned or didn't know about. Sometimes I thought it was knowing I was an accident that made me love everything so much. Every single thing was something I almost never got to see. But by remembering everything, I hoped to preserve it. This began when the world was very small and my list very short, as it was when I was eight and got my first diary and used it for this purpose. It was given to me by an elderly German man from church who had written on some of its pages already, in letters that all had square corners. He smelled bad and spit when he spoke: “You. Not.
Forget!
” His words hinted at that idea that consumed me, the certainty of loss.

The eventual disappearance of everything began with our cats, twelve of them, one by one, over the course of my childhood. Then it was the hills, which were leveled to make Walmarts and Kmarts and Targets and telemarketing centers. My dad would tell me those developments were going to help pay for my college education; my mom would refuse to shop there. Then it was the snow, which would often start to fall right on Christmas Eve and linger in the hills through winter. Now it was almost hard to picture there.

Arriving home for spring break, I wanted to show my son all the things I'd loved. I took a bike out to ride my old loop through the hills, but my stomach got in the way. Instead, I drove the car with the windows down, inhaling every twist and turn. I wanted my son to taste them, to remember them deep in his cells. That night, I found the book I'd gotten in Italy,
Oh!
, and I packed it to take back with me.

School began again in April, and I put away the profiles. Nearing campus the first day, I braced myself. A whole new group of students would be back from their internships and surprised to see me like this. From a long distance away, I saw my friend Brian stop midstride and stare at me. I approached him, embarrassed. But this was only the beginning of the humiliation I would face, returning to school.

“You got your hair cut!” he said, not noticing my girth even as he hugged me. I'd chopped off my hair so I'd have less to think about. Bangs were, in fact, itchy and distracting, but I was glad they delayed the shock of my pregnancy, which came to Brian eventually.

Enormous as I felt, my stomach was the size of a small basketball, more like I was five, not seven, months along. Nina assured me I just carried differently. I gorged myself on raw tofu and raisins, along with eggs and milkshakes, and my midwives reminded me to keep eating more because now I was building his brain. Small as he was, I felt my rib cage was too narrow to contain him. Sometimes he braced himself against my spine and pushed my lower ribs outward or tried to raise them like a garage door. Sometimes, aggravated by his efforts, I tried to help, pulling at my ribs with my hands to stretch them open. Sometimes, when I saw Jevn talking to other girls, I wished my belly were bigger, so I could wield it like a weapon.

*   *   *

My environmental geography class was held on the other side of campus. I passed McMillan Lawn, where Sleepy Amy and I sometimes studied in the sun. It was where, in the moonlight as we walked, Jevn had asked, “Do you see the angels?” I had wanted to be game, so I said yes, but I searched the sky to pinpoint what he might mean. The glow around the streetlights, the fog at the surface of the asphalt from the rain, or the moon's illumination of the clouds? I was satisfied that among the visible things, I was seeing something you might call an angel.

“Yeah?” He laughed. “Where?”

As I passed that lawn, I tried to imagine being a regular student just walking to class to do doable work and then relax in the sun, like you were supposed to do in college. I entered an old, normal building, with big, heavy windows you could lift open on a beautiful spring day like that one, straight hallways, rooms in a row, numbered sequentially so you could find them, right angles at every intersection of floor and wall, wall and ceiling.

The professor was a woman in her forties who was naturally beautiful. She read through the syllabus, and I got that beginning-of-school feeling of academic decadence: a whole new field of study would be laid out for me, chapter by chapter. Population dynamics, ozone loss, resource depletion, food webs and energy flow in ecosystems—high-level, philosophically fascinating, and urgent issues. We were talking about the end of energy, and topsoil, and life as we know it. After the adoption, maybe I would quit architecture and become a climate scientist.

When class was over, several students crowded around the professor at the front of the room. Another class was starting when she finally got to me, so we stepped into the hallway. I told her that I was pregnant, that I was doing adoption, and because I might miss some classes for appointments, I thought she should know. She waited for people to pass. Her eyes were big and beautiful, and she gazed at me sympathetically. When the coast was clear, she told me that she was adopted, too. She said she'd never met her birth mother, but she thought adoption was an amazing and selfless thing to do for a child. I stepped back at that. I wasn't telling her to be congratulated, and it wasn't about being amazing—it was just about making a reasonable plan and doing it. It was for everyone's benefit. I explained that I wasn't doing the old kind of adoption. It was a new and improved kind. I would get to see my son.

“Oh, that's wonderful!” she said. “He will love you, Amy, believe me. He'll be so grateful for what you're doing for him.”