God and Jetfire (5 page)

*   *   *

When Mom came down the stairs in her robe, Dad put a handful of peanuts in his pocket and went outside. She hugged me and listed the leftovers that were in the refrigerator. I was dreading our conversation, too, and so I took control of it right away.

“I had a meeting at Catholic Social Services,” I said as she put a loaf of bread on the countertop. I explained the logistics of the adoption process to avoid the unspeakable other things my pregnancy brought up. Boys. Money. Religion. Mom was Catholic, but she wasn't dogmatic about it, and I thought her own daughter's crisis pregnancy might test her conviction. But I was glad she'd been so certain about abortion. I already knew I couldn't do it, and now we didn't even have to talk about it. “They do open adoption, where you actually get to know the family who adopts the child. You pick them out from a bunch of letters couples have written, and you try to find people you think would make good parents.”

She sat down at the table next to me. I repeated everything I had learned from Molly. How it was free, how the child would go to a couple who needed it, and how there was a whole process that had been perfected. “I have a meeting with Molly when I get back to Cincinnati,” I said, to let her know I'd already begun the process. By the time I'd told her everything, I'd convinced us both that I was going to do adoption.

“It's going to be hard,” my mother said. “I think you'll just have to think about the couple it's going to help.” Then she got up and quietly returned to the countertop.
Enjoy the last of the chocolate milk
, I remembered her saying once as she put the square metal container away. Nestl
é
was somehow depriving the children in Africa of breast milk, so we weren't going to buy anything from that company anymore. If we were hungry for chocolate milk, we should just think about how hungry those babies must be. Feelings were a luxury of the modern age, and you could minimize them by remembering what real suffering looks like.

“Maybe we can stop by the Natural Foods Store and get you some prenatal vitamins,” she said, back to the comforting terrain of the practical. It didn't occur to me then that my old roommate's mother, who sent her the leopard-print underwear, would have probably offered to help raise the baby. And her father would have definitely beaten Jevn up.

She leaned over and kissed me on the top of my head and went back upstairs to put on her makeup. She left two sandwiches on the countertop, one for me and one for my dad.

*   *   *

Outside, Dad was partway through the process of replacing the driveway by hand, breaking up the concrete and carting the debris a quarter of a mile away by wheelbarrow to a busy road, along which he piled the chunks to stabilize the slope. All our cars were parked on the street, including the station wagon neighborhood teenagers were always offering to buy. It had a special suspension system, good for crash-up derbies. But Dad was saving it for a crash-up derby himself. The back door had fallen off, so he'd tied the canoe to the roof like an external spine and dangled the door from the cantilevered canoe behind. Driving cars into the ground was one of his money-saving strategies; we had cars abandoned all over town. When one broke down, we could walk to another, cross our fingers it might start.

He offered the sledgehammer to my brother, who had just pulled up, home from college himself. I'd told him my news over the phone, but he hadn't said much in response. I don't think he knew what to say. He hugged me hello in a way that told me he hadn't forgotten, and I stood back as he took a swing. It fell dull and heavy on the concrete. Dad took the sledgehammer back to demonstrate his technique. It struck with a solid metallic thud. Between swings, he leaned back proudly and smiled. “And some people pay
big bucks
for a gym membership!”

*   *   *

And then everything was normal. There was nothing more to talk about. My sister was still in China, but otherwise it felt like any other Christmas. We piled into the car and drove out to our land in the country as usual. Thirteen acres of pasture where we'd planted four thousand white pines and Douglas firs when we were little—Dad's backup plan in case his engineering practice failed. All those saplings grew into a solid block of forest by the time we were teenagers, but we'd drag a tree out of it at Christmastime to make good on the investment.

That night, Mom put the old shoeboxes full of ornaments on the coffee table, and we rummaged through them, decorating the tree. Most of the ornaments were from Germany and France, where my parents were living when they met. Both were working for the army, Mom as a teacher, Dad as an engineer. Our whole house was decorated with trinkets from other places: street artists' renderings of Vienna and Strasbourg, a camel saddle from Egypt, a glass clown from Murano. As much as I loved the mountains of Tennessee, I always knew it was just one place in the world, and I always knew I would be leaving.

“Isn't that a beautiful fire?” Dad leaned back from the fireplace, his hands behind his head, and invited us to admire it with him. I untangled a beaded angel I'd made in Indian Princesses, a father-daughter bonding organization we used to attend. He recognized it and smiled. We'd gone on a camping trip, during which the fathers told the daughters there were escaped convicts on the loose in the woods, and then a couple of fathers put on scary masks and came banging on the windows of our cabin late at night, and we stacked our mattresses ten high and scrambled to the top but only narrowly escaped their grasp as they reached for our ankles from the bottom. There was a lot of beer and poker, some canoeing and swinging on vines, and then there was the last-minute craft, Dad's fat fingers beading an angel to persuade Mom we'd had a weekend of quality time. Which, of course, we had.

*   *   *

That night before Midnight Mass, I called Jevn. We wished each other Merry Christmas. I told him my family supported the idea of adoption and I was feeling really hopeful about it. But Jevn said that his mother had been telling him more about abortion. It wasn't too late. She was a nurse, and she'd assisted with abortions. She was really worried, like he was, about whether I'd be able to go through with adoption. And what were my plans if I couldn't?

I didn't have an answer; the only answer was I had to do it.

I stood between my mother and brother at church, the only Catholic church for miles. Dad stood on my brother's other side, wearing the wool jacket he kept just for that annual occasion when he'd dutifully accompany us to Midnight Mass. At the Our Father, we all took hands to pray. I was comforted by the familiar motions, though I never knew much about what they meant. I remembered some of our born-again neighbors telling me you don't take anything with you when you die, not your parents, or your siblings, or your pets. Definitely not your possessions. Definitely not the hills of Tennessee, or anywhere else you might love. When they said God's ways were not our ways, I thought that was the least my way of all God's ways. Because I wanted to keep all those things.

When we got to the middle of the Our Father, we always lifted our hands, hand in hand, together, for the words “For thine is the kingdom.” It was an expression of submission to God's ways. But then it was an incongruous gesture, and for that reason it was always my favorite moment in the Mass. We were lifting our hands in surrender, but we were grasping them, hand in hand, like a human chain. With our mouths we admitted we don't make the rules, we may all die alone, but with a hundred clasped hands held high, we objected: we are going to hold on tight. It was a losing battle, our will against his, but we raised our clenched fists to God, as if we could hold on to anything.

*   *   *

Only secretly did I enjoy a new pleasure over the holidays. Having someone together with me while I rolled out cookie dough with my brother. Within me to share a taste of my mother's roasted vegetables and squash soup. Swaddled in my ski pants and thick wool sweater when we went skiing in West Virginia before I headed back to school. Someone who fell with me, careful as I was not to fall, when a skier came out of nowhere saying
sorry, sorry, sorry
beneath me as we all three slid down the hill. Someone who demanded pickles, just like on TV.

And someone who joined us for a last hike in the mountains, where Dad did what he always did out in the woods. He'd wander off the trail, studying one tree after another, from top to bottom. He'd press at a trunk inquisitively. When he found a good one, he'd press more until the tree began to move almost imperceptibly back and forth, and at that same tiny rhythm he'd push back. Soon the top of the tree would be whipping in large arcs, knocking through the canopy, and it would start to crack a few feet above where it met the ground. We were so used to him doing it, we didn't even turn around when we heard it fall, but sometimes we'd chop it up and roll it down the mountain for firewood.

“Just a lovely day, isn't it?” he asked me. It was sunny and not cold at all, though colder on the mountaintop than back at home. I told him about my internship that was coming up in January. My program consisted of alternating internship quarters and quarters in school, year-round for six years. Kids went all over the world for their internships, but I'd found a job in Cincinnati so I could be with Jevn, who would be in school. We'd made that plan before I got pregnant.

Dad liked to hear about architecture school. Architects' ignorance about construction made his engineering work more challenging, but he was amused by stories about this ignorance in its earliest stages of development. And he was always willing to help with my structures assignments. Design a column to be crushed, a bridge to be broken. You know a material best by knowing how it breaks.

“I was thinking,” he said, “it was nice with your mother and me, that when we had you kiddies she could take off from teaching, and I could work on making the money. And that we'd done all the traveling we wanted to do beforehand. I'd think it would be awfully hard to be a single mother—”

“I
know
, Dad.” I stopped him from nearing the subject, in his indirect way. “That's what we already decided. I'm doing adoption.”

And we had already established that hard and easy didn't matter. It wasn't about how it felt. It was about the facts, that a child needs certain things I couldn't give it. It was up to me to manage the emotional part.

He went silent and cracked some peanuts out of his pocket, offering one to me. He stepped off to the side and pressed at another trunk. Looked up the column to its leafless top. All that weight seemed weightless when it was woven within the other branches, reaching to the sky.

“What is it that makes it fall?” I asked.

“Oh, oh. Well. It's called resonance. Just the particular frequency of a material where it has a bigger amplitude.” He waved his hand back and forth, imitating the tree. “When you apply pressure at a certain rhythm, a small amount of force can generate a whole lot of oscillation.” His hand waved in bigger arcs. “Enough oscillation, and the material fails. It's in everything's nature to break. You just have to find the right force.” He pressed a few more times until there was a splintering, shifting deep inside the trunk. He looked at me and smiled, raising and wiggling his eyebrows. He scrambled backward as the tree came crashing down.

 

SIX

Molly brought a small stack of colorful packets into the room and sat down. Some were almost books, their cardstock covers bound with lace ribbons, and some were just a few pages stapled at the corner. There were beaming faces on the front pages, ecstatic fonts and cute margin art. “Hi! We're Rob and Robin!!” they cried out from some strange and wonderful place, out of cozy windows where fuzzy felt shutters were stuck to fuzzy felt walls. A primary instrument of open adoption, these were letters written by waiting couples to an unknown pregnant girl, kept on file by the agency for moments like this, when one stops in, contemplating the impossible.

Jevn hadn't gotten back from Colorado, but I'd begun to take the steps: I set up prenatal appointments at the university hospital and arranged my second meeting with Molly. I bought groceries and a pregnancy cookbook; I took the vitamins Mom had bought for me in Tennessee. On the phone, I told Jevn I could do adoption. All the while, I was still trying to convince myself that I was pregnant.

Molly handed me several letters, along with a work sheet she pulled from a folder, and left me to look at them. I had in my hands a bumpy pile of what could be my child's parents. The exercise would be as simple as this: for each potential family, a check box for yes and one for no, and three empty lines to accommodate an explanation. This was open adoption: you go into a little room with your ballpoint pen and a work sheet and come out with a completed form and a family for your child.

Dear Birth Mother, Our names are Kevin and Kate, and we are in our late twenties.

There was a heart-shaped photo of a brunette couple, china cabinet in the background, flowered border along the top of the wall behind them. Her wrist fell over his shoulder and her hand lay perfectly flat at his chest, as if to display her diamond ring.

We were high school sweethearts and have a very tender loving stable and supportive marriage.

I turned the page.

There was a photograph of Kevin sitting in the branches of a tree; it was affixed with football helmet and baseball glove stickers. His round, gold-rimmed glasses and wide face reminded me of my high school boyfriend.
Kevin is an attorney and works in a local law firm not far from home
, the caption said.

On the next page, there was a photo of Kate, limp-wristed and pulled up so close to the piano her belly was touching the keys. The photo was attached with music note and flower stickers.