God and Jetfire (7 page)

“I want to make sure you understand that adoption is not abandonment, Amy. It's a very important distinction. You're considering a plan for adoption so your child can have the
best possible situation
to grow up in.” Her head nodded with each important word. “You're making a
parenting
decision when you place your child for adoption. That's completely different from abandonment.”

I nodded, I know, I know, I know. I understood there was language I was supposed to use—
plan for adoption
,
placing my child
—but I wanted to use harder, more honest-sounding language. Language that wouldn't let me trick myself into thinking I was doing something more noble than I was. Abandoning my baby to llama kissers.

“The two of you are intelligent and resourceful, and you work well together, am I right in seeing that? Do you agree?”

I waited, but Jevn was silent. We had started a project together, collecting aluminum cans from the design studios. We'd bought special containers and drilled can-sized holes in the lids and spray-painted recycling symbols on them. We would borrow a truck every few weeks and take the cans to be recycled. We made a pretty good team doing that, I thought. But maybe Jevn felt differently.

“You seem to communicate well, which is one of the most important measures of a relationship. And you've been working together functionally up to this point. I know this could be a very sensitive question, but is there any way you can imagine parenting the child together?”

“Our relationship is complex enough not to have to add another layer of complexity,” Jevn said definitively. Just a couple of weeks ago he could imagine it, I thought. But then I didn't want her to return us to that moment we were now pretending never happened.

“And there are so many families waiting to adopt,” I added. It was easier to think of some other fresh, new couple, not us. Infinitely complicated us. I had to hope there was, in fact, a generic mass of good and worthy waiting families somewhere. I just hadn't found them yet.

*   *   *

Molly sent us home with our workbooks and asked us to spend time thinking about keeping our child. The workbook asked questions to test our preparedness for having a family.
Are you really ready to have a child? Do you know the basic needs of a child? Can your apartment accommodate a child? Do you have transportation? Do you have a babysitter? How often would you need one? Will your family help? Do you have the money to support a child (including rent, taxes, insurance, utilities, water, garbage collection, telephone, furniture, house repairs, cleaning supplies, groceries, eating out, gas, oil, automobile repairs, doctor, dentist, drugs, clothes, laundry, dry cleaning, tuition, books, special instructional fees, union dues, subscriptions, haircuts, entertainment, alimony, child's allowance, miscellaneous debts, cigarettes, hobbies, babysitters, Christmas, special occasions, church, and charity)? What dreams do you have for your life and could a child fit into them? Are there any compromises that might allow you to have all the things you want?

Having a child, according to the workbook, was a matter of figuring out a certain set of logistics, and you would need to be very organized and begin the process a long time in advance of getting pregnant. But even if you had everything in place, down to the money set aside for cigarettes, it still seemed to me you did not necessarily have a reason to have a child. What was a good reason to have a child? What justification could there be for keeping one? Surely every couple would fail on some test of preparedness—but should we all give up our babies, if we couldn't tick every box? And if some couple really was ready, should that alone entitle them to take my child? Nature certainly wasn't paying attention to anyone's readiness.

And it seemed to me that giving up a child would likely bring about issues I wasn't any more prepared to deal with than I was the logistics of parenthood. Why didn't my workbook ask:
Was I really ready to lose a child?

I didn't fill out the answers. The answers were obvious. No, I wasn't ready. Yes, every single one of my dreams precluded having a child at twenty-three. The questions did their job. They forced me to look closely at a future I was in important ways not equipped for and scared me back. I went online at the computer lab and began requesting “Dear Birth Mother” letters from every agency I could find. As the profiles streamed in, in thick packages that arrived on my stoop, Jevn and I spent hours reviewing them, and I began to send envelopes full of letters to my sister in China to scan for potential candidates.

 

SEVEN

The architecture building was buried in a hillside that sloped steeply from my favorite exit down to the street, and a signature landscape architect had put some signature ripples in the lawn on its way down. Only two floors peeped out from the top of the hill, but four stories were buried underground and opened like a geode into the interior of campus. The building had reputedly been constructed without a single 90-degree angle between any two planes; walls met floors and each other at various angles, some so closely approximating 90 degrees they didn't seem avant-garde at all, and some so acute they became dusty no-man's-lands into which no furniture could be squeezed. Room numbers were out of sequence and nested, such that 6206 was hidden inside a hallway accessed by 6104. The building was clad in a synthetic material painted pink and baby blue; the window mullions were Frank Lloyd Wright red.

I drove past it many times when I was in the conservatory. I thought it was a derelict elementary school, swallowed over time by an insatiable university campus and slated for demolition. I would soon learn about deconstructivism and that the building had just had its forty-million-dollar ribbon cutting.

*   *   *

“Hey,” I said, greeting Jevn in the computer lab.

“Hey,” he exhaled, leaning back in his chair, not looking up from the screen. I sat down at the computer beside him.

I didn't ask him about school, and he didn't ask about my internship, which had just started that week. It was the kind of architecture I'd hoped to do when I signed up for architecture school. Free design work for people who needed it. But most of the projects were on hold awaiting funding, and I spent a lot of time gazing out the storefront windows. The only thing that really broke up the day was eating my afternoon egg, which I shut myself in the tiny bathroom at the back of the office to do. I became a vegan when I was twelve, so I hadn't eaten an egg in ten years. I'd crack the shell on the sink and wrap the pieces in toilet paper. Then I'd swallow it like a pill. I'd face myself in the mirror, amid drawings stored along the side of the sink and behind the toilet, waiting for the fan to suck up the smell. I didn't mind the slow days; I could conserve energy for what felt like my real job, which began late in the afternoon when I pedaled back up Vine Street toward home.

*   *   *

We sat side by side in the back rows of the lab so other students couldn't see what we were working on. The Web was new—a haphazard database of incomplete information you stumbled upon using search terms:
open adoption
;
adoption agencies in Ohio
. We printed agency web pages and profiles we liked to read more closely later.

“I was thinking it would be nice if they came from the mountains,” Jevn said quietly, and because we always disagreed about whose mountains were better, I knew he meant, specifically, the sharp young Rockies, not the refined old Appalachians. We agreed our child shouldn't grow up in Ohio.

“Yeah, and be outside a lot,” I responded. Both of us loved to hike and ride bikes. I ran as often as I could, and Jevn liked to ski and cycle so much, he had come to school in Ohio to keep from being distracted by those things. “It could also be really good for them to have a child already, so we could be sure it would have a sibling,” I said. That was one very important thing I wouldn't be able to provide, were I to become a single parent.

“Yeah,” he agreed, “and if the sibling is adopted, we'd get to see what kind of relationship they have with the other birth parents.”

It felt like progress to visualize them.

We both read quietly through profiles to ourselves. Most couples said that they were Christian. I used to think I was a Christian, too, but our neighbors back in Tennessee were always correcting me. They said my whole family was going to hell. My mother because on top of being Catholic, she let a whole range of social justice issues in this world distract her from her future in the next. My dad because he wasn't religious at all. Like the devil, he enjoyed nothing so much as fire, and he would chop our neighbors' dead trees down for them, just so he could have the kindling. And the rest of us, because we were somewhere in between.

But those neighbors never stopped trying to save me. I'd play Barbies with the girl down the street, and one night her mother knocked on her bedroom door and asked: Do I want to be saved and go to heaven, or not, and suffer eternal punishment in hell? They had illustrated hell for me on many occasions: fire and extreme heat, no family, no friends, no Barbies, no pets. Everything you don't like—for ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever. I remember the dim lights and the quiet as they waited for my answer. They'd described heaven, too. Praising God forever. Crowns and gold and gates and glory and seraphim and cherubim. I didn't want heaven or hell; I wanted to be propped in front of my friend's four big-screen televisions in her living room, each one encased in faux wood and standing on its own four faux-wood feet, cable blaring from the one that worked, with boxes of Coke and Sprite stacked as tall as her father against the wall. Anywhere but cornered on the bed listening to my friend's mother talk about the devil, whom I knew to live at the bottom of the hill, before the woods, where the ground was soft and moss instead of grass grew by a tiny creek—more a fissure in the ground that appeared and disappeared—and where it was dark no matter what the time of day. Where we would eventually drink whiskey and try cigarettes. I may not have known much about God, but I knew well to avoid the devil. I lost my hustle whenever the ball rolled down the hill in that direction. I made things as easy as possible and prayed the prayer. But getting saved didn't mean much more than I was trusted to play with my friend, and then only until I turned twelve and became a vegan, at which point I was abandoned to the devil for good.

I'd spent a lot of time in college trying to untangle it all. I'd even broken up with Jevn over it, saying I needed to figure out God and to do that I needed to be free of Jevn's influence. I thought it could be a touchy subject now, but it was important to me; I wanted my child to have space on reserve for such important questions.

“I want them to be Christian,” I told him.

“Not Bible thumpers,” he qualified, by way of agreement.

Most of the things we wanted we didn't really have to talk about. They were complicated and nuanced things, but it was basically just us, a little more prepared and about ten years older. We weren't talking anymore about whether I could do adoption; we were just working hard to find a family we could do it with. Until we found them, the only decision we were making was that the baby was going to be born. There was still time to think about the rest.

“They should recycle,” I said.

“Of course.”

*   *   *

By early February, I had
no
piles and
maybe
piles,
Jevn-needs-to-look-at
and
Jevn-likes
piles. But they mixed together in my memory and got shuffled around as I stepped over them in my apartment. The letters had much the same structure; in the About Him and About Her sections, couples described themselves in long lists of benign adjectives: romantic, wacky, tender, fun, forgiving, encouraging, likes to laugh, a friend to everyone, a heart of pure gold. They wrote of gratifying careers and told stories of how they met and became best friends. They shared dreams of apple-picking, cooking s'mores over the fire, and driving to the farm for balled and burlapped Christmas trees to be planted in the yard come January. The About Our Home section read like a real estate listing: three bedrooms, two and a half baths, on three acres and a cul-de-sac with a fully fenced-in backyard just waiting for a swing set!

Photographs were strewn throughout—in Florida swimming with a dolphin, him backlit by the Planet Hollywood sign, her backlit by the Planet Hollywood sign, snowmobiling in Aspen, professional photos with his hand expressively positioned on her stomach, occasionally an idyllic picture of the Eiffel Tower or a beach in the Bahamas, with neither of them in the frame to suggest they were there to see it. Several couples shared their photos of the Magic Kingdom, all taken from approximately the same location. There were photographs shot in a single day by the kind of photographer who directs you to rotate your head on your neck in exceptional ways, who'd arranged the couple in various still lifes: beaming between the forked branches of a tree, sitting on rocks beside a small waterfall, donning different-colored raincoats and, inexplicably, sunglasses.

There were zany photos of her, standing on her head in the living room (
Mindy has flipped!
); him leaning proudly against the hood of his stock car (
Vrrrrroom!)
. Photographs had been cut out with pinking shears and surrounded with glittery stickers hand-stuck to the page. Captions were often handwritten with arbitrary capitalization, framed by thought bubbles, and more often than not terminated with exclamation points:
Birthday time is Fun time!
Margins featured baby rattles, stacked blocks, and teddy bears. In one case, an actual rattle was attached to the letter's cover, securing its position at the top of the pile. Sometimes there were appendices, with letters of recommendation from mothers and fathers and good friends and siblings of the hopeful couple, vouching for their “constant, effortless, and plentiful smiles. What sweeter emotions could a child be given?”