God and Jetfire (6 page)

I put the profile on the sofa beside me and looked at the next. Carl and Denise's letter had a light blue ribbon border and a soft pink rose in the corner. Its tone was direct and earnest.
While having a hysterectomy was certainly not something we wished for, we don't see it as the end of the world.
They described their home as
a four-bedroom house in a subdivision outside of a large metropolitan area
, and they had a three-year-old adopted daughter. Denise said Carl could always make her laugh; Carl said that Denise had an
irresistible childish joy
. They loved to travel; their daughter had already seen the Shedd Aquarium, FAO Schwarz, the Ghirardelli Chocolate factory, and Lake Tahoe!

I put them on top of Kevin and Kate.

Rob and Lori had wide smiles and giant plaid shirts.
We both love children and have been through four years of infertility treatment trying to start our family.
There was a photo of five indistinguishable heads bobbing in a lake. Handwritten below it,
swimming with friends.
Along the margins were colorful flowers overlaid with romantic fragments of script, as if their own seventeen-page message was printed on the palimpsest of a love letter from the days of inkwells and wax seals. There was a picture of Lori's brother kissing a llama. A picture of a mobile home with vast lengths of plastic siding where windows should have been. A cat and the handwritten text
precious
—the name of the cat, or maybe just the nature of its blissful curled-up-ness. A blurry picture of a deer, maybe in their yard, and a yellowed photo of a barge loaded with people, with the caption
boat parade
.

Molly returned and quietly closed the door.

“You'll have more time to look at these; I just wanted you to get an idea of the kinds of letters couples write. You're very early on in this process.”

This Process had Early Stages and Late Stages. I was sitting comfortably within known boundaries.

She said my options wouldn't be limited to the twenty or so couples she had on file, who were all Catholic couples living in southwest Ohio.There were many more couples, in other places across the United States. She advised me to go “online,” where I could search for open adoption agencies. They would send their own files of Dear Birth Mother letters, and if I found a couple I liked, Molly would work with their agency to represent me.

“How many profiles do people usually look at before they find a family?”

“It really just depends; everyone's different. Did you have any questions about those?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. The couples piled in my lap seemed perfectly nice. From what I could tell, they were ready for parenthood in exactly the ways I wasn't. They were married and had houses and jobs and incomes. But they weren't simply “waiting adoptive families,” the way I'd imagined them. I'd pictured them like the starving children in Africa my mother would tell me about: a homogeneous mass of people who were deserving inasmuch as they were in need. I thought I would cast my baby into the void of human heartbreak and know that, whatever it cost me, it was at least doing something good for someone who deserved it. But these were not homogeneous people at all! They had their own hair colors and names and neighborhoods and brothers who kissed llamas. They would have smells and jukeboxes and three-car garages. They might blast the air-conditioning, or heat the swimming pool, or watch enormous televisions in finished basements with parquet floors and windows that looked out to the undersides of holly bushes. There were so many things to watch out for.

Molly said that open adoption means you get to
know
the couple who adopts your child. That
knowing
had seemed simple and good. I'd know their names and addresses and what they looked like. Knowing seemed like a form of protection I'd retain as a parent. I'd have a window, like a guardian angel, into my child's life. But now knowing seemed dangerous and complicated. That window opened wide. I'd know the pattern of the wallpaper in the kitchen and the color of the carpet—and I would feel responsible for it, and for everything it signified. Everything I saw, I was choosing for my child. They'd be adopting my baby, but I'd be adopting the burden of every last detail of their lives, and I wouldn't be able to ignore it any more than I wanted to shut that window to my child. But once I signed the papers, the entire future would be set in motion, and I wouldn't be able to do anything about it.

*   *   *

When Jevn returned from Colorado, I told him that the meeting with Molly had been promising. I could feel a new distance between us, and I tried to think about how to love him in the right way—the new, broken-up but having a baby way. How to not hate him and his potential. But on my twenty-third birthday, it felt more like the old days. He took me to see
Island of the Sharks
at the Omnimax in the old art deco train station. The entrance was punctuated by fountains and pools and terraces and sculpture, and as we walked along them, I asked him to slow down; my tailbone was still hurting from my fall on the ski slopes. But I was always asking him to slow down. Sometimes I'd refer to the saying
Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow.
“Just walk beside me and be my friend.”

“Maybe you should just be my friend and speed up!”

The old train hall was sheltered by a monumental dome. We went to opposite corners of the arch, spoke softly to each other, and waited. His secret message would go bouncing up into the ceiling only to arrive at my ear, perfectly preserved as a whisper. After the film, we drove downtown for dinner at my favorite restaurant. It felt like we'd forgotten about all the complications and returned momentarily to our relationship in a prior form.

“I like you,” he would say simply, his smile gaping open. He meant something precise; simple and full of wonder. “I smile when I think about you.”

He often looked at me like he was a dog inspecting a curious object he thought might play with him at any moment. Like he was ready to burst into a run to chase it, and he could hardly wait for it to move, and his excitement wasn't diminished when it didn't.

For the two years we were together, we spent a lot of time apart, Jevn on internship, me overseas or in Tennessee.
I dreamed of you last night
, he wrote in one of his letters.
We were buying a board game for you.
In one of my letters I drew the James River, where I'd gone exploring abandoned canal locks and pump rooms with my brother, as a long line running along the edge of the page. In the next letter, he suggested we make a pact. We would traverse the world by river.

“Did you forget our pact?” he would ask in his letters that followed. Not because he thought I had. I think just because vulnerability was one of those exciting new territories he wanted to explore with me. When we were back in the same city, he named our pact “We have questions for God.” He was acknowledging my inability to pin down my ambiguous and uncertain faith, and he was enjoying, himself, having someone to ask such questions with. He folded the paper that detailed our itinerary.

“How many times should I fold it? One for you … one for me … and one for the third.” When he unfolded it there were eight panels made by the creases, for the number of deserts we were going to see by river.

*   *   *

That weekend after my birthday, I went to his apartment to get some of the things I'd stored there when I was overseas. The narrow door of the closet where I kept them opened to a space ten feet deep. He often offered it to me as a sublet; we joked that I could put a bed in there and a little lamp. Like a pocket he could keep me in.

I noticed he had taken down our pictures from the windowsill. Pictures he'd framed between two sheets of glass with small metal clips. The two of us at a cabin in the mountains by the Arkansas River, me wearing one of his gigantic wool sweaters, smiling for the timer on his camera before we took a long walk. When I closed the door, I told myself there wouldn't be time, for a very, very long time, to think about this relationship again.

*   *   *

Jevn joined me for my next appointment with Molly, but I sat mostly silent so she could ask him all the background questions she had already asked me. I looked to the floor to give them privacy.

I was afraid he wouldn't trust Molly or speak openly with her, and that later he would tell me I couldn't possibly give up a baby. And, knowing he had given it a chance, I might believe him and then we wouldn't have any options left. I looked up occasionally at Molly, willing her to be broad-minded, to capture Jevn's attention, to gain his trust.

She sensed his reserve. She matched his rhythms and tenor. And soon she began talking about things that concerned both of us, so I straightened in my seat.

“Given what you both know about open adoption, can you tell me a little bit about what you think could be the advantages? Do you think you would like to have a relationship of some kind with your child?”

I waited to hear Jevn's response.

“I think this child will be a very sensitive and special person,” he said. “Yes, I very much want to be around it, and get to know it, and have it know my family.”

I was surprised to hear him talk about it like that, like he was already thinking of it as a real person, someone to get to know. If it was real to anyone, it should have been me. I was the one with regular appointments in the maternity ward, where patients were all called
Mama,
where every woman was defined by the promise of a child within her. I was the one nodding in disbelief as they recorded its heart rate, estimated a due date, and told me I already wasn't consuming enough calories. I was the one who agreed to start eating an egg every day to build brain cells in a thing I still couldn't think of as an independent “it” I'd like my family to know.

“Do you have any feelings about parenting the child? Obviously, you'd get to know it best if you remained its father.”

“I would love to be its father—I think we'd both be good parents. And I'm not sure Amy can give up a child. This child.” Jevn spoke very slowly. “But we've talked about it. Neither of us is ready for parenting. A child needs two parents, and we've agreed we can't be together and be those two parents. Adoption seems the most loving option in our situation.”

Jevn often held his thumb and index finger a tiny distance apart when he spoke so that you would understand how deliberate he was being about his words. The half an inch he held horizontally in space seemed to register the degree of precision that distinguished his idea from other ideas, even those just a tiny distance away. He was admitting a margin of error, a dubious relationship between word and idea, but by admitting it, he was also telling you he was more careful than most people, and that the slowness of his speech was not for him, it was for you.

“And Amy might still be my friend,” he added.

Molly smiled at me, at this. But I didn't take any comfort in the thought of some distant time when we'd be able to be friends.

“Ideally, you will be able to know the child in some way as it grows up,” Molly said. “That's what we hope for. But there are no guarantees, and I want you to be very clear about this.” She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward, her hands in prayer between her knees. “There is nothing legally binding about ongoing openness in an open adoption. There's not a state in the country that can enforce openness. You will get to choose a family—in that way your adoption will certainly be ‘open'—but once you sign a Permanent Surrender, you will have no legal protections to ensure you can see your child. If the parents decide they don't want you to have contact with the child, for any reason, that will be perfectly within their rights.”

She softened as she continued. “In light of that, are you at all worried about how you'll feel after placing your child? Particularly given how strong your feelings seem to be for each other and for this child?”

“Yes, of course,” Jevn said, “it will be difficult knowing that it's in the world somewhere without me. I think, no matter what, I'll always be wondering about it. Especially if it ends up not being an open adoption. But I just want the best for it. I really want to find a good family.”

“Well, these are important things to consider. If you feel you wouldn't be able to give the baby up without openness, we have to really think about whether adoption is the right plan for you, or whether it might be best to think about parenting.” Molly turned to me. “What about you, Amy? We've talked about a lot of this before, but what are your feelings at this point?”

My feelings were located almost entirely behind my belly button, a satisfying knot that reached along the back side of my heart and all the way up to the hollow between my collarbones. This would transform unpredictably into a dramatic hunger and then a violent, nauseating heartburn. An excruciating compulsion to eat and a fierce impulse to vomit, with only a tiny window in between during which I could cast food at the thing everyone said was inside me. I did not have any well-reasoned things to say.

“I definitely feel concern. And excitement.” And disbelief, feral hunger, and heartburn.

“Last time we met I asked you to think about the advantages of parenting; do you want to talk about that?”

“Yeah, I've been thinking about it,” I said. “I just know that if I kept it, even if I didn't have money, and I didn't finish school, and I struggled forever, I'd find a way to make sure things worked out. I wouldn't have to worry about whether I'd chosen the right parents—and there would never be a day when it realized it was abandoned.”

Molly turned her head slightly, so that one side of her face was advancing toward me faster than the other.