Moving Forward in Reverse (24 page)

We strolled up the S-curved exposed aggregate walkway together,
then toward the forest green front door. Glass framed the door like a reverse
picture frame. Fifteen feet above the ground a huge, exposed Douglas Fir timber
ran horizontally the full width of the entrance, linking both sides of the
sloped roof together. From the beam, like the skeleton of a fan, sprouted three
hand-sawn golden timbers.

‘After you,’ I said with as gentlemanly a flourish as I could
muster using only my head. Ellen looked up at me, capturing youthful glee with
womanly poise in one elegant gesture that took my breath away. She
ceremoniously slid the key into the lock and, with an easy turn of the wrist I
couldn’t help but covet, opened the large front door to the rooms within.

From the open foyer it was a straight shot to the wall of windows
that backed our living room and framed a view of the woods beyond. For a brief
moment, everything was silent inside the house as we stepped delicately onto
the smooth golden brown concrete floor. I was taken back to my first visit to
these woods and the silent reverie that seemed to encompass everything in
winter. All we had stepped into was our new home, but from beneath the
seventeen-foot-high ceilings, it felt closer to a historical museum. An
ambiance of things untouched in perpetuation permeated the atmosphere.

Much of the design was based on the dainty, woodland creek that
now trickled through the center of our backyard. The interior was primarily
framed in the same exposed, wide post fir as the entrance. Large, square beams
of the natural wood accented the corners of the white walls and served as open
dividers between the kitchen and dining and living room areas. In turn,
separating the living room and dining room was a large two-sided fireplace
faced in grey river rock. Stereo in hand, I trailed after Ellen as she silently
made her way into the central hub of the house.

‘Oh, you didn’t!’ she enthused, her voice little more than a stage
whisper.

‘I did.’ I realized I too had whispered and added in a louder
voice, ‘Had it delivered yesterday so it’d be all set up when we moved in
today.’

She turned from the two new walnut brown and deep burgundy cloth
sofas, the leather Craftsman-style recliner, and matching squat, polished wood
coffee table that adorned the living room. My welcome home gift to my wife. She
would find the new set of furniture that we had ordered together already laid
out in our master bedroom and lofted office as well.

With a smile so full of promises I couldn’t begin to count its
meanings, she rose up on her tiptoes and kissed my right cheek. The verbal
thank you she added afterwards felt unnecessary in comparison.

‘Now go put that thing down and turn up the music,’ she
instructed.

She spun back around to the room and the two-story windows that
stretched high overhead, curving in a bright arch beneath the peak of the ceiling.
I stayed where I was, watching her slowly glide into the blurred, sunlit
reflections cast on the glossy floor. She stopped far enough from the windows
that the whole view could still be captured in a single gaze and let her head
loll back slightly to take it all in.
Outside, the rows of pines and clusters of ferns
remained unmarred by human hands. Snow-dusted branches billowed outward and
upward, perforating the blue skyline above.

I carried the stereo into the kitchen, setting it gently on the
grey granite counter beneath a row of white cabinets and tuned the dial to KMTT
FM radio. We spent the rest of the day unpacking and dismantling cardboard
boxes to the tunes of Seattle’s #1 Hit Music Station. When the sun sank below
the tree line and our new home fell into shadow, I lit an inaugural fire in our
new fireplace. Twelve of the grey stones that framed the fireplace were
engraved with the words: Honesty, Knowledge, Family, Integrity, Faith, Respect,
Love, Friendship, Humor, Confidence, Patience, and Responsibility. This was our
home and these were words that represented us.

27

Ellen and I were lying together on the living room sofa, my back
propped against a pile of pillows and her head on my chest while the local
evening news on KIRO, the CBS affiliate out of Seattle, aired on TV. From
around the room, the fluttering snores of our Dalmatian, Stuart, and mini
Dachshund, Fritz along with Bogart’s gently wheezing purr accompanied the
broadcast. Outside, the world was in quiet reverie.

Yesterday’s four inches of snow had turned into today’s slush,
leaving the world damp and matted like a wet dog. The last few weeks of the
fall semester had rushed by in a downhill flood, each moment since I told Mike
of my decision disappearing before I could fully comprehend it. The soccer
season ended uneventfully. My semester coursework had come and gone,
culminating in a series of final papers which would mean nothing now that I had
left the master’s program. Everything was shifting; the spotlight on my life
slowly panning left, searching for the next focal point.

I sighed, unintentionally ruffling Ellen’s curls with my breath.
She shifted in my arms. The “bad” news segment (crime coverage) was dragging on
longer than I felt necessary. How important were all these robberies and
shootings, jail riots and protests in the grand scheme of things? I wasn’t sure
I cared about any of it. If it didn’t breach my front door it might be better
not to know. In fact, I
didn’t
want to know. Not tonight at least. This
was our night for peace and quiet. What were we doing disrupting it with all
this negativity?

I opened my mouth to suggest turning the television off in favor
of whipping up a nice meal, when the anchor, white teeth flashing, cheered,
‘This concludes the evening crime report.’
Of course it does,
I thought
with a snort that was more of a sniff.

Just as I was thinking to reach for the remote so I could cut her
off before she tried to draw us in with another primer ad, she continued, ‘Up
next: An area family adopts three siblings from Haiti. Stay tuned.’

I paused.
Adopts three siblings from Haiti?
my mind
repeated, already beginning to imagine what it would be like to raise three
Haitian children in Washington State. With a mental shrug, I acquiesced.

One up-beat broadcast, then dinner,
I consoled my empty stomach.

Ellen and I sat quietly through the commercials like hypnotized
children, eyes never straying from the advertisements propagated across the
screen. I gave each ad unwarranted focus, listening intently to the woman
proclaiming her new laundry detergent to be the best one yet (
It even
removes those pesky grass stains!
) and to the slew of Brits extolling
Wendy’s new Cheddar Lovers’ Bacon Cheeseburger (
Fit for royalty! The Queen
will love it!
) and the mellow voice of a deep-chested man singing to the
Apple iBook (
You turned my whole world aa-rrround…
). I read the words
‘Think differently,’ emblazoned on the screen in simple black typeface beneath
an orange iBook three times. I even followed the gazes of a family of cartoon
polar bears as they watched fireworks while sipping on bottles of Coca Cola.
Anything to keep my mind occupied.

Since leaving Gonzaga I had felt oddly left behind. It felt
backwards, to be the one doing the leaving and yet also feeling left. Life
seemed to be running away without me, as if everyone else were zooming past in
the left lane while I rode the potholes on the right. Without a clear purpose,
I was stranded in their wake, floundering amidst car fumes and a void of
uncertainty – a dankness in my lungs I didn’t want to associate with the cold
density of The Fog – doing my best to look anywhere but down.

When the perfectly coiffed, smiling news anchor resumed her place
in the center of our television screen, a backdrop image of a vibrant blue sky
overlaying the Seattle skyline behind her, I blinked a few times and loosened
the muscles in my shoulders. Staying focused on this segment would hopefully
require less force of will.

After a brief intro – a recap of the primer ad, really – the image
blinked to a female reporter securely wrapped in a long winter coat, hat, and
scarf with a thickly-mittened hand dwarfing the microphone she held. She smiled
perkily at the camera, but her voice gave away the congestion lurking behind
her bright, Rudolf nose.

At her back, a gently sloping pasture mottled with brown growth
rolled modestly upwards, curving into a mound like the back of a turtle. Snow
blotted the ground in patches, spotting the fallow foliage with white in a
pattern not unlike that of the animals grazing off of it. They had elongated
backs and necks supported by four legs, stocky in comparison to the body they
supported. The result was a bone structure not unlike a six-foot tall wiener
dog with the neck of a giraffe and the face of a sheep.

Thick, fleecy fur grew across their lanky bodies and up their
necks like moss wrapping around a tree trunk. For the most part, they seemed
content to graze in peace. Only occasionally, one would turn disinterestedly in
the camera’s direction, peering at the goings-on like an ornery old man
squinting from beneath furry brows.

The family of five clustered just to the right of the numbed
reporter in two jumbled lines, however, appeared incapable of looking at
anything but the camera aimed at their wide-eyed, grinning faces. The husband
and wife I gauged to be in their early forties – he silver-haired and
congenial-looking with smiling, grey eyes only a few shades darker than his
hair; she a rosy-cheeked redhead with laugh lines around her green eyes and a
sharply pointed chin. Stationed in a line at their feet, from tallest to
smallest, stood three dark-skinned, brown-eyed children. Two boys with bulbous,
round heads still too big for their spindly frames, and a sister between them
in age. I had the distinct notion that were you to separate these two lines of
people, putting the man and woman in one place and the children in another,
you’d never know that they belonged together. But posed as they were in
Christmas-card fashion, there was no question that they were related. They were
a family solely because they had come together.

The couple, it turned out, were local llama and alpaca farmers
(those were llamas we could see behind them). They also had two children of
their own: a boy and girl each in their teens. The three children standing
before them had joined the family less than a year ago. Less than a year and
already they looked so natural together; so relaxed as they posed for the
camera with the smallest boy (aged four) clutching at his dad’s pant leg and
the oldest (seven years old) reclining gently against both parents, hands
hanging in his pockets.

When asked why they decided to adopt children from Haiti, the wife
responded simply, ‘Because there was a need.’

And when asked why they adopted siblings, the husband explained
with an unwavering grin, ‘One of the boys caught our eye. After we learned that
he had a brother and sister, we asked ourselves, “Why not?” It was the right
thing to do.’

My mind flashed to Robert Kennedy and his paraphrase of George
Bernard Shaw’s line: “There are those who look at things the way they are and
ask why… I dream of things that never were and ask, why not?”

Why not, indeed.

When the segment ended with the family of five waving cheerily to
the camera as Mom scooped the little girl into her arms, Ellen sat up. Cool air
rushing to fill the vacated space against my chest as she twisted to face me.
Our eyes met and mouths opened simultaneously, words tumbling forth in an
avalanching rush.

‘Wecandothat!’ I blurted in a barrage of syllables, then paused,
panting with excitement as Ellen’s words overlaid my own like a repercussion.
It took me a moment to decipher the echo and realize that it was Ellen
exclaiming the same thing at the exact same time. We stared at each other like
a couple of preteens after a roller coaster ride, all dilated eyes and
splitting grins. The phrase kept replaying across my mind on an endless loop,
getting more concrete with each repetition:
We can do that… we can do
that
…
we
can
do
that!

I glanced at the TV where the anchor was back at center stage, now
with a small snapshot of the family of five in the corner of the screen.

They even look like us,
I realized as I gazed at the white faces of the Caucasian couple
beaming at us from behind their three adopted children.
Mid-forties.
Laid-back. Locals.
Everything was lining up, pointing us down a defined
path: We could do that.

Ellen and I ordered pizza and scampered up to the loft-office in
the master bedroom to begin researching the idea.

I let Ellen take the office chair and pulled the extra seat over
for myself. My mind was a frenzied whir as we waited for the computer to boot.
Thoughts and images bounced around my skull like racquetballs, hurdling in one
direction only to ricochet off a wall and go rebounding the other way.

We’re going to adopt! We’re going to bring unrelated children into
our home and make a family. We’re going to…?

Are we crazy? Maybe this whole idea is lunacy…
Can
we really do it?

As my leg began to shake, bouncing up and down with anxiety and
doubt, my eyes travelled to the five-by-seven silver photo frame beside the
monitor and the words printed in black text on white paper captured behind the
glass panel. My rendition of Bobby Kennedy’s paraphrase:

Do
not ask

why

but
rather

why
not?

I’d carried that quotation with me from desk to desk as a teacher
and a coach. It was one of my mottos. The mantra that helped me get where I was
and the reminder I turned to whenever too many things seemed stacked against
me. When I had to decide if I’d ever walk again, when I had a bagel in front of
me and only two amputated arms to hold it with, when I stood at the bottom of
nine flights of stairs, when it came time to return to UWEC and the life I’d
known as an irrevocably changed man: those were why-not times.

Adoption? Why not?