God and Jetfire (24 page)

“Hi!” I said, unsure of what to say. We hadn't had a single conversation about what we should do in this situation.

“Amy is—well, is Jonathan's birth mother!” Erik laughed. “She came down from Ohio to visit for a couple of days! Amy is studying architecture there!” He said it as though each one of those facts surprised him.

“Oh, wow.” Heather glanced quickly at Jonathan and stepped in to shake my hand. “It's so good to meet you.”

Wow
, I thought, myself. I would have understood if he had called me a friend or distant cousin or a babysitter or an incoming theology undergraduate who wanted a tour of the parks in Durham. But of course, the truth. Why wouldn't we just tell people the truth?

“It's so amazing you're here. Jonathan is such a beautiful baby!” Then she turned to Erik. “Did you guys meet in Indiana?”

“Well, you know Amy contacted us through the agency in Indiana, but they have offices here as well, so the transfer wasn't difficult.” Erik elaborated the story, and we shared it like newlyweds, realizing it was fun to tell together. The improbability of our finding each other made everything seem meant to be. It was also easier to tell about it than it was to live inside it, and I found our conversation a welcome break from the alien new order of things.

As we talked, we strolled toward the swing sets. I helped Sarah into a swing and pushed her.

“Putt … putt … putt…!” as my dad would say when he'd pull the swing back, holding it suspended above his head for a moment, your heels dangling at his forehead as you barely held your seat, wondering when that moment of free fall was going to—
“Poooom!”
He would charge forward, pushing the swing until it was high above the reach of his arms.

It was a relief to play with Sarah. I could grab and squeeze and hold her tight, and even as she laughed and listened closely to me, there was no reason to fear I would swallow her whole to return her to my insides. Periodically, I would hear Erik and Heather laugh, but I couldn't tell what they were talking about. Maybe Paula's program, or Erik's research. Erik came over and handed Jonathan to me. He laughed as he realized he was focused on his conversation and hadn't asked. “I'm sorry, would you like to take him?”

I took him in my arms, my certainties about him reduced to a single fact: you have to cradle the wobbly head on the neck.

“Want to see something, Jonathan?” Sarah had her own curiosity about him, and she bridged the gap between us. I crouched down with him, but soon he was stretching with all his arms and legs. He was the kind of baby that arches its back and pushes against everything.

Paula told me he'd been crying a lot. We were calling it colic, but he was doing what any animal taken away from its mother would do. Crying his eyes out, screaming until he had no voice. I had a secret hope that when we saw each other, some sublime peace would overtake him. I wanted to see our connection in his sudden silence. I had that hope, and I had its opposite. I hoped, for the sake of all our futures, that he wasn't crying for me. And from what I could tell, he wasn't. Not for me, not for anyone. He was just broken. Between my letting go and his family taking hold, there was a fracture, and now there was no one who could give him comfort.

Erik suggested we go home; Jonathan was probably hungry. I carried him, blind with crying, to the car.

On the drive back, Jonathan fell asleep, and I reached around and felt for Sarah's feet. When I caught one, I turned around and smiled at her. She was smiling already, waiting to see what I was going to do next.

“So, Amy, I'd meant to ask, how does it feel to be back in school? Paula said you're applying for internships for the winter?” Erik didn't talk about himself, except when asked, and then he was keenly attuned to the precise intent of the question. The things he shared had already been processed and organized, and he retrieved them generously on request. I could imagine him having been very popular in high school, an athlete and an intellectual with a military demeanor. A genuine good kid, accustomed to early-morning chores on his family's farm. I felt especially sloppy, immature, and female next to him.

He receded to the background around Paula, who was both more outgoing and more laid-back than he was. She was the oldest of her siblings. She reminded me of the girl in my neighborhood growing up who was at least three years older than the other kids we'd play with. She would inform us of such things as:
Today we will play cosmetology school in the basement
. She was the accepted leader, and we didn't think to supplant her or resent her bossiness; without her we had no idea how to have such intricate and involved forms of fun. I looked forward to spending time with Paula. I fell into a familiar role, listening and responding to her, following her cues.

When we got home, Paula asked if I'd like to feed Jonathan. She handed me a bottle and I positioned him on my lap. I wasn't sure if I was helping them as they prepared dinner, or if they were helping me, offering me a moment of closeness with my son. I held the bottle to his mouth, and the angles of his chin against his chest, of his forehead and nose, bore no relationship to the view of him I'd had when I was filling him up with my own milk. I remembered the sharp pull in my chest when he would get a good latch, the way he'd draw me toward him as he nursed, tugging at a deep seam that wound and tangled through my entire body; I would sit stunned and silent, hypnotized, captured in an interior net. It had seemed then that our closeness was inextinguishable; it extended forever in all directions. But now touching him felt forced. Like being introduced to each other by friends who didn't know our intimate past, and because of decency, we shook hands like strangers. I held the bottle like a writing implement, and he drank as though it were the only thing he knew.

*   *   *

We had a small dinner, after which Erik washed the dishes and Paula and I sat in the living room and finished our wine.

“I have to tell you, Amy, that you look very good for someone who just had a baby this summer! I have so many friends who complain about their baby weight. Is there a secret?”

We both laughed. My secret was that I hadn't been able to eat very much; my own hunger alone wasn't enough to motivate me. I'd grown accustomed to swallowing an egg and imagining it like a marble drop game, the channels and funnels and gears it would pass through to somehow reach my son. Now I dropped things into an infinite void.

“It's funny you say that,” I said, “because I was in the computer lab the other day, and someone I hadn't seen since last quarter came in, and he sat down next to me and asked me when I was going to have the baby!”

“What would that make you now, eleven months pregnant?” Paula exclaimed. “But, you know, people see what they expect to see. I can't tell you how many times we've been walking together, Erik, the kids, and I, and someone will say they can tell we're all related. It's Sarah's eyebrows, or maybe it's just that Erik and Jonathan are both bald. I don't know! I'm of course thinking about how little we look like a family, but I guess when you put us all together—”

Erik refilled my glass of wine.

“Well, it seems like Sarah is really good with Jonathan,” I said. “I was watching her with him at the park.”

“She's a natural caretaker,” Paula said, holding her glass out for Erik. “Sometimes when Jonathan's asleep I'll remind her not to wake him. She'll watch him quietly and then pet him so, so gently.”

“Does she see her birth mother much?” I asked. Her birth mother was now a kind of sister to me.

“Yes, we make sure she sees her at least once a year. It's a long trip; we go there. And unfortunately, at least for now, we don't see her birth father.”

“We're off to bed; Amy, do you want to say goodnight?” Erik returned with Jonathan and lowered him gently into my lap. I held him and tried to think of what to say in front of everyone, realizing at that moment that my son would always be handed to me, and I'd forever be watched.

“Goodnight, Jonathan!” I said, straining. Paralyzed by self-consciousness. If motherhood was so powerful, my instincts should be kicking in. I shouldn't have to practice—I should be ready to perform on the spot. I should cradle him naturally, as if I could protect him from all present and future pains.

But I'd already exposed him to the very real unknown. I'd dealt his first blow. So what now? What was I supposed to say?

“I'll see you in the morning,” I said, retrieving a toy truck from the inside edge of my chair. I would distract him with a truck, rolling over the surface of his belly, from the things I couldn't share with him.

I couldn't see them looking at me; I only felt them smiling. I don't know if they noticed my awkwardness or whether they derived any satisfaction from it. Maybe they were surprised to see I'd lost my touch so completely, so soon. My motherhood was a brief fog. How could they help but enjoy this evidence it had all but dissipated?

I held him limply, my wrists loosening from my heart the way they used to during piano recitals, when I'd find myself overwhelmed by the keys' impenetrable code. He began to cry. My body bowed. I handed him to Paula. The wound was already healing in a manner that excluded me, and I could want nothing more than for him to learn her shape and adapt to it. Soft and pink would be his comfort.

She held him firmly; we were erasing my motherhood from both ends. She knew exactly how hard to pat his back, like I knew with dogs. The limit. Too soft and they remain a distant mystery. Too hard is of course mean. But just under too hard is a kind of acknowledgment of exact material limits. It is being known. And dogs turn and smile at you like you've cracked them, the species barrier and their own. Paula knew the precise physics of swinging Jonathan over her shoulder without overprotecting his head. She could communicate in her body that this high-speed lift up into the air was a kind of joke, and it would make him smile and stare at her, full of suspense. He knew very little about the world, but he knew the next good thing would come from her. Perhaps I was really the audience, and Paula and Erik who felt watched.

I watched and smiled as she showed me the things my son liked to do, how he liked to be held, what made him laugh. I already trusted them as his parents. But still, I didn't want to be shown—as though there were information to know about my son that I didn't already know by filling him up with blood and causing his heart to pound.

*   *   *

Closing the curtain in the playroom that night, it seemed silly, what I had expected. There was no way to return the amputated limb to the body and expect coherent action. The thing I'd somehow confused with my own extracted and wandering soul was a helpless, tiny baby who reached only for miscellaneous things: dangling hair, a filthy toy, those trinkets in the margins of the Dear Birth Mother letters. He wasn't substantially different from all the other babies in the world I'd never taken interest in, and he evidently hadn't been spending our time apart thinking about me. His life in the last few weeks hadn't been about discovering his sonhood. There was in fact no secret between us, no wholeness to return to.

And we were only at the very beginning of doing adoption. I could see clearly that he would need a long, long time to build muscle, and learn to talk, and learn what dogs are and what adoption is, and build forts and learn to read, and have his first tablet of lined paper, and meet his cousins, and have a crush, and scrape his shins on asphalt, and go to summer camp, and step hard on the edge of a shovel, and push it into the ground, and touch sharp things with his toes in the ocean, and learn arithmetic and algebra and geometry and trigonometry and calculus, and learn to dive, and practice piano, and quit piano, and slam doors, and move houses with his family probably several times, and make friends, and switch cereals, and get in trouble at school, and figure out that he likes physics but not chemistry, and learn to drive, and study for the SATs, and fall in love, and long for summers not to end, and lie sleepless at Christmas, and throw away his old favorite things, and throw water balloons, and fight with his sister, and find a temporary truce, and mourn his dog's death, and fly twenty times in a plane, and taste alcohol, and score a hundred baskets—before I might ever get a chance to ask him how he felt about this whole thing. I would have to let him live an entire life, and we wouldn't know the results of the experiment until it was over. There would be no opportunity to discover an error in the formula and begin again. Years would pass, so much would happen, and we might think about the life we missed, but we wouldn't really be able to miss it.

And it wasn't right to want him to save space for me. He would celebrate his birthday and not think of the moon that night we labored. He wouldn't even know that the moon had been there to remember. He would take his birthday and run, and I would have to let him have it. But that was motherhood for any mother: it's being happy that the ten fingers and ten toes you take such careful stock of will grasp and curl around the things of the world, will propel him forward and away, knowing that he will never look back into your eyes and feel what you feel.

*   *   *

I didn't wake up when they did to feed him. I awoke only when I felt Sarah watching me early in the morning from the side of the bed. Then I heard someone in the kitchen making coffee. There was an awkward intimacy when Erik asked me through the curtain if I'd like a cup. Paula brought Jonathan in to say good morning, and Sarah asked if I was going to get up. The performance resumed: playing, chasing, tickling. All the while, I felt the weight of constraints no one was imposing. I stopped every gesture short of its full realization. I did not bury my face in Jonathan's belly, or tell him that I loved him. It made me tired the entire day. I played with blocks and dolls and planes and held my eyes, heavily, from falling asleep. I would take every instant I could, a moment on the toilet, a minute running to the car to get my sweater, every chance I had, to rest my eyes against the exhaustion.