God and Jetfire (36 page)

“That's beautiful!” Andrew pointed in the direction of some trees.

“What's beautiful about it?” I challenged him, invoking my boyfriend.

“I don't know; it's just beautiful!”

Jonathan and Sarah walked their bikes ahead of us. Jonathan was wearing a puffy red coat that went down to his knees. Sarah led the way, but as they approached the steps of the bridge, they stopped and waited, their bicycles too heavy to maneuver. They were whispering while they waited for us, and I heard Jonathan say something about Jevn. He and Sarah giggled. I leaned down to lift his bike up the steps, bracing my lower back as my physical therapist had taught me. Then Sarah's.

“What were you guys talking about?” I asked. “Did you see Jevn recently?”

They both burst into laughter.

“I saw them almost
kiss
!” Jonathan laughed as he ran over the bridge. I smiled and followed them, shaking my head. I didn't want to seem shocked at the mention of Jevn's name, but it had been a while. The last time I'd seen him was in a framed picture in the living room on one of my recent visits. I was unsettled and intrigued, but I tried not to seem surprised about that, either. There was Jonathan, squeezing Jevn around the neck from behind, both of them stretching their smiles and squinting their eyes to the limit. The way Jonathan wrapped his arms around Jevn, like seeing him was pure pleasure, I thought it must be simpler to be a father. Jevn never left my mind entirely, but I was still surprised to learn he had a girlfriend serious enough to be introduced to Jonathan.

Andrew and I lingered on the bridge, looking at the mill below and the tangle of forest that surrounded it. Jonathan sauntered back to join us. He asked if he could borrow my camera, in case he saw something beautiful. I pulled it out of my pocket, and he assembled his fingers so that the index, long and delicate, rested softly on the shutter release. He glanced up at me to confirm they were in the right places, and as he adjusted them, I recognized them as my own—and I had the strangest sensation that I was looking in a mirror. That those delicate movements were mine; it was like a flickering in my deep muscles as they engaged to support the gesture he was making. He was the image of Jevn in every other feature, but I clung to the sight of his hands, my heart pounding. Long skinny fingers extending from short narrow palms. And an infinite network of tiny lines. Hard and fast evidence of his birth and our connection. It felt like I should grab him by the shoulders and shake him and say, “Jonathan! It's
me
!” like I'd found a long-lost son.

But he was never lost.
He is mine
, I reminded myself,
and he is not mine
. Equally important, opposite realities. I'd practiced both thoughts so often my heart was a branch bent back and forth, weakened every time.

He clasped the camera and ran into the woods ahead of me. I walked slowly behind. We piled our coats on a log by the stream, and I sat down to rest. While the kids played hide-and-seek, I drew my finger across the crease of my hip; it felt like cutting off my leg was the only way the pain would ever go away.

“Look!” Jonathan handed me the camera. He'd spun it while he was photographing the stream. Leaves had been captured in the ice, and water flowed through cracks in the surface. The tiny middle of the image was in focus, and the outer peripheries were blurred.

“Beautiful!” I said.

He ran off to take more pictures. Sarah and Andrew were crawling on rocks nearby. I followed Jonathan. I held on to his hand, like ballast, so he could lean out farther over the water.

“Do you think we could walk on the ice?” he asked.

“No, see how close the water is underneath?”

We chased his brother and sister. His brother ran slowly, swinging his arms hard like he was trying to fly. His sister caught him easily, in full mastery of her body now, at nine. We played for a couple of hours, and by afternoon the forest had taken shape: the soft carpet of dead leaves in the clearing was our living room, there was our mound of coats, the hollow between the hill and the tree, and the big rock sitting in the sun, home base. Everything we could see belonged to us.

It was starting to get cold. I gathered the kids' things and called them. Jonathan gave me my camera and put his arms through his giant coat. The neighbors would see us walking home with red noses after our long day in the woods. They might think I am my son's mother, and I wished that simple mistake could somehow stay suspended in frost on the window glass. I was happy to think it might at least enjoy a tiny life in the passive imagination of neighbors.

*   *   *

When I got to the farm for Thanksgiving dinner, my grandmother had a surprise for me. She handed me a mandolin swaddled in an old potato sack. The body was round and it pressed into the hollow of my abdomen as I held it.

“That was your great-grandmother Louise's mandolin,” she told me. “Grandpa's mother. She used to play every Saturday night. Your great-grandpa played fiddle.” I didn't know anyone in our family played music! I thought my inclination toward music was proof I didn't belong in my family at all! I used to play piano like I was blindly patting a wall, searching for the hidden entry into a magical underwater cavern, the world where I was meant to be. But then my mother would call me in to dinner, and the tide would suck away from the shore. I held the mandolin on my lap and pressed into the indentations of Louise's fingerprints. I understood why, years ago, Grandpa yelled, “That ain't no mandolin!” when I'd played mine: for him the sound of a mandolin was the sound of
this
mandolin and the sound of his mother playing it.

But now my grandfather was silent. He couldn't hear anymore, and he didn't make eye contact so that he wouldn't have to tell you so. Still, Grandma told me to hand him the mandolin, and my cousin took a picture of him handing it back to me. He leaned forward uncomfortably as I knelt beside him, the mandolin between us, and smiled. I should have it, Grandma said, since it would mean more to me than anyone, and I felt myself bound in a special new way to Louise and to my grandfather. As long as I could sink my fingertips into the shallow cavities between the frets, I would hold on to the sound of his childhood, and I'd always have my grandfather. But as we left, I heard him ask, “Who was that lady with the mandolin?” and realized he hadn't known who I was.

Returning to my childhood bedroom in Tennessee, I felt lucky that it at least never changed. The quilt Grandma made me, my old drawings from art class, a giant chunk of wood from a tree Dad felled. My drawer that held my cat's tooth and the orange pill bottle with Jevn's last name. My son would never have this experience. He had already had so many homes. He adjusted well, but when I was in Boston, Paula said he'd realized recently that he'd lost one of his toys, and he wanted to go back to the house in North Carolina to find it. It had been two years since they'd emptied that house, but he said he thought he knew just where it was in his old bedroom, and he assured her it would be okay for them to go inside, because that house was kind of really
their
house.

Tucked into my childhood bed, I looked at the pictures my son had taken with my camera: fragments of arms and legs, blurry close-ups of leaves caught in ice, so many spinning forest skies.
He has my fingers
, I thought with that strange satisfaction, and my impulse to grasp and hold on to beautiful things. To find them, again, in their dusty, lost corners, and to hold on to them forever—things he couldn't possibly keep.

 

TWENTY-EIGHT

From China, my sister told me a story about a man who joined a group of her friends for dinner, which was served family style. He got radish and beef soup, and as he ladled my sister's bowl, he deliberately set pieces of meat aside. They had just met, but he hadn't forgotten that on their way to the restaurant she'd said she was a vegetarian. One of her other friends ordered tomatoes and eggs, remembering from dinners past that it was Julie's favorite dish. Later, she was tutoring a student in conversational English. They began talking about love. “Love means that you take care of the one you love,” her student said. “If she is cold, you tell her she should wear more clothes.”

My sister thought that was funny. She argued, “Love means you remember.”

I could still picture vividly my sister's face the moment I signed the papers. I'd dressed for the occasion several times, but in the end we'd both worn delicate linen shirts she bought in China. Hers was mauve; mine was blue. They each had a single button made out of knotted linen at the top. I wore mine with a skirt she'd had made by a tailor in Nanchang. Her face matched her shirt as I wrote my name. Her sadness that day had given me some of my strength. And I counted on her to remember.

*   *   *

Her son was a year and a half old when I got a call from her. “Guess what little boy is going to have a little sister or brother!” I played along, but I was annoyed; she had no idea what some people have to go through to have children. But mostly I was busy. My office had just approved my transfer to New York, and I was saying goodbye to San Francisco every way imaginable: long last afternoons in the park, last rides out to Stinson Beach, last Monday nights with live music at the bar where I was always meeting people, last breakfast party on my roof, complete with clogging and a mandolin duo. And last espresso with my boyfriend, whom I finally broke up with.

I saw her just a few weeks later, when my family went skiing in West Virginia over the holidays. But she didn't ski because of her pregnancy, and I didn't ski because of my injury. Instead, we cooked and played games in the same cabin we'd stayed in seven years ago when I was pregnant. I'd hidden in my room and read
The God of Small Things
and was compelled to swallow a pickle every time I read the word
pickle
in that story about an Indian family that operated a pickle factory. We'd told none of my cousins or aunts or uncles who were staying in cabins next door. Seven years had changed so much; now, being pregnant and having children were things to proudly announce to everyone.

My sister had already ordered a birth pool in preparation for a home birth in the kitchen. After Jacob was born, she quit her job teaching English at a university to become a professional homemaker. She had additional freezers and refrigerators for her supply of grains, flours, beans, and nuts. She was part of a raw milk black market, and, concerned about the environmental impact of washing cloth diapers, she taught her son how to “eliminate” on command from birth by sitting him on a toilet at regular intervals and using a range of verbal cues. She and her husband occupied a parsonage in a D.C. suburb with strict neighborhood regulations. The neighbors minded her annual delivery of a pile of sheep manure from the farm, for use in her garden, and they minded that she sometimes “peed” her son out the front door of her house, saying
shhhhhhhhhh!
—a pre-lingual direction to urinate, and to be quiet about it.

For now, her motherhood was a frenzy of nursing and cooking and putting to bed, but eventually, I thought, she would have time to think about mine. I thought her own son growing up with white-blond hair just five years short of Jonathan would make her consider what I was missing at every step, and maybe she would feel for me what I couldn't even know to feel for myself. When we were little, we used to put all our coins in a pile and split it in half; it always felt better, whether I was gaining or losing, to have exactly the same as my sister. And when she cried so hard, more than I did, at the Surrender, it lightened the burden for me. I thought I could see she was taking on as much as any person could, her own share, of my grief.

But sometimes I wondered if her own son had made her forget. Jacob was the white-blond grandson of the family. We fed him and held him at Christmas, we played games with him on our backs, we helped him put on his shoes and walked with him in the snow, we got illegible notes from him in the mail. We knew his first words and his first steps, and all about his first successful poo in the toilet. We noticed my father in him, and when my father was filling out some medical forms at the doctor, Jacob would be the first grandchild he listed. Names would follow in order of age, but Jonathan wouldn't be among them. Maybe because, like me, my parents had no legal ties to my son, and tax forms and paperwork were not the time to go into it. Or maybe Jonathan registered more remotely in his mind, like a third cousin you rarely see but you love all the same. Jacob, on the other hand, couldn't be forgotten. Firstborn of the firstborn. Wanted of the wanted.

*   *   *

I still hadn't left California when Abigail was born that August, the same month my grandmother had requested fulfillment of her long-standing wish to meet my son. She planned everything. She suggested everyone meet at the farm and then go enjoy local attractions without her. Then Paula and Erik could enjoy dinner in town at an “upscale” restaurant without the children, and finally, she asked that Erik sit down with her at some point to explain the book he'd written. It had to do with a theologian from the thirteenth century. She said she'd read the whole thing and couldn't understand a word of it.

As usual, Paula and Erik were busy that August. They were living in an apartment while Jevn oversaw the renovation of their new house in Boston. By September they would have lived in four homes in ten weeks. Paula tried to keep me in the loop. Her updates usually detailed the family's scattered coordinates, but sometimes they were just about my son. One of those nights, in one of their homes, she said, as Jonathan was getting into bed, he asked, “Mom, do you know what my mind is fixed on?” She thought it was funny he used phrases like
fixed on
, but she couldn't guess. He told her, “God and Jetfire.” She said it was often late at night he'd say things like that, and she said he sounded just like me when he did. I liked to think about him contemplating God, the greatest and most untouchable thing, together with the smallest and most familiar, his favorite toy, a Transformer called Jetfire, making his mind bend around the mystery that somehow one becomes the other. Whatever he meant, it made me feel close to him, even if I wasn't there by his bedside for that conversation and didn't even know which house it happened in. I'd lost so many moments with my son, but Paula was always gathering them again to share with me.