God and Jetfire (40 page)

*   *   *

But now, I did feel it. I was saying it in my head; I was saying it to all the fibers of the gray carpet. I couldn't work because I was busy saying it. It felt brand-new and incredible, a whole new identity, a whole different terrain. What wall had been moved? What had changed in that moment sitting at my desk that freed this involuntary feeling, that brought my son so close to me, for the first time since his adoption?

I thought back to a moment on the Staten Island Ferry. The ferry was pushing through wet fog as the kids and I played a chaotic game of tag that had us running back and forth through the interior to the outer walkways on opposite sides. The ferry was almost empty that afternoon. On one of my sprints through the cabin, I found Paula and Erik and sat down with them to catch my breath. Soon, I heard the kids screaming. I got back up and peeked my head out the door and looked down the long walkway. I saw Jonathan, standing still but laughing and breathless, his back toward me. He yelled, “Where's Amy?”

“Over here!” I called back, darting away from him down the walkway, and our game resumed.

It was such a small thing that I hadn't told anyone about it. It was nothing—but it was everything—to see him looking for me. It seemed, in that moment on the ferry, he freed something that only he could. And now it was rising up in me, like butterflies.

And yet, when we signed off of our chat, I hadn't said it.
I love you
claimed to know and understand him. But I didn't know anything. I didn't know how he entertained himself on a lazy Saturday or what he thought was funny or his teacher's name or his favorite subject in school. And he didn't know me, because I hadn't let him.

I also didn't want him to feel like he had to say anything back. So instead, I just said: <3. Building a heart out of pieces felt true.

His response had been unrestrained: <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3.

*   *   *

Then Caleb appeared on my screen.

“Pow,” he said. “How you getting on?”

“Good; my son just chatted me!”

“Coolio. What'd he say?”

“Nothing much—it was just amazing to have him contact me.”

“Good they gave him your e-mail.”

“Yeah.” I hadn't really thought about that.

“What's the difference between
than
and
then
?”

“
Then
is time-oriented.
Than
is a comparison. I am taller than her. I was younger then.”

“Right. I knew that. Just confirming. What you want for din? I'll have it on ice for you if you're working late.”

*   *   *

My grandmother asked me to keep writing her e-mails and telling her stories, and when I had a free weekend in April, I went to visit her. She lay back in her recliner, and I sat close by in the green barrel chair with the wicker back and tried to entertain her with stories about my friends' love lives. I told her she couldn't possibly understand how complicated relationships were these days, because she'd married a really good man. Now there were not only no good men but hardly any men left at all. I told her about the bar I'd gone to in Brooklyn where my friend and I counted twenty-two women but only one man. And of course the one man was on a date with one of the women. I told her about all my friends trying to get pregnant through IUI and IVF and donor eggs; I told her about a friend who just found out her husband had been cheating on her for almost ten years and all of my friends who had boyfriends who wouldn't commit.

In light of all that, I said I was grateful for Caleb, who was at least loyal, even if he didn't want to get married or plan for kids. He just wanted things to happen, naturally, and there was something beautiful about that. If I could get myself comfortable with the idea of building a family without the security of marriage, which he insisted was illusive, I had no doubt he'd be a devoted partner.

My grandma just lay there with a washcloth over her eyes, but at some point she began to rouse herself. Slowly, she got up and into her wheelchair and rolled her wheelchair into my shins.

“The best man.” She looked at me hard. “I married the
best
man.”

*   *   *

Caleb hadn't come with me to visit her. My family didn't find him
Solid Gold
, and he felt it. They thought he dressed funny; his jeans were too tight, you could see his bright teal underwear when he bent over, and Julie didn't like his dog. My mother thought he should marry me if he loved me so much. He won my parents over when he cooked dinner for them one night and they finally saw how generous and charming he was, but it was already too late. My grandmother was getting sicker, and I felt like I was in a race to start my life before my family slipped out from under me.

I couldn't do it the way Caleb wanted to—get pregnant by accident, and then try to explain to Jonathan why, still unmarried, still financially unstable, this time I kept my child. And I couldn't just wait indefinitely for Caleb to change his mind, only to become one of those infertile people I'd met ten years ago. I couldn't bear to think that the only child I'd ever have would be the one I gave up, and I absolutely could not adopt. Caleb was standing by the bikes in the far corner of our apartment when I got home one afternoon and told him I wanted to break up. He helped me carry boxes and dismantle our bookshelves; he gave me all our joint stuff and made me a bike rack he painted hot pink to hang the bike he'd built for me. We put the pots for the tomato plants on my new fire escape. And he gave me a digital camera, a little present, he said, “for your son.”

My new apartment had counter space enough to roll out Christmas cookies and a view of the sunset over Brooklyn. Haystack liked to stand at the windowsill overlooking the city, and she didn't miss Reginauld at all. Sometimes she would walk out onto the metal grate to assert her long-lost independence, and one night she caught a mouse out there in the tomatoes; she brought it inside and ate it like a burrito and then reclined across the countertop as if she'd paid her half of the rent for a lifetime. I tried to make it a little home. It had everything I needed, all of it within a little more than an arm's reach.

But I realized that when I fell in love with Caleb, it was the first time I'd dared to think,
Maybe
this
was why it all had to happen
. Before that I'd rejected reasons—they trivialized the loss. But meeting him was a consequence of a whole life's worth of accidents that included my son's adoption, and wanting Caleb meant wanting to keep them all in place. It meant loving my son, who he was now, eight years old, three hours away, and adopted, instead of holding on to him through grief.

Breaking up with Caleb undid all that. Or maybe it was nothing more than habit. I loved with abandon; my love always let go, as if the fullest consummation of love was to destroy it. To love from afar and watch love float away.

Fresh, piercing pain to distract me from older, duller pains.

*   *   *

Paula wrote to tell me she'd been thinking about me and thinking about my grandmother. She said Jonathan had just been through his First Confession, and she herself helped him to write down his “very short, very earnest” list of sins. She said the confession was in preparation for his First Communion, and she invited me to come share it with them.

“I wanted to make sure you know that we would be happy to have you with us.”

Their conversion to Catholicism had happened after much “talking, praying, and thinking,” and though it meant my son would be raised in the same mysterious faith I'd been raised in, a distinct connection to me, I was mostly happy to be reminded that as solid and stable as they were, they never stopped moving and thinking and responding and growing.

“Jonathan will be resplendent in his all-white,” Paula said in her e-mail, “which, as you can imagine, makes him look like a very beautiful, small, slim, virginal used-car salesman. At the very least, we will send you photos!”

But my grandmother had been admitted to the hospital the same weekend, and I went to see her instead. She lay, shadowy and half-alert, in a room lit by a dim bulb hidden in a long, horizontal sconce above the window. Sometimes my cousins would come in and rub her head or her cracked heels, as they had been doing since they were little. What more important reason to have a child, than to have someone to rub your feet as you die?

“Precious one,” my grandmother said when I got close.

Her face was gray, her eyes vacant. It was not the time to remind her about what she'd said about getting my son back. I wanted to know what she meant, and if she still thought it, and how I was supposed to do it, now that she'd be gone. She only said something about how life never gets less painful, and she said it like she was disclosing what now, on her deathbed, she knew for sure; the world's worst-kept secret.

She died in her recliner at home two weeks later by her window that looked down the road and out to the bird feeder. The day she died was the same day the program I'd worked to develop began distributing fresh vegetables from a New York farmer to a low-income neighborhood in Brooklyn. After the distribution, I went home and stood in my kitchen. I wanted to call Caleb, but instead I placed an order for a thousand worms and built a worm compost out of two nesting plastic containers to sit in my kitchen, oozing and squirming, producing rich soil out of cantaloupe rinds and tomato stems, in honor of my grandmother. There was something about putting my hands into the earth that connected me to my family. Something about tomatoes, which my grandpa would slice with his razor-sharp knives, and worm castings to fertilize my fire escape garden, like it was in my blood to do. Taking the earth in my hands, I was embracing all of them, all of it.

 

THIRTY-TWO

I felt myself falling forward, rolling head over knees in darkness. I heard someone saying the word
breathe
. That word that had guided me so many times now seemed to be a quality of the black landscape,
breathe, breathe
. I heard the word repeated, but it appeared as a row of trees, chopping the sunset into a million pieces as I drove fast through the forest.

“Breathe, Amy, breathe!”—louder and clearer. I could no longer sense the pins tapped deep in my neck and my lower back, and my ankle, and the meat of my thumb. I'd taken flight, off the edge of the road, and I'd lost sense of up or down. There was just that word, a rhythm that could swallow all the world's complexities. Of the many possibilities, most of them were invisible; none of them had meaning. One of them was
breathe
; it was the string of a balloon rising faster than I was in the darkness, and as it nearly touched the edge of my hand, I opened my fingers to take hold of it.

After I opened my eyes, I sucked in the air. I was shaking and wet. The acupuncturist treating my injury said that I'd had a seizure. She was shaking herself. There was no real explanation. Just another confusing manifestation of my injury, or my grief, or just bad acupuncture. But it scared me. It made my injury, which had become an old friend, dull and familiar, seem newly potent and dangerous.

I had embraced the pain, thinking it was honest and simple. It communicated danger and had no motive for trickery. But pain was just a communication between the body and the brain. And like any relationship, it could turn dysfunctional. The physical injury and my son were all tangled up in my mind and in my blood and in my neurons and cells. I'd always known the knot wouldn't be undone by pulling hard on its ends, but now I knew time alone wouldn't loosen it, either. More than that, I understood that grief wasn't a friend, and that the tangled knot did not somehow contain my son.

When I recovered, I walked home strangely vigilant. I watched cars carefully, feeling vulnerable, under threat. I knew that I'd been at a fork in the road and that I could have decided anything; it hadn't even felt like a decision. But we are always making that decision, pushing through impossible pain, a thousand futures crumbling with every step.
Breathe
, I told myself, as I crossed Fourth Avenue.

 

THIRTY-THREE

“No physical contact,” Jonathan said, lifting a bucket of water in the driveway.

“No spitting,” Andrew added.

“No spitting,” Jonathan confirmed. “Um, pretty much anything besides throwing water on people is not allowed—”

“And walking around and breathing and living,” their neighbor Madeleine interjected, holding an empty cup and pouring it over Jonathan's head in mime.

“Anything besides throwing water on people is basically illegal.” Jonathan put the bucket down between his feet. “Besides, like, walking and living and that stuff.” His hands rotated slowly in a juggling motion, to capture in a cloud the world of processes and activities he couldn't enumerate comprehensively, but which you couldn't have a water fight without.

“Breathing,” Madeleine added again.

“Can you jump?” I asked. I was supposed to be the referee.

“Yeah, you can jump if you want. You can, um…” He held his hands, one nested loosely in the other. “You can't really pick up any items. Throw them, use them.” Each arm, alternately, moved out and around in a tiny backstroke to indicate everything in the yard around us that you could not pick up, throw, or use. Jonathan tried to lasso the unwieldy world of things that could not be done, and then he would try to encircle the universe of things that had to be. What water fights were, exactly, would not be pinned down.

“Rock throwing?” I asked.

“No, definitely not,” he said seriously.

“Okay, are we ready to start?” I tried to gather the participants. Sam and David called to Jonathan from across the street. Kids were always emerging from every corner, passing through the yard, coming home from church. None of them informed, this particular morning, that a water fight was about to commence.