God and Jetfire (44 page)

“Okay!”

Paula asked me to call Erik to bring the car over, and he pulled up a few minutes later.

“What do you think?” he asked me as he stood and assessed Jon's find.

“I don't really like TV, but I think for the sake of how happy it would make Jonathan…”

“I'm just concerned about how disappointed he'll be if it doesn't work. Or if we decide not to keep it.” This was how parents were supposed to think. He out-parented me.

They loaded the television into the trunk and secured it, hanging halfway out the back, with bungee cords. One of the neighbors walked across the yard to join us and asked, “Did you buy a television?”

“We don't even know if it will work, but we've bought an adventure.” Paula laughed. I laughed, too. That was how they thought about everything, and that was exactly what made it work.

Jonathan leaned out the car window, like a proud hunter coming home with his kill. Erik walked behind the car to secure the television in the trunk, and Paula was at the wheel, taking direction from him.

“Slow down!” Erik called to Paula. “Actually, go as fast as you can, I don't want the neighbors to witness this!”

But soon there was a crowd of neighbors and kids, guiding and advising and laughing and loading the enormous television into the basement, where it was never so much as plugged in.

*   *   *

Charles arrived to pick me up. Jonathan greeted him, eager to show him where I was, and Charles joined us in the living room. He greeted everyone and wished Paula a happy Mother's Day. Paula said her evening plans were to go out to eat with her three girlfriends; it had become a Mother's Day tradition to be left alone to do something extravagant without the kids. She made a gesture of shoving them away and laughed. Entitlement achieved; her motherhood was now a thing she could take for granted. In fact, she had to fend them off.

I hugged Andrew, who was always so sweetly sad to see me go.

“Amy, what should I call you?” he asked, pensively. “My birth aunt? Or … my stepmom?”

“I'm sort of like those things, I guess, but I don't really know, Andrew!”

Jonathan and Charles talked a little, and I wished they could talk more. But we were leaving, and Jonathan was going over to David's. It had been such a short day, but I felt the exhaustion coming. Then Paula said it had occurred to her that if the whole family went to Andrew's birth mother's wedding, they wouldn't be more than eight hours' drive from Tennessee. And maybe they could visit my father then, if that timing worked. I said that sounded good to me.
Please let it work.

We hugged goodbye, and I embraced Jonathan, letting go too soon, and he ran out the door. I was still feeling the urgency of that thing I'd come so determined to do; I just didn't have any energy left. I wasn't sure how I was supposed to get him back. But I knew they'd keep giving him—in weekend visits, in long walks alone, in time with my family—until I figured it out. I made Charles drive by David's, to see if we could see Jonathan again before we left. I wanted to say goodbye again. I wanted to be brave and hug him twice. Charles pulled over and asked if I wanted to jump out, but it was too strange. No, I just wanted to see him. Maybe they're playing basketball. Can you back up a little?

“Go see him if you want to see him,” Charles told me.

“No, no, no. It would be weird.”

We returned to his house, and exhaustion overtook me.

 

THIRTY-FIVE

When the earthquake happened in Haiti, Paula posted a warning on her blog against adopting hastily from there. She wrote that really helping a child orphaned by the storm means not just loving it and lifting it out of disaster, but being willing to embrace its original family and community and to “shake your fists at the heaving ground and crashing buildings that took those people away.” In precious moments alone with the child, when it's most possible to forget everything that came before, she said, it's an adoptive parent's obligation not just to love the child but to “love it
more
for all the people who couldn't be there.”

*   *   *

My dad's weight was down to 147. Mom said he was as thin as he'd been when he was all legs in his ski pants in the Alps, fifty years ago. He had shingles on his back, and his whisper was getting weaker. His hands were bruised, and he patched his skin together with painter's tape; it was so thin and delicate it would rip under the slightest stretch. But he always remembered his Mardi Gras beads when he returned for chemo. And as weak as he was, he couldn't stop building things. That spring, lightning had struck one of the trees that supported the zip line in my sister's yard, and a giant branch had fallen, crushing the railing of the launch deck and detaching the cable. He had to fix it. Building things was a kind of compulsion for him, as it had been for his father, as it was for Jevn. Building was like a first language for these silent men, comprised of saws and hammers and drills and rope, communicating the fundamentalest things.

*   *   *

When I found out he was heading to Baltimore, I told Paula and Erik that this would be the best opportunity to spend time with him. I didn't want to wait until he was dying. I wanted Jonathan to witness him alive and in his element, and perhaps to feel in his own blood the early resonance of something that had always meant so much to my father. I had asked Jonathan once if he was interested in learning how to build things. Jevn had built a playhouse in Paula and Erik's backyard in North Carolina and designed the renovation for their house in Boston. I wondered if it had sparked his curiosity about construction.

“Yeah, but nobody really has to teach me,” he responded. “I've known how to build things since before I was born.”

I laughed at his so casually taking ownership of a period of time when he was very much within me. He was all mine then! Mine to feed, mine to float in the water, mine to bake in the sun. It must be how mothers feel, I thought; as soon as you teach a child to speak, it will tell you it never needed you.

“Well, that's probably because you went to architecture school with me every day for nine months!” I fought back, playfully, happy to have him push me away and give me an excuse to pull him back.

I knew it would be difficult to coordinate, and I knew what I wanted was excessive and impractical: for my son to have a memory of my father with a hammer in his hand. But I told Paula what my mother had told me, that my father had been refusing to eat. She said she'd make seeing him a priority. Everyone except Sarah would be able to come.

*   *   *

When Jonathan got out of the car, he walked right up to my sister's son, standing by the tire swing. Both still blond and skinny, they stood for a moment before the mirror of each other. Jacob was nervous and shy; he battled a stutter, and he looked up at Jonathan warily, but Jon wrapped his arm around his shoulder like they were old friends, and they walked into the yard together. Paula and I said hello and stood side by side as we watched them.

“A little too sweet, isn't it?” She laughed. “Jon is drawn to kids younger than he is; he's really protective of them. It's so funny to me!” But she was positioned to be surprised by her children. She had no particular expectations, she said, because as an adoptive mother she never saw her children as miniature versions of herself. She said she was always aware that her kids were on a “completely new adventure called themselves.” We were both, all the time, between hugging and holding on to him—perpetually, reluctantly, letting him go.

*   *   *

“Jonathan,” my dad whispered, emerging from the house. He'd been taking a nap, trying to build up energy for the work ahead: rebuilding the zip line launch deck and its railing.

Jonathan walked, stiff-shouldered, up to my dad, who appeared pained as he stood in the driveway, one hand clasping the threshold of the garage. There were two-by-fours propped up on plastic kids' stools on top of the asphalt, prepared to be cut at an angle drawn in Sharpie. My father handed Jonathan the Skilsaw. He knelt down and showed him how to align the blade with the mark, instructing him to err to the left if at all. Then he stood and caught his breath, and Jonathan looked up at him. My father pointed to the mark and smiled wearily.

“Yeah. G-go ahead. Cut there,” he whispered, resting immediately after the exertion. My son seemed to understand that there was good reason he wouldn't get more instruction than this. Erik passed by carrying suitcases into the house and took a casual interest in Jonathan's work.

“Danger-parents, I think that's what we should be called, right, Jonathan? I think I'm supposed to be discouraging this kind of behavior!” He laughed.

My dad smiled, though I'm not sure he really heard Erik. But Jonathan heard him and looked up, unamused. He was by nature extremely careful, unlike Andrew, who returned repeatedly to the emergency room without acquiring any sense of his own fragility. Put together, Jonathan became a bit more daring, and Andrew might sometimes think twice.

We worked all afternoon. Jonathan was the primary laborer, given minimal direction just before having to execute, having no real sense of the overall scope of the work or when it might be complete. After the wood was sawed, the project moved to the yard, just beneath the launch deck, and my dad sat in a plastic chair while Erik and Jon assisted him. My dad showed Jon how to take slack out of the steel cable with the come-along, notch out joists, lay floorboards. Slowly, he showed him how to tie a bowline knot.

“It's a very useful knot,” he said. “Doesn't slip much. Doesn't slip any. All these knots here are bowline.” He pointed at the safety net. “Now, slip that around the two-by-four.” He handed Jonathan the looped end of the rope.

Every time I looked, my father was standing, seeming light-headed, taking a deep breath with his mouth open and squinting his eyes, or he was sitting, his head in his hands, occasionally handing a drill or an extension cord or a wrench to Jonathan. Jonathan worked while the other kids, too young to help, played on swings nearby.

My sister, now pregnant with her fourth child, came outside carrying a bucket of vegetable peels and cores and seeds. Jacob followed her, eyeing the construction site.

“Mom, what happens if the zip line falls on us?” he asked my sister, looking up at the thick, twisted cable above him as she dumped the compost into the garden.

“Then I consider how lucky I am that I have other children, man,” she said. Jacob's eyebrows furrowed. This was the kind of thing my family was always saying to me when I was little, reminding me at every opportunity that I was an accident. I hoped Jacob knew she was kidding. I followed them back into the house, where Paula and my mother were sitting at the table, talking about all the perfectly good things that get thrown away at the end of a college term. My mother described the way my brother, now a university professor, would drive around picking up furniture and lumber to salvage.

“That's a great idea!” Paula put a hand closer to my mother on the table, leaning toward her in her warm, engaging, friendly, easygoing way. “That's what we're always saying; there is so much stuff thrown away! Someone should organize a Goodwill or something to sell this stuff back to other students. I mean, lamps, and beds, things that parents spend a lot of money on. It's not like those things have had ten years of use.”

Julie put a plate of buckwheat burgers between them. She didn't coordinate proper meals the way my mother had; she just continuously cooked and continually put food on the table.

“I'll have to think about that,” Paula continued. “Some kind of exchange center for college stuff. I'm sure it wouldn't be that hard to organize.” Paula was often, breezily, coordinating bake sales and hosting refugees and renovating their downstairs apartment to provide cheap housing for students.

My sister had made a giant spelt pizza, and she called the kids over to the cyan picnic table outside to eat. Jonathan looked over at them.

“Let's just get three more floorboards tied in, okay?” I said. “Then we can go eat pizza.” It felt like a betrayal of the purity of our relationship, untainted by parenting, telling him what to do, as if I had any authority at all. But my dad was losing stamina, and every time he handed Jonathan a hammer, or helped him tighten the screws, or showed him how to avoid stripping the screw heads, Jonathan was seeing him, and there was a chance he would remember him. Jonathan glanced at me, then down at the drill, like I was laying claim to something he was unsure about giving me.

But I didn't have time to worry about it. My sister needed help carrying more things out to the table. Cauliflower-quinoa cakes, nettle soup, pumpkin custard, buttermilk smoothies, saut
é
ed greens from the garden, rhubarb chutney, chard frittata, peanut butter balls, cucumber salad, corn on the cob. My mother was nagging her to clean up the kitchen while she cooked instead of leaving a disaster to clean up in the morning. Paula was telling Erik that she was exhausted from the trip. Jacob was screaming at Abigail, two years younger but meaner. There was too much going on for me to think about who my son was to me; if anything, at that moment it felt like our loss was an incidental fray in a larger fabric. My son was part of the swirl of family, and when I looked over at him taking direction from my father, I felt, I
love
him, and I didn't think our bond at that moment needed tending. I could take it for granted so that I could pay attention to other things. To Paula and Erik, who I wanted to make sure felt comfortable and had what they needed. To my father, who often needed help silencing the commotion around him so he could be heard. To my brother, who I hadn't seen for a while, to Andrew, and to my sister's kids. I saw my son more often than any of them.

And I actually felt that. I could take him for granted.