God and Jetfire

by Amy Seek

  He offered the sledgehammer to my brother, who had just pulled up, home from college himself. I’d told him my news over the phone, but he hadn’t said much in response. I don’t think he knew what to say. He hugged me hello in a way that told me he hadn’t forgotten, and I stood back as he took a swing. It fell dull and heavy on the concrete. Dad took the sledgehammer back to demonstrate his technique. It struck with a solid metallic thud. Between swings, he leaned back proudly and smiled. “And some people pay big bucks for a gym membership!”

  * * *

  And then everything was normal. There was nothing more to talk about. My sister was still in China, but otherwise it felt like any other Christmas. We piled into the car and drove out to our land in the country as usual. Thirteen acres of pasture where we’d planted four thousand white pines and Douglas firs when we were little—Dad’s backup plan in case his engineering practice failed. All those saplings grew into a solid block of forest by the time we were teenagers, but we’d drag a tree out of it at Christmastime to make good on the investment.

  That night, Mom put the old shoeboxes full of ornaments on the coffee table, and we rummaged through them, decorating the tree. Most of the ornaments were from Germany and France, where my parents were living when they met. Both were working for the army, Mom as a teacher, Dad as an engineer. Our whole house was decorated with trinkets from other places: street artists’ renderings of Vienna and Strasbourg, a camel saddle from Egypt, a glass clown from Murano. As much as I loved the mountains of Tennessee, I always knew it was just one place in the world, and I always knew I would be leaving.

  “Isn’t that a beautiful fire?” Dad leaned back from the fireplace, his hands behind his head, and invited us to admire it with him. I untangled a beaded angel I’d made in Indian Princesses, a father-daughter bonding organization we used to attend. He recognized it and smiled. We’d gone on a camping trip, during which the fathers told the daughters there were escaped convicts on the loose in the woods, and then a couple of fathers put on scary masks and came banging on the windows of our cabin late at night, and we stacked our mattresses ten high and scrambled to the top but only narrowly escaped their grasp as they reached for our ankles from the bottom. There was a lot of beer and poker, some canoeing and swinging on vines, and then there was the last-minute craft, Dad’s fat fingers beading an angel to persuade Mom we’d had a weekend of quality time. Which, of course, we had.

  * * *

  That night before Midnight Mass, I called Jevn. We wished each other Merry Christmas. I told him my family supported the idea of adoption and I was feeling really hopeful about it. But Jevn said that his mother had been telling him more about abortion. It wasn’t too late. She was a nurse, and she’d assisted with abortions. She was really worried, like he was, about whether I’d be able to go through with adoption. And what were my plans if I couldn’t?

  I didn’t have an answer; the only answer was I had to do it.

  I stood between my mother and brother at church, the only Catholic church for miles. Dad stood on my brother’s other side, wearing the wool jacket he kept just for that annual occasion when he’d dutifully accompany us to Midnight Mass. At the Our Father, we all took hands to pray. I was comforted by the familiar motions, though I never knew much about what they meant. I remembered some of our born-again neighbors telling me you don’t take anything with you when you die, not your parents, or your siblings, or your pets. Definitely not your possessions. Definitely not the hills of Tennessee, or anywhere else you might love. When they said God’s ways were not our ways, I thought that was the least my way of all God’s ways. Because I wanted to keep all those things.

  When we got to the middle of the Our Father, we always lifted our hands, hand in hand, together, for the words “For thine is the kingdom.” It was an expression of submission to God’s ways. But then it was an incongruous gesture, and for that reason it was always my favorite moment in the Mass. We were lifting our hands in surrender, but we were grasping them, hand in hand, like a human chain. With our mouths we admitted we don’t make the rules, we may all die alone, but with a hundred clasped hands held high, we objected: we are going to hold on tight. It was a losing battle, our will against his, but we raised our clenched fists to God, as if we could hold on to anything.

  * * *

  Only secretly did I enjoy a new pleasure over the holidays. Having someone together with me while I rolled out cookie dough with my brother. Within me to share a taste of my mother’s roasted vegetables and squash soup. Swaddled in my ski pants and thick wool sweater when we went skiing in West Virginia before I headed back to school. Someone who fell with me, careful as I was not to fall, when a skier came out of nowhere saying sorry, sorry, sorry beneath me as we all three slid down the hill. Someone who demanded pickles, just like on TV.

  And someone who joined us for a last hike in the mountains, where Dad did what he always did out in the woods. He’d wander off the trail, studying one tree after another, from top to bottom. He’d press at a trunk inquisitively. When he found a good one, he’d press more until the tree began to move almost imperceptibly back and forth, and at that same tiny rhythm he’d push back. Soon the top of the tree would be whipping in large arcs, knocking through the canopy, and it would start to crack a few feet above where it met the ground. We were so used to him doing it, we didn’t even turn around when we heard it fall, but sometimes we’d chop it up and roll it down the mountain for firewood.

  “Just a lovely day, isn’t it?” he asked me. It was sunny and not cold at all, though colder on the mountaintop than back at home. I told him about my internship that was coming up in January. My program consisted of alternating internship quarters and quarters in school, year-round for six years. Kids went all over the world for their internships, but I’d found a job in Cincinnati so I could be with Jevn, who would be in school. We’d made that plan before I got pregnant.

  Dad liked to hear about architecture school. Architects’ ignorance about construction made his engineering work more challenging, but he was amused by stories about this ignorance in its earliest stages of development. And he was always willing to help with my structures assignments. Design a column to be crushed, a bridge to be broken. You know a material best by knowing how it breaks.

  “I was thinking,” he said, “it was nice with your mother and me, that when we had you kiddies she could take off from teaching, and I could work on making the money. And that we’d done all the traveling we wanted to do beforehand. I’d think it would be awfully hard to be a single mother—”

  “I know, Dad.” I stopped him from nearing the subject, in his indirect way. “That’s what we already decided. I’m doing adoption.”

  And we had already established that hard and easy didn’t matter. It wasn’t about how it felt. It was about the facts, that a child needs certain things I couldn’t give it. It was up to me to manage the emotional part.

  He went silent and cracked some peanuts out of his pocket, offering one to me. He stepped off to the side and pressed at another trunk. Looked up the column to its leafless top. All that weight seemed weightless when it was woven within the other branches, reaching to the sky.

  “What is it that makes it fall?” I asked.

  “Oh, oh. Well. It’s called resonance. Just the particular frequency of a material where it has a bigger amplitude.” He waved his hand back and forth, imitating the tree. “When you apply pressure at a certain rhythm, a small amount of force can generate a whole lot of oscillation.” His hand waved in bigger arcs. “Enough oscillation, and the material fails. It’s in everything’s nature to break. You just have to find the right force.” He pressed a few more times until there was a splintering, shifting deep inside the trunk. He looked at me and smiled, raising and wiggling his eyebrows. He scrambled backward as the tree came crashing down.

  SIX

  Molly brought a small stack of colorful packets into the room and sat down. Some were almost books, their cardstock covers bound
with lace ribbons, and some were just a few pages stapled at the corner. There were beaming faces on the front pages, ecstatic fonts and cute margin art. “Hi! We’re Rob and Robin!!” they cried out from some strange and wonderful place, out of cozy windows where fuzzy felt shutters were stuck to fuzzy felt walls. A primary instrument of open adoption, these were letters written by waiting couples to an unknown pregnant girl, kept on file by the agency for moments like this, when one stops in, contemplating the impossible.

  Jevn hadn’t gotten back from Colorado, but I’d begun to take the steps: I set up prenatal appointments at the university hospital and arranged my second meeting with Molly. I bought groceries and a pregnancy cookbook; I took the vitamins Mom had bought for me in Tennessee. On the phone, I told Jevn I could do adoption. All the while, I was still trying to convince myself that I was pregnant.

  Molly handed me several letters, along with a work sheet she pulled from a folder, and left me to look at them. I had in my hands a bumpy pile of what could be my child’s parents. The exercise would be as simple as this: for each potential family, a check box for yes and one for no, and three empty lines to accommodate an explanation. This was open adoption: you go into a little room with your ballpoint pen and a work sheet and come out with a completed form and a family for your child.

  Dear Birth Mother, Our names are Kevin and Kate, and we are in our late twenties.

  There was a heart-shaped photo of a brunette couple, china cabinet in the background, flowered border along the top of the wall behind them. Her wrist fell over his shoulder and her hand lay perfectly flat at his chest, as if to display her diamond ring.

  We were high school sweethearts and have a very tender loving stable and supportive marriage.

  I turned the page.

  There was a photograph of Kevin sitting in the branches of a tree; it was affixed with football helmet and baseball glove stickers. His round, gold-rimmed glasses and wide face reminded me of my high school boyfriend. Kevin is an attorney and works in a local law firm not far from home, the caption said.

  On the next page, there was a photo of Kate, limp-wristed and pulled up so close to the piano her belly was touching the keys. The photo was attached with music note and flower stickers.

  I put the profile on the sofa beside me and looked at the next. Carl and Denise’s letter had a light blue ribbon border and a soft pink rose in the corner. Its tone was direct and earnest. While having a hysterectomy was certainly not something we wished for, we don’t see it as the end of the world. They described their home as a four-bedroom house in a subdivision outside of a large metropolitan area, and they had a three-year-old adopted daughter. Denise said Carl could always make her laugh; Carl said that Denise had an irresistible childish joy. They loved to travel; their daughter had already seen the Shedd Aquarium, FAO Schwarz, the Ghirardelli Chocolate factory, and Lake Tahoe!

  I put them on top of Kevin and Kate.

  Rob and Lori had wide smiles and giant plaid shirts. We both love children and have been through four years of infertility treatment trying to start our family. There was a photo of five indistinguishable heads bobbing in a lake. Handwritten below it, swimming with friends. Along the margins were colorful flowers overlaid with romantic fragments of script, as if their own seventeen-page message was printed on the palimpsest of a love letter from the days of inkwells and wax seals. There was a picture of Lori’s brother kissing a llama. A picture of a mobile home with vast lengths of plastic siding where windows should have been. A cat and the handwritten text precious—the name of the cat, or maybe just the nature of its blissful curled-up-ness. A blurry picture of a deer, maybe in their yard, and a yellowed photo of a barge loaded with people, with the caption boat parade.

  Molly returned and quietly closed the door.

  “You’ll have more time to look at these; I just wanted you to get an idea of the kinds of letters couples write. You’re very early on in this process.”

  This Process had Early Stages and Late Stages. I was sitting comfortably within known boundaries.

  She said my options wouldn’t be limited to the twenty or so couples she had on file, who were all Catholic couples living in southwest Ohio.There were many more couples, in other places across the United States. She advised me to go “online,” where I could search for open adoption agencies. They would send their own files of Dear Birth Mother letters, and if I found a couple I liked, Molly would work with their agency to represent me.

  “How many profiles do people usually look at before they find a family?”

  “It really just depends; everyone’s different. Did you have any questions about those?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. The couples piled in my lap seemed perfectly nice. From what I could tell, they were ready for parenthood in exactly the ways I wasn’t. They were married and had houses and jobs and incomes. But they weren’t simply “waiting adoptive families,” the way I’d imagined them. I’d pictured them like the starving children in Africa my mother would tell me about: a homogeneous mass of people who were deserving inasmuch as they were in need. I thought I would cast my baby into the void of human heartbreak and know that, whatever it cost me, it was at least doing something good for someone who deserved it. But these were not homogeneous people at all! They had their own hair colors and names and neighborhoods and brothers who kissed llamas. They would have smells and jukeboxes and three-car garages. They might blast the air-conditioning, or heat the swimming pool, or watch enormous televisions in finished basements with parquet floors and windows that looked out to the undersides of holly bushes. There were so many things to watch out for.

  Molly said that open adoption means you get to know the couple who adopts your child. That knowing had seemed simple and good. I’d know their names and addresses and what they looked like. Knowing seemed like a form of protection I’d retain as a parent. I’d have a window, like a guardian angel, into my child’s life. But now knowing seemed dangerous and complicated. That window opened wide. I’d know the pattern of the wallpaper in the kitchen and the color of the carpet—and I would feel responsible for it, and for everything it signified. Everything I saw, I was choosing for my child. They’d be adopting my baby, but I’d be adopting the burden of every last detail of their lives, and I wouldn’t be able to ignore it any more than I wanted to shut that window to my child. But once I signed the papers, the entire future would be set in motion, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

  * * *

  When Jevn returned from Colorado, I told him that the meeting with Molly had been promising. I could feel a new distance between us, and I tried to think about how to love him in the right way—the new, broken-up but having a baby way. How to not hate him and his potential. But on my twenty-third birthday, it felt more like the old days. He took me to see Island of the Sharks at the Omnimax in the old art deco train station. The entrance was punctuated by fountains and pools and terraces and sculpture, and as we walked along them, I asked him to slow down; my tailbone was still hurting from my fall on the ski slopes. But I was always asking him to slow down. Sometimes I’d refer to the saying Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. “Just walk beside me and be my friend.”

  “Maybe you should just be my friend and speed up!”

  The old train hall was sheltered by a monumental dome. We went to opposite corners of the arch, spoke softly to each other, and waited. His secret message would go bouncing up into the ceiling only to arrive at my ear, perfectly preserved as a whisper. After the film, we drove downtown for dinner at my favorite restaurant. It felt like we’d forgotten about all the complications and returned momentarily to our relationship in a prior form.

  “I like you,” he would say simply, his smile gaping open. He meant something precise; simple and full of wonder. “I smile when I think about you.”

  He often looked at me like he was a dog inspecting a curious object he thought might play with him at any m
oment. Like he was ready to burst into a run to chase it, and he could hardly wait for it to move, and his excitement wasn’t diminished when it didn’t.

  For the two years we were together, we spent a lot of time apart, Jevn on internship, me overseas or in Tennessee. I dreamed of you last night, he wrote in one of his letters. We were buying a board game for you. In one of my letters I drew the James River, where I’d gone exploring abandoned canal locks and pump rooms with my brother, as a long line running along the edge of the page. In the next letter, he suggested we make a pact. We would traverse the world by river.

  “Did you forget our pact?” he would ask in his letters that followed. Not because he thought I had. I think just because vulnerability was one of those exciting new territories he wanted to explore with me. When we were back in the same city, he named our pact “We have questions for God.” He was acknowledging my inability to pin down my ambiguous and uncertain faith, and he was enjoying, himself, having someone to ask such questions with. He folded the paper that detailed our itinerary.

  “How many times should I fold it? One for you … one for me … and one for the third.” When he unfolded it there were eight panels made by the creases, for the number of deserts we were going to see by river.