by Amy Seek
For one thing, I got a part-time job at a radio station. Listening to local musicians’ demo tapes and pulling the best for airplay. One morning, as I removed some folders from the file cabinet, the receptionist pointed at my waistline in the back. “What is that?” she asked. I was still wearing the undies that had stretched with my stomach when I was pregnant, and it appeared some of the extra fabric was hanging out of my jeans. The next day, and many days after, there were little gift bags of underwear greeting me at my desk in the morning. Tiny lace thongs and zebra-striped pink-bowed short shorts like I’d never seen. Another day, she told me I should go out with Thomas, the guy who ran the other radio station in the building. “He’s hot,” she explained. I found out that on his off days, he was doing renovation work in a run-down neighborhood north of mine, and I offered to help him. We poured concrete and hammered shingles and lay wood floors and went swimming in the river farther north. After a few weeks of periodic manual labor, we were sitting side by side on his couch. I was wrapping my arms around my legs, folded into the hollow where Jonathan had been. Gingerly, he kissed my elbow and then apologized. He wanted to get close to me, but he sensed my reserve. I didn’t have room for another person, another heartbreak.
I stayed afloat in school, but I fell in love with the city. As I ran, I stirred the big soup of me, all the things I loved and longed for, all the things I couldn’t contain at once, embraced in the swinging of my arms. The city really began to feel like home when, like the Romans, I had augured a route around it, and for me that route became the city walls, as solid as stone, and everything within it I felt like I was somehow protecting.
* * *
Just as I was starting graduate school, Paula wrote to tell me that Jonathan had started preschool. She said he was reluctant to go, and so she read him a story about a raccoon mother who left a kiss on the baby raccoon’s hand so that he could press it to his cheek if he felt lonely.
“I pulled out my lipstick,” she said, “and left him with a big ‘Sangria Sunset’ kiss on his palm, and then he was happy.”
These images I had of Jonathan bore ever less resemblance to the shadow he cast in me. There was him beaming brightly up at the camera in the black-and-white photos Paula sent, and there was the numbness I carried around the design school and said nothing about. There was him laughing with Sarah as I chased them around the house during a rainstorm last time I visited, them skidding in their socks and shrieking with delight. And there was my ambivalence when Thomas tried to get close to me. As my grief sank to inaccessible depths, my son grew more and more self-assured. I didn’t feel any need to reconcile them. I simply felt I was looking at my son from a great distance. I let things divide and separate; the real boy Jonathan couldn’t teach my sadness to go away, and I tried not to bring my sadness to bear on my relationship with him.
* * *
I thought by then they had probably begun to tell Jonathan the whole story. Adding detail as he grew and as his curiosity and understanding allowed, the way they did it with Sarah. Hearing she’d come out of her birth mother’s belly, Sarah became fascinated with childbirth itself, and maybe because she saw me more often than her own birth mother, Paula told me she’d suggested Sarah save her childbirth questions for me. She would put a doll in my lap and ask me to give birth to it. She couldn’t frame her question. It wasn’t, Did it hurt? It wasn’t, How long does it take? She just wanted to see it, as if watching it happen might help her understand what it all meant. I’d put the baby under my shirt and moan and groan like they do on television. Sometimes I’d be sitting on the sofa, deep in labor and about to deliver the baby, and Sarah would leave the room altogether, her question, somehow, or at least for the time being, answered.
But Jonathan wasn’t interested in those things. He knew I was his birth mother, and that made me somehow special and specially his; I just couldn’t tell how much he understood about what that meant. But I didn’t want to interrupt a story in progress, one that was Paula and Erik’s to tell. They knew his sensitivities and the best words to explain it. And they’d be there to answer his questions or comfort him, hours, or days, or weeks later.
* * *
That Christmas, in an effort to understand what I was going to graduate school for, my father took an interest in a diagram he found in one of the books I’d left by the fireplace. When he was not tending to the fire, he read that all soil could be divided into varying proportions of sand, silt, clay, and loam. Doubting this, he went outside and took a shovelful of frozen earth. He put it on a cookie sheet and into the oven to dry, and then he spread it across the table where my mother would have very much liked to set Christmas dinner. He pounded it lightly with a hammer to break it apart. He planned to put it into a jar and shake it until the component parts layered themselves, but he left it there for days, pounding it occasionally until after I’d returned to school, where in fact very little of my work had to do with soil.
I never thought about actually getting Jonathan back, but I often wished he could be there when my family was together. I wanted him to join us on our hikes in the woods. I wanted him caught between my brother and me, stringing the lights; I wanted him sprinkling Christmas cookies with my mother and sister, or stocking firewood with my dad. I wanted him captured in our web, held tight by everyone. But since he had his own family to get tangled up in, I just wanted my family in Tennessee to miss him. Or at least notice that he wasn’t there. But then he had never been there, except the Christmas he was still within me.
I visited his family instead, before returning to school. After three and a half years, my relationship with Paula and Erik hadn’t changed, though their circumstances were always changing. With Paula no longer bound to North Carolina for her doctoral work, they’d started applying for jobs in Chicago and other cities. I knew they were working toward a third adoption, maybe sending their Dear Birth Mother letters and corresponding with potential matches, but I didn’t ask about it. They stayed in touch with my family, and I’d even heard that my aunt and uncle had visited them after the wool festival in North Carolina. As it was relayed to me, they just showed up on Paula and Erik’s doorstep and were welcomed in. I could imagine the way Paula would laugh in surprise, delighting in exactly the strangeness that might make another family uncomfortable about the whole situation.
I visited every three or four months; usually I initiated it, but if too much time passed, they would. The days I spent with them seemed to unfold largely as they might have without me. Everyone dispersed casually throughout the house, unless there was a church service or an event to pile into the car for. If we were home, I’d often spend hours sitting in the living room or standing in the kitchen talking with Paula. Sometimes I felt like talking to her was the best way to catch up with Jonathan. She was always giving me funny stories and insights into his personality, a long-exposure image of him I wouldn’t get myself on a quick weekend visit. But I’d always ask just as many questions about Sarah, or about Paula’s sisters and a few of her friends I’d met. Visiting meant reuniting with everyone.
And I’d always spend a lot of time playing with the kids in the living room. Blocks or hide-and-seek, or anything we could come up with. I loved the moments Jonathan would inadvertently touch my skin, rolling a car over my arm or holding steady as he stepped over his toys. I’d keep still like he was a butterfly that didn’t know it had landed on a person. I thought if I budged—it’s me you’re perched on—he might get scared and run away. His four fingertips on the top of my hand, the slight weight of his body against my upper arm. In those moments I’d remember there was a place only we had been and questions only we shared. But I was careful not to look at him in a way that bridged back to that place, and I was careful to make sure no one saw me thinking about those things. He’d go back to his blocks, always intent on his task, and I’d quietly catch my breath, there on the futon or cross-legged on the floor across from him. Then one of those times when we were playing in the living room, he crawl
ed into my arms and said, “Amy, pretend I’m your baby.” He put his thumb in his mouth and waited, looking right up at me.
I trembled—helpless and terrified, wondering whether he knew, or what he was saying, or what it all meant. But there was no time for questions. I held still and listened, making sure no one was nearby before I indulged his request, pulling him close and gazing down at him like he was my baby, my entire body shuddering at the chance to hold him like that for the first time since his adoption.
I was pretty sure Paula and Erik knew about those moments, because so often they would retreat to their offices, or they’d have somewhere they had to take Sarah, or they’d send me off for walks in the woods alone with Jonathan. When I got back to Philadelphia, Paula wrote to say that after I hugged them goodbye, Sarah and Jonathan climbed onto the couch and stood on their knees, looking out the window and watching me go. Sarah said, “I love Amy,” and Jonathan responded, “No, I love Amy.” My son had never said that to me, so it felt like a big deal to hear about it, even if they were just kids. I could picture them there, noses pressed against the window, trying to make sense of the world together. It was funny to think of love that way, as if one person’s love could inch over and threaten someone else’s. Yet it was the very conception of love we had to overcome to do what it was we were trying to do—and I was still surprised Paula had shared that story.
TWENTY-FIVE
Days before my sister’s first baby was born, she was consumed with housework, finishing the tasks she knew she’d find difficult after the birth, but over the phone I asked her to pause for a minute to think: she was about to become a mother. Everything she cared about—her values and priorities, her relationships to her friends and family, her capacity for love and sacrifice—was about to change. And not because of the new responsibilities of parenthood, but because of a physiological event. If she was vigilant, she might catch a rare glimpse of primordial motherhood at the moment it implants itself, or rips open her heart, rending new cavities to make way for an unwieldy and excruciating and impossible new love. But she could easily miss it amid the flurry of contractions, and pushing, and midwives, and gifts, and then caring for the new baby. I’d missed it because I wasn’t expecting it, and now it was among my most pressing questions: What is motherhood, exactly?
My sister sighed and said she had to paint the picnic tables. Cyan blue because that’s the only paint they had at the store, and then she was going to put in the lettuce, which meant getting out the rototiller, and turn the compost. But she said she might think about it after that if she had time.
Within a few days, a few hours before my final landscape paper was due, she went into labor. I packed my research materials and my laptop and drove down to Maryland to be present for the birth. I timed contractions sitting at the edge of her bed, laptop teetering on my folded leg. But I found myself wondering what I was there for. She was going to get to keep her child. She would have a beautiful birth and then a beautiful life as a family to follow. There were no comforts I could give her that weren’t already hers. And then Jacob was born, pale and blond and skinny like Jonathan, my parents’ first legitimate grandchild.
* * *
That summer, Jonathan turned five, the perfect age to start to really enjoy doing dangerous things, and that was why my father suggested we all meet in Virginia to take a ride in the glider. It would also be a chance for a Seek Family Wave-Off before my move to San Francisco, where I’d accepted a design job. I invited Paula and Erik, but they had a full summer ahead of them. They were relocating to Boston for new teaching positions in the fall, but before the move they’d be traveling to Florida to visit Sarah’s birth mother as well as Paula’s parents and to Indiana for “Cousin Camp,” where all ten or so grandkids canoed and swam and rode horses and otherwise hung out on Erik’s parents’ farm. And, the biggest event of all, they’d just finalized the adoption of their third child, Andrew, so they were busy getting him settled into the family. Between everything, they were packing and saying goodbye to their old home. It would be a lot to coordinate a trip to rural Virginia just to take a ride in a motorless plane. Nevertheless, they made it to the glider field.
My son was supposed to be the first passenger. He was beginning to look like a little boy in his red polo shirt. He was lanky and tall, white bangs trimmed straight across his forehead in a bowl cut Paula executed herself, using an actual bowl, but his head was always falling back in a wide, cheeky smile. In the shade of the open hangar, we unhooked the bungee cords that kept the cover tight over the curved glass of the canopy. The plane was seamless and smooth—bright white fiberglass, with long, narrow wings extending from the swell of the body at the middle. We rolled the glider by its wings onto the lawn, where my dad popped the latch, lifted the heavy glass lid by its frame, and began to show Jonathan the gears and sticks and knobs and pedals inside. My dad had learned to fly after returning from France in the sixties, and, fascinated with the pure physics of it, he joined a glider club in Virginia, where he and my mother first settled. The airfield was a three-hour drive from where they ended up in Tennessee, but flying was one of the few things my dad would take a whole Saturday off of work to do.
Under the bubble of the glass, the glider had a front seat and a backseat, enough space for a pilot and a passenger, but when we were little my sister and I would ride strapped together in the back, with pillows to elevate us so we could see. When Dad would tilt the wing, my sister would tell me it was because I wasn’t sitting up straight enough, and I might make us go completely over if I wasn’t careful. My father tilted one way, then the other, steeper and steeper, and asked me over his shoulder and over the noise of the air rushing through the windows, to stop leaning. I bore flying like many things my father exposed me to, with no certainty I wasn’t going to get killed.
Sometimes, he would pull the stick straight back and ascend until the plane stopped, vertical in midair. The nose would turn down and free-fall fast toward the ground, spinning like a top. He’d have to pull back on the stick fast enough that he wouldn’t hit the ground (certain death), but not so fast that the force of the change in direction would rip the wings off (certain death). Pilots had to be able to do this trick to maintain their licenses, but I begged my dad not to do it with me in the plane.
We finished the tour of the plane, but Jonathan, seated and strapped into the backseat, decided that he was too scared to go up. And to my surprise, my dad didn’t push it; he must have been uncertain about his privileges as birth grandfather. I wondered if he considered himself a grandfather to Jonathan at all. Instead of flying, Jonathan sat in the back of the plane while my dad told him about how they would fly someday, and how he would let Jonathan take the controls when they did. Which was true. You’d be soaring over mountaintops and he’d wiggle his hands in the air unsettlingly, to say, I’m not flying this plane—I hope you are!
While Paula and Erik each took flights, Jonathan and Sarah took turns driving me and my mother around in the golf cart that was normally used to tow planes to and from the grassy runway. Jonathan couldn’t catch his breath from laughing as he floored it across the open field. When the afternoon ended, I tried to convince myself that it was enough. Enough time with my family, enough contact with the thing my father enjoyed most in the world. Enough contact with my father, just to be there in the place he loved so much.
The next day, we took a walk in the woods before going our separate ways. Dad helped Sarah spatula a wriggling snake onto a stick to examine it. While everyone else stood in a circle watching, Jonathan gently took my hand and led me away, into the woods. He explained that what my father was doing was very dangerous, and he kept looking back to gauge our distance from them until he was confident we’d reached safety. Paula told me he sometimes wore a toy football helmet around the house, just because it made him feel secure. I didn’t want him to feel so fearful, but I was happy to be rescued from my father, and I was honored it was me Jonathan chose to save.
W
hen the snake got away, we all wandered down to the creek where I’d been catching frogs and crawdads between glider flights since I was born. It was wide as a street and shallow as a bathtub, and the clear water made hunting easy. Tall trees shaded the water, but there were generous openings where the sun streamed in and deep pockets in the creek farther down where you could swim. We all rolled up our pants and stepped in, and my dad showed the kids how to skip rocks.
“Pick a really flat one,” he told them, “like this one here.”
The kids stood on their tippy-toes to see what my dad had in his hand. He cast it across the creek, and it popped up one, two, three, four times.
“Here’s one!” Jonathan handed it to my brother. Because he was a white-water raft guide through high school, my brother read rivers like my dad read skies, but it was my father who’d taught him how to skip rocks. My brother threw it. One, two, three skips. Jonathan went looking for more. When he reached his hand to the shallow bottom, he was almost completely submerged.
Paula and Erik let the new baby wade in the creek with the others. Andrew was big and heavy with tan skin and curly hair. He cuddled into you and didn’t cry easily, and he had a satisfying give when you squeezed him. He looked perpetually just-woken and wide-eyed, perfectly unbiased and open to anything. They had adopted him at nine months old. I didn’t know the details about the adoption: his birth mother’s situation, how they found her, or whether it had been as hard for her as it had been for me. Paula told me, but I guess I didn’t want to think about it. I was just happy my son had a little brother.
Even though they had a long drive ahead of them, Paula and Erik let the kids get completely wet, let them run on the rocks, get muddy and destroy their day’s clothes. This gave my father so much satisfaction. He said his parenting philosophy had been: when in doubt, increase freedom. He didn’t have a single piece of advice for improving Paula and Erik as parents. He noted this quietly from his lawn chair, planted right in the middle of the stream beneath the trees, while they skipped rocks in the creek beyond us. I sat beside him, beside my mother. His pants were rolled up and his feet rested on a rock, half in and half out of the water. He smiled as he watched Andrew creek-walk up to his waist, his diaper floating loosely behind him. Then he got up and took Jonathan’s hand and led him up the creek, balancing on slippery stones. It looked very much like my dad was the one who might fall.