by Amy Seek
Over the course of several hours Jevn and I talked about our professional lives and our romantic lives. I insisted on addressing his love life because I didn’t want to get any more information inadvertently from Jonathan. I asked him about the girl Jonathan had seen him almost kiss! When he confirmed she existed and they were serious, I could see her immediately. Someone mature and sophisticated and confident and sensitive and beautiful and careful with words. Dark, voluminous hair. Tall. A hearty, full-throated laugh. Wide-legged slacks. Big sunglasses. A watch and a proper purse. Someone who buys flowers at the farmers’ market and fish at the fishmonger. And puts them all bountifully in the basket of the bike she rides glamorously in heels.
And I was surprised by how it sank me. Not just imagining her; I was sad that we could talk casually, as if the past had no presence and our son was just an accident. I wanted us to brush away the weightless things—just years, just geography and experiences, just other boyfriends and girlfriends. Some part of me still felt a claim on him, because we were once together and we might have stayed together, or because we were together, and always would be, in Jonathan.
* * *
Jevn still spoke of Jonathan with the deepest reserve and care. It seemed to be difficult for him, but I could not make out precisely why. He said Jonathan was one of the most intense people he knew and that they were already “good friends.” He said that finding Paula and Erik remained one of his proudest achievements.
I agreed, but then I mentioned a frustration I’d had when they visited, that Paula wanted to find a McDonald’s or Starbucks to duck into, out of the rain, but Jonathan wanted to find a hot dog stand, and I wanted to help him have a real New York City experience. Fortunately, I didn’t know where any McDonald’s or Starbucks were; the closest place I knew of was the café by the model boat pond in Central Park, so we went there.
Telling the story to Jevn, I just wanted a moment with the only person who lost the same son I did to take stock of the particular things we lost. But Jevn wouldn’t indulge me. He said he imagined my relationship with Paula wasn’t simple, but that he didn’t make any assumptions about anyone. He said he was just grateful to know Jonathan. And grateful for Paula and Erik.
Looking at him, I remembered a river. The Ohio River, as it flooded the valley the year I met him. Highway ramps looked like boat ramps; overpasses interlaced underwater. Collapsed buildings were saggy skins, mouths ripped open, gaping with driftwood. I’d ridden my bike beside it, still heaving heavily like the fat barrel of a horse, its obedience generous. The river, that stream of gut certainty Jevn had always told me to tap into—but rivers could overflow their banks and destroy the city, and still my son was the only river I’d ever had.
For a second I felt my old anger. People were always impressed with Paula and Erik’s generosity, and it was as if I should just pull a blanket of gratitude over all the loss. But recognizing their generosity undermined my own. I was still, every moment, every day, giving them my son. Surely Jevn could see that; surely he felt it, himself! It trivialized the care we took to find them and create this arrangement, which we’d all done together, and the pain and guilt and exhaustion I experienced all the time—didn’t Jevn feel those things, too? Letting us see our child was part of the deal; it was the least they could do, and it didn’t compare to what we’d sacrificed. Grateful as I was, I wouldn’t tell myself it solved anything.
But I didn’t say any of that. I just agreed that we were very lucky. Jevn was a blank, blunt wall that wouldn’t be penetrated. His friendliness and warmth, the particular give I could see he had for me, did not lead to an opening. I hugged him goodbye, but I couldn’t find his edges. He was a smooth, warm white wall, going to infinity in all directions, and my eyes still could not make out whether he was near or far.
THIRTY-ONE
“Hi.” My son’s name appeared in the lower right-hand corner of my screen at work, overlapping my drawing. My heart raced, surprised at his sudden appearance, completely unencumbered by planning, or packing, or traveling to see him.
“Hi!” I responded. I smiled and then glanced around the room and then waited anxiously.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Working,” I told him. “I work every day, from morning to night!” When I’d arrived in New York, there were twenty-five staff; now we were down to five. Those of us who had survived the economic collapse were just trying to keep our jobs, despite increased workloads, pay cuts, and mandatory unpaid days off.
“Man! You have a lot of work.”
I told Jonathan he should be outside instead of on the computer, and he told me I should be, too. He said he had to go.
I closed my chat and returned to work. I was trying to finish a layout for a park in London that was already under construction; landforms were being built at the speed we could design them. The project was enormous, fast-tracked, and understaffed, but I was accustomed to working under pressure. I knew how to time production for color calibration, for file size handling, for last-minute concept overhauls. I had work-arounds for every issue, and I’d seen enough sunrises over Tribeca to be confident I could produce efficiently around the clock.
I tore off a piece of trace to go over the contours again and paused for a moment to think. I gazed down at my tabletop; I adjusted my lamp and paused in its warmth. And then I said it to myself: I love him. I looked all around me, trying to orient myself. The windows still facing south, the last moments of sunset passing between the buildings, car horns sounding the early end of Friday. What I felt was beautifully automatic; it leapt ahead of me, holding and claiming him. I love him, I said to myself again and smiled, surprised that my feeling was persisting, that I hadn’t found a way to shut it down.
* * *
Those words felt new; I hadn’t said them to Jonathan since before his adoption, and I didn’t think them to myself when I pictured him. I might tell friends I loved him as a shorthand for the many feelings I felt for him that were too complicated to name, but I always knew it wasn’t love, exactly. Love was something different from desire, or pain, or guilt, things that rose easily to the surface when I thought of my son. Love was light and free; it was among my many feelings, but it was held down by heavier things. Love felt good, and I wouldn’t normally allow myself that indulgence.
I thought I remembered saying I love you in my mind as I held him when he was still a baby. But my love had no arms to wrap and keep him. I’d pushed that feeling forward like a birthday wish, or like a boat I was shoving off a sandy shore that scrubbed the surface of the ground, lightened, and was gone. I trusted it would go somewhere, but I had no control, and I didn’t watch to see it disappear. If I’d tried to say it out loud then, only Paula and Erik would have understood, Jonathan still so little, and I thought it might undo Entitlement. I thought if they heard me tell him I love you, they might think I was claiming my motherhood, or experiencing regret, or flaunting a feeling they were working hard to achieve. I love you did damage. I stayed silent and smiled at him, weighting my love till it floated forward and away.
When he got older, I could have said it, but how? After he took my pawn and I took his bishop? When we were playing basketball? Or riding bikes? No, those were words you whisper to your child as he’s falling asleep. Or when you’re sending him off to school, to remind him you’ll be there when it’s time to come home. Love was a comforting already-known, a balloon you tap easily, to keep it in the air. The right time would have been as I was leaving, when everyone was gathered in the foyer, saying things like “so good to see you,” “good luck next semester.” But then, that was not the right time to say it. “I love you,” directed at my son, was completely unlike “Goodbye, thanks for having me.” Instead of giving gracious closure to my visit, I love you would rip this structure wide open and point directly to my unique relationship with Jonathan. It would beg the question, If I loved him so much, why was I saying goodbye at all?
And since his adoption I hadn’t felt a
thing that was light and free, or that compelled me to say it. I had sedated my instincts, and there were no secondary instincts for a surrendered son that would bubble spontaneously to the surface with an appropriately timed and tempered statement of affection. My son was always examining me with narrowed eyes, and I thought he knew that the feeling I felt for him wasn’t simply love. Saying I loved him would make him doubt my love; he would think I just threw words around carelessly. It was enough for him to see that I was there, committed and available.
* * *
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 st
opped 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.