by Amy Seek
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.
“We are preparing for battle,” Andrew warned no one in particular, placing his own bucket into position, “and don’t get in the battlerabble!”
“Okay.” Jonathan took a timid step back and spoke to himself. “Madeleine is coming with two weapons, and I guess that’s okay because I didn’t say anything about that.” I turned to see Madeleine, the least threatening little girl in the world, teetering toward us with a cup of water in each hand.
“Do you wish you had said something about that?” I asked Jonathan.
“Yeah.” He laughed, as if that were an extreme understatement.
A plastic tub was stationed below the basketball hoop, rolled there atop Jonathan’s skateboard after being filled at the faucet on the side of the house. It would serve as the refilling station for the various weaponry: buckets and cups and squirt guns. But it became an excellent defensive fighting position for anyone who remained there, waiting for empty-weaponed aggressors to approach, seeking a refill. This Jonathan discovered, and the fight escalated in increasingly egregious challenges to the spirit of his carefully laid-out rules, until everyone but Jonathan was soaking wet.
* * *
He was nine. I’d attended his birthday pizza party; it was the first birthday I’d spent with him since he was born. Normally I celebrated alone, invisibly, a glance at the sky as I went about my normal routines, and I celebrated early—on the day before his birthday, the day I’d spent the full twenty-four hours in labor—so that his birthday itself could be his. I’d send him an e-mail, and I’d often hear from Paula. But on his ninth birthday, together with him in person, I told him nine was special.
“It’s the last year you will be a single digit!” I told him. “For the rest of your life, you’re going to be double digits.” I remembered the rough texture of my blue bulletin board as I gazed into it, trying to grasp the profundity, when my father told me that. Jonathan smiled up at me. His baby teeth were gone. Replaced by front teeth with a space between them, just like mine.
* * *
That early image Paula and Erik had described in their Dear Birth Mother letter and over e-mail before my son was born, a life centered around books and friends, had begun to flesh itself out. They’d moved to New Haven and bought a large, old house, where each of the kids could have a bedroom; there was a formal living and dining room as well as a sunken family room and, upstairs, a proper guest room, where they often had friends or colleagues staying. They’d always hoped to end up in Chicago, but New Haven had many of the things they wanted in a city: it was walkable (Paula could see her front porch from her office window), had a functional public transit system, and gave both Paula and Erik good career prospects—they had both acquired teaching positions. And since they planned to stay for a while, they quit homeschooling and enrolled the kids in an elementary school two blocks away.
This was the place the kids would remember as home. Paula and Erik had purchased the empty lot beside their house, splitting the cost with the neighbor on the other side, creating a very large combined yard, which functioned like a neighborhood park. Kids were always congregating there; you could generate a bike posse of probably fifteen kids without trying, and there were spontaneous dinners among neighbors. Doors everywhere opened and closed without knocking. And because I was to my son’s friends not quite a kid but definitely not an adult, I was dragged through kitchens and bedrooms and basements of neighbors’ homes, unannounced and uninvited, and sometimes I’d be standing face-to-face with a father or a mother, sometimes not properly dressed and certainly not expecting company, when I’d remember I was not a kid at all.
* * *
Paula had picked me up from the station alone because Jonathan was still at basketball practice. She told me all the news: Andrew was taking piano; Jonathan, guitar; and Sarah, violin. They were all involved in sports, and Sarah was getting some extra tutoring in math. Oh, and Jonathan was training to be an altar server at church. Everyone was busy.
> My news was that my dad had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer over the winter, and his prognosis was not good. Mom had called to tell me when I was at work. I’d hung up and gone home. In those moments, how easy, how necessary and natural it felt to abandon my work. I understood its limits as I hadn’t when I chose it instead of my son.
When we arrived back at the house, kids were gathered in the yard, and I approached them, looking for Andrew or Sarah. Someone emerged from the group to greet me, and I vaguely remembered him.
“We’ve met before,” I said. “Do you remember who I am?” After all this time, I still wasn’t comfortable saying.
“Yeah, you’re Jonathan’s mom,” he answered. “Lone Wolf,” he referred to himself, with a closed fist beating softly for each syllable in front of his heart. He added over his shoulder that I seemed too cool to be a mom. Then Andrew spotted me and leapt into my arms. We found Sarah, who was now a teenager, and she gave me a teenagery hug.
* * *
It was early May, the sky full of glorious, high clouds, and just warm enough for a water fight. When everyone left to put on dry clothes, Jonathan invited me upstairs to see his room. I sat on his bed and looked out the window, trying to assess the tiny rectangular space as one measure of his childhood. The exact proportions of this room were determined long ago, when I was looking through profiles, trying to anticipate what couples’ promises and photographs might mean for the eventual shape of my child’s life. And this was it. This was where he woke, his head pointing toward the window. This was the ceiling he gazed into, and these walls were the color blue of his childhood. Then I noticed there were two framed photos, of me and of Jevn, sitting on top of the hutch above his desk.
He was looking for something within the messy pile of toys beside his bookshelf. Finally, he pulled out the Swiss Army knife I’d given him, engraved with his name. He handed it to me, and I admired it, having forgotten all its features. It still had the toothpick and the plastic protector for the corkscrew, which I thought he would have lost by now.
“Does the pen still work?” I asked. He said it didn’t, and I told him I thought we could order a refill. But by then he was handing me the remote control helicopter I’d given him that never got off the ground. Now it was broken, and I felt bad. It wasn’t the best gift, but it was hard to buy him gifts. Caleb said to send him little things all the time, but I’d go into museum shops and the things just looked like things. An eraser shaped like the Guggenheim for my abandoned son? Finger puppets to say I wish I had him with me?
He’d sometimes send thank-yous for the things I did send: I got that Mars Mission ship, and I love love love love love love love love love love love love love it. You picked out one of the most famous ships in my Lego-land. I can’t wait to see you again because then you can give me challenges on my skateboard.
But I wanted him to get rid of the broken helicopter; I would get him the amazing toy helicopter I’d seen in Berlin that was so easy to fly. I told him as much, but he pointed to some of the propeller mechanics and said he had an idea for how to fix it, an idea that involved paper clips and pennies and tape.
“I still have this,” he said, showing me the camera that Caleb had given me to give to him.
“Oh, yeah!” I took it from him and examined it. I realized he wasn’t looking for anything, he was just showing me things I’d given him. “Does it still work?”
“Yeah, it does video, too.” He showed me how to turn the knob to the movie camera and then put it down on the bed beside me.
Then he held out a photo album I didn’t recognize at first. I’d put it together in a kind of daze, right after his adoption. It contained family photos, childhood photos, my whole family history in twenty images. As I turned the pages, I remembered I was going to give him a letter to go with it, the story of his adoption, but I’d left several such notes unfinished when I was pregnant, unable to picture my child or to make sense of my feelings. And after he was born there was never the right moment; the story didn’t feel finished. We were always somewhere in the middle of it. It even seemed a little strange for him to have these photographs. They weren’t the ones I’d choose to represent myself anymore.
He threw something onto the bed and I reached for it, another photo album. I was surprised to see childhood photos of Jevn and his brother; Jevn had made an album, too. We’d talked about compiling our photos together after the birth, but by then we were trying to heal apart, and I never knew whether he’d sent his own. During that time when there was such deep silence between us, Jevn was sharing his most precious things generously with Jonathan, photos I’d never seen, even one of his beloved uncle.
Finally, Jonathan stood up, finished, and glanced at the pile. It was surprising, the number of moves those things had made it through. I liked knowing he had some special category in his mind for the gifts I’d given him, but I was glad he didn’t have a special box for them. That his toys were broken and played with, and the albums containing our precious family histories were worn and sticky like children’s books are, telling their ever-changing facts of the real world—not unlike the books on insects or sharks that sat sticky beside them on the shelf.
* * *
Over the course of that year, my father’s cancer was treated with aggressive chemotherapy and surgery, during which his vocal cords were mistakenly cut, leaving him unable to speak above a whisper just when I wanted to talk with him most. I’d quit my job in the city and started working for a small garden design company in Brooklyn. I was following in my father’s footsteps, building a business. He struggled to hear, though he wanted to know every detail, and he struggled to speak, and I hated to make him repeat himself. But one day, walking home from work, I called to tell him about some business strategies we were developing at work, and he said very clearly that he had only one business strategy.
“Don’t overcharge people.”
“That’s not exactly a business strategy, Dad!”
“All I ever needed,” he whispered with conviction.
* * *
In the periods between treatments, he continued working in his office and on his side projects. When I went to visit in the early summer, he was busy building a twelve-foot-tall cannon-like device with a long, open channel made of two-by-fours, string, and PVC. The barrel of the cannon had various strings and springs and pulleys along it, and it leaned on a wood frame. From a distance, it looked like a tall, narrow, almost completely unthreatening easel.
“We’re calling it a gasoprong,” he said, smiling at me, though no one, not even he, knew where he got that name. “We have to get on the Internet and find out what it’s really called.”
“And what’s it for?” I asked him. His tools were scattered across the floor in the garage. And plastic chairs from the deck were positioned at his different workstations. Every word, every movement made him pause to catch his breath.
“Shoots a lead weight. There’ll be a string attached; it’ll go up over a limb.” He gestured with one index finger looping around an imaginary high limb and smiled, as though the delightfulness of this should be self-evident.
“But why?” I asked.
“It’s for making swings. Really high swings.” He smiled and wiggled his eyebrows once. Like an engineer of old, he had to invent a machine to create the thing he really wanted to make. The actual thing was a swing that would float on multiple hinge points through the forest, like a Jacob’s ladder, like Tarzan. He wanted swinging to be as much like flying as possible, and he planned to make this new swing in Baltimore at my sister’s house. He had surveyed her yard in the freezing cold of that previous winter, my sister manning the ranging pole, to determine possible trajectories.
Her backyard was a playground of custom-designed and hand-built hazardous things. There was a zip line that launched off a high platform and ran a hundred feet through the trees. It had two settings: dangerous and, with an ingenious mechanical adjustment even a small child could manage, very dangerous. He h
and-knotted the safety net, a complex matrix of big bowline knots of heavy rope and little bowline knots of a lower-grade rope. My mother said he sat working on it for hours. There were swings of all kinds, tire swings, infant swings; the backyard was a field of magical seats that swung from branches so high you couldn’t easily see where they attached.
My dad couldn’t say I love you, but he built things. The rare times I’d dated boys who couldn’t build things, I would wonder if they cared about me at all. But as long as shelves were built and knots were tied and gardens were planted and swings were hung, then I knew.
“Let me show you the power of this thing,” my dad whispered as he invited me to pull back on the mechanism, an eight-foot-long trigger that stretched a massive spring at the top to cock the device. I pulled down with both hands on opposite ends of the screwdriver that was serving as the handle for the cocking mechanism. Tugging with all my body weight, I could only get it halfway cocked.
“Don’t let it go,” my dad said, smiling.
My brother and I carried the gasoprong to the backyard and stationed Dad’s plastic chair at its base. We acted as if nothing was abnormal, though he was skeletal underneath his clothes. He had hammered new holes in his belt, and his pants were cinched around his tiny waist. We just enjoyed the evidence he was still the same person inside, even as we had to help him in ways we’d never had to before. We took his direction and moved the gasoprong into place. And soon, the tall inscrutable device was set up and ready to test.
“I’d like to be a little farther away from it when it fires, since it’s marginally dangerous,” he said. It was an inventor’s conundrum; how to be close enough to pull the trigger, but far enough away not to get hit with a lead weight. “And since I’m not sure how marginally.”