God and Jetfire

by Amy Seek

  I picked up the pencil I had left there days ago. I traced the lines, trying to find the feeling that had originally shaped them, a threshold to that time when their contours were my biggest concern. Now it appeared they’d been drawn by someone else.

  “Is this roofline supposed to meet this one?” he asked, but I didn’t know. I hadn’t decided. I designed with my eyes closed, like a mole digging where the ground was softest, asking myself if the space should open out left, open right. Should there be light, should there be shelter. Jevn thought about the quickest, simplest way to build things. The best material, the most efficient construction sequence. He cut similar pieces at the same time, using a jig for speed and precision. He would lay out all the parts before he assembled them. What resulted was always beautiful.

  He worked furiously at the table. I hated how he glanced at me as I handed him my long metal ruler. Sitting there, he required me to make my many unmade decisions, and in very little time the questions that had consumed me during the school term were given certain, unremarkable dimension, and the thing I’d allowed to remain a rich mystery for ten weeks began to look like a building. I ran into the bathroom to throw up. He continued to measure and cut, measure, cut, and he finished my model in half the time it would have taken me.

  I stepped into my shower and let the water pummel me. The north light of the frosted windows glowed; their rusted, wet cranks made muddy dust on the yellow tiles of the sill. I pressed my stomach with the palm of my hand. Nothing was visible there, but a small certainty began to develop inside me. A pebble dropped into my infinite lightness. A tiny weight that pulls a flying curtain flat. Two unstoppable inches and a hardening of my abdomen. When I moved, my muscles gently tightened around it, the weight of certainty, the early seed of a lifelong grief.

  * * *

  Don’t have an abortion, come to Tennessee; the only time I could remember my mother telling me exactly what to do. There are no accidents, hooray for that! my sister wrote from China. Jevn shuffled large sheets of cardboard outside the bathroom door, and I imagined the larger forces of the universe pausing for a moment to focus attention on me—not to destroy me, but to utilize me for an event as old as time, as vital as the nitrogen cycle.

  FOUR

  My favorite way to leave the architecture school was through the doors on the sixth floor. The ground on that side swelled to meet them, and in the summer, you could sit on the slope and bake in the warmth. The cold air of the new building, the fluorescent lights, and the doubts and fears harbored there would dissipate like trapped spirits set free in the body-temperature bath of sunset. I was so often struck by the sunset there that my friends would imitate me, falling over on the hillside, arms flung wide in a backward embrace. Desire so great it’s its own inversion. It’s so beautiful! they would say, mocking me.

  But now it was winter, and passing through those doors for the last time that term gave no relief at all.

  A narrow stand of bamboo grew along the side of my apartment building, screening it from the fraternity house next door and creating a breezy tunnel to my stoop. Bamboo filled my wide south window, and when the sun set it cast a shimmering shadow on the wall above my mattress, a few inches above the floor. At night I gazed up through the veil of torn leaves to the sky, and I could lean out and touch the tall stalks from my doorstep. Inside, a turquoise wingback chair given to me by a neighbor stood tall in the corner, and a bulbous blue Eames chair left by the last tenant was its round counterpart. On my desk, the Yellow Pages were folded where I’d left them.

  Jevn and I had each told our mothers. In a moment when my fears about our situation outweighed my terror about what she’d say, I’d exhaled the words Mom—I’m pregnant before I’d even uttered hello. I don’t know how Jevn told his mother. I only knew that the year before, she’d given me and her daughter-in-law the same red cardigan for Christmas, but in the past few days she’d started calling me to talk about Jevn’s talent and potential and how I was putting them both at risk. She kept telling me how simple abortion was.

  Within the pages I’d torn from the phone book, I found a listing for Catholic Social Services and called to make an appointment. There were private lawyers and agencies, but I didn’t want to talk to anyone who might have commercial interests in my pregnancy. And I was comfortable with Catholics. I’d spent a thousand Sundays gazing up at the timber ribs that swelled to support the ceiling of my mother’s church. I’d appreciate a perspective that was bigger minded in a situation like this.

  But Jevn didn’t join me when I drove downtown. He didn’t think I could do adoption. He said I was too sensitive. He reminded me: I couldn’t eat animals; I picked earthworms off the sidewalk after it rained. How could I possibly abandon a baby? But adoption seemed like our only choice. The only option that didn’t kill anything, wouldn’t deprive anyone of a father, and wouldn’t require biiiiiiig bucks.

  * * *

  The receptionist directed me to take a seat in the lobby. Her cushiony arms resting unmoved against the desk assured me that mine was a problem solved every day in this place. Molly appeared and introduced herself. She led me down the corridor and into a counseling room. I sat down in an armchair. She perched herself on the sofa and smiled. She was in her late twenties and pretty. She leaned toward me, brown hair brushing her shoulders as she spoke.

  “Tell me why you’re here today.”

  She asked questions that were easy to answer. I told her the stock stories of my life: I was born in Tennessee, I had come to Ohio to study piano at the conservatory but had recently switched majors to architecture. Those stories were like old friends, and it eased my mind to remember them.

  She listened closely, nodding with warmth, and then, as if it was simply another background question for her file, she asked, “Do you have any experience with adoption?” She might have asked what I thought about modern art or the conflict in Yugoslavia.

  “My uncle was adopted, and I think a friend of my brother’s,” I told her. It seemed unremarkable that certain characters would be cast into families by means other than birth. Being adopted seemed like a benign abnormality, similar to being foreign or an only child, or to having divorced parents or freckles, or to moving a lot because of your dad’s job; all vast mysteries of other people’s lives I didn’t have the imagination to ponder.

  “Do you know anyone who has placed a child for adoption?”

  I shook my head no, but it almost seemed like a trick question. The whole point of adoption was that the baby doesn’t have a mother—that’s why it needs a home. The whole point was that the mother is gone.

  “That’s understandable. Women who place their children often don’t talk about it.”

  I’d never even thought about it. All of those children had mothers.

  Not once had I considered Uncle Johnny’s real mother or the woman who must have given up my brother’s friend. The story I’d heard about my uncle was that he’d just shown up in the shed and stayed, so Grandma adopted him. That’s what adoption meant. You were added to a family. Adoption was a means of getting children, it was not a way to lose them.

  Molly handed me some work sheets to take home that would help me think about the decision. They were printed on blue and green and pink paper, FAQs about adoption. How soon after the birth can the baby be placed in its adoptive home? Will my medical bills be covered by the agency, the adoptive parents, or both? Will I be able to see my baby in the hospital?

  But I was thinking about Uncle Johnny. I’d observed the way his short nose and wide face didn’t match any of ours, but I’d never wondered who it was he looked like. His smoky voice and hearty laugh, his heyyy, hon! belonged to some other family, but I hadn’t had the flicker of a thought: Whose? His mother was standing right in front of me every time I hugged him, and yet I hadn’t seen her once; how had she accomplished such utter invisibility?

  “We refer to them as birth mothers, for lack of a better term.”

  A birth mother—it seemed
like some kind of fantastic, magical character. The shadow of the coatrack you couldn’t see, the wrinkles in a son’s face that assemble and disappear, a ghostly presence that slips across the side of the wall. If I was going to take on this role, the invisible member of adoption, I would have to understand the special sleights, the extraordinary hiding places.

  Molly asked if I’d ever heard of open adoption. It sounded like some kind of improved adoption. Adoption had of course evolved along with dentistry and flight and calculators and war. Allowances had been studied and generous contingencies put in place. By now, they’d have devised ways to make what used to be hard about adoption easier.

  “Open adoption basically means that the mother can know the family who adopts her child.” Molly explained that Catholic Social Services was at the forefront of a whole open adoption movement I hadn’t heard about. “That contact gives the adopted child access to information about its history. The parents gain the confidence of knowing they were specifically chosen by the birth mother to raise her child. And the birth mother gets to see that her child is happy and safe.”

  This all seemed sensible and exactly as it should be.

  It was brand-new information, but it registered easily, as if I’d always known it. Open adoption seemed perfectly suited to the modern world and the kind of hybrid solution I was looking for. It wasn’t once and for all like abortion, and it wasn’t being a single parent or getting married too young, but it wasn’t just giving up a baby, either. It was some mix of other things. These ideas I stored to think about later, with other thoughts I hadn’t fully processed: that I was pregnant, that I was going to have a baby, that it was already two inches big inside me.

  “You don’t need to make a decision today. We want you to feel comfortable with whatever you decide, and there’s still plenty of time.”

  Molly reassured me, in that imitation living room, with giant inoperable windows overlooking the Ohio River Valley, with her shoulder-length brown hair and her handouts xeroxed on blue and green and pink colored paper, on the fifth floor of a professional building in downtown Cincinnati, that everything would be okay, that people made adoption plans every day, that I was not too late for anything, that what she’d presented to me was a sound option. Adoption had a beautiful economy. It was like any biological process refined over millennia in which the by-product of one system becomes a building block of another. A special symbiosis. It drew on everything virtuous in human nature: love and selflessness and generosity. Things we should always want to cultivate. Molly would prepare me, and when the time came I would know what to do. It was a straightforward process, one that had steps; all I needed to do was take them.

  Molly stopped short of what I wanted her to tell me. I wanted her to tell me I had the look of a girl who could give up her baby. I wanted her to assure me, in her professional opinion, given my ambitions and history and constitution, that this was what I should do. Even though, as we agreed to meet again after Christmas, I knew Jevn was right.

  FIVE

  We left for the holidays without making a decision. I couldn’t remember how I’d ever decided anything. I’d changed majors three times, but those hadn’t felt like decisions. I’d started out in political science at a college in Virginia, but when I met with the dean she was wearing false eyelashes, and it wasn’t a decision; I just knew when she blinked that I had to go to music school. I switched majors to architecture a couple of years later because I happened to overhear a conversation between two architects, and it sounded so honest. Something about the “dimensions of the foundation.” People do not need modern reproductions of early polyphony, I realized at that moment; they need buildings.

  I didn’t really think I was making decisions then. To decide means to cut something off—you have to lose something. But I was never weighing one thing over another. There was never some haunting regret. I was just blown like a seed.

  But every step, even the littlest ones, forever changed the picture of my entire universe. During my summer overseas, I’d abandoned entire countries for the sake of a chapel in Todi, entire landscapes for a garden in Tivoli. I went to the Mediterranean coast instead of exploring Mantua. Because of a dream along the way, I bought a ticket to China. Who knows why I let those things be my guide? Who knows what I hadn’t seen as a result?

  I was deciding all the time. We’re always at a fork in the road, abandoning a universe of possibilities for the sake of just one, on the basis of inadequate information. And still we continue, as though a thousand futures were not crumbling with every step.

  * * *

  The heat of the interstate rippled the horizon as the soft ridges of East Tennessee came into view. I was accustomed to a high horizon, purple mountains in every direction; it felt as if they secured gravity in our little valley, like stones holding down the picnic-blanket edges of our town. Jevn wasn’t coming home with me for Christmas as we’d planned in the fall. We hadn’t even had to talk about it to know those plans had changed. I opened the creaky front door and dropped my bags in the hallway. My dad was in the kitchen, standing at the counter shelling peanuts out of the red canister Mom kept them in. He looked at me for a moment before he opened his arms.

  “Does someone need a hug from her daddy?”

  I’d never called him Daddy. I just wanted things to be normal. He made a high-pitched mmmmm!! sound when I squeezed him around his fat middle and patted me on my shoulder blades. He asked me if I wanted any peanuts, but he didn’t mention my pregnancy, and he said nothing about Jevn. I’m not sure what I expected. I was glad he wasn’t angry, but I wanted something more from him. I’d always wanted him to take my boyfriends aside and whisper manly threats in their ears, like the beautifully hot-tempered fathers and brothers in movies did. Like the Dukes did for Daisy. Like my brother had done only once, when I kicked Jeff Howl’s bike while he was on it, and Mikey threatened to beat him up when Jeff tried to chase me down and kill me. I’d felt so deeply validated, cowering behind my brother while he defended me—all the more because I didn’t know why I’d done it in the first place.

  But when my dad met Jevn the first time, he just asked, How do you suppose trees manage to grow taller than thirty-two feet? Atmospheric pressure keeps water from rising above that height, don’t you know. He wasn’t even trying to intimidate him, there was just no Internet then.

  Even when our neighbor pulled a knife on him, calling him a Yank, after we moved in—it only provoked him to clarify that Maryland, where he grew up, was actually south of the Mason-Dixon. Not that that mattered much to them, because Maryland still fought with the Union in the Civil War. We were still Yankees among Confederates, heathens in the Bible Belt.

  It just wasn’t in his nature to beat people up, or talk about my love life, or give advice. The only rule he ever instituted was, don’t kill spiders. And he didn’t have to say it twice. When the biggest, wolfiest spider showed up on my pillow once, he helped me find a wide-mouthed jar but sent me back upstairs solo. I flinched every time it leapt dry and furrily at the glass, but he knew I’d find a home for it in the brush across the street, because he said so few things, but he said that. Spiders are good; don’t kill them. He didn’t tell me not to kill ants, but one time in the garden he said that the earth would collapse if they went extinct. And structures were his expertise. Who knows what minuscule, squishable things hold up this whole entire universe? So I didn’t kill ants, either.

  * * *

  When Mom came down the stairs in her robe, Dad put a handful of peanuts in his pocket and went outside. She hugged me and listed the leftovers that were in the refrigerator. I was dreading our conversation, too, and so I took control of it right away.

  “I had a meeting at Catholic Social Services,” I said as she put a loaf of bread on the countertop. I explained the logistics of the adoption process to avoid the unspeakable other things my pregnancy brought up. Boys. Money. Religion. Mom was Catholic, but she wasn’t dogmatic about it, and I thought her own daughter�
��s crisis pregnancy might test her conviction. But I was glad she’d been so certain about abortion. I already knew I couldn’t do it, and now we didn’t even have to talk about it. “They do open adoption, where you actually get to know the family who adopts the child. You pick them out from a bunch of letters couples have written, and you try to find people you think would make good parents.”

  She sat down at the table next to me. I repeated everything I had learned from Molly. How it was free, how the child would go to a couple who needed it, and how there was a whole process that had been perfected. “I have a meeting with Molly when I get back to Cincinnati,” I said, to let her know I’d already begun the process. By the time I’d told her everything, I’d convinced us both that I was going to do adoption.

  “It’s going to be hard,” my mother said. “I think you’ll just have to think about the couple it’s going to help.” Then she got up and quietly returned to the countertop. Enjoy the last of the chocolate milk, I remembered her saying once as she put the square metal container away. Nestlé was somehow depriving the children in Africa of breast milk, so we weren’t going to buy anything from that company anymore. If we were hungry for chocolate milk, we should just think about how hungry those babies must be. Feelings were a luxury of the modern age, and you could minimize them by remembering what real suffering looks like.

  “Maybe we can stop by the Natural Foods Store and get you some prenatal vitamins,” she said, back to the comforting terrain of the practical. It didn’t occur to me then that my old roommate’s mother, who sent her the leopard-print underwear, would have probably offered to help raise the baby. And her father would have definitely beaten Jevn up.

  She leaned over and kissed me on the top of my head and went back upstairs to put on her makeup. She left two sandwiches on the countertop, one for me and one for my dad.

  * * *

  Outside, Dad was partway through the process of replacing the driveway by hand, breaking up the concrete and carting the debris a quarter of a mile away by wheelbarrow to a busy road, along which he piled the chunks to stabilize the slope. All our cars were parked on the street, including the station wagon neighborhood teenagers were always offering to buy. It had a special suspension system, good for crash-up derbies. But Dad was saving it for a crash-up derby himself. The back door had fallen off, so he’d tied the canoe to the roof like an external spine and dangled the door from the cantilevered canoe behind. Driving cars into the ground was one of his money-saving strategies; we had cars abandoned all over town. When one broke down, we could walk to another, cross our fingers it might start.