God and Jetfire

by Amy Seek

  * * *

  That weekend after my birthday, I went to his apartment to get some of the things I’d stored there when I was overseas. The narrow door of the closet where I kept them opened to a space ten feet deep. He often offered it to me as a sublet; we joked that I could put a bed in there and a little lamp. Like a pocket he could keep me in.

  I noticed he had taken down our pictures from the windowsill. Pictures he’d framed between two sheets of glass with small metal clips. The two of us at a cabin in the mountains by the Arkansas River, me wearing one of his gigantic wool sweaters, smiling for the timer on his camera before we took a long walk. When I closed the door, I told myself there wouldn’t be time, for a very, very long time, to think about this relationship again.

  * * *

  Jevn joined me for my next appointment with Molly, but I sat mostly silent so she could ask him all the background questions she had already asked me. I looked to the floor to give them privacy.

  I was afraid he wouldn’t trust Molly or speak openly with her, and that later he would tell me I couldn’t possibly give up a baby. And, knowing he had given it a chance, I might believe him and then we wouldn’t have any options left. I looked up occasionally at Molly, willing her to be broad-minded, to capture Jevn’s attention, to gain his trust.

  She sensed his reserve. She matched his rhythms and tenor. And soon she began talking about things that concerned both of us, so I straightened in my seat.

  “Given what you both know about open adoption, can you tell me a little bit about what you think could be the advantages? Do you think you would like to have a relationship of some kind with your child?”

  I waited to hear Jevn’s response.

  “I think this child will be a very sensitive and special person,” he said. “Yes, I very much want to be around it, and get to know it, and have it know my family.”

  I was surprised to hear him talk about it like that, like he was already thinking of it as a real person, someone to get to know. If it was real to anyone, it should have been me. I was the one with regular appointments in the maternity ward, where patients were all called Mama, where every woman was defined by the promise of a child within her. I was the one nodding in disbelief as they recorded its heart rate, estimated a due date, and told me I already wasn’t consuming enough calories. I was the one who agreed to start eating an egg every day to build brain cells in a thing I still couldn’t think of as an independent “it” I’d like my family to know.

  “Do you have any feelings about parenting the child? Obviously, you’d get to know it best if you remained its father.”

  “I would love to be its father—I think we’d both be good parents. And I’m not sure Amy can give up a child. This child.” Jevn spoke very slowly. “But we’ve talked about it. Neither of us is ready for parenting. A child needs two parents, and we’ve agreed we can’t be together and be those two parents. Adoption seems the most loving option in our situation.”

  Jevn often held his thumb and index finger a tiny distance apart when he spoke so that you would understand how deliberate he was being about his words. The half an inch he held horizontally in space seemed to register the degree of precision that distinguished his idea from other ideas, even those just a tiny distance away. He was admitting a margin of error, a dubious relationship between word and idea, but by admitting it, he was also telling you he was more careful than most people, and that the slowness of his speech was not for him, it was for you.

  “And Amy might still be my friend,” he added.

  Molly smiled at me, at this. But I didn’t take any comfort in the thought of some distant time when we’d be able to be friends.

  “Ideally, you will be able to know the child in some way as it grows up,” Molly said. “That’s what we hope for. But there are no guarantees, and I want you to be very clear about this.” She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward, her hands in prayer between her knees. “There is nothing legally binding about ongoing openness in an open adoption. There’s not a state in the country that can enforce openness. You will get to choose a family—in that way your adoption will certainly be ‘open’—but once you sign a Permanent Surrender, you will have no legal protections to ensure you can see your child. If the parents decide they don’t want you to have contact with the child, for any reason, that will be perfectly within their rights.”

  She softened as she continued. “In light of that, are you at all worried about how you’ll feel after placing your child? Particularly given how strong your feelings seem to be for each other and for this child?”

  “Yes, of course,” Jevn said, “it will be difficult knowing that it’s in the world somewhere without me. I think, no matter what, I’ll always be wondering about it. Especially if it ends up not being an open adoption. But I just want the best for it. I really want to find a good family.”

  “Well, these are important things to consider. If you feel you wouldn’t be able to give the baby up without openness, we have to really think about whether adoption is the right plan for you, or whether it might be best to think about parenting.” Molly turned to me. “What about you, Amy? We’ve talked about a lot of this before, but what are your feelings at this point?”

  My feelings were located almost entirely behind my belly button, a satisfying knot that reached along the back side of my heart and all the way up to the hollow between my collarbones. This would transform unpredictably into a dramatic hunger and then a violent, nauseating heartburn. An excruciating compulsion to eat and a fierce impulse to vomit, with only a tiny window in between during which I could cast food at the thing everyone said was inside me. I did not have any well-reasoned things to say.

  “I definitely feel concern. And excitement.” And disbelief, feral hunger, and heartburn.

  “Last time we met I asked you to think about the advantages of parenting; do you want to talk about that?”

  “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about it,” I said. “I just know that if I kept it, even if I didn’t have money, and I didn’t finish school, and I struggled forever, I’d find a way to make sure things worked out. I wouldn’t have to worry about whether I’d chosen the right parents—and there would never be a day when it realized it was abandoned.”

  Molly turned her head slightly, so that one side of her face was advancing toward me faster than the other.

  “I want to make sure you understand that adoption is not abandonment, Amy. It’s a very important distinction. You’re considering a plan for adoption so your child can have the best possible situation to grow up in.” Her head nodded with each important word. “You’re making a parenting decision when you place your child for adoption. That’s completely different from abandonment.”

  I nodded, I know, I know, I know. I understood there was language I was supposed to use—plan for adoption, placing my child—but I wanted to use harder, more honest-sounding language. Language that wouldn’t let me trick myself into thinking I was doing something more noble than I was. Abandoning my baby to llama kissers.

  “The two of you are intelligent and resourceful, and you work well together, am I right in seeing that? Do you agree?”

  I waited, but Jevn was silent. We had started a project together, collecting aluminum cans from the design studios. We’d bought special containers and drilled can-sized holes in the lids and spray-painted recycling symbols on them. We would borrow a truck every few weeks and take the cans to be recycled. We made a pretty good team doing that, I thought. But maybe Jevn felt differently.

  “You seem to communicate well, which is one of the most important measures of a relationship. And you’ve been working together functionally up to this point. I know this could be a very sensitive question, but is there any way you can imagine parenting the child together?”

  “Our relationship is complex enough not to have to add another layer of complexity,” Jevn said definitively. Just a couple of weeks ago he could imagine it, I thought. But then I didn’t want her to return
us to that moment we were now pretending never happened.

  “And there are so many families waiting to adopt,” I added. It was easier to think of some other fresh, new couple, not us. Infinitely complicated us. I had to hope there was, in fact, a generic mass of good and worthy waiting families somewhere. I just hadn’t found them yet.

  * * *

  Molly sent us home with our workbooks and asked us to spend time thinking about keeping our child. The workbook asked questions to test our preparedness for having a family. Are you really ready to have a child? Do you know the basic needs of a child? Can your apartment accommodate a child? Do you have transportation? Do you have a babysitter? How often would you need one? Will your family help? Do you have the money to support a child (including rent, taxes, insurance, utilities, water, garbage collection, telephone, furniture, house repairs, cleaning supplies, groceries, eating out, gas, oil, automobile repairs, doctor, dentist, drugs, clothes, laundry, dry cleaning, tuition, books, special instructional fees, union dues, subscriptions, haircuts, entertainment, alimony, child’s allowance, miscellaneous debts, cigarettes, hobbies, babysitters, Christmas, special occasions, church, and charity)? What dreams do you have for your life and could a child fit into them? Are there any compromises that might allow you to have all the things you want?

  Having a child, according to the workbook, was a matter of figuring out a certain set of logistics, and you would need to be very organized and begin the process a long time in advance of getting pregnant. But even if you had everything in place, down to the money set aside for cigarettes, it still seemed to me you did not necessarily have a reason to have a child. What was a good reason to have a child? What justification could there be for keeping one? Surely every couple would fail on some test of preparedness—but should we all give up our babies, if we couldn’t tick every box? And if some couple really was ready, should that alone entitle them to take my child? Nature certainly wasn’t paying attention to anyone’s readiness.

  And it seemed to me that giving up a child would likely bring about issues I wasn’t any more prepared to deal with than I was the logistics of parenthood. Why didn’t my workbook ask: Was I really ready to lose a child?

  I didn’t fill out the answers. The answers were obvious. No, I wasn’t ready. Yes, every single one of my dreams precluded having a child at twenty-three. The questions did their job. They forced me to look closely at a future I was in important ways not equipped for and scared me back. I went online at the computer lab and began requesting “Dear Birth Mother” letters from every agency I could find. As the profiles streamed in, in thick packages that arrived on my stoop, Jevn and I spent hours reviewing them, and I began to send envelopes full of letters to my sister in China to scan for potential candidates.

  SEVEN

  The architecture building was buried in a hillside that sloped steeply from my favorite exit down to the street, and a signature landscape architect had put some signature ripples in the lawn on its way down. Only two floors peeped out from the top of the hill, but four stories were buried underground and opened like a geode into the interior of campus. The building had reputedly been constructed without a single 90-degree angle between any two planes; walls met floors and each other at various angles, some so closely approximating 90 degrees they didn’t seem avant-garde at all, and some so acute they became dusty no-man’s-lands into which no furniture could be squeezed. Room numbers were out of sequence and nested, such that 6206 was hidden inside a hallway accessed by 6104. The building was clad in a synthetic material painted pink and baby blue; the window mullions were Frank Lloyd Wright red.

  I drove past it many times when I was in the conservatory. I thought it was a derelict elementary school, swallowed over time by an insatiable university campus and slated for demolition. I would soon learn about deconstructivism and that the building had just had its forty-million-dollar ribbon cutting.

  * * *

  “Hey,” I said, greeting Jevn in the computer lab.

  “Hey,” he exhaled, leaning back in his chair, not looking up from the screen. I sat down at the computer beside him.

  I didn’t ask him about school, and he didn’t ask about my internship, which had just started that week. It was the kind of architecture I’d hoped to do when I signed up for architecture school. Free design work for people who needed it. But most of the projects were on hold awaiting funding, and I spent a lot of time gazing out the storefront windows. The only thing that really broke up the day was eating my afternoon egg, which I shut myself in the tiny bathroom at the back of the office to do. I became a vegan when I was twelve, so I hadn’t eaten an egg in ten years. I’d crack the shell on the sink and wrap the pieces in toilet paper. Then I’d swallow it like a pill. I’d face myself in the mirror, amid drawings stored along the side of the sink and behind the toilet, waiting for the fan to suck up the smell. I didn’t mind the slow days; I could conserve energy for what felt like my real job, which began late in the afternoon when I pedaled back up Vine Street toward home.

  * * *

  We sat side by side in the back rows of the lab so other students couldn’t see what we were working on. The Web was new—a haphazard database of incomplete information you stumbled upon using search terms: open adoption; adoption agencies in Ohio. We printed agency web pages and profiles we liked to read more closely later.

  “I was thinking it would be nice if they came from the mountains,” Jevn said quietly, and because we always disagreed about whose mountains were better, I knew he meant, specifically, the sharp young Rockies, not the refined old Appalachians. We agreed our child shouldn’t grow up in Ohio.

  “Yeah, and be outside a lot,” I responded. Both of us loved to hike and ride bikes. I ran as often as I could, and Jevn liked to ski and cycle so much, he had come to school in Ohio to keep from being distracted by those things. “It could also be really good for them to have a child already, so we could be sure it would have a sibling,” I said. That was one very important thing I wouldn’t be able to provide, were I to become a single parent.

  “Yeah,” he agreed, “and if the sibling is adopted, we’d get to see what kind of relationship they have with the other birth parents.”

  It felt like progress to visualize them.

  We both read quietly through profiles to ourselves. Most couples said that they were Christian. I used to think I was a Christian, too, but our neighbors back in Tennessee were always correcting me. They said my whole family was going to hell. My mother because on top of being Catholic, she let a whole range of social justice issues in this world distract her from her future in the next. My dad because he wasn’t religious at all. Like the devil, he enjoyed nothing so much as fire, and he would chop our neighbors’ dead trees down for them, just so he could have the kindling. And the rest of us, because we were somewhere in between.

  But those neighbors never stopped trying to save me. I’d play Barbies with the girl down the street, and one night her mother knocked on her bedroom door and asked: Do I want to be saved and go to heaven, or not, and suffer eternal punishment in hell? They had illustrated hell for me on many occasions: fire and extreme heat, no family, no friends, no Barbies, no pets. Everything you don’t like—for ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever. I remember the dim lights and the quiet as they waited for my answer. They’d described heaven, too. Praising God forever. Crowns and gold and gates and glory and seraphim and cherubim. I didn’t want heaven or hell; I wanted to be propped in front of my friend’s four big-screen televisions in her living room, each one encased in faux wood and standing on its own four faux-wood feet, cable blaring from the one that worked, with boxes of Coke and Sprite stacked as tall as her father against the wall. Anywhere but cornered on the bed listening to my friend’s mother talk about the devil, whom I knew to live at the bottom of the hill, before the woods, where the ground was soft and moss instead of grass grew by a tiny creek—more a fissure in the ground that appeared and disappeared—and where it wa
s dark no matter what the time of day. Where we would eventually drink whiskey and try cigarettes. I may not have known much about God, but I knew well to avoid the devil. I lost my hustle whenever the ball rolled down the hill in that direction. I made things as easy as possible and prayed the prayer. But getting saved didn’t mean much more than I was trusted to play with my friend, and then only until I turned twelve and became a vegan, at which point I was abandoned to the devil for good.

  I’d spent a lot of time in college trying to untangle it all. I’d even broken up with Jevn over it, saying I needed to figure out God and to do that I needed to be free of Jevn’s influence. I thought it could be a touchy subject now, but it was important to me; I wanted my child to have space on reserve for such important questions.

  “I want them to be Christian,” I told him.

  “Not Bible thumpers,” he qualified, by way of agreement.

  Most of the things we wanted we didn’t really have to talk about. They were complicated and nuanced things, but it was basically just us, a little more prepared and about ten years older. We weren’t talking anymore about whether I could do adoption; we were just working hard to find a family we could do it with. Until we found them, the only decision we were making was that the baby was going to be born. There was still time to think about the rest.

  “They should recycle,” I said.

  “Of course.”

  * * *

  By early February, I had no piles and maybe piles, Jevn-needs-to-look-at and Jevn-likes piles. But they mixed together in my memory and got shuffled around as I stepped over them in my apartment. The letters had much the same structure; in the About Him and About Her sections, couples described themselves in long lists of benign adjectives: romantic, wacky, tender, fun, forgiving, encouraging, likes to laugh, a friend to everyone, a heart of pure gold. They wrote of gratifying careers and told stories of how they met and became best friends. They shared dreams of apple-picking, cooking s’mores over the fire, and driving to the farm for balled and burlapped Christmas trees to be planted in the yard come January. The About Our Home section read like a real estate listing: three bedrooms, two and a half baths, on three acres and a cul-de-sac with a fully fenced-in backyard just waiting for a swing set!