by Amy Seek
As I turned toward his grasp, I saw he was already holding Jevn in the same kindhearted but merciless old man clutch. He sat us both down on a leather bench in the hallway. He spoke soberly to the floor and under his breath.
“I know it was hard. I know it was, but do you know what I think about how you handled the situation, with finding a family and arranging for the adoption? And keeping track of your schoolwork and supporting each other? And making it possible for that boy to grow up in a stable home and still get to know you both?”
He tilted his face back to look down at us sternly through his glasses, his jaw clenched in a proud professorial underbite.
“A. Plus.”
* * *
What I should have been doing that September: tracing the delicate fur of my son’s cheeks and chin over his pounding heart and down his bulbous belly, to the scar of a belly button at the healing cord. I should have been exploring my child like a new country. And even more than a summer away, that new place would have changed me.
Nina hosted a pizza party for our birth class reunion after everyone’s babies were born. Those mothers emerged as if from cocoons, fresh and wise, fed on long days in the new land. They sipped some of their first glasses of wine in months, those who were not breast-feeding. Sparkling cider for those who were. They wore their motherhood as comfortably as their babies as they chatted over them in their frontpacks. Nina had made prizes, and each was awarded, one by one. Karen got the award for the biggest baby, at nine pounds, three ounces. There was an award for the longest labor, thirty-six hours, and the best effort at a natural birth went to Rachel, who had had to deliver by Cesarean. I got the prize for the mom who made a good decision but didn’t get to hold her baby every day. It was an empty picture frame.
I should have had no time to think about what being a mother or loving a child looks like. I should have been too busy doing it: nursing, and changing, and burping, and cleaning up. But my motherhood was like a flash of light in the eyes of an animal that disappears in the darkness. I looked for vestiges of it in the pressed-down grass where he lay and branches broken where he’d passed through. And I had nothing to do but wonder what loving him, that unknown hollow, should look like.
* * *
I’d moved into the attic of a house shared by design students who came and went, alternating between internships out of the city and school. Fall was approaching, and the early dark and the weight of the sloped ceiling was always pushing me toward the floor; everyone’s boxes and bikes surrounded me as though I were occupying the back recesses of someone’s memory. I had three roommates, but my interactions with them were limited: waiting outside the bathroom while one of them and her new boyfriend showered together. Fighting over cupboard space. Dirty dishes in the sink. Whose turn to buy toilet paper. My new walk to studio took me along a different side of the park, and, from the sidewalk, a clearing in the trees and a long lowland meadow framed a surreal, distant vignette: the short stone wall that wrapped around the pond where I’d eaten a baked potato in labor.
I turned to the life I’d chosen, and the whole point was now Architecture. Everything I had been through was so that I could realize Architecture. I wanted to see the place, Architecture, that had seemed so worth what it took to get there to everyone who’d given me advice. The thing that had competed with my son for space in my life and won. Maybe I needed my summer’s experience so that I could access unknown reserves of creativity: ingenious lines, inspired organizational principles, buildings that admitted light and air and attested to a depth of humanity that all the kids who were just playing around in the mud pies of their fertility could never have conceived. Maybe God would give me creative skill to fill the void, and I would possess Architecture as no mother can possess a son; I would give the world good lines, and we would all understand why it had to happen.
We inhabited a Disney World of Starchitecture; no building looked like another, because our dean had had a mission to fill the campus with buildings designed by signature architects. Built of Styrofoam and Spray-Crete, the architecture building was in rapid decay, an invaluable lesson for architecture students prone to thinking there were ambitions higher than Stay Standing for a building to aspire to. One afternoon, our Environmental Technology class went outside to look for thermal bridges, breaches in the building envelope where outside temperatures entered in, a result of deterioration or a failure of design. My group found a place where the screen skin that secured the Spray-Crete was exposed; it looked like someone had kicked the corner out of frustration.
While we waited for our professor to come see what we’d found, people in my group started talking about their internships. Jennifer was wearing an asymmetrical black T-shirt, its V off-center. She had been in London, working for a firm that designed skyscrapers and transportation centers all over the world. She sighed heavily as she spoke about redlines and construction sets, as though among the things she’d learned about architecture was that you are supposed to sigh about redlines and construction sets.
“Didn’t you stay here, in Cincinnati?” Seth turned to me. I wondered if he meant for my internship. Or was he hinting at the bigger experience I’d had, afraid to ask directly? “At the Design Center, I thought I heard?”
I’d come back to school with some amount of confidence, because what I’d done had been so big it seemed it had to be in some way adequate, but I realized then that it wasn’t. I had nothing to say about my slow days in the office, waiting for tasks, waiting for the end of day. But I couldn’t respond by describing labor and my son’s adoption, either. I wasn’t a mother, and I wasn’t a proper architecture student, either.
“I think you’ve been away from school for a long time,” Jevn had said months ago when I suggested our classmates were capable of being supportive and understanding. He didn’t expect any sympathy from them at all. He certainly hadn’t sent an e-mail to his entire class telling them about the birth, as I’d done. I had hoped to maintain control of the story and to ask for sensitivity. Jevn intended only to finish school and to move on.
He stuck close to the wall and avoided my eyes as we passed between studio and seminar, carrying drawings or models or slide reels or lumber. I searched him for scars; if he was still breathing, then I could still breathe; if he was getting work done and moving on, then I should be able to do the same. He would never say hi or stop to talk. One evening, riding my bike down the lawn in the dark, I almost hit him lying in the grass with someone I guessed was his new girlfriend.
It seemed Architecture should welcome me back, given my sacrifice, but as I stepped into my new studio, it felt like an ancient enemy. It was the same as always: a field of drafting tables, a latent tension, students arriving early and claiming their desks. The studio was trapezoidal in plan, and there was a single small window at floor level located in the most acute corner. You had to bend over to see out to the courtyard and across to the old part of the building, where windows were expansive and kindly placed at eye level. Still, someone shoved his desk as far as it would go toward the shard of light, monopolizing the single evidence of a world outside.
I found myself slipping into my headphones. Everyone wore them; they kept you from hearing the frenzied sounds of your studiomates tearing through trace paper on the trail of some inspired design. The music provided momentum; it elevated the beauty of the things you drew and helped keep you going. In studio, the biggest enemy was the blank page. We were coached not to fear it, but to strike fast: draw, draw, draw. Keep moving. Bad lines tell you something that no lines can’t. Get the billion bad lines out of your system, so you can get to the good one. You can make something beautiful out of any starting point. It’s the how, not the what.
I’d done that. I had faced a blank page and cast out a line. I wasn’t stalled on the decision anymore. All that mattered was moving forward. I was going to build something out of what I had to work with. But inside my headphones I maintained a foothold in grief; I listened to songs we’d sung
to Jonathan and songs we’d sung before him. I had to draw and keep drawing. I couldn’t think about the possibility that we had given him up so Jevn alone could arrive at Architecture.
* * *
In the first week of the quarter, before studio was in full swing, you could leave school early in the evening. I took advantage of that to go home at sunset one night to call Paula. We talked about when I might come down to visit, and she let me listen to Jonathan’s infant grunts. I hung up the phone unable to cry. It felt like my lungs were caving in, and my body couldn’t coordinate the process: shake my shoulders, release the tears, think of my son, all simultaneously. I just sat, stunned.
I loved my son so much I let him go, I thought. A lot of the songs I listened to in studio suggested that, that real love doesn’t depend on being together; it doesn’t demand to be realized in any particular form. Letting go so that the one you love can have everything he needs was the most generous and wholehearted and noble kind of love. What better thing to offer than that best kind of love? But I couldn’t figure out what my love should look like, or what it should do. I didn’t know my son in the way that makes missing cinematic and colorful. I had no memories to cherish, no stories to relive in his absence. He had no space in my life I could leave exactly the way he left it. My love hung emptily suspended, without a trajectory.
My structures professor’s wife called to invite me over for dinner, and I was grateful to get out of my attic room. I’d tagged along with Jevn on other occasions when they invited him over, like the time we’d all gone sledding, and then I borrowed her dry socks and danced in the kitchen with their children. They wanted to hear the whole story. They asked me careful questions with their brows furrowed, not believing I was okay, afraid I was just downplaying things. But by the end, they were relieved.
“We spoke to Jevn a few weeks ago,” she said, “and we were a little worried—”
I reassured them that everything had worked out. I could give no life to their fears. I told them I’d just spoken to Paula, just heard my son’s voice on the phone. I’d already made plans to visit. They were constantly sending e-mails and photographs, not just to me and Jevn, but to our extended families. All those good things were true.
“Well, this is such a relief to hear. You look so good. We’d been worried about you. We were worried about Jevn, too, but it’s just different for the mother.” She pressed her lips together in a flat smile, and the kids began taking dishes off the table. “I’m so glad it’s all worked out.” She held my eyes for a moment. “We’d been talking about renovating the attic, actually. We were thinking it might work for you—we weren’t sure how definite the adoption was, or what other options you had, so we just didn’t know, but we thought you might need a place where you could have the baby and finish school. I thought I might be able to help a little, but—” She smiled and shrugged, and I must have smiled back. My body had become an infinite receptacle for grief. “I’m glad to know you wouldn’t have needed it. We might have just confused things if we’d mentioned it. And it wouldn’t have solved everything, of course, it was just a gesture, but we just wanted you to know we were here to support you however we could.”
I walked home around the outside of the park. I walked fast. I could not think about what she’d said. I didn’t want to have such a clear picture of how it might have worked. I didn’t want to think about how I would have kissed him goodbye in the morning and handed him to her, leapt down those five porch steps and walked up the hill to class. How I’d have returned for lunch and to breast-feed. How their kids might have sung to him so I could take a shower, and I’d have done my studio work at the drafting table in their attic, trying hard to tear my eyes away from him. How I’d have told all my professors, and, recognizing the kind of motherhood they could easily make space for, they would have understood why I couldn’t work as late into the night as the other students. I’d have had a million school loans and gotten all Cs, and it wouldn’t have mattered. No other possibility would have even occurred to me.
I would never think about it. I only noticed the air was getting cooler, that summer was really over.
* * *
That night in my attic I collected songs for a mix tape to send to my son. I added “Wild Montana Skies,” the John Denver song we’d sung driving to the sand dunes in Colorado before I was pregnant. When we could see them on the horizon, just below the peaks of the Rockies, I wanted to jump out of the car and run for them.
“Guess how long that would take,” Jevn said.
“It feels like twenty minutes? I don’t know, it doesn’t matter!”
Mountains had an energy all their own; I felt propelled by them. When we finally got there, a couple of hours later, an enormous, shallow body of water was moving across the plain in front of the dunes. It was no more than an inch deep but it spread, searching for a container, and we walked across it like giants across an ocean. Jevn warned me to stay hydrated as we started up the face of the first dune. From a distance they looked like a single range of small mountains running in a row right in front of the Rockies, but it would take half a day to get to the top, and then you’d see that they extended far into the distance—infinite, disorienting piles of moving sand and shadows—to the base of the Rockies. You could easily lose your bearings once you lost sight of the parking lot.
Driving back, he read to me from Einstein’s Dreams. He read like someone unaccustomed to his own voice, gentle on account of it. Laughing, he told me about how he used to soak his saxophone reeds in Kool-Aid so he could suck on them during band practice. That night, sunburned and exhausted, we stayed in a Wild West, one-story, cheap hotel, the sole thing standing in the desert. I remember thin, dirty walls and the sun setting long and late, unhindered by any obstruction, pouring through the windows till infinity. We were very young but our spirits were aligned. Driving home the next day, we sang along to John Denver. It was a prayer to the landscape to raise an orphan child, to give him a drive and a passion to carry him in the absence of a family. Now it had real meaning to me. I couldn’t know for sure that Paula and Erik would provide my son with everything I wanted for him, but the beauty of the world was a teacher I could trust. The sky and the wind and the sunset would be his most important guides, even if I’d kept him. I comforted myself that giving him up and keeping him were exactly the same.
I added “Kan Guo Lai,” a song about unrequited teenage love that was popular in China when I was there with my sister. We had wandered the campus of her university and recorded ten or fifteen versions, sung by college students reluctant to admit they knew the words.
I added the song Sting was singing when my water broke and a version of “You Are My Sunshine,” the song I thought my mother would sing while washing the dishes, by Gene Autry.
But I couldn’t decide on a Patsy Cline song. My favorite had beautiful, bird’s-eye images of travel, the pyramids on the Nile, sunrise over the tropics, the market in Algiers. And it evoked the bittersweet conundrum: that to go anywhere, you have to say goodbye to somewhere else. I’d fallen in love with so many landscapes; I longed for everyplace I wasn’t. I wanted my son to travel and fall in love, and have his heart broken by beautiful places, too.
But for all that, the song said the wrong thing. Just remember when you’re home again, you belong to me. I didn’t want to even hint at that less noble kind of love. Love that longs, and clings tight, and possesses. But without the refrain, the poetry of travel was just an endless stream of images. What made it a love song was that the love found its way back. That’s what love does. Even Moses, released to the river, returned to his mother’s embrace. Without the return, love was aimless, loosed like a balloon till it floats away and disappears. Was there any difference at all between love like that and forgetting altogether? No, a mother might let go of her child, but that couldn’t be the end of the story. There was always that moment—when she dries her hands and peeks around the wall, and, seeing her, he smiles.
Withou
t it, love was aimless. Love released like a balloon till it floats away and disappears. There seemed to be little difference between love like that and forgetting altogether.
I’d use “Walkin’ After Midnight” instead.
NINETEEN
I arrived in Durham Saturday afternoon. I knew the house I was looking for, because Paula had sent me photographs right after they purchased it. There was a tiny stoop flanked by hydrangeas someone else had planted years ago. Tall pines made a light forest ceiling, and beneath it was an uneven lawn, littered with pine needles and occasional rhododendrons growing wild, with hostas and azaleas fading into the bare earth. A push toy sat in the driveway, where it had been deserted. There were no curbs because it wasn’t a proper neighborhood, just a little lane through the woods off of a busy road that connected Raleigh and Durham. It looked like a home.
“Welcome!” Paula sang as she let the screen door slam and stepped off the stoop to greet me. She hugged me with one arm; Sarah smiled at me from within the other.
“Jonathan’s asleep, come in! This is our house!” She laughed as she led me inside. She was so at ease that the question didn’t occur to me, how do we do this thing, open adoption.
“Hello!” Erik emerged from the kitchen and hugged me. “How were the directions? Are you getting the tour?” His manner was more reserved than Paula’s.
I’d been to several homes of prospective families, but because of their distance in Indiana, and then the move to North Carolina, we’d never seen Paula and Erik’s home. It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment—if things smelled wrong, it was too late. The living room had hardwood floors and a big window looking out to the front yard. There was a couch with a slipcover in front of the window and a couple of unmatched recliners. It felt recently moved into, not fully occupied yet. There were stacks of books that didn’t have places. Move-in clutter. Down the hallway were a master bedroom and a small bedroom for Sarah and Jonathan to share. We walked through the kitchen, where Erik was refilling his coffee, to the very large playroom that had been added on to the back.
