God and Jetfire

by Amy Seek

  I chatted with Paula and Erik in the lobby of the auditorium while they waited for Jevn to emerge after the ceremony. Friends came over and said hello and met Jonathan and saw that all of it was really true. Paula and Erik stood, cheerfully disoriented by the throngs of people who passed, being introduced, trying to remember who was who, and in between gathering and releasing their children. Jonathan was now toddling.

  I got a night at the pizza place with Nina, my parents, and Paula and Erik, and Jonathan and Sarah, and breakfast Sunday morning. The rest of the time they spent with Jevn, and new lines were drawn. Jevn and I had become independent satellites of our son, with our own independent risings and settings. And then, after graduation, he packed everything up into his car—his folding bed, his Aalto vases, his long row of books—and was gone.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Things normalize. Things as enormous and unthinkable as the Grand Canyon become background scenery. I am a mother, the worst kind of mother. I am bound forever to Jevn, but I may never see Jevn again. I have a one-and-a-half-year-old son.

  * * *

  When I was seventeen, I drove across Arizona with my boyfriend. “Look to your left, after the trees,” he said, to prepare me. The trees fell away and the earth opened like a mouth. It opened and kept opening. I sank into my bucket seat, grasping at its base. We were driving a rental with the top down. I felt the mouth sucking me into it.

  We parked, and I processed it in fragments, looking through my fingers. There was no middle distance. Near fell instantaneously into far. The canyon sides opposite us were crisp, brickish, and steamy. The distant rim seemed at once touchable and impossibly remote.

  I wanted to kick it. Or kick something into it. I wanted to watch a branch or a rock catapult down the sides, banging and rolling, to show me how here became there. My boyfriend said there were hiking trails below and you couldn’t do that or you might hurt someone. And it was too big, anyway. There was really nothing you could kick into it to get a sense of its scale.

  Then I wanted to kick it to express my frustration.

  We got out of the car and approached the edge. Trees hovered below in island landscapes, on the ledges and rock formations along the sides of the canyon. We walked down some stairs but then the magnitude of the canyon threw off my sense of up and down, and I fell to my knees and then clung to the ground like I was hanging off a cliff. My boyfriend picked me up and carried me back to the car, where we cut open the watermelon we’d had rolling around in the trunk since Tucson and sat at a safe distance, watching birds soar over the cavity. I put on my seat belt.

  I decided then that there was definitely God. At least there definitely could be God. My inability to believe it was proof of nothing. I couldn’t believe the Grand Canyon, either. I was sitting beside a thing whose cool breath could give me goose bumps in the desert heat, but if I was going to keep my balance, or swallow my watermelon without choking, I had to tell myself it was lavender paint spilled across sand.

  Sometimes everything seemed so big it exhausted me to process it. Other times, everything was so big I pretended it wasn’t true. It could still knock the breath out of me when I thought about it, and yet it all became background, the familiar setting for the rest of my life.

  * * *

  Paula wrote in January to say that Jonathan had started talking. He says “cheese,” “please,” “Mama,” “Da-da,” a very plaintive “Uh-oh,” and can tell you the sounds of the dog, cow, horse, truck, lion, bird, owl, and train. And he can not only point to his eyes, ears, hair, and fingers, but also to his chin and knees. When you come to visit, I’m sure he’ll know more.

  I’d imagined once he learned to talk, right away he’d tell us everything: most of all, how he felt about his adoption. But Paula was always sending stories and photographs that reminded me he was still just a baby.

  She also wrote to extend a generous offer. An invitation to spend a month in North Carolina that summer. She had arranged an opportunity for me to teach an art class as part of a program for incoming students in her department. She said I could live in the dorms or they could set up the playroom for me, and then I’d have a lot of leisurely time to spend with Jonathan, who she said was at a really charming age. It was a generous invitation, but I wasn’t sure how to respond. The emotional toll of a weekend with my son wrecked me for days. I would return mute and numb, with nothing to say to anyone, and I’d be derailed from my most important project: creating a life that made giving up my son make sense. That project was becoming more urgent as I neared the end of school without having found anything in architecture that seemed worth it. I couldn’t possibly afford a month away.

  I didn’t tell Paula how difficult her offer was for me. We used to talk about these kinds of complexities, but now adoption was their life; they’d built a real family on these foundations, and talking about the difficulties would only pose the question of an alternative. Talking about it would unbuild their home by unearthing the tangled structure that supported it. Instead, I said yes, I’d figure out my internship schedule for the summer, and I’d find a way to manage a month in North Carolina. There was just that one thing more important than my architecture project, and the nearest thing to undoing my first rejection was to never say no to him again. But I told Paula I thought I would stay in the dorms; I didn’t want to impose on them for such a long time, and I couldn’t survive a whole month without some kind of sanctuary, myself.

  * * *

  School had a firm grip on me as I approached my final year. My dad’s brother died that year and so did my mother’s mother, but I couldn’t afford the time to visit them in their last moments or to attend their funerals. Cousins got married and had babies; I heard about it all from a distance. It was never a conscious thought, but I found I couldn’t prioritize my family, even in those important moments, over architecture school, because I had prioritized architecture school over my son. It was a hierarchy that had to stand, if I was going to keep moving forward.

  My final year would begin that summer with my final internship. I’d gotten used to the ten-week rhythm of internships; I was always getting ready to leave. It seemed like the thing we learned more than anything: how to pack our lives into our cars and drive away. To never have too many books or too many bonds to abandon a place. To be skillful in finding temporary housing, very cheap, no leases, preferably furnished, hopefully in a not-too-dangerous part of town. While other students were building college friendships to last a lifetime, we practiced transience and adaptability. We were never in one place long enough to make it home.

  The rhythm suited me. I would learn the basic coordinates of any city: the good espresso, the train station and the drafting supply shop, a three-mile running loop, and then I’d close my eyes and open them in the middle of a fast-moving world of an entirely different nature. The miniature lives I built on internship were specially made to last ten weeks. By the ninth, they would begin to fall apart, in an arc I learned to choreograph. At the end of ten weeks, I’d break the news I was leaving, and when my new friends told me how much they would miss me, I would think, you have no idea what I can live without. I turned more resolutely to my next move; I wouldn’t anchor anywhere. As long as I kept moving, I would never find myself in the living room at Christmas counting who was and wasn’t there. Graham understood; he’d buy a Greyhound ticket to Asheville or Augusta and disappear, himself, for weeks.

  * * *

  I needed my final internship to remind me what was so great about architecture. An internship at another firm looking for red, or waiting for funding, or drafting vacation houses for New Yorkers, or calibrating parking spaces to building occupancies, would only prove I’d given up my son for nothing. I didn’t want to practice architecture, I wanted to look at it, hard.

  I sent another e-mail into the ether. I made a desperate last grasp at architecture to see if there was anything there at all. I targeted archaeology departments at Italian universities. I wrote asking whether there was any
one, anywhere, who might need an assistant of some kind. Surely a summer spent unearthing architecture would be as legitimate an examination of our subject matter as any internship in an office. I only got one response: Meet me at the duomo in Orvieto at noon on June 8. Claudio.

  I flew to Rome and took a train to Orvieto. The city was built on the top of a giant volcanic rock that propped vertically out of a broad valley bowl. There were steep cliffs from the edges of the city to the expansive plains below, and clouds raced across the valley, like a giant mirror, in shadows. I waited on the steps of the duomo, high above the surrounding plains. Several people warned me the invitation was a scam. But it was an old habit. I was open to anything. It was what Jevn most mistrusted about me.

  Noon arrived, and a little old lady approached.

  “Amy?” She smiled and gestured for me to follow her.

  We drove down the steep streets and hairpin turns of Orvieto, across the valley and back up into a wooded hillside to her cabin. The pillow I rested on at Claudio’s mother’s house that afternoon was at the same elevation as the city of Orvieto. I looked out the window straight across the valley to the steps of the duomo. On its side and at this distance, Orvieto looked like a toy city. Claudio arrived in the evening and we drove to the farm an hour away where his team of archaeologists was staying.

  We woke early, boiled espresso, and packed our lunches. Just as the sun was rising, we would gather on the terrace of the farmhouse, overlooking the apricot and olive groves, and caravan fifteen minutes into the hillside, where an Etruscan settlement lay deep under the pasture. We dug all day, leaving our communal plastic bottle of espresso in the sun, where it stayed warm, and took swigs as needed. Experienced diggers wore long linen sleeves, hats and scarves, but I shed clothes with the heat, hunched atop an unearthed surface of piedra madre. Since I wasn’t trained to care about tiny coins and shards of pottery, Claudio put me in charge of exposing the large stone wall that ran along one edge of my trench. In the evening we would cover our trenches with tarps, remove our tools, and pile into the vans to the little village, where I’d order a cappuccino at the café while Claudio deposited the day’s finds in the laboratory there. When we arrived back at the farm, I’d put on my running shoes and take off into the winding hills above the house until dinner, where each place was set with two wineglasses, one for red, one for white, and both would be refilled like water throughout the meal. This, I told myself, was perfect thesis preparation. I was studying beauty.

  Beauty was rarely mentioned in school; it was an unspoken by-product of good design, not its driver. But the only class I took together with Jevn was a sort of show-and-tell in which we’d describe objects we found beautiful. The drinking glass I’d found on the street: blue, transparent, bulbous. Those qualities were certain, but why did beauty adhere to them? Jevn brought in a spoon and showed us how pleasant it was to hold, counterweighted at the handle to balance perfectly on your index finger. Silver. Shiny. But beauty wouldn’t be so easily captured. Even as it sat solidly within those objects, it reached far beyond them.

  Beauty was why I’d left the conservatory—there were many things the world needed more urgently than music—but beauty was the only thing that made architecture worth pursuing. Long rows of repeated forms to contain infinity; solid stone and shadows to record entire arcs of days and years. Buildings could teach us to hold what we couldn’t touch. Reaching for beauty, I would grasp and keep every good thing. I wouldn’t have lost my son at all.

  Claudio could smell rain from two days away, and he could ward it off by furrowing his brow, silently, at the horizon. He would stand sternly above me, arms folded across his chest, to inspect my work. “That one,” he would say, to indicate which stone I should remove next. Only he had the authority to determine whether it was part of a wall or meaningless rubble. One day, I asked Claudio if he thought the wall was beginning to curve. If the wall curved, I would remove a certain set of stones. Or I’d remove others and the wall would disappear straight into the untouched ground beyond the trench. I was getting close to a point of decision.

  “You want it to curve?” he asked.

  I shrugged. If it curved, it could mean it was a temple or a monument of some kind. Or a cistern. It would seem fitting, given my many nightmares about tanks and pipes and churning water, that I’d find myself unearthing ancient plumbing. But it didn’t seem professional to want something. Claudio looked hard at the wall and exhaled. He pointed firmly at one stone, and another, and told me to remove them. Making way for my indefensible desire. The wall would curve.

  “Art,” he said, “not science,” and walked away.

  That July evening I went running as usual in the hills after work. I’d just received an e-mail from Jevn, who had entered a graduate program on the East Coast. He’d just been to visit Jonathan and said he was happy to see that Jonathan and Sarah and Paula and Erik were a truly functioning family, a rare thing.

  I’m so glad about Jon’s insatiable wish to be outside, he said. I love his laugh.

  I smiled, thinking about Jonathan exploring the world as I was. I felt connected to him as I ran, burned by the same sun as I reached ahead to grasp the beauty of the olive groves.

  Soon, the sky turned black and began pouring with hailstones as big as the apricots in the trees they pummeled. Big enough to knock you out. I hid under the branches of a giant oak and then ran into a chapel nearby. Hail beat the roof like someone’s fist, determined to bring it down. But soon the sun was glinting across fields of silver leaves that shuddered in disbelief. I ran back to the house, avoiding hailstones rolled in dust.

  Everyone greeted me excitedly when I got back to the terrace, handing me a glass of wine and a towel to dry off. “Are you okay?” they asked. Except that they sometimes made fun of me for putting on my running shoes after an exhausting day in the field, I didn’t realize they noticed my absence at sunset.

  “Did you come back with Claudio?” they asked. “He went out looking for you!” We turned to the road, and his truck was still gone. Just then, it skidded into the driveway. Claudio closed the door and walked across the gravel to the terrace, ignoring us. He turned a chair backward and sat down, lighting a cigar and gazing across the tops of the trees into the distance, as though he’d been sitting there for hours. He’d been worried about me, they all said so, but he didn’t so much as glance my way. And I didn’t thank him for trying to rescue me from the storm, but it fixed him forever in my affection.

  * * *

  Days later, I woke when a screen door slammed somewhere above my head. I opened my eyes and tried to make sense of where I was and who had slammed the door. North and south were spinning as I realized I was no longer in the villa in Italy. But I could be anywhere. Cincinnati, Boston, Copenhagen. No, I was in North Carolina. Not a sunburned archaeologist but a mother. And still not a mother, exactly.

  It was my son who slammed the door. I was staying with Paula and Erik for a few days before moving into the dorms to start the teaching job they’d arranged. Paula told me Jonathan sometimes got up, put his coat on, and went outside to play before anyone else woke up. His insatiable wish to be outside.

  Still lying in bed, I returned to Italy. I’d been reluctant to leave. I felt I’d started something there. A life I could love, even without Jevn, without my son. Or—with all of it, with their absences and all the complications. But time alone with Jonathan was precious, so I rolled out of bed and walked to the window. In the gray, wet warmth of early morning, he was pushing a wagon up the little lane, and then back down again.

  I joined him, walked beside him, asked him how he was doing and whether he’d enjoyed his summer as much as I had. He was silent. Busy. He trudged slowly against the friction of the rough pavement, and it occurred to me he might prefer to be pushed. I felt full and happy, and I wouldn’t let his seriousness intimidate me. I scooped him up and put him in the wagon. I was going to run behind him. Like a mother bird, I’d returned to him with good things I’d f
ound far away; I wanted him to feel the wind and the dry, bumpy road beneath him, like the roads I’d run in San Venanzo. He was supposed to laugh! We were having fun! But as soon as he found himself sitting, he clasped the sides of the wagon and began to pull himself out. I stopped pushing. Gravely, he stepped over the side and returned to the back of the wagon, glancing up at me with suspicion.

  I crumbled, ashamed of my sunburned skin, the Etruscan dust beneath my nails that had reawakened and revived me. While I basked in the sunset in Italy, he was here, amid the broken beginnings I’d left him. And now I was back, thinking everything should be okay, standing on the porch with banana bread. He looked at me narrowly, just like Jevn.

  For the rest of the month, I visited my son after class and on weekends. Most of the time he was happy. He pronounced the words he knew like percussion. Big! he would say, emphatically, always in reference to a feat he’d just done or was about to do. Or as though introducing himself by a name that more fully described him. He would puff out his chest as he said it. BIG! And jump off the side of the couch. He would say it to get the attention of men he didn’t know. Or standing tall above their Yorkshire terrier, the only thing smaller than he was.

  But then sadness came suddenly, fully, and unpredictably. I’d recognize in his wrinkled forehead my own ancient and irrational sorrows. This was exactly when I would have been sent to my room, and that was where I wanted to go when I’d see it come over him. Jevn had given him a beautiful smile and a tall stature, but I’d given him clouds to overtake him without warning. And then I’d given him up and given him something to really be sad about. I wanted to hide from all of it. But Paula would grab him and pull him close and whisper something I couldn’t hear. The words didn’t seem to matter. What mattered was the closeness of her lips as they tangled in his earlobe. What mattered was the funny tickling, the feeling that someone was not so far away and not afraid. His eyes would explore the room as he listened, and the clouds, with the lightness and grace of water vapor, would dissipate.