God and Jetfire

by Amy Seek

  My dad smiled, though I’m not sure he really heard Erik. But Jonathan heard him and looked up, unamused. He was by nature extremely careful, unlike Andrew, who returned repeatedly to the emergency room without acquiring any sense of his own fragility. Put together, Jonathan became a bit more daring, and Andrew might sometimes think twice.

  We worked all afternoon. Jonathan was the primary laborer, given minimal direction just before having to execute, having no real sense of the overall scope of the work or when it might be complete. After the wood was sawed, the project moved to the yard, just beneath the launch deck, and my dad sat in a plastic chair while Erik and Jon assisted him. My dad showed Jon how to take slack out of the steel cable with the come-along, notch out joists, lay floorboards. Slowly, he showed him how to tie a bowline knot.

  “It’s a very useful knot,” he said. “Doesn’t slip much. Doesn’t slip any. All these knots here are bowline.” He pointed at the safety net. “Now, slip that around the two-by-four.” He handed Jonathan the looped end of the rope.

  Every time I looked, my father was standing, seeming light-headed, taking a deep breath with his mouth open and squinting his eyes, or he was sitting, his head in his hands, occasionally handing a drill or an extension cord or a wrench to Jonathan. Jonathan worked while the other kids, too young to help, played on swings nearby.

  My sister, now pregnant with her fourth child, came outside carrying a bucket of vegetable peels and cores and seeds. Jacob followed her, eyeing the construction site.

  “Mom, what happens if the zip line falls on us?” he asked my sister, looking up at the thick, twisted cable above him as she dumped the compost into the garden.

  “Then I consider how lucky I am that I have other children, man,” she said. Jacob’s eyebrows furrowed. This was the kind of thing my family was always saying to me when I was little, reminding me at every opportunity that I was an accident. I hoped Jacob knew she was kidding. I followed them back into the house, where Paula and my mother were sitting at the table, talking about all the perfectly good things that get thrown away at the end of a college term. My mother described the way my brother, now a university professor, would drive around picking up furniture and lumber to salvage.

  “That’s a great idea!” Paula put a hand closer to my mother on the table, leaning toward her in her warm, engaging, friendly, easygoing way. “That’s what we’re always saying; there is so much stuff thrown away! Someone should organize a Goodwill or something to sell this stuff back to other students. I mean, lamps, and beds, things that parents spend a lot of money on. It’s not like those things have had ten years of use.”

  Julie put a plate of buckwheat burgers between them. She didn’t coordinate proper meals the way my mother had; she just continuously cooked and continually put food on the table.

  “I’ll have to think about that,” Paula continued. “Some kind of exchange center for college stuff. I’m sure it wouldn’t be that hard to organize.” Paula was often, breezily, coordinating bake sales and hosting refugees and renovating their downstairs apartment to provide cheap housing for students.

  My sister had made a giant spelt pizza, and she called the kids over to the cyan picnic table outside to eat. Jonathan looked over at them.

  “Let’s just get three more floorboards tied in, okay?” I said. “Then we can go eat pizza.” It felt like a betrayal of the purity of our relationship, untainted by parenting, telling him what to do, as if I had any authority at all. But my dad was losing stamina, and every time he handed Jonathan a hammer, or helped him tighten the screws, or showed him how to avoid stripping the screw heads, Jonathan was seeing him, and there was a chance he would remember him. Jonathan glanced at me, then down at the drill, like I was laying claim to something he was unsure about giving me.

  But I didn’t have time to worry about it. My sister needed help carrying more things out to the table. Cauliflower-quinoa cakes, nettle soup, pumpkin custard, buttermilk smoothies, sautéed greens from the garden, rhubarb chutney, chard frittata, peanut butter balls, cucumber salad, corn on the cob. My mother was nagging her to clean up the kitchen while she cooked instead of leaving a disaster to clean up in the morning. Paula was telling Erik that she was exhausted from the trip. Jacob was screaming at Abigail, two years younger but meaner. There was too much going on for me to think about who my son was to me; if anything, at that moment it felt like our loss was an incidental fray in a larger fabric. My son was part of the swirl of family, and when I looked over at him taking direction from my father, I felt, I love him, and I didn’t think our bond at that moment needed tending. I could take it for granted so that I could pay attention to other things. To Paula and Erik, who I wanted to make sure felt comfortable and had what they needed. To my father, who often needed help silencing the commotion around him so he could be heard. To my brother, who I hadn’t seen for a while, to Andrew, and to my sister’s kids. I saw my son more often than any of them.

  And I actually felt that. I could take him for granted.

  After the pizza, the kids dispersed in the yard and the loose forest became a sunset paradise of children swinging and chasing lightning bugs as the adults sat at the picnic table and talked. In the hazy distance, Jonathan and Jacob shared a tire swing. They faced each other and swung lazily in a long arc between the trees. What could they be talking about as they floated, so ponderous and slow?

  Dusk fell and my sister had another idea: fire. Jacob gathered sticks and helped her start it as my father had taught us to do, and all the kids gathered around. Jacob placed firewood as Julie directed him. She went inside and came back out with marshmallows and graham crackers and chocolate. The kids looked for long, straight sticks and taught one another to make s’mores.

  Fire was among his favorite things, but my father had gone to bed, and I went inside to check on him. He was lying on the sofa bed, unfolded in the playroom. The lights were still on.

  “Are you okay, Dad?”

  Without opening his eyes, he pointed me to the spot, and I reached out to massage his neck. His body felt hard and stiff as it never had years ago, when he’d beg for a back rub and I’d sink my fingers into his meaty shoulders. I didn’t know how to press this new hardness to give him relief.

  He was worried about getting finished in the little time we had left. He was still working full-time and had to get back home for a job. Usually, he would hide these kinds of concerns, but I could see the worry in him.

  “I’ll finish laying the floorboards first thing in the morning, before anyone gets up, so that part will be done by the time we get started,” I offered, desperately, to ease his mind.

  “Oh, oh!” He stopped me, lifting his head. “L-let the kids do that!” He smiled and nodded. He was worried, but finishing the project wasn’t more important than everything we’d come here to do.

  He lowered his head, and I stood above him, stroking his neck so he’d have strength for the morning, pressing carefully at his left shoulder, praying my son would really see him, rubbing his back like I was rubbing raw wool, that cloud of complicated bonds that secured us, a tight and tangled felt.

  * * *

  We had frittata and pancakes for breakfast. Everyone took a plate and a seat as they became available. My sister made the performance of motherhood she was so good at.

  “Julie, what is this beautiful table?” Paula asked her, sliding her hand across its marbled and many-colored surface. Julie was cutting an apple into skinless, bite-sized pieces and dropping them into Nina’s bowl. “It’s oak underneath, but I knew the kids would destroy it, so I got a piece of acetate cut for it, and then we finger painted the acetate.”

  “That’s brilliant!” Paula said. “The colors are so beautiful.”

  Motherhood didn’t have time for uncertainty. The hot frittata in the oven, the pancakes sizzling, the applesauce simmering on the stove, the leftovers in the fridge, the lists of chores pasted to the refrigerator, the basket of chocolate hidden on the highest shelf in the c
upboard, the cabinet stocked full of dry goods, and the facility with which my sister managed conversation with Paula while she peeled apples and cut servings for people gathered at the table—these were the unromantic realities of parenthood, and they always felt like blows meant to crush any illusion I might have had that I was somehow, also, a mother.

  Paula leaned in the threshold of the door, empty plate in hand, articulate and charming, representing and fleshing out and legitimizing our motherhood as she shared tricks of the trade with my sister. I felt as if we were partners, sharing different burdens in the same project. One that happened to look nothing like my sister’s. Her plate full, she made her way around the corner of the table and sat next to Erik. My dad sat at one end of the table, eating slowly and carefully. He looked up at Erik.

  “I was thinking”—he was asking for silence—“I-I’d guess birth fathers typically aren’t nearly as involved as Jevn is, would you say that’s about right?”

  “Do birth fathers typically design additions for the adoptive family’s house? If that’s what you’re asking, Walter, I’d say probably not!” Erik agreed. He glanced at me and smiled.

  My father turned to Jonathan, who had just sat down at the table. “How would you like to take the controls in the glider next spring? Would you like to try that?”

  Jonathan smiled, but my heart sank. Next spring. Could we really count on next spring? Could we count on ever flying again?

  * * *

  We gathered outside in the church parking lot, adjacent to the parsonage, an expanse of asphalt that sat empty most of the week and which provided an ideal surface for teaching kids to ride bikes, and roller-skate, and dribble a basketball.

  Suddenly realizing he was being watched, Erik stepped back self-consciously and explained—there’d been a fender bender, the damage was superficial, a ding in the bumper, and it had never gotten fixed.

  “But the lingering problem, which we discovered on the way down, is that the hood flies up just when it’s least convenient for it to do that.”

  My dad inspected Erik’s work. It was just like every single vacation I could remember from childhood. Cars breaking down, new cars being bought or assembled in some backwoods junkyard in the mountains. Crossing our fingers we would make it to our destination, or at least somewhere close.

  The kids were scattered around the parking lot, some of them playing with long balloons, twisting and tying them into shapes, popping them, letting them go, accidentally sending them squiggling across the pavement. Paula held Nina’s hands as she took some steps. My mother tugged on the bottom edges of Jonathan’s T-shirt to flatten the image on the front: How to Avoid Chores, it said, and she asked him to explain it. I wondered if it would be the last time my son would see my father, and I wondered what that meant. Then, everyone was strapped into the car, and they backed out. Jon stuck his head out the window; there was something else he needed to tell Jacob. I picked him up and held him at the window.

  “You know the action-adventure game?” Jonathan asked.

  Jacob nodded.

  “Space bar—that’s fire.”

  Jacob smiled, they pulled out, and we gave them a Seek Family Wave-Off.

  THIRTY-SIX

  When I was in architecture school, I asked several of my professors to admit that architecture was not the most important thing in the world. Only one of them would. Of course it’s not! He laughed at my constant struggling. He was the theory professor who had visited me in the hospital after Jonathan was born. Then he looked down and started thinking. “But what is the most important thing? Maybe memories? What are we, human beings, but what we remember? What else do we keep?” I agreed. Memory could definitely be among the most important things.

  “And can you think of a single thing that has happened in your life,” he continued, “without some kind of picture of the place where it happened?”

  Roller-skating in the basement. The cabin by the Arkansas River. The moon through the bamboo in my apartment the night I labored. He was right. Every memory had a place attached to it.

  An exercise we’d done in one of our classes had demonstrated the same thing. We had to ask family members to draw their hometowns and describe them as they drew. My mother drew her old village in a map only she could decipher, and the memories flooded back, as if the lines themselves somehow released them. Considering the exact adjacency between the barn and the summer kitchen, she remembered that all her neighbors spoke French and everyone’s last name, including her own, was Vallimont. That’s funny, I’d forgotten that! she kept saying. Locating the chestnut tree by the chicken house, she remembered her many hiding places and the junkyard in the woods where she collected glass bottles. She drew the front porch of her house, remembering the adult bike her dad bought her and how he laughed sitting on the steps of that porch as she tried to teach herself how to ride it. Sometimes she’d ask to go to the candy store, and he’d throw his hat up in the air and say, “If it stays up, we’ll go!” but it always came down, and they’d always go anyway. Sometimes to the store, or sometimes he’d take her and her brothers and sisters to the entrance of the coal mine where he worked.

  Seeing her see all of it, I could envision her as a child, someone dreaming of leaving her little town and riding a motorbike and never guessing a man might one day drink champagne out of her shoe.

  * * *

  My professor continued. “So if what makes us human, in a way, is our memories, then architecture, when you think about it, is nothing more than a frame for them, a way we try to keep them”—he shrugged—“and maybe I was wrong. Maybe architecture is the most important thing.”

  That kept me going for another couple of semesters.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  That winter I started walking. After three years of physical therapy, I had learned to flex muscles most people don’t know about and to silence muscles they don’t need to. For whatever emotional complexity was involved, my physical therapist explained what was happening on a physiological level like this: my tiny, deep muscles, traumatized by the accident, had receded entirely, forcing the more major muscle groups to cover for them, which is common after big accidents. Those major muscle groups rise to the surface during trauma, to enable you to lift a car off of a person or walk away after a crash, but you have to coax the small, deep muscles to return to work because they are responsible for the microscopic stabilizations of your whole body when you so much as contemplate movement. The big muscles alone do a clumsy job of the deep stabilizations, resulting in chronic pain. I had refused painkillers, and letting the pain linger made those deep muscles settle into their hiding places, as if there was still a threat. But for all these years, my therapist had been instructing me in various ways to call on my cowering deep muscles and assure them there was nothing to be afraid of anymore.

  * * *

  Pulling my laces that first morning made tiny clouds of dust; puff miniatures of the bulbous San Francisco hills where I’d last run. I zipped my jacket, pressed into the cold, and remembered my old friendship with the world in all its seasons. My leg burned and my hip clicked. Dynamic stabilization—I reminded myself of what my physical therapist called it—the healing that would come about as my body relearned a hundred microscopic adjustments. Stepping over puddles of icy water and blackened piles of snow, I concentrated on the tiny but essential gap between my sacrum and my pelvis. I watched the world getting ready for work in the early-morning silence as if I were an icicle, observing its passage in my own long, passing lens.

  Walking every morning before work, I carved out a space for someday running. And when I wasn’t walking, I practiced. Standing at the subway platform, I engaged my multifidi, those deep inner-vertebral muscles that were at war with my meathead hip flexor. No one knew how much concentration it took for me just to take a step.

  One morning waiting for the train with Charles, engaging my multifidi, I told him I was impressed with something Paula said when Jonathan asked her how we know there’s
a God. Paula told me she’d talked about the hunger we’re all born with for truth and justice and love, and Jonathan said he knew that hunger. She explained that perhaps the best evidence for the existence of those things is simply our desire for them. That, having small tastes, we only want more, and so we believe it must be out there, in some perfect form, somewhere: perfect love, and perfect justice, and perfect truth. And maybe those things are God.

  Her answer was just enough solid stake in the ground and just enough give.

  “What? What’s so great about that response?” Charles demanded.

  “I think it’s thoughtful, not too complicated for a kid but open-ended and powerful. It makes you keep thinking about it, testing it.”

  “I think you have an unfair perception of Paula as a good mother and you, for some reason, as not as good. You would have been able to handle that question, and I’d be much more interested in your answer.”

  “But I have no idea what I’d have said to that! I’m just really happy they have those kinds of conversations. Why can’t you just listen to what I’m saying?” Sometimes I wanted to say I regretted the adoption and have Charles comfort me, and sometimes I wanted to talk about how happy it made me that Jonathan had his family, his brother and sister, his neighbor friends—and I wanted Charles to celebrate with me. I wanted to cry about it and be silent and numb for days; I wanted to be grateful for it! Laugh about it! What was so difficult about that?

  “I’m not charmed like you are.” He was frustrated with me. “You’re determined to minimize your own capacities; I don’t get it.”

  “I chose them over myself to be my son’s parents, so of course I’m charmed! And maybe I see them as great because if they aren’t somehow great, then that makes this whole thing tragic. But even if my feelings are complicated, and I’m biased, that still doesn’t mean they aren’t great.”

  “Amy, they’re like master hunters, taking three different mothers’ children. And then raising them as their own—it’s a very hateable and unnatural thing to have done. To not accept what nature told you, that children are not for you.”