by Amy Seek
The train came, and we got in. By then I’d forgotten about my multifidi, and the pain in my hip returned. It was too crowded to keep talking, and I didn’t want to have a fight. He was good at defending me in our conversations about my son’s adoption. He was always on my side, against me.
* * *
That winter, I had a dream about my son. It was like the blizzard from Kurosawa’s Dreams, but instead of a group of men trudging steadily in the infinite white snow, it was me and my son, walking slowly toward each other. The distance seemed endless; we were on opposite sides of a great expanse. I couldn’t make out his face, only the swing of his shoulders over a shimmering horizon. It was a white space, white sky, clean white ground, the arc of the earth visible in the distance between us. The whiteness was warm and yellow, and waiting was easy.
As he got nearer, I felt a flush of satisfaction that must be the particular sustenance of parents, who feast on the sight of their children healthy and grown. I was content that I could see him there on the horizon and that his movements were filled with confidence. But it was undercut by terror, the greatest fear I know, that he was old enough to frame his question, and, slow as he was coming, he was approaching faster than I could concoct an answer.
I had braced myself for his questions a few times like that in real life. When he was eight, living in Hyde Park, in Boston, we were taking a walk, and I told him that when I had an internship in Chicago, the neighborhood I lived in was also called Hyde Park. Then I remembered that London had a Hyde Park, where I stayed when I was twenty-two on my way home from visiting my sister in China.
“Oh! And Cincinnati has a Hyde Park, too! I almost completely forgot about that.”
“Cincinnati!” He brightened. “That’s my password for my computer game.”
“Really? How did you come up with that? It’s kind of hard to spell!”
“Because Mom told me I was born in Cincinnati,” he explained. I inhaled, filling my chest, calming my heart. I didn’t know whether that word, born, and the idea of his birth were for him connected to me. I wouldn’t remind him that I was there, with him, in Cincinnati. I wondered if this would be the moment he would finally ask.
But I wouldn’t initiate. Beginnings are delicate, and whatever Paula and Erik had told him, he had grown into a secure and happy boy, which was all that I could want. I might have liked telling him about how much I loved him, but maybe his parents’ story was focused on my inability to care for him and how much they loved and wanted him. Maybe it would confuse him to know how much I enjoyed him in those two weeks I kept him and that after all this time, I felt certain there never would be a thing I want more than him. No; I wouldn’t draw his attention to what we didn’t have.
I thought about the conversation they must have had when Paula suggested Cincinnati for his password. She might have suggested her own hometown, or Erik’s. She might have suggested the town where Jonathan grew up. Why would she want him to be reminded, every time he played his game, of a place where, for a brief moment, he was mine? What efforts was she making, all the time, to bring our history into his life as an everyday reality, fearless of the complexity, fearless of the pain? How often must she talk to him about me, that he should greet me so readily, and want to spend time with me, and keep all the things I gave him?
How had she made sense of that place he was born—the place I let him go? To begin with, it seemed, she taught him how to spell it.
I remained silent as we walked, side by side as we had so many times before, steeling myself for the possibility he might finally ask, certain someday he was bound to, and I would have to find an answer. Steeling myself, too, that he might not ask today, and that I would have to continue to wait.
“When did Mom and Dad come after I was born?” He did draw a connection, his birth and his adoption, and me. He understood a certain sequence. He understood: first he was mine.
“They came right away. They’d been waiting for you.”
He was quiet. I was never sure if he was really interested when he was quiet, but I wanted to be very careful not to give him more information than he was asking for.
“How did you find them?”
“I interviewed a lot of people. Most people weren’t quite right. Jevn and I spent so much time searching. We wanted to find a really good family.” Was that okay? Had I said enough? Too much?
But after that he seemed satisfied, or bored, and changed the subject. Were those really his only questions? And had I really answered them, just like that?
* * *
I had my own questions, if he would let me ask. I wanted to know whether he had survived the experiment I’d entered him into. Was he okay? Had I done damage he couldn’t repair? Had my visits only aggravated the pain? Was he happy? Did he wish I’d kept him? And I’m not sure what answers would hurt more.
In my dream, when he finally got close enough to speak, he was towering over me, as tall as Jevn, maybe taller. The light behind him blinded me, and I couldn’t see his face, I could only feel the shadow of his broad shoulders shaped so much like Jevn’s. What would he ask, finally? Would I ever be ready? As he moved even closer, I caught a glimpse of that old suspicion in his face, his clouds, my old sadness, the sadness of all accidents, the sadness I gave him by giving him up. What could I say to comfort him? I felt myself shrinking under the weight, a burden I’d been bearing for years, and then I felt a new heaviness—the weight of his gaze, and then the weight of his arms, wrapping solidly around me. Space collapsed as he enfolded me. He bent his head to bury it with mine and answered questions he didn’t want me to ask. He hugged me so hard he stopped me from speaking.
* * *
A few days later, the whole Northeast was as white as my dream. I trudged through the snow in silence with Jonathan and a whole pack of his friends. They ran ahead, throwing snowballs, trying to surf down tiny descents. The temperature was reported to be negative thirty degrees Fahrenheit with the windchill, and I was dressed only to sit inside the whole day drinking tea and playing Legos.
But I’d arrived to some confusion. No one was home. I waited in the car until one of the neighbors noticed me, and then recognized me, and then invited me inside. Paula was at a pro-life march, they said, and Erik was playing basketball at the school. They called Jonathan, who was at another neighbor’s house. They told him he had a guest waiting for him and asked if he’d like them to come get him. He said, “If it’s Amy, then, yeah.” When he came through the door, he hugged me, and he seemed really happy. I asked him what he’d been doing.
“Trying to make something extremely dangerous,” he said, cryptically. “And failing.”
* * *
Erik returned and apologized; he’d thought I was arriving later. I settled into the warmth of the living room, catching up with Erik, but when the whole neighborhood of kids wanted to go sledding, and they needed a chaperone, and they begged me, I couldn’t refuse. I enjoy this special advantage over Paula and Erik: I have no parental rights, therefore I am fun.
On our way, irresponsibly and unparent-like, I told Jonathan about a horror movie I’d seen in which some kids get stuck for days on a ski lift. It was relevant, a gripping story about cold. I told him about their attempts to jump, getting eaten by wolves, trying to walk with their hands along the cables.
“Amy! Can we go through here?” one of his friends yelled, pointing out a shortcut through deep, fresh snow. I felt so funny to be the one to make this decision for them. I was such a bad parent I couldn’t figure out why it was even a question.
“Sure!” I said, and turned to Jonathan for reassurance. “I’m not sure I make a very good chaperone. What do you think my responsibilities as chaperone should be?”
“Make sure nobody’s leg bones come out of their knees,” he said, recounting the horrors of the story I’d just told him. “Make sure nobody gets eaten by wolves or frozen to death, and nobody puts their hand on metal so they have to rip it off…”
Perfect, I thou
ght. I liked having my role so clearly defined, and by my son himself. I could measure my success or failure easily. Our conversation meandered as we walked, wolves compared with dogs, the food choices he was making because of his recent conclusions about climate change.
We found the little hill, which was nothing compared with what I sledded on when I was little. And their flimsy plastic sleds didn’t compare to our long, waxed, wooden toboggan with the leather pillow seat and ropes down the length. We had to hold on tight because with all those kids piled on, and sometimes my dad, too, we’d get going fast, and whoever rode in front, the only person who could see to steer, always got a blinding faceful of snow. I couldn’t believe it was just a memory now. Something my son would see in seventies color if I told him.
This hill was just a five-second drop, but the kids were making the most of it. Face-first on their bellies, or rotating wildly, or standing as if their sleds were snowboards. They were screaming, nearly missing each other. The colder I got, my thin oxfords planted in snow twelve inches deep, the more fun they seemed to be having.
I started running in place, gently, cheering them on. The cold made my back tight, and I lost control of my deep muscles. My hip burned, even as I shivered. But I wasn’t worried about my injury; I began to worry that I might lose my toes if I stayed much longer. Except that you couldn’t lose your feet to frostbite when you were in the suburbs of New Haven, less than a mile away from home—or could you, if the temperature was low enough? Maybe it doesn’t matter how close you are to all the comforts of civilization, if you choose to forgo them? But the alternative was telling everyone the fun was over. Parents are supposed to sacrifice everything for their kids, I thought, and I wasn’t going to miss a chance.
I jumped up and down to stay alive, and I played it off by cheering at the kids. Some had set to work building a ramp that created messy pileups as one of them would come barreling down the hill before the last accident was cleared. Most of them weren’t dressed much more warmly than I was, but they had that endless resistance to cold that kids having fun in the snow enjoy. Jonathan came down the hill, dodging the mound of kids in his way. I hooted and hopped. When he picked himself up, he watched the action from the bottom of the hill. Then he turned to look at me. He studied me, as I more self-consciously jogged in place. He was so deliberate, so sober, he might have been positioning himself to confront me.
I stopped running and braced myself as solidly as I had in my dream. I had to be here for anything he might say. It was all I could do. I had to endure whatever might come. I didn’t have answers, but I was the only one who might, and it was the least I could do to be there for the questions. To have enough proximity and history that he could get everything I had to give. His eyes narrowed. I stepped a few times because my feet were going to fall off, but I held his gaze.
Then he finally spoke.
“I can see you’re cold,” he said. It was not a question.
“No, I’m fine!” I insisted. “How about three more runs?” But he was looking at me with the old suspicion. He could see right through me.
“How about one more run?”
* * *
In my dream, I experienced the relief of ages; peace I didn’t know I was waiting for. It was like stepping into the water when I was pregnant and feeling floating where I’d grown accustomed to weight. I had been waiting for it for eternity. How could I have guessed they would find a way to make it simple for him to love me? That I’d get him back, but only when he reached for me? I had a taste of a feeling I didn’t know I could feel. It was like the feeling of running, all my cells part of the earth in exactly the right places. All the complexities accommodated. But with this feeling I didn’t have to keep running to sustain it. With this, I could just rest.
* * *
There was another moment I didn’t know I was waiting for until it happened, a year later. The day I reached down to the floor to pick up the lead for my father’s mechanical pencil. Lead he had carefully placed in a ziplock bag, which went inside his briefcase, on his bedside table, along with his scientific calculator and the big green book of engineering standards he had helped develop in graduate school. He waved his hand, No, no, don’t get up. But he was paralyzed from the chest down, and I had been sitting there, pretending to work, waiting without realizing it for just that moment.
He had always asked so many questions about the world, but he didn’t ask any questions at all when he could no longer move his lower body, his spine finally devoured by the cancer. He just smiled sheepishly at the nurse who lifted and rotated his ankles, saying “You can’t feel this? Nothing?” He shrugged his shoulders, the lowest part of him that was not paralyzed, like he was embarrassed, or sorry to disappoint her, but he couldn’t lie. He had come home from work and couldn’t make it out of the car except with a cane, and then he couldn’t get up the stairs. He was paralyzed in a matter of hours, but he took that information in like it was simple arithmetic. Nothing there to study. It added up the same way every time. But who knows what pain he was hiding from us, to spare us.
With his unparalyzed but shaky hand, one afternoon, he indicated the number three. There were three things he wanted to talk to me about. He smiled his upside-down smile. I could tell it tired him more than usual to do it. I could tell that this upside-down smile, unlike all the others, was part frown.
Immediately, I started talking. About my brother’s ex, about my trip to L.A. with Charles, about his new job and the apartment we found him there, about the lemon trees in his new yard, about the reservoir full of black balls in Elysian Park, about my job in Brooklyn, about our crazy clients at work, about my flight down, about Charles’s separate flight down. About how we met by chance in the airport because my flight was rerouted. About meeting my brother’s new girlfriend, who was waiting with him to pick me up.
“Th-three things.” He smiled gently, stopping me. “One.” His lips were wobbly. I got wobbly. “Why do you think it bothered you so much to know you were an accident?”
It was worse than I could have imagined. He cut to the heart of everything, my very beginning, everything I was made of. Suddenly all the curtains were drawn and everything behind it exposed. It was because of him, because of my sister always reminding me, that I thought what I thought, I wasn’t wanted, I was in everyone’s way, but now he was questioning me. I stammered, saying nothing.
“Well,” he continued, “you were an accident.” He was stretching his face longways to give more space to his eyes to catch the water that was welling up in them. Distending his jaw a bit, opening his throat, lifting his eyebrows. It made his eyes wider; there were no eyelashes, or shadows, or blinking, to buffer his question.
“Your mother had had a couple of miscarriages before Julie, and we weren’t sure she could have a baby. We had your sister and brother, and we thought we had lucked out. When you came along, your mother was older, and we were scared you might be disabled somehow. And then there was the money. I was starting a new business in a new city, and I wasn’t sure I could support three children. My business partner had left and taken all our money.” I had only seen him cry at his own father’s funeral. “But once you got here and we saw you were okay—”
He paused, shaking his head, trying again. “When I try to think of the world without you…” He gestured with his hands, fingers spread, slowly erasing the horizon, shakily, back and forth, pushing back that wall of water and unbuilding my foundations. Addressing the imperfect circumstances of my birth and my imperfect understanding of them. Our whole lives can be built on the slightest misunderstanding about our origins. But with that tiny gesture, as effortless as a signature, as insignificant as a hundred visits that amount to nothing, until they add up to something, his shaking and imprecise hands made space for me.
“The second thing—” He dried his eyes with the edge of his bedsheet and smiled apologetically because it was no doubt not a time for emotions, but all the things were fallen. All the constructs of our rel
ationship we’d relied on for no reason at all, since I was born.
“Do you know how old you can be and still have children?”
“Dad!” It felt so good to be exasperated with him; I wasn’t sure I’d ever get to feel that again. “Charles is moving to California! It’s not going to happen with him, and it’s not a thing I can really control.”
“Well.” It was so against his nature to give advice. “The way I see it, I think you have lots of good things in your life. But I don’t see why you can’t have everything you want. A-at least, I think you want kids.” He smiled. “I’d think it would be awfully nice if you were pregnant by, l-let’s see, August of next year.”
August 2013, I registered to myself. It had a magical property. It was the most concrete advice he’d ever given me. Don’t kill spiders. Get pregnant by August. And dads understood things daughters couldn’t. August 2013 was the right time. And maybe it was less a project he was assigning me and more a prediction he was making, from the wise perspective of his paralysis. I felt my anxiety about the whole issue release, enclosed by the safety of his generous, yearlong boundary. Surely I could do it in a year. Find a man; have a kid. I wanted more advice, more challenges on my skateboard, each one specially designed and incrementally harder. I wanted all the advice he had never given me.
“I—I don’t mean that you don’t already have a child. I know that Jonathan is your child.”
“I know, Dad, yeah, it’s okay—” I stammered. I didn’t want him to feel guilty for anything.
“I just think you’d like to have a child you get to raise.” The upside-down smile. “Okay, okay, three.”
I could barely take another thing.
“The blue van. It needs oil, needs a new spare. There’s some rust that should be patched. Look in the back, there’s a rust kit. I’m going to sell you the van, a thousand dollars.”
