What I Carry

by Jennifer Longo

  I put my head on my knees. “Francine wants to adopt me.”

  “What.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She said that? Out loud?”

  “Yes.”

  “But—you’re an adult.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t— Can she do that?”

  “Yes. So I can stay. With her. And go to school.”

  “You can adopt adults?”

  “Sean, keep up, yes.”

  “And she’d be your, what, legal guardian?”

  “No, she would be my legal mother.”

  I dug in the dirt with a stick.

  “Do you like Francine?” he asked quietly.

  More than I could ever admit or express properly.

  “Muir,” he said. “I don’t understand why this is bad.”

  I rubbed my tired eyes. “Did you depend on your dad?”

  His brow furrowed. “Of course.”

  “Will you ever be the same with him gone?”

  “Oh man…please tell me you’re not trying to live your entire life never depending on anyone ever because they might leave or die.”

  “Too late. I already did.”

  “Well, that’s not our fault!”

  “It’s not mine, either! You think I like feeling every day like I’m walking a fucking tightrope, one misstep and I’m dead? You think it’s been fun feeling like that every day since I was a little kid?”

  “Of course not, that’s not what I— I mean, we’re here, we’ll catch you. We’re right here. Also I have severe acrophobia, so this metaphor is making my hands sweaty.”

  “How can you be a ranger with acrophobia? That’s stupid.”

  “Muir. We’re here. All of us.”

  “Yes,” I said. “You’re here now.”

  “What about our motto? Life is fucked and you know that better than anyone, but I know it, too, and I’m glad I didn’t not love my dad in case he dropped dead, because when he eventually did, I had years of really great memories. I had my mom, so I survived, and so will you. We are here, not everyone leaves, sometimes things turn out right. Why would it be so bad if Francine adopted you?”

  “A million reasons.”

  “A million? Really.”

  “You don’t get it.”

  “I know I don’t get it, I’m begging you to please help me understand.”

  “Well, to begin with, this country was built on stealing babies from their mothers. White people did it to indigenous people, and they still try it; slave owners sure as fuck did it; white people still adopt kids from other cultures, name them Tiffany, and pull that gross ‘We don’t see color’ crap. The Catholic Church said poor moms and single moms are ‘immoral’ so they stole their babies and gave them to rich Catholic couples, and then Georgia Tamm…that bitch stole kids and straight-up sold them. People still do it, and it’s just— Adoption isn’t always the happy cure-all people pretend it is.”

  Birds sang in the clean, cool air. What a gorgeous morning to feel so crappy.

  “Muir,” he said. “I can’t ever know how hard every day has been for you, every hour, your whole life. I would do anything to be able to go back and make it right for you. It’s insane; it’s unfathomable, every kid and parent who was so screwed over. I wish— I honestly understand adoption isn’t a magic answer for any of it; I get that. But I mean—were you stolen?”

  “I don’t— She couldn’t keep me, she didn’t have the help she needed. Or maybe—okay, she might not have wanted to keep me, she maybe didn’t even know she was pregnant; none of it matters. It’s all beside the point; I don’t want to be someone’s legally obligated anything. I can’t be trapped. I’m not here to be kept until I’m an inconvenience.”

  He looked so sad. “Francine would never do that to you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because…she wouldn’t. She doesn’t want to trap you; you could never be an ‘inconvenience.’ ”

  “You don’t know that. I won’t survive if I let her—if I stay and get used to her taking care of me—it’s already happening! The food and house and she sticks up for me, she’s…” My throat was burning. “It won’t work out and I’ll be dependent and unprepared for life alone and I’ll be heartbroken because I love Terry Johnson so much. I love him. I’ll be so lonely without him. I love him, I do….” He put his arms around my heaving shoulders.

  “I know you love…Terry Johnson. Terry Johnson knows you love him. Trust me. Terry knows you’re not able to tell him. Terry Johnson understands that better than anyone. Terry Johnson has never wanted to adopt anyone before you. I know, because I would have heard about it. Terry Johnson just…loves you.”

  I tried hard to stop crying.

  “I’m not trying to convince you to depend on anyone. On me,” he said.

  “Too late.”

  “Do you believe I love you?”

  I wished he would stop saying that. I wished he would say it again.

  “I believe you think you do,” I said.

  He stood up.

  “Muir, I’m not going to let you— I know my own mind and my…I’m not just going to walk a million miles in the forest with you, and have a bunch of great sex with you, and want to tell you before anyone else whenever something good or bad or hilarious happens, and watch you eat toast and jam every day, and put up with my jealousy for the obsession you have with goddamn Terry Johnson—who’s still pretty indifferent to me, when all I’ve ever been is good to that guy; I helped save his life and still he barks at me—and I know I can never know what your life has been, but I want to know what it is now and what it will be. And you can’t know mine, but I’d never blame you for that because you want to and you try so hard and you know what? I lied. I do want you to depend on me. Because you can. I want to take even the smallest part of this weight you carry every second, I want to take apart how every adult in your life has screwed you over and replace it with me doing right by you. And so does Kira. And so do her parents. And more than anyone, so does Francine. She wants to be your family and make it so you are never alone, and you can go to school and be a wilderness ranger or whatever the hell you want to do or be, because she knows you could be anything, and so do you. She wants to help you have the life you deserve, and I think you should let her because the only reason she wants it is because she loves you and, okay, maybe that is selfish, but the thing is, she loves you for you. She didn’t expect to, but there it is, with no agenda, nothing wanted in return. In fact she can’t help it and life would be easier if she didn’t but it’s too late now and it’s making her sick to imagine you leaving. She loves you.”

  He grabbed his water bottle and walked away, fast, to the lodge.

  Then my heart wasn’t still at all. Now it just felt broken.

  * * *

  —

  “So you’re not really sick? Or you are and pretending not to be?” Kira demanded, arms crossed, standing beside my Blackbird table where I sat sulking over tea and toast. “Because you look not great. You look like you’ve been crying.”

  “I have.”

  “So you are sick.”

  “I feel awful. I told Jane I was sick so I could leave, but I’m not, like, flu sick.”

  Her arms relaxed. “Okay.”

  “I’m sick of being mad.”

  “Maybe you should go home and sleep?”

  “Not home,” I said. “Francine’s house.” I put my head on my arms.

  Kira sighed. “Okay, now your hair is in your tea. You’re a mess.”

  “I don’t care.”

  I heard her sit in the chair across from mine. “Muir.”

  “What.”

  “Muir.”

  I lifted my head. I forgot sometimes, because she was so kind, and sometimes so hurt and vulnerable,
how fierce her appearance could be when she needed it to. Ears pierced, all tattooed, dressed in black from her boots to her shredded tank top, hair up and away from the stern look on her face, now so familiar, unwilling to put up with my bullshit. Not content to let me suffer.

  My friend.

  I kept my head up. “Francine wants to adopt me.”

  Kira sat back. “She does?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She offered.”

  “She did not.”

  “She did.”

  “Well,” Kira said. “That is…I mean. Can’t say I’m not surprised, she’s never…Doesn’t mean you have to let her.”

  “She promised she wouldn’t.”

  “I know.”

  “No one ever keeps their promises. Ever.”

  “Okay, but isn’t this one more like, I promise I’ll never take you to Disneyland, oops, I guess we’re going—surprise!”

  “No,” I said. “Adoption isn’t like going to Disneyland. At all.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just wish…it could be.”

  “Kira. She lied to me.”

  She put her hands on the table. “Or maybe she just really likes you and wants to be your home to come back to, no matter when or where you go?”

  I glared down into my tea.

  “What?” Kira said.

  I shook my head.

  “Oh, all right, I get the silent treatment now? Muir. Muiriel.”

  I sat.

  She stood. Untied her apron. “Hey,” she called into the kitchen, marching behind the counter. “I’ll be right back, I have an emergency.” She tossed her apron onto the glass pastry case, grabbed her wallet, and stood beside me. “Let’s go,” she said. “Now.”

  “I’m not done with my tea.”

  She got a paper cup and lid, poured the tea in, and held the door open.

  “I’m only going because I feel like it,” I said as I stepped out into the sunshine.

  “Oh, I know,” she said, and dragged me to the bus stop.

  * * *

  —

  The late-spring morning was cool and bright at the trailhead to the bonfire beach. In the trees at the path we had walked with Sean to the water, I stood now with Kira in a clearing before a long stone wall, shaded by a low wooden roof, curved like ribbon, beneath the words Nidoto Nai Yōni: Let It Not Happen Again.

  Photographs and words were embedded in the wood, black-and-white images of Japanese American women and men and children, teenagers at the high school, families and homes and pets and farms and shops. Pictures of people living what looked like a beautiful, happy life.

  The sun was warm on my back and I read the posted notices from the US government, the word Japs again and again. Japanese American citizens, Kira’s family, suitcases in their hands, dressed in layers of their best clothes, even elegant hats, waiting on the dock, armed white soldiers lurking beside them and in the periphery. A tiny little girl in a wool coat smiled in the arms of a white soldier wielding a huge gun. A young mother held an infant, both visibly tagged with numbers, not names. Grandmas and grandpas, mothers and fathers, and siblings rounded up while their neighbors watched. Ripped away with virtually no warning from their homes, farms, beloved pets, and friends. Gone.

  Then photographs from the camps. From Manzanar. Razor-wire fences and gun towers in the desert, keeping the families imprisoned to appease white America’s rabid, racist fear. The American government betraying its own people, handing out gold stars to Kira’s great-grandmother, to all the mothers of dead sons, killed while fighting for the America that put them in this prison.

  I stood, mesmerized by the faces of a group of teenagers. They looked like my age. In the yard at Manzanar, in the dust and dirt. Smiling. Friends or cousins or siblings, but together. And rising behind them, above the tower and the shacks and razor wire, away but not far in the desert, I recognized Mount Whitney, the highest peak in all the continental United States and, if you start walking in Yosemite Valley, the end of the John Muir Trail.

  One more cruelty. Imprisoned beneath the freedom of that mountain, its soaring beauty turned to a looming taunt.

  We walked to the water’s edge, where the dock once stood, where Kira’s family was marched at gunpoint to a ferry that took them away from home, to an unknown future. Today the water sparkled, quiet and calm.

  “I didn’t get any artistic tendencies or talent from my great-grandmother,” she said.

  “You did,” I sighed. “It’s not debatable; it’s an established fact. You are an artist.”

  “I didn’t inherit it from her,” she said.

  “Those birds are works of art,” I said. “That she didn’t make art before or after has nothing to do—”

  Kira shaded her eyes from the sun. “No, I’m not related to her. Not by blood. None of us are.”

  I blinked in the light from the water. “Not related to who?”

  She sighed. “Muir. Keep up. To my great-grandma.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because my grandma was an orphan. My great-grandparents adopted her.”

  I stood, blank-faced. “She wasn’t a baby? In the camp?”

  “She was. Look, I wasn’t ever going to go into all this if you were going to be gone the second you graduated, and I’m sure as fuck not here to be your Wise Asian Friend who drops the fucking ancient mystical knowledge about the beauty of family or some shit, and yes I admit bringing you here was a bit dramatic, but if Francine…Look. This whole situation is getting stupid, and I need you to really hear me.”

  A carload of people pulled into the parking lot and walked to the wall, talking quietly and taking pictures.

  I sat in the grass beside the water, my chest tight. Kira sat beside me.

  “When the internment started, the government searched all the orphanages for Japanese kids,” she said. “If a baby had even one-eighth Japanese blood, they were taken to Manzanar, to this makeshift orphanage called Children’s Village. Something like a hundred babies and toddlers and little kids. My grandma was born with a deformed left hand, which apparently freaked out her parents, who left her at a Catholic orphanage in Oregon, and that’s where she was rounded up before her first birthday and sent to the prison camp because Japanese orphan babies were totally a threat to national security.”

  “Obviously,” I said.

  She smiled. “Right? My mom says a lot of Japanese adults back then considered orphans part of the Burakumin, which is like untouchable. So when the war ended, most of the orphans were either sent back to the nuns or adopted by white families. But not my grandma.”

  “Why?”

  She shook her head. “Don’t know. My great-grandparents’ son was still alive, fighting in the war, so it wasn’t like a mending-a-broken-heart, lost-child thing. All Grandma ever said was that Great-Grandma and Great-Grandpa saw her playing in the camp one day, chasing birds in the dirt in a fenced-off area cordoned with razor wire and they just liked her so much.”

  We turned to look over our shoulders when the family at the wall laughed. They were speaking Japanese, the kids all had flowers that they placed on the narrow ledge beneath one of the embedded photographs.

  “Muir,” Kira sighed. “I never wanted to be all, Oh, I understand all about adoption because some people I never really knew adopted my grandma decades before I was born. I can never know your life, I would never pretend to, but none of us can know anyone’s but our own, and I know you now. So does Sean. And Francine. And be pissed about this all you want, but we wish you would stay.”

  Variation on a theme.

  “Did you and Sean talk about this?”

  She frowned. “About what?”

  “Me. Staying.”

  Her eyes went up and back. “You know, we have our own l
ives. You are not the sun and moon—we don’t have time to ruminate constantly on your life plans. Of course we talk about this shit! Don’t you get it? Francine has had probably a hundred kids live with her, kids she adored, and she had them with her when she was a lot younger and could have been a, like, energetic, run-around-the-park type of mom, and she has never once brought up adoption. Ever. I will never say any of this was meant to be, because I think that’s a bullshit concept and it’s also gross and disrespectful to your actual mom, and it’s just a total lie. But what I am saying is…sometimes people turn out to be the ones…” She paused. She blinked fast.

  I moved closer, right beside her.

  “Saving me from my asshat ways wasn’t the only reason my parents came back here to live,” she said. “And the Suquamish would rightfully be all Whatever, bitch to hear me say this, but for lack of a better way to express it, this is our home. We belong here. My family belongs here.” She opened her wallet and pulled out a folded piece of lined notebook paper, the blueprint material for all her masterpieces. “Here,” she said. “This is your tattoo.”

  “You said to never start. You said I’ll get addicted.”

  “Well. Yes. But at least you know a good artist. It was going to be my next, but I want it for you.” I unfolded the paper.

  Black ink, simple, languid script, a beautiful, single word.

  Gaman.

  From the bird-pin shoebox.

  “To bear the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity,” Kira said.

  I turned to her, my friend, who more and more I could not imagine being without.

  “Kira, I can’t. This is you. This is your family.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It is.”

  * * *

  I carry with me a paper price tag.

  In a thrift shop once I found a pair of shoes. They were brand-new, not a mark on the soles, silver strappy satin sandals with a kitten heel and tiny rhinestone buckles, Value Village tag: $20, and they were my size. The label stitched to the arch read Prada. They were unlike any shoe I had ever owned, and I knew I would never have a reason to wear them, ever. Too special for jeans. But I saw them, and I loved them.