“She’s… in her feelings,” I said, and it felt like a teenage answer in an adult mouth. “She thinks if we tried hard enough we could all have Thanksgiving together.”
Mark laughed once, a sound without joy. “Americans and our holidays,” he murmured. “We really think a turkey can fix a wound.”
“Turkeys are blameless,” I said, and the banality of the exchange saved me from the urge to say something I’d regret.
There were moments when I wanted to take a picture. Mark pushing Jacob on the swing, sunlight netted in the chain links, their profiles lined up like some test a biologist could grade. I refused myself the sentimentality because sentimentality is where self-betrayal begins for me. But I allowed myself to watch, to store the image in the place inside me where I keep the thing that is larger than this: the belief that my son deserves people who love him and show up.
Sometimes, after a visit, Jacob would fall asleep in the car and I would choose the long way home because his sleep and the quiet multiplied each other. I would drive through neighborhoods that felt like different countries—mansions with landscaping that looked like a certificate, small rental houses with Black Lives Matter signs wilted by rain, an apartment complex whose balconies were always populated by someone smoking, someone arguing, someone watering a plant like a god. I would stop at a drive-thru Starbucks because I could and order an Americano in a voice that tried to sound less emotional than I felt. The U.S. is a nation of drive-thrus, and sometimes I wonder if that explains us more than any founding document.
At a summer visit, Mark arrived early. He stood in a patch of what I can only call American sunlight—big, unshaded, earnest—and looked like a man trying to memorize a son’s current face because he had learned how fast they change. He had cut his hair. He wore a T-shirt from a Portland half-marathon he’d pretended to enjoy. “Do you want to come to the zoo with us sometime?” he asked, carefully, as if he were walking a verbal tightrope he’d stretched himself. “I know that’s… big. I just don’t want his memories to be only swings.”
I surprised us both. “Okay,” I said. “Public, midday, short.”
We went to the Oregon Zoo on a Saturday so crowded it felt like all of Portland had decided to show their children an elephant in one day and be done with it. Mark kept pace. He bought nothing without asking. He lifted Jacob to see the seals without making himself a hero. He took a photo of Jacob and me near the otters without saying, “Let me send this to you.” I asked him to send it, which, even then, felt like letting a stranger back into my phone.
After the zoo, Jacob fell asleep in his car seat with the complete abandonment of someone who knows he is safe. I parked outside my apartment building and sat with the engine off because the sound of a car cooling is, in fact, a real and comforting thing. I looked at the photo Mark had sent. I looked tired and happy in a way that embarrassed me. Jacob looked like the answer to a question I had finally begun to admit was mine to ask. I did not text Mark back. I did not need to thank him for not doing the wrong thing as if restraint were generosity.
We had, by then, switched to a mediated app for scheduling, the kind that lawyers recommend and that keeps records in case anything ever needed to be read by a judge. The app had the bland cheeriness of U.S. customer service. Messages were timestamped in Pacific Time, a jurisdiction I could live inside.
Once, in late fall, a soccer ball rolled toward our bench, and a boy of maybe nine called, “Sorry!” with a reflexive American politeness that made me want to adopt him. Mark trapped the ball with his foot and sent it back, inelegant but kind. Jacob clapped like he had watched a miracle. “Dada kick!” he yelled. The word hit Mark’s jaw like a slap and a kiss. He closed his eyes. Opened them. Nodded. “Dada kick,” he repeated, but he didn’t look at me to gauge my reaction. He looked at Jacob, and the word became an oath in his mouth.
PART VI: The Long Road to Peace
Time makes itself known most obviously by what becomes ordinary. The extraordinary shrinks to fit the drawer. The man who once broke you pushes your son on a swing twice a week and everyone survives. The app pings. The weather changes. Daycare sends a note that Friday is pajama day. You write “pajamas” in dry-erase marker on the fridge because motherhood is a grocery list with a heartbeat. The U.S. postal service brings you a flyer about voting by mail, and you explain to your son in children’s language that we get to put pieces of paper in envelopes and say what we think and the grown-ups count them and then try to keep their promises.
When Jacob was three and a half, he asked, “Why don’t you and Daddy live together?” He did not look wounded when he asked. He looked curious, the way he looked when he found out that a bus was just a large car with strangers pre-installed.
“Sometimes,” I said, careful, measuring each word like a medication dose, “grown-ups love each other and then stop loving each other the way they need to live together. But they keep loving you. Always. That doesn’t change.”
He accepted this like he accepted the fact that blueberries sometimes had stems and sometimes didn’t. Later, in the bath, he asked, “Did Daddy do a bad thing?” He said it as if the world could be sorted into two bins: good and bad, recycling and trash.
“Yes,” I said, because I refuse to lie to my son to spare an adult. “Daddy did a bad thing. And he is trying hard to do good things now.” He poured water from a cup into the tub with the focus of a person who believes all spills can be undone. “Okay,” he said, and dunked his dinosaur as if demonstrating something I was supposed to understand.
Forgiveness lived in the same neighborhood as peace, but they did not share a house. Peace visited. It stayed for coffee. Forgiveness came by to check the thermostat and then left. I learned the difference. People will tell you that you must forgive to be free, but I have found that to be a sales pitch for a product you may not need. I built something else. Boundaries with windows. I let Jacob see his father generous and flawed. I let myself be the wall he could bounce a ball off of without worrying it would fall. I did not do this perfectly. I resented holidays. Thanksgiving sat like an accusation on the calendar, an American demand to gather and perform a story about gratitude that did not match the guest list. We learned to trade. Mark took Jacob for the parade on television—floats shaped like cartoon characters moving down a New York City street we knew from movies. I took Jacob for the meal. Later years, sometimes, we did the meal together with other friends, a potluck that let us hide our arrangement in the general American soup of chosen family.
Emily became a ghost and then, slowly, as years stacked, a person again. She moved to California, then Arizona, then came back for a summer, then left. She called our mother too often and me never. She sent Jacob a birthday present once: a set of wooden blocks with letters, the kind that Pinterest loves. I did not know whether she meant the gift, but meaning is not a quality control I could apply anymore. Jacob stacked the blocks and knocked them down and laughed. “From Auntie?” he asked, and I said yes because sometimes you have to put the simplest word on a complicated box and wheel it into the room without a speech.
When Jacob turned five, he lost his first tooth and the Tooth Fairy (who uses U.S. currency because where else would she shop?) forgot on the first night and then overcompensated on the second with a dollar bill tucked under his pillow like a treaty. Mark texted, Did the tf forget last night? Rookie. I said, She’s overburdened. He said, We should increase her funding. It was a dumb, small joke and we laughed, separately, which is a kind of togetherness I can tolerate.
St. Mary’s changed administrators. The new COO was from Texas and used phrases like “optimize the patient journey,” which made me want to set my ID badge on fire and hand it to him like a protest sign. I stayed because the unit still felt like a place where things could be made better by hands. The U.S. healthcare system continued to be a machine that ate and chewed according to rules that kept changing because someone thought profit was a better story than wellness. But on my floor, Rosa still laughed like a church, and Linda retired with a party where we put her name on cupcakes as if sugar could be a medal.
One summer evening in Year Six after the farmer’s market, we were at a baseball game—Triple-A, the kind with small-town mascots and a man in the seventh inning who led the crowd in “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” as if it were the national anthem. Jacob held a foam finger bigger than his torso. He sat between us because that was the geography that kept everyone honest. He spilled his lemonade on his shorts and shrugged because at eight you learn early that summer dries you fast. Mark bought him a hot dog and handed me napkins and for a strange, suspended second, we looked like a family at a ballpark in America doing what families at ballparks in America do: a picture so generic you could put it in a frame in a craft store. I felt the sorrow and the gratitude crash into each other in my chest like two waves and collapse into foam.
Jacob looked up and said, “Mom? Dad?” And for a terrible moment I thought he was going to ask if we could all live together. Instead he pointed at the field, where a fly ball climbed high and then fell into a glove and the crowd made that sound humans have agreed to make in unison. “Did you see that?” he asked, and his joy was so complete I wanted to thank someone and had no idea where to send the card.
He began to ask more complicated questions. “Did you love Dad?” “Why did Aunt Emily marry Dad?” “Are you mad at Aunt Emily?” I answered with smaller truths that amounted, I hoped, to a bigger one: that love and harm can cohabit, that choices have shadows, that people can be both the wound and the hand that bandages what they can. I did not give him every detail. I did not name my sister’s orbit or my mother’s wish for a peace that looked like a family photo and not like a treaty. I told him enough to trust me later when the rest made itself known.
One evening, after a parent-teacher conference where his second-grade teacher told us he was kind to a classmate who cried and we both felt a ridiculous, mammalian pride, Mark walked me to my car—habit, courtesy, a relic of a time when he had been the person who knew how long it took me to remember where I’d parked. He looked at me and said, “Thank you.”
“For what?” I asked, tired from a day that had given me a patient who survived, a patient who did not, and a coffee that had been too weak to count.
“For not making me a villain in his story,” he said. He didn’t say, for letting me try to be a father. He didn’t say, for letting me come back to the table and not sit at the end. He said only that, and it was enough.
“I don’t need you to be a villain,” I said. “I need him to know what to do with his love.” The sentence surprised me as it left my mouth. It felt like something a therapist would applaud and then underline.
We stood beside my car and the city hummed around us—the MAX light rail dinging, a siren far away, a woman yelling into her AirPods about a conference call scheduled on Pacific Time that should have been Central. The sky did that Portland thing where it could not commit. “I am sorry,” Mark said, and I believed him in a way I hadn’t allowed myself. Not a sorry that asked for anything. A sorry that set itself down and kept its hands visible.
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