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  For my family—all of it

  ZERO

  My son and I were lying on my bed, looking up at the ceiling and speculating about eternity. It was just like when I was his age, ten or eleven; I’d stare up and think: Eternity means forever. And ever. And ever and ever and ever and ever. Eternity means I’d still be saying “and ever” from the last time I lost myself in the scaleless white, trying to make sense of eternity.

  At some point I turned toward him. He looked at me without lifting his head from the pillow. I reached over and brushed his hair behind his ear.

  “I wanted you. You know that? I really wanted you.” I paused, pressing his face with my palm. He held my gaze for a moment.

  “Yeah…,” he said, knowing that. Then he turned back, squinted, and addressed the ceiling. “But why?”

  I might have thought it was the question I was always waiting for. The one that would free me to share the whole story: how he came to be and why I gave him up, and how everything had been shaped by his absence. There was so much I wanted to tell him, so much I wanted to know, but every month and then year that passed, I kept having to remind myself that he was just a child. He would need time. Time to build muscle and learn to walk and eat lots of breakfasts and get the training wheels taken off his bike, and earn an allowance and spend it a million times, and practice cursive and pass notes in class, and ponder lots of different careers—maybe even go to college and get married—before we could talk about those things.

  And the way he studied the ceiling, I could tell he meant something else. He was asking everyone’s question. It was the question, Why everything? Why consciousness? Why time? Why desire; why love? He wasn’t hurt, and he wasn’t looking for an answer. The question wasn’t for me. I turned back to the ceiling and asked it with him.

  It was just like him to contemplate such things. And it was very much him: lying there, skeptical slits of eyes piercing the ceiling, weight so real he sank into my duvet. It was exciting to have him there with me, and it was fun to be cohorts confronting the universe together. But the most fantastic thing was touching him. No one was watching, and I wasn’t thinking about whether it was okay or whether it made him or anyone else uncomfortable, or whether I was allowed to express my love like that, without restraint. I didn’t think about anything at all! I just reached over and combed through the blond mop, bent the warm, rubbery flap of his ear, as it felt natural to do—as I had, in fact, never once done. He had never been to my apartment, and we had never lain like that. I’d never said those true words, making sure he understood. I’d never let my affection flow straight from my heart, through my outstretched arm, and land so solidly and without hesitation. I’d never enjoyed that relief—profound, even as he turned and let it roll to the side, his mother’s love, imponderable as eternity, shedding it as a son will do.

  If I could have, I’d have turned to my other side and put his question to my father. But when I woke, there was just the west, buildings gleaming pink, illuminated by sunrise. And another eternity to contemplate: I would never, ever, ever be my son’s mother.

  ONE

  A sympathetic Jesus hovered just above the head of the woman who was telling me my baby would be born in July. I had to tilt my head to see him fully, down to his toes. His eyes were sad and his soft mouth was mute. In his outstretched palms, he held a tiny red baby curled up in the fetal position. The woman leaned toward us with an elbow on the desk. “Don’t you know what happens when you have premarital sex without a condom?” After three tests at home and one in the pink-painted bathroom to her right, I still had an urge to look behind me at the pregnant girl she was leveling with. I couldn’t believe she was speaking to me. Me!—who was, myself, an accident, as my sister often reminded me. The woman held her fingers two inches apart. On the basis of the dates I gave her she informed us that I was eight weeks pregnant.

  I sat silently and waited. The walls and bookshelves shimmered, deflated, like surfaces loosely attached to brittle frames. I wanted the woman to talk forever, pointing at diagrams and unfolding brochures. Then I would never have to leave this place, and time wouldn’t proceed past this moment. If I was pregnant, it was just barely, and I simply wouldn’t take a single step further.

  I’d left the third test on the side of the sink in my apartment. My hands were shaking as I stumbled out of the bathroom, at once blinded and liberated by the impossibility. I couldn’t be pregnant. I couldn’t be. My mind raced, lurching for certainties to anchor me—I was too young, I was only in my second year of college, I didn’t have any money, I had my whole life ahead of me—as if reason could cure my body of its delusions.

  I opened the phone book to the unthinkable first few pages, those that stick close to the cover, concealed, as you thumb for wonderfully innocuous middle things like Plumbers and Laundromats. Between Abortion and Advertising, I discovered a dark world of resources I’d never had reason to know about, and, overwhelmed, I returned to the bathroom to reexamine the device—compelled, then hesitant, to look. Jevn arrived as trembling and incredulous as I was, but he reminded me we already knew the options. There wasn’t some brand-new way of dealing with pregnancy, and there was no one to call until we knew what we were going to do.

  I called anyway, frantically, picking a number at random. I needed to say it: I’m pregnant. To hear it, to see it land somewhere and stick. I wanted to speak with a professional in the field and be presented with the full range of options. But the woman on the line wasn’t moved by my urgency and wouldn’t indulge my disbelief. She wanted me to call back when I was prepared to schedule an abortion. I scanned the thin pages and dialed another number. The receptionist invited me to come to the center that afternoon; I could take another test, just to be sure, and someone would be there to help me process it all. It was a Christian ministry, but we could correct for their bias, I told Jevn. I just needed to talk to someone. And that’s how we ended up here.

  I looked at the woman unblinking, waiting for her to flip through her paperwork, admit the mistake, and agree with me: it couldn’t be true. I wanted things to be returned solidly to their proper places, all the softened surfaces filled full again. She put her pamphlets resolutely aside. She said we were a beautiful couple; we should get married and have the baby. I felt Jevn shift as if to get up, but I couldn’t leave yet. This could not be the end of our conversation! I hadn’t even accepted the premise that I was pregnant; I couldn’t admit this conclusion. We’d never even spoken about marriage! Until just days ago, I’d been planning our breakup. Steeling myself for it, speaking it through in my mind, assuring myself it was best. But Jevn was putting on his coat. Reluctantly, I put on mine. We smiled as we shut the door.

  Jevn walked ahead of me across the parking lot to the car. He could fit his entire apartment in that tiny car, his long row of books that lined its perimeter, his perfectly weighted silverware, his Aalto vases, even his bed, which he’d built to come apart
for that purpose. I didn’t know there were cars with heated seats until I met Jevn. I grew up with empty dashboard panels for luxuries I could only imagine.

  I asked him to walk slower, but he was propelled by the forward swinging of his broad shoulders, and I moved my feet just to catch myself from falling. With each step, I divided the future into halves and halves, approaching a moment I hoped to never reach.

  The Yellow Pages were folded behind the windshield. I’d ripped out the whole first chapter and written directions in the margins. We were somewhere in the suburbs, north of the university, near a drive-through bank kitty-corner from a Kohl’s. Jevn drove like he did everything, with a determination that intimidated me. It was December; my seat was on high.

  * * *

  I had certain ideas about what life should look like at my age, thanks to my mother, and they didn’t include a baby. There were just forests of bamboo, clear water and high cliffsides, a dangerous motorbike and wind so strong you couldn’t keep a hairdo—and, most intriguing of all: men who would drink champagne out of your shoe. Glimpses she gave me of her time working overseas before she met my dad. What many years lay ahead of me! What mysteries of the world must unfold before I might find myself in circumstances like those, propping my bike on its stand, slipping off my shoes so the men could drink! Marriage and family might have been somewhere in the hazy distance, but I wasn’t dreaming about them. And that’s why I kept breaking up with Jevn. Committing to a boy meant deciding too many other things about the future. I’d only made it as far north as Cincinnati for college; there wasn’t a place I could think of I didn’t still want to see.

  Dad would pass the phone to Mom whenever the subject turned to romance, but she wasn’t anything like my roommate’s mom my first year of school, who sent her leopard-print underwear in the mail to help her snatch up a man. And so I was nothing like my other roommate, who would cry, curled up on the carpet of her bedroom with her best friend, because, at age twenty-one, no one had yet made them brides. My mother put all boys in one category: they were a phase. Like letting my sister shave one half of my head, like huffing Scotchgard and falling in love with the Karate Kid, boys were a thing I’d look back on, laugh and cover my mouth and not be able to believe I did that. Phases were important, because they’re part of growing up, but my mother didn’t pay much attention to interests of mine she knew would pass. She was already old by the time I was born, she already had white hair and people thought she was my grandmother. Her ambivalence about boys made me embarrassed to care about them at all. It was why I always called them “boys.” She didn’t have to tell me not to waste time with them; she really didn’t have to tell me not to get pregnant.

  * * *

  The top of Jevn’s head almost touched the ceiling of the car. Bending down to see out his side window, he filled its frame like someone who’d been stuffed into a television set. The highway ran along the Mill Creek Valley, which emptied into the Ohio River as it curved around the southern edge of the city. Just on the other side was Kentucky, and, beyond that, the South I was always trying to get away from.

  I’d always feared somehow getting stuck there, becoming one of those girls I used to see in the Kmart parking lot. Girls with stringy long hair who couldn’t carry their own toddlers for their girth and didn’t teach them not to cuss. They emerged wearing flip-flops from long maroon cars with hot vinyl seats, shorts inching asymmetrically up the insides of their thighs while they shopped for microwaves, boxes of Coke, and dirty birthday cards. They were the girls who had the sons who sat on the front porches of half-fallen homes on rural roads that didn’t have curbs, who called at me as I jogged past: “Yewanna run?… We kin make ye’ run.”

  Pure products of the mountains, I grew up among them, I carpooled with them to school in smoke-filled hatchbacks, but I begged for braces to fix the gap between my front teeth so no one in my future would know where I’d come from and send me back. I was an accident, so I knew I didn’t belong in the world at all, but I especially didn’t belong in Tennessee.

  But soon after I got to Cincinnati, I realized it was just an extension of Kentucky, whose southeastern hills wove right back into the mountains of Tennessee. It was like I just couldn’t escape the South, hard as I tried.

  * * *

  We got off the highway and onto the gridded streets of the university neighborhood. As we neared my apartment, I tried to make sense of it. Eight weeks pregnant. Due in July. I tried to work out what it should mean to me by imagining what it might mean to other people. My mother was Catholic, so I knew she’d be disappointed, and could guess at least one option she wouldn’t approve of. And my dad wasn’t anything, but I was pretty sure I knew what he’d say.

  Biiiiiiig bucks!

  He’d lean back and smile with both thumbs up when he said it, as if to say: it must be so much fun to spend money you didn’t work your fingers to the bone to earn! Besides all the lost dreams, the dropping out of school, the flying Confederate flags—having a baby was expensive. And he’d always tried to curb my expensive tastes. He used to tell me that if he let me spend money the way I wanted to, our whole family would end up on the street eating dog food. My siblings were content to be potato-sack bears and old-laundry-basket worms-in-apples, but I wanted a store-bought, trademarked, two-piece vinyl Halloween costume with a plastic mask. I wanted a real Barbie and real Breyer horses. My desire for things knew no bounds. And so my father worked carefully every day to thread a fear of poverty into my most basic wiring.

  What I begged for most was a grand piano. One with keys you could plunge your fingers in like the muddy bottom of a pond; one with worlds to plumb before you sank to somewhere solid. Our piano was an Everett upright that was fine for Christmas carols, but for real music it was just like diving into the shallow end.

  Biiiiiiig bucks meant no, and that that was the end of the conversation. Dad made me get a job at Pizza Plus so I could earn my own grand piano and, he hoped, see what a future in music would really look like—no doubt similar to single motherhood. Poverty always appeared the same way in my imagination: sitting on the curb eating a big bag of dog food, kibble by kibble.

  * * *

  Jevn dropped me off at my apartment. I don’t remember if we said a single word, or if we were both just speechless. It was almost the end of the school term, so we had plenty of things to get back to.

  TWO

  The first time I ever saw him I was shocked by his beauty. Very tall and tan, white-blond hair and shadowy blue eyes. I lost my breath—that first time, and every time I’d see him. I was content to admire him from a distance, but sometimes when he’d come around the corner I’d actually jump in surprise, which only drew his attention. He began to leave things on my desk in studio. Long strips of industrial felt, aluminum tubes with torn ends, crumpled sheets of lead, tiny dunes of broken glass. I don’t know how I knew it was him. He had a name for me, before he knew my name, and he’d say it softly, like an owl, after we’d pass each other in the hallway.

  Wooomb.

  This began after the pumpkin-carving competition in my first architecture studio in college. Jack-o’-lanterns in the manner of famous architects. I picked Louis Kahn, whom I’d never heard of, and read his famous conversation with a brick. The architect asks what the brick wants to be, and the brick responds, “An arch!” It’s one of the most well-known fairy tales in architecture school literature, the point of which is that we should let materials be what they want to be. Bricks do well stacked heavily on top of one another in compression; they do not make good curtain walls, as another famous architect later demonstrated on our very own campus.

  I couldn’t understand why an architect would want to do otherwise, but I resolved to stay true to my material. I opened the pumpkin up like a belly from the side, revealing within it a tall, narrow gourd, which I cut open and splayed to reveal a small, pale white pumpkin. Each fleshy layer revealed the pumpkin-y nature of my pumpkin; each was backlit with candles, and water poole
d in the bottom like a bodily fluid.

  The judges favored the jack-o’-lanterns that had square windows and an architectural sense of structure. More like buildings and less like the midpoint of an open heart surgery. Technically, I was still a piano major.

  Jevn was one of the judges. After that, I’d see him. I’d jump. He’d say, Wooomb.

  * * *

  Then he was there again, recruited to teach my architecture history review sessions, which met only before tests to revisit material our professor had covered in class. But what Jevn liked to talk about instead was architects’ deaths. Borromini fell on his sword, but not as you’d expect. On the long axis of the oval of his chest. Kind of significant, when you think about San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. Right? He would glance around the room. We’d all be mad because it was never the material we were going to be tested on.

  Late one night before a review session, he came into my studio and asked if I was indeed in his class (he supposedly couldn’t remember). He wanted my assistance with a task having to do with slides and projectors. I followed him to his office, the only office belonging to an undergraduate, and after a long pause, he told me I seemed like someone who had a brother. I said I did. Two years older. Mikey. Jevn was reclining in his swivel chair and I was standing in front of his desk. And he just went silent and watched me.

  I remember two other things about that conversation. His using the words reindeer and clouds, and although I’d learned those words many, many years ago, my not knowing what he was talking about. I also remember that I asked him what his favorite book was. It was a dense philosophical text I later read, but at the time I only understood the part about felt. It pointed out that felt, unlike woven textiles, gets its strength not through organized structures but through disorder; tangling. The sociopolitical implications were lost on me, but I took it as a small sign of our connection. My family were sheep farmers, and I’d made felt, rubbing handfuls of raw wool between my palms in soapy water until big clouds of it, piled on the floor and across the kitchen table, became thick fabric. I didn’t understand Jevn, but I knew firsthand about that special resilience born of complex and messy knots. And that seemed like some kind of auspicious starting point.