I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (24 page)

In the booth at the pizza place, Julia is excited to go home and watch a movie on the big screen upstairs—a comedy. It sounds fun. But once we get in the room, in our chairs, she suggests a movie about a child raised by someone not his mother. It’s no comedy, and I panic, say, “No.” So, Mark scrolls through more movie choices—he’ll buy the one we choose. We all want something funny, but there is only one. A boys’ movie that turns out to be one obscenity after another. Louder on the big screen. It is like being bludgeoned. “Is it okay?” Mark asks. I know they’re embarrassed; I’m embarrassed. We’re trapped in this awkward room. We watch the main character, a famous comedian, have sex with one girl, then another. James Taylor appears at one point, asks the
comedian if he ever gets tired of talking about his dick. We can’t even manage to pick a movie, how can we ever talk about my son? Finally Julia walks out. So, soon after, I do too.

3.

In the morning, when I come down the stairs, the six dogs bark their heads off as if I’m an intruder. Which I am. My aunt and uncle are early risers; I’m late. But they wait to eat breakfast with me at the island in the center of the kitchen, the dogs gone back to sleep in their individual beds arrayed under the big windows. Two dogs sleep next to each other like twins. I’m slow drinking my coffee, and Mark goes upstairs to his office. Julia is on a chair beside me. I ask her fast, I’ve practiced—“Can I talk to you about Tommy?” I know she knows all the words I’ve said, that she’s heard me, but there’s a white space. She says she remembers my asking about him last time, my wanting to talk two years ago. “It’s why I’m here,” I tell her.

One of the dogs is seventeen years old, blind and deaf, covered in long hair—her whole world dark and ending. When she bumps her head into a corner of the kitchen, Julia turns the dog’s body to face another direction. A big dog bumps against me until I pet him.

Julia and I talk over the sink. “I don’t know how you did it,” she says, meaning how I gave him to her. “I was prepared,” she said. She had thought I might change my mind. Julia said she came to me in the hospital, stood next to my bed and said, “He’ll always know who his birth mother is.” She said I said, “Not until he’s eighteen.” And she was surprised. I’m surprised. Why would I have said such a thing? It sounds as though I’m parroting. Like the story of my dad not knowing his father wasn’t his biological
father until he was eighteen. She said it was never a secret where Tommy came from, who his mother was, not to her family. Maybe Mark’s—she looks unsure about that. Wouldn’t she know that? I think that means Mark’s family didn’t know—it was a secret. Why? And why does her face keep changing, as if she’s remembering something, but uncertain how to say it? Tommy’s related by blood to Mark’s family. Why wouldn’t they want to know that? I try to see myself in that hospital bed, Julia standing beside me, but it’s like a movie I glimpsed once, changing channels.

“We never knew who Tommy’s father was, or anything about your situation,” Julia said. I tell her that I’d been engaged before I got pregnant, but fell out of love. That when I’d tried to break up with my fiancé, he’d said, “You’re not trying hard enough.” I didn’t tell her that when I told my ex-fiancé I was pregnant, he tried to convince me to have an abortion, and I wouldn’t. I told her that my ex’s family wanted to adopt my baby, that his mother phoned me and asked, “When will we get our bundle of joy?” I didn’t tell her that he’d stalk me at work and school, follow me to my car. But when I said that I’d finally told him the baby wasn’t his, my aunt smiles like a mother. She smiles in admiration and a kind of surprised pride. “I was ready to go to court and say it,” I tell her. “I didn’t know about DNA.” My aunt said, “They didn’t really have the test then.”

Julia said that Tommy had an earache before Christmas—December 9 or 19. That was when it started. The doctors kept thinking it was a virus. But he didn’t feel good at Christmas, and by New Year’s Eve they knew it was leukemia. She said that they have a beautiful tree in the basement, but that my uncle still doesn’t like to put it up, because Christmas is when Tommy got sick. She said he still won’t talk about Tommy. My son is as present in their lives as he is in mine. That sorrow wasn’t short-term for anyone. It changed us the way cancer changed my son’s DNA.

While we talk, sometimes I still feel as though my face is a mask. But then my aunt says that the next step in my son’s treatment was going to be a bone marrow transplant. That he needed to get a little better first. She tells me, “That’s when you were going to get the call. You were going to be his donor.” Then I cried. I had what he needed. I could have given it to him, helped him, my body could have saved him. But he couldn’t get strong enough for the transplant.

Someone’s in the room next door—it’s Mark. He’d come down the other stairway, been right beside us, unheard. “Did you just come downstairs?” my aunt asks.

“I’ve been here the whole time,” he says. I don’t know what to say.

“I guess I’ll go upstairs,” I say to them.

At the round table I’m just looking out the window. Then someone is rushing through the doorway I can’t see, running toward me. It’s Mark—I know he’s not laughing, but what is he doing? His body looks destabilized, seismic. He’s convulsing like someone being punched in the chest, hunched forward. I try to see his face in the reverberations, but he’s moving so quickly toward me. I can see he’s crying now, shaking. In his hands are envelopes, a giant photo, tapes.

His voice is so loud, as if his words are one on top of another—the same words said over and over. Mark’s arms are around me before I can hear what he’s saying. No one has ever held me so tightly. It’s a shock to matter this much. It isn’t like arms are around me, it’s more like a house, as if he has made a house around me. As he did around Tommy. As I did in Florida when Tommy was sick and I couldn’t go to him, when he was dying, when he died, I made my arms a cradle. When I’d go to sleep at night, I arranged my arms and hands into a bed for him.

Mark says, “I just loved him so much.” It takes a long time to say. I could engrave it, I could carve it in the air. The things in
his hands have been dropped on the table. His arms are still so hard they feel permanent, that even when he lets go, I’ll feel them. I understand that he is holding me and Tommy too. I’m afraid of this much sadness. It’s not kept in a room of his body, it’s his whole body grieving. Maybe he knew what he was doing, keeping it under wraps—who am I to ask him to talk? I hadn’t understood what it had been like for him, for Julia, to hold my son, their son, day after day, touch and hear, to love him in person. And to feel him become thin, sick, see the lost look. It could not have been easy for them to face me. What is it like to lose someone and see them looking back at you in someone else’s face?

My own grief seems to go down deep in the guilt of hurting Mark. Julia will tell me that Mark could do this for me because he loves me. She didn’t know about the drawer with Tommy’s photos. She wondered if Mark would open the drawer when she was at work. Look at the photos by himself. I don’t know who I am that I can be loved this much.

And a weird power comes back too, makes me feel I’ve manipulated Mark and Julia. There’s a mad scientist moment of having them in a kind of thrall. But mostly I’m numb. Why is it such a shock to be loved? Why can I only feel it for a second—a warmth in my chest—before I detach?

Julia said that when we’d been discovered in the kitchen, Mark had said to her, “That was a long talk you were having.”

And Julia had said, “Kelle wants to know about Tommy.” She said that’s when he went to the drawer. Took all the things out and started to hand them to her, saying, “Give these to Kelle.” Then he said, “No, I’ll do it.” And he’d come rushing up the stairs. All of it inside, all these years. And now he’s talking about Tommy because I asked him to, because he loves me. I’m still numb, but it feels as though I’m materializing, like a time traveler. My atoms knitting together in one place.

Before this day, the only pictures I’d seen of my son were in the hospital when he was born, his first few days, and before he died. Only a couple of times in between. But in these envelopes, I find him. Here he is—happy, happy boy smiling at me. Mark holds Tommy to his chest at the beach, the trunk of the car open behind them. In the sun, my son rests against my uncle’s chest. Mark’s hair is long, he’s fit, tan; Tommy is baby chubby, and they lean into each other so contented, relaxed, father and son. Nothing bad has touched them; no inkling of harm. It’s all one happiness. Standing beside me now, the color has gone from my uncle’s hair, lines run like scratches across his cheeks.

I’d thought my son lived in the past in their lives, that now they had the dog hotel, the new house, their friends with whom they went to Ireland, golf and gardening and things from this century. I thought I was alone with the whole of it, my son’s photo sleeping in the house with me. Julia comes up the stairs, into the room. She hands me a gold locket, with Tommy’s picture in it. I feel faraway. Her eyes are very open. It’s her locket—I can’t understand this yet. It’s jewelry, it’s a tiny photo of Tommy that they’d sent to me and my parents at Christmas. He’s in a swing, wearing a sweater that makes him look very strong, like a football player.

“What about the hope chest?” Mark asks. “With Tommy’s things?” It’s in Mansfield. “It’s only forty-five minutes, I’ll go.” And he’s gone.

4.

It’s almost Christmas, 1981. My son, their son, is standing in front of Mark, who holds a stocking that is almost as tall as Tommy. At the top is part of an
O,
an
M
. A snowman smiles midway down. Tommy’s smiling, one hand by his hip, one arm lifted, bent at the
elbow. I can count his fingers. He’s wearing green corduroy overalls, a long-sleeved white shirt with red and green, white baby shoes. I can only smile when I look at him—he is so happy. Bright eyes.

Tommy is on a horse, holding the wooden handles above the horse’s head. He has a dark jacket on over red pants like pajamas, a butterfly shape at one knee, green socks. Someone is holding him steady. Children play in the wallpaper behind him. His face is serious, looking at the photographer. It is my face too. I am looking into my eyes, his eyes. If this is Christmas, he is already sick.

Another smiling photo—the warm red pants, white socks with his feet turned out, a white shirt with red stripes, and the word COWBOY in navy repeated over and over. A gigantic stuffed dog three times his size is just behind him. He’s looking up with his bright eyes again, smiling.

In his playpen, four fingers in his smiling mouth, his other hand in motion as if he’s about to wave. His fingers long like mine. Strawberry blond hair curling. Red shirt, blue. Bunny lying down. One finger pointing. He looks as though he’s having fun. Laughing.

Sitting on the back of a giant real dog, both of them on a couch. Tommy reaching one hand out to touch the dog’s neck, one leg over the front of the resting dog. Wearing his cowboy shirt with the green overalls.

Earlier, October, 1981. He’s seven months old. Sitting on my uncle’s lap. Mark has his arms around Tommy, who has one leg outstretched on Mark’s thigh, one falling between. In his hands, my uncle holds a small pumpkin, carved with a smile. Tommy holds the top of the pumpkin. One palm is outstretched near one of the pumpkin’s eyes as if petting it. He’s in light blue pajamas with feet. Beautiful. Julia told me about a psychic she listens to, reads. All this time, I thought she’d been gardening. I know what she’s doing now, looking for a door.

Tommy’s drinking from a bottle, sitting in a high chair with a
yellow tray. Eyes happy, smiling. Now he’s riding a Snoopy dog. Holding on to the train conductor’s hat, feet on the carpet. His eyes so dark blue, flushed. Here Tommy looks like no one but himself, so beautiful I stop breathing. He looks lost. I would take off my body for him right now. Detach my bones, hand them over. He’s not feeling well here, an indention near his eye, at his temple. There’s confusion, sadness. He just got here, and now he’s already going.

Tommy never learned to talk—never said any actual words. Julia said, “When he would have been learning, developing, he was fighting to live.” There is a birthday photo I don’t recognize, because he is tiny, thin, blond hair gone. He looks older and smaller at the same time, hand lifted to his chest, fingers in, smiling with his mouth closed, other hand reaching again. Julia has him in her arms, big smile, hand on Mark’s hand. Tommy has an aqua blanket on his knees. My grandmother is smiling, sitting next to them. He’s one year old. Almost gone. His eyes are very very blue.

There is a yellow balloon above Mark’s head that says, “Happy Birthday Tom.” “Did you call him Tom?” I ask.

“Yes,” Julia says. “Tom-Tom.” It’s a shock to me, not knowing what name he was called. Tom.

Mark had come back with his arms full of bags. “I didn’t open any of it—I just took it all.” He placed it all on the dining room table. A speeding ticket in his hand. Just a warning. Julia with me at the table. Mark standing behind us. There is a clown at the party, cake, pointy hats. Tommy is sitting in Julia’s lap smiling and laughing. I said, “He looks so happy even though he’s sick.”

“He was always like that,” Julia said.

When she opens the Baby Book, Julia gasps. “There might not be much in here,” she’d started to say, and then we see it is almost full. His first smile is two or two and a half months. His first laugh
is four or four and a half months. His first incisor. “Which tooth is an incisor?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” Julia says, almost laughing. Because it was gone and now it’s back—he’s here, he’s cutting a tooth. There’s a favorite foods question, and one of the answers is “Beef.”

And I say, “Beef?!”

And Mark or Julia says, “Yes, you know, in the little jars.” It’s a little funny because I’m a vegetarian, and they are slightly defensive about this. There’s a medical history page. Julia points to “Dec 9” (or 19?) with the handwritten “earache.” She says, “This is where it started.” She says it was AML, acute myeloid leukemia, like the guy supposedly had in the awful movie we’d watched.