Atlas muddled through that semester as we all did. It must have been hard for him, passed hand to hand, sometimes in tears, by one caretaker rushing out the door only half together to another breathlessly just home, still half in the library. I thought he would become overly attached to Jill, wail only for her, or worse, for another one of us, but he didn’t. He was content equally with anyone, not just the three of us but also Jason and even Lucas and even Ethan, who still came now and again for dinner, and of course with his many grandparents—Diane and my family—who visited as often as they could but not often enough for Atlas to remember one visit to the next. He learned, I guess, I hope, that someone would always be there to love him though there was no telling who. He must have learned too though that that person would almost certainly be exhausted, often preoccupied, regularly in crisis.
Atlas was the most stable person in the house that semester. Jill was having a crisis of faith regarding her studies and research, Katie regarding the possibilities presented by love, men, and marriage, and me by, well, the two of them. The inability of my roommates to get their lives together drove me to exhaustion. Their undoing by the printed word and the failure of The One to show up on schedule, their inability to consistently get along with each other or make their own meals or maintain their own friendships wore me down. Taking care of Atlas was my joy. But it was also my burden—the fact of it crept slowly into my consciousness and moved in. Like everyone else, it would not leave. I resented Jill’s every activity that was not the studying I had sacrificed my own for. I resented Katie’s obsession with dating, saw through it to the exit strategy it implied. I resented that Jason spent one night a week with us then got to go home. Occasionally, I still resented Daniel though it seemed also that he had dropped out of our story almost entirely. Even his absence, so glaring after he left, so looming for the first weeks after we brought Atlas home, faded almost to airy nothing.
I knew that most of this anger was unfair. I knew that there was nothing I could do about it. I knew that it was interfering with the brief moments I had for uninterrupted, guilt-free work. But I couldn’t make it go away. Jill strayed further and further from school and deeper and deeper into yoga and meditation. I am sure she needed it, and I am sure it helped, but it drove me near to madness to rush home for Atlas and find her sitting placidly in full lotus in the living room, garnering spiritual fulfillment from activities she used to mock me for doing. Katie stayed on top of her work but retreated too into manifest prayer. Church had always been there, of course, but now it was everywhere. She spoke constantly of God and prayer, of His control of all our lives and destinies. Again, I am sure it helped her, brought her peace, saw her through the same struggles I was dealing with, but I found it disingenuous, grating, and besides, I was jealous of the peace it brought her, rendering me none. I would love to think none of this impacted Atlas, but I know that can’t be true. We all tell each other’s stories.
For solace, for sanity, I started running again in earnest. I ran in college but stopped because it hurt my knees, and yoga seemed a much gentler, much more healing sport. Jill was ruining it for me though, and while I knew that yoga would preach all the ways in which Jill’s doing it in the living room was a good thing for both of us, I couldn’t bring myself to a studio to hear it. Whatever it does to your knees, running calms your spirit too. When all you can hear is your breath, your mind can go anywhere or nowhere as it likes. It’s hard to be mad when you’re gasping for air, when your legs are screaming to stop, but nonetheless everything in your body beats in time, pounds together, and carries on, forward and forward.
Running through winter also hastens spring and summer simply because running is the one thing it is enjoyable to do outside in February. Though it is dark and cold inside and out, winter allows you to exercise without being too hot. Which is a good silver lining. And which means that, though every other millimeter of your being is screaming for July, one small part of you (probably your thighs) is content with the slow creep of winter, and since, as everyone knows, nothing prolongs anything quite like your desperation to see it end, running brings an early spring.
Soon enough, there was an end in sight. It is one of the best things about academia—no matter how bad things seem, they end and begin anew every fifteen weeks or so. And you can do anything for fifteen weeks. Never mind that summer would not end Jill’s depression or Katie’s obsession or my anger or Atlas’s muddled family, still it would be a new start, a chance to reevaluate, make a new plan. And whatever else, we wouldn’t be taking classes, which would mean tons more free time comparatively speaking. We’d still have to teach and research and write, but it’s not the same. When you’ve spent as long as we have in school, your body and brain automatically take the summer off.
Also, the coming of summer felt like completing something, like having survived the first round. It reminded me, of course, of last summer when all this started, and though I spent some time with nostalgia for last spring, my own apartment, my own uncomplicated days before all this, it felt so remote as to have been another life. All that chaos and uncertainty had been replaced in the intervening year with the sick feeling of an unsteady truce, a wobbly, barely holding on, desperate balance. But also in the interim year, chaos had become Atlas, and there was no denying the joy of that development. Things were, if not good, better than before. If not easy, making it. As I say, you can do anything at all for fifteen weeks, and so as weeks eight and nine became ten and eleven and twelve, my anger at the situation began to subside if only because soon this situation would be gone, and there’d be a new one in its stead.
One afternoon, I left to go running despite waning sunshine, an ominous sky, and foreboding weather forecasts. It was happening more and more that I simply lost track of everything when I was running—how far, how long, and where, and by the time it was really and truly raining, I was miles from home. It is not true that it always rains in Seattle, and when it does, it’s rarely heavy, more like months and months of soupy drizzle. Torrential downpour is the purview of spring around here. I turned around, hot enough by then to be grateful for the rain, and ran home through what was, soon enough, late spring deluge. The streets and sidewalks became rivers of water, tributaries of which coursed down my hair, over my face, straight through my clothes, and into my skin until I was less jogging than jumping in giant, waterlogged sponges from puddle to puddle like a little kid out playing in the rain. Cars honked. Passengers inside them pointed and laughed at me or looked truly concerned for my sanity and safety, but I was breathless with laughter, hysterical to find myself so wet and still getting wetter, running through water, cleansed and cleansed and cleansed.
And better even still, rare as rainbows, I arrived home finally to a dark, completely empty house. I couldn’t imagine where everyone was, and I couldn’t have cared less. I stood breathing hard and dripping in the middle of my kitchen, listening to nothing, all the lights off, gathering dusk and entrenched rain clouds turning everything an undifferentiated, hidden blue, and considered my options. Taking a bath. Talking uninterrupted and un-overheard on the phone. Cooking dinner just for me. Simplicity matched only by luxury. It had been so long. I hadn’t realized how, more than anything else, I missed this solitude. It’s not selfish to think only of yourself when you’re all alone. I stripped off sopping running clothes and left them in a spreading heap in the middle of the kitchen floor, donned dry sweatpants and sweatshirt, brought junk food to the sofa, and settled into it to watch anything or nothing at all on TV and listen to the rain in the dark all by myself. I closed my eyes and felt muscles I wasn’t even aware of relax for the first time in months.
The glass door to the porch slid open revealing a grinning, dripping, naked Atlas on the hip of a grinning, dripping, naked Jill. She almost dropped him when she saw me.
“You scared me to death!” But she was whispering as if not to break the spell.
“Me too,” I whispered back, shorthand.
“We were playing in the rain,” she explained.
“I got caught running,” I said.
She nodded. Inside, puddles formed around them, and their chill, drenched skin turned bright red. They glowed, slick and shiny, cold and hot. Even in near dark, they were so beautiful I couldn’t take my eyes off them. Atlas laughed still—to be inside again I guess or at his slippery wet mother. Jill laughed too, left over from outside, from the quick scare of seeing me on the sofa, from a little embarrassment at being naked. And then suddenly, she was crying instead, not hard, not loud, not very different from the laughter and the rain except suddenly the water on her face came from inside instead of out.
“I’m so sorry, Janey.” Barely a whisper. “I didn’t know it would be this way. I didn’t know it would be this hard.”
“Me neither,” I breathed back.
“I don’t want to lose you guys.” Into Atlas’s hair as much as anywhere.
“You never could,” I assured her, meaning it.
“I just want so much for him,” she said. “It is worth sacrificing anything—even you, even me—for him to be loved.”
“He always will be. You too. No one’s been sacrificed.”
“Do you think it’ll be okay?” she asked.
I wondered what she meant. Our friendship, her career, my sanity, Atlas’s childhood? “It will be okay,” I promised, whatever it was. “It will. It will all be fine and better than fine,” and added as evidence, “It’s spring.”
She smiled, then grinned, wiped her eyes and nose with one free hand, remembered again that she wasn’t wearing anything, blushed even through her rain-drenched glow.
“Think this is what they mean by naked love?” she asked.
“Must be.” I smiled, still entranced but coming back out of it. “You better get dry and warm before you both get sick,” I said, channeling my grandmother. “I’ll get him dressed while you take a bath. We can have potato pancakes for dinner.” Her favorite. Not mine especially. But it is sometimes not true that the behavior has to shift so much as the attitude. I had to stop being angry more than she and Katie had to change. I had to remember about open, blind, knowing, unreserved, unambiguous, unconditional love—naked love—before any of it could make sense again. I had to find it the many places it hid, drag it out in the open and wrap it all around me, wear it around the house, feel its imprint on my skin, weave it into my hair, let it rain down wet and fresh from the sky before I could feel it, share it, be comfortable in its grasp, and understand, finally, what it all meant, at least this part of it, at least today.