They strolled her parents’ patches of tomatoes and sunflowers, Fay and Wright, they discussed the path of a worm. Her love for him arrived late and enormous. The more she practiced she found it was possible: to live one life in your mind, furious and predatory, and another out in the open, quiet and untouched by foresight. On the margins of her devotion was paranoia, a worry that the pamphlets and underground newspapers she read, the hate they scavenged in her, would taint her, so she tried to read only when he was asleep, to speak to him only in the light sounds her mouth had invented the day he was born. It was a voice that knew nothing of children fleeing their homes, ducking under the slant of their thatched roofs on fire, or of the American teenagers who had carved notches into the backs of corpses, placed the removed eyeballs there.
She was sickened by the masculine bark of her country, the sports someone who looked like her could never play, and in some lower register she was delighted by the warmth of her son’s scalp under her hands. She could not imagine a place for herself in the decades to come, and in the long, cool evenings she launched Wright in the air—again was the word he loved—while her parents clapped. If she would never be a wife who waited for a husband in a warm kitchen, she would always be a mother who delighted in the opening of her son’s life. Fay had never made so many promises to herself, never bargained at length with her worst intentions. Shortly after his third birthday, there was an afternoon picnic with his favorite hen, a moody queen of green-gray chevron, when he declared his life’s aspirations. She had to tell him he would not grow up to be a chicken nor marry one. As he sobbed, his earnestness total, she cackled and held him, and though she could crawl inside the complete joy of that minute, she knew she could not stay much longer.
She found the ad in one of her parents’ papers, a humanitarian aid group with outposts along the Amazon, and within two weeks had obtained and returned the application, a few details forged or omitted. Somehow she believed that his presence would disqualify her so she ticked the box that said independent housing preferred (not recommended) and decided she would disclose the fact of her motherhood once they had met her, seen the seriousness of her face. From a chest in the attic she retrieved her old Spanish textbooks, their margins littered with additional vocabulary from the phone calls she’d had with Charlie—a language their parents wouldn’t learn and so the one they’d always communicated in—motherfucker, pubic hair, volcano, criminal, gonorrhea, devotion.
When the letter arrived she read it barefoot outside, two fingers pinched on the raised flag of the mailbox. He was inside with her mother, trying to make a straight blue line on yellow paper.
The next day she told a small lie in order to borrow the car—she wanted to attend a group for young mothers a few towns away—and they were in San Francisco in forty-five minutes flat, Wright made silent by the hills disappearing into the wash of fog. “We’re going to get our passports,” Fay said, her nose at his when she pulled him from the car seat. “Password,” he said. “Pass-port,” she corrected. The word was a gentle indictment of their life in this country, the first promise about their future she made blind.