Jeremy had the sense that he was watching with future retrospection. There was a sense of something having already happened imprinted in the unfolding present, an aura of story, once upon a time. He was not American after all. He was from the part of the world where inevitability was still expected. You were your father’s son. Or at least your mother’s.
The symbols for sounds were black on his screen, bold. When news carried the potential to change your life, it seemed as though it should be served with some physical weight, even if only the weight of a sheet of paper. But that wasn’t what was happening. It came through with the department store coupons and day center memos. He opened the email.
“You’ve been matched,” it said.
He was going to be a father.
Borderless Children, the letter was signed.
The agency communication stated that the child was not a girl, as their preferences had been listed, but he didn’t remember preferences. An image of spiraled metal appeared at the bottom, an attachment. He didn’t want attachment yet, though. He didn’t want to look at the attached photograph of the child. Jeremy didn’t look. If somehow the adoption didn’t go through, there would always be that little face, that face he’d have to remember as the one that should have been his family.
They’d been matched.
He removed his sandwich from a paper bag and laid it on napkins, but his hands were their own animals. Fatherhood rooted you between past and present, walls of time streaming in and out, the people who gave you life and the person to whom life came from you. He could be someone’s history. He could be someone’s fate. They could. They had asked and they had waited. He had waited so long.
“Ham and cheese again?” Lily Framer asked, tapping his cubicle on her way out to buy lunch. “Live a little, Jeremy. Nothing worse than regret.”
He was hoarse with the morning, with the psychoeducational script used at the day treatment center. Who here hears voices? It’s a disease of the brain. There’s no reason why people get it. There’s no reason to it. “Still thinking about the roast beef sandwich that got away?”
“Atlanta, 2006,” Lily said. “It’s why I got into this line of business. You know what they say: therapists become therapists because they want therapy.”
“And that’s working out for you?”
“You’ve known me how long and you’re asking? I’ll see you in group, Jeremy.”
He stared at the sandwich. Someone is offering the impossible life.
His telephone shivered against the desk. It sounded like a quiet automatic. He stared at the words. Matched. He thumbed glass. “Have you looked at the picture?” he asked.
“He’s ours,” Alexandra said.
“I didn’t look. Couldn’t.”
“But we’re doing it, aren’t we? Parenthood.”
He switched the phone between hands, put it to his other ear. He could hear the street surrounding Alexandra, a weave of voices and car noises. The sounds were the same as any other day, but they landed with new weight. “It’s the only clear good thing I could ever come up with.”
“You make a good toast,” she said.
Lily Framer held up fingers expressing dwindling time. He would need to run a harm reduction group.
He said a thing he needed to do. He took the stairs to the room for group. The walls were vibrating with a failing bulb. There was verification in this, the simple motion of ascendance. You decided on one foot and then the other and somehow it meant that you rose in the small hoists. It was not that the room shifted without your motion, and that was a miracle. He turned into a room rimmed with people in folding chairs, nodded, went to the back where Lily was shuffling papers.
“If it isn’t Mr. Ham and Cheese,” she said.
“You know me.”
“You make it easy, Jeremy.”
She was talking. He could see her mouth. She was telling him there were bagels in the break room from the Risperdal drug reps. But the break room seemed very far away when there was his boy. The letter said his name was Han. They would promise to love him. They already did. The feeling was so big it was strange to think that anyone looking at him would not know he was meant to be a father.