What We Lose(28)

We winnow one person out of all those we meet and deem sexually attractive and worth several hours of our time. We get to know each other. We decide, against all better judgment, to take on the risk and pair with this person. We like someone. They like us; we stay together, we fuck our brains out, like turns to love. We ignore all the little nuisances of their personalities.

Then trouble intrudes. For some, the relationship flares into violence. Some simply fade out and stop calling; they fall into someone else’s bed. You splinter and you split.

We want to be together. We want to stay. This is our default setting.



We love each other. We are having a baby together. The choices are few, and there is a clearly logical one.





Peter and I marry on a spring day on a Pennsylvania mushroom farm, half an hour west of where I grew up. His mother and father fly in from Portland, along with college friends from California, Hawaii, and Spain.

I allow my father to bring his girlfriend.

Aminah is the only one accompanying me to the altar; I won’t bow to the pressures of tradition and be traded between two men. I wear an ochre gown that I find in a consignment maternity store. It was a bridesmaid’s dress, not a bridal gown. Aminah skins up her face the first time she sees it, but over time, she stops objecting.

I’m so big by this time that I rely on her arm for support. I’m so pregnant I feel dizzy.

Peter looks giddy as I walk down the aisle. I feel swollen and odd. The sun turns his red hair translucent, his suit slightly too large around his shoulders. But there is nothing about him I would change.

Peter’s cousin officiates, and he says only a few words, and then we kiss; we rush out of there, for it’s time to eat. We hurry back down the aisle the way we came, except this time our hands are joined in the air like we’ve just won a game. It’s all joy and celebration, and fast, without hitches—barely time for a pause, just as I designed. There’s no time to cry for who isn’t there.



We name our son Mahpee, after the sky. Our friends and family chide us for the name, and we are embarrassed for how odd and romantic it is, but we don’t take it back. We do shorten it to M. His real name is a keepsake between the two of us.

M has my button nose and Peter’s freckles. His hair starts off smooth and amber colored when he is born, and then falls out, grows back in rough, kinky, and mahogany colored, with flecks of gold sprinkled throughout. If we created a scale between me and Peter, M would be halfway between. There is no way I can look at him without seeing Peter.

Peter and I are happy, and M is too. He is always smiling, even when he is sleeping, and even when he’s fussy, he just kicks his fat little legs, that permanent smile still etched on his pink lips. We can’t stay mad at him. When we’re tired, we grow angry at each other. You made him cry. You made him angry. You fed him too much and made his poop green!

My father learns quickly to be a grandfather. Aminah and Frank threaten to put off their baby-making indefinitely, they are so preoccupied as aunt and uncle. Peter had a hard time leaving Portland, but he likes New York enough. I drain the rest of the money out of my mother’s inheritance and buy us a small, plastic-sided house with a small yard way out in the farther reaches of Queens. The house is musty and the walls are thin, but there’s enough space for all of us without feeling cramped—extremely rare in New York City. Some days, we’re even able to forget how far we are from friends and amusements (what we formerly conceived of as “civilization”), how draining our commutes are. On hard days, we want to leave, but on good days, we feel like we have everything we need.



M sits between us. His favorite move is to link Peter’s fingers in mine, and then, giggling mischievously, crawl behind one of our legs and hide. He does this especially when Peter and I are fighting or distant. There is something about him—he has a sense for knowing which spaces to fill in people. Even if it never helps him on a test or in a game, I will always be proud of him for this.

Every time I touch him I think, how can something be this soft? It is impossible, this feeling of his newness against my coarse fingers. His every bone and skin cell is in a state of formation. He is coming into being before my eyes.

I have also felt sublime terror since he was born. It is impossible to think of him without thinking of his death—when he falls from the couch, when I struggle to hold him after a long day. I imagine him falling from a great height, the terrible sound, the way his body will become foreign with the life gone. I have never wanted someone as much as him and simultaneously been so afraid of that person being taken away.



Aminah’s father has a heart attack. It is his second; the first was three years ago, and he recovered fairly quickly then. This time, though, he is older, weaker. His doctors order him to walk slower, and he has to hook up to an oxygen machine when he is at home.

He starts to recover, to walk around the neighborhood without help, and eventually he drives into the city to visit my father. They go back to watching football again at their favorite bar on Sundays, though he stops short of the Eagles parking lot, which would mean disaster.

Aminah tells me he confided in her that he was shocked by my mother’s death, brought down, and I realize that I’ve noticed a certain light gone from his eyes. He isn’t funny in the wild way that he used to be, telling rude jokes in all manner of company. He is a softer, more quiet man since he saw her go—as we all are—sobered, constitutionally, by the experience.