We Are Unprepared (7 page)

“I think we're getting ahead of ourselves,” Pia said politely.

“Yes, we need to talk about this,” I added. “But what will happen to August for now?”

Bev took a deep breath. She was unsure herself and it struck me just how haphazardly a child's future could be decided. This woman had too much discretion, nice as she was. And none of the answers seemed obvious to a table of adults. I wasn't even sure I understood what the question was.

“I'll let him stay over there for now,” Bev said, “on the condition that you promise me to check in with him every morning and evening. I'm going to be calling you for updates.”

I nodded.

“But we can't do this for long,” she went on. “You've got three months to decide what you want. After that, I'm putting him in a foster family. I don't want him in that house when these storms come. That's not happening.”

Pia and I both nodded. We knew that she was serious. And she was right: August's fate needed to be determined before The Storms came.

We sat silently at the kitchen table for a moment, listening to Bev's car drive away. When there was no chance of her return, I put my head into my hands and yelled, then rubbed my face over and over. Pia walked over and wrapped my head in her arms as she stood above.

“I thought he was dead,” I said into her body.

“I know.”

“I kept seeing these images of him in the woods... It was so bad.”

Pia released me and sat in the closest chair. She nodded in sympathy, which was all I needed her to do. There was nothing else to be said about that horrible day. August was okay.

“How could his parents just lose him like that?” I asked. “The social worker's right. He can't stay in that house.”

Pia drew a reluctant breath. “You want to take him, don't you?”

“Yes. Don't you?”

She breathed again, then shook her head. “I see what you're doing here and you have to stop.”

“What?” I asked.

Her tone was kind, but firmer now. “Don't confuse this situation for a message from the universe about us becoming parents. Don't do that. This isn't serendipity; it's ugly reality. It's a poor kid in a marginally dangerous household. This isn't ours.”

“I'm not doing that,” I said, shocked. I didn't think I was doing that. I wasn't sure.

Pia looked at me kindly, almost pitifully so. “I love that you want to save him and that you think we can. I love that about you. But it's not black-and-white, Ash. This is so much more complicated than what we're equipped for. It can't be solved with love.” She said the last word as one might refer to Santa Claus.

I understood the point she was making, but it seemed irrelevant. “Some of this is perfectly black-and-white, though. He either stays here with us or he goes somewhere else, with people he doesn't know and a million other unknowable variables. There's a deadline and a decision to make. It's not a philosophical difference we're talking about here; it's August's life. He's here or he's somewhere else, probably somewhere worse.”

I suspected that Pia thought this sort of reasoning made me simple and naive. I was okay with that. A problem existed and we could offer a solution. It wouldn't be uncomplicated or easy, but how could we leave this helpless young human to such an uncertain future? It was uncertainty multiplied by uncertainty with the storm looming. And I wasn't suggesting it out of a misguided sense of poetry—to have a child that binds us forever—I was suggesting it because it was right.

“This is the right thing to do,” I said. “You know that it is. It's not a fashionable reason, but it's just the right fucking thing to do and we will always hate ourselves for doing the wrong thing.”

“Oh, don't do that.” Pia shook her head. She had shifted back in her chair, away from me. “Don't be
good
because it makes you feel superior to me. The stakes are way too high for that. You're not considering the very real possibility that we would be terrible parents to this kid. With his upbringing, he probably has special behavioral needs that we know nothing about; and maybe he needs special doctors or schools that cost more than we can afford. Maybe we are the bad option for this poor kid. It's arrogant to assume we're not.”

She was making perfect sense and gaining speed with her strengthening argument. It was true that we probably weren't equipped to handle a traumatized seven-year-old boy. Was that what this was: trauma? I didn't know. Pia was right about all this, but it still made me sick to imagine him alone in a world of strangers who didn't appreciate his specialness. Or worse, people who confused his specialness with dysfunction, something to be fixed and medicated. It got worse and worse as my mind wandered.

“But did you read that think piece, in the
Nation
, I think it was, about how horrible foster care is?” I asked. “All that sexual abuse and fraud. We can't let him go into that.”

“I'm sure it's not all like that,” Pia said. She paused and then seemed to collect herself after a moment of weakness. “Anyhow, it's not a problem that we can solve. That's the point here. All of these options are bad, including us...especially us.”

I stood up and walked to the sink, which was filled with dirty mismatched coffee mugs from the previous three days. A rind of whole wheat crust floated in dirty water. “I don't know. I have to think. We have to decide quickly.”

“Also, who would be the primary caregiver?” she asked. “It can't be me. I have to figure out my career.”

“Yes, you do,” I agreed.

“Well, don't say it with such disdain. It's not a crime to be unemployed and confused.”

I had never heard her describe her situation so honestly.

She went on, “You know, we were told our whole childhoods to find something that we love doing. Major in something we love in college and all that. So I did those things, but then the world changed, and now we have to just do anything that pays. I'm sure I sound like a privileged brat, but I haven't adapted to this new world. I don't want to just do something that pays.”

It
was
privileged and bratty, but Pia was being honest and she looked ashamed by this admission. I didn't want her to have to do something she hated either. For me, it was different. I didn't have a singular passion like she did for art. I was better when I was working and the work could be more broadly defined. I didn't really know the feeling she was describing, but I knew she was sincere about it.

“I'm sorry, honey,” I said. “This is a discussion worth having, but it's a different discussion from the August one.”

“Well, maybe not.” Her shoulders rose and fell. “It's a discussion about what we want to do with our days. I'm telling you I don't know what I want to do with my days and that's not the right way to be thrust into parenthood.”

“Everyone is thrust into parenthood, though.” I didn't mean for it to sound so grim. “I mean, it starts abruptly.”

“A lot of things feel abrupt lately.”

I knew what she meant. We had moved to Vermont only months before with only peaceful daydreams of a more rustic life, and then we learned of The Storms, and now this. Things just kept happening at us.

I stood up and kissed the top of her head. “I hear everything you're saying. Please, just think about this for a few days. I will keep an eye on August for now, but let's keep talking about this, okay?”

“Okay,” she agreed, but her thoughts were already elsewhere.

FIVE

BY MID-OCTOBER
, insomnia had become a regular occurrence. I had always been an easy sleeper, out by eleven most nights and unmoving until dawn. But everything changed that fall when the fear crept into our lives. At first, it was just a few restless nights—I hardly noticed the change—but soon a pattern emerged. And by the time this particular evening rolled around, October 18, I expected one to two hours of generalized anxiety before I had any chance of sleep. My mind jumped back and forth between present dangers and old memories. I tried to dwell on the old stuff, the good stuff.

* * *

“Our kid will be cool,” I said. “Or kids, plural.”

We were lying on our backs in the grass of our backyard, looking up at the clouds. It was the second day in our new Vermont home.

“Yeah, they'll be cool,” Pia agreed. “But not, like, into being cool. They'll just be really great people, but they won't care about the idea of being cool.”

“Right. Smart and funny and fearless.”

“So fearless,” she went on. “They will need to be... The world is changing. Things might be harder for them.”

I remember wondering what she meant by that, but I didn't ask.

“Oh, I'm not worried about our imaginary kids,” I said. “They've overcome every imaginary obstacle they've faced.”

“They're really kicking imaginary ass,” Pia agreed. I could feel her smile beside me.

“They are.”

We laughed and kissed, so pleased with our wit and drunk on our hopeful fantasies.

* * *

I tossed in bed with my gentle memories and emerging concerns. Would the world be different for our kids, I wondered. Of course, it's different for every generation, sometimes easier, occasionally harder. That's just the ebb and flow of humanity, right? Cultural pluralism is winning in America, but California is running out of water. Gay marriage is law, but social mobility is reversing. Is it getting better or worse? And do we have an obligation to consider the conditions our not-yet-conceived children might live under?

Finally, I drifted off, only to be woken again by a clanking.
Bink, bink, bink.
It sounded as though someone was banging on the kitchen sink with a hammer. Oh my God. Pia? She wasn't in bed beside me. Where was she? I reached under the bed for a wood baseball bat that had been signed by Wade Boggs in 1990 and ran downstairs in my boxers. I imagined that someone was breaking in through a window, maybe collecting what little we had of value or, worse, attacking my wife. Though I had been asleep less than a minute before, I could already feel my armpits tingling with sweat and my head pounding audibly. At that moment, only my truest, most elemental feeling about Pia was known to me. It was the feeling of desperate, protective animal love that a parent might have for a child. I was ready to attack, maybe even
kill
someone at the thought of helpless, beautiful Pia being harmed. It's a thrilling feeling—to know that your primal self has not been dormant for so long that you can't transform into an attack dog when you must.

I thudded downstairs with my arm cocked back, ready to strike with the bat at whatever I encountered. But there was no intruder. Pia stood at the kitchen sink in a long, ratty nightgown with a hammer in one hand and a plastic tube in the other. She obviously heard me but didn't acknowledge my arrival.

“What are you doing?” I huffed, still on a breathless high from the sprint downstairs.

She looked frustrated, close to tears, over whatever project was keeping her up at three o'clock in the morning.

“This, this thing!” She waved the tube in front of her, looking near me but not exactly at me. “I have to get it to fit into that other piece, but it's impossible!”

There was a pile of odd parts on the floor beside her, which, according to the empty box nearby, was supposed to be a hand-crank water sterilizer. I noticed that her feet were filthy, as if she'd been walking around outside. I thought I would find a robber or rapist when I ran downstairs, which now seemed like a much less complicated situation. The obsessive, wired woman before me was more frightening.

“You don't have to do this—not now, love,” I said gently. “Let's have a cup of tea and then go to bed.”

To my surprise, she nodded and stepped out of the mess of objects into my arms. I led her by the hand to the couch in the living room, as if a stranger might still be lurking around a corner, and threw a blanket over her while I prepared mint tea for each of us. It was cold downstairs. We had turned the woodstove on earlier that week for the first time, but it had burned out hours before. I focused on making the tea, unsure of whether I was angry or frightened.

It wasn't uncommon for Pia to find inspiration at odd hours or obsess over a project for a few frantic days. Those episodes were exciting for her, but never upsetting. And often they really did produce something inspired, like the time Pia made an entire quilt to hang on the wall in our old apartment. She had taken a workshop in abstract quilting and spent hundreds of dollars at the fabric store. Oddly shaped strips of colorful torn fabric shed threads around the living room for days, until one sleepless night, I awoke to find a striking quilt the size of an entire wall draped around her as she trimmed stray ends. The vibrant colors danced together in an explosive design that looked something like a sunrise. It hung in our apartment for two years, until we moved to Vermont. The quilt was a symbol of Pia's exuberance and artistic gifts. I don't know why we hadn't hung it yet in our new home, but I missed it as we drank tea on the couch. The quilt always helped to explain and excuse the erratic aspects of passionate Pia.

We sat quietly for a while, staring forward at the inert television.

“I'm sorry,” she finally said. “I don't like this about myself. I wish I could change it.”

I hugged her. “I know.”

“I'm just...scared. I can't explain why.”

I wanted to be entirely there for her, to dedicate myself to conquering the internal and external threats that frightened her. But I was scared, too. The future that we'd planned for had been unmoored by the storm reports, and I wanted comfort now, as well. I didn't know where self-care ended and selfishness began or what my obligation to my wife should have been then. I only knew that suddenly I didn't have that selflessness in me. I was afraid, too.

We shivered together under a blanket, each privately fearing the changes afoot.