Early Draft Excerpt: The Snowblower part II

Here's a second part of some of the work I wrote while at Hedgebrook this month!

Do you want to see more excerpts? Y/N

Thank you again for supporting me and my work! Love, Na Mee

The Snowblower, excerpt part 2

Chapter # 

In retrospect, I don’t know why my dad came with me to the airport. I was a grown woman, sort of, and I knew how to drive to an airport, park at an airport, and wait at the gate for my lover to return. Maybe he wasn’t there? My dad I mean. Maybe I remember him there, because I wanted him there, but maybe the oldest truth is I was alone. Sometimes you can be so alone even your memory takes pity on you, throws you a bone.

* * *

Me, Sunwoo, and my dad. We wait at the gate for a long time.  Long enough for all the passengers from one plane to trickle out, then herd, then trickle, then stop. Eventually, no one else is coming through the gate. 

I call Fernando. No answer

Maybe he’s downstairs, someone says, and by someone I mean me or my dad who was there or possibly not there. We walk down to baggage claim. I’m carrying my baby in the front, the baby my lover and I made. The baby is quiet. He has my eyes, which at this moment are wide and uncomprehending. He has his father’s smile, which at this moment is absent.

The lover is not at baggage claim. That is, I don’t see him, and so I am scanning the room and the next room over, and every wall, and the ceiling and the floor and each body that is not his body, the doors the trim the corners. Maybe he was here and he left? 

I call Fernando. No answer

The conveyor belt is still rotating. There is one bag, which at first I don’t notice. I don’t notice the bag because I’m not looking for a bag; I am looking for my lover, my baby’s dad.

Is this his? my dad says, and he means the bag. My dad looks at me. I am my dad’s baby. I don’t have his eyes or his smile. What I have is his heart, the kind we don’t want anyone to see breaking. What I have is, quietly and desperately needing everything to work out. So yeah, my dad lifts the bag off the belt and says nothing.  

I call Fernando 

Chapter # 

No answer 

Chapter # 

My new theory is he was detained at the airport. Possibly deported. Definitely being held against his will. Definitely out of phone range or out of range of his phone. I call the airport, all the airports, I scan the newspapers, police blotters. I don’t call who you think I should call because what if I’m wrong. I don’t want to rock the boat. I try to row quickly, quietly. I try to be still. I hold our son and pretend to be the kind of mom whose baby daddy doesn’t disappear. I cry all the time. The baby stops smiling. 

I’m sorry. I was new at this

What did I do who did I call what did I type in the search bar, I can’t fully remember

The steps were fleeting.

Chapter # 

We’re at my parent’s house for dinner. SunWoo and I. My dad has begun to call SunWoo Sunny. 

Sunny! my dad calls out to him, as though Sunny is on the next mountain over. Sunny is in his arms. Sunny! he says again, the word like an echo, bouncing off the baby. 

Sunny, like a place. Sunny, like a reason to go outside. Sunny, like a side you can look on, a choice. Sunny, I try, from the other side of the couch. Sunny turns his face towards me. He does not know his new nickname, but he knows my voice. The knowing brings me back. 

Another thing about this age is the startle reflex. If a baby is startled by a loud sound or sudden movement, the baby becomes a starfish and stretches its arms and legs. And then the baby pulls everything back in, like an umbrella closing. Sometimes a baby can cry so much that the sound of its own cries will cause this reflex. Like this, your own echo can startle you. 

When I was SunWoo’s age, I was still with my birthmother.  

I reach out to SunWoo 

and he holds my finger

At this age, a baby is very good at holding on. At this age, a baby does not know how to let go.

Chapter # 

A year later which may have been one week or three, Fernando calls me. Caller ID identifies him as Unknown. 

He’s in jail, he says. They picked him up at the airport, he says. It’s because he missed court dates before. Not this court date, a different court date. Yes I guess you can go to jail for that, he says. 

I knew it! I think, relief like a break in the storm. I found him. He’s here. Calm water is like a mirror. I reflect. Everything he says makes sense.

  * * *

It just doesn’t quite make sense, my mom says everyone says

We are shopping at the thrift store, a weekly ritual. I am carrying SunWoo on my back; looking at the baby clothes. 

Dad says he looked up the court records, and there is no record of Fernando, she adds. 

Oh that’s because he uses a lot of names. He probably won’t show up as Fernando, I reply, tapping my way though the used onesies. The onesies look fresh. New.

Why does he use a lot of names? my mom asks, looking directly at me, briefly. That doesn’t make sense, she says, the umbrella of her gaze closing, now eyeing whatever is below my eye level, some jackets. 

It’s, like, a thing, so he can get more jobs, I say. So Dad probably won’t be able to find him in the court records, I shrug. It’s a circular rack. I’m back where I started. 

I consider a tiny blue onesie. It looks like it’s barely been worn. They grow so fast at this age; barely enough time to wear something twice. I don’t know how long Fernando is going to be in jail, and the thought smacks me like a sudden gust of wind. How much is he going to miss? 1-3 months? 3-6 months? 12-18? What size will SunWoo be the next time his dad holds him

* * *

Mom asks what other names Fernando uses and I relay the ones I know. Just the first names, not the family ones, which seems odd to everyone else except me. Listen. Our love was wildfire. Blazing and unbothered and wide. A brand of passion that does not care what the last name of your fake name was. We both had family names we used and didn’t use. What was more pure than being part stranger?

* * *

Next week, when we shop again, Mom doesn’t report back about whether or not Dad found Fernando’s fake names in the court records. What she tells me is that Dad says when Fernando returns, he is not allowed in their house. 

When she tells me this, we are in the car, driving away from the thrift store. We are bringing home things other people used to love.

My mouth opens, looking for a place to root. I feel betrayed. I feel betrayed by my dad. How could he not believe what I believe, which is that Fernando would not lie about this, would not leave us? How could he think Fernando would leave me. 

How could he say that? I sob to my mom, who is pretending I am not crying.

My mom looks ahead. Through the windshield, into the traffic, the sea, the past. For years her silence could shatter me, like calling out to a mother who won’t turn around.

Later I will know how impossible it is to see your child suffer and not take their suffering away. The impossibility can make you play dead. But for a long time, including now, her silence can feel like she’s refusing to throw the rope. Or worse, like she herself pushed me overboard. 

Of course, my mom and dad are not the ones who betrayed me. Even in my dingy memory, they were beside me. Even in their unskillful and unlikely ways. They were simply the ones who knew what an abandoned child looks like. 

They should know, because they cared for one. 

Chapter #

If you and your lover have two different cell phones on the same service, you can create an online account for both. Logging in, you can see each service period, designated by dates. Available to you is a downloadable detailed report of that service period’s call records. Every incoming and outgoing call, the date, the time. It is a pdf. You can print it.

I wish I didn’t know this. I wish I didn’t try to find this. I wish I was not the kind of woman who stares into the eyes of her computer and claws at it, starving, but I am. I pick at each line of the pdf, like raw meat hanging on the thinnest of bones. 

I am breathy and gaunt. When I find the dates I’m looking for - the date he disappeared through today - I see the fat I’m after: lines and lines of numbers, phone calls Fernando made and received with his cell phone. I want to chew them off the paper with my teeth, but I don’t move. I blink. 

I always thought the thousand yard stare meant your body is here but your stare is a thousand yards in front of you. What I know now is that your stare is right here, but your body is a thousand yards behind you. It is a younger you. A brittle, smaller you. You, in hiding. 

For days, I tell no one about the phone logs. I don’t make a sound

Chapter # 

When SunWoo naps, he naps for exactly 90 minutes, as consistent as phases of the moon. Seriously! I can plan my day around it. Awake he does freakishly adorable things like attempt to lift his head and turn it and open his mouth and close it and lay on the floor and kick his legs like a river dancer. But when he sleeps, he sleeps for 90 minutes, and it is so exact I can almost set a timer. He is what everyone calls an easy baby. He barely fusses, he eats lots, he seems to like literally everything. He sleeps through the night; we both do. We sleep like babies. 

I don’t tell other moms this, because it makes them jealous. Their babies are tiny heathens who scream all day and all night and who puke in their mother’s hair and beg for the food but won’t eat it; this is what they tell me. The gods of parenting are fair, says one mom to all the moms, as she wipes her baby’s spit off her sweatshirt. She says if teething is hard now, your baby will talk with no problem. If they never sleep now, then potty training will be a breeze. The gods of parenting sound reasonable. Only one hard thing at a time.

The gods of parenting are taking it easy on me since everything else is hard. Fernando has been gone for almost a month. SunWoo is almost two months old. So far motherhood is breathtaking and cruel. And, because of SunWoo’s 90 minute sleep cycles, motherhood is, I don’t know how else to put this, organized.

In those 90 minutes of quiet, I do things like fold laundry and cry and use google to reverse look up the phone numbers on Fernando’s call log. One of them is a McDonald’s in the suburbs, where, I think, his ex works. 

Is this Gema? I ask during SunWoo’s next 90 minute nap time. 

Who is this? says Gema.

Who are we? 

She is the mother of Fernando’s daughters; I am the mother of his son. 

Only a thousand yards between us