“He’s my baby,” Jill interrupted.
“Yeah, now he is. Now that you have someone else to babysit—”
“Dan isn’t babysitting. He’s the father.”
“Now that you have someone else to pick up the slack and support your nervous breakdowns and your mood swings, someone else to rearrange his life to take care of your responsibilities, someone else to do diapers and go to Atlas when he wakes up in the middle of the night and pick him up when he wakes up in the morning before dawn.”
“You’re getting married the day after tomorrow,” said Jill. “You weren’t sticking around anyway.”
“You are deluding yourself,” said Katie, “if you think that we wouldn’t have rented a house right in the neighborhood, taken late shifts and early shifts, continued to arrange our lives around all of our schedules so we could keep taking care of Atlas.”
“He’s our baby too, Jill,” I added. “Just because we didn’t give birth to him doesn’t mean that isn’t true. You know this. I wasn’t trying to keep him from you. He was sick. He needed his mother. I was the mother that was there. It wasn’t even a lie. That’s good parenting, not bad parenting. It’s what he needed so it’s what I did.”
“The only person thinking about taking a baby,” Katie said to Jill, “was you.”
Jill said nothing. She looked dark. Then she said very, very quietly, “I had a chance to get Daniel back.” And then, even more quietly, “We have a chance to be a real family.”
“We were a real family,” Katie and I said simultaneously. And Katie added, “You’re the only one who seems not to have noticed.”
Thirty-nine
Summer one’s final project is a creative assignment. During regular term, everyone’s brains are fried with final exams and the ends of four or five classes and a zillion other worries, none of them conducive to creativity. But during summer session, students aren’t also taking calculus and chemistry and Latin American history, so they can dedicate all of their brain power to making meaning of their own. And Seattle summer is enchanting, inspiring; there’s something magic about all that sun, all that long daylight. It enkindles creativity. I give them lots of choices—a few poems, a short story, a one-act, an essay, the start of a screenplay or novel. But mostly I get memoir, sometimes cloaked as something else but their own stories nonetheless. They think their lives are epic—and maybe they are, maybe all our lives are—and so they take the opportunity to get it all down.
I had missed a lot of time with these students. In recompense, whether in the spirit of guilt or solidarity, I have tried as well. Hence this story—my Summer One final exam. Somewhere between memoir, autobiography, literary theory, and pedagogical treatise, but isn’t everything?
Last days are always a little bit sad. They are mostly joyful—I was about to have almost two months off—but even in the worst of classes, there are a few students you will miss. In this case, I was going to miss the whole bunch of them. Everyone shared snippets of their writing projects—read a poem or a chapter, an excerpt of an in-progress memoir or part of a short story. A couple of them cajoled classmates into performing part of a screenplay or one-act. It was amazing, not because they were all brilliant—they were varying levels of decent and not, rough drafts all of course—but because they were all so personal and heartfelt and dramatic. My students were right; their lives—or the lives they imagined—were epic, full of drama, full of plot. It wasn’t just me. Many of them had had a crazy five weeks.
Last days also, of course, inspire reflection. I looked back with them on the five weeks we’d spent together and wondered at all that had changed, wondered, in fact, at how little had stayed the same.
I met Ethan on the steps outside, after all the goodbyes, just as we had on the first day of class.
“How’d it go?” I asked.
“Fine. I gave a lecture on the import of the study of history, reflected on what we learned in the course of human progress through the five hundred or so years we covered. You know, big-picture stuff. How about you?”
“Same.”
“Really?”
“Everyone read excerpts from their creative writing projects.”
“How is that the same?”
“It’s the point of literature. What’s changed. What we’ve learned.”
“Interesting,” mused Ethan. “Well, I can’t give you five hundred years, but I can give you five weeks. What have you learned?”
“Me?”
“Everyone.”
I thought about this. “Katie learned how to plan a last-minute wedding, a skill I’m sure she’ll use again and again.”
“Jason and Lucas learned crisis parenting,” Ethan offered. “A skill they probably will use again and again.”
“My grandmother learned to predict the future.”
Ethan smiled. “Peter learned what he’s in for.”
“You too,” I said.
“Yeah, me too.”
“Jill learned she’s mean and insane. She learned she doesn’t care about me or trust me or even really like me.”
“I don’t think that’s quite it.”
“What about you?” I asked.
“I learned I do care about you and trust you. I even really like you,” said Ethan. We sat quietly, eyes closed against the sun, legs leaning lightly against one another’s, hands touching but not holding. “You?” he asked quietly after a long time.
“That,” I said. “And, in the last thirty seconds or so, that it’s warranted.” He smiled again. “And some other stuff I haven’t quite figured out yet.”
“Atlas?” he asked.
I laughed and also teared up a little. “Atlas learned to make bubbles with his spit. He learned he likes wedding cake. He learned to chew blocks. He learned to bang on things with other things. He met his father. His lost his great-grandmother. He lost me and Katie. It’s been quite a five weeks for Atlas.”
“For Atlas,” Ethan agreed, “it’s only the beginning.”
Ethan walked me home. Then Katie and I spent the afternoon on the phone making last-minute arrangements, answering questions for friends, giving relatives directions, reminding caterers about various dietary restrictions, and finding something blue. At some point, we realized we were starved.
“We should just carry out of somewhere,” I said.
“No,” said Katie, suddenly horrified. “You have to teach me how to cook. Before I get married.”
“I tried,” I reminded her. “You weren’t really interested.”
“I didn’t really want to learn how to cook back then. I just said I did. Really, I just wanted to be friends with you and Jill.”
“Seriously?”
“Of course.”
“Can Peter cook?”
“I have no idea,” she said blankly. And then under her breath, a little giggly, “I’ve only known him for a few weeks.”
“You’re not going far, and you’re only getting married, not turning into a new person. I’ll teach you how to cook next week.”