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.
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