Heather was skinny when she had her baby, irreconcilably skinny for the fact that she was pregnant and reasonably healthy. The nine months leading up to the birthday were a time of very little growth, physically or emotionally--for her anyway. Obviously Jack did more growing in that time than he ever would again, except the year he turned 14 and had to pretend he was 18 in order to prove--well, his name wasn't really Jack, either, it was Stanley, a name as skinny as his mother, but no one knew it because she gave him away when he was 5 minutes old, after holding him once and bursting into tears because he was deformed.
In fact, he was not deformed, but no one would ever tell him that. Somehow Heather, in her post-labor hysteria, managed to hallucinate that her baby had no eyes. What a nightmare! She passed him off as quickly as she could without throwing him to the nurse, who cleaned him up and lay him to rest in an incubator, doctor's orders.
Maybe Heather's faux pas was a result of some kind of drug (although Jack seemed fine). Or maybe she was just not cut out to be a mother. She could easily have passed for his ten-year-old sister.
In later years she would increasingly wonder what happened to her little eyeless baby, and sometimes even wonder if hers was the right reaction. As reactions go, it was arguably not the most caring, or well-grounded. Sometimes it's best to go with your first impulse.
And so baby Jack was left as soon as he got here, which perhaps brought his expectations down to a reasonable level as soon as possible.
In fact, he had very large eyes, very large blue eyes indeed, how Heather missed them--
Jack's eyes were a beautiful baby blue, the color only a baby's could be, and they were wide and solemn. Soon they changed to brown but their large wideness remained, as if he could see and comprehend exceptionally well for a 2-week-old. At that age the brown eyed boy had reached his projected birthday and the nurses celebrated by sending him home with a family whose son had passed before meeting his brother, born two minutes earlier. The stillborn's name was Aidan.
Given Jack's (and Heather's) shaky medical records, it is unclear how Jack ended up in Aidan's place at the Simons' house, suddenly endowed with a twin brother and parents who loved him simply because he was alive.
Before he had time to acclimate to his new home, where he spent the first night under a black and white mobile with the letters AIDAN hanging from it, waiting to be batted and learned, Jack was whisked away again. This time it was because, as he might learn later, his poor father had shown up at the hospital not two hours after the Simons had left. Really! Exhausted, sweaty, caked with dust, Joel Samson collapsed upon hearing the news, in a dramatic exclamation point to his impromptu journey across several continents. Because after hearing, much too late, that his seed had indeed brought forth a tiny life from a slip named Heather, he had immediately bought a plane ticket and then alternately sat and stood up on a second-by-second basis, legs shaking, hand massaging face, for the several days until his flight left from Accra, capital city of Ghana, West Africa. Joel had decided in a previous life (not Jack's) that the jubilee-celebrating country of Ghana, having been liberated in 1958, was a good place to sort out all his problems. Ironically, it was another woman who had sent him there in the first place, several months earlier, when she told him she was pregnant with his twins. (Not pregnant--Jessi was a compulsive liar. Even more ironically, her compulsiveness meant she had not even completed the thought when the beginning and middle were in Joel's ear. Incidentally, the beginning of his thought of Africa formed at the same time as the end of hers.) It was not until he was in Heathrow airport that she called and told him the truth, but when she found out his itinerary she screamed bloody murder and dumped him. So he decided he might as well go to Ghana, at least until she was out of the apartment.
On a whim one day in Accra, he had turned into an Internet cafe, having about an hour before he had agreed to meet his friend Kwame for a beer. In his inbox he was mildly surprised to find a note from Heather's roommate Delia, a florist with scary round eyes who had always been nice to Joel, the few times he'd met her--even helping him arrange his bedroom so that the pigeon droppings would not blow onto his pillow and his karmic energy would not clog the bathroom--saying that Heather had just gone into labor, and had just as recently divulged a) the pregnancy and b) its cause. Delia just thought Joel should know.
And so Joel found himself pacing the cement outside Kwame's rich uncle's house until he lost count of the nights. The airplane was no less frenzied but at least British Airways served free alcohol. Headachey and incredulous, Joel passed a nine hour layover in Heathrow scavenging the stores for a suitable baby gift (whether for Heather or the baby it was not determined), before he realized he had 100 cedis and 2 dollars but no f-ing pounds. He finally slept on the plane to JFK but woke to find they'd been delayed 5 hours and hadn't left England yet.
Eddie Fontaine picked him up from the airport and tried to get him to clean and shave and eat and sleep before meeting his new family, but Joel insisted. Heather was nowhere to be seen and the baby, he was duly informed, was safe with a foster family. Having not eaten or changed clothes for almost four days when he collapsed, he was a right mess and the same nurses obligingly made up a bed for him, where he spent the night. Eddie came through again the following morning (luckily a Saturday), and by doing so convinced Joel that had to go home, clean up, and approach this the right way.
"Oh, sorry," mumbled Joel, head down, as he went to step around her.
"Oh--it's okay--I mean, hi Joel," said Lisa, who knew who Joel was, partly because he ran into her all the time.
They lived in the same apartment building, and had for a couple years now, a fact of which Joel was completely unaware. Lisa didn't mind. She was shy anyway, and could do with one less person trying to engage her in small talk in the hallway everyday. But she liked Joel.
Joel was an imperfect person and he knew it. It seemed to him that he really could not be any other way, given his genetic makeup and chancy upbringing; of course, those didn't affect his future, so conceivably he could be any way he wanted, but they determined his actions of the past, which he knew one should not cry over anyway. And the future was constantly slipping into the past, like sand through the thin part of an hourglass, or the land rushing beneath you on a plane, so fast and irretrievable it was hard to tell which moment was where. As soon as you see the Nile, he reasoned, you are over it and there's nothing to be done about it. He hadn't flown over the Nile on his way to Ghana but he knew this to be true because rivers are thin, not unlike the neck of an hourglass, and planes are fast, not unlike life. For Joel, there was no present, only the future whizzing by him into the cesspool of history. Or, the present was the whizzing sound it made.
Ever since he had pulled Jack, who he loved so passionately, into his life, he had been wishing desperately to have a present.
Lisa, on the other hand, had no Jack to speak of and possessed a very different view of time. For instance, she was constantly amazed at how much faster time passes when you are a grown-up than when you are a child, for whom one day stretches out like a summer vacation. To her, the present is all there is; she imagined time like an inscrutable map laid out on an enormous table, over which one pores with a magnifying glass, and because the map is so staggeringly large, made larger by the magnifying glass, and because we can only look through the magnifying glass, bent low over the table, we never see what the map is of--but if we could step back, we would. The present is the circle of the magnifying glass.
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