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One of the greater joys in life is when, before kissing you goodnight and turning the light off, your dad makes Rabbit have heated discussions with one or several of the other fluffy creatures, who live alongside Rabbit in a crowded community at the foot of your bed. Mostly it's about which stuffed animal will be permitted to take which stuffed animal out dancing, but now and then they plan a heist like robbing a Build-A-Bear or going berserk in a s'mores factory.
Some of the animals you’ve named, some your dad named—at this point in time you can’t recall which one of you came up with what. Your dad makes the voices for all of the animals however, you’ve tried providing a voice but you’re never quite as sure what they want to be saying as he is. Now and then he’ll put someone like Ragamuffin D. Chimp in your clammy little hand and Rabbit will ask him, “Whaddya say, pal? Let’s blow this popsicle stand!” and Ragamuffin D. Chimp will simply stare at Rabbit and then fall over while you break into peals of laughter above them.
“Popsicles should be distributed equally amongst the people, not frivolously exploded,” Ninotchka - who is by birth a noble pig but by heart a fastidious idealist - says, matter-of-factly in her thick accent. You don’t really understand what this says about her as a person or even, as it may be, a plush toy pig, but there are a lot of things you don’t understand about your stuffed animals. “Unless it is to thwart the capitalist machine, of course.”
“Yes!” you say.
“No,” Rabbit says. “There ain’t no popsicles—it’s only an expression. You know what an expression is, dontcha, Mila? Tell Ninotchka.”
“An espresson is when someone says something and it sounds funny because it’s weird and you don’t understand it because it’s not what it means it’s something else and that’s what an espresson is.”
“Expressions are a waste of time that could be spent tilling earth and overthrowing regimes,” Ninotchka says.
-o-
This show is stupid. All the boys are unfunny nonsense talkers and they haven’t been horseback riding for at least half an hour. You want to watch cartoons but if you voice that will, you’ll be found out as a nuisance: the authorities will realize it’s way past your bedtime and you’ll be deported from the couch straight into the prison that is your room at nighttime.
The lady gives out all the roses and one boy is left without, meaning the show is over; the boy without a rose will grudgingly be on his way back where he came from, and similarly, you’ll be grudgingly on your way to bed, where you came from. This morning.
“She made the right call,” your dad muses, nodding to himself and more perfunctory, to you—giving you a perfectly legitimate opportunity to start a conversation.
"Daddy. Where did I come from?"
You say this with emphasis on every word, aiming a stern look your dad’s way because now is the time for answers. This is serious.
You have been mulling this over for a while now, at least judging by your standards, without finding any at all reasonable explanations. More than anything, this whole business has shone a light on the many gaps in your knowledge you never before realized were there.
You know that other children usually don't have only two daddies.
Most children have one dad and one mom, some have one mom, one dad, and another mom or dad who's only sort of their real and actual parent, but not entirely. Even grownups have one of each parent-type most of the time, only maybe there's just one of them left now because eventually someone will die or move to Nebraska. Then there's Molly who has two moms. She's kind of a novelty, like you.
"Um," your dad says, like he's not really listening, or would rather talk about something else. He scratches his hair but continues to watch the television even though there’s commercials on and he hates those. His hair is blonde and short, it’s nothing like your hair. Molly’s hair is big and curly, like her mom’s. You wonder why that is.
He looks at you with a blank face.
"What," he says, and you wait for him to continue but when he pretends the both of you have forgotten about the conversation, you ask again.
"Where did I come from? The baby Brooklyn-”
“Beautiful baby name,” your dad interrupts. He’s back to watching the commercials.
“-came from Peyton's belly," you explain, thinking about your neighbor having gotten fatter every time you saw her, to one day turn up being practically her original size once again, and with a baby hanging off her shoulder. Your dad doesn't seem to understand that there's a connection there. "Molly came from Rosemary's belly - but which belly am I from?" You poke your dad in the stomach. "From yours?"
You don’t remember your dad ever being fat, not fatter than he is now, anyway, but then—would you?
"Um," your dad says again. "Actually," he starts and screws his face up, as he does when he's thinking really hard on something. "We kind of—found you," he tells you, finally, and you feel none the wiser.
"Where?" you say, and wonder—is this an alternative way of acquiring a baby? You just go outside looking for one to take home. Maybe you can chance upon them on the street or in the park. Maybe there’s a special store somewhere. There are places that sell baby things, but you’ve yet to see one with actual babies in the storefront window.
"...in a building...that had...collapsed, somewhat."
“What?” you say, because that doesn’t sound right at all.
"What the hell, Steve?" your other dad says, poking his head out from their bedroom.
"What?" your dad says, sourly now. He doesn't like to be reprimanded. You can relate. "That's what happened."
-o-
“Mila,” your dad says. “Let me tell you how we got you.”
-o-
Daddy has fallen asleep on the kitchen table. When he wakes up, there's a puzzle piece stuck to his cheek. You laugh in his face - he's so silly sometimes - and he looks at you, confused and possibly already annoyed.
"Where's your dad?" he asks, sounding sleepy still.
Your hand flies up immediately to point at him. He huffs and blows the hair out of his face, the puzzle piece falls off—now you can clearly see he’s annoyed and you snicker about it while retrieving the fallen puzzle piece.
"The other one, smarty-pants."
You don’t remember, so you don’t answer. You get on with trying to fit puzzle pieces together so that it’ll make a (goddamn) picture already.
“Did he go out?”
“Maybe,”
Your dad gets up and starts searching the apartment. The phone on the table lights up, but it’s on silent. You don’t pay it any mind. You vaguely hear your dad question the state of your dress, because you’re still in your pajamas, but you don’t pay him any mind either. The front door opens and you hear your lost dad’s voice—you don’t care. But then you hear another voice. A low voice, a flat tone that you recognize, that makes your stomach flip in excitement.
The puzzle is abandoned without a second thought. Most of it falls to the floor as you scramble off the chair in a hurry to get to the hallway.
“Nat,” you say, slightly breathless. You were not expecting this.
Nat kneels and let’s you hug her. “Hello, Lyudmila,” she says, then unclings you from herself to hold your face in both hands. “Why aren’t you dressed yet?”
Oh, right. That.
“I told you to put your clothes on before I left!” your dad says, and you suppose that might be true, it sounds like something he would say—but that sort of thing hasn’t got the same gravitas coming from his mouth.
You desist from commenting and instead, like any reasonable person would, continue to address the real important presence in the room.
“I saw a rat eat nachos! Yesterday!” It wasn’t exactly yesterday, but anyway- (maybe it wasn’t a rat so much as it was a dog) it’s still a good story and you’re off to a decent start.
“Oh. My. God. You have to tell me all about that later,” Nat says as she’s pulling off her boots, and by God, you will. You will tell her with even further embellishments.
“Nat, come look at my rocks!” You attempt to drag her by the arm into your-room-slash-the-house-geology-section.
“Not now,” Nat tells you, not moving an iota of an inch because she’s a rock. An amazing rock, better than all the crap rocks in your collection. “I have to go see your dad. The cute one.”
Your not cute and no longer lost dad makes an affronted noise and goes into the kitchen. There’s nothing for you to do but follow him forlornly and lie down on the floor in front of the sink. You watch him pull stuff out of the refrigerator, start chopping things up and opening containers and cracking eggs. You stretch your arms out and he almost trips over you on his back and forth route between fridge and countertop.
You like watching him make food. There’s something compelling in following his complete focus, utterly absorbed in what he’s doing—now and again seeing him lose his train of thought and stop dead in the middle of a movement. Flailing around, going this way and that. Your dad cooks with a real sense of urgency, and you appreciate that, especially from an idle vantage point such as the floor.
“You’re in the way,” your dad says and scoots you away with his foot. You laugh and try to grab onto it, only managing to snag his sock for a second. He grumbles your name as he opens the oven door and puts the food in. “Go get dressed already!”
Gosh! You’re about to! you think.
Later.
-o-
You start out very small, like a tiny, tiny flower seed. It’s so small you can’t even see it without a microscope, and even if you could you wouldn’t because the whole thing takes place inside someone’s belly. That’s where you grow, like the seed in the dark earth in the pot in the window. You stay in there until you’re ready to pop out.
That’s how you’re born.
After that, well. Who knows what can happen.
-o-
“That’s a beautiful name for a baby,” your dad is saying, looking adoringly at Peyton’s baby, touching the baby’s bundled up little foot. Smiling.
You think the baby is moderately cute, but also a bit unnerving. She looks like a toy almost, but the most squishy and fragile toy on this God’s green earth. You feel like you have to be careful merely looking at her, no sudden movements. No loud noises.
“Tell that to my husband,” Peyton scoffs. “He thought we might as well name her Joisey—after New Jersey.”
All three grownups laugh uproariously like they couldn’t dream to imagine to think of a more ridiculous name.
Then your dad suddenly looks a little worried. “But your husband’s not from New Jersey though, is he?” he says. He stops touching the baby.
“Are you kidding me? No!” Peyton says, sounding almost offended. “He’s from Milwaukee, the poor bastard. Oops!” She covers her mouth and catches your eye for a second. “Sorry…!” she whispers to your dads. They wave it off. Whatever ‘it’ was. Maybe you’re not supposed to say Milwaukee. Maybe it’s like saying Hell.
“Isn’t she cute, Mila?” your dad asks you in the other language. Your language. He’s standing a little bit farther away with you, like he too might be afraid of damaging the baby just by breathing wrong.
“Yes,” you answer, not entirely sure if he means Peyton or Brooklyn. He picks you up so you sit on his metal arm. You hold onto a handful of his hair with one hand and the front of his jacket with the other. From your perch you can see the baby more clearly: her wrinkly and dissatisfied looking face, her clenching baby fists, and you think, yes, he must’ve meant Peyton.
“You were almost that small when we first got you,” your dad tells you in a confidential way, face close to yours, looking at you as you look at the baby.
That sounds highly unlikely to you. It’s one thing being told you start out like a tiny little blob, smaller than a grain of salt, and accepting that as how it must be since it’s your own dad giving you this information. It’s a whole other thing to actually look at a tiny blob doll of a baby and accept that that was you, earlier. You were once that size and shade of vivid pink only you’ll never remember the experience. No. This doesn’t sit right with you at all.
You nod your head nonetheless at your dad so as not to cause a meltdown of the entire world and he gives your cheek a quick kiss, happy to have your unsuspecting agreement.
-o-
Today is Nat Day, as it turns out.
You can never be sure when Nat Day will happen—much like the weather, it is a completely unpredictable phenomenon and no amount of science can help you determine when it will next occur. Your Nat takes you on day trips to the pool, or to the zoo, and sometimes she stays in with you to watch a funny movie or teach you important life skills, while your dads go away and do whatever it is dads do when they’re away.
You guess maybe they discipline unruly aliens or impolite robots more often than not. Maybe they just sit around holding hands like the bozos they are, who knows, really. They’ll be alright—they even said so themselves. And one of your dads has metal for an arm. You literally can’t bite into that, no matter how hard you try. And you’ve tried.
“Nat.”
You pull at Nat’s jacket. She snatches it out of your hand.
“Nat. Nat, Nat, Nat, Nat. Nat.” You attempt to jump high enough in front of her to be in her line of vision, but you’ve somehow overestimated your own jumping ability. Huh. Weird. Next you hold your breath and stare at her without blinking - that works with some people - but even in that amazingly vast span of time, Nat does not acknowledge you.
This is when you’ve almost given up. Your head sags and you look away—just then you whisper “...Nat...” and finally, finally! She answers.
“Did you say something?” she says in the other language, to make it a little harder for you to understand.
“Did you know,” you say, in English, but she looks displeased and so you continue in the other language. “That I wasn’t in my dad’s stomach? At first? They found me.”
“Which dad?” Nat asks, completely missing the point of what you’re saying.
“Two.”
“Right. Well,” Nat guides you to sit and motions you to undo your shoes. “I do know. I was with them, when they found you.”
“Nobody knows where I was first—I was in the building, then it collapsed all over the place, so nobody knows.”
“Yeah. It’s tough.” Nat pats you on your head. You don’t really like being patted on the head but you like it when Nat is sweet.
Your shoes have been replaced with ice skates. Nat puts on her skates, and then the two of you get on the ice. You’ve gone skating before, with your daddies, but never with Nat and never in the city. Being an opportunist and at your core a true athlete, you realize now is your time to shine—and impress the H-E-L out of Nat.
But Nat is obviously not familiar with your level of twizzling seeing as she takes your hand as soon as you step into the rink.
On the one hand, Nat is holding your hand and that’s a highly favorable outcome, but on the other, you would like to show off your radical skills and that means being a free-flung, icy, rogue planet.
The two of you go a couple of laps around the rink, Nat holding you steady all the while. It’s quite crowded but the clusters of merry skaters part like the Red Sea as Nat and you come gliding through. You know that this has nothing to do with you and everything to do with Nat, and you hope that her sea-parting abilities will rub off on you simply through proximity.
“Nice footwork, Lyuda,” Nat tells you. “Now straighten your posture, don’t hang off my arm.” She shakes your hand a bit and thankfully you don’t fall on your face. Nat pulls back your helmet somewhat and wouldn’t you know it, that helps a lot with the everything.
“Let go,” you pant.
“You sure?”
“Let go!”
Nat slides away from you and stands to the side, leaning against the railing and looking as cool and insouciant as a hockey player on TV.
“Show me what you got.”
You reach far and try to go the fastest you’ve ever gone. You swish past her one way and then another, and after that, once you’ve caught your breath for a few seconds, you show off your pirouettes.
Nat is an integral part of your athletic development, this she has explained to you and you can’t but agree. That’s why accomplishments like pirouettes become vitally important to you when she’s in the audience. Your dads want you to simmer down and not blow your wig—because they don’t always recognize the integrality of Nat’s part, or even the part where you undergo athletic developments. You love your Nat. Nat is definitely your best friend—even though you don’t see her all that often and she never plays with you unless it’s for educational purposes like practising marksmanship or hiding to spy on people and then jump out and scare them. Nat’s from the same place you’re from, approximately. That’s why she talks in the other language with you, like your dad does, sometimes.
Nat is a grownup. She’s friends with your dads, she speaks the other language, she was there when they found you… The math checks out—she could, hypothetically, be your mom.
You get ready to do a groundbreaking, ground level quadruple when you see that Nat’s not paying attention to you because she’s on the phone. You’re forced to lose your balance and hurt your knee to win her back.
“You okay, Milyushka kasa lapyi?” Nat says with more insouciance than you care for in this particular knee-hurting moment. She doesn’t even look up from her phone. If your dad were here, either one of them, they’d be all over you—asking you if you’re alive, if you need a medic, if you need ice cream: STAT. Well, maybe not exactly that. But they would help you up.
Nat wants hot chocolate and needless to say, as do you, so the two of you go to the nearest vendor then circle back and watch the other, less talented people, skate while you drink.
You love Nat, but you don’t want Nat to be your mom. You don’t want her to pick you up from school everyday instead of your dad, and you don’t want her to tuck you in at night instead of your other dad. Sometimes would be okay. If she did it sometimes, like a surprise, that would be neat. Just not all the time.
You can’t be best friends with your mom.
“You did really well out there today,” Nat says and glances at you to the side. You’re not aware if you’re smiling at her like you want to be, or just staring. Nat looks away, at the skaters, at the paper cup in her hand. “Was it fun?”
You nod.
“High five,” Nat says and holds her hand up near your face. You look at her hand and forget what she said so you lean in and kiss her palm: it seems right.
Nat makes a face. “Okay…” she says slowly, and wipes her hand on her jeans. “Let’s get you to the Tower, the snot police is waiting.”
You see them as the elevator doors open and JARVIS tells you you’ve arrived, one with the hand on the other’s back, rubbing gently.
"DADDY!" you holler and they both turn around at the same time to smile at you.
-o-
Daddy is hiding under the table. You want to believe it’s because he’s playing, but another, more logical - albeit very underdeveloped - part of you can guess at what’s really going on.
Sometimes, your dad get’s scared for no apparent reason. Sometimes a noise will startle him - that, oftentimes, you can anticipate - but more often it will be something happening inside his head. something only he knows about.
“Hello,” you tell your dad and smile at him, to make him feel better. You’re not sure if he’s noticed you. After a while he asks you—
“Mila, where is your dad? Where’s Steve?”
“He went to the store, we have to have granola—for breakfast. He said he’ll be back soon and you said okay.” As you explain this, your dad seems to get sadder. He grimaces, then nods along to what you’re saying.
“Right. I know, I remember.”
“Do you want to play Go Fish?”
“In a bit.”
You settle on the floor and put your hands in the big pocket on the front of your sweater. you fiddle with the toy car you’re carrying around there, then you take it out of your pocket and drive it around some. You drive it along your legs and up your left arm, then up into the air, like it’s made a big jump. Then you drive it on the floor, outlining your dad’s legs, like he’s a mountain. You drive the little toy car up the mountain, it surges over your dad’s bent head - you have to lean on his knee to reach - the car scrapes against the underside of the table - and then it swoops down your dad’s metal arm.
Your dad lifts you onto his lap and hugs you very tightly.
-o-
You hear your daddies whispering over the sound of the priest.
“Aaand she’s asleep.”
“What? She napped just before we left!”
You’re not really asleep, you’re mostly resting your eyes and trying to tune out the droning voice of the priest because like most boys who talk a lot, he’s a real bore.
“As if you enjoyed this shit at her age.”
“Bucky.”
“Shit,” you mumble.
“Mila...!” your dads say, and you keep your eyes closed as you smirk.
After church you get a bearclaw. It’s tasty and sounds dangerous and cuddly at the same time. You growl as you eat it. You wish you had five more.
“Did you like mass today, Mila? Did you listen to what the priest was saying?”
“No,” you say, and stuff your face full of pastry.
“Okay then,” your dad says, nodding. That was not what he wanted to hear, you can tell. Oh well. Behind you, your second dad’s snorted so loud he’s started coughing.
Figuring you’re in his good graces, you turn around to venture a vital question. “Can I have more? Bearclaw?” you say. “Please?” you add, and hope he didn’t notice the lapse.
“No,” is the answer.
You growl.
Later you make a den out of all the pillows in the apartment. It collapses on you because you’re not in hibernation mode just yet. You rise from the ruins with a beastly roar. No collapsing house can stop you. You prowl the apartment, looking for berries and small animals to prey on. The berries you find in the jar of granola, the small animals are harder to come by, but you do see a bird outside in the tree and you hurry to the window to paw at the glass menacingly.
“Stop licking the window, Mila.”
You don’t understand his human speak, so you press your mouth to the pane and make a fart noise. Even bears think that’s hilarious, but your dad glares at you with an angry frown.
Wow.
Humans have no sense of humor.
When you’re all tucked in and nearly asleep, you think maybe you are a bear? If no one’s seen your mother, she could be anyone. She could be the coffee shop lady, she could be a mermaid. She could be Peyton. Your real name might be New Jersey.
What would your dads say if they knew? A bear, they might accept. But a child named New Jersey…? (New Jersey is Milwaukee on earth. It’s the worst!)
-o-
You tell Molly about this conundrum.
“You didn’t come from your dad’s belly?” She looks astonished. “The blonde one?”
You reconfirm that no, apparently this is not the case. Nobody knows whose belly you’re from.
“Maybe you came from a big egg,” Molly suggests gleefully. “That an alien put here.” Molly’s eyes go wide, then abruptly narrow. she’s imagining something spectacular. “A big, slimey, alien egg. That makes you an alien.”
“No way,” you protest, but how can you be sure? Molly is right about a lot of stuff. This could be accounted by the fact that she talks a lot, often repeating specific things she’s heard others proclaim with conviction, things like “The caucus race is a farce and it doesn’t take an Olympic medalist to know that much!” or “Kale might be good for you, but that’s what they said about radium fifty years ago”—but you don’t realize this quite yet.
“You could be a crazy alien monster!” Molly says and she’s even scaring herself now. “What if you take off all your skin before you go to bed? What if you eat my whole head when I look away!?”
You insist that you wouldn’t—you would never eat an entire head. Especially not Molly’s! Christ. But Molly has been spooked by her own speculations, and she needs some space from you.
You feel alone.
“You got the blues, baby?” your dad asks you the following evening, after a long and lackluster day of playing by your lonesome self. Even Rabbit is unsuccessful in his attempts to cheer you up. You gaze into Ninotchka’s deep, black eyes and feel a kind of kinship with her, now more than ever. She never laughs at Rabbit’s jokes either.
“What if my mom is a weird, crazy, slimey alien?”
“I really don’t think so.”
“How do you know!”
“Well, does it matter, if she is? You’re still you. Your dad and I, we’d still love you the same.”
“If I was a bear?” you demand, because surely there are limits. Surely a bear would wreck this apartment and poop everywhere once she realized her mistaken identity.
“You’d still be our baby bear.”
You're not in the right frame of mind to take that for what it is. “I don’t want to be an alien,” you say sourly.
“Come on. It’s not so bad. Thor’s an alien, and you love him.” True. Thor is incredible the same way Grand Canyon is incredible, you can’t really begin to fathom it until it’s right in front of you, and even then it’s unreal. “And you’re slimey all the time, and it never seems to bother you.”
Excuse you?
“Am not!”
“Am too!” your dad says and wipes your face with his hand, then wipes his hand on your bedsheets.
-o-
First, you’re a little seed in the earth. Well first, broadly speaking, there needs to be two people—but that’s not important right now so let’s skip that part.
First, you’re in the dark. Dark like it’s nighttime, all day round. You would think there would be light, shining in from the bellybutton, like the keyhole in a door, but no. Apparently not. The bellybutton is where the cord goes: on the baby. The cord with nutrients. Food. Like bearclaws, but if you ate them through a straw with your bellybutton.
In the dark, in your mother’s belly, you wait. You eat, you sleep, you poop, you wait. You try to grow as much as possible, so that when you come out, you’re healthy and strong and can pick up where you left off in your eat-sleep-poop routine, with added wailing. And even though you’re out of your mother’s belly, she keeps you close, really close. She feeds you, she rocks you in her arms when you’re crying. She washes you in the sink, kisses your whole face, blows raspberries on your belly to see your smile and hear your laugh.
She takes care of you, always—even when you think you're all grown up and don't need her to, she takes care of you. Until she can’t anymore.
-o-
“There was a fight, in a city with lots and lots of people in it. Folks had come from all over the world to visit, because the city was having a big event that year, a World Fair. Well, the fight started because a bunch had holed up in the mountains in secret, and made plans to hurt the people at the World Fair, that way everyone in the city would be busy helping them and the ones who’d been hiding in the mountain could steal something important. They thought they were real clever but we found out about the plan, and we went there to stop them.
"We wanted to draw them away from the crowds - there were so many people there, it was as bad as Manhattan on freakin’ Halloween - but it’s never as easy as that. They were really dangerous, these people, and they wrecked a lot of buildings and so did we, trying to catch them. But there was some room to have it out, around a factory that had been shut down. Some of the guys went into the factory, so the building didn’t do so well, in fact—it mostly collapsed, like Stevie said. But we caught them in the end and they didn’t get to hurt all the folks at the fair, or steal the thing, but there was a lot of damage still and even though a whole lot of people had been saved, a lot had been injured and even killed, too.
"The roof of the factory had caved in, and so had most of the upper floors. There was a massive hole in the front of the building, and everything had kind of tipped towards it. Stevie and I stood there and waited, and I looked at the ruins and into the hole where you could see straight through the second floor, and there were papers and ash blowing around in the wind, and dust and snow and smoke too; and I thought to myself how upset everyone would be, with all the destruction. And I thought about wanting to go home, because I didn’t want to see all those people being sad about it—that made me sad, and I felt selfish and I just wanted to go home and hide.
"But we had to wait there, and while we waited I heard something—something that sounded like a little animal wailing, and it came from the upstairs: the second floor.
"And I found you there, in a room that tilted so that everything had fallen over, even you had ended up on the floor—but you were okay, you were wrapped up in so much fabric to keep warm, it had cushioned your fall. I almost couldn’t believe it at first, I thought maybe I was- dreaming. Then I picked you up and you looked at me and cried and wrapped your itsy-bitsy hand around my finger and I climbed down with you, out of the factory. I couldn’t hear anything but your complainin’, I barely remembered where I was. I just stood outside with you, holding you very close to me and rocking you until you calmed down.
"But then. I got scared, the way I get,” he locks eyes with you, you don’t say anything but you know what he means. “And I told Stevie to take you, but you know how clumsy he is. I thought maybe he’d drop you on accident, or squeeze you too tight, so I kept an eye out all the while.
"And that’s how it was. We got back home, to New York, and we still had you—we didn’t know then, how long we’d get to keep you. You weren’t ours yet. And I kept my eye on you all the time. I looked at you, and looked at you. Eventually I held you again; and I didn’t want to at first- because we thought- I thought we’d have to give you up to someone else sooner or later. So then I was feeding you and getting you to sleep and talking to you all day, and you were real difficult about it; you were so tiny, like a newborn even though you were more’n two months old when we found you. You didn’t eat so good, seemed to spit most of it out as I recall, and that drove me crazy. And you could scream for hours, which also drove me crazy. But… I mean. I thought that I could do that, take care of you and then, and then, give you to some other parents, real parents. Or maybe we’d find your mom and we’d give you back to her. I thought I could do that, but I already knew you, and it was already too late. Staring into your eyes every day, seeing you smile or cry and blow drool bubbles—I realized after a while that I don’t know what I’d do without you. I wanted to know what you’d say when you learned to talk, I wanted to know all the things you’d grow up to do, I wanted to know what your singing voice sounds like, if you’d ever play baseball, what your face will look like when you’re all grown up.”
He strokes your hair, your cheek, and your rapt face breaks into a smile. “Our baby girl,” your dad says and you fall asleep like that, feeling right at home.
-o-
“So, Jackie told me Molly’s taken to calling them ‘White Mom’ and ‘Black Mom’.”
Your dad’s hand stops on its way to shovel cereal into his mouth, you can see a shadowy silhouette of yourself reflected in his arm as it’s held perfectly still.
“Wow,” is all he says.
“I feel like… I mean, when she said it, it sounded like maybe she suspects us of having given her the idea.”
“No way,” your dad says around the food in his mouth. You’re not allowed to talk with your mouth full, but your dads are lawless in the morning, they can’t do nothing quite right. “No way—she knows the kid she’s raisin’, she can’t be jumping to conclusions just because we’re,” he glances at you. “Old, or something.”
Your other dad only shakes his head and starts in on his sandwich.
“Jackie’s not even white!” your dad says and points the spoon like it’s a remote control. “It doesn’t even make sense!”
“You know how kids are. They don’t make much sense,” your dad says and then turns to you, sandwich half-gone already, “no offense, honey.”
Offense taken, lunkhead. You make an angry face at him but he doesn’t see.
“No, but—that’s what I’m saying.” He’s pouring more milk into his bowl for another portion of cereal. They’ve already had lots of scrambled eggs and bacon and bread and bananas and coffee. You’re doing your level best to finish your yoghourt—breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Also lunch, dinner and all the snacks in-between, according to your dad. “Take this cuckoo-head, she doesn’t make a distinction at all between us.”
You think, maybe, he’s talking about you, but you’re not entirely sure—your focus is mainly on trying to hear the cartoon that’s still running beyond your line of sight..
“That one’s kinda on us though,” your dad says.
“Pfft,” your dad answers.
When he’s finished his sandwich he leans back in the chair with his coffeecup poised to drink. “How fff- flipping flipped up isn’t it though, that a four-year-old-”
“Five,” your dad interjects between crunching cereal sounds.
“-five-year-old is categorizing her parents like that. I thought we had it bad, but holy shhh-”
“-Shiva.”
“Change is slow going. Slower than…”
“Than molasses in Siberia.”
Your sentiment on the subject is that could they shut their (goddamn) pie holes for one (...goddamn...) minute so you can hear what Mojo Jojo is saying to the Powerpuff Girls.
(Goddamn.)
You’re too busy to tell them off but the irritation is there, simmering in your arms and legs for the remainder of breakfast.
-o-
Miss Blake is talking to your dad about how everything is good and nothing bad has happened and how you haven’t had an episode of sudden, extended crying this entire week. Last week you had a bad time of it after seeing a video of a capybara nonchalantly chewing grass that was so perfect, it made the inside of your teeth itch and your eyes fill up with tears, because your dads say you’re too young to have a pet—even the likes of a turtle or a small fish. If you had a capybara you would name it Nat and you would sleep on top of it and you would feed it mini marshmallows Every. Day.
Now your dad is nodding along politely in a manner he almost never takes with you when you’re explaining things, such as your demands and the potential property damage that could come from not abiding by them.
“That’s good,” he says and Miss Blake agrees. “That everything’s… good.”
Miss Blake smiles brightly at him.
The closer your dad gets to the school, the more stiff and awkward he becomes. Usually you come outside to the gates and he’s there waiting. Sometimes kids or teachers or passersby are there fawning over him, but nowadays most people have gotten used to his presence. Your dad is nice and everything, but you don’t really understand why people are so keen to talk to him all the time. He’s not all that charming, to put it politely—he’s no capybara.
Your dad is holding you like his shield, trying to inch his way toward the door. This happens a lot when he’s inside the school building.
Miss Blake graciously doesn’t mention it—instead she tells him about the bake sale the older kids are having to end child hunger, which reminds you that you want cake.
Miss Blake is young—younger than most adults you know, yet in possession of great wisdom and even greater patience. She is of a towering height and her hair is blonde, like your dad’s—and in your mind’s eye she’s almost glowing, like jellyfish, or a crate full of lemons. Even though you can’t read more than your full name and a tiny handful other things, and you’re not all that great at counting since you tend to skip a few numbers here and there—she tells you you’re smart, she tells you you’re impressive because you know two languages and how to do a somersault.
Miss Blake doesn’t have children, but you’re sure she would make a more-than-okay mom. She certainly is tall enough for the job, you’ve assured her of this. But Miss Blake says she has so many kids already, since she sees you and the others almost every day. She says she might not ever decide to be a mom—even though all the children are great, she’s not sure she’ll ever have her own. You’ve never thought of it that way; it’s hard to wrap your head around. Being an adult and not having a baby, ever. But come to think of it, you know plenty of childless adults. Tony Idiot Stark doesn’t have any. Nat doesn’t have any. Sam Falcon doesn’t have any.
...aren’t they waiting though? For their turn?
Your dad wishes Miss Blake a good weekend, and Miss Blake says to take care.
The two of you walk home even though it takes approximately 17 hours: you walk until you get tired or too slow for your dad’s liking, then he picks you up and carries you the rest of the way. You clamp yourself to his back like a kid koala, you lean your head against his neck, you watch the people pass, the shops, the cars. Sometimes you fall asleep like that. Sometimes your dad gets you ice cream, and he doesn’t say anything when it drips on his shirt. He tells you not to tell your dad you got sweets, because he doesn’t like you eating too much sugar.
“It was hot out!” your dad defends himself when your other dad finds out.
“So give her water!” your cheapskate dad says.
Today’s too cold for ice cream, (you know this because you asked for it yesterday as well as the three days leading up to yesterday.) You enjoy this routine. Always walking home, unless the weather’s unbearable. A couple of kids have asked you why your dad doesn’t have a car. Is he poor because he doesn’t have a job? Does he not know how to drive? They want to know if you’ve ever taken the subway. (You have, you inform them, scoffing. Lots.) They feel sorry for you, that your dad doesn’t have a job, that you have to walk all the way home like in the olden days. You don’t know what days those were. It’s always been like this, ever since you started school—for all you know, it’ll be like this until you graduate. Your dad’s always warm, he smells nice. If your clammy Mary Janes chafe against your feet, he takes them off and carries them with one finger through the loops. When he sees a dog he lets go of your leg and points to it so you don’t miss it.
“Who d’you think lives there?” he might ask, and point to a window or a balcony high up somewhere.
“LeBron lives there.”
“What kind of pet do they have?”
“Alligator,” you say.
If you feel like it, or if he’s being Particularly Insistent, you give your dad the lowdown and relate to him the events of the day, where some details are more accurate than others, but on the whole not very consistent with that thing people call reality.
Sometimes he calls you out and asks stuff like, “But didn’t you go to the library after lunch? Wasn’t today library day?” So you have to revise your story and tell him things about the library. Like what books were read and by whom and what the story was about and how many pages it was and what compliments and praise you received from the librarians and Miss Blake and even the janitor in regards to your impeccable conduct.
Days like this one, where there’s a chill in the air but no bite to it, and the sidewalk is calm and sparsely populated, the two of you are content to be mostly quiet. You’re still thinking about cake, but also - a bit distantly - about hungry children. Your dads went hungry sometimes as children. There just wasn’t enough food always. This one, whose back you’re on, was the poorest, because he didn’t even get a cake on his birthday sometimes. And that’s devastating. But apparently, it’s just how things were back then. Maybe those were the olden days you’ve heard of. But then, how come kids are baking for hungry children still? Why aren’t parents taking care of these children?
“Daddy,” you say, looking at the side of his face. “Where did your mom live?”
“She lived with me,” your dad says and stops to wait for the light at the crosswalk. “In Brooklyn.”
You bite his jacket and let go a few times while you both wait.
“She’s in heaven now?” you ask: to confirm. You don’t always remember the particulars of things.
“Yeah, that’s right, sweetheart. She’s in heaven with my dad, and Bucky’s parents, too.”
“Is my mom in heaven?”
Your dad is silent as you cross the street.
“We’re not- we’re not sure where your ma is,” your dad says eventually. “She might be in heaven. We don’t know.”
“Okay,” you say. You suppose it’s not so bad, if she’s there with the rest of them.
“You know,” your dad starts and squeezes your legs. You’re almost home now. You’re passing the park where you play on weekends. Up ahead is the coffee shop where your dad gets coffee if he oversleeps and misses breakfast before taking you to school. “I never knew my father. I never met him once.”
You don’t understand how that’s possible.
“But. When you were in the belly. How.”
“Oh yeah,” your dad chuckles. “When I was still in my ma’s belly, he met me then, sort of. But I never saw his face, only in photographs.”
Your dad has slowed his pace. You reach up to pluck a dry leaf from the shedding branches above your heads. You put it in his hair; he shakes his head but it doesn’t fall off right away. You snicker.
“A lot of people have it like that, you know, Mila?”
You don’t really know. You sort of know. Everyone has a different constellation of family members. Some have a sister, some don’t. Some have a father, some have two. But moms. Moms are in abundance, you see at least thirteen moms a day. But nobody knows who’s yours.
“We don’t all got one mom and one dad.”
“Yes, I know,” you say, a bit put upon—you’ve heard this line many times over in your short life.
“My ma. She was.” He’s sounding a bit distracted. Probably scrunching his face up. You feel around for it on his face but he pushes your hand away. “My ma worked very hard. She didn’t have it easy. For a long time, she was all that I had. My whole family, before I met Bucky.”
“Mhm...” You yawn. You’re feeling sleepy and hungry, but for now you’re still content to listen to your dad’s voice as he talks.
“I think, maybe, that’s what it was like for you and your mother, when you were together. Then Bucky found you, only he couldn’t find your ma.”
“Okay,” you mumble.
“Don’t fall asleep Mila. We’re five seconds from home.”
“Okay,” you say, but your eyes are closed and you're drooling on his jacket.
-o-
“Come here, look.”
Your dad motions you over by jerking his head like a horse. He has a shoebox in his lap, and when you peek over its rim you see that it’s full of translucent papers, papers with photographs tacked on them. He flips through the papers carefully and unfastens one of the photos. It’s a little woman and a little boy standing on a stoop. They look little because their clothes are too big for them, and they don’t take up much room at all in the photo.
“Can you guess who that is?” your dad whispers—because it’s still very early, and he doesn’t want to wake your sleeping dad.
You consider him for a moment, then consider the little boy in the photo. Supposedly, it’s someone the both of you know… otherwise, why would he be asking in that way, with that look. Maybe it’s Jeremy in second grade? His hair is almost white it’s so blonde, and he’s got big ears. Does your dad know Jeremy in second grade? He never talks about him. But then you notice how the boy in the photo is frowning almost like he doesn’t know he’s doing it, and you realize it’s your dad. The one sitting next to you on the couch, that one. From when he was a hungry child.
“That’s you!” you say, muffled halfway by your dad’s hand because you forgot to be quiet. He gives you a meaningful look and you bite your lips to appear contrite.
“And that’s my ma,” he says and points to the little woman. She looks serious, like little boy dad does, but she does wear a faint smile, and her eyebrows aren’t drawn together in a frown. You look at her white face, her white hands clasped in front of her, her black shoes. The photo is in black and white, you can’t see much detail. Her nose is barely visible, her mouth only a thin line. Your eyes drift to the little boy dad figure. He stands on the step below, his hands are at his sides, like he doesn’t know what to do with them. His shoes look funny.
“That’s in front of Bucky’s house,” your dad tells you. There’s not much to see of the house, mostly the stoop and some of the brick wall, part of the dark door. “I think this was Thanksgiving, or maybe… maybe it wasn’t. I can’t remember. She does have her nice skirt on though.”
Your idea of a nice skirt has far more tulle and far less gray, but you don’t argue. Your dad is looking at the photograph in his hand, but he doesn’t look happy. Seeing him like that has something unpleasant turn in your stomach, like ice bobbing around in a glass of soda.
You stroke his hair. “Don’t be sad,” you say, and after moment he turns his head and kisses your arm. “I’ll make you breakfast,” you tell him in the same instant the brilliant idea congeals in your head.
“You’re gonna make breakfast?” he asks and the corners of his mouth curl upward but it doesn’t look quite right.
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
You go to the kitchen and drag a chair over to the top cabinets, your dad tsks and sighs but doesn’t stop you. You climb the chair and take out one bowl for your dad, close the cabinet only to open it again and take out another for yourself as well. The (slight!) ruckus wakes your sleeping dad.
Well, what can you do—you’ve got to make some omelettes to break some bread.
You get a third bowl. You get the yoghourt and the granola - and as a treat, some cocoa powder - and you mix it together until it looks like gluey, gray porridge. Mmm, delicious. Exactly like Nat makes it.
Making breakfast has you feeling pretty gosh darn grown up, and it’s not without a small measure of pride that you walk back to your dad with the food presented to him with both hands and something approaching a curtsy.
“Oh, gee,” your dad says and his eyebrows migrate toward his hairline. “Thanks- thank you, Mila, this looks so good.” He puts the bowl on the coffee table. He’s laid some of the papers from the shoebox on the cushion beside him, a photograph of him and your dad held delicately in one hand. They have different hairstyles in the photo, but otherwise look the same. You go get the other bowls.
When you sit down on the floor by the coffee table with your breakfast, the dad you may or may not have woken up has taken the place of the papers on the couch. He looks through them in a similar slow and solemn fashion, not saying anything until he gets to the one of the little woman and little boy dad.
“About time we put this in a frame, huh, Stevie?”
They lean against each other and look down at the photo.
“Yeah,” your dad agrees slowly. “I keep forgetting I have it.” He starts tidying them all away, back into the box they go. He covers it with the lid and covers the lid with his hands. Your dad puts his hand atop of them and squeezes. “Only too bad I’m making that face.”
“You’re always making that face.”
Your dad looks up at your dad, then at you. You nod at him, then at the other who nods back. You sit there nodding at each other for a while, as your dad makes that face at the two of you.
“Mila made breakfast.”
“I did,” you whisper and burst into a toothy smile. Mostly gaps, but some teeth.
“What’s that, sweetheart? You gotta talk louder.” Your dad picks up a bowl. “Jesus Christ…!” he says, “...my favorite.”
-o-
In your room - which is sometimes, often concurring with what the authorities call “bedtime”, known also as your eternal prison cell; and other times, when Nat is over, The Geology Section - you have a variety of stuffed animals, funny looking dolls, shiny cars and other good toys. You have masquerade clothes and several jigsaw puzzles of varying severity. You have a painting of a girl and a dog on a sidewalk that your dad made. It hangs on the wall opposite your bed, and you look over at it every night, trying to see into the windows across the street from the girl and the dog, willing the girl to turn her head toward you so that you can see what her face looks like. The girl has dark hair, like you. You think it means you’ll have a dog in the future, when you’re older, like the girl. You’ll have a dog that looks just like that, and maybe it’ll be a capybara. Either way, you know what you’ll call it.
In your room you have a pot with a little plant called a seedling. You and your dad planted it together. It took a lot of doing, everything had to be just so when planting a plant. Your dad got dirt stuck in his fingers and had to take the plates apart. You and your dad fussed over the plant the entire summer. It took weeks for a sprout to show its green little head, but to you it felt like years. You checked it every morning and every night, often more. You tapped your fingertip against the clay pot, you looked and looked.
“Nothing’s happening!” you lamented.
“Patience, Mila,” your dad said. “Lots is happening, in the soil, you just can’t see it.”
Now that the seed is a seedling, a green sprig with leaves from the bottom up, it doesn’t require so much worrying and so much attention. You get to water it every other day, when you feel that the dirt has gone dry. Your dad checks on it too, but he trusts you to do the work.
“When are the lemons coming?” you ask.
“It’ll take a while,” he says, and sometimes he says: “When you’ve graduated high school.”
The seeds were from a lemon in the fruit bowl in the kitchen, You hadn’t imagined, before that, something so innocuous could yield something so complex, something so grand as an entire tree.
In your room you have a photograph in a frame that looks like gold that’s gone old. It’s a photograph of your dads and you from when you were a mere three-year-old. It stands on the windowsill, next to your pot with your little plant. The frame is tilted somewhat towards the pot, so that the seedling can see the photo and your dads and you can see the seedling.
Sometimes you turn the frame so that the photo will face the window, but only for a while at a time, and only during daylight. That way, if your mom happens to be looking in through your window, she’ll see your clay pot with your little green baby tree, she’ll see your dads and you where it’s winter and snow out, and you’re all wearing hats, looking out of the photograph right at her—and she’ll know you’re doing okay.
