Tragedy struck in Paul takes the form of a mortal girl, but it was June in the magical realist 90s as it was (and is) June here on the island, and Paul and I were navigating Pride in tandem, our genders Gordian knots we both wanted to take a sword to, but feared the frayed ends that might ensue.
The biggest difference between us was that Paul had San Francisco, and I’d once again sacrificed all cities on the altar of apocalypse, the Supreme Court my punctuation every June in varying degrees. Last summer, it had been Roe v. Wade overturned, the fresh scars on my chest a visceral reminder of the girlhood I’d abandoned in favor of what my high school dyke best friend had sneeringly called my “addiction to power and control.” In the upscale hospital cafes of NYU-Langone, I cried and smiled in stark intervals, thinking all the while how kin I was to the grimy, hollowed-out cafe patrons in the opening scene of Children of Men, yet unbound to any revolutionary plot. I had my mother and that was all that mattered.
This June, still in New York State but an unimaginable distance away, I’d perched right in the middle of the Forest Headquarters here at the Station to finish my readings (Paul takes the form of a mortal girl, by Andrea Lawlor, for my fictional enrichment, and “A Theory of Vibe” by Peli Grietzer, “Indigenous Collectives” by Carol Edelman Warrior, and Monster Theory by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen for my ideological framework, the bones of my project) and was at the part in Paul where the only thing to do with my other hand was to shove it in my mouth like a child and hold the hell on. I’m annoyed at myself for developing this unsanitary nervous tic, something I swore I’d never do, but I am my father’s daughter. We both drive cross-country with our teeth on our cuticles and our eyes on the horizon.
So there I was, all my insecurities about wasted time and resources falling away. Abundance always comes in the wake of fictional death, for me, other people’s heartache a safe territory for me to store my own so I can focus on how mythic scarcity really is.
Looking up, I caught Terrance’s eyes in a flash. He tilted his phone towards me and said, in that quiet way of his, “Supreme Court voted to uphold the Indian Child Welfare Act, seven to two.”
I hummed in noncommittal acknowledgement, and then the tears started.
It’s been a trip riddled with babies and themes of parenthood. My arms still remember the sleep-heavy weight of Cass’s toddler, who’d scrambled out of the bedroom while Cass and I watched the Ultimatum: Queer Love in anxious, companionable silence. I never picked up the kids without their express permission, but the three-year-old was sobbing and sweaty and frightened. When I scooped him up, he wiped his little auburn curls from his still-closed eyes and said, “Fwankie? How’d you get here so fast?”
There were other moments in other homes I won’t share, but a day or two ago, here on the Island, I stopped in my tracks as my instincts bade me go no further. Right where my next step would have fallen, there was a newborn snapping turtle, all alone and angry as anything.
I crouched and cooed at him, aware of how ridiculous I looked and sounded but uncaring. He was no bigger than my middle finger.
“Where’s your mama?” I asked, and shivered away the sense-memory of my least favorite scene from Dear Georgina, the one that made me feel sick and protective of the elder but unable to fix it.
I did manage something, though, that day. It was pre-pandemic. We were in Camden, Maine. Georgina herself was at the screening. I was a girl back then, and my voice was deep and my legs were hairy because fuck you, but being near this pre-ICWA survivor cowed me. I used up as much of my magic as I could to make myself small for her, small enough to be trustworthy, and I held her hand until I couldn’t. That’s all I’ll say about it.
“Where’s your siblings?” I asked the turtle, images of sea turtles in exodus documentaries flashing across my mind, though I knew better than that.
He didn’t answer, of course.
“Can I take a picture of you?” I asked.
Begrudgingly, he stuck out his tiny head and blinked at me. I held him tenderly between my thumb and index finger, right in front of his little back legs, and felt the life of him thrum across my skin in rolling waves of electricity.
The Bird Guy, who was trying to catch a robin to study its role as a vector for Lyme disease, suggested I put the baby turtle next to the horseshoe ring.
“It’ll hear the water,” said the Bird Guy. “It’ll know where to go from there.”
I nodded and stood. The fall from the horseshoe ring was steep, but the baby was small and his claws were already so sharp.
I set him down in the soft fallen pine needles and sat with him awhile.
“I want you to do me a favor,” I said.
He looked up at me. He really was so small.
“I want you to grow up,” I said. “No, don’t just grow up. Grow old. Grow old and as big as you can. Grow like Godzilla. Can you do that for me?”
The little turtle gazed resolutely out toward the lake. I took that as an affirmation and let him be.
Sometimes I feel like I’ll be a bad writer because of how much information I withhold. Really, though, is it anyone’s business? I already told a journalist for the Imprint that I’m the child of an adoptee. What more is there to say? To flatten my family into a pancake of trauma porn is to invite your ceramic breakfast plate, and while you can eat what you want of what I feed you, you’re not allowed to even salivate over my family. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve met that cloying smile, that question of “and your father…” with my own brick wall. Yeah, he’s a musician. Yeah, he’s way cooler than me. Yeah, he’s a good dad, a good grandparent. Yeah, he’s back home. Get fucked.
Still. I want to write about us, in a way, at least with this project. All my family’s stubborn devotion to each other. All the choices we make and have had made on our behalf.
Once upon a time, my great-grandmother’s mother died and the social worker found her and her siblings in a tableau so horrific, she cried writing the report for the agency. A childhood was lived. An adolescence survived. My great-grandmother made her way back home to be with her siblings, and that was that.
My great-grandmother’s eldest son helped raise his siblings and then he had a daughter with his wife and then they fell in love with my dad, a baby in foster care, who was loved so deeply already, and that was that.
A social worker was involved in this exchange as well, but she wasn’t crying. She placed my Ojibwe father with an Ojibwe father because “I just thought it’d be neat.” And that was that.
I was a little girl in an auditorium when another adoptee was up on stage screaming and screaming and screaming.
She told all of us in the unseen audience that she knew she was different but that her white parents had told her she’d better forget about it or else. In her story and in her pain and in my little girl brain, her father was a mirrored blade and her mother was an apron.
That was that.
Once upon a time, my mother was the daughter of a soldier and a nurse and the soldier would never let anything happen to me. He was cleaning my room and found one of my notes where I threatened to run away. I was hiding in a closet and he knew it but he talked about me as if I were dead already, grief caught in his throat. “I don’t know what I’d do if my sunshine ever ran away,” he said. “I’d probably die of a broken heart. I don’t know what I’d do.”
In the closet, I cried until I fell asleep, and tore apart every note until only fiction remained.
My dad and his dad both make weird noises. Stimming, I guess. One time my dad was making a weird noise and his oldest granddaughter started to beatbox over it.
One time my grandpa was making weird noises and his white wife said, “Good God, you’re weird. I could have sworn you weren’t this weird when we got married.”
My grandpa glanced at me conspiratorially with eyes I didn’t realize were green until this year. “We should have gotten you tested,” my nana said.
My grandpa finished putting on his shoes and shrugged. “Well, too late now.”
That was that.
When the idea of having a baby became less of a threat and more of a hope, I fled the Midwest again. All hope remained and I gazed out at the manmade, low-nutrient body of water that is Cranberry Lake and seethed.
“S-seven-two?” I repeated.
I stood up. The clouds parted outside. I got a text from my little sibling: “7-2 for icwa shoutout auntie Mary” and I remembered how I was in Mary’s house just a week ago, so close to the Court and so afraid of its gravitational pull. How she listed off Pride events happening in D.C. for me and I realized she wanted to keep me there and I wanted to be kept, but had to be here, on this island with its gargantuan boulders and a palpable sense of—not just safety, but a complete lack of any danger.
I ran out of the office. June made new in the sunlight. Butterflies flanked me as I ran to my cabin and pulled kinnikinnick off of my altar and ran back outside. Yesterday, I’d found a spot by the lake I was already calling “My Spot.” Energy built up and subsided and built up again in rhythmic power surges. Yesterday the lake was placid and misty. Today, it danced, cresting copper in the sun. I almost war-hooped, but I was self-conscious, again, about all the unseen white people in the woods. The thought made me laugh. What a turn. What a twist.
7-2. 7-2. A stay of execution. A band-aid. Breaching the surface of the water after so long under. Gulping in air. I’d just been talking this morning about the ICWA protest, that one in DC back in November. I’d missed breakfast, my first missed breakfast since getting to the Station, so I pounded two cold brews and made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The students are already settling into their new lives, and so am I, though upheaval is always around the corner, and I’m there for that, too, life made and unmade and remade.
Thoughts of the little baby I’d met whose parents couldn’t take care of him come to me unbidden, and I hold them in my purview alongside memories of the Doorstop Baby, the little turtle, Georgina, that stage. White people in the woods and bears falling into traps meant for birds. A blackfly lands on my temple and drinks. When I reach to scratch my head, my fingers come away bloody.
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