Crescent Moon

He looked up at the evening sky, pudgy legs wrapped around my waist, sippy cup in hand, tiny sneakers kicking my hip, and pointed above.

“Crescent moon.”

I was at work when they called.

I ran to my boss. “Catherine. They have a baby for me.” She hugged me. I took the train home. The social worker was waiting. She said something like, you are never going to believe how beautiful this kid is. Then she put him in my arms and something in me went still.

Oh hi. There you are.

I had nothing. No clothes. No crib. No stroller. No high chair. I raced around that afternoon. Friends showed up. We pulled together what we could. And somewhere in the middle of building his crib and organizing his drawers, he fell asleep in my bed.

I stood there watching him. Overwhelmed. Astonished. Feeling like I was standing at the edge of something enormous that I had not been prepared for and would not have missed for anything in the world.

I wanted desperately to snuggle behind him. I knew he was emotionally exhausted and scared even if he didn’t have words for it. So I just stood there. Watching him breathe. Not wanting to overwhelm. Not able to look away.

The first morning I approached his crib with caution. He was standing up in an all-white onesie, diaper peeking out, holding the side of the crib. I said, “Good morning, baby.”

His eyes were huge. Deep in a way I wasn’t prepared for.

He lit up. He reached out to be picked up.

He was home before I was.

I hadn’t caught up yet.

He loved to dance. Especially to Flo Rida. “Good Feeling.” He loved to be tossed in the air. He loved our nightly walks, standing up ever so slightly in the stroller, his arms up, bending up and down to the rhythm of the wheels on the pavement.

I called it stroller surfing.

He would look up at the sky and point.

“Crescent moon.”

We ended every walk at the lake where a couple who adored him was waiting with popsicles. He accepted their love the way he accepted everything, completely, without reservation, as if love were simply what the world was made of and he had always known it.

I think he had.

I think that was the thing about him.

When we turned into the driveway in the early evening, he would call it out from the back seat before I had stopped the car.

“Ooooommmeee.”

Home.

I do not remember him being difficult.

He must have been. He was two.

*

The visits were different.

He would come back overwhelmed. Sobbing, kicking, throwing whatever was in his hands.

His parents were in the revolving door. Drugs, court, lockup, home, and around again to the same place.

All I could think was how fucked up all of this was. How much I wanted to protect him. How the system that was supposed to put him at the center kept asking him to carry what adults could barely hold.

I tried to build a bridge. I invited his family to his third birthday party. I gave his great-aunt and uncle updates. Walks on the beach with his aunt. Dinners with the other aunt and her children. Meetups at the playground. I believed, I genuinely believed, that if they trusted me, if they knew I would never shut them out, he would stay.

They loved him too. That was the unbearable part.

And then at the birthday party his mother wanted to take him, and he looked up at me. Confused. Questioning. Not wanting to go. His eyes asking me something I didn’t have an answer for.

I said, “It’s okay, baby. Go.”

Because I was his mom. I saw something in his face that I recognized. I had been seeing it every day for a year. And I could not protect him from what came next and I said go anyway.

I have never fully forgiven myself for that.

I wonder now if I had been selfish, whether the outcome would have been different. If I had kept him away from them. If I had not built the bridge. If I had fought harder.

The question arrives uninvited. Usually at 3 a.m.

*

The night before he left, I slept on the floor of his room. His hand and mine meeting through the slats.

Morning came anyway.

I dressed him in the clothes he arrived in to send him back. I wanted there to be a beginning and an ending. Something his body might carry even if his mind couldn’t.

Grey sneakers with an orange tongue. Overalls I rolled at the ankle so nobody would see they were already too small. And the shirt I will always remember. Horizontal stripes, a putrid green and a mustard and something else, worn thin, pilled across the front.

He opened the door to greet the social worker himself. His blond hair was not fully combed. He went to her eagerly, because he knew her. He didn’t know he was leaving me.

He was placed with a great-uncle and aunt. Several weeks after the transition, I was allowed to call him.

I said, “Hi baby. Mommy misses you and loves you.”

Then I asked him what I always asked him.

“Where do you find me when you need me, and I’m not with you?”

“Heart,” he said.

That was the last time we spoke.

*

I grieved the way people grieve when there is no funeral.

No casseroles. No cards. No language the world gives you for the loss of a child who is still alive somewhere, living a life you cannot see, becoming a man you will never know.

I ran as if the act of running would release the grief. Anything to dull it. I dismantled his crib. Packed his things into the attic because keeping them as they were was gutting. Not comforting. Gutting. I placed everything carefully in boxes. His clothes. His toys. The things that still smelled like him.

I ran into them once, at a restaurant near their house. The couple from the lake. They asked how the baby was, with real excitement, genuinely wanting to know.

I broke. The woman, whose name I will never know, wrapped herself around me in the middle of the room.

Every woman in my family had a traumatic birth. I had always meant to adopt. It was never a second choice.

Then I lost him.

After that, the medical risk did not frighten me. Neither did the chance of miscarrying. I was no longer afraid of losing, because I already had. My children exist because of him.

*

He is always two in my dreams.

Always reaching up. Always with those eyes. Always pointing at something in the sky that I already know the word for before he says it.

I don’t know who he is now. I don’t know if he is happy or peaceful or loved the way he deserves to be. I don’t know if he remembers me or if I am simply a warmth from somewhere early that he cannot place. A feeling without a face.

I want him to know, in his bones, without question, that none of it was his fault.

He was an exceptional child.

He was mine for a moment.

That moment was everything.

I think of him every day. His picture is on my wall. His face comes around again in the frame that rotates through my photographs, without warning, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon.

The grief is still there. It does not go away. It has just learned to live alongside the living.

I have to believe this. I have chosen to believe it every day for years. Somewhere, he is okay.

And somewhere in a dream he is still two years old.

Legs wrapped around my waist.

Sippy cup in hand.

Tiny sneakers kicking my hip.

“Crescent moon.”

There you are.