Devotion Read Free Page A

Mary Janes with white lacy socks. Jacob spotted us, tilted his head to the side, and gave us a distinctly Jacob-like smile, both bashful and proud.
    We are not daily beggars who beg from door to door, but we are neighbors’ children whom you have seen before…
    Jacob looked straight ahead, arms loose by his sides; his voice was clear and distinct to my ears, even among seventy-five others. And suddenly—why hadn’t I expected this?—a rumbling rose upfrom deep within me. It was familiar, unstoppable—an avalanche. I knew I had to sit there and let the rocks fly. If any of the other parents happened to glance in my direction, they would never have known from looking at me. Outside, I was composed—serene, even. But inside, all hell had broken loose. It was the daytime version of my nightly panic. I knew that I couldn’t fight it; resisting only made it worse.
    We almost lost him.
    It was all I could do not to whisper it out loud. To put my hand on the shoulder of the mom next to me, or the one in front, or behind. None of them knew this thing that defined me, the knowledge I wore like an invisible cloak. We almost lost him. I leaned into Michael and wondered if he was thinking about it too. Would we ever sit in an audience and watch Jacob do normal little-boy things—swing a bat, recite lines in a play, sing in a holiday concert—without having the thought? We almost lost him. Repeating it was like a prayer, a mantra. It was my own personal covenant. I could never allow myself to forget, even in the happiest times. Especially in the happiest times. It was a private bargain I had struck—but with whom?
    I was always compiling lists in my mind: what had gone wrong, what could go wrong. I hadn’t figured how to live with my heightened awareness of exactly how fragile it all is. And so the lists grew and grew. I was trying to control the universe—and it’s hard work to try to control the universe. I thought that maybe by naming each potential disaster, I could prevent it. Michael could have a heart attack shoveling snow. Lightning could hit our house. The superstitions I grew up with—Yiddish terms, peasant languageleft over from the Old World—rose up from some buried place. Poo, poo, poo . I warded off the evil eye like a fishwife. K’ayn ayn hora . I counted to eighteen, chai , the Hebrew number signifying life. Eighteen, for the number of seconds I microwaved my morning coffee. Eighteen, for the number of crunches I did at the end of my yoga practice. Eighteen, so that the angel of death might pass over our house for another day.

5.
    Just a few months ago, Michael and Jacob had been driving home late at night from a baseball game when someone threw a glass bottle of salad dressing off an embankment. The bottle hit the roof of our car and shattered. One fraction of a second earlier, and it would have hit the windshield.
    Salad dressing, I thought to myself, when Michael told me what had happened. I never considered salad dressing.

6.
    Maybe books weren’t enough. Maybe I needed to travel to some far-flung place, though it didn’t feel very practical. Thoreau may have lived in isolation, but I lived in Connecticut. I drove carpool, ordered socks by the dozen from Land’s End, paid the mortgage,filed health insurance claims, gave dinner parties, supported my local congressman. I worried about bills, and was drowning in Post-its: Michael, colonoscopy. J—dentist! The lists fluttered everywhere. They were attached to the edges of my desk, the pages of my appointment book, the kitchen counter. I was mired in the domesticity that I loved—that same domesticity that kept me on a treadmill from the first sounds of pounding feet in the morning to the last hazy thought— We’re almost out of dog food —that drifted through my mind before passing out at night. Could I find and hold on to a deeper truth than the whir and strum of my daily life, which seemed designed to ensure that some day I would wake up—after