Planting Dandelions (26 page)

I was due to return to Little Rock through Boston, our usual route. Now I was stranded, like everyone else; detained once more on the other side of the border from Patrick. While running errands one morning a few days after the attacks, I caught the live radio broadcast of ceremonies on Parliament Hill honoring those who had died. The Canadian anthem was played first. Then a Mountie sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I laid my forehead on the wheel of my mother's car and wept with a heart that was truly broken. In that moment, it was no longer “their” anthem. It was mine, too.

Though I have sometimes, fleetingly, questioned the wisdom of it, I brought my children home to their country after September 11, 2001. I gave birth to another U.S. citizen. My sons are smart, healthy, and beloved. They are also white, middle-class, American males, which is to say they are princes—extraordinarily privileged, even in the shifting world order. The responsibility I feel for their upbringing is beyond personal for me. It's global. In them, I like to think I am helping to raise a new nation, one with fewer enemies, at home and abroad. Be kind, I tell them. Share. Take turns. Stand up for your brother. Include the girls. Use your words. Look after the little ones. Pick up after yourselves. Cooperate. And when you promise allegiance to the flag, remember what it stands for: liberty and justice for all people. I believe in those words. But my kids have never heard me pledge them.

My cold feet were easier to rationalize when becoming a U.S. citizen meant renouncing my Canadian citizenship. Nobody has ever blamed me for not wanting to sever ties with a country that offers universal health care and vacations in Cuba. But that excuse no longer holds water. The rules have changed, and it is possible for me to hold dual citizenship now. By virtue of their birth, my kids are already dual citizens.

“You're Canadians, too,” I remind them occasionally. But they don't really know what that means, and I can't tell them, because I don't know, myself, except as a stance apart. I am Canadian mainly when I am exasperated with the United States and want to distance myself from its messes and its problems. I'm Canadian if I don't like the election results or I disagree with a war. I wear my Canadian identity like a T-shirt that says “Not with Stupid.” I'm not sure I know what patriotism is, but I'm pretty sure that isn't it.

The childish truth is, I haven't wanted to commit. Becoming a U.S. citizen would mean having to dismount from my Royal Canadian high horse. It would mean having to say, “I'm an American,” not just on a day when a black man is elected president, and I could burst with pride, but on days when U.S. missiles strike down children in another land, on days when the Stars and Stripes decorate a mob's hatred, on days when greed and piracy are sold as freedom. It would mean having to sing
my
country, 'tis of thee, in praise and in lament.

It would mean I belong.

I've gotten used to the idea of not belonging anywhere. It's romantic to play the exile, the desperado. But that's a thin veneer of bravado pasted over a lifetime of yearning. I used to think I could act, look, work, even marry my way into belonging, right up to the moment I'd realize that I hadn't, in the shattering way a bird comes face-to-face with its truth in a patio door. Epiphany of bone and glass.

I didn't realize that belonging isn't something you can make happen. It's something you let happen.

In Newfoundland, the old people say you are “in the fairy” when you are lost in a dream. All these years, there's been a part of me that believed I had wandered into the fairy, into this American dream, and that I would eventually wander back out. That my enchantment with this country was just that: an enchantment. In the back of my mind, there was a voice that kept saying,
Someday, I'll wake up and go home.

The last time I crossed the border was through the Toronto airport, on my way back from a reading in Canada. I followed the moving sidewalks and escalators to the same U.S. Customs area as I did on that November day all those years ago, only now I got to stand in the line for U.S. citizens and alien residents. My hands and smile were steady as I passed my green card over the counter. The customs inspector smiled back, then frowned. In a post-traumatic flashback, an American bald eagle glared and flexed its talons.

“Do you know this is about to expire?”

Ignorance is no defense, I know, and I'm sure it sounded lame to say I'd forgotten that I wasn't a U.S. citizen, but it was the truth. I need to be reminded that I'm not a U.S. citizen, because the rest of the time, I feel American. I assured the customs inspector that I would update my immigrant status as soon as I got home, and boarded the plane.

For the last leg of my itinerary, I was on a tiny regional flight, bound from Chicago for Little Rock. There was no mistaking my fellow passengers for anything but Americans: across the aisle, a death row prison guard was flying home to an execution that night. Behind me, a born-again Christian was preaching to his seatmate. Ahead of me sat a large black woman, her hair sculpted and lacquered into a rigid, gleaming mass that never touched the headrest. They were all very different from me, but they felt very familiar. Not characters. People. My people.

The next day, I climbed to the attic to retrieve a box, then pulled out the file that held my old immigration records. I had already looked over the forms online and spoken with the consultant who had helped me with my green card application. Naturalization would be a lengthy and expensive process. It would be so easy to apply for a renewal instead. To buy myself another ten years of limbo, of wait-and-see.

A faded piece of facsimile paper was tucked among the visas and medical records. It was a poem from my father, faxed to me in Mexico, his way of blessing my departure from his country. Although at the time, I had assured him I'd come back to the island someday, it was clear that he had seen my path unfolding differently.
Going toward yourself is the longest journey of all,
he wrote. I could hear his priestly intonation in my mind, and was reminded of a line of Deuteronomy.

These are the words I should teach my sons. Going toward yourself is the longest journey of all. Belong.

The thermal ink of my father's signature had faded with time. Had it really been fourteen years since I came across the border? All around me were the dusty boxes full of files and memorabilia to prove it.
A long time wandering in the fairy,
I thought.
Time to wake up
. I climbed downstairs, went to my computer, and opened a file. N-400: Application to Become a U.S. Citizen. Under “Your Name” I began typing. Pittman, Kyran.

Time to come home.

T
hough it might come as a surprise to some—including my husband—for all thirteen years of our marriage, I have been continuously and completely monogamous. I'm kind of surprised by it myself. I wouldn't blame anyone who wouldn't put it past me to cheat. For one thing, I am married to the man with whom I cheated on my first husband. For another, I don't play the part of reformed sinner very well. When stories of extramarital affairs come up, my friends are used to me withholding judgment. It's not that I think it's okay to sneak around. I just don't feel like I have a ticket to the stoning. In fact, I'm adamant that I am not the person anyone wants counseling them through a case of hot and bothered. Not if they're looking for someone else to put on the safety brake.

“Adultery kind of worked out for me,” I tell them, with more honesty and less chagrin than is probably seemly. It did work out for me, but I'd hardly write it up as a prescription for anyone. It worked out in the sense that an organ transplant works out—with pain, risk, and scarring. Worse, I wasn't the only person to suffer the consequences. That much, I do regret. But I can't pretend that an affair is the worst thing that could ever happen to someone, or that a marriage is such a fragile orb, it pops the minute someone sticks a body part outside of it. Affairs change marriages—even the ones that go unconfessed and undiscovered—but those changes aren't always bad. A marriage might not survive them, but infidelity isn't like breaking a spell, where everything instantly goes “poof.” Unless you've been living in a fairy tale, that is, in which case, something was going to burst your bubble eventually.

As for my husband, he's not the jealous type, but he assumes every man I meet is going to fall in love with me the way he did, and try to win me away the way he did.

“Honey, nobody else is that crazy,” I tell him, and he has the good humor to agree. There's a subtext to our banter, though. We're depth sounding.
Are you worried? Should I be?

My reassurances are never as direct or unequivocal as he would like. Words like “never” and “forever” feel glib to me; easy to say, and impossible to guarantee. Like the sober alcoholic who knows “never again” is a fool's pledge, I've kept my promise, for thirteen years, one day at a time. Not once, in all those years, have I so much as kissed another man.

But I have been untrue.

“Archer,” he said, rising from his chair to extend a hand across the restaurant table. He was more handsome in person than in his profile photo. I like to place people's faces in time. His belonged to the nineteenth century. A gentleman farmer, I thought. Like Ashley Wilkes in
Gone With the Wind,
but absent of torment.

“Hey, so great you could come out,” I said, before turning to tell the next person some variation on the same sentiment. I had business in the city, and had suggested a meet-up with some of my online friends in the area, mostly other writers, some of whom I'd met before, others whom I was meeting in person for the first time. Of all the people I was looking forward to seeing that night, his name was barely on my radar. We had connected through mutual friends and exchanged quips from time to time. I had noticed his wit, but had missed the charm. It was a pleasant surprise, but he was just one of several charming and witty dinner companions that night. It was all delicious.

But after it was over, and I was back in my hotel room, it was the thought of him that lingered, like the Turkish spice and incense that clung to my hair and clothes.

The thought lingered with me all the next day, and into the evening, when I took supper by myself in the bar and imagined him wandering in, us having a drink together by ourselves. It lingered through my flight home, and wafted around my head over the next few months—faintly, but pleasantly. His first message to me after our meeting made me think some thought of me lingered with him, too. Our online exchanges became more frequent, and frequently, more private. One day it came up that we both had plans to be out on our respective towns that night, with friends, and not spouses. We should text each other the play by play, we joked, with a semicolon wink. I gave him my mobile number, and we did. It was all very innocent. There was nothing in our messages I couldn't share with my husband. Yet I didn't.

I am good at keeping secrets, especially from myself.

We were becoming good friends, I thought. We should extend it to our mates. I bet I'd like your wife, I told him. You should visit, he said. We might, I replied.

“We should take a road trip this summer,” I told Patrick. “I know lots of people we could stay with on the way.”

There was a writers' conference I was going to first. My friend wondered if it was something he would find of interest.

YES, I texted. PLEASE come!

Well, that was a bit much, I thought, immediately after I sent it.
What's gotten into you?
I modified my encouragement with a nonchalant e-mail. It's a great conference, I wrote, as if the program was what had me so excited. There are lots of sessions you'd find interesting. By all means, come. If you want to.