A Simple Distance Read Online Free PDF Page A

hills is like what it must have been to look up at Oakland long ago, barely dotted with lights. But during the day I saw no such similarity.
    As the bus climbed the bridge, I could see the Golden Gate, the Pacific just beyond, and my mind left my mother’s ocean for mine.
    Just beyond the cliffs at Fort Point was where Cynthia and Linda bought their house, when Sadie was due. Three pieces of a once solid whole.
    As the bus descended the downward slope of the bridge and we reached San Francisco, I wondered what was so wrong with the concept of sharing; why the law so loved the mutually exclusive. I deboarded heavy of foot, crossed the street, and made my way inside.
    I remembered a recent telephone conversation with Cynthia, her anger still palpable as she told me, I saw it coming, you know, Linda and Cara. But I shut my eyes. She’d hoped it would pass on its own. Linda and Cara were coworkers, saw each other every day in the halls, at meetings. Things like that. Then it’d become social: pot luck dinners, office lunches. Linda would put it on Sadie. She’d say, Kids aren’t really going to be there. So it was better if Sadie and Cynthia stayed at home.
    Cara’d grown bold. Calling Linda’s cell phone at home to invite her out on the weekend, putting Linda on the spot. How can kids not be allowed to go swimming on a Saturday afternoon at Lake Chabot? Cynthia would ask.
    Of course I knew. I knew before Linda , she said. Continued, Weeks after she left, I thought I’d lose my mind with anger. My neck, my arms, my hands—I burned rage. I called their office, but I didn’t know Cara’s last name, so I couldn’t get past the damn voicemail. I wrote her letters, but again, no last name—so I couldn’t send them. I steamed. Stuck, alone with her righteousness. I wanted Cara to know that Sadie and I were real and their actions had consequences outside themselves.
    But Linda’d checked out.
    Linda wants what she wants. There’s nothing I can do about that. But I want what I want, too. And I want her to regret her choice.
    I’m sorry, Cynthia , I’d said, trying to offer comfort, but not too much. It was selfish of Linda and Cara, it was. It sounded hard, but look at Cynthia, at what she was doing—using Sadie to see Linda hurt—who was she to talk?
    You don’t need to take a right from one person to grant it to another. I wished Cynthia could see that. But that week, she had the law on her side and could have taken us back over a decade if she chose.
    I grabbed a quick cup of coffee, lots of cream, lots of sugar, passed the receptionist’s desk in the kitchenette down the hall from my office, logged on to my computer, pulled up the decision: Sharon S. :
    Annette F. petitioned under the independent adoption statutes to adopt Joshua, the biological son of her relationship partner, Sharon S. (the petitioner here). After the women severed their relationship, Sharon sought to terminate the adoption proceedings, arguing in part that the adoption statutes do not permit a second-parent, or co-parent, adoption (one in which the unmarried relationship partner of the parent adopts that child and the parent retains parental rights). We agree …
    The rules that govern our actions derive from conflict. What Sharon S. meant was, if you were gay, and you and your partner wanted to parent a child in California, you did so at your own risk. A single paragraph withheld from unmarried couples and their children that which married couples took for granted: family, legally recognized.
    And at the end of that week, mine was to be the mouth that made this happen. I cleared my throat, thought about grade school and autumn, when the leaves on the gingko tree in the courtyard of Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and studio, kitty corner across Chicago Avenue from the playground, would be yellow and falling to the ground. Thirty-two years old and I was in the fourth grade all over again.
    It was at the side of the long, low brick wall protecting