To Wes

We got back from Toronto last night. Now you keep saying, “Raise your hand if you wish we were still in Toronto,” and “Who else is getting sick of America?” At the bus stop this morning, our neighbors asked why we went to Toronto, if we had family there, or friends. You said, “Friends,” not mentioning my book tour, or that your father went to grad school in Toronto, or that you were born a Canadian citizen. Why did you love Toronto? The streetcars, the view from the top of the CN Tower, the wet snow in late November. Our friends’ doodle puppy careening around High Park on springy legs. Mostly, you liked Cora, our friends’ six-year-old daughter.

Your dad and I first got to Toronto in the middle of August, 2010. We arrived to find that the apartment we’d rented had been destroyed: the toilet lay on the kitchen floor. In the yard was a freshly-dug grave for appliances the landlord had ripped from the kitchen. There was no running water. We kept our stuff in the van that we’d driven over the border and asked the landlord to give us back our money, which was all of our money. She never did, and we garnished her bank account after a harrowing day in landlord-tenant court, months later. Meanwhile we moved into a shithole of an apartment a block north of Queen Street. The floors were so sloped that anything you dropped in the kitchen slid into the bedroom. Immense were the cockroaches. The bathroom was a former closet, encrusted with rust and mold. Those early days became stories we repeated until they lost their luster—until the people to whom we might’ve told those stories were too far from their own beginnings in other cities, and from knowing your dad and me as newlywed twenty-one-year-olds, to care. We liked that apartment because its unimpeachable shittiness enabled us to get a puppy and think nothing of the puppy chewing on the linoleum. And we liked the apartment because Kate and Ross lived downstairs.

You are eight and a half. Every year of your life, you have asked me to accept things I found unacceptable and to do things I found impossible. It’s not your fault, but mine, that I’ve never had a fucking clue. I used to think I was nothing before I met your dad, and I was, but nothing compared to the nothing I was before I met you. In Toronto I read ten novels a month and rarely drank less than a bottle of wine. I walked two miles across slush and salt to pretend to be a receptionist in a law firm but actually to write teen romances on a company computer. Then I walked two miles home, in the dark, to see how much of the floor the puppy had eaten. When Kate moved in downstairs, that same August, it was during a thunderstorm. She unloaded a U-Haul by herself. I can’t imagine your dad didn’t offer to help; I can easily imagine Kate refusing him. She was six feet tall, a nursing student, and had a beagle rescue named Louis who howled when Kate left for work at 5 a.m. If we’d been children instead of very young women, I’d have issued her an immediate invitation to be my best friend.

We left Toronto a few months after you were born in 2017. Since then, I have only seen Kate and Ross and their children a handful of times. In some fundamental way Kate remains my best friend. She was the first person I texted when I found out I was pregnant with Ramona. This is not a letter about your sister, though of course it is about your sister, in my arms as the plane lurched over Lake Ontario. Ramona asks for nothing more or less than you did, as an infant—but in being second to ask she asks for nothing at all. Siblings are raised by different parents, even when they are raised by the same parents. I’m sorry. On Friday, Ramona woke up congested and Kate felt her head for a fever. If, in your late-thirties, you have a friend who will reach out and check your baby for a fever, you are lucky.

Last week, we landed in Toronto on Tuesday afternoon. Kate picked us up from the airport. Toronto returned to me, a forgotten sensation: the eerie flatness of the city stretching endlessly to the north, the lake lapping at the city’s frozen southern edge. The fact that I, who was never twenty-one, was once twenty-one. Also eerie was the way you waited, with your eight-year-old’s intuition, for Cora to get home from school. By bedtime you had asked her to be your best friend. How did you know you would love her? How does anyone know to love where they’re from?

People often ask me why I left Portland. No one ever asks me why I left Toronto, though it was the only place I ever considered not leaving. For a while, I thought it might be enough to love your dad, to walk the dog in Trinity Bellwoods Park, to write goofy love stories and plant myself, permanently, in a city no one from my hometown ever thought to imagine. We left because your dad finished his PhD and got a job in the US. We left because we were not Canadian citizens and had no choice. It broke my heart to leave, but my heart needed breaking. Last week, I told Ross about my friends in New Haven who are about to have their first baby, the guilt I feel being unable to explain—what? “How much of yourself had to die before you could be who you are now,” Ross said.

“Raise your hand if you wish we were still in Toronto.” Happy to be home, I keep my hand at my side. I betray you over and over. In truth, I know why you love Toronto. I know why you’re “getting sick of America.” As always, I have almost nothing to offer you. Only that I’ll go on accepting what I thought I couldn’t. I will pretend to make the rules, secretly waiting for you to show me what needs to be done.