THE CHILEAN WRITER eats a spoonful of the crème brûlée we’ve somehow ordered. I’ve talked and talked and now want mostly to be quiet. I hold my coffee with both hands.
You were so young, she says.
She was also, I say.
What could you have done? she says.
It’s a question that I’ve heard before and hate and want no part of.
Shown up.
And now? she says.
We’re grown-ups, I say; we text. I stalk her on the internet once my children are in bed.
And she’s pregnant? she says. She’s better?
I don’t know what that means, I say.
5
MY HUSBAND’S TAKEN a job out of town for three weeks and I have to go in late to work while he’s gone. I keep asking for concessions. I keep sloughing off responsibilities on my co–homeroom teachers—kids I ask them to check in with, readings I want to make sure my students get for which I do not trust the twenty-four-year-old—and only think enough to feel guilty about it afterward.
I’m pretty sure by now I won’t get fired no matter what I ask for. I’m a thirty-four-year-old J. Crew–cardigan-clad white woman with an Ivy-League PhD, and, though both of my co–homeroom teachers work harder than I do and are better at their jobs than I am, when the CEO walks from classroom to classroom to watch all of us teaching, she always reports back to the principal that she likes the feel of me.
I take both girls to school and it feels magic to get to do this daily. They fight with me sometimes and sometimes with each other and they cry and do not want those socks or that dress or that underwear and sometimes they lie on the floor by the front door and scream because the seams on their shirt are rubbing wrongly on their collarbone again. But still, I get to hold their hands and walk them to the bus and ride it with them. I walk them each into their classrooms, and I linger, knowing that I’ll be late, as they sprint up to their friends. Sometimes, they sprint back, to kiss me on the leg, ask for one more hug. I put them in the running stroller early and I run them a loop around the park before school starts, packing my clothes and bag into the bottom of the stroller, changing in the school bathroom, locking the stroller up close to the school and going into work still smelling of sweat.
I’m scrolling through Sasha’s Instagram a week before my husband gets back: more vacations, coastal pictures. She went to see her sister. Her mother visits. I can only see above her chest in all the pictures; I wonder, though, if she was pregnant after all. I count the weeks between each photo, try to match them with the texts she’s sent. I imagine her close to due now, showing, surely. I reconsider making up a profile to befriend her spouse on Facebook.
We haven’t been outside all day and the girls are getting antsy, but also upset at the prospect of having to put on coats and shoes. I convince them, finally, getting a text from my husband asking what we’re up to and wanting to say, truthfully, that we’ve been outside. The elevator takes too long and we climb down the stairs, both girls with a toy and book, still fighting over who got what and why. We pass a man standing on the landing and they stop crying to wave and smile at him and I laugh, remembering how quickly they can switch.
That night, I’m back looking at Sasha, the computer whirring too close to my face, and I hear something outside our door explode. I jump up to wake the children, who have been asleep for hours after the afternoon spent in the park.
I smell the smoke. The fire alarm.
Sprinklers run and the air is filled with smoke. I hold both girls to my chest and carry them quickly down the stairs, phone and keys and wallet in my hand and their blankets wrapped around their backs.
What’s going on? the four-year-old asks me.
Her sister is wide-eyed, the two of them looking at me, then one another, their cheeks still hot and red with sleep.
I don’t know, I say. It’s fine.
The two-year-old cries off and on and asks for her father. Daddy, Daddy, she says, delirious still with sleep.
Everyone’s outside—so many of us, but we’re never together all at once. Our building is half rent-controlled and half gentrifiers who can’t afford renovated apartments. It’s old and brown and black and young and white and the groups all clump together. I look around for the handful of neighbors I know from the elevator, start searching for Josslyn.
The firemen come to check us and I ask them if they’ve seen her.
6C, I say to no one. Check 6C.
It’s cold and they bring a city bus to store us. Many of the tenants are old and need their medications. Many of us aren’t wearing coats.
