I’m sorry if it freaked you out, I think.
I call Melissa to check in about the investigation, to see if she’s in trouble. She says she hasn’t heard from anyone. Which means, she tells me, that I’m the one under investigation for whatever they think I did.
Some fucking shit, I say.
I know, she says. It’s all politics.
There are factions in the department of which I have very little knowledge—groups of people allied with one another who like to hire other allies. Groups of people who have, for a long time, been trying to push her out.
I leave work early and surprise our girls at pickup.
Mommy, says the four-year-old, on our walk home, if you don’t go to work, will we still live?
The Chilean writer’s going home for a month before the start of the new semester. She calls and I’m supposed to be at work but I’m staring at a painting in a gallery in the East Village by myself; it’s a landscape, Rackstraw Downes, the city; it’s all the sketches that he drew in advance. I’m not sure, after telling her all that I told her, that I can be in the same room with her again, but I see her name and I answer, wanting then to tell her about what I’m looking at.
I’ll come meet you, she says, before I can stop her.
The paintings are just shy of realist: meticulously detailed and from unexpected angles.
We’re not far from Chinatown, and we walk farther south to get a plate of dumplings.
I’ve missed you, she says, holding my arm; I feel my body lean toward hers.
I talk less than she talks and she doesn’t mention Sasha.
My sister, she says. The one who’s dead.
The dumplings are filled with pork and beef. The salt settles on my tongue and I have to open my full mouth to let the heat out.
We took her youngest daughter in after she died.
I wrap my hands around my green tea.
She was fourteen and her brothers were all older. She found her, her mother; she’d strung herself up by her neck.
My son was still in the house and, though maybe I didn’t know it then, my marriage was ending. And we took this feral girl into our house because I thought maybe I had killed her mother. We took her, I guess, because she had nowhere else to go.
She was wild, she says. Dumbstruck, maybe. She hardly knew us; her dad was gone, her mother dead.
It was awful, she says, for the months and years that followed. I was watching her destroy herself in slow motion. We tried all the systems, all the techniques, all the private schools and therapists and locking her inside her room, and nothing worked.
But time passed, she said. She got older. Time passing is the only truth I believe in anymore.
We’re not friends now, she says. She doesn’t call me Mom or tell me that she loves me. But she has thanked us once or twice for caring for her. She finished college, has a small apartment not far from us. Once a month or so she agrees to come over for a meal.
I love her, she says, and I think my sister would be grateful for it. I’m grateful that I get to love her, that there is that space still, for me to make a sort of amends.
I get coffee with the rich woman who wants to buy my husband’s sperm. I touch my stomach while we talk, unthinking. I do this all the time and it’s only now—cognizant, suddenly, of my powers as a baby maker in the presence of this woman who seems so wholly defined by her inability to make a baby—that I realize how often I do this.
Can’t you get sperm for cheaper? I want to say. Aren’t there better ways to spend your money? What is it like, I want to ask, to have money like you do? I can’t fathom the power, the way she must walk around every day so differently than I do. What’s it like, I want to say, to have pain in your teeth and go get them fixed instead of waiting it out until you’re pretty sure the nerve has died since you don’t feel it any longer? To not always have to be shortsighted because to look ahead is to just see more and more, but even more expensive, of the same? To not get the bad, refurbished phone that you have to replace regardless, the winter coats and hats and gloves that fall apart and break? I can fathom this, because I used to have it, because I was brought up inside it and had to unlearn it, which makes me resent it that much more. I recognize the look of it on other people, and I hate them, because I still have to remind myself, too often, that what they have is no longer mine.
I’m not so very married to genetics, I say. But I’m not sure this is my choice.
Your husband said you needed to be okay with it, she says. That’s what he told Jeremy.
I have forgotten that her husband’s name is Jeremy.
I am momentarily furious that my husband talked to him without my knowing, but I appreciate—though, of course, also resent—that he has given me the final say.
I want everything both ways all the time and I’m tired of feeling sorry for this. I want the money that they would give us and for my husband to be okay with it, for us to just forget about it, to pretend it never happened, to pay our rent for a few months without worry. But I have no control over my thoughts or feelings, and the fact that somewhere in the world would be a small baby like our babies, who is part of him but who we cannot love and keep safe, who we cannot check on late at night when she is sleeping, makes
