My husband grabs hold of my bare arm as I’m walking toward our room to get dressed with a towel wrapped around me.
You went running, he says.
I nod and shrug and smile.
His hand is big and warm but my arm stays tight and I start to lean away from him. He’s not angry, but his grip also isn’t soft.
This shutting down and pushing through, he says. It’s not as convincing as you think.
* * *
There is a woman in Josslyn’s apartment. The door is cracked open and I see her in the kitchen, opening the drawers.
Hello? I say.
It’s been a month. The place still sits empty. Pieces of the floor tiles are still missing and the molding at the base of the hall walls close to her door is still charred.
Hi, says the woman in Josslyn’s apartment.
She’s my age, a little younger. She wears a pleated skirt, a tucked-in tank top, her hair held back in a bun. Last I heard from Luis, the cops think it was a random man who’d fixated on her from across the street for months.
I’m Iffy, she says.
I tell her my name.
Ifeoma, she says. My name’s Ifeoma, but my mom’s the only one who calls me that.
I nod.
There’s a small box a quarter full in the corner, an old TV on a wooden box in front of a dark-red couch with a wool blanket spread over the back in the room past where she stands.
Josslyn was my mom, she says.
I’m so sorry, I say.
I think I want to hug her but stay still.
She nods, her hands still by her sides. She was a little nuts, she tells me.
She shakes her head and I step closer to her but stop at Josslyn’s doorway.
She says, again: She was my mom.
* * *
I’m at work when I get an email from the rich woman. There are paragraphs below her signature about copyright and confidentiality. The disclaimer covers ten times the space of the few sentences she writes.
I worry that we shocked you, she writes, and I’m sorry. I hope you don’t mind I found your email online. I wanted to say that we don’t mean to presume anything in our asking for this thing that feels so monumental. It’s just we liked your husband so much. We’re so desperate to find something that works.
Everybody likes my husband, is attracted to him; everybody falls in love with him.
She tells me about their failed attempts at IVF and her husband’s low sperm count. She tells me she’s imagined inserting the sperm of someone she doesn’t know into her womb. They clean it, she writes. In a machine. It’s all so strange and clinical and I couldn’t quite imagine how a baby might come out in the end. It’s all so abstract, so unreal, so exactly nothing like I thought. I just, she says. I thought it would be worth it to ask and I am sorry if it freaked you out.
* * *
I sit at the high school in an office with five other people. Fake wood panels separate our desks. Everyone seems always to be busy. I used to feel busy, but now I come here and stare at my computer, not sure how I used to fill all of my time. I keep looking around to see if anyone is watching. I wonder if someone somewhere in human resources has gotten an alert because the word sperm passed through the network on its way to me.
I close my computer and go back to reading: So Big, Edna Ferber. About mistakes it’s funny. You’ve got to make your own; and not only that, if you try to keep other people from making theirs they get mad.
I pretend the woman hasn’t emailed. I want to be able to say no to her without thinking. I want to give her what she wants, to get what we want, and not care. I no longer believe that there’s such a thing as everybody getting what they want and no one paying for it later. I’m embarrassed, maybe, by how much I still hope that we can get to okay on our own.
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.