* * *
Every day or two I get a text from Sasha, pictures of the baby. I touch my phone’s screen and smile at her. I don’t know how to tell her what I think, how much I hope for her and her baby, how much I wish I could be there with both of them. I send back pictures of our girls instead.
We’re friends now, I think. It’s different. I think maybe this time, as we try to love each other, maybe it will be more careful and less dire.
* * *
I get an email from Melissa. Just wanted to check in to say I’ve been cleared, she writes, of whatever this whole thing was about. I wanted to thank you, she says. She suggests we meet for dinner and I agree too quickly.
I’d love to, I say. Tell me when and where.
How are you? says Melissa. I see her outside. She’s very thin, no longer pretty, but the structure of her face serves as a sort of palimpsest for all the ways it must have been pretty, must have been a force.
We hug although I’ve never hugged her. I brush my arm accidentally along her abdomen.
I don’t think the food is very good here, she says. She picked the restaurant. It’s close to my apartment, she says. And the drinks are strong.
I smile, not sure if I’m meant to laugh.
The host leads us to a table in a dark corner of the room. She gets a gin martini and I am grateful and I get the same and she smiles at me, showing teeth.
You’ve been good? she says.
She never asks about my children and I’ve always liked this about her. She has no children. I have heard, though she’s not said this to me, that she dislikes them.
I’m so glad, I say, that all of this is settled.
Our drinks come and she sips hers.
She says my name. You have no idea, she says.
I don’t know if you want to talk about it.
It’s fine, she says. It’s over now.
What happened? I say. What did any of this have to do with you?
David is a friend of mine, she says.
David is the man about whom the students had been talking, the man of whom I reported uncertain allegations but who now has apparently been cleared.
There are certain people, she says, who have been out to get him. Not least because he is allied with me.
She’s a fiction writer. I’ve read only one of her books, and in it a woman sleeps with her sixty-five-year-old professor/mentor. She’s a gorgeous writer. The book spends a good amount of time unpacking all the various ways and places they have sex. There are paragraphs describing New York, at night and early in the morning, the park, along the water, that I can still picture sometimes in my head.
There’s something happening right now, she says, a certain type of victimhood, she says.
Our food comes.
I sip my drink and she sips hers.
It’s been weaponized, she says. Anyway, she says, noticing that there’s food before her.
What happened, though? I say. What’s happening with David?
He was dating a student, she says.
But he’s married, I want to say, and then feel strange and dumb but also angry. He’s married. He has little kids.
There are all these new provincial rules because the institution is afraid, she says.
She eats her sandwich in small bites and chews it slowly.
I have a cheeseburger that I’ve yet to touch.
One of these hypersensitive girls thought it was not appropriate, she says.
She, this girl, she says, not his girlfriend—she asked to be removed from his class. I told her I saw no reason for this, she says.
She sips her drink and I press my hands against the hard wood of the table.
So she told on me, she says.
I pick up my burger and I bite.
It’s still not clear to me, though, she says, why they looped you in.
I chew and neither of us speaks for too long for it not to be on purpose.
Yeah, I say. Who knows?
* * *
When I get home, my husband is in bed. Left out on the counter, meant for me to see it, is a letter telling us the owners of the building are converting it to condos. They’ve given us the option to purchase our apartment or to leave within the month.
* * *
I call the rich woman the next morning.
Could we get coffee? I say to her.
I have news, she says.
We’ve waited too long and she’s pregnant. They did one round of IVF with other donor sperm she doesn’t explain and it worked.
I hold briefly onto my stomach.
It’s still early, she says.
Of course, I say. Good luck.
Were you— she starts.
Just seeing how you were.
* * *
My husband’s parents keep a small farm in Maine and have very little money, but they have gotten us a rental car. We’re meant to drive up to Maine to get our girls and spend the next week with them and my husband’s parents. We stop in Boston to see my friend Leah, who has brand-new twins and a new house; they live up high on a hill, across the street from a small natural preserve with lots of large, dark trees in the back. They have a dog they’ve had since the year that they got married and she’s huge now, an English bulldog, and she has bad hips and is sometimes incontinent and has to be lifted in and out of the house every hour so she doesn’t pee or shit on the floor too much.
We have nothing in common, Leah and I. We met our third year of college, before we were formed enough to know who we might one day be. We like each other. We’ve liked each other for long enough that it feels worth it to keep being friends.
* * *
I hug her and I grab a baby from her arms when we get there. I dip my face into the top of his head and breathe him in; he squirms and is warm on my chest and I breathe out long after a week without our children. Most of the time when she’s not up and moving through the house and doing something—cleaning, cooking—Leah has a baby latched on one of her breasts.
The first day and a half is all catching up and small talk. Leah’s husband is extraordinarily calm and kind and my husband helps him install IKEA shelves that they bought months ago for the babies’ room. They ask us about the girls and about New York, and when I say I quit the high school job Leah and her husband get quiet and look at each other.
What’s the plan, then? Leah says, trying to stay neutral.
I’m not sure, I say. I have four jobs for the fall, I say.
I’ve got some things lined up, my husband says.
I want to tell her we will at least be able to care for our kids but I don’t know that.
We might be without a place to live in two weeks, I don’t say.
Leah puts the twins to bed and we open a third bottle of wine and sit outside looking at the trees until we all begin to fall asleep and Leah says, We should go inside, and we go into our separate rooms.
* * *
My husband falls asleep as soon as we get under the covers. I read for a while. I scroll through my own Instagram account, all the pictures and the videos of our daughters, years of them: babies, bigger, laughing, crawling, the last summer we were up in Maine. I go briefly to Sasha’s, where there is nothing new except a single picture of the baby, red-faced, big-eyed, hairless. I like it, then plug in my phone and try to fall asleep.