The waiter cleared our plates away; we both declined dessert. ‘I just need another month,’ I said. ‘Really.’ And though this was a lie, it was hard to imagine that Caroline cared whether or not I was telling the truth.

She nodded too kindly, said okay, said she had a new suggestion. ‘Are you open to hearing it?’

‘Of course,’ I said, exasperated. ‘Of course I am.’

‘I think you should write a memoir.’

I swilled the dregs of my Côtes du Rhône and felt a pulsing in my temples; heat flushed my arms, my face. ‘About?’ I nearly spat.

As she breathed in, audibly, it occurred to me that I’d become an impossible person. ‘I guess,’ said Caroline, my agent of twenty-five years, my touchstone, my one remaining connection to a professional reality, ‘I shouldn’t have brought it up.’

 

On the train back to Brooklyn, I fell into a wine-induced stupor. Settling into my coveted seat, I tried to let my shame go; I told myself I could do without it, at least long enough to rest. Though I still did some freelance editing and kept up my membership at a writing co-op, and though I sometimes returned to a document on my laptop called ‘third novel’, I rarely wrote more than the occasional fragment. So the shame of not writing was a familiar shame. What I wasn’t used to was this: I had only one story now. It was obvious to everyone who knew me, even – evidently – to Caroline, the sole person who’d maintained a staunch belief in my imagination. I had always written out of a desire to escape, to conjure, but I couldn’t do it anymore. To have an imagination: this seemed like the world’s greatest luxury.

I closed my eyes and tried to think of Tom: how he’d look as I approached him at the entrance to the park. I met him there most Wednesdays after his long run, and his face lit up every time. After everything, in the midst of it all, this was true.

When he’d started running the previous spring, it was still light out when he finished, and kids came bounding out of the meadow all sweaty and smiling in the sunshine. One group was evidently taking a Wilderness Skills class in Prospect Park, which was easy to mock; but now that it was fall and the park’s entrance was a dark mouth and the air foreshadowed winter, the idea of knowing how to use a compass seemed pretty sound.

I turned to my book and had barely finished a page when I heard a voice.

‘I see you are an intellectual.’

I continued reading, offering the curt smile I reflexively gave to men on the street who said things like Baby, you looking for me?

‘It is unusual,’ the voice said, ‘to see someone with a hardcover book.’

He was somewhere between professorial and homeless. He was older – grandfatherly – with a worn tweed coat and unruly eyebrows. He was foreign – Eastern European.

‘I’m no intellectual,’ I muttered.

‘Nor am I,’ he said.

 

She came into the world via C-section: dark blond, ears smushed, furious ruddy skin. Her hands splayed as she cried out and then the crying stopped. Later, the surgeon told me that she could hear our daughter sucking her fingers from across the operating room. Tom and I confessed to each other that we’d both thought there’d been a switch. We only admitted it later, after her features had emerged and there she was, so familiar. First she was big – what a big baby! – and then she wasn’t. Delicate. Feminine. So like you, our friends said. Sometimes I’d think almost wistfully about that first baby, the baby she’d been for a couple of hours. Big and fierce.

 

I was on the Q train, a weekday, after a late boozy lunch with my agent had gone long. I was on my way to pick up my son Alex in Prospect Park. I remember being excited to have time to read. I’m sure I was thinking of Alex, how he’d look as he saw me there at the entrance to the park. I picked him up every week and his face lit up every time.

 

I was on the Q train, the foreign man had yet to speak to me. I was reading my book, though the words started to blur, and I felt a strong desire to fall asleep and let the train carry me to Coney Island. Many years earlier, I’d acted in a student film with that very premise. Three young Eastern European men had approached me in Union Square and, with great seriousness, asked if I’d star in their movie. I’d burst out laughing and said I’m not taking any clothes off. Later they’d told me they’d thought I was Czech or maybe Polish, and that’s why they’d approached me so easily.

My family moved thirteen times before I was sixteen, and, probably due to trying to fit in for so many years, I evidently project a certain tabula rasa quality, or so I’ve been told, which I guess sounds better than something else I’ve heard: you look blank. It’s not that I have a friendly face or a familiar face, just an easy one to project onto. Whatever the reason, people often think I’m of their world. It’s probably why those Czech film students thought I was Czech. Although of course they could have been lying. And even though one of those film students became my husband, with whom I’ve now lived for over twenty years, I’m still not sure.

 

I don’t have a son named Alex. I never had a boy.

I had – I have – a daughter, who is, as they say, grown.

 

When the foreign man started speaking to me on the train that late afternoon, I was in some kind of tipsy-tired state, more susceptible to strangers. There must have been something about his accent that triggered the memory of that long-ago day and the three hopeful foreigners. He asked what I was reading and I said it was a novel about baseball but not really; how I loved books and movies about sports but never the sport itself.

‘You’re not a fan?’ he asked.

‘Never,’ I said. ‘I’m too distrustful of teams.’

‘I understand,’ he said.

I closed the book.

 

The baby sucked so hard on my nipple that in the first skin-to-skin minute she created an open wound. Then the milk came in a torrent, a tsunami bound only by my previously tiny, previously negligible breasts – breasts that I’d always secretly believed made me more beautiful because the rest of me had to work harder; because, really, couldn’t anyone get attention for breasts? But there they were, nothing negligible about them now: my girl was on it, sucking powerfully, but they were so full that she couldn’t get latched, and by the end of the first week, my nipples were bloodied and raw. Once home, I wanted her near me at all times. Everyone leave us alone, I’d command, my gaze shifting between this ravenous pissed-off baby and the ruins of my nipples. Pie for breakfast, up all night; leave us the fuck alone.

 

I closed the book as the Q train shot across the Manhattan Bridge. Yellow-pink light framed the old man’s face. The sun was setting; his jaw was strong beneath sagging skin. As he shifted his body to listen to me while I answered his questions there was a whiff of something. If he were younger I would have registered this smell as unhealthy and antiseptic, but because he was old, because he was wearing a worn tweed jacket, my brain came up with camphor, moors, a splash of wet wool. I was talking about how I was a writer who hadn’t written in years, a writer who had published a critically and commercially successful novel at twenty-three, an unsuccessful novel several years later and then never came up with another. I was talking about public transportation, traveling alone, audiobooks, smoked fish. I was speaking in code about loss. Why was I speaking? I had literally never spoken to a stranger on a train. Once, on the F train, many years before, a Chinese woman had reached into a cloudy glass container; she pulled out a hard-boiled egg and handed it to my toddler. I was both disgusted and touched and I let my daughter accept it. I thanked the Chinese woman, but she didn’t speak English and so we’d just smiled at one another for several stops until she got off at East Broadway.

The foreign man said, ‘I am visiting.’ He said, ‘I am grateful for your conversation.’

‘Where are you from?’

‘I live in Washington.’ As if he’d just remembered.

‘And before that?’

When he said he was from Prague, I became overly excited. ‘Oh! My husband is from Prague. I’ve been many times!’

‘Yes?’

‘I love it,’ I said. ‘We usually go in the spring.’

He rooted around in his jacket pocket and produced a torn piece of paper. There was a scribbled address, the words Saint Ivo.

‘Are you familiar with this restaurant?’

‘Here in Brooklyn?’ I asked, disappointed that he didn’t want to know what I loved about Prague.

‘I think so. But I don’t think it’s a restaurant.’

‘No? He told me that it was.’

‘Who did?’

‘My son. He is the owner.’

‘Oh. Well then, I guess it is,’ I smiled. ‘I thought it was a bar. I’ve passed it but I haven’t been inside.’

‘Is this my stop coming up, then?’

‘Yes. You’re meeting him there?’

‘You are a writer,’ he said. ‘I should like to read your books.’

‘Well,’ I said, trying not to sigh, ‘there are two. They exist.’ I told him my name.

He rummaged around in his pocket again and took out a small notebook and a pen.

‘Please write your name,’ he said, and I did.

‘There’s only one of me.’ And when he looked confused: ‘My name,’ I said. ‘It makes things easier online.’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I do not use the Internet.’ The subway came to a stop. ‘Please,’ he continued, ‘write down your address and your telephone number and this way I may telephone or write to you if I cannot find your books.’

The subway doors opened; he was going to miss his stop.

What a request! So Old World. That a stranger would ask for my home address so earnestly, without any sense of self-consciousness – it was wildly out of step with our time. Was there ever such a time?

What I wanted: to be in Prague this spring with our daughter. To sit in the unremarkable cafe that was, amazingly, still there with each passing year, and to fill sketchbooks with watercolors the way we’d done since she was ten. To order pastry after pastry. To talk about the various museums and castles we’d surely visit the next day, or maybe the day after. To listen to how she’d come up with a theme – Mythological Creatures! Death! Kafka! – and to sit side by side, by her side, quietly painting until the water in the glass turned black.

I wrote down my phone number. I wrote down my home address.

 

When I was a child, my father gave me a password so that even if he knocked on our door and I asked, Who is it? and it was my father saying, It’s your father, I was to ask for the password with my half of it and if he didn’t respond with his half, I was to never, not under any circumstance, let him in. This went for my brothers and my mother too. Not even if we heard each other’s voices were we to let each other in. He changed the password monthly. When we traveled, he never allowed anyone to put our home address on our luggage tags, in case the baggage handlers saw the tags and decided to rob our empty house. He didn’t believe in having food delivered, because what kind of person has a job delivering food? Do you really want that person at your doorstep, getting a good look inside? Whenever I mention these quirks, people inevitably ask if my father could have been a spy or involved in organized crime, and when I respond that he was definitely not, all of these precautions seem immediately and entirely crazy. And even though I laugh and say they sound crazy to me too, I secretly believe they were smart ideas; why should only spies be cautious? It was my father I thought of as the train doors closed and the foreign man disappeared with my telephone number and home address into a rush-hour crowd. Watching him from afar, he looked younger, almost rakish. I felt genuinely nervous, as if someone was watching me.

My father’s voice rang in my ears:

Sure you didn’t want to hand over your mother’s maiden name? Name of your first pet? Last four digits of your Social?

 

She braided hair so elaborately that in high school she started charging for it. She ate frozen waffles out of the freezer, claiming they tasted better that way. She would dive off any rock, cliff or board without hesitation. When she shaved off her long hair, when she went swimming in the icy Atlantic in December on a dare, when she stood up to a teacher who accused her of cheating, we thought she was brave, and she was brave, no question. Our daughter was brave. Even after she became addicted to heroin. Maybe especially then. The things she did. The places she went. When I said this at Family Day during one of the many excruciating Family Days we went to – Massachusetts, Florida, Arizona – people acted like I was Susan Sontag saying the men who flew into the World Trade Center weren’t cowards.

 

After Holly had been sober for a year, she left for a yoga retreat on the West Coast and never returned. When she didn’t return my calls or emails, I flew to LA and ascertained that the yoga retreat was connected to a ‘women’s empowerment project’ in Pasadena. Some cursory sleuthing turned up the fact that the female leader had been part of a couple that had done some pretty menacing work in Florida. There were reports of money laundering, brainwashing, pending lawsuits. The male leader had evidently absconded to Mexico, where he had a significant following; the female leader had moved to Pasadena, changed the name of the organization, and somehow met our Holly.

Tom traveled so much for work that I told myself it didn’t matter where we were based and I rented us a furnished Craftsman in Altadena. Then I tried, almost every day for a year, to talk to our daughter, to say anything I possibly could to get her away from their influence. This accomplished nothing except Holly distancing herself further. Then Tom hired a very expensive deprogramer who accomplished nothing, which led to Tom not coming back to Altadena. At some point my husband decided that our daughter was no longer a child; she was sober and it was her life, her choice.

I did not agree. Then Holly moved with the group further south, then across the border and off the grid and then she cut off contact.

 

I walked up the station stairs, sat on a park bench in the oncoming dusk and typed ‘Saint Ivo’ into my phone. I was searching for something, but I wasn’t sure what. Some verification that this bar had food service? That they had staff ? That someone with a Czech father worked there? Saint Ivo, as it turns out, is the patron saint of lawyers, a sometime-symbol for justice. He’s also the patron saint of abandoned children.

I blew through Yelp reviews, blog mentions, and as the blowsy sky shot through gray to inky blue, a text came in from Tom – How was lunch with Caroline? Where are you?

Where was I?

I was with Holly, as I often was.

Seriously, Mommy? Get a grip.

I kept going over the subway ride. How I’d closed my eyes, how I’d been thinking – almost dreaming – of Alex, my non-existent son. I know I’m not the only one who gets these glimpses: other children, other husbands, other lives. This is where my imagination had gone: frittered away on longing and regret, just like everybody else.

I once met a woman in a support group. She was significantly older than me, and though she looked tired and sad, she also looked great. I remember how beautifully she was dressed, and I took solace in the care she clearly showed herself. She’d been very frank about cutting off her son. I’m done, she’d told me. It’s over. He’s not getting any more money. I’ve already given; do you know what I mean? I gave at the office. I gave at the door.

I thought about how the man had singled me out, how he’d flattered me and it had worked. I had been conned; I could feel it. I checked that my wallet was in my bag. I checked my wallet to make sure that all my money and cards were there.

I’ll meet you at home, I managed to type into my device. Sorry, train delays xx

The sun was setting and the chill felt reassuring. Summer had lasted too long. I had no desire to hear what Tom would say about Caroline’s suggestion. I had no interest in his sympathy or disgust at the idea of me writing about Holly and our family, or – least of all – how it might not be such a bad idea and that maybe I should consider it.

Where was I?

I’m with our daughter again, Tomas. I still call you Tomas. You’re making lush films that no one will see because it’s the dawn of the 1990s and there’s funding and interest and no internet for the foreign man on the subway to ignore, and I am with our daughter. I’m sitting on the pine floors of our Prospect Heights kitchen a million or twenty-two years ago after feeding the baby breakfast, and I’m seeing the grooves in the honey-colored planks, the bits of food that are stuck in those grooves that I need to remove with a special knife kept specifically for this purpose. I’m with our daughter – twelve, thirteen years later – different apartment, different world. She laughs so hard at the TV that I think something is wrong with her (could something be wrong with her?) and then I start laughing too because her laugh is contagious and yes, just a touch scary, the way the best laughs are.

 

She had packed up her purple duffel bag and flown off to California, and I’d thought: how great is that? How great is it that she’s taking such good care? She may have been a little bit addicted to yoga but come on. I wasn’t about to start in about how any addiction was an addiction. If our daughter became yoga-addicted, maybe vegan, maybe a little too earnest, if she lived a clean and sober life: you would never hear me complain. You’d never even hear me make a joke.

These days I admit I think with some frequency: Fuck yoga. Just, seriously? Fuck yoga.

 

The call had come in the middle of the night when Tom was away – in Mongolia of all places – on a T-Mobile shoot.

Hi, Holly said. It’s me.

Please, I said. Just tell me where you are.

I’d expected Holly’s refusal, just as I’d expected some tears. But there was neither. Holly said she was sorry for causing any pain. She said she was ready for a visit. I took down the information and was on a plane the next day.

 

It was nearly dark now. I’d planned to buy groceries on my way home but as I left the park bench I thought, why not go a bit out of my way to the better market where I could buy fish and fresher produce and still get home with enough time to cook dinner? The bar happened to be on a side street near that market. This was not why I was going there; I was not stopping for a drink on my way home, though nothing would have been wrong with that. When our daughter was in elementary school I had a friend who did that every day before coming home from work and she was the sanest mother I knew. And really, what would it hurt to go take a look at the place? To see if they did, in fact, serve food and if the old man had been telling the truth about his son working there? I knew there was no real reason to think he’d been lying, but I was my father’s daughter, and sometimes, even if it doesn’t make sense, we need to scratch an itch. Tom and I only ever went to the same four restaurants, which was absurd; maybe I was just in need of a new place. I could call it research and return with Tom some other night if the place was appealing.

There was an alley to the side of the building, unusual for the neighborhood. I saw a man stacking trays of glassware. I watched as he stacked, as the glasses piled up, glinting. I wasn’t sure why I watched him, but I told myself I’d walk away after the last tray. But then he finished. He checked his phone, he ran his hand over his bearded face, and there I was, motionless. He went inside the bar through the side door. Almost immediately, he came back out again, this time with the old man from the subway. It was so strange to see him again; in a way it was just as surprising as it would have been to discover that I’d imagined him. The two men were speaking low, in Czech, which I knew enough to recognize, but not much more than that. Also, there was an urgency, or maybe it only seemed that way because what was I doing there, watching? The old man looked different – more gruff ? – his movements were quicker; he hastily lit a cigarette and the younger man waved the smoke away.

Tom texted me that we should order in, that it was getting late. Almost home, I texted back. I’ll cook. I went to the classical-music-playing market, bizarrely determined to make dinner, even though Tom would have happily eaten cereal. I bought mahimahi and bok choy and avocado. I bought cardamom ice cream. While speed-walking home, leaves blazed orange under streetlights; flyers stapled to telephone poles curled up at their fraying edges.

 

The beach where I met Holly was off a bumpy road scattered with horse dung and broken glass. The parking lot was swarming with flies; giant scorched palms framed a broken gate. My daughter led me over a muddy path. The ocean roared in the distance.

‘It’s not how I pictured it,’ I said.

‘Oh, it never is.’

‘But you’ve been here before?’

‘Jesus, yes, a hundred times.’ She walked ahead of me, light on her feet, almost running. She looked more enlivened and clear-eyed than the last time we’d met.

She waited for me where the thicket of palm trees opened up, and when I stood beside her and saw the beach, I actually gasped. The ocean was cobalt, the sand pristine. Two wild horses galloped at a safe distance; they headed toward a rock outcropping a quarter-mile down the beach. ‘It’s unreal,’ I said.

‘It’s real all right.’

Holly wasn’t wearing sunglasses or a hat. I bit down on my urge to tell her yet again how she’d ruin her lovely fair skin.

‘I knew you’d appreciate this spot,’ she said. The sunlight hit her directly in the eyes and she didn’t even shield them. ‘Look, Mommy. We’re the only ones on this whole beach. Just you and me and the horses.’

‘I think I see someone way down there,’ I said, squinting toward the rocks.

‘I don’t see anyone.’

 

Tom was still in his running clothes, hunched over the table and drinking beer.

We were well into our forties. Some of our old friends had kids in middle school; a few – this being New York City – had recently had their first. Most friends we saw these days were childless and none had children our daughter’s age. We’d let go of those friendships, the ones we’d made when we’d been the youngest parents in the room, when people often thought I was the babysitter.

I preheated the oven and became inexplicably thirsty. I gulped down water, prepared the fish and bok choy and when Tom came into the kitchen, I said, ‘Do you remember when I used to feel self-conscious about being the youngest in the room?’

He shook his head.

‘I used to feel embarrassed that I’d had a baby so young. You don’t remember that?’

‘No.’

‘I can’t believe you don’t remember that.’

‘I do not remember half of what you remember. You know this.’

‘I do.’

‘Just stop, Julie.’ He sounded severe but he smiled slowly. ‘What
I remember is that I felt lucky.’

I realized I was nodding, biting my lip so hard it hurt.

‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘Did you have a very bad day?’

‘I had a very bad day,’ I lied. I’d had much much worse.

‘I am sorry.’

‘You are,’ I said, ‘I know. And I know we tried everything. We did. I know we did.’

‘Yes,’ he said, grabbing my hand. ‘Now tell me. Tell me how it went with Caroline.’

‘Fine,’ I said, shrugging. ‘You know.’

‘Do you think you can finish it?’ he asked, and I could hear how he tried his best not to sound tentative, not to acknowledge that I might, in fact, throw a plate if he asked such a question.

In a recent support group, I met another woman, still grief-stricken after a decade. Her son had been on a course, and while trying to get to the next level in whatever godforsaken cult he’d joined, he’d become gravely ill. Evidently he had asked for medical attention and someone had read him the Vedas.

‘Should we have dinner?’ I suggested, keeping it bright.

Tom nodded, finished his beer. ‘Thank you for cooking.’

His politeness sometimes struck me as funny. ‘No problemo,’
I said, more sharply than I’d meant to.

 

‘You’re allowed to come here?’ I asked, and immediately regretted it.

‘Allowed? I’m not trapped. We’ve gone over this.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s walk.’

‘How many miles is it?’

‘I have no idea.’

The sand had created a stream of shallow water that the ocean refilled as the waves crashed down. Holly jumped over the stream and cried out to the empty beach.

I followed more slowly with no cry of my own. ‘Are you going to do cartwheels?’ I asked. Holly had spent several summers as a child obsessively cartwheeling and demanding an audience for each one.

‘Shut up,’ my daughter said, her smile bright.

She’d had her teeth fixed. I wondered if they’d paid for it. Maybe it was one of the ways they’d lured her. How her teeth had looked when we’d found her that last time: yellowed, jagged; two missing. As though her mother had not made appointments and kept them; as if the mother had not diligently taken the daughter to the dentist and orthodontist until her nearly perfect teeth were perfect, not so long ago.

 

I woke in the night. Beyond our shades the sky was pale and I assumed it was almost dawn. I took my phone to the bathroom and when I saw that it was only 1 a.m. I splashed my face with water and lay back down. In my mind’s eye, I watched myself pull on clothes and walk outside. I imagined visiting our storage unit down by the canal. It was open 24/7. So good to know, I remember joking with Tom when we first rented the space. Could there be a sadder time than the middle of the night to deal with one’s possessions? I imagined nodding to the receptionist, taking the elevator, walking the fluorescent corridor. I could sit on the cold and dusty floor with the plastic tubs of stuffed animals and photos and irrelevant documents. I could cry over carefully folded baby clothes. That was always an option.

Hello there, I greeted my insomnia like an estranged old friend. Oh hi, HI! It’s been a while.

 

On my way home the next evening, I picked up beets and carrots at the market and as I turned down a diagonal street, I came upon the storefront surrounded by brownstones, that odd alley where I’d seen the old man from the subway. This time I went in through the front door. It was as if I were now that mom-friend from years ago, bracing herself for dinner-bath-bedtime. I tried to project her insouciance, her seemingly effortless clarity. But being back here again and having barely slept the night before – I felt kind of blurry even before ordering a drink.

There was nothing distinctive about the bar, which was just a bar (no food, old man, sorry): Waylon Jennings on the stereo, twinkly lights, a tattered American flag. The bartender was presumably the old man’s son; I’d seen him stacking glassware the previous evening, waving his father’s smoke away. I realized why I’d continued to watch him go about such a mundane task: he was attractive. I almost laughed out loud now at how disconnected I’d become from my own blunt instincts. The man’s appeal hadn’t struck me at first, but it seemed pretty obvious now.

I ordered a Manhattan, my voice managing to sound both shrill and shaky at once.

He ran his hand over his face and squinted. ‘What was that? Can you speak up?’

I repeated myself and he nodded.

‘Got it,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

‘No,’ I shrugged. ‘I’m a low talker.’

‘I’m just really beat,’ he admitted. He poured bourbon into
a shaker.

‘Me too.’

‘Is that right? Rough day at work? You got a baby at home?’

‘No,’ I said, hard.

‘I don’t know why I asked that. That’s none of my business. This neighborhood just seems colonized by babies and their attractive parents.’

‘I’m a little old for that,’ I said.

‘Well now you’re just fishing.’

He looked at me and I didn’t look away. I willed myself not to flush at the base of my neck, where I could feel the blotches blooming.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Last night I cut off this guy when I realize how drunk he is. He gets belligerent. I tell him to go home, and he immediately passes out. I spend the rest of the night getting him to a hospital and answering questions.’

‘Sounds rough,’ I said. ‘But . . . he’s okay?’

‘Oh he’s fine,’ he said, evidently in no hurry to mix my drink. He balanced a cherry on a spoon, held on to it and continued: ‘I mean, job hazard, I realize, but this is exactly the type of bullshit I was hoping to avoid when I opened a bar on the fringes of a bourgeois neighborhood. Not dealing with this bullshit is what I tell myself I’m getting in return for ponying up this kind of rent every month.’

‘That and the attractive parents.’

He dropped in the cherry, placed the glass on the bar. ‘Well of course,’ he said. ‘That goes without saying.’

I took a sip. ‘Thanks.’ It was cold and smoky, completely delicious. I wondered why I ever bothered with wine. ‘You know,’ I said, ‘bourgeois drunks are still drunk.’

‘Wise woman,’ he said, cracking his first real smile. ‘And you’re neither.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘No system. It’s just a guess.’

‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Wait,’ he said, ‘wait, I recognize you.’

‘Probably from this bourgeois neighborhood?’

‘Maybe,’ he said, seeming slightly deflated. ‘Probably.’

 

I stood with Holly on the deserted beach in Baja. I was breathless. Mainly from so much walking and the sun and wind, but also the phenomenal beauty. The sky was the same Pacific sky as in the backyard of the Altadena rental, but it looked entirely different next to the jutting cliffs, next to the lush palm groves in the distance, so dense they looked black.

‘It’s enough,’ I said.

I didn’t know if Holly had heard me. She hurled herself toward the sand, did five perfect cartwheels in a row.

‘It’s enough,’ I said loudly now. ‘It’s time to come home.’

Holly stood tall, not remotely out of breath.

‘I mean –’ I wanted to hold her small smooth hands. I wanted to smell her hair. ‘You seem strong. I really think you can handle it.’

Holly kept her eyes on the waves, closing out fast on the shore.

‘I’ll find you a job.’

She laughed in one hard, bitter peal. ‘You will?’

‘You’ll stay with us, but it doesn’t have to be forever. Of course it doesn’t. Just until you get yourself settled. You have so much to offer. You’ve been through so much. Have you ever thought about how much you could help people?’

Holly shook her head; it was less of a response than a way to redirect the conversation. She came close and took hold of my shoulders. We were exactly the same height.

‘Mommy,’ she said. Her hair hung down her back in the blond waves of girls’ drawings. Her eyes were light green, feline, which was funny because she could never stand cats. ‘Mommy,’ she said, with a stronger tone. She gripped my shoulders as if she might start shaking me. ‘You’ve got to stop crying.’

‘Please,’ I said, ‘just please.’

She looked into my eyes. She wasn’t crying. Not even close. ‘I’m staying here.’

‘These people. Holly, these people are insane.’

‘You’ve got to let me go,’ she said. ‘These people care about me. I’m happy. I invited you here to tell you that.’

‘Never,’ I said. ‘I will never let you go.’

But I had flown back to New York and returned to my life, which was the life of our family, which wasn’t a family without her. I was forty-seven years old. Holly was twenty-five.

 

I was forty-eight years old and at Saint Ivo again. I’d been back a handful of times, always returning around six o’clock – the same time as when I’d seen the old man. I suspected he’d return and when he didn’t I was curiously discouraged. I never stayed long, always left after one drink and I never mentioned it to Tom. Each time I sat down at the bar I was afraid of running into someone I knew – not because I really had anything to hide, but because I’d created some kind of odd little bubble and I didn’t want it disrupted.

‘You must see a lot,’ I said to the bartender. I still didn’t know
his name.

He shrugged. ‘I don’t pay attention.’

‘Somehow I don’t believe that’s true.’

‘I drove a cab for a summer on Long Island. That was crazier.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Oh yeah. Sure. People need to talk.’

During the first of many pregnancies after Holly’s birth, I’d been invited to do a reading at a club in Westchester and the book group had sent a car; the Sudanese driver and I spoke at length as we headed north and he told me proudly that his wife was pregnant. He revealed the due date, which was also my secret due date; the coincidence was too much and so even though I’d not yet said it aloud to anyone besides Tom, I told the driver that I was pregnant too. We wished each other well; I miscarried later that night.

‘What’s the craziest thing you’ve heard?’

‘It blends together,’ he said. ‘Y’know?’

‘I do,’ I said. ‘I wish I didn’t, but I do.’

He placed both his hands on the bar. ‘I’m Alex.’ When he noticed my reaction he smiled tightly. ‘What? What was that face for? Do you have a cute expression for every thought or something?’

‘What did I do?’ I blurted.

‘You have a very expressive face.’

‘I do not. In fact I’ve always been told the opposite.’

‘Not sure what blind jackasses you’ve been talking to.’

I was too flustered to say anything else.

‘So . . . is Alex your husband’s name or something?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No. My husband’s name is Tom.’

‘Aha,’ he said. ‘Okay.’

The door opened and two couples came in, bringing with them a trace of sundown. Beyond them was the same street I knew, a slice of lavender sky. Cars and trucks took this corner too fast and I imagined being in one of those cars, driving out of the city, out of my life entirely. I watched as the couples deliberated and Alex behaved with unusual attentiveness, offering them tastes of what was on draft, giving a lengthy description of a local IPA. He rolled up his sleeves with particular care; I expected some ink but there was none. By the time he made his way back to me, I’d finished my drink. I smoothed bills down on the sticky wood.

‘Going already?’ he asked.

I nodded. ‘Do you – do you serve food here?’

‘Why?’ asked the bartender. ‘You hungry?’

I shook my head and looked over at the couples, laughing and touching each other’s arms. ‘I met your father. That’s why I came in here. I mean, he recommended it. I met him on the subway and he asked me for directions.’

‘You met my father on the subway?’

‘I don’t know why I didn’t mention it right away.’ Alex’s eyes were brown, his skin many shades darker than his father’s; his forehead was inscribed with lines. ‘He seemed like a nice man.’

He nodded. ‘My father –’

‘I was in a strange mood when he struck up a conversation,’ I said, standing still. ‘But he seemed to think –’

‘My father has dementia. He shows up sometimes but he doesn’t remember. He thinks that I’m a world-class chef.’

‘Oh,’ I said. I could feel my lips twist into a disappointed grin. ‘Oh.’

Holly was gone. I knew this. I’d heard Tom say it more than he could stand. Stop making me say it, he’d finally yelled, his voice hoarse with tears by then. After a lifetime of shunning exercise, he’d started running the very next morning.

‘That must be painful,’ I said.

‘Of course it is,’ said Alex. ‘It’s also a pain in the ass.’

It was quiet between us and then it was silent.

‘I’m Julie,’ I said. I couldn’t meet his eye.

Sometimes I thought I had nothing left: no more despair, no more desire. I was always wrong.

That night I had insomnia again and I left the house at dawn. I walked not toward the park but through the neighborhoods: down the hill to the storage units, over the canal to the waterfront. On my way there I walked quickly, barely noticing my surroundings, but on my way back, I took it slow. I stood on the bridge, alone under the scant moon and the glaring streetlights, fearful of who might be out at this hour, but also marveling at how the stench from the polluted canal was absent. The air smelled so clean; on the other side of the bridge stood a lush patch of sunflowers. I always wondered who tended such an impressive garden, one that grew more elaborate each year, seemingly unmessed with by passersby. I thought, as I always did, how Holly had always loved this bridge and this garden and how she – in a parallel universe or maybe even in this one – would enjoy being with me there, right then. I thought of how we both loved small pockets of wonder, sought beauty in rough places. It had been so long, I realized, since anyone had pointed out our similarities. Then I looked more closely at the garden and – I swear – saw a young junkie passed out in the sunflowers, streetlight shining brightly on her acne-scattered face. Dyed green hair, nose pierce, cheek pierce, eyebrow pierce, and there I was, seized with such revulsion that I turned away and ran onto the bridge, gripping the railing and dry heaving like I did during all of my pregnancies, trying and failing for some kind of release into the foul water below.

Dear Caroline, I’m writing to thank you. Dear Caroline, I’ve been thinking it over . . .

When I walked up the hill and through the familiar pattern of streets, I was half surprised to find the bar simply closed like every other bar, that neither Alex nor his father were there, waiting for me in the doorway.

Tom, I knew, would wake and assume that I was in the kitchen. He wouldn’t fall back to sleep because once he was up he was up. He’d make his way through the apartment and, when he failed to find me, would find a scribbled note. He’d find an answer; he always would. I’d never make him wonder. Then he would suit up for his run, his sneakers hitting the pavement as I made my way home. Out and back, in and out, both of us moving through our lives. When I lay down in our empty bed and closed my eyes, I saw Holly’s new teeth. They flashed like shells on the shoreline; they came and went with the tide.