Good in Bed

EIGHTEEN

When I opened my eyes, I was underwater. In a swimming pool? The lake a t summer camp? The ocean? I wasn’t sure. I could see the light above me, filtered through the water, and I could feel the pull of what was underneath me, the dark depths I couldn’t make out.

I’d spent most of my life in the water swimming with my mother, but it was my father who’d taught me how, when I was little. He’d flip a silver dollar into the water, and I’d follow it down, learning how to hold my breath, how to go deeper than I thought I could, how to propel myself back to the top. “Sink or swim,” my father would tell me when I’d come up empty-handed and sputtering and complaining that I couldn’t, that the water was too cold or too deep. Sink or swim. And I’d go back into the water. I wanted the silver dollar, but, more than that, I wanted to please him.

My father. Was he here? I turned around frantically, paddling, trying to flip myself up toward where I thought the light was coming from. But I was getting dizzy. I was getting all turned around. And it was hard to keep paddling, hard to stay afloat, and I could feel the bottom of the ocean tugging at me, and I thought how nice it would be just to stop, not to move, to let myself float to the bottom, to sink into the soft silt of a thousand seashells ground down fine, to let myself sleep…

Sink or swim. Live or die.

I heard a voice, coming from the surface.

What is your name?

Leave me alone, I thought. I’m tired. I’m so tired. I could feel the darkness pulling me, and I craved it.

What is your name?

I opened my eyes, squinting in the bright white light.

Cannie, I muttered. I’m Cannie, now leave me alone.

Stay with us, Cannie, said the voice. I shook my head. I didn’t want to be here, wherever here was. I wanted to be back in the water, where I was invisible, where I was free. I wanted to go swimming again. I shut my eyes. The silver dollar flashed and glittered in the sunlight, arcing through the air, plunging into the water, and I followed it back down.

I closed my eyes again and saw my bed. Not my bed in Philadelphia, with its soothing blue comforter and bright, pretty pillows, but my bed from when I was a little girl – narrow, neatly made, with its red and brown paisley spread tucked tight around it and a spill of hard-cover books shoved underneath. I blinked and saw the girl on the bed, a sturdy, sober-faced girl with green eyes and brown hair in a ponytail that spilled over her shoulders. She was lying on her side, a book spread open before her. Me? I wondered. My daughter? I couldn’t be sure.

I remembered that bed – how it had been my refuge as a little girl, how it had been the one place I felt safe as a teenager, the place my father would never come. I remember spending hours there on weekends, sitting cross-legged with a friend on the other side of the bed, with the telephone and a melting pint of ice cream between us, talking about boys, about school, about the future, and how our lives would be, and I wanted to go back there, wanted to go back so badly, before things went wrong, before my father’s departure and Bruce’s betrayal, before I knew how it all turned out.

I looked down, and the girl on the bed looked up from her book, up at me, and her eyes were wide and clear.

I looked at the girl, and she smiled at me. Mom, she said.

Cannie?

I groaned as if waking from the most delicious dream and slitted my eyes open again.

Squeeze my hand if you can hear this, Cannie.

I squeezed weakly. I could hear voices burbling above me, heard something about blood type, something else about fetal monitor. Maybe this was the dream, and the girl on the bed was real? Or the water? Maybe I really had gone swimming, maybe I’d swum out too far, gotten tired, maybe I was drowning right now, and the picture of my bed was just a little something my brain had whipped up by way of last-minute entertainment.

Cannie? said the voice again, sounding almost frantic. Stay with us!

But I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be back in the bed.

The third time I closed my eyes I saw my father. I was back in his office in California, sitting up straight on his white examining table. I could feel the weight of diamonds on my finger, in my ears. I could feel the weight of his gaze upon me – warm and full of love, like I remembered it from twenty years ago. He was sitting across from me, in his white doctor’s coat, smiling at me. Tell me how you’ve been, he says. Tell me how you turned out.

I’m going to have a baby, I told him, and he nodded. Cannie, that’s wonderful!

I’m a newspaper reporter. I wrote a movie, I told him. I have friends. A dog. I live in the city.

My father smiled. I’m so proud of you.

I reached for him and he took my hand and held it. Why didn’t you say so before? I asked. It would have changed everything, if I’d just known you cared

He smiled at me, looking puzzled, like I’d stopped speaking English, or like he’d stopped understanding it. And when he took his hands away I opened mine and found a silver dollar in my palm. It’s yours, he said. You found it. You always did. You always could.

But even as he spoke he was turning away.

I want to ask you something, I said. He was at the door, like I remembered, his hand on the knob, but this time he turned and looked at me.

I stared at him, feeling my throat go dry, saying nothing.

How could you? is what I thought. How could you leave your own children? Lucy was just fifteen, and Josh was only nine. How could you do that; how could you walk away?

Tears slid down my face. My father walked back to me. He pulled a carefully folded handkerchief from his breast pocket, where he always kept them. It smelled like the cologne he always wore, like lemons, and the starch the Chinese laundry place put in, like they always did. Very carefully, my father bent down and wiped away my tears.

Then there was the darkness below me again, and the light above.

Sink or swim, I thought ruefully. And what if I wanted to sink? What was there to keep me afloat?

I thought of my father’s hand on my cheek, and I thought of the steady green-eyed gaze of the girl on the bed. I thought about what it felt to take a warm shower after a long bike ride, to slip into the ocean on a hot summer day. I thought about the taste of the tiny strawberries Maxi and I had found at the farmer’s market. I thought about my friends, and Nifkin. I thought about my own bed, lined with flannel sheets softened from many trips through the dryer, with a book on the pillow and Nifkin perched beside me. And I thought for a minute about Bruce… not about Bruce specifically, but the feeling of falling in love, of being loved, of being worthy. Treasured, I heard Maxi say.

So okay, I thought. Fine. I’ll swim. For myself, and for my daughter. For all the things I love, and everyone who loves me.

When I woke up again I heard voices.

“That doesn’t look right,” said one. “Are you sure it’s hanging the right way?”

My mother, I thought. Who else?

“What’s this yellow stuff?” demanded another voice – young, female, crabby. Lucy. “Probably pudding.”

“It’s not pudding,” I heard in a raspy growl. Tanya.

Then: “Lucy! Get your finger out of your sister’s lunch!”

“She’s not going to eat it,” Lucy said sulkily.

“I don’t know why they even brought food,” Tanya rumbled.

“Find some ginger ale,” said my mother. “And some ice cubes. They said she can have ice cubes when she wakes up.”

My mother leaned close. I could smell her – a combination of Chloe and sunscreen and Pert shampoo. “Cannie?” she murmured. I opened my eyes – for real this time – and saw that I wasn’t underwater, or in my old bedroom, or in my father’s office. I was in a hospital, in a bed. There was an IV taped to the back of my hand, a plastic bracelet with my name on it around my wrist, a semicircle of machines beeping and chirping around me. I lifted my head and saw down to my toes – no belly looming up between my face and my feet.

“Baby,” I said. My voice sounded strange and squeaky. Someone stepped out of the shadows. Bruce.

“Hey, Cannie,” he said, sounding sheepish, looking wretched, and horribly ashamed.

I waved him away with the hand that didn’t have a needle stuck in it. “Not you,” I said. “My baby.”

“I’ll get the doctor,” said my mother.

“No, let me,” said Tanya. The two of them looked at each other, then hustled out of the room as if by mutual agreement. Lucy shot me a quick unreadable look and dashed out behind them. Which left just me and Bruce.

“What happened?” I asked.

Bruce swallowed hard. “I think maybe the doctor better tell you that.”

Now I was starting to remember – the airport, the bathroom, his new girlfriend. Falling. And then blood.

I tried to sit up. Hands eased me back onto the bed.

“What happened?” I demanded, my voice spiraling toward hysteria. “Where am I? Where’s my baby? What happened?”

A face leaned into my line of sight – a doctor, no doubt, in a white coat with the obligatory stethoscope and plastic name tag.

“I see you’re awake!” he said heartily. I scowled at him. “Tell me your name,” he said.

I took a deep breath, suddenly aware that I was hurting. From my belly button on down it felt like I’d been torn open and sewn back together sloppily. My ankle throbbed in time with my heartbeat. “I’m Candace Shapiro,” I began, “and I was pregnant…” My voice caught in my throat. “What happened?” I begged. “Is my baby okay?”

The doctor cleared his throat. “You had what’s known as placenta abruptio,” he began. “Which means that your placenta separated from your uterus all at once. That’s what caused the bleeding… and the premature labor.”

“So my baby…,” I whispered.

The doctor looked somber.

“Your baby was in distress when they brought you in here. We did a cesarean section, but because we didn’t have the fetal monitor in place, we aren’t sure whether she was deprived of oxygen, and if so, for how long.”

He kept talking. Low birth weight. Premature. Underdeveloped lungs. Ventilator. NICU. He told me that my uterus was torn during the delivery, that I was bleeding so badly, they had to take “radical steps.” Radical as in my uterus was now gone. “We hate to have to do this to young women,” he said gravely, “but the circumstances left us no choice.”

He droned on and on about counseling, therapy, adoption, egg harvesting, and surrogates until I wanted to scream, to claw at his throat, to force him to give me the answer to the only question I cared about anymore. I looked at my mother, who bit her lip and looked away as I struggled to sit up. The doctor looked alarmed, and tried to ease me back down onto my back, but I wasn’t going. “My baby,” I said. “Is it a boy or girl?”

“A girl,” he said – reluctantly, I thought.

“Girl,” I repeated, and started to cry. My daughter, I thought, my poor daughter whom I couldn’t keep safe, not even on her way into the world. I looked at my mother, who’d come back and was leaning against the wall, blowing her nose. Bruce put his hand awkwardly on my arm.

“Cannie,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

“Get away from me,” I wept. “Just go.” I wiped my eyes, shoved my matted hair behind my ears, and looked at the doctor. “I want to see my baby.” They eased me into a wheelchair, sore and stitched up, hurting all over, and wheeled me to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. I couldn’t go in, they explained, but I could see her through the window. A nurse pointed her out. “There,” she said, gesturing.

I leaned so close my forehead pressed on the glass. She was so small. A wrinkled pink grapefruit. Limbs no bigger than my pinky, hands the size of my thumbnail, a head the size of a smallish nectarine. Tiny eyes squinched shut, a look of outrage on her face. A dusting of black fuzz on top of her head, a nondescript beige-ish hat on top of that. “She weighs almost three pounds,” the nurse who was pushing me said.

Baby, I whispered, and tapped my fingers against the windows, drumming a soft rhythm. She hadn’t been moving, but when I tapped she pinwheeled her arms. Waving at me, I imagined. Hi, baby, I said.

The nurse watched me closely. “You okay?”

“She needs a better hat,” I said. My throat felt thick, clotted with grief, and there were tears running down my face, but I wasn’t crying. It was more like leaking. As if I was so full of sadness and a strange, doomed kind of hope that there was nowhere for it to go but out. “At home, in her room, the yellow room with the crib, in the dresser, the top drawer, I’ve got lots of baby hats. My Mom has keys”

The nurse leaned down. “I have to bring you back,” she said.

“Please make them give her a nicer hat,” I repeated. Stupid, stubborn. She didn’t need fashionable headgear, she needed a miracle, and even I could see that.

The nurse bent closer. “Tell me her name,” she said. And sure enough, there was a piece of paper taped to one end of the box. “BABY GIRL SHAPIRO,” it read.

I opened my mouth, not sure what would happen, but when the word came I knew instantly, in my heart, that it was right.

“Joy,” I said. “Her name is Joy.”

When I came back to my room Maxi was there. A quartet of candy-stripers clustered at the door of my room, their faces like blossoms, or balloons packed tight together. Maxi pulled a white curtain close around my bed, shutting them out. She was dressed more soberly than I’d ever seen her – black jeans, black sneakers, a hooded sweatshirt – and she was carrying roses, a ridiculous armload of roses, the kind of garland you’d drape around a prizewinning horse’s neck. Or lay across a casket, I thought grimly.

“I came as soon as I heard,” she said, her face drawn. “Your mother and sister are outside. They’ll only let one of us in at a time.”

She sat beside me and held my hand, the one with the tube in it, and didn’t seem alarmed when I didn’t look at her, or even squeeze back. “Poor Cannie,” she said. “Have you seen the baby?”

I nodded, brushing tears from my cheeks. “She’s very small,” I managed, and started to sob.

Maxi winced, looking helpless, and dismayed at being helpless.

“Bruce came,” I said, weeping.

“I hope you told him to go to hell,” said Maxi.

“Something like that,” I said. I wiped my non-needled hand across my face and wished for Kleenex. “This is disgusting,” I said, and hiccoughed a sob. “This is really pathetic and disgusting.”

Maxi leaned close, cradling my head in her arm. “Oh, Cannie,” she said sadly. I closed my eyes. There was nothing left for me to ask, nothing else to say.

After Maxi left I slept for a while, curled up on my side. If I had any dreams, I didn’t remember them. And when I woke up Bruce was standing in the doorway.

I blinked and stared at him.

“Can I do anything?” he asked. I just stared, saying nothing. “Cannie?” he asked uneasily.

“Come closer,” I beckoned. “I don’t bite. Or push,” I added meanly.

Bruce walked toward my bed. He looked pale, edgy, twitchy in his own skin, or maybe just unhappy to be near me again. I could see a sprinkling of blackheads on his nose, standing out in sharp relief, and I could tell from his posture, from the way his hands were crammed in his pockets and how his eyes never left the linoleum, that this was killing him, that he wanted to be anywhere but here. Good, I thought, feeling rage bubble up in my chest. Good. Let him hurt.

He settled himself on the chair next to my bed, looking at me in quick little peeks – the drainage tubes snaking out from beneath my sheet, the I.V. bag hanging beside me. I hoped that he was sickened by it. I hoped that he was scared.

“I can tell you exactly how many days it’s been since we talked,” I said.

Bruce closed his eyes.

“I can tell you exactly what your bedroom looks like, exactly what you said the last time we were together.”

He grabbed for me, clutching blindly. “Cannie, please,” he said. “Please. I’m sorry.” Words I once thought I would have given anything to hear. He started crying. “I never wanted… I never meant for this to happen”

I looked at him. I didn’t feel love, or hate. I didn’t feel anything but a bone-deep weariness. Like I was suddenly a hundred years old, and I knew at that moment I would have to live a hundred more years, carrying my grief around like a backpack full of stones.

I closed my eyes, knowing that it was too late for us. Too much had happened, and none of it was good. A body in motion stays in motion. I’d started the whole thing by telling him I’d wanted to take a break. Or maybe he’d started it by asking me out in the first place. What did it matter anymore?

I turned my face to the wall. After a while, Bruce stopped crying. And a while after that, I heard him leave.

I woke up the next morning with sunlight spilling across my face. Instantly my mother hurried through the door and pulled a chair up beside my bed. She looked uncomfortable – she was good about cracking jokes, laughing things off, keeping a stiff upper lip and soldiering on, but she wasn’t any good with tears.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m shitty!” I shrieked, and my mother pulled back so fast that her wheeled chair scooted halfway across the room. I didn’t even wait for her to pull herself back toward me before continuing my tirade. “How do you think I am? I gave birth to something that looks like a junior-high science experiment, and I’m all cut open and I h-h-hurt…”

I put my face in my hands and sobbed for a minute. “There’s something wrong with me,” I wept. “I’m defective. You should have let me die”

“Oh, Cannie,” my mother said, “Cannie, don’t talk that way.”

“Nobody loves me,” I cried. “Dad didn’t, Bruce didn’t…”

My mother patted my hair. “Don’t talk that way,” she repeated. “You have a beautiful baby. A little on the petite side, for the time being, but very beautiful.” She cleared her throat, got to her feet, and started pacing – typical Mom behavior when there was something painful coming.

“Sit down,” I told her wearily, and she did, but I could see one of her feet jiggling anxiously.

“I had a talk with Bruce,” she said.

I exhaled sharply. I didn’t even want to hear his name. My mother could tell this from my face, but she kept talking.

“With Bruce,” she continued, “and his new girlfriend.”

“The Pusher?” I asked, my voice high and sharp and hysterical. “You saw her?”

“Cannie, she feels just awful. They both do.”

“They should,” I said angrily. “Bruce never even called me, the whole time I was pregnant, then the Pusher does her thing…”

My mother looked shaken by my tone. “The doctors aren’t sure that’s what caused you to…”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said querulously. “I believe that’s what did it, and I hope that dumb bitch does, too.”

My mother was shocked. “Cannie…”

“Cannie what? You think I’m going to forgive them? I’ll never forgive them. My baby almost died, I almost died, I’ll never have another baby, and now just because they’re sorry, it’s all supposed to be okay? I’ll never forgive them. Never.”

My mother sighed. “Cannie,” she said gently.

“I can’t believe you’re taking their side!” I yelled.

“I’m not taking their side, Cannie, of course I’m not,” she said. “I’m taking your side. I just don’t think it’s healthy for you to be so angry.”

“Joy almost died,” I said.

“But she didn’t,” said my mother. “She didn’t die. She’s going to be fine”

“You don’t know that,” I said furiously.

“Cannie,” said my mother. “She’s a little underweight, and her lungs are a little underdeveloped…”

“She was deprived of oxygen! Didn’t you hear them! Deprived of oxygen! There could be all kinds of things wrong!”

“She looks just the way you did when you were a baby,” my mother said impatiently. “She’s going to be fine. I just know it.”

“You didn’t even know you were gay until you were fifty-six!” I shouted. “How am I supposed to believe you about anything!”

I pointed toward the door. “Go away,” I said, and started to cry.

My mother shook her head. “I’m not going,” she said. “Talk to me.”

“What do you want to hear about?” I said, trying to wipe my face off, trying to sound normal. “My my asshole ex-boyfriend’s idiot new girlfriend pushed me, and my baby almost died”

But what was really wrong – the part that I didn’t think I’d be able to bring myself to say – was that I had failed Joy. I’d failed to be good enough, pretty enough, thin enough, lovable enough, to keep my father in my life. Or to keep Bruce. And now, I’d failed at keeping my baby safe.

My mother wheeled in close again and wrapped her arms around me.

“I didn’t deserve her,” I wept. “I couldn’t keep her safe, I let her get hurt…”

“What gave you that idea?” she whispered into my hair. “Cannie, it was an accident. It wasn’t your fault. You’re going to be a wonderful mother.”

“If I’m so great, why didn’t he love me?” I wept, and I wasn’t even sure who I was talking about – Bruce? My father? “What’s wrong with me?”

My mother stood up. I followed her eyes to the clock on the wall. She watched me watching, and bit her lip. “I’m sorry,” she said softly, “but I have to run out for a few minutes.”

I wiped my eyes, buying time, trying to process what she’d told me. “You have to…”

“I have to pick up Tanya at her continuing education class.”

“What, Tanya forgot how to drive?”

“Her car’s in the shop.”

“And what is she studying today? Which facet of herself is she addressing?” I inquired. “Codependent granddaughters of emotionally distant grandparents?”

“Give it a rest, Cannie,” my mother snapped, and I was so stunned that I couldn’t even think to start crying again. “I know you don’t like her, and I’m sick of hearing about it.”

“Oh, and now is the time you decided to bring it up? You couldn’t wait until maybe your granddaughter makes it out of intensive care?”

My mother pursed her lips. “I’ll talk to you later,” she said, and walked out the door. With her hand on the doorknob, she turned to face me one more time. “I know you don’t believe it, but you’re going to be fine. You have everything you need. You just have to know it in your own heart.”

I scowled. Know it in my own heart. It sounded like New Age crap, like something she’d pirated from one of Tanya’s stupid Healing Your Hurt workbooks.

“Sure,” I called after her. “Go! I’m good at being left. I’m used to it.”

She didn’t turn around. I sighed, staring at my blanket and hoping none of the nurses had heard me spouting third-rate soap opera dialogue. I felt absolutely wretched. I felt hollow, like my insides had been scooped out and all that was left was echoing emptiness, vacant black holes. How was I going to figure out how to be a decent parent, given the choices my own parents had made?

You have everything you need, she’d told me. But I couldn’t see what she meant. I considered my life and saw only what was missing – no father, no boyfriend, no promise of health or comfort for my daughter. Everything I need, I thought ruefully, and closed my eyes, hoping that I’d dream again of my bed, or of the water.

When the door opened again an hour later I didn’t even look up.

“Tell it to Tanya,” I said, with my eyes still shut. “ ’Cause I don’t want to hear it.”

“Well, I would,” said a familiar deep voice, “but I don’t think she has much use for my kind… and also, we haven’t really been introduced.”

I looked up. Dr. K. was standing there, with a white bakery box in one hand and a black duffel bag in the other. And the duffel bag appeared to be wriggling.

“I came as soon as I heard,” he began, folding himself into the seat my mother had recently occupied, setting the box on my nightstand and the duffel bag on his lap. “How are you feeling?”

“Okay,” I said. He looked at me carefully. “Well, actually lousy.”

“I can believe it, after what you’ve been through. How is…”

“Joy,” I said. Using her name felt strange… presumptuous somehow, as if I was testing fate by saying it out loud. “She’s small, and her lungs are a little underdeveloped, and she’s breathing with a ventilator…” I paused and swiped a hand across my eyes. “Also, I had a hysterectomy, and I seem to be crying all the time.”

He cleared his throat.

“Was that too much information?” I asked through my tears.

He shook his head. “Not at all,” he told me. “You can talk to me about anything you want to.”

The black duffel bag practically lurched off his lap. It looked so funny I almost smiled, but it felt as if my face had forgotten how. “Is that a perpetual motion machine in your bag, or are you just glad to see me?”

Dr. K. glanced over his shoulder at the closed door. Then he leaned close to me. “This was kind of a risk,” he whispered, “but I thought…”

He lifted the bag onto the bed and eased the zipper open. Nifkin’s nose popped out, followed by the tips of his oversized ears, and then, in short order, his entire body.

“Nifkin!” I said, as Nifkin scrambled onto my chest and proceeded to give my entire face a tongue-bath. Dr. K held him, lifting him clear of my various tubes and attachments, as Nifkin licked away. “How did you… where was he?”

“With your friend Samantha,” he explained. “She’s outside.” “Thank you,” I said, knowing that the words couldn’t begin to express how happy he’d made me.

“Thank you so much.”

“No problem,” said the doctor. “Here… look. We’ve been practicing.” He lifted Nifkin and set him on the floor. “Can you see?”

I propped myself up on my elbows and nodded.

“Nifkin… SIT!” said Dr. K., in a voice every bit as deep and authoritative as James Earl Jones’s telling the world that this… is CNN. Nifkin’s butt hit the linoleum at lightning speed, his tail wagging triple-time. “Nifkin… DOWN!” And down went Nifkin, flat on his belly, looking up at Dr. K. with his eyes sparkling and his pink tongue curled as he panted. “And now, for our final act… PLAY DEAD!” And Nifkin collapsed onto his side as if he’d been shot.

“Unbelievable,” I said. It really was.

“He’s a fast learner,” said Dr. K., loading the now-squirming terrier back into the duffel bag. He bent back to me. “Feel better, Cannie,” he said, and rested one of his hands on top of mine.

He walked out and Samantha walked in, hurrying over to my bed. She was in full lawyer garb – a sleek black suit, high-heeled boots, a caramel-colored leather attaché case in one hand and her sunglasses and car keys in the other. “Cannie,” she said, “I came…”

“… as soon as you heard,” I supplied.

“How do you feel?” asked Sam. “How’s the baby?”

“I feel okay, and the baby… well, she’s in the baby intensive-care place. They have to wait and see.”

Samantha sighed. I closed my eyes. I suddenly felt completely exhausted. And hungry.

I sat up, tucking another pillow behind my back. “Hey, what time is it? When’s dinner? You don’t have, like, a banana in your purse or something?”

Samantha rose to her feet, grateful, I thought, to have something to do. “I’ll go check… hey, what’s this?”

She pointed at the bakery box that Dr. K. had left behind.

“Don’t know,” I said. “Dr. K. brought it. Take a look.”

Sam ripped through the string and opened the box, and there, inside, was an éclair from the Pink Rose Pastry Shop, a wedge of chocolate bread pudding from Silk City, a brownie still in its Le Bus wrapping paper, and a pint of fresh raspberries.

“Unbelievable,” I murmured.

“Yum!” said Samantha. “How does he know what you like?”

“I told him,” I said, touched that he’d remember. “For Fat Class, we had to write down what our favorite foods were.” Sam cut me a sliver of éclair, but it tasted like dust and stones in my mouth. I swallowed to be polite, sipped some water, then told her that I was tired, that I wanted to sleep.

I stayed in the hospital another week, healing, while Joy got bigger and stronger.

Maxi showed up every morning for a week and sat beside me and read from People, In Style, and Entertainment Weekly magazines, embroidering each story from her own personal stash of anecdotes. My mother and sister stayed with me in the daytime, making conversation, trying not to linger too long at the pauses that came where I would normally be saying something smart-ass. Samantha came every night after work and regaled me with Philadelphia gossip, about the antiquated former stars Gabby had interviewed and the how Nifkin had taken to stopping, mid-walk, and planting himself in front of my apartment building and refusing to budge. Andy came with his wife and a box of Famous Fourth Street chocolate chip cookies and a card that everyone in the newsroom had signed. “Get Well Soon,” it read. I didn’t think that would be happening, but I didn’t tell him that.

“They’re worried about you,” Lucy whispered when my mother was in the hall, talking about something with the nurses.

I looked at her and shrugged.

“They want you to talk to a psychiatrist.”

I said nothing. Lucy looked very serious. “It’s Dr. Melburne,” she said. “I had her for a while. She’s horrible. You better cheer up and start talking more, or else she’s going to ask you about your childhood.”

“Cannie doesn’t have to talk if she doesn’t want to,” said my mother, pouring a cup of ginger ale that nobody would drink. She straightened my flowers, plumped my pillows for the fourteenth time, sat down, then got up again, looking for something else to do. “Cannie can just rest.”

Three days later, Joy took her first breaths without the ventilator.

Not out of the woods yet, the doctors warned me. Have to wait and see. She could be fine, or things could go wrong, but probably she’ll be okay.

And they let me hold her, finally, lifting up her four-pound-six-ounce body and cradling her close, running my fingertips over each of her hands, each fingernail impossibly small and perfect. She clutched at my finger fiercely with her own tiny ones. I could feel the bones, the push of her blood beneath her skin. Hang on, I thought to her. Hang in there, little one. The world is hard a lot of the time, but there’re good things here, too. And I love you. Your mother loves you, baby Joy.

I sat with her for hours until they made me go back to bed, and before I left I filled out her birth certificate, and my handwriting was clear and firm. Joy Leah Shapiro. The Leah was for Leonard, Bruce’s father’s middle name. Leah, the second sister, the one Jacob didn’t want to marry. Leah, the trick bride, the one her father sent down the aisle in disguise.

I bet Leah had a more interesting life anyhow, I whispered to my baby, holding her hand, with me in my wheelchair and her in her glass box that I forced myself not to see as a coffin. I bet Leah went on hiking trips with her girlfriends and had popcorn and Margaritas for dinner, if that’s what she wanted. I’ll bet she went swimming naked and slept under the stars. Rachel probably bought Celine Dion CDs and those Franklin Mint collectible plates. She was probably boring, even to herself. She never went on an adventure, never took a chance. But you and me, baby, we’re going to go on adventures. I will teach you how to swim, and how to sail, and how to build a fire… everything my mother taught me, and everything else I’ve learned. Just make it out of here, I thought, as hard as I could. Come home, Joy, and we’ll both be fine.

Two days later, I got part of my wish. They sent me home, but decided to keep Joy. “Just for another few weeks,” said the doctor, in what I’m sure he imagined was a comforting tone. “We want to make sure that her lungs are mature… and that she’s gained enough weight.”

I burst into bitter laughter at that one. “If she takes after her mother,” I announced, “that shouldn’t be a problem. She’ll gain weight like a champ.”

The doctor gave me what he no doubt believed was a comforting pat on the shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Things should be fine.”

I limped out of the hospital, blinking, in the warm May sunshine, and eased myself into my mother’s car, sitting quietly as we drove back home. I saw the leaves, the fresh green grass, the St. Peter’s schoolgirls in crisp plaid jumpers. I saw, but didn’t see. To me, the whole world looked gray. It was as if there was no room inside of me for anything except fury and fear.

My mother and Lucy unloaded my bags from the trunk and walked me to my building. Lucy carried my bags. My mother walked slowly beside me, and Tanya huffed behind us. My leg muscles felt wobbly and underused. My stitches ached, my ankle itched in its walking cast. It turned out that I’d only sprained my ankle when I’d fallen, but nobody had thought to look at my legs until days later, so the foot had stayed bent, and the tendons stayed torn, which meant a walking cast for six weeks: small potatoes, in relation to everything else I was dealing with.

I fumbled through my purse. My wallet, the half-empty pack of chewing gum, a Chap Stick and a book of matches from the Star Bar looked like relics from another life. I was groping for my keys when Lucy put her key into the first-floor door.

“I don’t live here,” I said.

“You do now,” said Lucy. She was beaming at me. My mother and Tanya were, too.

I limped across the threshold, my cast thumping on the hardwood floors, and stepped inside, blinking.

The apartment – a twin of mine up on the third floor, all dark wood and circa 1970s fixtures – had been transformed.

Sunlight streamed in from windows that hadn’t been there before, sparkling on the pristine, polished maple floors that had been neither pristine nor polished nor maple when I’d last seen the place.

I walked slowly into the kitchen, moving as if I were underwater. New cabinets stained the color of clover honey. In the living room were a new couch and love seat, overstuffed and comfortable, upholstered in buttery yellow denim – pretty, but sturdy, I remember telling Maxi, as I pointed out things I coveted in the latest issue of Martha Stewart Living one lazy afternoon. A beautiful woven rug in garnet and dark blue and gold covered the floor. There was a flat-screen TV and a brand new stereo in the corner, stacks of brand-new baby books on the shelves.

Lucy was practically dancing, beside herself with joy. “Can you believe it, Cannie? Isn’t it amazing?”

“I don’t know what to say,” I told her, moving down the hall. The bathroom was unrecognizable. The Carter administration-era pastel wallpaper, the ugly dark wood vanity, the cheap stainless steel fixtures, and the cracked toilet bowl – all gone. Everything was white tile, with gold and navy accents. The tub was a whirlpool bath, with two showerheads, in case, I guessed, I wanted to bathe with a partner. There were new glass-fronted cabinets, fresh lilies in a vase, a profusion of the thickest towels I ever felt stacked on a brand-new shelf. A tiny white tub for giving the baby a bath sat on one counter, along with an assortment of bath toys, little sponges cut into the shapes of animals, and a family of rubber duckies.

“Wait until you see the baby’s room!” Lucy crowed.

The walls were painted Lemonade Stand yellow, just the way I’d done them upstairs, and I recognized the crib that Dr. K. had put together. But the rest of the furniture was new. I saw an ornate changing table, a dresser, a white wood rocking chair. “Antiques,” Tanya breathed, running one thick fingertip along the curved whitewashed wood that was tinged very faintly pink. There were framed pictures on the walls – a mermaid swimming in the ocean, a sailboat, elephants marching two by two. And in the corner was what looked like the world’s smallest branch of Toys “R” Us. There was every toy I’d ever seen, plus a few I hadn’t. A set of building blocks. Rattles. Balls. Toys that talked, or barked, or cried, when you squeezed them, or pulled their strings. The exact same rocking horse I’d admired in a shop in Santa Monica two months ago. Everything.

I sank slowly down into the yellow denim love seat, underneath the hanging mobile of delicate stars and clouds and crescent moons, next to a three-foot-high Paddington Bear.

“There’s more,” said Lucy.

“You won’t even believe it,” said my mother.

I wandered back to the bedroom. My plain metal bedframe had been replaced with a magnificent wrought-iron canopy bed. My pink sheets had been swapped for something gorgeous – rich stripes of white and gold, tiny pink flowers.

“That’s two-hundred-thread-count cotton,” Lucy boasted, ticking off the merits of my new linens, pointing out the pillow shams and dust ruffle, the hand-knotted carpet (yellow, with a border of pink roses) on the floor, opening the closet to show off yet more of the pinkish-whitewashed antique furniture – a nine-drawer dresser, a bedside table topped with a gorgeous spray of daffodils in a blue ginger jar.

“Open the blinds,” said Lucy.

I did. There was a new deck outside the bedroom window. There was a big clay pot of geraniums and petunias, benches and a picnic table, a gas grill the size of a Volkswagen Bug in the corner.

I sat down – collapsed, really – onto the bed. There was a tiny card on the pillow, the kind you’d get with a bouquet of flowers. I slid it open with my thumbnail.

“Welcome home,” it read on one side. “From your friends,” said the other.

My mother and Lucy and Tanya stood in a line, regarding me, waiting to hear my approval.

“Who…,” I started.“How…”

“Your friends,” said Lucy impatiently.

“Maxi?”

The three of them exchanged a sneaky look.

“Come on, you guys. It’s not like I’ve got other friends who could afford all this.”

“We couldn’t stop her!” Lucy said.

“Really, Cannie, that’s true,” said my mother. “She wasn’t taking no for an answer. She knows all of these contractors… she hired a decorator to find you all these things… there were people working in here, like, around the clock…”

“My neighbors must have loved that,” I said.

“Do you like it?” asked Lucy.

“It’s…” I lifted my hands, and let them sink into my lap. My heart was beating too fast, pushing pain into every part of my body that hurt. I thought of the word that I needed. “It’s amazing,” I finally said.

“So what do you want to do?” asked Lucy. “We could go to Dmitri’s for dinner…”

“There’s a documentary about lesbians of size at the Ritz,” rasped Tanya.

“Shopping?” asked my mother. “Maybe you want to stock up on groceries while we’re here to help you carry things.”

I got to my feet. “I think I’d like to go for a walk,” I said.

My mother and Lucy and Tanya looked at me curiously.

“A walk?” my mother repeated.

“Cannie,” my sister pointed out, “your foot’s still in a cast.”

“It’s a walking cast, isn’t it?” I snapped. “And I feel like walking.”

I got to my feet. I wanted to exult in this. I wanted to feel happy. I was surrounded by the people I loved; I had a beautiful place to live. But I felt like I was looking at my new apartment through a dirty mirror, like I was feeling the crisp cottons and plush carpets through thick rubber gloves. It was Joy – not having Joy. None of this would feel right until my baby came home, I thought, and I was suddenly so angry that my arms and legs felt weak with the force of it, and my fists and feet tingled with the desire to hit and kick. Bruce, I thought, Bruce and the goddamn fucking Pusher. This should be my triumph, goddammit, except how can I be happy with my baby still in the hospital, when Bruce and his new girlfriend were the ones who put her there?

“Fine,” said my mother uneasily. “So we’ll walk.”

“No,” I said. “By myself. I want to be by myself right now.”

They all looked puzzled, even worried, as they filed out the door.

“Call me,” said my mother. “Let me know when you’re ready for Nifkin to come back.”

“I will,” I lied. I wanted them out already, out of my house, my hair, my life. I felt like I was burning up, like I had to move or explode. I stared out the window until they’d all piled in the car and driven off. Then I pulled on a jogging bra, a ratty T-shirt, a pair of shorts, a single sneaker, and thumped out of the house and onto the hot sidewalks, determined not to think about my father, about Bruce, about my baby, about anything. I would just walk. And then, maybe, I’d be able to sleep again.

May drifted into June, and all of my days were built around Joy. I’d go to the hospital first thing in the morning, walking the thirty blocks to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia as the sun came up. Robed and masked and gloved, I’d sit beside her on a sterile rocking chair in the NICU, holding her tiny hand, brushing her lips with my fingertips, singing her the songs we’d danced to months before. Those were the only moments I didn’t feel the rage consuming me; the only times I could breathe.

And when I felt the anger coming back, when I’d feel my chest tightening and my hands wanting to hit something, I’d leave her. I’d go home to pace the floors and pump my breasts, to clean and scrub floors and counters that I’d cleaned and scrubbed the day before. And I’d take long, furious walks through the city, with my ankle in the increasingly filthy walking cast, charging through yellow lights and shooting evil glances at any car that dared inch toward the intersection.

I got used to the little voice in my head, the one from the airport, the one that had floated up to the ceiling and watched me rage at Bruce while mourning quietly that he wasn’t the one. I got used to the voice asking Why? every morning, when I laced up my sneakers and yanked a succession of nondescript shirts over my head… and asking Why? again at night, when I’d play my messages back – ten, fifteen messages from my mother, my sister, from Maxi, and Peter Krushelevansky, from all of my friends – -and then erase each one without ever calling back, until the day I started erasing them without even listening. You’re too sad, the voice would murmur, as I stomped up Walnut Street. Take it easy, said the voice, as I gulped scalding black coffee, cup after cup, for breakfast. Talk to someone, said the voice. Let them help. I ignored it. Who could help me now? What was there left for me but the streets and the hospital, my silent apartment, and my empty bed?

I let the voice mail keep taking my calls. I instructed the post office that I would be out of town for an indefinite period and to please hold my mail. I let my computer gather dust. I stopped checking my e-mail. And on one of my walks I dropped my pager into the Delaware River without missing a single step. The cast came off, and I started going on even longer walks – four hours, six hours, meandering loops through the city’s worst neighborhoods, past crack dealers, hookers of the male and female variety, dead pigeons in gutters, the burned-out skeletons of cars, without seeing any of it, and without being afraid. How could any of this hurt me, after what I’d already lost? When I ran into Samantha on the street, I told her I was too busy to hang out, shifting from foot to foot with my eyes on the horizon so I wouldn’t have to see her worried face. Getting things ready, I explained, waiting to be off again. The baby’s coming home soon.

“Can I see her?” Sam asked.

Instantly, I shook my head. “I’m not ready… I mean, she’s not ready.”

“What do you mean, Cannie?” asked Sam.

“She’s medically fragile,” I said, trying out the term I’d heard over and over in the baby intensive care ward.

“So I’ll stand outside and look at her through the window,” said Sam, looking perplexed. “And then we’ll go have breakfast. Remember breakfast? It used to be one of your favorite meals.”

“I’ve got to go,” I said brusquely, trying to edge my way around her. Samantha didn’t budge.

“Cannie, what is going on with you, really?”

“Nothing,” I said, shoving past her, my feet already moving, my eyes fixed far ahead. “Nothing, nothing, everything is fine.”

NINETEEN

I walked and walked, and it was as if God had fitted me with special gl asses, where I could only see the bad things, the sad things, the pain and misery of life in the city, the trash kicked into corners instead of the flowers planted in window boxes. I could see husbands and wives fighting, but not kissing or holding hands. I could see little kids careering through the streets on stolen bicycles, screaming insults and curses, and grown men who sounded like they were breakfasting on their own mucus, leering at women with unashamed, lecherous eyes. I could smell the stink of the city in summer: horse piss and hot tar and the grayish, sick exhaust the buses spewed. The manhole covers leaked steam, the sidewalks belched heat from the subways churning below.

Everywhere I looked, I just saw emptiness, loneliness, buildings with broken windows, shambling addicts with outstretched hands and dead eyes, sorrow and filth and rot.

I thought that time would heal me and that the miles would soothe my pain. I waited for a morning where I woke up and didn’t instantly imagine Bruce and the Pusher dying horrible gruesome deaths… or, worse yet, losing my baby, losing Joy.

I would walk to the hospital at the break of dawn and sometimes before, and walk laps around the parking lot until I felt calm enough to walk inside. I would sit in the cafeteria gulping cup after cup of water, trying to smile and look normal, but inside, my head was spinning furiously, thinking knives? guns? car accident? I would smile and say hello, but really, in my head I was plotting revenge.

I imagined calling the university where Bruce had taught freshman English and telling them how he’d only passed his drug test by ingesting quarts and quarts of warm water spiked with goldenseal that he bought from a 1-800 line in the back pages of High Times. Urine Luck, the stuff was called. I could tell them he was showing up stoned at work – he used to do it, probably he still was doing it, and if they watched him long enough they’d see. I could call his mother, call the police in his town, have him arrested, taken away.

I imagined writing to Moxie, including a picture of Joy in the NICU, growing bigger, growing stronger, but still a pathetic sight, run through with tubes, breathing on a ventilator more often than not, with who knew what horrors strewn in her future – cerebral palsy, learning disabilities, blind, deaf, retarded, a menu of disasters that the doctors hadn’t mentioned. I’d gone online, to sites with names like preemie.com, reading first-person stories from parents whose children had survived, horribly damaged; who’d come home on oxygen or sleep apnea monitors or with holes cut in their throats so they could breathe. I read about kids who grew up with seizure disorders, learning disabilities, who never quite caught up, never quite got right. And I read stories about the babies who died: at birth, in the NICU, at home. “Our Precious Angel,” they’d be headlined. “Our Darling Daughter.”

I wanted to copy these stories and e-mail them to the Pusher, along with a photograph of Joy. I wanted to send her a picture of my daughter – no letter, no words, just Joy’s picture, sent to her house, sent to her school, sent to her boss, to her parents if I could find them, to show them all what she’d done, what she’d been responsible for. I found myself planning walking routes that would bring me by gun shops. I found myself looking in their windows. I didn’t go inside yet, but I knew that was next. And then what?

I didn’t let myself answer the question. I didn’t let myself think beyond the image, the picture that I treasured: Bruce’s face when he opened his door and saw me standing there with a gun in my hand; Bruce’s face when I said, “I’ll show you sorry.”

Then one morning I was burning past a newsstand and I saw the new issue of Moxie, the August issue, even though it was only just July, and so hot that the air shimmered and the streets turned sticky in the sun. I yanked a copy off the rack.

“Miss, you gonna pay for that?”

“No,” I snarled, “I’m going to rob you.” I tossed two bucks and change on the counter and started flipping furiously through the pages, wondering what the headline would be. “My Daughter the Vegetable?” “How to Really, Really Screw Up Your Ex’s Life?”

Instead I saw a single word, big black letters, a somber incongruity in Moxie’s light-hearted, pastel-heavy lineup. “Complications,” it said.

“Pregnant,” says the letter, and I can’t read any more. It’s as if the very word has poleaxed me and left me paralyzed, save for the icy crawling along the back of my neck, the beginning of dread.

“I don’t know an easy way to say this,” she has written, “so I’ll just say it. I am pregnant.”

I remember sixteen years ago standing on the bimah in my synagogue in Short Hills, looking over the crowd of friends and relatives and mouthing those time-honored words, “Today I am a man.” Now, feeling this rush of ice to my stomach, feeling my palms start to sweat, I know the truth: Today, I am a man. For real, this time.

“Not quite,” I said, so loudly that the homeless people loping along the sidewalks stopped and stared. Not hardly. A man. A man would have called me. At least sent a postcard! I turned my attention back to the page.

But I’m not a man. As it turns out, what I am is a coward. I tuck the letter in a notebook, stuff the notebook in a desk drawer, lock the drawer, and accidentally on purpose, lose the key.

They say – they being the great philosophers, or possibly the cast of Seinfeld – that breaking up is like pushing over a Coke machine. You can’t just do it, you have to set the thing in motion, rock it back and forth a few times. For C. and me it wasn’t like that. It was a clean, swift break – a thunderclap. Intense and awful and over in seconds.

Liar, I thought. Oh, you liar. It wasn’t a thunderclap, it wasn’t even a breakup, I just told you I wanted some time!

Then, less than three months later, my father died.

I went back and forth with the telephone in my hand, her number still first on my speed-dial. Call her? Don’t call her? Was she my ex or my friend?

In the end I opted for her friendship. And later, when a houseful of mourners picked over deli trays in my mother’s kitchen, I opted for more

And now, three months later, I am still mourning my father, but I’m feeling as if I’m over C., truly and completely. I know what real sadness is now. I can explore it every night like a kid who’s lost a tooth and can’t stop tonguing the pulpy, wounded, empty space where the tooth once was.

Except now she’s pregnant.

And I don’t know whether she’s set out to trick me or trap me, whether I’m even the father, whether she’s pregnant at all.

“Oh, this is unbelievable,” I announced to Broad Street at large. “This is fucking unbelievable!”

And, the thing is, I’m too chicken to ask.

It’s your choice, I imagine I say with my silence. Your call, your game, your move. I manage to silence the part of me that wonders, that wants to know how she chose: whether she went to the clinic on Locust Street and marched past the protestors with their pictures of bloody dead babies; whether she did it in a doctors’ office, whether she went with a friend, or a new lover, or alone. Or whether she’s marching around her home-town right now with a belly as big as a beachball and books full of baby names.

I don’t ask, or call. I don’t send a check, or a letter, or even a card. I’m done, empty, dried out and cried out. There’s nothing left for her or for a baby if there is one.

When I let myself think about it I get furious at myself (how could I have been so dumb?) and furious at her (how could she have let me?). But I try not to let myself think of it too much. I wake up, work out, go to the office, and go through the motions, try to keep the tip of my tongue away from that hole in my smile. But deep down I know that I can only postpone this so long, that even my cowardice can’t stave off the inevitable. Somewhere in my desk, tucked in a notebook and locked in a drawer, there’s a letter with my name on it.

“You’re late!” the head nurse scolded, and smiled at me to show she didn’t mean it. I had the copy of Moxie curled up like I meant to smack a dog with it. “Here,” I said, handing it off. She barely spared it a glance. “I don’t read this stuff,” she said. “It’s worthless.”

“I agree,” I said, heading toward the nursery.

“There’s someone here to see you,” she said.

I walked to the nursery and sure enough, there was a woman standing at my window, the window in front of Joy’s Isolette. I could see short, impeccably coiffed gray hair, an elegant black pantsuit, a platinum diamond tennis bracelet around one wrist. A light whiff of Allure was in the air, her freshly polished fingernails glittered under the fluorescent lights. The Ever-Tasteful Audrey had put together just the right ensemble for going to visit her son’s illegitimate premature firstborn.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded.

Audrey gasped and took two giant steps backward. Her face went two shades paler than her Estée Lauder foundation.

“Cannie!” she said, and pressed one hand against her chest. “I… you scared me.”

I stared at her, saying nothing, as her eyes moved over me, unbelieving.

“You’re so thin,” she finally said.

I looked down and observed with not much interest that this was true. All that walking, all that plotting, my only food a snatched bite of bagel or banana and cup after cup of bitter black coffee, because the taste matched the way I felt inside. My refrigerator held bottles of breast milk and nothing else. I couldn’t remember the last time I sat down and ate a meal. I could see the bones in my face, the jut of my hipbones. In pro-file, I was Jessica Rabbit: nonexistent butt, flat belly, improbable bosom, thanks to the milk. If you didn’t get close enough to notice that my hair was dirty and matted, that I had giant black circles under my eyes and that, most likely, I smelled bad, I was an actual babe.

The irony had not been lost on me: After a lifetime of obsession, of calorie counting, Weight Watching, and StairMastering, I’d found a way to shed those unwanted pounds forever! To free myself of flab and cellulite! To get the body I’d always wanted! I should market this, I thought hysterically. The Placenta Abruptio Emergency Hysterectomy Premature and Possibly Brain-Damaged Baby Diet. I’d make a fortune.

Audrey fingered her bracelet nervously. “I guess you’re wondering…,” she began. I said nothing, knowing exactly how hard this was for her. Knowing, and not giving a damn. A part of me wanted to see her twist in the wind like this, to struggle for the words. A part of me wanted her to suffer.

“Bruce says you won’t speak to him.”

“Bruce had a chance to speak to me,” I told her. “I wrote and told him I was pregnant. He never called.”

Her lips trembled. “He never told me,” she whispered, half to herself. “Cannie, he is so sorry about what happened.”

I snorted, so loud I was afraid I’d bother the babies. “Bruce is a day late and a dollar short.”

She bit her lip, twirling the bracelet. “He wants to do the right thing.”

“Which would be what?” I asked. “Having his girlfriend refrain from any more attempts on my baby’s life?”

“He said that was an accident,” she whispered.

I rolled my eyes.

“He wants to do the right thing,” she repeated. “He wants to help out”

“I don’t need money,” I said, deliberately crude, spelling it out. “Not his or yours, either. I sold my screenplay.”

Her face lit up, so glad that we were on a happy subject. “Honey, that’s wonderful!”

I said nothing, hoping she’d fall apart in the face of my silence. But Audrey was braver than I’d given her credit for.

“Could I see the baby?” she asked.

I shrugged and stabbed one finger at the window. Joy was in the center of the nursery. She looked less like an angry grapefruit; more like a cantaloupe, perhaps, but still tiny, still frail, still with the science-fiction-looking ventilator attached to her face more often than not. The chart at the end of her glass crib read “Joy Leah Shapiro.” She was wearing just a diaper, plus pink and white striped socks and a little pink hat with a pompom on top. I’d brought the nurses my stash, and every morning they made sure that Joy got a different hat. She was far and away the best chapeau’d baby in all of the NICU.

“Joy Leah,” whispered Audrey. “Is she… did you name her after my husband?”

I nodded once, swallowing hard around the lump in my throat. I can give her this much, I thought. After all, she wasn’t the one who ignored me, who didn’t call me, who had caused me to fall into a sink and almost lose my baby.

“Will she be all right?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably. They say probably. She’s still small, and she has to get bigger, her lungs have to grow until she can breathe on her own. Then she’ll come home.”

Audrey wiped her eyes with the Kleenex she extracted from her purse. “And you’ll stay here? You’ll raise her in Philadelphia?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. Honest to a fault. “I don’t know if I want to go back to the paper, or maybe back out to California. I have friends there.” But even as I said it, I wondered if it was true. After dashing off a perfunctory thank-you note that couldn’t begin to express the gratitude I should have felt for everything she’d done for me, I’d been giving Maxi the same silent treatment as all of my friends. Who knew what she was thinking, or whether she even thought she was my friend still?

Audrey straightened her shoulders. “I would like to be a grandmother to her,” she said carefully. “No matter what happened between you and Bruce”

“What happened,” I repeated. “Did Bruce tell you I had a hysterectomy? That I’ll never have another baby? Did he happen to mention that?”

“I’m sorry, Cannie,” she said again, sounding shrill and helpless and even a little scared. I shut my eyes, slumping against the glass wall.

“Just go,” I told her. “Please. We can talk about this some other time, but not right now. I’m too tired.”

She put her hand on my shoulder. “Let me help you,” she said. “Can I get you something? Some water?”

I shook my head, shook her hand off, turned my face away. “Please,” I said. “Just go.” And I stood there, turned away from her, with my eyes shut tight, until I heard her soles slap-slapping back down the hallway. That was where the nurse found me, leaning against the wall and crying, with my hands curled into fists.

“Are you okay?” she asked, and touched my shoulder. I nodded, and turned toward the door.

“I’ll be back later,” I told her. “I’m going for a walk.”

That afternoon, I walked for hours, until the streets, the sidewalks, the buildings turned into a grayish blur. I remember that I bought a Snapple lemonade somewhere, and a few hours later I stopped at a bus station to pee, and I remember that at one point the ankle I’d had the cast on started throbbing. I ignored it. I kept walking. I walked south, then east, through strange neighborhoods, over trolley tracks, past burned-out drug houses, abandoned factories, the slow, brackish twist of the Schuylkill. I thought maybe, somehow, I would walk all the way to New Jersey. Look, I would say, standing in the lobby of Bruce’s high-rise apartment building like a ghost, like a guilty thought, like a wound you’d thought had scabbed over that had suddenly started to bleed. Look at what’s become of me.

I walked and walked until I felt something strange, an unfamiliar sensation. A pain in my foot. I looked down, lifting my left foot, and watched in dumb confusion as the sole slowly peeled off the bottom of my filthy sneaker and flopped onto the street.

A guy sitting on a stoop across the street whooped laughter. “Hey!” he shouted, as I stared stupidly from shoe to sole and back again, trying to make sense of it. “Baby needs a new pair of shoes!”

My baby needs a new pair of lungs, I thought, limping and looking around. Where am I? The neighborhood wasn’t familiar. None of the street names rang any bells. And it was dark. I looked at my watch. 8:30, it said, and for a minute I didn’t know whether it was morning or night. I was sweaty and grimy and exhausted… and lost.

I dug in my pockets, looking for answers, or at least cab fare. I found a five-dollar bill, a fistful of change, and some assorted lint.

I looked for landmarks, for a pay phone, for something.

“Hey,” I called to the guy on the stoop. “Hey, where am I?”

He cackled laughter, rocking back on his heels. “Powelton Village! You in Powelton Village, baby!”

Okay, then. That was a start.

“Which way’s University City?” I called.

He shook his head. “Girl, you lost! You all turned around!” His voice was deep and resonant, and sounded Southern. He lifted himself off his stoop and walked over to me – a middle-aged black man in a white undershirt and khakis. He peered closely at my face. “You sick?” he finally asked.

I shook my head. “Just lost,” I said.

“You go to the college?” he continued, and I shook my head again, and he moved even closer, his expression growing more concerned.

“Are you drunk?” he asked, and I had to smile.

“No, really,” I said. “I just went for a walk and got lost.”

“Well, you better get found,” he said. For one sick, terrifying moment I was absolutely certain he was going to start talking to me about Jesus. But he didn’t. Instead, he took a long, careful inventory of me, from my falling-apart sneakers, up my scabby, bruised shins, to the shorts that I’d folded over twice at the waistband so they wouldn’t slide down off my hips, and the T-shirt I’d been wearing for five days running, and my hair that had grown past my shoulders for the first time in more than a decade, and was doing a sort of impromptu dread-lock thing in the absence of being washed and brushed.

“You need help,” he finally said.

I bowed my head and nodded. Help. This was true. I needed help.

“You got people?”

“I do,” I told him. “I have a baby,” I began, and then my throat closed up.

He raised his arm and pointed. “University City that way,” he said. “You go to the corner of 45th Street, the bus take you straight there.” He dug in his pocket, found a slightly tattered bus transfer pass, and pressed it into my hand. Then he bent and looked at my shoe. “Stay here,” he said. I stood, stock-still, afraid to move so much as a muscle. Afraid of what, exactly, I wasn’t sure.

The man came out of his house with a silver roll of duct tape in his hand. I lifted my foot, and he wrapped tape around and around it, holding the sole in place.

“Be careful,” he said. Keffel, the word sounded like. “You a mother now, you need to be careful.”

“I will,” I said. I started limping off toward the corner he’d pointed at.

As filthy as I was, with duct-taped shoes and tears cutting slow tracks through the grime on my cheeks, nobody spared me so much as a glance on the bus. Everyone was too wrapped up in their own private coming-home-from-work thoughts – dinner, children, what was on TV, the minutiae of normal lives. The bus heaved and groaned its way across town. Things started looking familiar again. I saw the stadium, the skyscrapers, the far-off glimmering white tower of the Examiner building. And then I saw the University of Philadelphia’s Weight and Eating Disorders office, where I’d gone a million years ago. When the only thing I thought I had to worry about was not being thin.

Get found, I thought, and pulled the “Stop Requested” cord so hard I thought for a moment I’d yanked it off. I took an elevator up to the seventh floor, thinking that I’d find all the lights out and the doors locked, wondering why I was even bothering.

But his light was on, and his door was open.

“Cannie!” said Dr. K., beaming. Beaming until he stood up, came around the desk, and got a good whiff of me. And a good look.

“I’m a success story,” I said, and tried to smile. “Look at me! Forty pounds of ugly flab gone in just months!” I swiped one hand across my eyes. “I’m thin,” I said, and started crying. “Yay, me.”

“Sit down,” he said, and closed the door. He put his arm around my shoulders and eased me toward his couch, where I sat, sniffling and pathetic.

“Cannie, my God, what happened to you?”

“I went for a walk,” I began. My tongue felt thick and furry, and my lips felt cracked. “I got lost,” I said. My voice had gone strange and croaky. “I went for a walk, and I got all turned around. I got lost, but now I’m trying to be found.”

He put his hand on my head, stroking gently. “Let me take you home.”

I let him lead me to the elevator, out the door, into his car. On the way out, he stopped at a soda machine and bought a cold can of Coke. I grabbed it without asking and guzzled the whole thing down. He didn’t say a word, not even when I burped hugely. He pulled into a convenience store and came out with a quart of water and an orange Popsicle.

“Thanks,” I rasped, “that’s very nice of you.” I drank the water, sucked on the Popsicle.

“I’ve been trying to call you,” he said. “At work and at home.”

“I’m very busy,” I recited.

“Is Joy home yet?”

I shook my head.

He looked at me. “Are you okay?”

“Busy,” I croaked again. My breasts were aching. I looked down and was unsurprised to see two circular stains beneath the V of sweat from my collarbone down.

“Busy with what?” he asked.

I shut my mouth. I hadn’t really planned any dialogue beyond “busy.”

At a stoplight, he looked over at me, staring at my face. “Are you okay?”

I shrugged. The car behind us honked, but he didn’t move. “Cannie,” he said kindly. A single tear trickled down my cheek. He reached out to brush it away. I jerked back as if I’d been burned.

“No!” I shrieked. “Don’t touch me!”

“Cannie, my God, what’s the matter?”

I shook my head, stared at my lap, where the ruins of the Popsicle were melting. We drove in silence for a while, the car purring beneath us, cool air whispering from the air conditioner over my knees and my shoulders.

At another traffic light, he started to talk again. “How’s Nifkin? Did he remember anything I taught him?” He glanced at me quickly. “You remember when we visited you, right?”

I nodded. “I’m not crazy,” I said. But even as I said it, I wasn’t sure whether it was true. Did crazy people know they were crazy? Or did they think they were perfectly normal, all the while doing crazy things, wandering around filthy and with their shoes falling apart and their heads so full of rage it felt as if they’d explode?

We drove for a few more blocks in silence. I couldn’t think of what to say, what to do next. I knew that there were questions I should ask him, points that I should make, but it felt as if my head was full of buzzing static.

“Where are we going?” I finally managed. “I should go home. Or to the hospital. I should go back there.”

We pulled up at a red light. “Are you working?” he asked me. “I haven’t seen your byline”

It had been so long since I’d had this kind of normal cocktail-party conversation with anyone, it took me a while to get the words sorted out right. “I’m on leave.”

“Are you eating right?” He squinted sideways at me in the dark. “Or maybe I should ask, are you eating anything?”

I shrugged. “It’s hard. With the baby. With Joy. I go to the hospital to see her twice a day, and I’m getting things ready at home I walk a lot,” I finished up.

“I can see that,” he said.

Another few blocks of silence, another red light. “I’ve been thinking about you,” he said. “I was hoping you’d stop by, or call”

“Well, I did, didn’t I?”

“I thought maybe we could see a movie. Or go to that diner again.”

It sounded so bizarre I almost laughed. Was there a time I’d gone to dinner, to movies, when my every thought hadn’t been about my baby and my rage?

“Where were you going, when you got lost?”

“For a walk,” I said in a small voice. “Just for a walk.”

He shook his head but didn’t question me. “Why don’t you let me take you to my place? I’ll make you dinner.”

I considered this. “Do you live near the hospital?”

“Even closer than you. I’ll take you as soon as you like.”

I nodded once, giving in.

I was quiet on the elevator ride to the sixteenth floor, quiet as he unlocked his door, apologizing for the mess, asking if I still liked chicken and did I want to use the phone? I nodded for chicken, shook my head for phone, and walked through his living room slowly, running my hands along the spines of his books, considering the framed family pictures, seeing but not really seeing. He disappeared into the kitchen, then emerged with a stack of folded things: a fluffy white towel, a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt, miniature bars of soap and bottles of shampoo from a hotel in New York City.

“Would you like to freshen up?” he offered.

The bathroom was big and clean. I stripped off my shirt, then my shorts, halfheartedly trying to remember when they’d been clean. From the look and smell, I surmised that it had been a while. I folded them, then folded them again, then decided the hell with it and tossed them in the trash. I stood under the water for a long time, with my eyes closed, and thought of nothing but the feeling of the water on my face. Found, I told myself. Try to get found.

When I come out of the shower, dressed, with my hair toweled dry, he was putting food on the table.

“Welcome back,” he said, smiling at me. “Is this okay?”

There was a tossed salad, a small roast chicken, a platter of potato pancakes, which I hadn’t seen anyone serve outside of Chanukah in years. I sat down. The food actually smelled good – the first time anything had smelled good to me in a while.

“Thank you,” I said.

He piled my plate high, and didn’t talk while I ate, although he watched me carefully. Every once in a while I’d look up and see him… not staring, exactly. Just watching me.

Finally, I pushed my plate away. “Thank you,” I said again. “That was really good.”

He led me over to the couch and handed me a ceramic bowl full of chocolate ice cream and mango sorbet.

“Ben and Jerry’s,” he said. I stared at him, my head still staticky, remembering that he’d brought me dessert once before, when I was in the hospital. “Remember when we talked about ice cream in class?”

I looked at him blankly.

“When we were talking about trigger foods?” he prompted. And I remembered then, sitting around the table a million years ago, talking about things I liked to eat. It felt unbelievable that I had ever liked anything… that I’d enjoyed regular stuff. Food, and friends, and going for walks and to movies. Could I ever have a life like that again? I wondered. I wasn’t sure… but I thought that maybe I could try.

“Do you remember all of your patients’ favorite foods?” I asked.

“Only my favorite patients,” he said. He sat in the armchair across from me while I ate it, slowly, savoring each mouthful. I sighed when I was finished. It had been so long since I’d eaten this well; so long since anything had tasted good.

He cleared his throat. I figured that was my cue to go. He probably had plans for the night. He possibly even had a date. I racked my brain and tried to remember. What day was it? Was it the weekend?

I yawned, and Dr. K. smiled at me. “You look so tired,” he said. “Why don’t you rest for a while?”

His voice was so warm, so soothing. “You like tea, not coffee, right?” I nodded. “I’ll be right back,” he said.

He went to the kitchen and I stretched out my legs on the couch, and by the time he came back I was half asleep. My eyelids felt so heavy. I yawned, and tried to sit up, as he handed me a mug.

“Where were you going today?” he asked.

I turned my head away, reaching for the blanket that was draped over the back of the couch. “I just went for a walk. I guess I got kind of lost or something. I’m fine, though. You shouldn’t worry. I’m fine.”

“You’re not,” he said, sounding almost angry. “You’re very obviously not fine. You’re half-starved, you’re stomping around the city, you quit your job…”

“Leave of absence,” I corrected. “I’m on a compassionate leave of absence.”

“You don’t have to be ashamed to ask for help.”

“I don’t need help,” I told him, reflexively. Because that was my reflex, ingrained as a teenager, honed over the years. I’m okay. I can handle it. I’m fine. “I’ve got everything under control. I’m fine. We’re fine. Me and the baby. We’re fine.”

He shook his head. “How are you fine? You’re not happy”

“Why should I be happy?” I shot back. “What’s to be happy about?”

“You have a beautiful baby” “Yeah, no thanks to anyone else.”

He stared at me. I stared back, furious. Then I put down my tea and got to my feet.

“I should go.”

“Cannie…”

I looked for my socks and my duct-taped shoes. “Could you take me home?”

He looked distressed. “I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“You haven’t upset me. I’m not upset. But I want to go home.”

He sighed, and looked down at his feet. “I thought…” he mumbled.

“Thought what?”

“Nothing.”

“Thought what?” I repeated, more insistently.

“It was a bad idea.”

“Thought what,” I said again, in a tone that wasn’t taking no for an answer.

“I thought that if you came here, you’d relax.” He shook his head, seeming stunned by his own hopes, his own presumptions. “I thought maybe you’d want to talk about things”

“There’s really nothing to talk about,” I said. But I said it more gently. He had given me dinner, clean clothes, an orange Popsicle, a ride. “I’m okay. Really. I am.”

We stood for a minute, and something passed between us, some small easing of the tension. I could feel the blisters on both feet, and how my cheeks felt tight and painful with sunburn. I could feel the cool thin cotton of his T-shirt on my back, and how nice it was, and my belly full of good food, and how nice that was. And I could feel my breasts, which ached dully.

“Hey, you wouldn’t happen to have a breast pump in here?” I asked. My first attempt at a joke since I’d woken up in the hospital.

He shook his head. “Would ice help?” he asked. I nodded, and sat back down on the couch, where he brought me ice wrapped in a towel. I turned my back to him and tucked the ice under my shirt.

“How’s Nifkin?” he asked again.

I shut my eyes. “With my mom,” I muttered. “I sent him to stay with her for a while.”

“Well, don’t let him stay away too long. He’ll forget his tricks.” He took a sip of his tea. “I was going to teach him how to speak, if we’d had a little more time together.”

I nodded. My eyelids were feeling heavy again.

“Maybe some other time,” he said. He kept his eyes politely averted as I shifted the ice around. “I’d like to see Nifkin again,” he said. He paused and cleared his throat. “I’d like to see you, too, Cannie.”

I looked at him. “Why?” A rude question, I knew, but I felt like I was past the point of good manners… of any manners, really. “Why me?” “Because I care about you.” “Why?” I asked again.

“Because you’re…” He let the last word hang there. When I looked at him he was waving his hands in the air, like he was trying to sculpt phrases out of the air. “You’re special.”

I shook my head.

“You are.”

Special, I thought. I didn’t feel special. I felt ridiculous, really. I felt like a spectacle of a woman, a sob story, a freak. How must I look, really? I imagined myself on the street that night, my shoe falling apart, sweaty and filthy, my breasts leaking. They should take a picture, put my poster up in every junior high school, staple it in bookstores next to the Harlequin novels and the self-help books about find-ing your soulmate, your life partner, your one true love. I could be a warning; I could turn girls away from my fate.

I must have dozed off then, because when I came awake with a start, with my cheek against the blanket and the towel full of ice melting in my lap, he was sitting right across from me.

He’d taken his glasses off, and his eyes were gentle.

“Here,” he said. He had something in his arms, cradled like a baby. Pillows. Blankets. “I made up the guest bedroom for you.”

I walked there in a daze, aching from exhaustion. The sheets were cool and crisp, the pillows like an embrace. I let him draw back the covers, help me onto the bed, tuck them up over me, smooth the blanket over my shoulders. His face seemed so much softer without his glasses, in the dark.

He sat on the edge of the bed. “Will you tell me why you’re so angry?” he asked.

I was so tired, and my tongue felt heavy and slow in my mouth. It was like being drugged, or hypnotized; like dreaming underwater. Or maybe I would have told anyone, if I’d let anyone get close enough to ask. “I’m mad at Bruce. I’m mad that his girlfriend pushed me, and I’m mad that he doesn’t love me. I’m mad at my father, I guess.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“I saw him… in California” I paused to yawn, to fight the words out. “He didn’t want to know me.” I passed my hands over my belly, or where my belly had been. “The baby…,” I said. My eyelids felt freighted, so heavy I could barely keep them open. “He didn’t want to know.”

He brushed the back of his hand against my cheek, and I leaned into his touch like a cat, unthinking. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “You’ve had a lot of sadness in your life.”

I breathed in, then out, pondering the truth of this. “That’s not exactly a news flash,” I said.

He smiled. “I just wanted you to know,” he said, “I wanted to see you, so I could tell you…”

I stared at him, wide-eyed in the dark.

“You don’t have to do everything alone,” he said. “There are people who care about you. You just have to let them help.”

I sat up then. The sheets and blankets fell around my waist. “No,” I told him, “that’s wrong.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

I shook my head, once, impatiently. “Do you know what love is?”

He considered the question. “I think I heard a song about it once.”

“Love,” I said, “is the rug they pull out from under you. Love is Lucy always lifting the football at the last second so that Charlie Brown falls on his ass. Love is something that every time you believe in it, it goes away. Love is for suckers, and I’m not going to be a sucker ever again.” When I closed my eyes I could see myself as I was, months ago, lying on the bathroom floor, highlights in my hair and makeup on my face, the expensive shoes and fancy clothes and diamond earrings that couldn’t keep me safe, couldn’t keep the wolf from my door.

“I want a house with hardwood floors,” I said, “and I don’t want anyone else to come inside.”

He was touching my hair, saying something. “Cannie,” he repeated.

I opened my eyes.

“It doesn’t have to be that way.”

I stared at him in the dark. “How else could it be?” I asked, quite reasonably.

He leaned forward and kissed me.

He kissed me, and at first I was too shocked to do anything, too shocked to move, too shocked to do anything but sit there, perfectly still, as his lips touched mine.

He pulled his head back. “I’m sorry,” he said.

I leaned toward him. “Hardwood floors,” I whispered, and I realized I was teasing him, and that I was smiling, and it had been so long since I had smiled.

“I will give you whatever I can,” he said, looking at me in a way that made it clear that he was, somehow, oh miracle of miracles, taking this all seriously. And then he kissed me again, pulled the sheets up to my chin, pressed his warm hand on top of my head, and walked out of the room.

I listened as the door closed and as he settled his long body onto the couch. I listened until he’d clicked the lights off and his breathing became deep and regular. I listened, holding the blankets tight around me, holding that feeling of being safe, of being tucked in and taken care of, around me. And I thought clearly then, for the first time since Joy had been born. I decided, right there in that strange bed in the dark, that I could go on being scared forever, that I could keep walking, that I could carry my rage around, hot and heavy in my chest forever. But maybe there was another way. You have everything you need, my mother had told me. And maybe all I needed was the courage to admit that what I needed was someone to lean on. And then I could do it – could be a good daughter, and a good mother. Maybe I could even be happy. Maybe I could.

I slipped out of bed. The floor was cool on my bare feet. I moved stealthily through the darkness, out of the room, easing the door shut behind me. I went to him there on the couch, where he’d fallen asleep with a book falling from his fingers. I sat on the floor beside him and leaned so close that my lips practically touched his forehead. Then I closed my eyes and took a deep breath and jumped into the water. “Help,” I whispered.

His eyes opened instantly, as if he hadn’t been sleeping, but waiting, and he reached out one hand and cupped my cheek.

“Help,” I said again, as if I were a baby, as if this was a word I’d just learned and could not stop repeating. “Help me. Help.”

Two weeks later Joy came home. She was eight weeks old, and she’d topped seven pounds and was finally breathing on her own. “You’ll be fine,” the nurses told me. Except I decided that I wasn’t ready to be by myself yet. I was still too hurt inside, still too sad.

Samantha offered to let us stay with her. She’d take leave from work, she said, she had weeks built up, she’d do whatever it took to get her house ready. Maxi volunteered to fly in or, alternately, to fly us both up to Utah, where she was shooting a cowgirl epic with the unwieldy title Buffalo Girls 2000. Peter, of course, was first in line to tell us that we could stay with him or that, if I wanted, he could stay at my place with us.

“Forget it,” I told him. “I’ve learned my lesson about giving men the milk for free and then expecting them to buy the cow.”

He turned a gratifying shade of crimson. “Cannie,” he began, “I didn’t mean…”

And I laughed, then. It was still feeling good to laugh. I’d gone too long without it. “Kidding,” I said, and looked at myself ruefully. “Believe me, I’m in no shape to think about that for a while.”

In the end, I decided to go home – home to my mother and horrible Tanya, who’d agreed to put her loom in storage for the duration and give me and Joy back the Room Formerly Known as Mine. Actually, they were both glad to have us. “It’s so nice to hold a baby again!” said my mother, considerately ignoring the fact that tiny, bristly, sickly Joy, with her sleep apnea monitor and myriad health concerns, was not exactly the sort of baby a grandmother would dream about.

I thought it would be for a week or two – just a chance for me to regroup, to rest, to get used to taking care of a baby. In the end, we stayed for three months, me in the bed that had been mine when I was a girl, and Joy in a crib beside me.

My mother and Tanya let me be. They brought trays of food to my door and cups of tea to my bedside. They retrieved my CDs and a half-dozen books from my apartment, and Tanya presented me with an afghan in purple and green. “For you,” she said shyly. “I’m sorry about what happened.” And she was, I realized. She was sorry, and she was trying – she’d even managed to quit smoking. For the baby, my mother had told me. That was nice.

“Thanks,” I said, and wrapped it around me. She smiled like the sun coming out.

“You’re welcome,” she said.

Samantha came a few times a week, bringing me treats from the city – grilled grape leaves from the Vietnamese food stall in the Reading Terminal, fresh plums from a farm in New Jersey. Peter visited, too, bringing books, newspapers, magazines (never Moxie, I was pleased to note), and little gifts for Joy, including a tiny T-shirt that read “Girl Power.”

“That is so great,” I said.

Peter smiled, and reached into his briefcase. “I got you one, too,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said.

Joy stirred in her sleep. Peter looked at her, then at me. “So how are you really?”

I stretched my arms over my head. I was very very tan, from all that time walking in the sun, but things had started to change. I was taking showers, for one thing. I was eating, for another. My hips and breasts were coming back, and I felt okay with it… like I recognized myself again. Like I was reclaiming not only my body, but the life I’d left behind. And all things considered, it hadn’t been such a bad life. There were things that I had lost, true, and people who wouldn’t ever love me again, but there was also… potential, I thought, and I smiled at Peter. “Better,” I told him. “I guess I’m doing better now.”

Then one morning in September, I woke up and felt like walking again.

“Do you want some company?” Tanya rasped.

I shook my head. My mother watched me lace up my sneakers, her brow furrowed. “Do you want to take the baby?” she asked.

I stared at Joy. I hadn’t even considered it.

“She might like some fresh air,” said my mother.

“I don’t think so,” I said slowly.

“She won’t break,” said my mother.

“She might,” I replied, feeling my eyes fill. “She almost did before.”

“Babies are stronger than you give them credit for,” she said. “Joy’s going to be okay… and you can’t keep her inside forever.”

“Not even if I home-school?” I asked. My mother grinned and handed me the Snugli baby carrier. Awkwardly, I strapped it over my chest, and lifted Joy inside.

She was so small, still, so small, she felt like an autumn leaf against me. Nifkin looked at me and pawed my leg, whining softly. So I hitched him to his leash and took him, too. We walked slowly, down to the edge of the driveway, then out onto the street, moving at a pace that would have made an arthritic snail look speedy. It was the first time I’d been out on the street since I’d arrived, and I felt terrified – of the cars, of the people, of everything, I thought ruefully. Joy nestled against me with her eyes closed. Nifkin marched beside me, growling at cars that went by. “Look, baby,” I whispered against Joy’s downy head. “Look at the world.”

When we got back from our morning walk Peter’s car was parked in the driveway. Inside, my mother and Tanya and Peter were sitting around the kitchen table.

“Cannie!” said my mother.

“Hello,” said Peter.

“We were just talking about you,” Tanya said. Even after close to a month smoke-free, she still sounded like Marge Simpson’s sisters.

“Hey,” I said to Peter, pleased to see him. I gave a genial wave, then unstrapped Joy, wrapped her in a blanket, and sat down with her in my lap. My mother poured me tea as Joy stared at Peter, wide-eyed. He’d been over before, of course, but she’d always been asleep. So this was their first real meeting.

“Hello, baby,” Peter said solemnly. Joy screwed up her face and started to cry. Peter looked distressed.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he began.

“Don’t worry about it,” I told him, turning Joy so that she faced me, and rocking her until her sobs subsided into whimpers, then hiccoughs, then quiet.

“She isn’t used to men,” said Tanya. I thought of at least six snappy comebacks to that, but prudently kept my mouth shut.

“I think babies are scared of me,” Peter said, sounding mournful. “I think it’s my voice.”

“Joy’s heard all kinds of voices,” I said tartly. My mother shot me an evil look. Tanya didn’t seem to notice.

“She’s not scared,” I said. She was, in fact, asleep, her lips slightly parted and her eyelashes long and dark against her rosy cheeks where there were still tears drying. “Here,” I said, “see?”

I wiped her face and tilted Joy toward him so he could see. He leaned down, looking at her. “Wow,” he said reverently. He reached out one long, slender finger and gently touched her cheek. I beamed down at Joy, who promptly woke up, took one look at Peter, and started bawling again.

“She’ll get over it,” I said. “Rude baby!” I whispered in her ear.

“Maybe she’s hungry,” said Tanya.

“Wet diaper,” suggested my Mom.

“Disappointed with ABC’s prime-time lineup,” I said.

Peter cracked up.

“Well, she’s a very discerning viewer,” I said, bouncing Joy against my shoulder. “She really liked Sports Night.” Once she’d settled down, I helped myself to tea, and to a fistful of the chocolate-chip cookies in the center of the table. I added an apple from the fruit bowl and went to work.

Peter looked at me approvingly. “You look much better,” he pronounced.

“You say that every time you see me,” I told him.

“You do,” he insisted. “Much healthier.”

And it was true. With three meals a day, plus snacks, I was quickly regaining my old prediet Anna Nicole Smith proportions. And I continued to welcome the changes. I could see it all differently now. My legs were sturdy and strong, not fat or ungainly. My breasts now had a purpose besides stretching out my sweaters and making it hard to find a non-beige bra. Even my waist and hips, riddled with silvery stretch marks, suggested strength, and told a story. I might be a big girl, I reasoned, but it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. I was a safe harbor and a soft place to rest. Built for comfort, not for speed, I thought, and giggled at myself. Peter smiled at me. “Much healthier,” he said again.

“They’ll kick you out of the weight-loss center if it gets out about your telling me that,” I said.

He shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “I think you look fine. I always did,” he said. My mother was beaming. I shot her a mind-your-own-business look and settled Joy in my lap.

“So,” I said, “what brings you to these parts?”

“Actually,” he said, “I was wondering if you and Joy would like to go for a ride.”

I felt my chest tighten again. Joy and I hadn’t gone anywhere in the car since her arrival, except for checkups at the hospital. “Where to?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

“Down the shore,” he said, using the typical Philadelphia construction. “Just for a little drive.”

It sounded nice. It also sounded absolutely terrifying. “I’m not sure,” I said regretfully. “I’m not sure she’s ready.”

“She’s not ready, or you’re not ready?” asked my helpful mother. I sent her an even more intense mind-your-own-business look.

“I’ll be there,” Peter said. “So you’ll have medical assistance, if you need it.”

“Go on, Cannie,” said my mother.

“It’ll be good for you,” urged Tanya.

I stared at him. He smiled at me. I sighed, knowing I was defeated. “Just a short ride,” I said, and he nodded, eager as a schoolboy, and stood up to help me.

Of course, it took a while – forty-five minutes, to be precise, and three bags full of diapers, hats, socks, sweaters, stroller, bottles, blankets, and assorted baby paraphernalia, all shoved in the trunk – before we were ready to leave. Then Joy got stowed in the infant seat, I sat on the passenger’s side, Peter took the wheel, and we headed down to the Jersey shore.

Peter and I talked a little at first – about his job, about Lucy and Maxi and how Andy’d actually gotten a death threat after savaging one of Philadelphia’s famous old fish-houses that had been coasting on its reputation and so-so snapper soup for decades. Then, when we turned on to the Atlantic City Expressway, he smiled at me and touched a button on the dashboard, and the roof over our heads slid away.

“A moon roof!” I said, impressed.

“Thought you’d like it!” he shouted back.

I looked back at Joy, tucked snug in her infant seat, wondering if the wind would be too much. But she actually looked like she was enjoying it. The little pink ribbon I’d tied in her hair, so that everyone would know she was a girl, was bobbing in the breeze, and her eyes were wide open.

We drove to Ventnor and parked in a lot two blocks from the beach. Peter unfolded Joy’s complicated carriage while I got her out of the car, wrapped her in more blankets than the warm September day merited, and set her into the carriage. We walked slowly down to the water, me pushing, Peter walking beside me. The sunshine felt wonderful, thick as honey on my shoulders, making my hair glow.

“Thank you,” I said. He shrugged and looked embarrassed.

“I’m glad you like it,” he said.

We walked on the boardwalk – up for twenty minutes, back for another twenty, because I’d decided I didn’t want Joy outside for more than an hour. Except the salt air didn’t seem to be bothering her. She’d fallen fast asleep, her little rosebud mouth slack, her pink ribbon coming unfurled, and her fine brown hair curling around her cheeks. I leaned close to hear her breathing, and to check her diaper. She was fine.

Peter returned to my side with a blanket in his arms. “Want to sit on the beach?” he asked.

I nodded. He unfolded the blanket, I unstrapped Joy, and we walked down close to the water and sat there, watching the waves break. I worked my toes into the warm sand, and stared at the white foam, the blue-green depths, the black edge of the ocean against the horizon, and thought of all the things I couldn’t see: sharks and bluefish and starfish, whales singing to each other, secret lives that I would never know.

Peter draped another blanket over my shoulders, and let his hands linger there for a few seconds.

“Cannie,” he began. “I want to tell you something.”

I gave him what I hoped was an encouraging smile.

“That day on Kelly Drive, when you and Samantha were walking,” he said, and cleared his throat.

“Right,” I said. “Go on.”

“Well,” he said. “I, um… I’m not actually a jogger.”

I looked at him, confused.

“I just… well, I remember how in class you used to say you went on bike rides there, and you’d go for walks, and I didn’t feel that I could call you…”

“So you started jogging?”

“Every day,” he confessed. “Morning and night, and sometimes on my lunch hour. Until I saw you.”

I sat back, surprised by the extent of his dedication, knowing that if it were me, no matter how much I felt that I wanted to see the other person, it probably wouldn’t be enough to get me to jog. “I, um, have shinsplints now,” he mumbled, and I burst out laughing.

“It serves you right!” I said. “You could’ve just called me…”

“But I couldn’t,” he said. “First of all, you were a patient…”

“Was a patient,” I said.

“And you were, um…”

“Pregnant with another man’s child,” I supplied.

“You were oblivious!” he exclaimed. “Completely oblivious! That was the worst part! There I was, mooning after you, giving myself shinsplints…”

I giggled some more.

“And first you were sad about Bruce, who even I could tell wasn’t right for you…”

“You were hardly objective,” I told him, but he wasn’t through.

“And then you were in California, and that wasn’t right for you, either”

“California’s very nice,” I said, in California’s defense.

He sat down next to me and wrapped his arms around my shoulders, pulling me and Joy tightly against him. “I thought you were never coming home,” he said. “I couldn’t stand it. I thought I’d never see you again, and I didn’t know what to do with myself.”

I smiled at him, turning so I could look him in the eye. The sun was setting over us, and seagulls swooped and squawked above the waves.

“But I did come home,” I said. “See? No shinsplints necessary.”

“I’m glad,” he said, and I leaned against him, letting him support me, with the setting sun glowing in his hair and the warm sand cradling my feet, and my baby, my Joy, safe in my arms.

“So I guess the question is,” I began, in his car on the way home, “what do I do with my life now?”

He smiled at me quickly before turning his eyes back to the road. “I was actually thinking more along the lines of whether you wanted to stop for dinner.”

“Sure,” I said. Joy was asleep in her infant seat. We’d lost her pink ribbon somewhere, but I could see sand glittering on her bare feet. “So now that we’ve got that settled…”

“Do you want to go back to work?” he asked me.

I thought about it. “I think so,” I said. “Eventually. I miss it,” I said. Knowing, as soon as I said it, that it was the truth. “I don’t think I’ve ever gone this long without writing something. God help me, I even miss my brides.”

“So what do you want to write?” he asked. “What do you want to write about?”

I considered the question.

“Newspaper articles?” he prompted. “Another screenplay? A book?”

“A book,” I scoffed. “As if!”

“It could happen,” he said.

“I don’t think I’ve got a book in me,” I said.

“If you did,” he said seriously, “I’d devote all of my medical training to getting it out.”

I laughed. Joy woke up and made a questioning noise. I looked back and waved at her. She stared at me, then yawned and went back to sleep.

“Maybe not a book,” I said, “but I would like to write something about this.”

“Magazine article?” he suggested.

“Maybe,” I said.

“Good,” he said, sounding like it had been settled once and for all. “I can’t wait to see it.”

The next morning, after I’d walked with Joy, had breakfast with Tanya, talked to Samantha on the phone, and made plans to see Peter the next night, I went down to the basement and fetched the dusty little Apple that had gotten me through four years of Princeton. I wasn’t expecting much, but when I plugged it in it chugged and bleeped and lit up obligingly. And even though the keyboard felt strange under my hands, I took a deep breath, wiped the dust from the screen, and started writing.

Loving a Larger Woman

by Candace Shapiro

When I was five I learned to read. Books were a miracle to me – white pages, black ink, and new worlds and different friends in each one. To this day, I relish the feeling of cracking a binding for the first time, the anticipation of where I’ll go and whom I’ll meet inside.

When I was eight I learned to ride a bike. And this, too, opened my eyes to a new world that I could explore on my own – the brook that burbled through a vacant lot two streets over, the ice-cream store that sold homemade cones for a dollar, the orchard that bordered a golf course and that smelled tangy, like cider, from the apples that rolled to the ground in the fall.

When I was twelve I learned that I was fat. My father told me, pointing at the insides of my thighs and the undersides of my arms with the handle of his tennis racquet. We’d been playing, I remember, and I was flushed and sweaty, glowing with the joy of movement. You’ll need to watch that, he told me, poking me with the handle so that the extra flesh jiggled. Men don’t like fat women.

And even though this would turn out not to be absolutely true – there would be men who would love me, and there would be people who’d respect me – I carried his words into my adulthood like a prophecy, viewing the world through the prism of my body, and my father’s prediction.

I learned how to diet – and, of course, how to cheat on diets. I learned how to feel miserable and ashamed, how to cringe away from mirrors and men’s glances, how to tense myself for the insults that I always thought were coming: the Girl Scout troop leader who’d offer me carrot sticks while the other girls got milk and cookies; the well-meaning teacher who’d ask if I’d thought about aerobics. I learned a dozen tricks for making myself invisible – how to keep a towel wrapped around my midsection at the beach (but never swim), how to fade to the back row of any group photograph (and never smile), how to dress in shades of gray, black, and brown, how to avoid seeing my own reflection in windows or in mirrors, how to think of myself exclusively as a body – more than that, as a body that had fallen short of the mark, that had become something horrifying, unlovely, unlovable.

There were a thousand words that could have described me – smart, funny, kind, generous. But the word I picked – the word that I believed the world had picked for me – was fat.

When I was twenty-two I went out into the world in a suit of invisible armor, fully expecting to be shot at, but determined that I wouldn’t get shot down. I got a wonderful job, and eventually fell in love with a man I thought would love me for the rest of my life. He didn’t. And then – by accident – I got pregnant. And when my daughter was born almost two months too soon I learned that there are worse things than not liking your thighs or your butt. There are more terryifing things than trying on bathing suits in front of three-way department-store mirrors. There is the fear of watching your child struggling for breath, in the center of a glass crib where you can’t touch her. There is the terror of imagining a future where she won’t be healthy or strong.

And, ultimately, I learned, there is comfort. Comfort in reaching out to the people who love you, comfort in asking for help, and in realizing, finally, that I am valued, treasured, loved, even if I am never going to be smaller than a size sixteen, even if my story doesn’t have the Hollywood-perfect happy ending where I lose sixty pounds and Prince Charming decides that he loves me after all.

The truth is this – I’m all right the way I am. I was all right, all along. I will never be thin, but I will be happy. I will love myself, and my body, for what it can do – because it is strong enough to lift, to walk, to ride a bicycle up a hill, to embrace the people I love and hold them fully, and to nurture a new life. I will love myself because I am sturdy. Because I did not – will not – break.

I will savor the taste of my food and I will savor my life, and if Prince Charming never shows up – or, worse yet, if he drives by, casts a cool and appraising glance at me, and tells me I’ve got a beautiful face and have I ever considered Optifast? – I will make my peace with that.

And most importantly, I will love my daughter whether she’s big or little. I will tell her that she’s beautiful. I will teach her to swim and read and ride a bike. And I will tell her that whether she’s a size eight or a size eighteen, that she can be happy, and strong, and secure that she will find friends, and success, and even love. I will whisper it in her ear when she’s sleeping. I will say, Our lives – your life – will be extraordinary.

I read through it twice, cleaning up the punctuation, fixing the numerous typos. Then I stood up and stretched, placing my palms flat against the small of my back. I looked at my baby, who was beginning to resemble an actual infant of the human species, rather than some miniaturized, prickly fruit-human hybrid. And I looked at myself: hips, breasts, butt, belly, all of the problem areas I’d once despaired of, the body that had caused me such shame, and smiled. In spite of everything, I was going to be fine.

“We both are,” I said to Joy, who did not stir.

I called information, then dialed the number in New York. “Hello; Moxie,” said a chirpy subteen-sounding secretary. My voice didn’t tremble even slightly when I asked for the managing editor.

“May I ask what this is in reference to?” the secretary singsonged.

“My name is Candace Shapiro,” I began. “I’m the ex-girlfriend of your ‘Good in Bed’ columnist.”

I heard a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line. “You’re C.?” she gasped.

“Cannie,” I corrected.

“Ohmygod! You’re, like, real!”

“Very much so,” I said. This was turning out to be very amusing.

“Did you have the baby?” asked the girl.

“I did,” I said. “She’s right here, sleeping.”

“Oh. Oh, wow,” she said. “You know, we were wondering how that turned out.”

“Well, that’s why I’m calling,” I said.

TWENTY

The good thing about naming ceremonies for Jewish baby girls is that they ’re not tied to a specific time. With a boy, you’ve got to do the bris within seven days. A girl, you can do it in six weeks, three months, whenever. It’s a newer service, a little bit free-form, and the rabbis who do namings tend to be accommodating, New Age-ish types.

Joy’s naming was on December 31, on a crisp, perfect winter morning in Philadelphia. Eleven o’clock in the morning, with brunch to follow.

My mother was among the first wave of arrivals. “Who’s my big girl?” she cooed, lifting Joy from her crib. “Who’s my bundle of joy?” Joy chuckled and waved her arms. My beautiful daughter, I thought, feeling my throat catch at the sight of her. She was almost eight months old, and still it felt like every time I saw her she was a miracle.

And even strangers said she was a miraculously beautiful baby, with peachy skin, wide eyes, sturdy limbs pillowed with cushiony rolls of fat, and a wonderfully happy way about her. I’d named her perfectly. Unless she was hungry, or her diaper was wet, Joy was always smiling, always laughing, observing the world closely through her wide, watchful eyes. She was the happiest baby I knew.

My mother handed her over, then impulsively reached and hugged us both. “I am so proud of you,” she said.

I hugged her hard. “Thank you,” I whispered, wishing that I could tell her what I really wanted to, that I could thank her for loving me when I was a girl, and for letting me go now that I was a woman. “Thank you,” I said again. My mother gave me a final squeeze, and kissed Joy on top of her head.

I filled Joy’s white tub with warm water and gave her a bath. She cooed and clucked as I poured the water over her, washing her legs, her feet, her fingers, her sweet little baby behind. I rubbed on lotion, dusted her with powder, snapped her into a white knitted dress and put a white hat with roses embroidered around the edges on her head. “Baby,” I whispered in her ear, “baby Joy.” Joy waved her fists in the air like the world’s tiniest triumphant athlete and gurgled a liquid string of syllables, like she was having a conversation in a language none of us had learned.

“Can you say mama?” I asked.

“Ahh!” Joy announced.

“Not even close,” I said.

“Oo,” she said, looking at me with her big, clear eyes, as if she understood every word.

Then I handed her off to Lucy and went to take my own shower, to do my hair and face, to practice the speech I’d been writing for days.

I could hear the doorbell chiming, the door opening and closing, people coming inside. The caterers had come first, and Peter had come second, with two boxes wrapped in silver paper and a bouquet of roses. “For you,” he’d said, and put the flowers in a vase. Then he took Nifkin for a walk and emptied the dishwasher while I finished getting things in order.

“What a sweetheart,” said one of the caterer’s assistants. “I don’t think my husband even knows where the dishwasher is.” I smiled my thanks without bothering to correct her. It was all too confusing to explain to strangers… like telling them I’d gone through the day with all my clothes on backward. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage. Even little kids knew how it was supposed to go. But what could I do? I reasoned. What happened happened. I couldn’t undo my history. And if it had given me Joy, there was no way I would want to.

I walked into the living room with Joy in my arms. Maxi was there, and she smiled at me, giving me the tiniest of waves. Samantha was next to her, and next to Sam were my mother and Tanya, Lucy and Josh, Betsy and Andy and Andy’s wife, Ellen, and two of the nurses from the hospital who’d taken care of Joy. And, in one corner, was Audrey, impeccably turned out in crisp cream-colored linen. Peter was standing beside her. All my friends. I bit my lip and looked down to keep from crying. The rabbi asked for silence, then asked for four people to come forward to hold the posts of the huppah. It was my grandmother’s, I saw, recognizing the fine old lace from my cousins’ weddings. It was the huppah I would have been married under, had I gotten things in the right order. At naming ceremonies the huppah is meant to shelter the baby and the husband and wife. But I’d made prior arrangements, and at the rabbi’s request everyone crowded under the huppah with me. My baby would get her name surrounded by all of the people who’d loved and sustained us, I decided, and the rabbi had said that it sounded fine to her.

Joy was awake and alert, taking it all in, beaming as if she knew she was the center of attention, as if there was no doubt that it was exactly where she was meant to be. Nifkin sat politely by my feet.

“Shall we begin?” asked the rabbi. She gave a short speech about Israel and Jewish tradition, and how Joy was being welcomed into the religion handed down from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and also Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah. She chanted a blessing, said prayers over bread and wine, daubed a cloth in Manischevitz and pressed it against Joy’s lips. “Ooh!” Joy chortled, and everybody laughed. “And now,” said the rabbi, “Joy’s mother, Candace, will tell how she chose the name.”

I took a deep breath. Joy looked at me with her wide eyes. Nifkin was very still against my leg. I pulled a notecard out of my pocket.

“I’ve learned a lot this year,” I began. I took a deep quavering breath. Don’t cry, I told myself. “I learned that things don’t always turn out the way you planned, or the way you think they should. And I’ve learned that there are things that go wrong that don’t always get fixed or get put back together the way they were before. I’ve learned that some broken things stay broken, and I’ve learned that you can get through bad times and keep looking for better ones, as long as you have people who love you.” I stopped and swiped my hand across my eyes. “I named my baby Joy because she is my joy,” I said, “and she’s named Leah after her father’s father. His middle name was Leonard, and he was a wonderful man. He loved his wife, and his son, and I know that he would have loved Joy, too.”

And that was all. I was crying, Audrey was crying, my mother and Tanya were holding each other, and even Lucy, who tended to go non-reactive at sad occasions (“It’s the Prozac,” she’d explain), was wiping away tears. The rabbi observed this all, a bemused look on her face. “Well,” she finally said, “shall we eat?”

After the bagels and whitefish salad, after butter cookies and apple cake and mimosas, after Nifkin had devoured a quarter pound of Nova lox and been sick behind the toilet, after we’d opened the gifts and I’d spent fifteen minutes telling Maxi that Joy, wonderful baby that she was, was really not going to be needing a strand of cultured pearls until at least her eighteenth birthday, after we’d cleared away the wrapping paper and put away the leftovers and the baby and I had taken a nap, Peter and Joy and I walked down to the river to wait for the century’s end.

I was feeling good about things, I thought, as I bundled Joy into her stroller. Preproduction on my movie was beginning. My version of “Loving a Larger Woman” had come out at the end of November, replacing Bruce’s column. The response, the managing editor told me, had been overwhelming, with every woman who’d ever felt too big, too little, too ugly or strange to fit in or be worthy of love writing in to praise my courage, to decry B’s selfishness, to share their own stories about being big and female in America, and to offer best wishes to baby Joy.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” the managing editor had said, describing the piles of mail, baby blankets, baby books, teddy bears, and assorted religious and secular good-luck icons that had filled the Moxie mailroom. “Would you consider writing for us regularly?” She had it all figured out – I’d do monthly dispatches from the single-mom front, ongoing updates on my life and Joy’s. “I want you to tell us what it’s like to live your life, in your body – to work, to date, to balance your single friends with your obligations as a mother,” she said.

“What about Bruce?” I asked. I was thrilled with the chance to write for Moxie (and even more thrilled once they’d told me what it paid), but I was less than enamoured with the thought of seeing my articles appear next to Bruce’s every month, watching him tell readers about his sex life while I filled them in on spit-up and poopy diapers and how I could never find a bathing suit that fit.

“Bruce’s contract hasn’t been renewed,” she said crisply. Which was just fine with me, I said, and happily agreed to her terms.

I spent December settling back into my new apartment, and my life. I kept things easy. I’d wake up in the mornings and get dressed and dress the baby, put Nifkin on his leash, push Joy in the stroller, walk to the park, sit in the sun. Nifkin would fetch his ball, the neighbors would fuss over Joy. After, I’d meet Samantha for coffee, and practice being out in public, around cars and buses and strangers and the hundred thousand other things I’d learned to be afraid of after Joy came into the world so abruptly.

Along those lines, I found a therapist, too: a warm woman about my mother’s age with a comforting way about her, plus an endless supply of Kleenex, who did not seem at all alarmed when I spent the first two sessions crying nonstop, and the third one telling the once-upon-a-time story of how much my father had loved me and how it had hurt me when he’d left, rather than addressing what surely seemed like the more pertinent issues at hand.

I called Betsy, my editor, and made arrangements to come back part-time, to pitch in on some big projects, to work from home if I was needed. I called my mother and made a standing date: Every Friday night, dinner at her house, and Joy and I would sleep over so we could go to Wee Ones swimming class at the Jewish Center the next morning. Joy took to the water like a little duck. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Tanya would growl, as Joy paddled her arms, looking adorable in a small pink bathing suit with ruffles all over the bottom. “She’s going to swim like a fish!”

I called Audrey and apologized… well, I did whatever apologizing I could, in between her nonstop apologies for Bruce. She was sorry for how he’d behaved, sorry he hadn’t been there for me, sorriest of all that she hadn’t known so she could have made him do the right thing. Which, of course, wasn’t possible. You can’t make grownups do what they don’t want to do. But I didn’t say any of that.

I told her I’d be honored if she would have a role in Joy’s life. She asked, very nervously, if I had any intention of letting Bruce have a role in Joy’s life. I told her that I didn’t… but I told her that things change. A year ago I couldn’t have imagined myself with a baby. So who knows? Next year maybe Bruce will come over for brunch or a bike ride, and Joy will call him Daddy. Anything’s possible, right?

I didn’t call Bruce. I thought about it and thought about it, turned it over and over in my mind, and looked at it from every angle I could think of, and in the end I decided that I couldn’t. I’d been able to let go of a lot of the anger… but not all of it. Maybe that too would come in time.

“So you haven’t talked to him at all?” Peter asked, as he walked alongside me, balancing one hand beside mine on Joy’s stroller.

“Not once.”

“You don’t hear from him?”

“I hear… things about him. It’s this very Byzantine system. Audrey tells my mother, who tells Tanya, who tells everyone she knows, including Lucy, who usually tells me.”

“How do you feel about that?”

I smiled at him, beneath the sky, which had finally gone completely black. “You sound like my shrink.” I took a deep breath and huffed it out, watching it turn into a silver cloud and blow away. “It was awful at first, and it still is sometimes.”

His voice was very gentle. “But only sometimes?”

I smiled at him. “Hardly ever,” I said. “Hardly every anymore.” I reached for his hand and he squeezed my fingers. “Things happen, you know? That’s my one big lesson from therapy. Things happen, and you can’t make them un-happen. You don’t get do-overs, you can’t roll back the clock, and the only thing you can change, and the only thing it does any good to worry about, is how you let them affect you.”

“So how are you letting this affect you?”

I smiled sideways at him. “You’re very persistent.”

He looked at me seriously. “I have ulterior motives.”

“Oh?”

Peter cleared his throat. “I wonder if you’d… consider me.”

I tilted my head. “For the position of in-house diet counselor?”

“In-house something,” he muttered.

“How old are you, anyway?” I teased. It was the one topic we’d never quite gotten around to during our trips to bookstores and the beach and to the park with Joy.

“How old do you think I am?”

I took my honest guess and revised it five years downward. “Forty?”

He sighed. “I’m thirty-seven.”

I was so startled at that there was no way to even try to hide it. “Really?”

His voice, usually slow and deep and self-assured, sounded higher, hesitant, as he explained. “It’s just that I’m so tall, I think… and my hair started going gray when I was eighteen… and, you know, being a professor, I think everyone just makes certain assumptions”

“You’re thirty-seven?”

“Do you want to see my driver’s license?”

“No,” I said, “no, I believe you.”

“I know,” he began, “I know I’m still probably too old for you, and I’m probably not exactly what you had in mind.”

“Don’t be silly…”

“I’m not glamorous or quick on my feet.” He looked down at his feet and sighed. “I’m kind of a plodder, I guess.”

“Plotter? Like, Murder, She Wrote?”

A faint twitch of a smile lifted his lips. “Plodder. Like, one foot in front of the other.”

“Especially now with the shinsplints,” I murmured.

“And I… I mean, I really…”

“Have we come to the emotional part of the presentation?” I asked, still teasing. “You don’t mind that I’m a larger woman?”

He wrapped his long fingers around my wrist. “I think you look like a queen,” he said with such intensity that I was startled… and tremendously pleased. “I think you’re the most amazing, exciting woman I’ve ever met. I think you’re smart, and funny, and you have the most wonderful heart…” He paused, swallowing hard. “Cannie.” And then he stopped.

I smiled – a private, contented smile – as he sat there, holding my wrist, waiting for my answer. And I knew what it was, I thought, looking at him looking at me. The answer was that I loved him… that he was as kind and considerate and loving a man as I could ever hope for. That he was warm-hearted, and decent, and sweet, and that we could have adventures together… me, and Peter, and Joy.

“Would you like to be the first man I kiss this millennium?” I inquired.

Peter leaned close. I could feel his warm breath on my cheek. “I would like to be the only man you kiss this millennium,” he said emphatically. And he brushed my neck with his lips… then my ear… then my cheek. I giggled until he kissed my lips to quiet me. Snuggled against my chest, squeezed between us, Joy gave a little shout and waved one fist in the air.

“Cannie?” Peter whispered, his voice pitched low, for my ears only, and one hand in his jacket pocket. “I want to ask you something.”

“Shh,” I said, knowing in my heart what his question was, and what my answer would be. I do, I thought. I will. “Shh,” I said, “they’re starting.”

Above our heads, fireworks burst, in great blooms of color and light. Silver sparks showered down, racing toward the river, and the night was full of explosions and the whistling shrieks as the spent fire-crackers hurtled through the night and into the water. I looked down. Joy’s face was rapt, her eyes wide, both her arms extended, as if she wanted to embrace what she was seeing. I smiled at Peter, holding up one finger, asking him with my eyes to wait. Then I unstrapped Joy from her carryall, putting my hands under her armpits, holding her in front of me as I scrambled to my feet. Ignoring the good-natured shouts of “Down in front!” and, “Hey, lady, be careful!” I stood on the ledge, letting the cold and the light pour down over my hair, my face, and my daughter. I raised my arms over my head and lifted Joy up toward the light.