Her neighbor was nodding slowly, her arms clasped around the child at her hip. “Well, you know best. But I could’ve sworn it was March because I was just pregnant with Kyla and I felt awful. Lawson was a terrible two, and I was stuck inside with him, bored out of my mind. I remember when they took the sign down—all of that snow.” Now Annie was looking at her with barely concealed eagerness, trying to divine what she knew. “Kim was sweet with Lawson, always spoiling him with toys and stuff. We were worried George would be lonely when she moved out—but then of course he found you.”
Some old instinct kicked in, and Amina adjusted her expression. She was grateful suddenly for her skin, which didn’t flush in an obvious way. “George is so generous,” Amina began, and she was startled to hear her accent returning, as strong as it had been a year ago. Suddenly she sounded like a well-to-do Deshi lady, imperious and blunt—in fact more like her aunt than her mother. “And Kim has such troubles.”
“I think you’re both very generous,” Annie said, glancing again at the house. “I should take this one inside before she freezes.” She turned to the child. “Is da little nosy frozen?” The little girl laughed, revealing a set of miniature teeth.
“Please say hello to Dan for us,” Amina said, and because she needed Annie to believe that nothing she’d revealed was a surprise, that Amina had been perfectly aware that Kim had been living in this house—their house, that George had bought “too soon” in their courtship—she added: “George and I would like to invite you for dinner.”
“Oh—we’d love that. It’s just a question of sitting. If you know anyone?” Annie added, but Amina shook her head.
“I’m afraid I don’t know any babysitters.”
12She took the bus to East Avenue, and then walked to Edgerton Street. She entered the apartment building and climbed the four flights to the door, waiting a moment before she tried the key in the lock. Kim wasn’t home. Amina was struck as usual by the blithe disarray of the apartment: the futon bed unmade, strewn with clothes; a dirty mug and plate on the floor; a towel hanging over the back of a wooden chair. Amina instinctively reached to pick it up, and then stopped. She had often wondered that Kim wasn’t more embarrassed about the state of her apartment, given that Amina was a guest: she apologized for it (her “reaction” to years with Ashok) but in an effusive, theatrically self-deprecating way that had never convinced Amina, even when she had found it charming. Now this disregard for propriety struck her as characteristic in a more threatening way.
She knew Kim didn’t teach until the afternoon, and so she was probably out shopping. Amina had already decided that she wasn’t going in to work—at some point Kim would come back and find her here—if necessary, she could wait all day. Apart from tidying or watering the plants, she had always been careful not to disturb the things in Kim’s apartment more than necessary. She was pretty sure Kim wouldn’t have noticed, but she had certainly never opened a closet or a drawer. She’d been conscious that Americans protected their privacy more closely than anyone she’d known at home, and that fact had kept her from exploring the apartment as thoroughly as she would have liked.
Now she began with the desk. The picture in the drawer was still there: when she glanced at it, Ashok’s expression seemed to have changed. Now there was a slight smirk at the corner of his mouth, as if in wonder at her ignorance. Amina moved into the bathroom, where even the medicine chest became interesting when she pictured its contents scrambled with George’s things at home. Apart from a great number of all-natural creams, scrubs and exfoliants, and a sleep aid made from valerian root, there was nothing much to discover, and so Amina moved into the main room. She leafed through a book called The Yoga of the Yogi that was sitting out on Kim’s desk, and then a date book: either Kim didn’t have many engagements, or she was the kind of person who bought a calendar but couldn’t remember to write things down. The closet door was open and Amina stepped inside. It wasn’t any of the hanging things that caught her attention but a pair of flip-flops—real plastic Bata chappals, the pattern on the sole worn smooth. The shoes were sitting on the highest shelf; if she hadn’t noticed them, she might also have missed the brown paper envelope, wedged underneath a pile of sweaters. She had to stretch to reach the envelope, but she didn’t hesitate. She felt as if she’d been absolved of any trespass by everything she’d learned in the last twenty-four hours.
Letters were what she’d expected, and so at first she was disappointed. The photographs were printed as a horizontal strip—there were four of them—each inside a black-and-white arc, like the space opened up by the single wiper on the rear window of a car. Each image was dark and grainy, indecipherable, a black oval with a milky center, and it took several moments for Amina to understand that she was looking at a human fetus. The quality of the paper, and of the envelope itself, was much finer than you would find at home; Amina thought the clinic where Kim’s mother-in-law had sent her must have been a place exclusively for rich people. She was replacing the pictures carefully in the envelope—calculating that they must now be eight years old—when she noticed the information printed in a minuscule font along the margin:
Amina stared at the date, wondering if she were making some kind of obvious mistake. But the facts were printed clearly on the page. If these numbers were correct, Kim had gotten pregnant in February of 2004—right here in Rochester. A month later, George had decided to buy a three-bedroom house in a genteel suburb known for its excellent school district. He had moved in immediately, bringing along his pretty, eccentric cousin, who had planted delphinium in the overgrown beds around the house, and then perplexed the neighbors by leaving before summer had even started.
If Kim had been eight weeks pregnant in April, she might have discovered the pregnancy at the beginning of March—right around the time that George stopped writing to Amina. It crossed her mind that Kim might have gotten pregnant with someone else’s child, and even that George might have taken her in under those circumstances. But the fact of the house made that easy explanation impossible to believe. She remembered the way Annie had looked at her in the driveway, and the way she’d spoken of George and Kim as if they’d been a couple. During that ten-week break, when Amina was working up the courage to go back on AsianEuro, they had been setting up a life together.
And then something had happened. It was hard to believe Kim would’ve had another abortion, if she were telling the truth about the way she’d felt the first time. Had she miscarried? And if so, how could George have resumed writing to Amina immediately afterward? Why would he have gone on AsianEuro in the first place, if he were already involved with his cousin?
It had been more than two years since she’d sat in Kim’s apartment for the first time. Her memories shuffled and reordered themselves like the numbers on her parents’ old flip clock, baldly revealing their humble mechanics. From that first visit, George and Kim had been acting out a drama for her benefit, and now she saw that the pretense stretched even further back. Who knew? she wondered. Had Annie guessed what had happened, or had she simply thought George and Kim had a romance that didn’t work out? Did George’s mother know, and did Cathy? There was more to Cathy’s antagonism than simple bigotry, if she’d really hoped to settle her flighty daughter with someone as solid and dependable as George. More disturbing, Amina could now explain how warmly Eileen had welcomed her, a stranger about whom she knew nothing—if she’d thought any alternative was better than the one at hand.
She was sitting on the futon with the envelope of pictures in her lap when she heard the key in the lock. She nearly cried out, but controlled herself; instead it was Kim who started and gasped.
“Amina—you scared me! I mean, you’re welcome anytime—it’s just, Lucas said you were sick. I’m glad to see you, actually—I was just at the market and they had all this great—”
But she had seen the envelope. She set two cloth grocery bags carefully on the kitchen linoleum and her keys on the counter. Then she turned back to Amina
and smiled.
“Can I make you a cup of tea?” Kim was wearing kneesocks with imitation fur boots that laced up her calves and a long, white sweater with wooden buttons. In place of a knit scarf, she wore a brightly colored embroidered shawl, knotted so many times that her hair stood out wildly around her shoulders.
“No, thank you.”
Kim glanced at the envelope, and back at Amina. “It wasn’t serious. I mean, in spite of what you’re holding. I always knew he didn’t really want to marry me—if it came down to it.” Her voice had a strained quality that Amina had never heard before.
“But he asked you.” Amina kept her eyes on her plain brown socks, wishing suddenly she hadn’t removed her shoes.
“He’s a gentleman,” Kim said. “I was so screwed up, you know, after I got back. It happened the first time right after I got to Rochester, when I was staying with him in Brighton. And then, you know, every once in a while after that—the way it is with those things.”
A flush was creeping from Kim’s neck to her ears. If George had made Kim pregnant without even trying, the failure to conceive was certainly Amina’s fault. The worst thing was that Kim knew it, too.
She looked down at her engagement ring—to which Cathy had reacted so pointedly. She tried to keep her voice neutral, but it came out a strained whisper:
“Did he offer you this ring?”
“Oh, God—no,” Kim said. “Of course he knew I wouldn’t have worn it. And really, we were just getting something out of our systems. I’d never gotten over Ashok, and George knew that. But he was thinking of marrying and having a family. It all started as a game—I used to tease him. I said we should find him a real wife. We looked at Match and eHarmony, but you know, you have to register and everything. We picked AsianEuro because you don’t have to log in—and you can look at all the girls for free.”
George had pointed out the computer to Amina as soon as she’d arrived, the desk where he’d sat to e-mail her, and it had been thrilling to see for the first time the place she had hazily pictured in her mind for all of those months. Now she amended the picture to include Kim standing just over his shoulder, her unbound hair brushing his wrist, her skin smelling of scented oil. Had she been the one to click the mouse on the attachment Amina had been so embarrassed and so excited to send: the picture of herself in red lipstick, modeling Ghaniyah’s red silk sari? If it had been a game, then hadn’t it also been a kind of foreplay between them—looking at the desperate girls from halfway around the world together?
“A game.”
“Well, but not afterward,” Kim hurried on, “I mean, I didn’t even know he’d continued it, after I moved out. I didn’t know until my mom told me George was going to Bangladesh to meet a girl.”
She remembered the note that touched her so deeply—about his own hesitancy—and how their correspondence had intensified suddenly after that. It wasn’t hard to imagine George seeing one avenue closing and moving unsentimentally to pursue another. After having written those e-mails, and received a favorable response, he must have reasoned that it made sense to seek a return on his initial investment, rather than beginning again with someone new. He’d needed to justify his period of silence (and his house), and so he’d come up with an explanation. He might have been so eager to forget the recent past that he’d even convinced himself.
“You wanted to have the child with George?”
“I thought about it,” Kim said. “At first.” She shifted from one foot to the other, looking around the apartment as if its condition were a misfortune that had befallen her, over which she had little control. “You know, they were always disappointed in me—my mom and Aunt Eileen and everyone. Eileen used to say I had potential, if I would just apply myself to something. But after a while even she stopped expecting anything from me—I guess I stopped myself. George was the only one who thought I could do anything, stick with anything. He kept telling me what a great mother I was going to be.”
Amina stared straight ahead. If there was one thing she was not going to do, it was feel sorry for Kim.
“But it started to drive me crazy. When it first happened, I said I was going to take something. The morning-after pill, we call it.”
“Plan B.”
Kim looked surprised. “That’s right. Anyway, George was completely against it. He’s more conservative than he lets on, you know. He’d already been looking to move, and then he found the house—and a month later we were moving in there. All I could think about was this thing inside me, getting bigger every day. After a couple of weeks I wouldn’t get out of bed, and he told me I had to go to the doctor. He literally dragged me to the car and sat there in the waiting room, like he thought I was going to run away or something. It wasn’t until I got in the office that I realized I could make the decision on my own. I signed the papers, and then there was nothing he could do.”
“You had another abortion?”
Kim was still standing by the counter where she’d put the bags, as if it were Amina’s apartment and she were waiting for an invitation to sit down. She didn’t answer the question.
A part of Amina wanted simply to walk out, but there was another, stronger part of her that needed to understand.
“I found these,” she said. “I was looking at them—I thought they were from India.”
Kim was already shaking her head. “Oh—I don’t have those.”
“You told me you kept them.”
“I don’t have them here. And I mean, no offense, but if I’d wanted you to see them, I would’ve shown them to you. Or left them out on the table. What were you doing—going through my closet?”
Amina was prepared to defend herself, but she’d gotten better at determining what was sincere and what was a performance, and she thought the irritation in the other woman’s voice sounded false. Kim had hidden her face behind a curtain of blond hair, bending to remove first her boots and then the long wool socks.
“You felt sorry about Ashok’s child—but not George’s? You didn’t care about getting rid of that one?”
Kim stood up, biting her lip in a childish way. Her expression was the same one Amina remembered from the day they’d gone shopping at the health food store: a defensive wariness at odds with the way she ordinarily presented herself.
“I only did it once. And who are you to judge?”
“What about India?”
Kim’s eyes got wide. “I wasn’t pregnant in India—okay? I made that up.”
“You—what?”
Kim took one of her yogic deep breaths, adopting an expression of patient forbearance, and came out of the doorway into the room. She dropped cross-legged onto a bright cushion, wrapped her arms around her legs, and put her chin on her knees.
“I used to imagine what it would be like to have a baby there, but Ashok wasn’t ready yet. I thought they all might get to like me more, once we had a child.”
Amina was still struggling to reconcile the truth with what she’d believed for almost two years. “But you never got pregnant.”
“I used to slip up a little, but he was insanely careful. There would’ve been no way.”
“George wasn’t careful?”
Kim shrugged. “George wants a family.”
Amina’s lungs closed up, and it was hard to breathe. She felt as if someone were walking on her chest in heavy boots.
Kim stretched her legs out in front of her, pushing her hair back from her face with one hand. “And honestly? I guess there was a part of me that wanted to tell you. George was completely against it, of course, and his mom didn’t even want me to meet you—that’s why I didn’t come to any of the wedding stuff. She and my mom didn’t know about the pregnancy, but they knew we’d moved in together.” Kim looked at her earnestly, as if everything that had come before might soon be forgotten. “But I thought if there had been a way just to tell you straight out, you’d understand.”
Amina thought she recognized what Kim was doing. She’d noticed it ever since s
he’d arrived in America, not only in life but on television. You might cheat, steal, lie, but if you confessed, you could be instantly forgiven—as if the bravery it took to admit it made the thing itself all right.
Kim glanced absently at the table and picked up a wooden necklace with a saffron silk tassel. She fiddled with the beads, threading them through her fingers, keeping her eyes on the ground. Suddenly Amina hated her.
“You thought I’d understand.”
Kim smiled in a relieved way. “Yeah. I mean—I always knew you and I would understand each other.”
“You thought I’d understand about you and George—living together and getting pregnant and everything.”
Kim’s expression changed, and she looked like she was about to speak. But Amina had dropped the photos on the futon and was moving blindly toward the door.
“Amina!” Kim called after her, but she picked up her shoes and hurried down the steps, grabbing the railing to keep from slipping in her stocking feet, so that at least Kim wouldn’t see the expression on her face.
13She didn’t remember until she was on the bus going home that George was supposed to pick her up at Kim’s that afternoon. She called as soon as she knew he’d gone into his afternoon meeting and left a message saying that she’d come home early from Yoga Shanti, since she wasn’t feeling well. When he got home that evening, she was waiting for him in the kitchen.
“You’re feeling better?” He removed his parka, looking at her with more than the usual amount of concern.
“Not really.”
“Is it your stomach?”
“Yes,” Amina said.
“Nausea?”
Suddenly she understood him. “Since about ten this morning. But I’m not pregnant.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
George stepped back. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought …”
She had been practicing what she would say all afternoon, but now that the time had come, she couldn’t begin.
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