I take the tissue and nod my head, though I do not understand. Halfway down the block toward the coffee shop, she stops us mid-walk, turns me to face her. She wipes the last tear from my cheek with a fresh tissue. “Look at that skin, Hope. You have so much time.”
• • •
When the baby comes, just four days later, it’s fast. The children are asleep when I get to Jill and Dev’s place, and when they wake up, she’s already here. I don’t sleep much that night, my phone abuzz with messages and e-mails from phone numbers I don’t know, the list of people that Jill gave Dev—in New York and London and Paris and Charlottesville and Ridgefield—waking up to the news, all the parents and the exes and the second spouses and siblings and baby Kiri’s rosebud lips. I feel tears come into my nose as I show Anjali and Sacha the photos of their new sister, the phone vibrating in my hand with each congratulations, each declaration of her perfection.
“Do we have to go to school?” Sacha asks.
“Why are you crying?” Anjali wants to know, their questions crossing.
“Sometimes people cry when they’re happy,” I say, and then, “Yes, we do,” though I’m not sure if happiness is why I’m crying today, why this baby is making me cry. I saw the look on Jill’s face, her preemptive exhaustion, as she kissed me as she left for the hospital under Dev’s arm. It wasn’t joy, exactly, but I know it’s what I want.
“Where’s the blood?” Anjali asks, skating her thumb and pointer finger across the screen to make Kiri’s picture larger.
“She’s all cleaned up there,” I say.
“Aw,” she says, frowning. “I wanted to see the blood.”
Sacha asks for breakfast.
I get the kids to their schools and myself back to bed; it’s not worth it for me to go to work, and the weekend is ahead of me, full of all those people coming in, kids to bring back and forth to the hospital, the playground, the diner three blocks away for the umpteenth grilled cheese and undercooked french fries. My sister had her baby, I text Henry before I can change my mind, or think about why I want him to know. He’s in Chicago by now, his apartment, his life in New York emptied and over in a matter of weeks. He’d asked that I stay in touch. He’d apologized. I turn my phone off and go to sleep for a few hours.
• • •
I wake up just after noon in Anjali’s bed. Dev’s left a voice mail, asking if I wouldn’t mind getting Jill some pajamas; she didn’t, for this baby, prepack a bag, and had forgotten them. He assumes I know where they are, and I do. I have spent so much time in Jill’s closet that I only open a few wrong drawers before I find the right one. I find, too, a tote bag to put them in. On top of the bureau in the closet are framed photographs: the kids when they were babies, dirty with ice cream or jam on their rounded cheeks; Jill and Dev on their honeymoon, standing on some island cliff, a big sun hat on Jill’s head; and the one of Emily and my father, that though I’ve seen it many times, I always do a double-take on. The frame on that one, a mosaic of warm orange and peach tiles, is heavy when I lift it; I’ve never been able to really get a good look at it with Jill there—not that she’d mind, or question my curiosity, but I am still shy in this, in things concerning Emily. The frame is missing a few tiles from the corner, as though it’s been dropped. I know this used to be in the living room, collected on the bookshelves with all the other markers of time, though I never saw it there; it was before Jill and I were close—who knows, maybe it was before I was here at all. “It upset Caitlin so I moved it,” Jill explained, with a face, the first time I noticed the photo. She was putting together a bag of clothes for me, yanking things from the hangers seemingly at random and folding them swiftly into a stack before I could say if I wanted them. This was two years ago, right after I had graduated college, right after I’d moved back to New York. I’d asked her who that was in the photo, and then, before she could reply, asked, “Oh my God, is that Dad?”
She laughed, said, “I know, right?” and kept pulling, folding, stacking.
It’s no secret that my father and Emily were unhappy from the start. Jill claims this is the only photograph of them smiling together. They do appear genuinely pleased with each other, with themselves. They’re in T-shirts, but over bathing suits; you can see a red string tied at the back of Emily’s neck. Her hair, blond, wispy, just like Caitlin’s, in a high ponytail, the wind on the beach blowing a still-wet strand to the left. My father’s eyes are bright and he’s leaning his head toward hers, and she is receiving it. They’re looking at the camera, the both of them, but in a way, they’re looking at each other; they’re seeing themselves together, their possibility. No one can remember or agree when or where it was taken: Montauk? Laguna Beach? On the sound? Was Jill born yet? Jack? Were they married, even? It’s not my place to ask if anyone has asked.
Today, on the floor of Jill’s closet, in a life that mine won’t resemble, I’m grateful that this photo exists, for the story of this moment of Emily and my father, and all of us who follow, grateful that Jill is wise enough to keep it, to believe in this story, even if she has to hide it from the others. I know it’s there. She’s shown it to me, the place where I can find it.
• • •
It’s me and the kids in the late afternoon at the hospital when my father arrives from a meeting he had in the city. He kisses us, washes his hands, and demands the baby, whom Jill has swaddled and stretched out on the length of her thighs. Dad takes Kiri, pulling off her hat so he can see her hair, which swirls, jet-black, along the back of her head. I’m happy to see this coloring, her father’s, her siblings’, because it brings her closer to me, makes the team of brunettes stronger than the team of blondes on my half siblings’ sides. “Never gets old,” Dad says as he walks the small perimeter of the room with Kiri in the crook of his arm, muttering alternately to her and to us. He smiles, he coos; he looks like a pro, and he is: He’s holding the tenth baby in his genetic line. The three of us—Jill, Devdan, and I—are worn out, but my father is energized by this little empire of his ego. He’s so sure that she is right, that we are right.
I leave the hospital with my father. We’re both headed uptown, and I offer to ride with him toward Grand Central. “If you’d like to,” he says, but I know tonight he’s delighted by us, by me, by naming me correctly. I know he wants my company.
On the subway, my father takes his tie off, folding it into an accordion shape and holding it in the same hand as he does his briefcase. It’s been a while since we’ve been on the subway together. For a couple of years, when my mother was working late a lot (some promotion she’d gained or was trying to), he’d leave his office early and pick me up from after-school two days a week. He always looked out of sorts entering the cafeteria, where we all dumped our backpacks and jackets. Part of this was his exceptional height; I knew by then, the fourth grade, that I, too, would be taller than the other kids, and this perspective always caused both of us to survey our surroundings as though we were responsible for something that others couldn’t see. Years later, I imagined this look was in part because he felt worn out by still doing this kind of thing, twenty-plus years after he’d started, Caitlin by then out of the house at college, and me, still with all that time to go—but maybe he was just looking for me in the crowd of kids.
He always got me earlier than my mom did, and once I gathered up what I needed, he’d touch my shoulder and guide me to the subway wordlessly. We were both done for the day, and he’d fold up his tie like he does now. By that hour, I was too tired to take my backpack off, but he’d ease it off my shoulders and into the space between my feet on the floor so I’d have more room to lean back. He’d always take a seat across from me, not next to me. We wouldn’t talk, and any person would think we were strangers, if not for the slope of my nose, the outline of my chin. We don’t talk today, either. After we see my half siblings, I never know what to say that won’t open up a gorge, or drag us into the ones we know are already the
re. He falls asleep. He always does. He has three stops before I’ll need to wake him.
We hit a station with cellular service and my phone buzzes in my pocket. Henry: Sweet.
The first time I teased out for Henry the whole mess of them, the family tree, from Emily down to then-unnamed Kiri, the brief summary of who left whom and who fought and how and the ways in which we worked, or didn’t, some years, he wanted to know if I was “like them.”
“Which ones?” I asked.
He lined the heel of his hand up against mine. My fingers are long, too, and my hand was barely short of his.
“Which family?” I asked, and my own question caught something in my throat. I worked my fingers through his, squeezed.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not upset,” I said.
In my family, someone is always saying, That’s not how I remember it, and it’s become a joke, how many versions of the stories there are, how no one can leave any story alone till it’s mangled and full of contradictions and maybe, by then, seemingly invented entirely. I remember after one big family dinner—looking down the length of the folding tables Jill and Dev had strung together for the meal, Jack in town, next to me, jet-lagged but in a good mood, and Caitlin shifting her son, still so little then, not yet talking or walking, from one knee to the other, my parents in the other room with the other kids—when it seemed like my sisters might come to some boiling point over a story like this. I don’t remember what the story was, or whom it belonged to to begin with, just that the story involved me, and I didn’t want to chime in, to say that I, too, remembered it a different way. It seemed, then, too big a risk, when I still felt lucky enough to be sitting there. It ended with Caitlin throwing the baby’s wet burp cloth in Jill’s direction, with laughter, with a new joke born, one of us, always now, saying, That’s not how I remember it, no need to go on.
Acknowledgments
This book is nearly two decades in the making, and the list of those who have supported me through that time reflects how many others are necessary on the path to a first book.
My agent, Julie Barer, has been a dream. Thank you for your enthusiasm, your quick reach for reason, and your fierce protection of my art. Thank you to Nicole Cunningham and all the awesome women who power up the Book Group.
My editor, Sarah Stein, had me at hello. What a pleasure it’s been. Thank you to Shannon Kelly and the team at Penguin Books for your professionalism and patience during my first go-round.
The seeds for funding for this book began with the Hopwood Awards while at the MFA program at the University of Michigan. The Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance gave me multiple grants in my early days of taking myself seriously, and I’m grateful for those checks, and for the community of artists in Inwood and Washington Heights that NoMAA continues to champion. A grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts kept me afloat and focused in the final stages of writing these stories.
I’m so grateful for the editors who said yes and first published these stories in literary magazines: Laurence Goldstein at Michigan Quarterly Review; Junot Díaz and Deborah Chasman at Boston Review; David Daley at FiveChapters; Linda Swanson-Davies and Susan Burmeister-Brown at Glimmer Train; Morgan Beatty at People Holding; Peter Kispert, then at Indiana Review; Steven Schwartz at Colorado Review; Joanna Luloff at Copper Nickel (and V. V. Ganeshananthan for pointing me that way); Emily Nemens at The Southern Review.
My teachers, who each taught me something different, and who collectively pushed me out on my own boat: Susan Sherman, who somehow got The Lover into my fifteen-year-old hands and changed my life. Dan Chaon, who showed me that the heat was in the stories that already belonged to me. Tom Jenks and Carol Edgarian, who taught me to get there sooner. My cohort at the University of Michigan MFA program and its exceptional faculty: Michael Byers, Peter Ho Davies, Laura Kasischke, Julie Orringer, and especially Eileen Pollack, who never spared me the truth, even when I didn’t want to hear it.
I rely on the following readers to make my work smarter and fuller. These stories wouldn’t be what they are without Neela Banerjee, Christina McCarroll, Mika Perrine, Jackie Reitzes, Brittani Sonnenberg, and Anne Stameshkin. Thank you to KC Trommer, my head postmistress, for our conversations in song and works of art and words. My sanity is intact because of Jes Haberli and Celeste Ng, who are always there with a doughnut or a match when I need it. Pings.
All of these women are formidable writers in their own rights, and the time they have lent to the work of others doesn’t go unnoticed. These are the women who have had faith in me when I haven’t had it myself. They hold me up.
So many friends have been longtime champions of my work. Priscilla Morales, for her decades of understanding my authentic self, and for her helpful reads. Lizzi Sofge, for giving me more family when I thought I had plenty already. Brian Herrick, pal. You were the first to hold me accountable to my art, and your commitment to making yours continues to inspire me. Sasha Schwartz and the crew at Scribble Art Workshop, for making my kids artists, and for reminding me that art is joy but it’s also work. A special thank-you to Natasha Hesketh, whose story about her painting, “Unknown Date,” unlocked a key detail in “Second-Chance Family” for me.
There are at least a hundred other women who have shared their stories with me and listened to mine, and I am grateful for our tradition of storytelling as our means of trying to see and help each other. Keep talking. Don’t ever shut up.
My dogs Louie (RIP) and Otis provided companionship and needed walks on working days. I promise there are more dogs in the next book.
To New York City, for raising me up, spitting me out, and taking me back in when I realized there was no other place I could belong.
When people ask me how I am able to write, it’s because of my parents, Ellie and Jay Lazarin, not only for their loving care of my children (equal in dollars at least to this book’s advance), but for never thinking I should do anything else, and whose insistence that I be beholden to what I wanted came at cost to them. Your patience with me as a human and as a writer is the foundation of this book.
My sisters, Sunan Jones and Lauren Lazarin: it is no accident that this book is full of sisters, in all our complications and strengths. I wouldn’t want to tell a different story.
My extended family, for all the occasions we’ve gathered around tables and shared stories and meals and questions.
My daughters, Phoebe and Talia, unwilling participants in the great experiment of motherhood. Thank you for making my life more beautifully messy.
Last, a gigantic thank-you to my husband, Alex Shulman, who has never minded when I disappear with my imaginary friends or my real ones. You’ve given me the space and time and resources to do the work that keeps me grounded, and I’m grateful for your unwavering commitment to my work and our family, and for always seeing where the two intertwine.
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