Kushi pointed out prior to their adopting Tej, when they’d agreed early on that they were open to transracial adoption, that if Alice were alone with their hypothetical, mythical, biological baby, she might get versions of the same reactions, the same curiosity as to whether she was, or could possibly be, their baby’s mother. She knew Kushi was right, but still, she wished for strangers with better imaginations. She wanted the kind of easy congratulations that any mother got, not ones that came with pity, or any kind of extra commendation, the suggestion that what she was doing was for anyone other than herself. People had babies because they wanted to. She was the same. Just before this trip, Alice had worn Tej face-out in his carrier to the co-op, his neck newly strong enough to see the world this way. In line to check out, a white woman somewhere between Alice’s age and her mother’s had approached, put her hand too close to Tej’s face, nodded, and said, “So brave,” shook her head in apparent awe. Alice had felt in her fist that if she didn’t have Tej strapped to her chest she might have socked the woman, but then, of course, she wouldn’t have been given a reason. Instead, she pretended not to hear her, wished she would have thought to volley back, “You, too! So, so brave,” so that the woman would spend all night wondering what courage Alice commended, what deformity or depravity Alice had seen or sensed. She would find better ways to answer or ignore the questions people asked or tangled themselves up in knots not to. She would learn to be better, and the world would, too; it had to.
Alice thought of the thrill she’d felt when Hillary Clinton announced her presidential campaign just a few weeks earlier, and the debates they’d had already on this trip about her. No one would ever convince Alice to vote for anyone other than Hillary, there was not a chance, but she didn’t mind letting Lainey try. A few of Lainey’s Occupy Wall Street friends were working for Bernie Sanders, and they’d invited Lainey to come write speeches for the senator, who was preparing to announce his own campaign, who promised revolution.
Lainey was not ready to throw herself into such work, but the heat she felt discussing it, the desire to, even the ability to find space in her mind for attention up and out, held a kind of painful promise. In the months right after what she’d done, she couldn’t even read her emails, couldn’t write a thing, could some days barely speak. Her role in her own life, as Elizabeth’s mother, felt so precarious and provisional that to even glance in any direction other than down, at her daughter, seemed obscene.
Her mistake had hurried that work, toward breaking their bond, a rupture she knew would one day come, but needn’t have occurred with such violence. Now Elizabeth took a bottle from Adam in the night. Now she could nap in another room. None of these were things Lainey wanted her to do, not yet, maybe never, but she’d been the one to put that distance there, and now she would need to learn to live in it, to watch her daughter from across space as she did now, Elizabeth on her brand-new land legs. She did not so much toddle as careen, Adam close behind. Lainey let the warmth from her friends’ bodies keep her from leaping up, let their chatter keep her from calling out, tried just to watch as Elizabeth careened, careened, careened, not near the water’s edge, but headed in that direction, toward its depths. Adam scooped her up and she squealed in his arms, her laughter a sound that Lainey could hear above any crashing wave.
Lainey was both of these women: the one who would never bite her daughter, and the one who had. She wanted to be able to explain this to someone who understood.
Ji Sun leaned closer to Lainey as her friend called out to her husband, watched along with Lainey as Adam caught Elizabeth, lifted her into his arms. Ji Sun thought of how, before the bite, Lainey had told her that Adam’s daily runs had begun to look like he was fleeing something rather than enjoying the exercise, how she’d looked down from their window and seen him sprint away, how he flew from the door, liberated. He’d escaped his wife and daughter’s oppressive love, the smells of their milk and shit and skin. Ji Sun remembered picturing him—his long legs, his easy gait—she had thought of him running toward her. That she had imagined this so recently, so vividly—a crowded street, all the other people falling away, the exact faded navy of the Quincy-Hawthorn shirt he wore—was more painful to her than what she had done with Adam in the motel. Those nights were somehow easier to file away as fantasies than the ones she’d had during daylight hours, and she yearned to be able to long for him in a harmless way, or a way she’d believed benign. She felt split, like Lainey, both the woman who would never hurt her friend, and the woman who had. She rested her head on Lainey’s shoulder, longed, too, for an earlier iteration of her friend, one whose wildness felt risky but not perilous, one whose pain had seemed in some ways so like her own. It was not possible to rescue anyone, she knew by now, but you could recognize her. You could see what she showed you, flinch and keep looking, let her find in your own face the truth.
Ji Sun looked past Adam and Elizabeth at Margaret, still in the water, even as clouds crept half over the sun, smudged and diffused the light, made the sky dimmer and brighter both, somehow, a color more like the sand and less like the sea.
From Margaret’s vantage, her friends so near to each other, legs leaned one to the next in such a way that if you didn’t know which fabric each favored, you might mistake one’s legs for another’s, joined there at the knees. Margaret wished she had brought her camera into the water, to capture what they looked like from this distance, so like the girls she met when she entered their common room, its window seat a ticket to another world. She remembered one of their first evenings together, how they’d been in their own rooms and heard a loud sound at the window. They rushed out, kneeled close together on the bench, and cranked open one of the windows, tighter in summer, the seam sealed stuck with ancient layers of paint. They disagreed on the source of the sound: crack of a rock or thunk of a bird? There had been no swain, Lainey’s word, there in the empty courtyard, no small body of a hurt bird. Lainey popped the screen and leaned all the way out, knew she would find someone fleeing with their flowers, the song they’d been too cowardly to sing. Her two braids, dyed candy apple red then, dangled out the window and Alice lifted one, called out Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!
Ji Sun said that birds didn’t always die when they hit glass, and Margaret hadn’t believed it, had said she learned growing up that they always do, that they hit their heads and if they don’t die right away, they die later. Everything dies later, one of them answered, and they had laughed at that, everything funny and fearsome then, when they shared that room. Maybe the sound had been the building settling, maybe it was nothing, maybe they had all imagined it.
Margaret wasn’t ready to go in just yet, as eager as she was to be wrapped in a warm towel, to smell her sons’ skin, to sit beside her friends and listen as they wondered and worried and argued and laughed, decided what to do next. She hoped they’d build a bonfire, stay on the beach until it died, until their children fell asleep in their arms, until they were close to sleep themselves. They still had time. She waved. She would go in soon, tell them how they had looked to her.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people helped me realize this dream of having a book with my name on it in the world. My enduring, ecstatic, and enormous thanks to those named here, and to every reader who chooses to spend time with this book.
Lisa Grubka and Laura Tisdel, Midwest dream team, for changing my life before we met, for leading by example, and for loving this book with a ferocity and tenderness that humbles and heartens me.
Lisa, thank you for convincing me you knew exactly what to do, and then doing it, and for everything you’ve done for me and this book since. All future daily Michigan sightings will remind me of how glad I am to be on this path with you. Laura, thank you for making me laugh until my cheeks hurt, for beautifully balancing vulnerability and strength, and for championing this book beyond what I could have imagined possible.
Thanks to everyone at Fletcher & Company,
Viking Books, and Penguin Random House who has read, supported, and labored over this book. What a thrill to work with people who so love books and are so brilliant at their jobs.
Thanks to those individuals and institutions whose belief in me has been a sustaining and necessary force, especially to the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program, and my generous teachers there: Peter Ho Davies, Nicholas Delbanco, Laura Kasischke, Matt Klam, Eileen Pollack, and Nancy Reisman. Thanks to my earlier writing teachers, who made whole worlds possible: Dr. Steve Behar, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Judith Claire Mitchell, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Amy Quan Barry, Ron Kuka, and Ron Wallace. For your dedication to making space for art in the world, thanks to Kerry Eielson and John Fanning at La Muse Artists and Writers Retreat. Thanks to Julie Barer for that first corsage. Thanks to Cill Rialaig Arts Centre, the Helen Riaboff Whiteley Center, the Vermont Studio Center, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Program in Creative Writing.
Thanks to Quincy House at Harvard University, in whose Qube Library much of this book was written and in whose company I found true community.
My wholehearted thanks to the women who cared for, sang to, and loved my child while I wrote this book. Rama Nakarmi, for my first precious, tentative steps out the door. Everyone at Snowdrop, especially Megan Pentz and Anna Brabazon: I could not have done my work without the grace with which you do yours.
This is a book about friendship, and in friends I have been very rich:
For a lifetime of showing me what friendship means, this book is for Jenny Di Meo. Thank you for seeing me.
An MFA offers the time and space to write, but if you are truly lucky, you will meet lifelong friends and readers in the process. Natalie Bakopoulos, she of the fierce intellect and nougat heart, whose counsel, encouragement, and example is worth more than any fellowship, and without whom this book simply would not be: thank you. For years of Sundays, support, and clear-eyed love, thanks to Britta Ameel and Preeta Samarasan. For showing me what real writing—noun and verb—looks like, thanks to Jesmyn Ward. Thanks to Celeste Ng for your words on the page and off. Thanks to Dargie Anderson, Charlotte Boulay, Christina McCarroll, Jeremiah Chamberlin, Ray McDaniel, Joel Mowdy, and Marissa Perry.
Thanks to every friend who has cared all these years about the answer to the How’s-the-writing-going question, including: the Friday Club, the Moms of Camberville, Brandon Abood, Jocelyn Ellis Abood, Tina Chang, Dorothy Cronin, Patrick Egan, Elisa Gabbert, Clark Gardner, Sarah Green, Lindsay Heightman, Rebecca Hoogs, Lauren Kleutsch, Aiste Lazauskaite, Beth Mattson, Adam McGee, Katie Miota, Erin Mosely, Marin Nelson, Brody Railton, Sarah Rinderle, Zachary Watterson, and Delia Wendel.
Thanks to my family, full of raconteurs, for your stories, your faith in me, and your wicked, wonderful laughs. For this and for carrying on the legacy of our storyteller matriarch, Marilyn Elizabeth Quinn Smith, thanks to Emily Smith, Lizzie Smith, Victoria Smith, and Robin Smith Staudt.
Thanks to my brother, Quinn Staudt, for our evolving admiration for one another.
Thanks to Jeff and Diane Brower for your steadfast belief in me, and for so much support over these years that I have been lucky enough to count you as family.
Thanks to my parents, Robin and Jake Staudt. To my mom, for hoping I’d be a reader from the start, and for helping to make it so. To my pop, for coming to books and tears later in life, and for sharing both. Mom and Pop, thank you for accepting even some of those aspects of me that are useful to a writer but perhaps difficult in a daughter. I am so fortunate to be your child, and will forever endeavor to make you proud.
My deepest thanks to Lowell, and the beloved little family we are making together:
For Bridge, thank you for reminding me, before you’ve even arrived, of what I cherish most in this world.
For Maya, who renewed my momentum and gave me a new reason. The joy in knowing you is a fullness no words can contain.
For Lowell, most golden, who has shown me what abundance means, and whose devotion is the greatest gift I’ll ever know. No list, not even one you might write, is overstuffed enough to say what I am grateful for in you. Every story I tell is for, and thanks to, you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elizabeth Ames is graduate of the University of Michigan MFA program, where she won the Hopwood Award. Her short stories have appeared in Ninth Letter and Third Coast. She currently lives in a Harvard dormitory with her husband, toddler, and a few hundred undergraduates. This is her first novel.
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