I Might Sleep With My Neighbor, If She Isn’t My Half-Sister
An excerpt from This Vital Absence by Sophia Veltfort
Every few weeks, Dean posted a new video about famous musicians he’d known in his prime. Eric Clapton, Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd. He sat in a black mesh chair in what looked like a home office. Behind him, shelves painted a fading cerulean held slender statuettes of birds with long necks and legs, their plumes carved in porcelain or bronze. He wore thin gray T-shirts, sometimes maroon, often a hoodie or crewneck sweatshirt, his receding gray hair pulled back in a ponytail. When he talked, his spine pitched him forward, his eyebrows shot up and down, and his voice lurched with emphasis. His desire for appreciation was so naked it embarrassed me, made me reassess my own prowess in camouflaging a desire that I harbored, too. Below one of his videos, someone had commented, This man is an idiot. He’d lost his medical license for administering anesthesia while high on fentanyl. He lived in upstate New York, he had my chin and eyelids, and he allegedly bore some responsibility in the death of a famous pop star.
It was the summer of 2014, and I had just moved back to New York from a postgrad fellowship in the UK when my moms, Celeste and Lucia, emailed me what I would come to think of as the Dean Dossier. They’d done some sleuthing, they explained. I tried to follow their lines of inquiry through the clues they’d assembled, but there was no clear order to the documents they’d attached: a series of screenshots from a 2009 CNN interview; another of an acknowledgments section in Google Books, with a nurse’s name highlighted in yellow; a handful of news articles from the late 1980s and early nineties they’d downloaded or copy-and-pasted into RTFs (“New York, in Move to Bar AIDS, Puts New Limits on Sperm Banks,” October 4, 1989); local news items identifying the anesthesiologist on the pop star’s 1997 World Tour. They attached emails they’d exchanged with their fertility doctor following his release from prison in 2006 for insurance fraud, then a scan of a hand-drawn sketch I knew already of a man in profile who looked, it was true, much like the man in the screenshots. I got the gist of my moms’ missive. They thought they’d found something I wanted very much: my father’s name.
Dean Nagler came up immediately in a Google search. Despite the bad press, he was no recluse. Stripped of his medical license, he’d started volunteering in a local bird sanctuary, and he spent his free time reminiscing about his heyday administering medicine to the stars. I respond to most messages within two hours, his Facebook page read. Of the hundreds of videos he’d posted, I picked a first one at random: a seven-minute and thirty-nine second discourse on The Who.
For years I’d looked at men’s faces and seen my own in their features. I’d stand in line for the bus and think yes, from that forehead, from those hooded eyes, you could get mine. There had been an embarrassing incident in a subway station I tried not to think about, when I discovered that an older man’s attention did not necessarily mean a shared inference of genetic relation. But Dean looked just like me. I didn’t have to look for my features in his; they were right there.
That night, there was a housewarming party that my roommate—Tom, an economist who’d been on the postgrad scholarship the same year as me—and I were planning to go to together. While I blow-dried my hair in our overlit bathroom, I glanced through the articles my moms had sent. Dean was a fuck-up, a real piece of work. I pictured him operating high, no one catching him, and tried to guess how it must have felt, that rush of perceived invincibility, of feeling golden, untouchable. I did know that feeling. It was the electric current running like a third rail beneath daily life. So often I’d tried to convince my parents and teachers I was reliable and good, but always it had felt like an optical illusion, a hologram through which shimmied the abyss. It was a relief to know I came from dissolution and recklessness.
Dear Dean, I typed in a new Facebook message before I could hesitate. My mother was a patient of Dr. Nielson in 1989. I’m hoping to find the sperm donor. I wondered whether you might be willing to tell me if you ever donated sperm. Sincerely, Sylvia F.
Tom was already putting on his shoes when I got to the living room. I still thought of him as the economist, though in the few weeks we’d lived together, it had become clear that he hadn’t studied economics, as such, but rather something to do with Marxist influences on the American administrative state during the New Deal period. He worked at McKinsey. I had a mostly virtual tutoring gig through a test prep company and vague plans to apply for more school and funded time to read and write. We weren’t crazy about each other but had both needed a place to live and had accepted an amicability, if not a friendship, as mutually beneficial. It was nice to have someone with whom to go places and come back at night. Tell me your secrets, he’d say, wagging his fingers like a conjuring magician as we stumbled up Broadway. Sometimes he’d recite the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales or Ecclesiastes. He tended to wear all denim and walk like he planned to be a senator, but he made me laugh when he flirted with me.
The housewarming party was on 95th and Fifth Avenue, right by the brick armory that housed my old high school. The host, a mutual friend from Tom’s and my scholarship class, had recently inherited the apartment from his grandmother. Tom called the elevator. When it arrived, the car we stepped into was snug, almost too intimate. Beside me Tom seemed to feel this, too. He nudged his shoe against mine. Around the third floor, my phone vibrated in my pocket. Dean had written back. Holding my phone close, like a hand of cards I didn’t want Tom to see, I read, Hi, Sylvia, Nice to hear from you. I did indeed work with Dr. Nielson, but I never donated sperm. I hope you find what you’re looking for!
When I looked up, I could just make out the shape of Tom’s eyes behind the lenses of his glasses still dark from outside. Tough day? he asked.
My dad reached out to me, I said.
Tom’s eyebrows rose above the flat top of his frames. I thought you didn’t have one.
I didn’t, I said, but it’s him all right.
Fuck, he said. What’s he like?
I shrugged. A lot like everyone else: mostly pathetic with some redeeming comic features.
You don’t think that, Tom said. The elevator doors pinged open. We headed through a marble foyer and into the party. At this point in a given outing, one of us usually glimpsed people we liked better and swiftly abandoned the other, but this time we made it to the drinks counter without either of our peeling off. Tom poured us each a shot of tequila and handed me a beer.
Over the last couple of years, I’d noticed that people talked to me more when I slipped into an easy, thoughtless nihilism, and I loved this, as though I’d discovered how to morph into an electronegative oxygen molecule hogging electrons from the measly hydrogen I’d been most of my life. It was the changeability I liked, the sense that I had it in me to be many people. And it was easy, like going through the drawers under my childhood bed, finding an old treasure box I’d once carefully protected, realizing it held nothing I needed to keep.
Tom returned his empty shot glass to the counter and considered me briefly. This the dad from your daddy issues essay? he asked.
During orientation a couple of years ago, someone had found an essay I’d published in college, a humorless obsession piece about my unknown father, and had sent it around to the other people on our scholarship. I hadn’t realized Tom had seen it. I started to say it wasn’t a daddy issues essay but decided that wasn’t so inapt a description. The very same, I said, wondering whether my essay had perhaps overstated the enlightened indifference I had attained regarding my paternity. I found myself telling Tom about the files my moms had sent that evening, how—I shouldn’t tell him this, I said—people thought my father had killed a pop star.
Are you going to write back to him?
I shrugged. Do you think I should?
Not to insist you’re his kid, if that’s what you’re thinking. Tom had been raising my beer to his mouth but now held it suspended as he seemed to appraise me, and it annoyed me how much I liked stepping into his blithe nonchalance, the knowingness, false or not, that seemed to lurk in his eyes, the sense that, between us, many things could still happen, and he’d thought of them all.
In fact, what he had suggested had been exactly what I’d been thinking: in a keenly worded letter, I would paint a portrait of myself so compelling that Dean would have no choice but to recognize me as his brilliant offspring.
I probably won’t write back, I said curtly, reclaiming my beer. After that, we went our separate ways at the party. For a while I danced with the host, stupid outsize moves we always did together when music played. There were toasts to the host’s late grandmother and a small altercation over the playlist. At some point Tom and I wound up on the makeshift dance floor, then in a cab. I decided I would write back to Dean. As we crossed the park heading back to our building, I pulled up Facebook Messenger and made Tom check for typos in the message I drafted: Dear Dean, Thank you for taking the time to write to me! I admit I’m disappointed—I loved your videos about Duane Allman and the Fillmore East. You seem like you know how to negotiate the competing parts of yourself. Lately I feel as though who I am and what I want are just two people rewriting each other over and over. Sylvia
It was a shameless appeal to Dean’s vanity, his longing for admiration, and I felt a little dirty feeding it so directly.
It was a shameless appeal to Dean’s vanity, his longing for admiration, and I felt a little dirty feeding it so directly, but the cab had reached Broadway and was slowing to a stop. By the time we got to our building, Tom’s hand low on the small of my back, Dean still had not replied. Maybe he really didn’t donate sperm, I said as Tom steered me upstairs. Maybe that message was a mistake.
He’s lying, Tom said, stepping into our apartment. He could never tell you the truth. It was probably illegal, what he did. Clearly he’s in trouble for the insurance fraud and the fentanyl. Tom scanned my face, looked back at Dean’s Facebook page, locked the door behind us, stepped closer. But he’s definitely your dad.
When I woke up in Tom’s bed the next morning, I imagined what it might feel like to have someone in my corner to talk to, someone to whom I could lay out the facts of where things stood with Dean on the one hand and Tom on the other. The person to whom I might once have spoken, my roommate in college, had mostly stopped speaking to me for reasons I both understood and resented. She had been my model of how to go about being a woman in the world. She had plucked me out of my dorm room, where generally I’d crouched on my desk chair with a bowl of cereal, and molded me in her image; what had happened with Tom was something she might have done.
When I looked up, Tom was leaning against his doorframe and drinking from a bottle of Pedialyte. Want to compare war stories from last night? he asked. Just kidding. I basically had to carry you home, you drunk oaf. Don’t worry. It was all very PG. Maybe PG-13. I was incredibly chivalrous.
By the time I’d made coffee, Dean had responded, My advice is be all of them. Being just one person has never appealed to me. Actually there’s no need to choose, it just takes some ingenuity and stubbornness, and you rearrange yourself a little. Let me know how it goes. D
When I’d moved into the apartment that summer, a girl in cutoff jean shorts and sunglasses had been in the mailroom, and she’d held open the front door as I’d brought in my boxes. When I mentioned my apartment number, she told me she knew the unit well, that an older couple had lived there until recently, and that she’d often taken in their mail when they visited their son in Vermont. She lived across the hall and still had a spare key, which she was happy to return, she said hastily, unless I preferred that she hold onto it. I might find it came in handy if I were ever locked out. That was how Molly and the former tenants had become friendly—she and they were always getting locked out, and her roommate was nearly always at her boyfriend’s so no help at all. In fact, she said, maybe she could leave a spare key of her own with me, unless I was a psycho or irresponsible or otherwise unpleasant, in which case, she could continue leaving it with another set of neighbors she mentioned, but they didn’t always check their phones and anyway often went to bed early. Did I go to bed early? she wanted to know.
I told her I tended to go to bed pretty late.
That’s a relief. She offered to carry upstairs one of my houseplants.
Since then I’d seen Molly periodically. She was a year or two out of college and often did her laundry, as I did, when a medical show we both watched became available for streaming. She worked at a jewelry store downtown, ordered a lot of delivery, and hadn’t been joking when she said she often locked herself out of her apartment. The morning after this happened for the first time, she left a box containing a single large cupcake outside my door. Sometimes she left popcorn, once a yoyo, and I felt like I’d befriended a wild crow that liked to exchange gifts.
No one in my family thinks I’m related to them, she told me one afternoon some weeks after the housewarming party as she moved her clothes to the dryer. Both my sisters sent me DNA tests.
What do they suspect? Adultery? I asked as I loaded my dirty clothes into the washer. She’d left a few socks in the barrel, but I didn’t tell her. Last week, my new crochet underwear had not returned from the laundry room, and I blamed her.
Molly shook her head. Dark hair framed her jaw in a tidy bob. She wore a loose white V-neck half-tucked into gray sweatpants. They think there was a mistake at the hospital, she said. As I looked up, she peeled a thick sheet of purple lint from the filter then carried it between her thumb and forefinger to the trash. She glanced back at me. It happens more than people realize, she continued.
How often? I asked.
About one in a thousand, my sister says. You notice most mistakes within a few days, usually before the babies leave the hospital. But sometimes it’s years. A dad will refuse to pay child support because the kid doesn’t look like him. DNA tests show that neither parent’s a match. Her quarters clinked into the dryer. She ran her finger down the list of settings. My sisters say it’s too bad our parents are so happily married, she added. Otherwise, they would’ve found out by now.
The dryer started to hum, and Molly turned to go. In the doorway she paused. You should take the extra test, she said. I only need to spit into one of the cups, and I can’t return the other. I looked up. You can find out where all your ancestors came from, she continued, and we can drink wine and watch TV. It’ll be a date.
It wasn’t as though I hadn’t realized you could pay a hundred dollars to spit into a cup and learn your genetic makeup. For the better part of my first two decades, my biological father’s identity had been my neighborhood black hole of uncertainty and speculation. When I was a kid, my moms had passed on to me the handful of adjectives their doctor had given them. Tall. Slim. Wavy brown hair. Doctor or medical student. Eastern European. Jewish. Young. On a yellowing sheet of pocket-sized carbon paper, I had the profile of a man my mom had sketched because he’d been at the right place at the right time, and she had a feeling. From such materials I had forged every father I could imagine over the course of my twenty-four years.
But, historically, that preoccupation had not gone well for me. There had been a girl online—Adelaide—I’d once, not unreasonably, convinced myself might be a half-sister, but that hadn’t come to much more than a few awkward messages. Now there was the open question of Dean. I tried not to think about the party I’d gone to the night my moms emailed me their Dean Dossier, how I’d reconstructed their theory while in line for the bathroom. I’d started with the hand-drawn sketch they had scanned because this was the part of the story I already knew: as they’d sat in the waiting area of the fertility clinic, they’d observed a young man with a short ponytail walk into a side room, close the door behind him, and then, five minutes later, emerge with a smile like he’d jacked off into a cup. This would have been illegal in 1989, when health departments began requiring clinics to use frozen sperm, a rule some facilities resisted on the grounds that frozen materials were less effective. But the nurse who’d been present had said the donor was an anesthesiologist, and Dean—who, based on the images in the CNN interviews following the death of the pop star, was undeniably the man in my mom’s sketch—happened to be an anesthesiologist, too.
Tom thought it was probably stupid to take Molly’s DNA test but that I might as well do it if I wouldn’t be weird about it. He’d just gotten back from work and was watching a Hot Pocket spin in the microwave.
Why would I be weird about it? I asked.
Tom gave me a look, and internally I conceded he had a point, until he continued, Do you think you’ll be attracted to them?
Who?
Your billions of half-brothers and -sisters.
No, I said, after a beat. That is disgusting.
It’s a documented phenomenon. Tom signaled me to wait while he looked it up on his phone. After a moment, his eyebrows shot up. Genetic sexual attraction, he reported, occurs in fifty percent of all reunions between close genetic relatives who meet as adults.
You’re worried about voluntary incest.
I’m not worried, he said, bringing his plate to the table and slathering it with hot sauce. I’m fascinated.
Molly opened the door in a black silk jumpsuit with small cream buttons down the front and leopard-print loafers. Her apartment was a mess. By the door, a stack of Amazon boxes formed a small tower. Each chair in the eat-in kitchen held a pile of sweaters, scarves, and shirts. On the counter I recognized her gray sweatpants beside a desiccated house-plant the size of a fist.
It’s all my roommate’s, Molly said, pulling a pair of shot glasses from a cabinet and a half-empty bottle of tequila from the top of the fridge. The instructions say not to eat or drink for an hour before spitting in the cups, so I think we should knock back some shots, eat milk balls, and watch something. Then we can spit and enjoy that wine you’re holding. I looked at her suspiciously. She had told me not to eat or drink for an hour before coming over, and I hadn’t. I placed the wine I’d brought beside the dead or dying houseplant.
Molly handed me a lime, a saltshaker, and a serrated blue knife with silver silhouettes of vegetables fading down the length of the blade. I followed her through a hallway to the living room, where two long couches faced a flat-screen TV. While she cut crescents of lime, I eyed the framed movie posters on her walls—a 1951 Hitchcock film with two men wrestling, and a woman, and a set of train tracks cutting through a swath of orange—and the photographs on her shelves. A smiling middle-aged couple appeared more than once. I wondered if they were Molly’s parents or her roommate’s. She picked up the saltshaker. Don’t forget to lick first, she instructed. Otherwise, the salt won’t stick. She watched as I licked the back of my hand, and then she shook salt onto the wet patch of my skin.
After a second round of shots, I said that was enough. Stay right there, she told me. In a minute she returned with a box frosted in ice crystals, opened it, and handed me a small chocolate ball. Yum, she said before popping one in her mouth. She watched me. How long have you and your roommate been together?
We’re not together, I said around the chocolate, though this had become marginally less true in the weeks since the party. When Tom and I went out in groups, we found each other more often than not, his arm along the back of my chair at a restaurant table, his knees brushing mine in the backseat of a taxi, my arm in his under a shared umbrella, his thumb on my bottom lip on our way out the door. We never talked about it. Before Molly could ask any follow-up questions, I pivoted, asking, What makes your sisters think you’re not related to them?
We’re nothing alike. She laughed, hesitated briefly. You and I have more in common.
I considered this strong evidence. She and I had no notable similarities beyond our appreciation for medical soap operas. She got up from her couch and sat next to me. Let’s see whose hands are bigger, she said. She held up her palm. I wiped mine on my jeans and placed it against hers. Her skin was sticky with lime juice and sweat. See? She exhaled. Exactly the same.
Molly said she would mail in the kits and let me know when we got our results. She handled everything: making sure my spit reached the appropriate line in the vial, mixing the stabilizing solution into the saliva, packaging the sample. We should hear back in four to six weeks, she said.
In the morning, thinking of Molly’s messy apartment, I washed dishes and hung up stray clothes. I watered the jade plant Molly had carried up for me the day I moved in. From the lower branches, little white roots wavered like legs struggling to tread water.
I liked Molly, the way she seemed to offer an intimacy that felt at once novel and familiar, like something I’d had once and lost, or never had but hoped for.
The first morning I’d woken up in this apartment, I’d reveled in being accountable to no one. Both the living room and my bedroom windows looked out over the entrance to the building, and from my loft bed I could watch the crosstown bus accordion past pedestrians below. I’d grown up in this city. My old elementary school was sixteen blocks north. As I’d gotten dressed and started to unpack, I’d taken stock of who I knew in New York beyond my moms—a few people from college, a handful of Marshall Scholars, some acquaintances from high school, a couple of old friends from kindergarten—and, over the course of my first weeks back, when I wasn’t seeing my parents, I’d reached out to a few of them. Sometimes with but more often without Tom, I’d gone to their birthday parties and poetry readings and happy hours. At overpriced taverns in Greenwich Village, I bought myself drinks that I nursed in corners while making small talk so pointless that even I stopped listening.
I liked Molly, the way she seemed to offer an intimacy that felt at once novel and familiar, like something I’d had once and lost, or never had but hoped for. I liked how committed she seemed to her sense of herself, even if she hadn’t trusted me not to eat before spitting into the vial. I carried the trash and recycling to the basement. In the recycling area, a tower of unflattened boxes took up the whole bin. I reached for the smallest and pulled apart its flaps. Inside was a single receipt for two DNA kits. I looked for Molly’s sisters’ names, but the billing address matched the shipping. No matter how many times I reread it, the result was the same: Molly had ordered both kits herself.
Upstairs, I googled Molly and combed through her Facebook and Instagram. She’d grown up in Billings, Montana, and attended a Catholic high school before going to a liberal arts college in Ohio. She took a lot of computer selfies: Molly at her desk in what looked like her childhood bedroom, her dark hair messy, her head cocked; Molly on her bed in her college dorm room, her face bright with makeup, a Solo cup in her windowsill. I pictured her pre-gaming with a vodka soda while she outlined her eyes, but something in her face seemed less apprehensive than defeated. She’d been out already. I pictured her trying to smile at a party where no one talked to her, feeling the rising tides of isolation creep up. She’d pretend to get a call and step out unnoticed. Back in her room, she’d pull up Photo Booth to see where she’d gone wrong.
Why had she lied about her sisters sending her an extra DNA test? If this troubled me, it troubled me less than it should have, or perhaps would have, had a wonderful possibility not bloomed warm in some dark corner of my subconscious. When I wasn’t tutoring boarding-school students over Skype or filling out applications for PhD programs—when I wasn’t vacillating about whether to take Dean up on his offer to let him know how it goes, his recommendation that I rearrange myself a little—I learned everything I could about Molly from the internet. She’d joined the swim team in high school but quit after a season. She’d written one movie review for the school paper in college. A poem of hers had received honorable mention in a now defunct literary magazine’s annual contest. Someone with her same name had died in Westport, Connecticut, in 1887.
On weekday mornings, I sat at the desk under my loft bed and watched through the window as Molly turned left for the coffee shop a block south. When she went running, she always wore the same gray leggings and oversized hoodie. She never went out to buy groceries. She ordered her perishables from Fresh Direct, her trash bags from Amazon, her clothes from a rotation of online retailers.
If I was right in my hunch—and even if I wasn’t, Molly’s lie gave me carte blanche to be at least proportionally weird, as far as I was concerned—then I could allow myself certain liberties. One morning, I followed her out in a marine mammals baseball cap I’d found in Tom’s closet. It had been a few days since I’d last left the house, and in the interim the weather had cooled, the autumn air becoming sharper, more alert, readier for something to happen. At the corner of 96th and Broadway, a woman with shoulder-length gray hair and a small shopping cart frowned into her scarf as she held her hand up for a cab; her eyes darted between the oncoming traffic and the other side of the crosswalk, where a man with shoulder-length gray hair and four plastic bags of takeout stood with his arm out, too. As I crossed the street from the woman’s side to the man’s, I wondered if they were strangers in competition for a cab or if they were together, but already Molly was opening the door to the coffee shop at the end of the block, and I hurried after her.
Before a rack of upside-down orange mugs, she ordered an iced coffee with oat milk and a poppy seed strudel. I liked the easy confidence with which Molly scanned the pastry display case, how she arched backward, not forward, to get a better look inside. Behind me, a woman with a baby carriage asked if I was in line to order.
Oh, no, I said, my heart speeding clumsily as I tried to account for myself. I’m just waiting for my sister.
The pleasure that swept through my gut was so keen my armpits prickled.
For as long as I’d known about the wavy-haired doctor or medical student who was presumably my father, I’d understood that I must have a handful of half-siblings and had always expected one to look me up. Molly’s methods were weird, but I respected them. She’d plunged me into a new narrative universe that was mine to explore. Dean was a cipher I wasn’t yet sure what to do with. The medical show Molly and I watched had ended, and I’d finished the nineteenth-century novel I’d been nursing for months. Without their plotlines to hold me steady and to structure my thinking, I’d been feeling unmoored, unsure how to negotiate the waste of every day. Now I had Molly and whatever it was that she wanted from me.
Shit, said Tom, when he came home one evening to find me in a work blouse and pajama bottoms, scrolling through photos Molly had taken of her breakfast on vacation in Dublin in 2007. Listen to me, Sylvia. Take a shower. Put some pants on. Go for a walk, get some air.
I regretted telling him about Molly and, even more, I rued having disclosed anything about my Dean Dossier or how thoughts of my father had preoccupied me as a kid. Because it was true, the rush was the same. Once, I had imagined my father pouring cereal in the morning, buying a movie ticket and popcorn, marking passages in a book. I’d pictured Dean pacing his kitchen for keys he couldn’t find, spilling coffee on his countertop, boiling water for tea. Now a similar ease let hours slip by as I read through Molly’s Instagram captions. Each character was a hole I could dig forever. My attention was inexhaustible. I just wanted to see.
If I’d thought I could just peek into Molly, just put a toe into the abyss of this old obsession, I’d forgotten the feeling of not being able to see down to the bottom, how readily my whole being could reorient around the desire to know. As a kid, I’d dreamed of standing in a landscape of filing cabinets stretching out to infinity, the imagined relief of having the information I wanted within my power to find. A name, a personality, a physical body. A mind with its likes and dislikes, its caprices, its fingerprint. I’d imagined each of these details listed on 4″ × 6″ index cards, and I’d imagined building my father up, data point by data point, until—what? Until he loved me? Until he could look at me and tell me that I impressed him? Until I could see him clearly enough to set him in motion like a windup toy?
With Molly, I had that data. I had her Facebook and Instagram, her Twitter, her Google results. I had pictures of her breakfasts, of makeup brushes she liked. I had image after image of her face, and whether it resembled mine. I could build her up into a platoon of Mollies and deploy them for any narrative need.
I was wearing Molly’s black ankle socks when I left the building. Over the last few weeks, I’d accumulated a growing collection of items she’d abandoned in the washer and dryer: a white tank top, a pillowcase, a cheap tote bag that had gotten balled up and caught in the folds of the rubber gasket. It emerged soaking wet and still soapy, and I had to rinse it out before putting it back in with my clothes. I kept a tally of my own items that had gone missing: two unmatched crew socks, the crochet underwear, a pair of leggings I sometimes wore while tutoring over Skype.
Molly hadn’t gotten back from work yet, but I traced her route to the coffee shop she liked. The upside-down orange mugs looked calmer in the evening’s softer light, more settled. I ordered an iced coffee with oat milk. As the barista scooped ice into a cup, I wondered idly if Molly avoided dairy because she was lactose intolerant or for environmental reasons.
Let’s hang out, I texted her. I wanted to add, I miss you, you little freak, but I didn’t. After all, she did not know that I knew that she’d ordered both tests.
I can’t, she texted back. I’m on a date.
Oh, I said. Gotcha.
It’s going badly, she continued. She hasn’t laughed at any of my jokes.
Should I rescue you? I asked. As your [insert roommate/sister/lover/cat sitter] I have a crisis to which you must urgently attend. My chest caught as I gave her these options.
For a few minutes, she did not respond. I sat at the countertop by the window. The metal stool pressed cold through my jeans as I watched a woman outside look furtively to see if anyone had noticed her poodle take a dump amid the roots of a tree. She seemed to decide they hadn’t and abandoned the turd.
If I could find the right words, if I could tell the right story, I knew Tom would understand this need to see things play out even just a bit further with Molly, if I could spin it with humor. If I could make him laugh, and make him think I was laughing. He liked the weird and unexpected, the perverse. He liked when I had enough emotional distance to joke about things. I liked that he thought so erroneously that I had it within me, emotional distance, control, when really all I had was tumult and the luck to pull out the right piece of myself when I rummaged inside.
Yeah ok, Molly texted. Come get me.
She gave me the address.
It was a bar I’d passed but never been to, full of arcade games and murals of naked women in shades of aquamarine and violet. Molly stood by an ATM, her black turtleneck translucent in the neon light spilling out from the window. Her crimson skirt matched her heels. She held a plastic cup of clear liquid with a thin pink straw in it, and every few seconds she craned her neck forward to sip.
Beside her was a sandy-haired woman in a baseball cap and a Missoula sweatshirt. With some animation the woman was telling a story about a bear she’d seen swimming. Every few strokes, she said, the bear just looked at her, continued to doggy-paddle. Molly wanted to know how big was the bear.
Pretty big, the woman said cautiously. Then, more brightly, I can show you the video.
As she reached for her phone, I stepped forward. I liked the way Molly’s eyes brightened with recognition, the way she took me in before saying, Carol. What are you doing here?
It’s the baby, I said. She’s sick.
You have a baby? The woman frowned.
Molly nodded gravely. Our sister’s, she said. She’s dead. She had a child.
Shit, the woman said. No dad in the picture?
Not a one, Molly said, eyes twinkling. Bye now.
We didn’t go home. There was a wine bar around the corner Molly wanted to try that had opened a few weeks ago. The tables were all taken, so the waiter pulled chairs up to an old console radio along the wall opposite the bar. I tried to arrange my legs to the side of the radio but could not find the right position; either my spine got too twisted or my hip flexors strained. Molly leaned back and surveyed me.
So, she said. Sister, not lover or cat sitter or roommate.
It could’ve been our baby, I said. We could’ve been married, divorced.
You wouldn’t have left it. She reflected. I’m still not sure who you left it with.
It grew up, I said.
When the waiter came over, Molly ran her fingers down the menu and ordered a gimlet. I asked for a glass of prosecco.
Are we celebrating something? Molly asked.
I’d like to, I said. What’s there to celebrate?
Here Molly looked at me, and I wanted to ask her what she thought we were doing. More than once when I’d observed her leaving the building, I’d thought I imagined her glancing up to my window. With her eyes on mine now, I wanted to know how she arranged what she knew of me, and what she guessed, into a coherent projection. And I realized that somewhere in my accumulation of Molly details, my desire to know—to inundate her with the bundles of questions I’d saved up all my life—had yielded to something else, something closer to love.