The day I met Sarah, I woke to a hangover and the flat, familiar aftertaste of bad sex. Cal was in the bed with me, the muscles on his hairless chest as clear and cut as a Ken-doll's, his hair a perfect yellow cap. Cal was hands-down the most Teutonic of the men I slept with in college. He had these soaring high cheekbones, and skin so delicate that when I first touched it I thought I'd leave bruises. I never did, although in moments of intense tenderness or angst I sometimes wanted to.

The previous night, we’d gone to sleep arguing about our love life: Specifically, about cunalingus. Arms crossed over my chest, I’d listed my (ostensible) objections: “First off, it’s too clinical. It’s got this surgical aspect; isolating this one tiny part of somebody’s body.”

He looked at me skeptically. “Most women love that kind of surgery,” he said.

“Second,” I said, ignoring him, “it’s soulless. You can’t hold a gaze when you’re down there. That strips the sex of its emotion.”

“I could rig up a periscope,” he offered; but he was starting to sound drained. We fought a lot over sex; or rather, over my hang-ups about it. I knew he felt cheated. Cal edited the poetry quarterly that had run four of my poems. The poems were about sex; they dripped with references to things like mingling body fluids and post-coital cigarettes. It must have come as a shock when he finally jimmied off my jeans, and discovered what a shitty lay I was. When a boy licked my ears, I squirmed. When he stroked me I froze. Out of print, I had all the sensuality of a naked window mannequin.

“Third, it’s demeaning,” I said, in summation. “It boils me down to a body part. It’s what men always do to women.” Arms still crossed, I flapped an elbow awkwardly at my nightstand, which was covered with textbooks and candy wrappers. A collection of Adrienne Rich essays topped the pile, opened and inverted: a stern paper hat.

"But if feels good," said Cal. "I want you to feel good. That makes me feel good.” His forehead ruffled in bafflement as he spoke. “I don't see anything politically incorrect about that."

“Then you're not looking hard enough.” I pulled the blanket up to my neck. “Sex should be about us. Not just our g-spots. You. Me. Our whole bodies."

He shrugged – whatever – and reached past Adrienne’s glowering picture, to snap off the bedside light.

What I really wanted was for him to spoon me as he had ten weeks earlier, just after we’d met. I wanted to hear the giddy joy in his voice, between kisses; the I can’t believe I found you’s, the god, I want you so much’s. But all I heard was the quiet rush of his breath. Perhaps he thought that I would make some sort of move. Probably, I should have. But I didn’t, so he pillowed his whiteblond head on his arms. I listened as his breathing evened into sleep.

I woke to a wan November sun, and warm hands pushing my legs apart. For a moment, I thought I was dreaming; but the wet shock of Cal’s mouth was undeniably real. Equally undeniably, my body seemed to have gone right ahead and welcomed it: It was opening to him like a sunflower. His lips and tongue radiated through every pore, every hair-shaft, every sleep-crusted lash. Still, I clenched my fists and closed my eyes. When I came, I tried not to make a sound.

A moment later, he emerged from beneath the covers, smelling of sea and grinning.

“That,” he said, “wasn’t boiling you down to a body part. Was it?”

I looked down at the whole body I’d so vehemently defended just a few hours earlier: My stomach, with its soft-swelling fold of fat that I sometimes had fantasies about cutting off with a knife. My breasts, olive-toned globs of wax that sloped off to the sides, each with a stiff brown wick.

“No,” I said. But even as I laughed, it was hitting me: The nausea. The overwhelming flood of guilt. The ineradicable certainty that I’d just made a mistake: I’d let down my guard down. I’d let him make me feel safe. And now, he’d vanish.

A foul taste crept into my mouth, only partly the juice-and-gin aftermath of the last night’s drinking.

“But,” I added, “it did feel just the tiniest bit clinical.”

I meant it as a joke; at least, I thought I did. I could tell he didn’t take it as one. I started to say “sorry,” but then I saw the clock, and realized how late I was. So I just said: “See you later,” and air-pecked his cheek. Then I got up to go to the showers.

**

When I think now about my birth, it sometimes seems that my mother should have been the person most affected by the convolution of it all. She was the parent people saw me with the most; and she was always sensitive to what others thought about her. She must have sensed the speculation, the silent guessing games people played when they saw the two of us together. And yet she never copped to it; not once. She blithely ferried me between playdates and dancing lessons and various, failed sojourns into sports. If someone brought up the adoption, she brushed it off. “It doesn’t matter,” she’d say. “We never even talk about it at home.” Which was true.

Still, as I grew from toddler to child to teen, I felt them: the gazes whisking between the three of us. The puzzled attempts to connect genetic dots: My father’s Mayflower gray eyes to my brown ones. My mother’s blonde bob to my unruly brown braids; the way her arms circled my dark body like the milky nimbus of a planet. People made the comments people everywhere make to mothers: She’s the spitting image of you, Janet! Or: She really has Bob’s nose, doesn’t she! But tone often betrayed such comparisons as questions, ones I’d confront over and over: Their daughter, she said? Really?? How did this happen? How could she have come from them?

The truth, of course, was that I hadn’t. My birth took place ten weeks before Janet and Bob Godfrey ever laid eyes on me. The woman who conceived and carried me did the latter part alone, and the former by mistake. She gave birth one January morning, in a home for unwed mothers, in West Hartford. Then she signed some papers, and left.

It was my mom who told me this story, as one of our first—few – discussions about where, exactly, I’d come from. The talk took place sometime around my sixth birthday. I can’t recall what sparked it. It certainly wasn’t spontaneous; my mother was acutely uncomfortable talking about sex. When she did it, she used gardening terms: Man, woman, seed. Babies, she explained to me, grew out of seeds. Men planted these seeds inside of women. But in my parents’ case, there was some sort of seed shortage. They tried and tried, but nothing would grow. So when they heard that I’d grown in another lady by mistake, they were thrilled. They went straight to her house, and picked me.

My mother related all this in the same, strained tones she used to explain math homework she found daunting; the same tone she used to warn me that two cookies were plenty, and that more would make me ill. It must have been a shock. Oddly, though, the only feeling I remember is a somewhat startled acceptance; almost relief. After all, it made sense. It explained so much: my Mediterranean shading despite their pinkpale skin. My lonely sweet-tooth in a house filled with fruit. My abysmal abilities on the very same tennis courts where they played mixed doubles every weekend, and generally won.

Perhaps most of all, it explained how my parents could have managed to procreate in the first place: With the exception of back pats and the occasional air-kiss, they never seemed to touch each other. I couldn’t picture my father “planting his seed;” or, for that matter, my mother in labor. It all seemed too messy. But I’d seen them both labor over various forms: club applications; taxes; mortgage applications for our summer home. It seemed appropriate that my conception was contracted as well; something neatly typed and signed, and more or less immaculate.

As I grew, though, and my breasts swelled two cup-sizes larger than my mother’s 32A, it became clear that my parents did think about sex – at least visa-vis me. Particularly my father. It was he who warned me about boys, their mysterious inseminating powers. “It only takes one mistake,” he’d repeatedly say; as though certain that the fierce fecundity that led to my birth swam in my bloodstream, too. Steps were taken to make sure history didn’t repeat itself: by high school, a gauntlet of social regulation had been put into place. Curfews were early. Dates were in groups. If a boy called, an invisible timer was set: after ten minutes my father would come onto the line, and reminded me brusquely about homework, or laundry, or tennis lessons.

I dealt with these restrictions in the same way I handled my mother’s quota on refined sugars. Outwardly, I complied. I hung up the phone, and was home by 9:30 sharp, even on Saturday nights. But secretly, I was binging. I spent long hours reading romance novels and Penthouse letters, fantasizing about being wanted; about having someone make me his. At fifteen, I began crafting sleepover alibis and sneaking out. I was determined to round the petting bases. The wet caresses and moist, breathed promises of boys sounded even more comforting than chocolate.

It wasn’t until I finally made it into the squeaky backseats, and the rec-rooms with their spore-filled couches and pillows, that I realized something was wrong. Far from assuaging the loneliness, the self-doubt that seemed always to be gnawing, sex turned me into ice. It sparked flaring bouts of panic that blocked my breath, stopped my cries. It kept my arms glued to my sides. Sometimes, even the lightest of caresses could leave me all but immobile.

**

It was during Summer Break, just after Freshman year ended, that my parents handed me Sarah’s first letter. It had actually arrived at our home two weeks earlier; but as it was finals, they’d held off giving it to me. They finally did, three days after I’d come home, and one night before my summer waitressing job was to start.

I read the two sheets: once, twice, then half of a third time. I noted spelling and grammatical mistakes (“I have always regreted giving you up” and “a time and location of you’re choosing”). I studied the handwriting, as neat and heavy-pressed as a third-grader's. In the enclosed Polaroid, Sarah sat on a bed, by bare walls. Her body was full and small. Her hair appeared to be the color crayons companies called "Indian Red," before anyone considered this racist.

"Well?" asked my father.

I looked up. His gaze was even, but his jaw was tight. He held his bourbon between his knees with both hands.

Exchanging thoughts on adoption had never come easily to us. When I was twelve or so I’d tried talking about it, for a while. I’d had mused out loud about my birth mother; about whether she was a ballerina or an actress. I’d asked – rhetorically -- why she’d given me away; I wondered if she’d ever try to find me again. My parents responded with pre-practiced, careful sentences that they probably had taken from books. The exchanges clarified little, encouraged less. After a while, I stopped bringing it up.

"She really doesn't look anything like me, does she," I said now, tentatively.

“What do you think about meeting her?” he asked. Melting ice made a chilly little shifting sound in his drink: clink.

“I don’t want to?” I said. And watched, as relief poured into his face. My mother’s eyes clouded thoughtfully; but she didn’t say anything. She usually let my father lead family discussions.

On my way to the ferry the next morning I dropped both the letter and the photo into the trash.

**

I spent the summer serving sand-specked Vineyard vacationers, and making out with Izod-clad boys. Most of the boys were blond; few asked me out again. In July, Sarah wrote another letter. It’s tone was less formal and more confessionary than her first: I realize every day what a mistake it was, she wrote. I get very depressed on your birthday. She’d enclosed another picture of herself; in this one, she held a hyper-clipped poodle in a pink barrette. The day I got the letter, I stared at the two of them for a long time during my lunch break. Then I crumpled them up and submerged them in my half-eaten ice-cream sundae.

I returned to college Sophomore year a little heavier and significantly darker, and wrote the poems that caught Cal’s pool-colored eyes. I next heard from Sarah in mid-October, when she somehow tracked down my school telephone number.

“I don’t want to intrude,” she said, after I’d taken the phone and she’d hesitantly identified herself. “I just wanted to make sure you got my letters.”

“I got them,” I said. I let the phrase sit for a few moments; I didn’t know what else to say. I pictured her hand, topped by tacky red nails, nervously playing on the phone's keypad. I pictured the phone, and saw one of those yellow-y Seventies models. Then I decided it probably didn't even have a keypad. It probably had a dial.

Outside, the Jackson Chapel bell rang once, then twice more, to let students know classes started in five minutes. There was laughter and patter as latecomers rushed past my window, and my suitemate banged on my door.

“Are you going to Chaucer?” she called.
“Wait for me.” My voice sounded thick, phlegm-filled. Sarah cleared her throat.
“I don’t want to keep you,” she said. “But I’d really like to see you."
I gnawed at a hangnail, then watched as a drop of blood, tear-like, rose gently from the cuticle. “Can I call you back?” I finally asked.

It was my father who came up with the idea of meeting on campus. "Look," he said. "She’s already overstepped one boundary by calling you. If we don’t take control, she may just show up at your door.” There was a small pap as he punched his hand with his fist. His tone implied that she might arrive armed. “This is at least a chance to meet her on our own ground.”

He said our ground because Haverford was his school, too; he’d graduated in 1961. My mother was Bryn Mawr, class of ’63; they got married the year after she finished. I remembered Sarah’s letter, saying how she’d wanted to go to art school. After having me she’d waitressed for a while in Detroit, sketching and saving. Then she met her husband, Arnie, and they decided dental hygiene training made more sense.

"Don't you think so, Janet?" my father asked my mother, who was on the upstairs line. She cleared her throat uncertainly.

“Certainly,” she said.

***

Inside Alumni House, autumn light streamed through the doors and windows. It striped the walls a sunny white, gave life to dust patterns between them. We found Sarah perched on a chair, in the same outfit she’d worn in the Polaroid. A copy of the alumni magazine lay in her lap. Her fingers, which had been clasped on top of it, untwined nervously as my father strode forward.

“Mrs. DeFillipi?” my father boomed. “Bob Godfrey.”

“Yes,” she said. “How did you know?” As they shook hands, she laughed, alone. Her front teeth were smudged with lipstick.

My father presented my mother. Then he turned to me.

“And this,” he said, “is Rebecca.”

“Hello,” I said, stepping forward, and thinking absurdly about the Sound of Music scene where Julie Andrews meets the Von Trapp kids. Her hand felt fragile, slightly damp. As it met mine I looked down, and saw ten nude nails, five well-chewed cuticles. I felt my father’s hand, large and commanding, on the small of my back.

“I’ve reserved a meeting room for us,” he said. “It’s just over here.”

“This campus is really pretty,” Sarah observed as we settled, her next to my mother, my father next to me. “Is that why you chose it?”

“I guess I just assumed I’d end up here,” I said. “It’s kind of a family school.”

“Bob was class of ’61,” said my mother. She didn’t mention Bryn Mawr.

“I see,” Sarah said. She looked inquiringly at the wall art; as though she expected to find my father and me up there, among the trustees and patrons. She seemed younger than she had in the photo, her hair less red than auburn where the light caught it. Her eyes were amber-flecked. They bloomed with soft lines when she smiled; but there was also something uncomfortably needy, almost pleading about them. I felt them scan my face like fingers, as if searching for some small, emotional aperture into which she could reach.

“You know,” she said. “I always wondered about your eyes. I never saw them open before.”

“They’re brown,” I replied idiotically.

“Mine, too,” she said. She laughed again. My father shifted in his chair. The smile faded from my cheeks before I’d fully registered its presence.

Sarah wiped her hands on her pantsuit. She reached below her chair.

“Well,” she said. “I thought you might like to see some pictures.” She pulled a worn shopping bag onto her lap.

“Pictures?” I said.

“Just to give a sense of your background.” As she spoke, she pulled out a photo album.

“Oh,” I said. I darted a glance at my father. He tapped his foot twice, sharply.

Sarah pulled her chair to my other side and put the book between us, a small, folding bridge. Left alone on her side, my mother sat awkwardly. Then, smile in place, she stood and moved behind us.

The album had a cracked cover, with small patches flaking off like scales. The words "Family T-easur-” ran in tarnished yellow across the front cover. Sarah apologized as she opened it. “I need to organize this better,” she said. “I keep saying I’ll get around to it.”

“That’s fine,” I said, and felt my face heat. Who was I to forgive her? I don’t even know this woman. Still, I found myself leaning forward as she smoothed back the album’s waxy buffer page, revealing squares of time-washed color below. In the pictures, people sat stiffly for formal portraits, embraced sloppily at parties. They planted proud feet on new car fenders, and clapped over candles on birthday cakes. There were Sarah’s parents: a thin man with a furrowed brow; a heavyset woman, erect and squinting. Her aunt passed through the pages as child, teen, then spinster. Her grandparents stood on a dust-darkened field. The woman was so tan she looked black. Her mother, Sarah said, had been a full-blooded Cherokee.

Startled, and sheepishly delighted, I shot a look at my father. He shrugged, and looked out the window.

A few pages later came pictures of Sarah; luminous and smooth at sixteen, a little more lined after she’d had me. There were shots of her at her wedding shower, surrounded by kitchenware and women in pale lipstick. For her wedding she wore a sequin-layered dress, and her husband a pale blue tuxedo. Arnie’s arms wrapped her like two brawny, rolled-up rugs.

Sarah touched the pictures lightly as she spoke, flattening bubbles, tucking corners back into tiny triangles. I felt her eyes brush my face yet again as I gazed down, searching for myself in the sepia-veiled squares. Sometimes I found me; here the nose, there the thrust of a hip. Then I’d blink, and the resemblance I thought I’d seen vanished, and there would be nothing there but a stranger. Throughout it all my father watched, exasperated and silent, as though sitting through a particularly bad movie. My mother, polite as always, murmured things: really, lovely. But once, at a picture of Sarah’s daughter, she reached out the filed curve of her fingertip.

“’Becca looked a little like that, at that age,” she said.

“I did?”

“Yes,” she said. “Think about that picture we blew up. The one with you on the beach.” She was talking about a photograph that hung on our living room wall. In it, I’m three. I’m flying a kite. I wear little khaki shorts and a big Irish sweater, and I’m laughing up at the sky. In Sarah’s album, her other daughter was on a beach, too. She was wearing a frilly little bikini. She looked angry; but it may just have been the way she was squinting at the sun. Her fists looked like toasted walnuts.

“I’d like – I’d like very much to see ‘Becca’s baby pictures,” Sarah said. “Sometime.”

I pictured her in our house, staring up at my wind-whipped hair.

As though reading my thoughts, my father made an odd sound: half-snort, half-laugh. It echoed like a detonation.

When we’d reached the last page, Sarah closed the album. She stroked it for a moment, like a cat in her lap. Then she shuffled her chair back to it’s original place. It made a chalky sound against the floor. My father looked down, as if searching for a scratch.

“Do you have any questions?” Sarah asked, as though concluding a business presentation.

Did I have any questions. Of course I did; I had to. But bizarrely, I couldn’t summon a single one. My brain felt as viscous and dense as a swamp: nothing in it seemed to be moving. Days later, after all the dust had settled, they’d come to me – little interrogative bubbles, floating to the surface. What about my birth father? Where was he? What had happened? Did your parents ever seen me? How did they feel about the adoption? And how on earth did you find me? And why?

Why now?

“I have a question,” my father said.

Startled, we all turned. His face was stern and unsparing; an in-the-flesh echo of John Boyd’s, class of ’48, whose picture glared from the wall behind him.

“I want to know,” he said, “why you broke your promise.”

“My promise?” repeated Sarah.

“Nineteen years ago, you made a promise.” He spoke slowly: Anger stretched each word until it seemed in danger of tearing. “You promised that you would turn this child over to a new home. You promised you’d relinquish all claims. Now, nineteen years later you show up.”

He held up a finger as Sarah tried to interrupt. “I don’t want to know why,” he said. “Frankly, I don’t give a shit. But I do want to make one thing clear. Very clear.”

He leaned forward, shaking off the hand my mother put on his shoulder. “If ‘Becca chooses to have future meetings with you, that’s fine. But it’s to be her choice. Hers. Am I understood?”

Sarah’s dark gaze fixed on him. Mine did too. I looked at the man who, nineteen years earlier, had not-planted me. The man who had taught me to fly kites; who’d spent countless, fruitless hours working on my backhand, and once sat up a whole night with me in high school. It was the night after my two best girlfriends had inexplicably and abruptly dropped me; I remembered telling him how ugly I felt, and how very, very lonely. I remember looking up, and seeing – to my shock – that his eyes were filling with tears.

“It is lonely,” he said. “Life is lonely. You think sometimes that you’ve fixed it; you’ve insured yourself. You think you’ve finally built a house that will keep the pain out.”

He pressed his fingers against his eye’s inner corners for a moment. Then he shook his head. He reached over and patted me on the back, like he always did. Only this time, his hand remained -- for a long, long time. Long enough that I had to stop holding my breath. It moved gently along my spine and ribs, his fingers making warm circles over my shirt. It was the most physical contact I could ever remember having with him since the days he carried me on his shoulders. I sat there, my heart pulsing in my ears, fearing either that he’d stop, or that he wouldn’t.

Eventually, he did. It was late. We air-kissed, and went to bed.

“Am I understood?” he repeated now.

My birth mother drew herself up in her chair, to the full, diminutive height of her torso.

“You certainly are,” she said.

My father’s neck pulsed faintly. But he sat back in his chair. I found myself looking away. A roar emerged outside, from the direction of the stadium. It filled the room like static.

My mother cocked her head towards the window.

“Who’s playing today?” she asked brightly.

“Swarthmore, I think,” I said, although really I had no idea.

As we stepped back into the sun, the smell of burnt leaves engulfed us. I inhaled deeply, trying to loosen my thoughts; trying to cleanse my congealed mind with the air’s tang. Beyond the parking lot, Jackson chapel rose like hope: a white icicle defying the Autumn flames of the woods. Sarah paused for a moment, admiring it.

“’Becca,” she said. “Can I to take your picture?”

I felt hideous; as exhausted and armpit-damp as if I’d just had one of my rare work-outs. I looked to my parents, but they were both ahead of us; they hadn’t noticed yet that we’d stopped. Something I’d read somewhere tugged me; an Indian belief that photography steals your soul. I started to say No; to say We’re in kind of a rush. But she was already aiming a banana-yellow instamatic:

“Cheese,” she said.

I gave a rictus-like smile. The camera hiccupped, then whirred into rewind. My parents stopped and turned. My hangover came rushing back, full-force: someone was driving nails through my temples.

No one spoke again until we reached the parking lot.

“Well,” my father said, extending his hand. “Thank you for making the trip.” The words were as brittle and flimsy as tin.

I knew that I should say something as well; but nothing came. I couldn’t say it was nice to have met her; neither “nice” nor “met” seemed at all right. I couldn’t say that I hoped to see her again, because I didn’t; or didn’t know if I did. In fact, standing there, faced with this strange trinity that had launched me into life, I didn’t know what I wanted at all. From anyone.

It was Sarah who resolved the quandary. She did it by leaning over and putting her arms around me. She did it without warning or preamble; like it was the easiest thing in the world. Without really planning to, I closed my eyes, and circled my arms around her. I felt the curl of her hair as it tickled my chin, and smelled the acrid blend of the chemicals in it, and of her sweat-dampened top. I smelled something else, too; something floral, and earthy, and a little like freshly-cut grass.

When I stepped back, I felt dizzy. My parents were both looking away; my mother at the Chapel, my father at the sky.

“You should take some time to look around the campus before you go,” I told Sarah; mainly because it was the first thing to come to mind.

“I already did, a bit,” she said. “I got here early.”

She hesitated. “Actually, I read some of your poems.”

“You did?”

“Yeah. There were some magazines in the Student Center.”

I pictured her, licking her finger, smoothing pages. Reading about rising waterlines and stiffening skins, and the salty tangling of saliva.

“I thought,” she said quietly, “they were beautiful.”

I looked down at the gravel; at her scuffed beige pumps, and my mother’s evenly-planted black flats beside them. A hot tide rose to my cheeks.

“Well,” said my father. “We have a lunch reservation.”

My mother stepped forward. To my amazement, she leaned over and kissed Sarah on the cheek. “It was lovely meeting you,” she said.

The three of us turned away, and began walking towards the Quad.

“I didn’t know,” my father said, after a few feet, “that you wrote poetry.” He sounded wary; as though poetry were the first step down some undefined, slippery slope.

“It’s not very good,” I said.

“Oh, I’m sure it is.” But he didn’t ask to read it.

I assume that by that point, Sarah was also walking towards her car. I don’t know. I didn’t look back.

***

Cal hadn’t met my parents yet, and we’d made plans to eat dinner together in town. But when I went back to my room to change, there was a note taped to my door saying he couldn’t make it. I was both relieved and disappointed. Relieved, because introducing boyfriends to my father always left me tense and drained. Disappointed, because I found that I missed him; missed his querying gaze, and the firm, polished feel of his arms and legs. I thought of how his mouth had felt on me that morning; its teasing determination. The tart joy of its wake. A yearning shot through me, so heated and insistent that I had to sit down for a moment. For the first time in my life, I desperately wanted to just drop everything, to shut my brain down and fuck. With abandon.

At the restaurant, we ordered drinks and appetizers, and sat silently until they came. My dad raised his glass.

“To family,” he said. Candlelight projected his martini onto his sweater, logo-like.

“I think,” he continued, after we’d all drank, “that went as well as could be expected.” He looked at me. “Don’t you, ‘Becca?”

I looked down at my beer. I didn’t want to talk about the meeting. It still felt too stingingly fresh; like an abrasion that I wanted to keep wrapped.

My mother’s little finger circled the rim of her wineglass. “I really felt for Sarah,” she said thoughtfully. “She seems to have been through so much.”

“Felt for her?” My father looked as if we were talking about Lizzie Borden. “Felt for her? The woman gave no thought at all for the past. For the law. For whether she’s wanted or not. She didn’t give ‘Becca a choice.”

“Oh, Bob,” my mom snapped. “For Christ’s sake. The woman lost a child.”

I stared at her, stupefied; not at the statement. But at the indignation in her voice. My parents never argued– at least, not around me. It was one of those unwritten house-rules. Like No sloppy expressions of emotion. And No more than two cookies at a time.

“She didn’t lose a child.” He squeezed the words out, small and sharp: pointed little pebbles. “She made a choice. She gave one up. She’s responsible for that decision.”

“She was nineteen,” my mother said. “How responsible is anyone at nineteen?”

“I’m nineteen,” I said in a small voice; but neither of them heard me. I rifled through the breadbasket, looking for cornbread.

“She was responsible enough to get herself pregnant,” my dad said. It was the same voice he used for It only takes one mistake.

Spots of red flared on my mother’s cheeks: little roses of anger. “Women don’t get knocked up,” she said coldly. “Men contribute.” She picked up her wineglass. “At least, most men do.”

My father looked as though he’d been slapped.

“Is that what this is about?” he said, very quietly. “Yet another of my failings?”

He said “failings” wearily; as though they’d had this argument dozens of times before. Had they? I felt utterly disoriented; as though aliens had whisked away the calm duo of my youth and beamed down fuming strangers in their place.

Suddenly, I couldn’t stand it. I threw down the cornbread, which I’d been buttering elaborately, like a little art project.

“Jesus, stop it!” I said. “Just stop it, will you???”

My mother’s glass froze halfway from her lips. I realized I’d been shouting: something else we never did. Chagrinned, I looked away, into the candleflame. Mist formed a halo around it. I blinked, rubbed my eyes. Across the room, in the mirror, my face was a damp, dark moon.

“Look,” I said, more quietly. “It’s over. O.K.? She came. We met her. She’s gone. Let’s just pretend it never happened.”

My mother’s thin hand fluttered to her throat, then her lips. She patted them, as though checking for tulip-pink smears. Then, stiffly, she smiled.

“O.K.,” she said. “If that’s what you want.”

My father drained his martini and set it down. He signaled the waitress for another.

We spent the rest of the meal straining vainly for normalcy; pretending that this was simply a casual family reunion. We talked about things like my Junior year overseas, and my interest in going to Italy. My dad pushed for China; he’d been traveling there recently for something related to his business. “Wave of the future,” he said. “Picture it: one-point-three billion people.”

I pictured it: one-point-three billion pale, slender bodies. For some reason, the image left me very lonely.

After dinner, my parents went back to the Inn, and I went to meet Cal at his frat house. I found him in the living room, in line at the keg. Saturday night Tap was in full swing. I practically leapt into his arms.

“Wow,” he laughed. “This is new.” But my ardor seemed to catch him a little off-guard. He patted me on the back a couple of times. Embarrassed, I stepped back.

“How’d the big meeting go?” he asked.

“O.K., I guess. Who knows. It was weird.” I took his hand. “The most bizarre part was dinner. It’s a good thing you didn’t come; it wasn’t a great night to meet my parents.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Sorry about that.” He pulled his hand away to scratch his head. He suddenly looked uncomfortable.

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” He started to say something, then stopped. “Look,” he said. “Can we go outside for a sec?”

I felt my smile tighten, like a gut expecting a punch. But I didn’t let it fade.

“Sure,” I said, over-brightly. “Just let me get a drink.”

We went to the roof where we’d first kissed. We sat next to each other, but separate; the only parts of us touching were the clouds our breath made as they hit cold air and condensed.

“You may have figured this out already,” he said. “But I thought I should tell you myself.”

He told me: In past weeks, he’d met someone else; a plumpish, darkly beautiful girl named Frani. He’d already asked her out; that’s where he’d been tonight. He hadn’t broken it to me earlier because he knew that the timing was terrible, given Sarah’s arrival.

“I’m sorry,” he said, finally. “I feel like a jerk. I just – this isn’t working for me. You must have sensed that.”

His words sank into my stomach, and grew there into something heavy and sour. “It’s o.k.,” I said. “You’re right. In fact, I actually sort of expected it.”

As I said it, I realized it was true: I had. I really always did.

After he’d left, I sat, gazing at the campus’s stately curves, the stilted flicker of the stars. I found a pack of breath mints that I’d forgotten about in my jacket, and ate every last one of them. I wondered distractedly if there was anything sweet in the frat house’s fridge beside beer yeast and rancid ketchup. I decided there probably wasn’t. Eventually, I eased myself back down the fire escape, and made my way towards my dorm.

I’d been sitting on my bed for maybe half an hour – just sitting there – when the telephone started to ring. I let the machine get it; I couldn’t picture moving, much less getting my mouth and throat to make sound. I heard to myself chirping cheerfully about being unavailable. There was a beep, the click of a hangup. Then it started ringing again.

Cal, I thought. I crossed the room. “Hello.”

“Hi, ” said Sarah.

“Oh,” I said. There was an uncomfortable pause.

“I just wanted to say how -- how glad I was to see you today.” She stuttered a little, her voice echoing the pleading look I’d seen in her eyes earlier.

Me too. I very nearly said; just out of reflex; but then I realized that I would be lying. I still didn’t know what I felt, but glad certainly didn’t cover it.

So I just stood there, listening. Listening to her breathe; listening to my heart pound. Sounds, I suppose, that had marked the first ten months of my existence.

After a while, she cleared her throat.

“I also wanted to tell you,” she said quietly, “that I never meant to just -- abandon you.”

“But you did,” I said. “You did abandon me.”

“I came back,” she said.

I came back. The words released some hidden door in my heart. Emotional backlog spewed through it, like toxic waste. It seared away the numbness I’d been feeling since morning; since summer. Perhaps for parts of my whole life. There was joy in the mix; a sense of fierce vindication that I was worth coming back for, after all. There was pity: The woman lost a child; a sad ache at the vague image I had of her leaving the home, arms and belly empty. There was grief at the thought of my little existence, ripped from its origins, bounced between foster cribs for weeks. Then signed away with a smile and a court-order, and neatly installed in quiet, tightly-controlled home.

There was fury at all the things I’d been denied: breastmilk. Long, real hugs. My own eyes laughing back at me. A sister. There was defiance that now, after years and years of burying these feelings, I was had to dig them up, and feel them, and present them like treasure.

Perhaps most of all, there was outrage; real outrage over her assumption that nineteen years meant nothing; nothing at all. She’d been nineteen when she had me, yes. But for Sarah, I realized, I wasn’t really a person. I was still part of her past; a mistake she’d made that she thought she could correct. She’d allowed that mistake to take over her own life. Now she wanted it to take over mine.

I came back.

“Fuck you,” I said. “That’s even worse.”