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By Root 452 0

fiction, not being much interested in either — that split into two or more directions when the baby died: on one track he lived and we took him home and somewhere in the universe at this moment we have a one-year-old baby and a newborn and are ignorant, exhausted, cheery (or maybe only the first two); on the other track, the one I accidentally took, he died, and we left France. But time changed backwards, too, and now, no matter what, every single day of my first pregnancy, when I was laughing till I was paralytic at my own jokes about what to name the baby, when I was addressing fond monologues to my stomach as I drove a horrific old Ford Escort through the French countryside, he was already dead, and France was already culpable, and our hearts were already broken.

If you’d asked me five years ago — let’s say five years ago and seven weeks — where I saw myself, five years and seven weeks in the future, I would not have mentioned a husband, children, living in six different countries. I was thirty-five and had never had a really serious romance. This mostly didn’t bother me. I liked living alone. I even liked going to movies alone and eating in restaurants alone. I would never have called myself single. The word suggests a certain willingness to flirt in bars or take out advertisements for oneself on the Internet: single people are social in the hope that they won’t be single forever. I was a spinster, a woman no one imagined marrying. That suited me. I would be the weird aunt, the oddball friend who bought the great presents and occasionally drank too much and fell asleep on the sofa. Actually, I already was that person.

Then I went to a party in New York thrown by Barnes and Noble and discovered that the author of that weird illustrated book I’d liked so much was not, as I’d concluded from the work and author photo, a midforties, balding, puffy misanthrope, but a cheerful, floppy-haired thirtyish Englishman. A month later, he came to Boston to work on an art project and called me up. We went out every night for a week. On our third date, he said, “I have something to tell you.” It transpired that his name was not, as was printed on his book, Edward Carey, but in fact, as was printed on his passport, Jonathan Edward Carey Harvey. He displayed the passport to prove this. As revelations went, I could live with it, though it was too late for me to call him anything but Edward. At the end of the week, on our fifth date — which happened to be his thirty-second birthday — he asked me very seriously if I wanted children.

The only other people who’d asked me that question were my similarly aging childless girlfriends. The answer I generally gave was: not abstractly, but if I met someone who really wanted children, and I thought he’d be a good father, and I was relatively sure we’d be married forever or at least for the length of two roughly concurrent childhoods, then yes, I would want children, yes please. I loved family life, adored my parents and my older brother, our decades-old running jokes, our familial obsessions. We went out for long, boozy meals. We took trips together and brought home souvenirs and outlandish stories. The McCracken Family Circus. We even went to the actual circus together, all four of us being actual circus buffs. Yes: I would want children if I met someone with whom I could imagine raising eccentric, friendly, hilarious children who we could bundle off to Europe and museums and circuses no matter how old or young they were. At thirty-five it seemed unlikely I’d meet such a person. That was OK. If life never brought me a husband or children, I wouldn’t miss them. I’d devote myself to good works or bad habits.

But I could tell that Edward wasn’t asking idly. He has a wide forehead upon which all emotions are legible: sincerity, anxiety, apprehension, skepticism; he has passed it down to our sincere, apprehensive, occasionally skeptical second baby. My answer would make a difference.

“Yes,” I said. “I think I would.”

A week after that — it has been five years and seven weeks, Mother, and I no