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By Root 987 0

green bottles stubbled with sand. Under the football stadium, down Ash Street, across the high school lawn, they shook out Teddy’s ashes from the plastic bags in their pockets, a trail of bread crumbs like a map of Lintonburg. The lake glittered on the mirrors of Eliza’s sunglasses. From the stone wall that edged the park, Jude could see down into the tops of the trees on the shore, into their knotted brains, the variegated greens of their leaves. He couldn’t help but think of the woolly thatch of hair between Eliza’s legs, but for the last twelve hours, there wasn’t much that didn’t remind him of sex. The knobs on his dresser drawers were twistable nipples. The emergency brake, over which he’d leaned to kiss her, a giant erect dick. The soda straw squeaking in and out of the X poked in the plastic lid of the cup passed between them, her spit mingling with his, the molecules of their bodies clinging invisibly to one another: sex.

There was one more place to go. On the ferry to Plattsburgh, the upper deck was filled with families and couples, summer campers in red T-shirts, fathers with cameras strung around their necks, mothers holding on to their children’s elbows as they leaned over the railing, hoping to steal a sight of Champ. The water and the sky and the mountains were so blue they were almost transparent, a holograph transmitted from space. It was a nearly windless day.

When they had pulled away from the dock, when the trees on the shore were no longer individual trees, they found the quietest corner of the boat, and Jude took the last plastic bag from his pocket. It was a little smaller than the plastic bag of pot he’d stolen, which his mother had flushed, leaving its heartbreaking dust behind. When Jude emptied the ashes over the railing, they didn’t scatter in the breeze, or splash. Somewhere between the boat and the surface of the lake, they simply disappeared, soundlessly, swallowed by the air.

In an hour they reached New York, and the passengers filed out of the ferry and onto the dock, heading for the Ethan Allen Homestead or Port Kent. Eliza and Jude remained on the upper deck, their twin scalps gleaming in the sun, holding hands because they didn’t know what else to do. They weren’t going to the other side, Jude told the woman who approached them, concerned, as if they were small children. They were just taking a ride.

Twenty-Four

The eastern perimeter of Central Park, from the waiting room window, was dappled orange and gold and apple red, the first insinuations of fall. It did not remind Jude of sex. There was plenty of that here on the maternity ward, where Jude had witnessed (in the cries of pain from Eliza’s next-door neighbor, a cart of metal instruments wheeled down the hall, the pink-skinned newborns behind the nursery glass) the inevitable end of the reproductive act. On the other side of Mount Sinai a glass pavilion was being erected, eleven stories high and a block wide, which according to one of the construction signs was meant to contribute to the patients’ sense of buoyancy and recuperation.

It was a coincidence that the baby would be born in the same hospital as Jude, but not a big one: it was, after all, one of the biggest hospitals in New York. There were three floors of nurseries, and he visited all of them, looking through the window at the empty incubators, where he’d spent the first hours of his life. They were waiting for the next baby, maybe Eliza’s. Beside Jude, Di tapped her fingers on the glass and made grotesque faces at the babies, as if she were going to gobble them up or kidnap them on the spot. They paid her no attention. She’d been more relaxed since the annulment had come through and the Milans had dropped the adoption suit. In a single envelope, Ravi had returned the annulment forms with Johnny’s signature and wrote that he had decided, with his wife, to adopt a child from India. Whether he had had a change of heart on his own or with Johnny’s help, Jude could only guess. In another envelope, postmarked San Francisco, Eliza found a series of large, crisp bills,