Tim Murphy - Christodora

She had probably been to her studio about twice since then, and that had been eighteen months ago. Often, she considered giving it up to no longer have to pay rent on it. The same canvas had been sitting there half-finished since last year. Whenever she thought of picking up the brush, she thought, Here I am, another low- to no-name-recognition New York “artist” adding to the junk heap. We’ll all die and only.00001 percent of this stuff will have any resonance beyond our own lifetimes.

Of course she shared this with Gallegos. He’d once told her he liked to write a little fiction or poetry on the side himself. He shared these little bits of himself with her from time to time very offhandedly, which flattered Milly. She was fairly certain he didn’t do that with all his patients.

Gallegos heard Milly out. Then he said, “But aside from all that, how do you feel when you’re painting? Don’t you feel good?”

And she said, “Honestly, Richard? I feel stupid. I feel silly. I feel there has to be something more productive I could be doing. Kids are growing up nearly illiterate right in my own neighborhood, right over in the projects on Avenue D, and I’m sitting here dabbing and daubing? I’m a joke.”

“How did you feel when you were teaching kids to draw and paint?” he asked.

“That was different,” she said. “That wasn’t necessarily for them to grow up to be professional artists. It was to help them find a creative voice and to introduce them to art and the role it can play in their lives. Especially if they’re from unstable homes. I mean, just to have craft paper and a box of crayons — that’s such a balm.”

Craft paper and a box of crayons. Her eyes welled up as she started to say it. She couldn’t even think about craft paper and a box of crayons.

“What came up just then?” Gallegos asked her. “That affected you?”

Milly deflated in her chair and rubbed her eyes. “I can’t think about craft paper and a box of crayons without thinking about the first time I saw him,” she said. “M.”

“You felt love and delight because you saw a kid being creative and you wanted to encourage it, right?”

“He was drawing scary, hairy monsters.” Oh God, she would never forget him, lying on his stomach, kicking his little sneakers together in the air.

“You could have more of that feeling if you went back to work.”

So that was why he’d brought that up? Milly felt a bit tricked and betrayed. “I don’t have the time or the mental energy anymore to teach,” she said. “I have to take care of my father. He just gets worse and worse.”

“He’s with his own nurse all day,” Gallegos said. “He’s with her right now, safe and sound. Here you are, here with me, and everything’s okay.”

Milly didn’t like this conversation very much, frankly. She no longer liked leaving the house and avoided interacting with other people. The whole thing made her very uncomfortable and exhausted her. She made some exceptions. Groceries, obviously. Sometimes she went to see a movie. Taking the train back and forth to see her father. Even these things, though, she had to bear up for, and the whole time she was out there, she felt like a raw nerve being pummeled by other people. Loud young kids, for one thing, the N-word being every other word that flew out of their mouths. Couples who were too demonstrative. People whom she thought she knew, or had known. They were the worst of all. She literally crossed the street if she thought she saw up ahead someone who looked like someone she thought she once knew.

“I’m sure I’ll go back to work part-time eventually,” she finally said, to shut him down.

He gave her a skeptical look, like he was not very pleased with her.

At least, Milly thought, we’re not talking about her anymore. She meant Drew. The issue with her had taken up sessions with Gallegos for months. How was Milly feeling about it, one week later? Had she and Drew communicated? And on and on and on.

Two years ago, Drew had left Milly a voice mail. For Milly, even just seeing Drew’s name there in the queue on her tablet was a bit startling, because Milly felt she had barely heard from her in a year. But there was the message, all hushed with portent: “Millipede? It’s Drew-pea. Millipede, I am freaking out, I’m having twins. Call me, please, I need to talk. I’m freaking out. Christian and I are both freaking out. Love you.”

Milly calculated: You had to be several weeks into your pregnancy to find out you were having multiples. That meant Drew knew she was pregnant weeks before. A fact she hadn’t shared with Milly. And then: A voicemail. She tells me this news on a voicemail, Milly thought.

Milly didn’t call back right away. She actually put down the tablet and went to the window and finally sat and just stared out. Then she stood and picked up the tablet to call Drew. Then she put it down. The truth was she didn’t know what to say to her. She didn’t know if it was such a good idea that Drew was doing this at her age. Milly knew the treatment and technology had changed a lot in ten years, but no amount of technology could mitigate the fact that when your kid was ten you were going to be sixty and when they were twenty you were going to be seventy. Your kid was probably going to watch you die when they were thirty or thirty-five. So much for their kids having a grandma. Milly couldn’t get past this, and in some ways, it just felt so completely Drew to her. Like there was nothing left for Drew to write about coupledom, or about the new urban couple communes, or about couples growing all their own food on their roof, so she was going to have kids to put herself into the next readership bracket. That didn’t feel very fair to those kids, Milly thought.

So Milly simply didn’t reply for five days. That felt like the decent thing to do because she just didn’t know what to say.

“She’s probably waiting to hear from you,” Gallegos said when she told him about it the next day.

“I don’t know if she’s doing the right thing,” Milly said.

“Can I ask you, Milly? Can I ask you how you really felt when you heard the news?”

“I felt: Don’t tell me you’re going to do that to those kids,” she said to Gallegos. “Just for another book.”

Gallegos challenged her on that. “Here’s your best friend and it’s always been a certain way between the two of you and now it’s probably going to change. She’s probably not going to be able to come to New York as much as she used to. You might need to go out there to see her, help her with the kids.”

“Oh, I hate it out there. It’s still so fake and plastic to me, even though it’s all supposedly become like Brooklyn but with constant sunshine. But obviously some aspect of life out there appeals to her, because she’s never come back to New York.”

Gallegos rolled his eyes in that way that he did. “I’m asking if you’re afraid you’re going to lose the friendship.”

Milly laughed a bit. “I think I’ve told you the friendship’s already been fading the past few years,” she said. “She’s allergic to sadness. If you can’t just make lemons into lemonade and be grateful for whatever happens to you, Drew doesn’t have a lot of patience for you. It’s all about being grateful with Drew. Grateful, grateful! I’m sure she’s just grateful she’s having these kids, she’s thanking the universe, and she’s not thinking about these kids when they’re twenty or thirty.”

“Listen carefully to yourself,” Gallegos said. “You’re starting to cut the cord with your best friend of thirty years.”

For better or worse, that thought stuck with Milly over the next several days. She felt quite chastised by Gallegos. Finally, she picked up the tablet. But she could not figure out how she wanted her own voice to sound when Drew picked up or if it went to voice mail. So she pulled up a text box. “Oh my God!” she pinged. “Awesome news! Keep me posted! xo Mills.” And she sent it.