Tim Murphy - Christodora

“We’re going out somewhere ourselves,” she told him. “We haven’t decided yet.” She was lying; she felt basically fine except for a little crampiness, but she was in no mood to sit in a crowded restaurant and maybe run into people. Drew flashed her the tiniest look of reproach.

“You’ll be home tomorrow after work, right?” he asked her.

“Of course I will,” she said. “We’ll cook together.”

She and Drew watched silly movies till midnight, then slept together in Drew’s friend’s comfortable queen-size bed, spooning just as they’d done that night at Milly’s Brooklyn apartment before Drew went to rehab. Milly hadn’t slept with anyone but Jared in three years, since that window of 1993–1995 when she and Jared weren’t together and she’d dated a little, and now Drew’s soft, slim body and the cinnamon smell of her hair were comforting, and she slept long and well for the first time in weeks. They went to Tartine in the morning for breakfast before Drew hailed a cab on Seventh Avenue to go to JFK.

They embraced. “Thank you for being such a good friend,” Milly told Drew.

Drew cupped Milly’s face between her cool palms. “I love you, Millipede. I’ll call you when I’m home.”

Milly went in and did her half day of work, as had been planned, her heart strangely bursting at the opportunity to see her new students again and assign easels. She still felt that sense of good fortune and happiness as she shopped for dinner after work, and when she came in the apartment and saw Jared in front of his laptop at the kitchen table, some hummus and pita bread beside him, she felt not guilt and remorse but love and contentment, dropping the bags to go sit in his lap, put her arms around him, and kiss him a long, long time.

“You and Drew had sex and she obviously rebooted your libido,” he said, face flushed. “I’m lucky she’s in your life!”

She laughed. “We did not have sex! We snuggled but we did not have sex.”

Fall turned into winter and she continued going to Sister Ellen’s home on Saturdays, sometimes with Jared, sometimes without. There were the Thanksgiving art projects, the Hanukkah art projects, the Christmas art projects. She woke up on Saturday mornings happy, dying to fill her bag with art supplies and hop on the train. She loved walking in the sunny room now because the boys cheered and went wild when she came in. All except Mateo, who, immediately upon seeing her, would smile quietly and go sit off by himself at a little table he had designated as his personal art area, out of which he would carefully pull the projects he had been working on that week to show Milly. He waited patiently, professionally, for Milly’s attention, his arms folded, watching her every move as she set up the other boys. Milly knew that he knew that they were mere prologue to him, Milly’s star student, and he was right. Milly adored him, but she never let herself show it too much because Mateo made it very clear with her that he wanted them both to keep a cool tone.

On December 20, the Saturday before Christmas, Mateo turned five.

“We’ll have his cake at dinner tonight,” Sister Ellen said. Then Sister Ellen looked at the wrapped gift that Milly had brought for Mateo with Sister Ellen’s approval. It was his own paint set.

“Do you want to foster him?” Sister Ellen asked her.

Milly felt like her eyes popped out of her head. “What? Be foster parents?”

“It’s not adoption,” Ellen said calmly. “It’s a trial-basis thing. Your mother would retain legal guardianship for the time being. If it doesn’t work out, he comes back here.” She paused. “How can I give that boy the opportunities that his talent deserves as he gets older with a whole house to run?”

Sister Ellen scared Milly a little. It seemed like she could read minds, or hearts, because it was as if she knew that Milly had been running this scenario over and over in her head nearly every day for the past month. She found herself taking her cue from Ellen and being strangely, bluntly honest: “I do want to,” Milly said. “But I don’t know if Jared does. He wants us to have our own baby.”

“Who’s to say you couldn’t?”

Milly said nothing.

“I will tell you this,” Ellen continued shrewdly. “I know parents who’ve fostered, then adopted. They thought they couldn’t do it because they didn’t have enough money or time, or they wanted their own kids someday. They thought it was going to close up their lives. And what happened was their lives exploded open. Before their eyes.”

Milly nodded, taking this in. She glanced over at Mateo, who sat with his arms folded, project in front of him, kicking his legs off the chair into the air, watching her with an air of patient expectation.

She giggled at Ellen. “Just look at him. He knows he’s my star student.”

Ellen smiled. “Plus,” she added, “it’s his birthday.”

“Well, you’ve planted the seed,” Milly told Ellen.

Ellen gave her a two-second massage on one shoulder. “I know the seed was already there,” she said, walking back into the kitchen.

Milly went over to Mateo. “Hello, my friend,” she said. “I hear it’s someone’s birthday.”

“It’s my birthday,” he corrected her, no patience with her coyness. “Will you look at this?”

“Will I look at this what ?”

“Will you look at this please , Milly?”

“Thank you, that’s better.”

That night at dinner with Jared, after telling him about Mateo and his latest work and how he’d reacted to his gift (concern that all his favorite colors were included, followed finally by a cautious thank you), Milly dropped the bomb oh-so-lightly.

“Sister Ellen asked me if we’d ever consider fostering Mateo,” she said.

“Are you serious?” He tossed off the question so lightly, Milly knew that he had not ever even remotely considered the idea. Mateo existed to him in a little cozy pocket of an occasional Saturday, something way out in the sporadically visited right field of his life. He wasn’t in there taking up space all the days in between. “It must be a whole second job for her trying to find actual homes for those little guys.”

She said nothing, scrambling for what to say next, which, in a few moments, alarmed him.

“Did you tell her we’d consider it?” he asked, already incredulous.

She shrugged. “I told her I’d mention it to you.” She was trying to sound light, ingenuous.

“Would you really want that? I want to have our own kids, Milly.”

She panicked. How long could she go on obfuscating like this with him? “I’m scared of having our own kids,” she blurted out. “I’m scared of having a depressed, bipolar kid. I can’t watch that all over again, in my own kid. And what if the whole experience makes me worse, in some hormonal chemical way, and I go down the tubes while we have a child to raise? Here is a child who already exists who could use this home.”

Jared’s jaw dropped lower and lower, ever more deeply stunned. He made a staccato sound to talk, then stopped. “You really think that kid isn’t going to be trouble?” he finally asked. “His mother died of AIDS, Milly. We don’t even know who the father is or God knows what was wrong with him. At least we know ourselves and our families.”

“It’s just fostering; it’s not a lifelong commitment.”

“You see him every Saturday, Milly. I barely see you Saturdays now.”

Milly felt herself getting worked up, approaching tears, for reasons she couldn’t fully understand. “We have a room that could be his,” she pressed on. “He could have his own room. His own easel in his own room. Now that I know him—” She crumpled a bit. “I think about him all the time, Jared.”