“He—graduated.”
Elisabeth wanted to ask more, but she could hear Andrew’s voice in her head: Boundaries.
“What are you studying?” she said instead.
“I’m a Studio Art/English Lit double major. My dad likes to joke that he’s not sure which is the more useless degree. He wanted me to major in economics.”
“I’ve worked with a lot of former English majors,” Elisabeth said. “They turned out okay. Don’t worry.”
“What do you do?” Sam said. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
“Of course not. I’m a journalist. I was at the Times for twelve years.”
“How exciting.”
“It was.”
Elisabeth did not say that a year ago, she and half her friends had taken buyouts, rather than risk getting laid off six months later.
“Now I’m writing a book,” she said.
“That’s incredible. Is it your first?”
“My third.”
“Wow.”
“Do you know what you want to do after graduation?”
Sam looked embarrassed. “Since I was a kid, I’ve loved to paint. But that’s not a job, obviously.”
“It is for some people,” Elisabeth said.
“I’d love to work in a gallery, maybe teach someday,” Sam said. She straightened her posture. “Sorry. I should have mentioned, I have lots of infant experience. I’m CPR certified. I have great references here in town. I did a bunch of night and weekend sitting my first three years of school.”
“And three full days a week won’t interfere with your studies?”
“Senior year,” Sam said. “Not too strenuous. Besides, every other year, I had a campus job in the dining hall and built my classes around that, so I’m used to it.”
“Great,” Elisabeth said. She had a list of questions, but no idea where she’d put it. She felt like she should be asking more. She had gotten caught up in the pleasant conversation.
Sam looked around the room. “How long have you lived here?”
“A month.”
Elisabeth and Andrew had started talking about leaving the city ten years ago, on their third date. They had gone to so many open houses, casting themselves into lives they weren’t ready to live—small farms on the Hudson, New Jersey Colonials with big backyards, even beach cottages in Maine, which, in mid-July, they could almost convince themselves they might stay in year-round.
“You shouldn’t waste a realtor’s time if you’re not serious,” said her mother-in-law, apparently a champion of realtors’ rights.
But Elisabeth could never be sure whether they were serious or not. New Yorkers reveled in complaining about the city: the crowds, the subway delays, the hassle. Every sane person wanted to go somewhere else. New Yorkers could best be understood not by where they lived but by where they talked about escaping to—L.A. or Portland or Austin or wherever they came from to begin with. And yet, when someone left, it shocked her.
Her friend Rachel had moved to a suburb of Cleveland, her hometown. She spoke of its charms whenever they talked, repeating herself.
“On Fridays in summer, they have beerfests at the botanical garden, and you can sit in the grass, drinking craft beers from a bunch of different breweries,” Rachel had said on at least five occasions.
It sounded nice, but how often could a person drink beer at the botanical garden? Then what?
To Elisabeth and Andrew, life in the city had never felt permanent, even though they both lived there for twenty years, longer than they’d lived anywhere else, including the places they called home. She had long wondered what would be the thing to make them go. A child, she assumed. But Gil wasn’t the reason. It was the situation with Andrew’s father; the situation with Andrew himself.
Most days, Elisabeth didn’t know what she was doing at 32 Laurel Street. How, after all that searching for the perfect place, she had ended up here, in the middle of nowhere.
Before they left, when anyone asked where they were moving to, Andrew would say, “Upstate.”
She felt the need to add, “But not, like, cool upstate. Take wherever you’re picturing and add two hundred miles.”
She liked that their house didn’t look like every other house on the block, at least. Their neighbors had torn down old capes to build monstrosities that extended to the furthest possible edges of their property.
Their house was an original. Small but lovely. A glossy red door, ivy crawling up a white wooden façade that the realtor advised would need to be repainted every four or five years. Elisabeth and Andrew nodded, casual, when she said it, as if they hadn’t spent their entire adult lives in apartments, never taking on a home-improvement project more involved than changing a light bulb.
Gil reached for Sam now and cooed, unwilling to be left out of the conversation.
“Is it okay?” Sam asked.
“Of course.”
She took hold of him, held him up in the air. In that way one does with an infant, she spoke to Elisabeth through him. “I can tell you are an exceptionally smart young man, Gilbert,” she said. “I think we’d have lots of fun together.”
He grabbed hold of her hair, and they both laughed.
Elisabeth beamed. “Look how good you are with him.”
“He seems like such a sweet one.”
“He is. We got lucky.”
Her eyes still on Gil, Sam said, almost absentmindedly, “Do you think you’ll have more kids?”
A strange thing to ask during a job interview. But then, she was young enough to believe this was a simple, unloaded question. And hadn’t Elisabeth recently complained to Andrew that it gave her the creeps how everything here seemed hidden? In the city, she found it unsettling that lives were on display. People fought or ate lunch or tweezed their eyebrows right in front of you on the subway. But her neighbors here, darting out their front doors and straight into their SUVs with plastic smiles and apologetic waves, were worse.
“I only ever wanted one,” Elisabeth said. “Andrew, my husband, he’d have five. So, who knows what will happen.”
Didn’t she sound carefree? Unbothered. Willing to leave it all up to chance. She thought of the two embryos, frozen in liquid nitrogen at a storage facility in Queens.
Andrew had nightmares about them.
Four times a year, they received a bill from Weill Cornell in the amount of two hundred and sixty-two dollars. The storage fee was the same no matter how many embryos a person had, so every time Elisabeth saw that bracketed number 2 on her statement, she felt a tug of annoyance at the cost.